World War One was a reluctant push onto the global stage for the United States. The country involved itself only with the last nineteen months of the war. A slow starter, it took a year before meaningful numbers of American troops began to reach the European theater. The summer of 1918 saw the development of a new army which learned the lessons the European citizen armies had already earned over almost four years of brutal industrialized killing. Remembrance would come later, enter the ABMC.
COST OF WAR
Total casualties for the American forces were insignificant in the total course of the war compared to France, England, Germany, Russia, Italy, Turkey or Austria-Hungary, but in the five-six months of heavy American involvement in the war, over 53,000 men died through combat – another 64,000 died from disease (mostly the Spanish flu) or accident – while another 204,000 suffered wounds. Of those casualties, 117,000 were suffered in the last 47 days during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive which saw 1.2 million American soldiers in action.
LEAVE IN PLACE OR BRING THEM HOME?
Of the American dead, the Department of War had promised to return those lost to their loved ones in the US. This promise was hard to keep in the time just after the end of the war. First, France placed a restriction on repatriation for at least three years because of the potential strain on the already hard-pressed transportation system and for health reasons. Second was the cost of such a massive move.
British, Commonwealth, French and Italian dead were buried in cemeteries – or ossuaries in the majority of Italian cases – near where they died without repatriation to hometowns. This was not universally popular but became the rule for those countries.
That idea was brought up in the United States as well with the most obvious case being former President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s son Quentin served as an American pilot in the AEF. He died when his plane was shot down in July 1918. His plane fell behind German lines. Out of respect for the former president, Quentin was buried with honors in an isolated grave north of the Marne River. After the gravesite came under American control, the Army offered to repatriate Quentin’s remains. Rosevelt refused saying, “Wherever the tree falls, there let it lie.” Quentin lay in his isolated grave until 1955 when he was moved to the Normandy ABMC cemetery to lie next to his older brother Theodore Junior who died of a heart attack leading his men in another war at D-Day.
INITIAL MOVES
Cemetery concentration was achieved in the immediate years after the end of the war. From the over two thousand various cemeteries, American dead were gathered into 52 large cemeteries from which permanent burial and repatriation overseas could take place from. The end of 1920 saw five large permanent burial sites established by the War Department: Paris, Meuse-Argonne, Belleau Wood, Somme and London, sites near the main American battlefields and hospital sites where many had died before or after the fighting. Congress approved $850 million to purchase land for permanent cemeteries in Europe. The lands eventually donated by France and Belgium or purchased through the French government with additional cemeteries established at Oise-Aisne, St Mihiel and Waregem, Belgium.
WHAT STORY TO TELL?
Stories, lessons, versions of both were there afterwards to be gleaned. The men who fought wanted future generations to know of the struggle they endured. What better way than creating memorials to actions, units and men who fought.
American experience with remembrance of wars past centered upon the many monuments erected after the Civil War, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The battlefield granite forests of Gettysburg, Antietam and Chickamauga thrilled some, but left a bad taste for others. Stories became told on regimental levels by which regiment erected the best monument.
Right after the end of the World War, men who had fought began to place monuments at places of memory to tell their stories. The Army – with the Federal government convinced – decided to get out in front in order to guide which story would be told.
OUT IN FRONT
General Pershing pushed for government control of the story from the end of the war. It was not until a veterans group asked how for information on how to build their monument in France in February 1921 the government acted. In June, the War Plans Division within the War Department established a Battle Monuments Board. This all Army-officer board set out objectives but noted early on a broader commission should be raised to better achieve what they felt they could not accomplish because of the narrow scope of the Board’s membership and potential oversight on the part of the legislative branch which funded any such project.
Congress reacted and in February 1922 created the American Battle Monuments Commission. An eight-member commission gained authority to carry out the earlier mission of the BMB and required non-federal monument builders to achieve the same level as the potential federal monuments. One year later, 4 March 1923, the American Battle Monuments Commission was signed into being by President Warren Harding.
ABMC GETS ITS START
The commission comprised of eight members and a non-voting secretary who was a regular army officer. The members appointed by the President were all civilian except for General Pershing – voted quickly as chairman for life. With so few active military members, the army’s feathers were ruffled, but six of the members had seen service during the war, one member earning a Purple Heart, one a Distinguished Service Medal and another a Distinguished Service Cross. The one member not serving was a Gold Star Mother – meaning she had lost a son in the fighting.
Pershing’s inclusion elevated the game of the nascent ABMC to a high level. The ABMC would take up a major part of the General’s last twenty-five years of his life. His role, here with the ABMC, as AEF commander and his enduring bond with those who served would ensure his role as “chief of national remembrance”.
MANDATE GIVEN
The mandate given to the ABMC was to beautify and maintain the permanent cemeteries in Europe – in concert with the Commission of Fine Arts who had been previously given the same task – and erection of battle monuments reflecting upon American involvement in the war. Only one foreign soil cemetery held American burials at the time, a cemetery in Mexico City (which has recently come into ABMC care). Outside of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, US forces had not ventured outside of the country on any large scale. The European cemeteries were a first for the US.
Also, a first, was the development of the battlefield monuments. The federal government had given money for regular army regimental monuments after the Civil War – i.e., Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Stones River – as well as a monument raised inside Arlington National Cemetery for the men of the USS Maine. Those earlier wars were conducted through the individual states for a large part, reflected by many of the monuments erected afterwards. The Great War was much more of a federal affair and the government wanted to tell their tale of the World War.
INITIAL PLANS
Originally, the commission planned for three large monuments for battlefields where US forces fought. Funds became appropriated for twelve smaller monuments plus a monument in Tours to the memorialize the Service of Supply, five naval monuments – two large monuments at Brest and Southampton and three smaller at Corfu, Ponta Delgado in the Azores, and Gibraltar. Eight cemetery chapels also gained funding, non-sectarian in nature. The chapels not used for services but only to serve as places for prayer and meditation. Architectural gems to distract from the utilitarian administration buildings of the cemeteries.
HEADSTONES
The next big task taken on by the commission was to decide what kind of headstones to use. The Graves Register Service, CFA and War Department had thought along the lines of the rectangular headstones of Arlington. The commission disagreed and went with Latin crosses and star of David headstones for those of Jewish faith. Cost and availability pushed acceptance of Italian marble versus New England granite. The CFA thought crosses too fragile and the original charter for the ABMC had the CFA co-designers. The ABMC got around that having the funding appropriation for headstones dictated by only the ABMC and the Secretary of War.
For inscriptions on the headstone, name, rank, unit, and day of death became ingraved, as well as significant medals earned – i.e., Medal of Honor (these men earned their inscriptions in gold), Distinguished Service Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, Navy Cross, French Croix de Guerre. In addition, on the backside of the headstone, families had a personal inscription of up to sixty characters subject to approval. This measure is similar to British headstones. Unlike the British example, used extensively, only nineteen families have inscriptions on their loved one’s headstones in all eight of the ABMC WW1 cemeteries. It is very easy to miss them.
MONUMENTS – ABMC AND OTHERS
Along with the cemeteries, the list of battlefield monuments to erect finally gained approval in 1927. The original list winnowed down to eleven monuments and two plaques in total. The commission also clarified the standards for other possible monuments to be erected by outside agencies. Monuments were supposed to serve a useful purpose and maintenance was to be provided for. Examples were water fountains – Nantillois or Chamery – or clocktowers.
A MIX OF MONUMENTS ALREADY ON THE GROUND
Before the commission had begun, already almost seventy American memorials stood in Europe. Sixty-one honored the first five divisions of the army, all regular army divisions. Six more identified with the 26th (New England), 28th (Pennsylvania), 30th (Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee), 80th (Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania) Divisions and two for the 37th Division of Ohio.
Some monuments deemed suitable but others not – three of five monuments to the 1st Division erected on ground not liberated by that unit. Like the Battlefield Monument Board before it, the ABMC knew they lacked the legal authority to remove pre-existing monuments, but they wanted future monuments passing through their commission first.
ABMC’S ROLE IN MONUMENT ERECTION
One particular proposal paid dividends for the ABMC. In 1924, Dr. Paul Cret, an architect from Philadelphia born in France serving with the Pennsylvania Battle Monuments Commission made an appearance helping push for approval for several monuments in honor of their state’s efforts. The ABMC, taken by Dr Cret’s designs so much, offered him the post of consulting architect the next year, a position he filled until his death in 1945.
While Pennsylvania was successful, as well as Ohio and Massachusetts, other states and individuals were denied approval. Monuments to units smaller than divisions were not considered.
The 316th Regiment of the 79th Division (a Pennsylvania National Guard unit) successfully got around the ban erecting a monument on the heights above the east bank of the Meuse River, a scene of heavy action in the last days of the war. Pershing’s request to demolish the monument was denied by local French authorities. After a lot of bad press, Pershing agreed to authorize the monument only after the inscription changed to commemorate all American units serving in that sector.
HISTORY DEFINED
The ABMC also set up a Historical Section during its first year to better evaluate monument locations, inscriptions eventually producing battle maps and narratives filling more than a hundred cartons in the National Archives. Working with the Army War College, the twenty-eight volume Summary of Operations in the World War eventually published in 1944.
Eight cemetery chapels and eleven monuments decided upon finally by 1927, took until 1933 to complete. The formal dedications waited until 1937, twenty years after the US entered World War 1.
CEMETERY CHAPELS
The chapels are all arranged centrally with no graves located behind seven of them. A unique case is Flanders Fields in Belgium where 368 graves encircle the chapel. The chapels served to create a crowning feature for the cemeteries. Design made for small chapels not large in size since no services within would take place. While the interiors of the chapels have a religious nature, with central altars and Latin crosses, Jewish stars and Roman numerals I through X corresponding to the Ten Commandments were added to commemorate Jewish participation in the war. Either on the chapel walls or tablets mounted upon the walls, you find the names of men missing in action in the vicinity inscribed.
MAPS AND WALLS
Unlike the ABMC cemeteries from World War 2, chapel walls do not include battle maps. Only at St Mihiel and Oise-Aisne can you find adjoining buildings housing such maps. For maps correlating to Meuse-Argonne, Aisne-Marne, Somme or Flanders Field you have to go to nearby monuments – Montfaucon, Chateau-Thierry, Bellicourt – Cantigny, or Audenarde – Kemmel.
Each cemetery is set off from the surrounding countryside by stone walls. Prominent entrance gates erected decorated artistically provide a proper entrance into the home of heroes. No individual monuments exist inside the cemeteries except the graves.
those never found
Following the example of the British, bodies never found became inscribed on the walls of the chapels, either inside or out. This was the first time the names of all Americans who died gained recognition.
ALWAYS AN EXCEPTION
The sole exception is at St Mihiel where a statue of a seemingly average young Doughboy stands with head bowed. This is actually a statue of Walker Blaine Beale who died from his wounds suffered during the St Mihiel campaign 18 September 1918. His mother was the daughter of James G. Blaine, a former secretary of state for James Garfield and Chester Arthur and Republican nominee for president in 1884.
Mrs. Beale, in 1928, commissioned Paul Manship, a well-known American sculptor, to produce a statue with her son. Nowhere on the statue does Walker’s name appear. She hoped to place the statue in the cemetery of St Mihiel to represent all the dead. Her gift initially rejected by the commission – all private gifts rejected as a matter of course – until General Pershing became aware of who Mrs. Beale was and the exorbitant cost of the monument – estimate at $40,000 – the commission quietly accepted the monument.
MONUMENTS TO TELL THE STORY
big stories
Some of the hardest parts of erecting the monuments were to find all the French lot owners, especially at Chateau-Thierry where there were 575 separate owners and at St Mihiel where the number of lots was 1,000.
The monuments outside the cemeteries went to sites of primary American involvement, the size of the monument affecting the grandiosity of the actions. Pershing decided three main battle monuments were to be Montfaucon, a hill seized on 28 September during the Meuse-Argonne battles – this monument meant the most to Pershing; Bute de Montsec giving a wide overview for the St Mihiel operation and Hill 204 above Chateau-Thierry for the important battles fought at the end of June into July along the Marne River.
other stories
Smaller monuments went to Cantigny in the village square where the First Division opened serious American involvement at the end of May 1918; Bellicourt, where the monument straddles a tunnel used by the St Quentin Canal, part of the Hindenburg Line defenses where US forces punched through at the end of September 1918; Kemmel and Audenarde, in Belgium, where American forces fought late in the war under British and Belgian command; Blanc Mont in the Champagne where American forces of the 2nd and 36th Divisions, as part of the French 4th Army, pushed through German lines through October west of the main American Meuse-Argonne offensive;
Tours supports a statue commemorating the Services of Supply. Two naval monuments also went up, one at Brest, the main entry for American soldiers into France and an archway over a staircase in Gibraltar to honor naval work in the Mediterranean and its close work with their British naval counterparts.
Belleau Wood fell into ABMC hands in 1931 from a private association which could not keep itself funded. In 1955, a Marine Corps monument went up to honor the Marines who fought and died valiantly in the fighting here in June 1918. The monument is the twelth of the World War 1 ABMC monuments and the only one honoring a unit smaller than a division – the Marines made up one of the two brigades of the 2nd Division.
DEDICATIONS AND AN END TO ABMC?
Dedications came about finally for the chapels and monuments in 1937. After consultations with Canadians regarding their earlier dedication at Vimy Ridge, a series of dedications came off through the summer just as another war lie on the horizon.
With the completion of cemeteries and monuments, it seemed the ABMC had finished their job. President Franklin Roosevelt hoped to subsume the commission as part of cost-cutting measures to simplify government, but a wary Congress parried him successfully. At the time, General Pershing became seriously ill. President Roosevelt said he would make no move to alter the ABMC while the general lived. In the end, Pershing outlived Roosevelt by three years. By that time, the ABMC had plenty of new monuments and cemeteries to erect and care for.
beyond the great war
The World War 1 ABMC monuments and cemeteries remain glorious beacons of memory. They are also lonely beacons lacking a version of Saving Private Ryan with visitor counts rarely measuring more than ten thousand a year. World War 2 ABMC cemeteries at Normandy and the Netherlands, in contrast, drew over a million though that was back in the 1970’s. As time goes on, it will be interesting to see if the World War 2 ABMC sites decrease in visits as that generation passes.
Of the visitors, Americans make up a small percentage. Normandy and Manila see the most American visitors. Americans make up an even smaller percentage of visitors to World War 1 sites.
renewed roles
A newer role taken on by the ABMC is to educate about the men and women who died in the service of their country. Walking the cemeteries and seeing the monuments is a great first step. Each cemetery includes a visitor center. Expansion of these centers continues throughout the ABMC network to better tell some of the stories.
I have seen the new center at Manila which is quite impressive and thoroughly expands the knowledge of the events leading to the burial of so many young men and women in the grounds surrounding. Flanders Field and Meuse-Argonne are two of the World War 1 cemeteries that have opened enlarged visitor centers in the recent fifteen years.
Newer monuments have come onto the scene with the 100-year anniversary of the Great War. Three of the four regiments of the 93rd Division have received monuments in France despite the initial ABMC mandate only division-sized units would be remembered. The fourth regiment, the 370th, the only regiment to fight under non-White officers, is remembered with a monument in Chicago.
The monuments to the regiments probably resulted to try and take some sting from the horrible way in which the men of the 93rd – and the 92nd – found themselves treated during the war. The 93rd, like the 92nd, comprised of African American soldiers. At the time, the American army was still segregated, and racism was rampant. Higher up officers did not want anything to do with the soldiers either division. The divisions were split into their regiments and given to the French who were only too happy to use the men in their army. There are no monuments in France to my knowledge specific to the 92nd Division at this time.
Many different attempts to establish a monument of some sort for the men of the “Lost Battalion” were attempted over time, but only somewhat recently did such a monument get erected – 2002. 687 men under the command of Major Charles Whittlesey from the 77th Division, became isolated in the Argonne Forest for five long days during early October of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Their story received lots of media attention in the United States at the time. Eighty of the men died during those days. The 77th Division, a division made up of New Yorkers, has the highest number of graves in the nearby Meuse-Argonne ABMC Cemetery than any other division. That and in light of 9-11, the ABMC finally made an exception.
Today, the ABMC has grown to administer and operate 25 permanent cemeteries along with 27 federal monuments scattered across the globe. In whichever cemetery you walk, from whichever war, the feeling of awe is ever present.
Burials for ABMC World War 1 Cemeteries:
Aisne-Marne 2,289 MIA 1,060
Brookwood 468 MIA 563
Flanders Field 368 MIA 43
Lafayette Escadrille 51 MIA 5 – associated with the ABMC since 2017
Meuse-Argonne 14,246 MIA 954 – side of chapel MIA from northern Russia
Oise-Aisne 6,012 MIA 294
Somme 1,844 MIA 333
St Mihiel 4,153 MIA 284
Suresnes 1,565 MIA 974 – all buried or missing at sea
To read further – two sources stand out. For a discussion on how American dead became identified and handled during and after the war, go no further than the wonderful doctoral thesis from Kyle J. Hatzinger Democracy of Death: US Army Graves Registration and Its Burial of the World War I Dead. Hatzinger recalls the history of burials in the Army before WW1, as well.
For the story of the American Battle Monuments Commission, War and Remembrance: The Story of the American Battlefields Commission by Thomas Conner is the best overview of the history of the ABMC from its 1924 beginnings to today.