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Sarah Dvorak
Dr. Dixon
EH 102
30 November 2015
Why We Remember
The colossal USS Alabama floats proudly in Mobile Bay, a glaring testament to
the United States’ vast military might and prowess. The glaring sun shines off her
polished deck, and even decades of battering from the unrelenting sea have not been able
to tarnish her massive steel hull. Today she is a popular attraction in Battleship Memorial
Park, as she emanates glory and pride in commemoration of the hard-won Allied victory
in WWII. Arguably one of our country’s most celebrated wars, the countless WWII
memorials across our nation that immortalize this conflict are nothing short of awe
inducing. What few people realize though, is that these WWII relics serve as a tool to
turn tragedy and mass death into honor and national pride, and often to successfully
amend the loss of hundreds of thousands of individuals to a common loss or heroic
sacrifice for the greater good.
A common misunderstanding is over the difference between monuments
commemorating a war and war memorials. Monuments are physical structures or replicas
meant to celebrate a victory, while war memorials are “…grief laden; they reference the
life or lives sacrificed for a set of values” (Adams 166). War memorials are always built
to serve a purpose. They are not meant to be something pretty to look at, or to stir
nostalgia for how things were done in the past. They are meant to either emit pain and
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heart wrenching sorrow, or to bolster chest-thumping pride and a renewed sense of
patriotism in one’s nation based on military might. In addition, historian John Bodnar
declares, “The reality of death [can]not be masked but efforts to justify and honor it [are]
substantial” (86). For example, the USS Alabama is now a popular tourist attraction and
is seen as a focal point to the city of Mobile, Alabama. An exit survey taken in 2010
found that 64% of visitors to Mobile named the battleship the most enjoyable part of their
visit, and many left comments that declared it was a nice, fun and educational place to
spend the afternoon. (Chang 16, 22). Most visitors seem to forget when they trounce
across the decks though, is that during WWII while many were on duty, “the deck of a
fighting ship in action [would often] become littered with pieces of men” (Adams 108).
War memorials such as the USS Alabama often erase the idea of tragic death altogether
and instead replace it with victory and glory.
As one historian points out, this tactic of using war memorials to shape society’s
opinion is usually politically based: “Their construction… comes not from shaping of
granite but from the desire to shape the public’s perception of this form of socially
sanctioned death” (Behuniak 166). Great examples of this are the national WWII
memorial in the U.S and the Memorial to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad in Russia.
The U.S memorial successfully commemorates a war that involved genocide, mass
killings, and nuclear death, and presents it neatly in a “…narrative of heroic death”
(Behuniak 169). For example, during WWII, the U.S government failed to foresee the
attack on Pearl Harbor, had discriminatory military policies based on gender and race,
and placed its Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, but the WWII memorial
still paints a picture of pure honor, heroism and valor.
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In comparison, the memorial in Russia focuses on the duration of Hitler’s siege of
Leningrad, 900 days and 900 nights, and tells the story of the bravery and heroism of
Leningraders rather than dwell on the fact that over one million people perished and
thousands turned to cannibalism because their government’s policy accepted starvation
over surrender. Undoubtedly, both of these memorials “…rather than simply honoring the
sacrifices of the dead, convey a deliberate political message: that those who died were
heroes, and that a heroic death is one in which the sacrifice is worth it” (Behuniak 165).
Though these two countries had extremely different leaders, politics, and general wartime
experiences, both successfully “…celebrated heroic death while denying tragic death- to
promote not only national unity but also patriotism based on militarism” (Behuniak 165).
Such a specific and politically driven goal all but necessitates that a universal memory be
instilled and then preserved in stone. This concept is still fairly new though, as it wasn’t
until after WWII had ended that there was a push to “…center remembrance on actions
mounted by the nation itself and on the newfound sense of power that victory brought”
(Bodnar 86).
Some arguments even go a step further and maintain that along with being
political, a war memorial’s choice to “…depict death as tragic or heroic not only
determines interpretations of past wars but also instructs present day politics on both the
national and individual level” (Behuniak 178). Young generations of Americans who did
not personally experience the effects of war, upon seeing the glorious and massive USS
Alabama in Mobile Bay, will look upon it proudly as a positive and even wonderful war
our nation dominated- despite the hundreds of thousands of lives lost. Dr. Steven Trout,
the Director of the Center for War and Memory and Chair of the English Department at
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the University of South Alabama, acknowledges that “A battleship is a powerful symbol
in American imagination”. It is more than a symbol of Alabama’s state pride; it is a
“…symbol of power and global dominance”. This was undoubtedly a major driving force
behind the campaign that was launched in 1964 to bring the USS Alabama home from
where it had been stored in Washington since the military’s transition to a peacetime
navy almost two decades earlier (Battleship USS Alabama BB-60).
A battleship that once brought death and destruction is easily turned into a tourist
attraction because, as is the case at most war memorials, death is so easily forgotten.
Along with completely erasing the idea of tragic death altogether, war memorials can
often romanticize the idea of it, even though there was often hardly any romance in the
matter as to how combatants become casualties in the first place:
[Proclaimed author and historian] William Manchester was wounded by a shell
blast blowing parts of his men into his back. A tank officer found he was choking
on bone fragments from his shattered left hand. A GI was killed by his buddy’s
flying head, another by the West Point class ring on his captain’s severed finger.
One young soldier watched in horror as a tank rolled over his legs. A new
phosphorous shell, developed in 1944, threw out pellets, which ignited with air to
cause massive burns… [and made men] flare up like Roman candles. (Adams
107)
Upon seeing his buddies melt in front of him, one soldier went into hysterics, sobbing,
“No more killing, no more killing”(Adams 107). Where is the romance in that somber
scene? War memorials do not acknowledge or offer any comfort to the “…25 percent of
WWII veterans still in veterans’ hospitals [that] have psychological wounds”. What they
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were forced to endure scarred them so much that they recoiled permanently from our
world and, “They will never return from overseas.” (Adams 107, 113). As two professors
of Anthropology at the University of Alberta point out, war memorials “…all present a
sanitized version [of war] and brand the dead as, heroes, martyrs, and victims, when most
had no say in their role” (Lovell and Mant 33).
Memorials often paint an unrealistic portrait of war, and photographs can be
guilty of this as well. The famous photograph of the Marines raising the American flag
atop a hill on Iwo Jima is probably the most well known picture of WWII and is viewed
as a symbol of national unity and triumph, and successfully “…effaced traumatic
memories completely,” even though it was taken during one of the bloodiest battles of the
war, and before the battle was even won. Three out of the six men who raised the flag
never even got to leave the island. They were killed shortly after the picture was taken.
(Bodnar 87).
War memorials are very talented at showcasing only one small aspect of war; the
triumphant soldiers that return home. But what about all the men who came home in
coffins? Bedford, a town in Virginia, lost more soldiers on D-Day per capita than any city
in the United States. The city then erected a bronze statue of a soldier holding a bible in
order to commemorate Raymond Hoback, one of two brothers who both were killed on
D-Day. What that statue failed to note though, was that “…for the rest of her life the
mother of the dead men often woke up at night asking where her boys were” (Bodnar
115).
A large cemetery in Florence, Italy also seems to think that the pangs of grief are
easily vanquished, as an inscription on the wall reads, “…let their burden be lightened by
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the glory of the dead, the love of honor” (Bodnar 86). But, not mentioned at this
magnificent memorial to the dead are the frequent wailings of all the young widows who
come to visit their husband’s graves, the cries of a mother who has lost her children, or
the sobs of the youth who will grow up without ever knowing their fathers.
Why then, do soldiers who survived or those who have lost loved ones, so often
visit memorials and cemeteries, places that must cause them so much pain? Would
visiting the magnificent USS Alabama battleship memorial comfort someone who had
served aboard a battleship in the Navy and almost drowned in the Pacific? Perhaps he
would be reminded of how proud he should be of his nation’s victory, and that the mental
and physical scars he still has, courtesy of the war, were all worth it. Veterans and
civilians who have lost loved ones in war sometimes visit such places, fueled by the small
hope that they will prove to be healing, or help to tame the demons wrestling inside them.
Such was the case with Raymond Halloran, a bomber pilot who for more than four
decades after the war, was still tortured by horrendous nightmares and PTSD episodes of
his time as a Japanese prisoner of war. After visiting the National Memorial Cemetery of
the Pacific in Hawaii, he declared that getting to see the graves and “talk” to some of the
men he had served with helped to “…temper the effects of [his] troubling nightmares”
(Bodnar 86). So as well as potentially being somewhat healing, Dr. Trout offers that since
“War itself is so unthinkable,” war memorials may also be the result of our “Impulse as a
species to make sense and meaning of death itself”.
A great example of this is the sculpture in place at Normandy beach, one of the
sites of the D-Day invasions. It is described as the “Spirit of American youth rising from
the waves,” and represents the soldiers who did not make it to the beach and perished in
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the surf. This 22-foot statue transformed the slaughter at Omaha Beach into the bronzed
figure of a muscular American soldier, and avoided the idea of death and tragedy
altogether. It also turned the death of 300,000 young allied troops into the mere idea of a
collective or group loss (Lovell and Mant 20).
Monuments must portray the ideal that sacrifice is necessary for the greater good,
but the ongoing “…struggle between individual identity and collective loss is [still]
evident” (Lovell and Mant 21). War memorials often have to overlook the loss of
individuals, of husbands and sons and fathers, in order to emanate victory and provoke a
renewed sense of nationalism. The USS Alabama does not broadcast the lives it took
while on duty in Pacific, nor the lives of it’s own seamen lost during a friendly fire
accident. Its focus is on pride and military might. Heroic depictions and the avoidance of
the tragedy of death “…discourage a questioning of war and instead pose an explicit
threat of future warfare by showcasing military superiority” (Behuniak 178).
Perhaps the most famous example of a large number of deaths memorialized in
one entity would be the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington D.C. The total
number of unidentified American soldiers who died is unknown, but the number could
easily be in the thousands. And yet, one person represents them all, and it is only his
remains that lay entombed in white granite. Much debate is currently over whether
“Massive ceremonies or monuments to the missing serve as more powerful political
statements…” (Lovell and Mant 33). For a nation such as ours, is it better to sweep the
cases of missing soldiers under the rug, or proudly display them such as the Tomb of the
Unknown does, despite the negative connotation it may cast on past and future wars?
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A common belief is that “Death should never be without meaning or purpose or
dignity” (Adams 157). This is all good and well, however, Dr. Trout points out, as long
as we also acknowledge that “We humans create the meaning and the purpose”. This is
one plausible reason as to why there is often so much controversy over war memorials,
from their actual construction, to their placement, to which specific deaths are
recognized. Public debates surrounding war memorials are often centered on the various
ways the tragic aspects of war could be overlooked- including the dead themselves.
Everyone has different recollections of war and death, and how each should be
represented and honored in order to be justified properly. War memorials at their core are
“…a struggle over death and its meaning” (Behuniak 166). For instance, the USS
Alabama was brought to Mobile as a “…memorial to the state’s sons and daughters who
had served in the armed forces” (Battleship USS Alabama BB-60). But, did this
memorial offer any real comfort to the grieving widows and childless mothers who could
now gaze upon a magnificent battleship, but never again at the face of their lost loved
one?
Another source of friction that adds to the struggle over the meaning of death is
when those who have lost a family member in war refuse to think of it all as a necessary
price for honor or victory. This is not usually done out of spite or with malicious intent; it
commonly occurs when a family or loved one refuses to “…erase the memory of loss,”
and holds onto the individual loss rather than embrace the idea of a collective death that
comes with a mass military burial or burial at a military site such as Arlington National
Cemetery (Bodnar 121). Overcome with such sorrow, they often feel that erasing the pain
is impossible, and find it offensive when their government suggests that honor and
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national pride could ease the ache of a missing loved one. Rejecting the “…official
memory of war created by war memorials,” some choose to mourn and memorialize their
fallen family member in a more individualistic way, keeping alive his or her individual
identity and forgoing any government funded cemeteries (Lovell and Mant 30-31).
War memorials and monuments should not be despised or ignored by society;
they are truly useful and thought provoking relics if built correctly. They can be a crucial
healing tool for many people who wish to make sense of loss, can renew one’s sense of
nationalism and pride, and can help define for many people the true meaning of death.
Perhaps this is the essence of why people keep flocking to the USS Alabama year after
year to trod across her decks, wander among her barracks, and gaze in awe at her
grandeur from bow to stern. But, while we are there, we might also consider that they are
often politically driven, can shape the way a nation recalls a war, frequently romanticize
war and death, and rarely direct their focus on all the soldiers who did not make it home.
I am simply arguing that we should look at the messages they convey critically,
especially, in the case of WWII, when they turn great tragedy and loss into heroism and
valor, while also modifying the loss of many individuals into a common or collective
casualty.
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Works Cited
Adams, Michael C. C. The Best War Ever: America and WWII. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994. Print.
“Battleship USS Alabama BB-60.” USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park. Middle Bay
Multimedia LLC, n.d . Web. 10 Nov. 2015.
Behuniak, Susan M. “Heroic Death and Selective Memory: The US’s WWII Memorial
and the USSR’s Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad.” Probing the
Boundaries 82 (2012) : 165-184. Web. 02 Nov. 2015.
Bodnar, John. The “Good War: In American History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2010. Print.
Chang, Semoon. Exit Survey of Visitors to USS Alabama: 2nd quarter 2009 to 1st quarter
2010, cumulative. Mobile: Center for Business & Economic Research, Mitchell
College of Business, University of South Alabama, 2010. Print.
Lovell, Nancy and Mant, Madeleine. “Individual and group identity in WWII
commemorative sites.” Mortality 17.1 (2012) : 18-35. Web. 01 Nov. 2015.
Trout, Steven. Personal Interview. 05 Nov. 2015.