On Hallowed Ground

by Robert M Poole

  That rethinking, just under way as Christmas of 1950 approached, was jump-started by the sudden death of Lt. Gen. Walton H. “Johnnie” Walker, commander of the 8th U.S. Army, on December 23, 1950. As allied forces edged their way back toward North Korea that winter, the hard-charging Walker, known for racing around to check on his troops, had sped north of Seoul on icy roads. He urged his driver into a passing lane and into the path of an oncoming truck. The general’s jeep swerved and flipped into a ditch, killing Walker—just in time to rescue his reputation.11

  Although credited with leading UN troops on their breakout from the Pusan Perimeter that autumn, Walker was also blamed in part for the enemy’s early success in Korea. Criticized for advancing too cautiously, he was second-guessed and undermined by MacArthur’s command in Tokyo; indeed, in the weeks before his accident, Walker had been convinced that his days in Korea were numbered and that he would be relieved of command. When death released him from the war at age sixty-one, it not only silenced his critics but also earned him a hero’s homecoming at Arlington.12

  Promoted to four-star rank in death, Walker was showered with honors. A special Air Force Constellation was summoned to take the general’s body to Washington. The lordly MacArthur turned out to pay respects when the funeral party stopped in Tokyo. Lt. Gen. James S. Van Fleet, commander of the 2nd Army, met the plane in Philadelphia, where Walker’s widow came aboard and an honor guard of military police stood vigil. Uniformed pallbearers took up the general’s flag-covered casket in Washington, bore him past a ceremonial guard of fifty soldiers with fixed bayonets, and saw him safely to Fort Myer on New Year’s Eve, there to await services on January 2, 1951. That day broke clear and cold at Arlington, where many of Walker’s old comrades came to see him off, their gathering constituting a who’s who of World War II luminaries: Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff Gen. Omar N. Bradley—all marched behind Walker’s new four-star flag as his horse-drawn caisson creaked down McPherson Drive, past the Confederate Memorial, past the graves of men of the U.S.S. Maine, past the tombs of Moses Ezekiel, James Parks, Thomas Selfridge, and all the nameless ranks from the old wars. The procession came to a halt on Pershing’s Hill in Section 34, where Eisenhower and the old lions filed into position, formed an honor cordon, and snapped off their salutes. Unseen howitzers, tucked away in the hills, pounded out a seventeen-gun tribute, just as an Episcopal priest prayed for permanent peace and Gen. Walton H. Walker was settled into the ground.13

  Because of Walker’s prominence and his recent promotion, his funeral was well covered by the press. Wire services had tracked the Constellation’s progress from Korea. The New York Times prominently displayed a photograph of Eisenhower and other famous mourners at graveside.14 All hailed Walker as a hero. Few begrudged the tribute, but his high-profile treatment touched a raw nerve among ordinary citizens whose wartime sufferings had passed without much notice. “I’d like to know if a soldier’s high rank made him better to be brought home right away for a safe burial,” a sergeant’s widow wrote President Truman three days after Walker’s funeral. “If I had my way, and could get to Korea, I’d accompany my husband’s body home … I’ve been very bitter about all this, and there are a lot of others who feel this way … When I look around and see what little it matters to the big guys, that my daughters have lost a father, I can’t help the bitterness.”15 More families chimed in, calling for the return of their loved ones.“I am one of the many mothers with a personal grudge toward you,” Norma Potter wrote Truman from Cheboygan, Michigan. “My son is gone. I can do nothing about it,” she wrote. “But I can and will find out somehow where his body is and if possible I will get his personal things.”16 Deara Eartbawey pleaded with Maj. Gen. Henry H. Vaughan, a military aide to Truman, to send her dead son from Korea. “I want my boy buried where he was born in Boston with his father,” she wrote.“That’s the least I could do is to give him a decent burial and that’s the least the army could do to help me find my boy.”17 If the nation could bring a general home, families argued, it could do the same for the privates and sergeants dying in Korea.

  Prodded by this outpouring of public sentiment and faced with combat conditions which made American cemeteries vulnerable in Korea, the United States quickly adopted a new policy of “concurrent return,” which meant that the nation’s war dead would be collected on the battlefield, transported to Japan, and shipped home for timely burial. This new policy, announced by George Marshall in March 1951, made the Korean conflict the first in which America’s dead were repatriated during active hostilities, a practice continued with each subsequent war.18 In time, the image of flag-covered caskets arriving at bases in the United States would become the symbol of unpopular wars, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, but at midcentury the practice of concurrent return was lauded by the press and by families alike.

  The return of dead sons and husbands helped loved ones adjust to the loss. President Truman, excoriated for the government’s laggard response early in the war, now was praised for bringing relatives home for burial.19 As the first funeral ships arrived in the port of Oakland in the spring of 1951, newspapers noted the historic nature of the moment with approval. Not only were the dead being returned in wartime, but their treatment reflected the multiplicity of America’s fighting forces: the caskets of enlisted men and officers were stowed side by side on shipboard without regard to race or rank, proof that the nation had recovered its sense of democratic propriety, briefly undermined by the handling of General Walker’s funeral.20

  The Korean conflict, launched with broad public support, lost popular backing as the war of containment dragged on with no clear sign that success was at hand. In the days after Walker’s funeral, a national survey showed that more than 60 percent of Americans favored withdrawal from the peninsula. It was not the sort of war the United States was accustomed to fighting. Truman’s popularity sank, and Korea became known as the forgotten war, fought on obscure terrain under restrictive conditions. “It is murder to send boys to fight with their hands tied by your ‘limited police action,’” the mother of a dead airman scolded the president in 1951. “Have you forgotten how America fights?”21

  American servicemen had not forgotten. They fought with determination and distinction in Korea, even as patience faded on the home front and the first waves of war dead arrived at Arlington. Among those who joined Walker at Arlington were Marine Pfc. Walter C. Monegan Jr., who single-handedly took out two enemy tanks before he was gunned down near Sosari; Army Sfc. Charles W. Turner, who dashed through hostile fire, took an exposed position on a tank, and repelled enemy troops until his platoon could safely regroup for a counterattack near Yongsan; Marine Staff Sgt. William G. Windrich, twice wounded and refusing evacuation near Yudam-ni, where he guided his platoon to a strong defensive position and held the ground until he lapsed into unconsciousness; Navy Hospital Corpsman Francis C. Hammond, who exposed himself to enemy fire while treating wounded Marines near Sanae-dong—all perished in the Korean fighting, all came to rest in the hills of Virginia, all earned the Medal of Honor for their heroism.22

  They had not won the war, but they helped turn back the threat to South Korea, which finally made its uneasy truce with the North in 1953. When the shooting stopped, the army’s identification specialists continued searching for the dead in South Korea, in due course recovering 30,425 American service members and identifying more than 29,500. The low proportion of unknowns—less than 3 percent of those recovered—was unprecedented, a tribute to the growing professionalism of the army’s specialty teams. Identification experts established a modern laboratory near Yokohama, Japan, where they collected and collated information for each dead serviceman, including his dental profile, hair color, height, shoe size, skin pigmentation, and fingerprints. X-rays were taken for each of the dead, which revealed old injuries and helped identify some of them.23 Another 8,100 combatants were listed as missing in action, presumed to be buried in North Ko
rea or held as prisoners of war when the truce was declared.24

  The few Americans who ended the war as unknowns—there were 848 in that category—were held at the allied mortuary near Yokohama. There they remained, stripped of their identities and unclaimed by loved ones until 1956, when officials began to cast about for a suitable burial site. The army, designated as the lead service for handling the dead from Korea, first proposed that the unknowns be interred at the United Nations cemetery near Pusan, South Korea. This idea was abandoned when the fragility of the truce was considered; North Korea had overrun the South in earlier fighting, and it might do so again. Officials next considered moving the unknowns to the Philippines, where the United States maintained a cemetery for the dead of World War II; this suggestion was discarded as a hard sale for the American public. The next proposal was to send the Korean unknowns—all of them—to Arlington, which proved unworkable; the cemetery was already cramped for space and it was thought that the mass interments of Korean war dead would detract from the Tomb of the Unknowns. With all other options exhausted, the Army finally decided to bury the Korean unknowns in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, an old volcanic crater known locally as the Punchbowl for its scooped-out topography. There, in May 1956, all of the unknowns from the Korean war were buried, taking their berths alongside more than two thousand unknowns from the Second World War.25

  The uneasy truce along Korea’s demilitarized zone allowed the United States to resume the unfinished business the conflict had interrupted—namely, the burial of an unknown serviceman from World War II at Arlington. In August 1955, responding to requests from veterans’ groups, the secretary of defense asked the Army to find an unknown from the Second World War for Arlington honors; the next year, in August 1956, Congress authorized the burial of an unknown from the Korean conflict. To simplify matters, both would be repatriated in a joint ceremony at Arlington on Memorial Day 1958.26

  Plans for the World War II Unknown had originally called for construction of a new sarcophagus on the amphitheater terrace. With two Unknowns scheduled for burial on the plaza in 1958, the Army revised its original plan, deciding instead to excavate crypts for the two newcomers at Arlington, each of whom would have his grave marked by a flat marble slab to be placed in the shadow of the World War I monument. While construction began at the amphitheater, specialty teams scattered overseas to exhume a number of nameless servicemen from both wars, reexamining each candidate for any identifying features or personal effects, and destroying all paperwork associated with the burials to guarantee the anonymity of the selection.27

  For World War II candidates, the Army picked finalists from the transatlantic and transpacific theaters to ensure that the main regions of fighting were fairly represented. They exhumed thirteen of the dead from military cemeteries in North Africa and Europe; those thirteen were sent to the U.S. cemetery at Epinal, France, where one unknown candidate was chosen and shipped across the Atlantic on the U.S.S. Blandy, one of the Navy’s newest destroyers, in mid-May 1958.28

  While these proceedings went forward, a second candidate for World War II honors was chosen in ceremonies on May 16 at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii from unknowns exhumed at the Fort McKinley American Cemetery in the Philippines and from the Punchbowl on Oahu. The Pacific candidate joined the Korean Unknown, already designated on May 15, for the long flight to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. From there the two servicemen were transferred to the U.S.S. Boston, which steamed northward for the Virginia Capes to complete the selection. The Boston met the Blandy offshore on May 26, when the Unknown from World War II was chosen by Hospital Corpsman 1st Class William R. Charette. Charette, a Medal of Honor winner from the Korean conflict, placed a wreath on one of the World War II caskets, saluted smartly, and stepped back. The runner-up was taken eight miles out to sea, wrapped in the traditional sailcloth shroud, and committed to the deep; he hit the water, slid under the waves, and disappeared to the sound of Taps.29 With these rituals accomplished, the Unknowns remaining—one from Korea and one from the Second World War—were ready for the last phase of their journey. Side by side, their flag-covered caskets were settled onto the Blandy and, watched over by honor guards and with sailors lining the rails, motored up the Potomac for Washington, following the path their comrade from World War I had pioneered more than thirty-six years before.30

  For three days thousands of citizens converged on the Capitol Rotunda to pay their respects. Foreign dignitaries brought flowers and expressions of thanks; comrades with gray hair filed through the echoing marble hall; hundreds of families still missing loved ones stood under the dome, stared at the flag-covered caskets, and allowed themselves to think that one of their own had returned home. They joined some one hundred thousand mourners who turned out to see the Unknowns bound for Arlington on Memorial Day, May 30, 1958.31

  At precisely one p.m., just as the caskets were borne down the Capitol steps with the Unknown from World War II in the lead, an artillery battery at the Washington Monument commenced the booming salutes that would punctuate every minute until the Unknowns arrived at the amphitheater. Silent crowds gathered along the sidewalks with heads bared to watch the procession roll down Capitol Hill, along Constitution Avenue, around the Lincoln Memorial, and over the river to Arlington. The matching black caissons, each draped in velvet and pulled by six gray horses from the Fort Myer stables, rode side by side, preceded by the national colors. At the cemetery gates, the procession halted, the World War II Unknown swung into the lead, and the cortege resumed its unhurried progress in a single column, ascending the green hills as twenty fighter jets and bombers rumbled overhead, each group flying the missing man formation.32

  When the caskets were settled into the apse of the amphitheater and VIPs had filed into their seats, the nation’s most prominent World War II veteran, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, took his place as chief mourner. The sun blazed high, raising the temperature to eighty-two degrees and sending waves of heat rippling up from the bowl of the white marble amphitheater. Several hundred spectators swooned, including an associate justice of the Supreme Court. For his part, President Eisenhower, dressed in a black suit and accustomed to state ritual, soldiered on through the heat and glare, impressing at least one reporter that afternoon.33 “The President’s capacity for standing at attention and sitting in prayerful attitude during the long ceremonies was notable,” the New York Times reported. “Others fanned themselves with their programs. Many did not display the sixty-seven-year-old President’s stamina.”34

  Looking cool and crisp, Eisenhower stepped across the stage to speak for the two honored warriors who had endured so much and traveled so far to reach Arlington: “On behalf of a grateful people I now present the Medal of Honor to these two Unknowns who gave their lives to the United States of America,” he said, placing the first medal, mounted on a velvet board, atop the flag-covered coffin of his comrade from World War II; he followed suit for the Unknown from the Korean conflict. Then ceremonies moved onto the terrace, where hundreds of servicemen stood rigid in the sun, bayonets fixed, medals shining, young faces incongruously set and stony.35 Casket teams lowered the Unknowns onto rails over their crypts and lifted the flags from each, holding them taut. Watching solemnly, President Eisenhower stood at the World War II Unknown’s grave, while Vice President Richard M. Nixon took his place before the Korean Unknown. Chaplains from the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish faiths stepped forward to read the burial service, each in his way and each in his turn. A battery from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, positioned over the next hill, shook the warm afternoon with their twenty-one-gun salute, which was still reverberating when a firing party shouldered their rifles and delivered the traditional three-part volley. A lone bugler sounded Taps. Dusk eased down on Arlington, and workers lowered two honored warriors beneath the terrace.36

  With their arrival, each of the century’s major wars took its place on the amphitheater plaza, where three tombs symbolized a distinct phase of the n
ation’s evolution—one from the era of Black Jack Pershing, biplanes, and doughboys; one from the time of Pearl Harbor, Ike, Normandy, and the mushroom-shaped cloud; and one from the false hope of Inchon and the confusion of night fighting, long retreats, and limited war. Having used the ultimate weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the United States could not easily unleash it again—nor, for that matter, could the growing number of nations in possession of that power. The specter of nuclear holocaust, hovering just over the horizon, ensured that the last wars of the century would be small, costly affairs of containment, limited in scope and unsatisfying in outcome, with few obvious winners.37 Total war was unthinkable, the future uncertain.