World War II Monument: A Reflection

A month ago I gave a talk to the Jewish War Veterans of Rhode Island. My hosts were generally of an age to have been in service during the Second World War, possibly Korea. I thought of them again on the day before Thanksgiving.

I’d done some shopping on Federal Hill and on my way back to the more familiar environs of the East Side I stopped at the newly dedicated World War II memorial on South Main Street. There were no legal spots to park, so I took my chances with the law and walked to the shrine. Its principal features are two low walls bearing the names of the 2,562 Rhode Islanders who died while serving in the war and eight pillars dedicated to specific engagements in the Pacific/Far eastern Campaign (3 of these); the South East Asia campaign; the Battle for the Atlantic; the Mediterranean conflict; and the European Theater (2 of these). The pillars support an open circle of stone, suggestive of a halo above the whole. Inscribed on the walls are two phrases, the first unintentionally ironic, given the length of time it took to complete the memorial. It’s by Edward Everett, the other speaker at that famous Gettysburg cemetery dedication in 1863. “No lapse of time, no distance of space, shall cause you to be forgotten.” The other is from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Decoration Day”: “Yours has the suffering been, the memory shall be ours.”

Near this circle are four benches; while the inspirational lines and the names of the dead are the magnets to the eye, the benches, I think, provide the context. Onto each, carved by RISD professor Merlin Szosz, (the idea was suggested by my friend and colleague Michael Fink, also of RISD) is one of the four freedoms enunciated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his sobering January 1941 State of the Union Address:

“I suppose,” he’d said, “that every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world …. During 16 long months this assault has blotted out the whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of independent nations, great and small. And the assailants are still on the march, threatening other nations, great and small.”
Then, after discussing the munitions necessary to engage the enemy the president reminded:

“As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone. Those who man our defenses and those behind them who build our defenses must have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all the things worth fighting for. [Mr. Incumbent President, are you listening?] In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

“The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
“The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way everywhere in the world.
“The third is freedom from want, …everywhere in the world.
“The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments...”

If ever there was a rallying cry for a good and just war, these four freedoms, their summation carved into the benches at the World War II memorial, was it. Our enemies were real; their weapons were real; their conquests were real; their defeat as uncertain as it was necessary. We (they, those of that generation, my father’s generation) were not fighting for natural resources, or for strategic advantage, or just because we could; they were fighting for a recognizably just purpose. That we have not yet achieved the goals is not the point. It may be impossible to achieve any of the four. But reading them on the benches at the memorial is the constant reminder or what freedom is really all about, what struggle with tyranny is really about.

When I got back to my car, I saw it had been ticketed by an over zealous constable. But how could I complain? My cost was as nothing compared to the 2,562 who I had come to commemorate, Rhode Island’s dead of the Second World War. Zichrono Livracha; Requiescat In Pace; rest in peace, haverim of the previous generation who died in the effort to preserve our freedoms.