The Spirit Is Everything

With the passage of time, U.S. dead of World War II have become a part of the foreign soil in which they lie. But last week President Truman signed a bill under which the remains of the fallen will be returned to the U.S. for reburial if the next of kin so request. Exhumation and shipping will be at Government expense; so will reinterment, if it is in a national cemetery.

It will be an immense and grisly task, for 261,000* now lie in 356 cemeteries on four continents and countless Pacific islands. War Department estimates that up to 70% of the next of kin will ask for the return of remains are based largely on experience after World War I. There had been opposition to the move then, as when Theodore Roosevelt said of his son Quentin, "Where the tree falls, let it lie." There was opposition also to the new and greater march of the dead, both from servicemen (who believed that $200 million could be better spent to aid widows and orphans) and from widows and bereaved parents.

Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. declared that she wished the remains of her husband (Quentin's brother) to lie at Ste. Mere-Eglise in Normandy. Said Mrs. George S. Patton: "I feel soldiers should stay where they fall. . . . General Patton . . . would always have wanted to have been buried with his men." Mrs. Simon Bolivar Buckner, whose husband was killed in action at Okinawa, expressed the same thought. So did Mrs. Clara Jane Hawkins, mother of the Marine lieutenant for whom Tarawa's airfield is named, and the young widow of another Marine hero, Sergeant John Basilone who died at Iwo.

Said Mrs. Nicholas E. Young, mother of Private Rodger Young whose heroism at New Georgia has been commemorated in ballad: "The body is nothing, the spirit is everything, and I feel that Rodger's spirit is always with me."

* Fatal casualties were 328,000, but approximately 67,000 were missing in action, or were lost or buried at sea.

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