WASHINGTON – Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Leo S. Mackay Jr., Ph.D., will participate with U.S. ambassadors and local officials of host countries in their annual Memorial Day ceremonies to honor America’s World I and World War II war-dead. Ceremonies are scheduled in France, Italy and Luxembourg at cemeteries administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission.
Mackay will be the highest-ranking official from the Department of Veterans Affairs to visit the cemeteries since the end of the Iraqi War. He will pay tribute to the shared alliances of these countries with the United States over many decades and continuing into the present.
“From the beaches of Normandy to the streets of Baghdad,” said Mackay, “America sent her sons and daughters to help the tyrannized. Early on, America and its allies forged a durable and principled alliance that witnessed history’s march to democracy.”
At the World War II Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial in Luxembourg City, Mackay will join U.S. Ambassador Peter Terpeluk in a ceremony on Saturday, May 24. The city was headquarters for the U.S. Third Army led by Gen. George Patton, who is buried at the cemetery. Many of the more than 5,000 American soldiers buried here died in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium.
Under a French Air Force flyover on Sunday, May 25, Mackay will speak at a ceremony at the World War I Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial east of the village of Meuse. The 130-acre cemetery holds the largest number of American dead in Europe, 14,246.
Finally, on Memorial Day, May 26, Mackay will participate in a ceremony at the World War II Sicily-Rome Cemetery and Memorial, in Nettuno, east of Anzio and 30 miles south of Rome. Joining him will be U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson. Many of the nearly 8,000 Americans buried here lost their lives in the liberation of Sicily and the landings at Anzio and Salerno.
