Veteran’s Day Remarks
Monday, November 12, 2012
General Ham, members of the Military Attaché Corps, honored guests.
Good Morning and welcome to our Veteran’s Day ceremony. I am honored to be here today on this solemn occasion and to preside over a ceremony that pays tribute to the 2,841 fallen soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines buried here and further recognizes on the wall behind me the names of 3,724 men and women missing in action. This year marks seventy years since U.S., British and Free French forces landed in Morocco and Algeria during Operation Torch. This operation was a significant turning point in the war when the enemy forever lost the initiative and was on the defensive until the end of the war in 1945.
However, Operation Torch was difficult, and 70,000 allied troops were killed, missing and wounded at the end of the campaign. For the Americans, it was an “Army at Dawn” as Rick Atkinson called it in his classic novel on the North Africa campaign. This army fought their first battles, in his words: “unready to fight, unsure of their marital skills, yet willful and inventive enough to finally prevail...” Operation Torch was also where many of the Allies’ great battle leaders of World War II emerged, including Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Alexander, and Montgomery. But it is in ceremonies such as this that we gather to pay tribute to all the fallen and missing regardless of their rank and stature, and to recognize their contributions as individuals who sacrificed their lives so that others could survive.
The passing of time makes it hard to remember the details of these battles. As we gather here today at this final resting place for so many, we try to imagine what they went through and what were they thinking in their final moments. Private Nicholas Minue, the only Medal of Honor winner buried here, found himself on April 28 1943 not far from Medjez-el-bab, on a rainy, dark night when his fellow soldiers were pinned down by enemy fire. On his own, he decided to fix his bayonet and charge the enemy machine gun positions in the face of inevitable death. We don’t know what he was thinking when he did this, but we do know that his courage saved the lives of his buddies and gave his unit the offensive spirit that changed the tide of that battle and drove the enemy out of the sector. From there, larger units were able to drive on to Tunis and Bizerte and end the campaign a month later. Lieutenant Floyd Draper, a gold medal winning track star who ran with Jesse Owens at 1936 Olympics, is also buried here. On January 04, 1943 he took off in his bomber in support of Allied troops pinned down by enemy fire, never to return to his base. We don’t know what he was thinking when he did this, but we do know that he and his bomber crew helped protect their fellow allied soldiers and contributed to a cause much greater than themselves. While these are but two stories of those buried here, each one of those headstones and names on the wall has a similar, individual story, and therefore we honor the sacrifice of all of these brave men and women.
In the seventy years that have passed since these events, many of the survivors, whom we know now as the “greatest generation,” are themselves rapidly joining the ranks of the fallen. The average age of our Operation Torch veterans is 89 years. In another decade we will only have a handful of World War II veterans still with us. Recently I was informed that a group called The Greatest Generations Foundation is organizing a 70th anniversary visit in February to the battlefields of North Africa on which some of them fought. For many of them, it will possibly be the last time they will return to the locations where they and their fallen comrades fought for their country. It will be an honor for us to host these veterans and allow them to add to our knowledge of those buried here. The stories that they will surely tell will help us remember the acts of valor of those buried here in these 27 beautiful acres of Tunisia. And once again, we thank the Tunisian people for allowing us to be here, and we thank the honor guard and officers that join us today and every time we hold a ceremony here.
So, in closing, let us pause for a few moments to reflect and ponder on what it truly means to be free -- and the cost of that freedom -- and to pay tribute to those who have given their lives so that we may pursue our own. Thank you for joining us today. I would now like to introduce the Commander of the United States Africa Command, General Carter Ham.