Skip to main content

Field Trip

The Scholars and their teachers took a field trip after lunch today. We first visited the Air and Space Museum, which was pretty crowded today. Given the crowds and the nature of this trip, I decided to stay in the World War II portions of the museum. I'm a little bummed that the World War II exhibit hasn't been updated in some time. Still, it provided a pretty good photo opportunity for the group.


Photo taken from the balcony.

The intended shot, with a mural of a B-17 in the background. One Scholar in the group is studying an airman who was a tail gunner on a B-17. 
We next visited the World War II memorial which one can find between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. Lynne provided an overview of the memorial's construction, explaining the reason behind its sunken design, reminding the students of appropriate decorum at the Memorial, and discussing the meaning behind the columns and wall of stars on the opposite end. She also challenged us to look at the Memorial with a few questions in mind.

First, how does the structure affect its message?

Bas relief panels tell a chronological story of the war experience. This panel has more meaning for me now given how and where Bill died. 
Prominent battles are memorialized along the sides of the memorial. 
Columns honor the contributions and sacrifice of the 48 states and eight territories in the war. 
A wall of stars memorializes the more than 400,000 men and women who died in service of the country. 
Does the monument do justice to the event?

The wall of stars comes close to doing this for me. I love the iconography of the Gold Stars. Yet having each Gold Star represent 100 lost lives seems to be an inadequate representation. I don't know how they could have created a display with 100 times as many stars, but that might have seemed more noteworthy. Perhaps a Gold Star for each battlefield overseas. 

I'm glad to see the battle at which my grandfather was wounded memorialized here. Still, I wonder how many engagements are overlooked by the design. 
Is there anything you would change?


The panels. Make them bigger and more explicitly linked to photographs from the war. 
I anticipated a group shot at the memorial but that didn't happen. That's okay. It was very hot and crowded . . . a Sunday in June in D.C. And we'll get more chances for photos as we move through the next week.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Those whom we honored (the final eulogies)

The chapel interior at Luxembourg American Cemetery. Most of us on the trip completed research for soldiers buried at Luxembourg American Cemetery. It's situated right outside of Luxembourg City and it receives a good number of visitors every year. The fact that General George Patton is buried there has something to do with their high visitorship. In fact, the initial attempt to bury him along with the soldiers failed when the foot traffic to his grave wore out the grass. Patton's grave now sits by itself near the top of the hill at the cemetery, near the chapel and tablets of the missing. Suzy's soldier. Six of us delivered eulogies that day: five teachers and Kaat. When I had the chance to listen to students' eulogies back in 2017, I was struck by how something of each student's character worked itself into the story they told. I still get a bit of a sense of that with eulogies delivered by teachers. However, the element that works itself more powerfull

Some Thoughts on Liberation

One of the markers placed by the French and Belgian governments to mark the path of the liberators.  My greatest takeaway from this most recent trip involves some refined feelings about liberation. I'm writing this post in a time of high cynicism. And the were matters of which one could be cynical back in 1944, the year in which Charlie fought and died. This trip, however, left me with renewed appreciation for what our country did back in that war, helping me refocus on what I've had the chance to see and do the past few years. Christopher is the military historian who accompanied us on this voyage. In one of our webinars this spring, he made an offhand reference to a piece of scholarship about the Holocaust he said was worth reading. It's entitled Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It's heavy. I can't say I read every chapter. But I read most of it on our bus rides this summer. And I'm glad I did. My unassigned reading. Saying that Bloo

Eulogizing Charlie

By Charlie's graveside in Luxembourg.  You may find the eulogy I wrote for Charlie interesting. I have it copied here. The marker by which we stand today identifies Staff Sergeant Charles F. Simcox, Jr., as a hero who gave his life in service to our nation. Before entering the service, his family knew him as Charlie. To this day they keep the memory of Charlie, or Uncle Charlie, alive. Many of the members of this closely-knit group still live near West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Simcox grew up. They have not grown apart in the decades of peace and prosperity that Simcox’s service and sacrifice made possible.    Something that I wanted to convey, but that seemed very difficult to convey, was the joyous and warm sense of his family. When I reached out to them this winter, they were more than happy to meet with me. I felt like something of a guest of honor. And so many of them came out to meet me that I lost track of who was who. A warmly receptive family isn't a