Little Rock author, trial lawyer, historian and Vietnam veteran Phillip McMath spoke at the Arkansas state Capitol Saturday as part of the inaugural Little Rock Immortal Regiment Remembrance Walk to honor those who participated in the fight against fascism during World War II. His topic is the legacy of his father, Arkansas Governor and World War II hero Sidney McMath, as well as the cooperation between the allies that enabled the defeat fascism.
Here are his remarks:
It is a great honor to be asked to commemorate VE Day (Victory In Europe) of May 8 and to remember and glorify the intrepid veterans and their families who sacrificed so much to extirpate the scourge and horror of fascism from the face of the earth.
The Immortal Regiment organization that has sponsored this event here and around the world is to be saluted for commemorating and sustaining this great victory in our collective memory. Something purchased at so dear a cost of 60 million souls should never be forgotten. Had this victory not been achieved, humanity would have been plunged into what Winston Churchill called in 1940 "the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science," and from which the world might not ever have found its way into the beneficent light of civilization again.
This is not something we should ever forget, if for no other reason that in forgetting we may yet be forced to remember by way of a future repetition of that tragedy. I fear that we are on the cusp of another such catastrophe now as weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical and biological--proliferate and are finding their way into the hands of rogue nations and terrorists.
So it is even more imperative that we remind ourselves of the scope of the last great world war that involved 62 nations locked in deadly combat for six terrible years with two of the greatest war machines ever assembled: Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, armed with all the instruments of death modem technology could provide, married in turn to the ruthless efficiency of the bureaucratic totalitarian state.
In that war my father, Sid McMath, a decorated Marine hero, fought the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. And my uncle J.B. Spencer, a B-17 Eighth Air Force pilot shot down in Europe, was wounded and imprisoned in East Prussia until liberated by the Russians in 1945. Then there was my dear late friend Penina Krupitsky, originally from Romania, a Holocaust survivor who fled to the Soviet Union and served in its army as an interpreter.
But it is simply impossible, no matter how vivid, creative or powerful the imagination, to grasp and relate the weight and depth of the suffering that war inflicted upon humanity. No single story can accomplish anything other than speak as a symbol for all the uncountable others who are now relegated to silence by their annihilation.
The Western Allies of the United States, Britain with its commonwealth and empire, the Free French, resistance groups, and other Western nations of Europe suffered well over four million fatalities, and China at least 15 million, while their other great partner, the Soviet Union, suffered 25 million--over 15 million civilian and almost 10 million military, perishing in that leviathan battle known as the Eastern Front. Never has such a titanic struggle been waged before or since in all the dark annals of war.
Nor can we omit the deaths by genocide and slave labor that in many ways were the worst of all because of the helplessness and despair of the victims. Six million Jews (three-fourths of European Jewry) were murdered. Countless Slavs, Gypsies, partisans, dissidents, and Russian prisoners of war are added to the pile, which can be counted up to 15 million.
We cannot open the door to this calamity without pushing back a mountain of corpses. One cannot comprehend these numbers or the sacrifices, courage, and agony of those who experienced it, but it is precisely because of the unfathomable nature of this suffering that we must convert the depth of this loss into something sacred through our collective remembrance today. Even if it is all we can do, it is something we must do, or render all else we might do as undone and worthless.
One day my father and I were attending a soldier's funeral. We rode in silence through a large veterans' cemetery past thousands of graves marked with clean, white crosses.
Finally, I said, repeating the lines of the great poem of the First War by John McCrae, killed in 1918.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row ...
That was all I could remember, but the nearly 90-year-old Sid McMath, without missing a beat, picked it up where I had stumbled, and finishing to perfection, said in a subdued but resonant voice:
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
McCrae meant victory in that war, but I think he would join us to say, in our world, we should make that enemy war itself today.
Editorial on 05/07/2017