The Mardasson Memorial, just outside the city of Bastogne, Belgium, is one of the largest, most stunning, yet under-marketed WWII monuments in the world. It sits atop one of the tallest rolling hills of the Ardennes Forest. The location marks the furthest point of the German advance during operation Wacht-am Rhein, colloquially known in the United States as the "Battle of the Bulge."

The Mardasson Memorial stands 39 feet high and 103 feet across and rests upon .82 hectares of land, circumscribed by law into an area of everlasting pastoral beauty. While the monument itself is of a massive scale and ostensibly dedicated to honoring the 76,890 American casualties of the campaign, the underlying motives for its creation appear to be more partisan. Most documentation relating to the financing and underlying aims of the Mardasson creation remains lost, obfuscated, or undiscovered. It seems the monument was created principally as a diplomatic mechanism to advance post-war Belgian political and economic goals vis-a-vis the United States.

The monument was the brainchild of a group of powerful Belgian politicians loosely grouped as the Belgo-American Association (ABA), who was "...anxious to strengthen the alliance with the powerful American ally". The creation of the ABA in 1945 was more of a continuation of Belgian wartime endeavors than a stand-alone affair in seeking a substantial postwar benefactor in international and economic interests. Belgium had just witnessed the conspicuous destruction of the infrastructure and economies of its closest pre-war allies (France and Great Britain), and the new choice seemed obvious.

Georges Dedoyard, a noted Liege architect who had lost a lung to gas poisoning in the trenches of WWI, designed the memorial. His vision incorporated a massive ten-panel narrative of the Ardennes battle. These panels included the unit names and crests of the US divisions participating in the Ardennes campaign. The final battle narrative carved into these ten sandstone panels points to the insights of US General and WWI veteran S.L.A. Marshall. During WWII, he was a noted journalist and historian. Another interesting design component initially wrapped the frieze of the star with the then-48 states of the United States in large bronze letters. The frieze later included the addition of Alaska and Hawaii as states in 1958-59.

The initial groundbreaking was a simple affair. A few shovelfuls of earth from the top of the barren Mardasson hill were permanently ensconced in a small portable malachite urn and ebony "casket" produced in the Belgian Congo. The earth was extracted on July 4, 1946, after which the casket was wax-sealed by the Burgomaster of Bastogne and flown directly to the United States on the inaugural transatlantic flight of SABENA, the Belgian national airline. This sarcophagus was presented to then-President Harry S. Truman by the Belgian ambassador to the United States on July 10, 1946. The excavation site now exhibits a small marble slab inscribed in Latin that translates as "To its American liberators, the Belgian people who remember, July 4, 1946". Today, that casket rests in the Truman Presidential Museum in Independence, Missouri, and the early memorial slab now occupies the very center of the finished monument. Some sources indicate that the extracted earth had been "soaked in American blood," but there is little evidence of support since there is no known record of American deaths or internment at that location. Instead, a small stele is close to the Mardasson hill, indicating the furthest advance of German patrols, where a German soldier died on December 19, 1944. The stele's inscription reads, "HERE, the invader was stopped, Winter 1944-45". Consequently, the belief that the contrived gesture of American-bloodstained soil being sent directly to President Truman was purely symbolic, as was the transport of that same offering on the first flight directly connecting Belgium to the United States.

An early marketing project for the site was the extension of the Voie de la Liberte' to expand that route to include a final marker directly adjacent to the proposed location of the Mardasson. Conceived as an all-French commemoration route, the Voie de la Liberte' celebrated General Patton's path from his US Third Army from Sainte-Mere-l'Eglise to Metz. The ABA entered negotiations with French officials in March 1946 to extend the track to Mardasson hill, and this last Belgian marker was quickly approved and later inaugurated on July 5, 1947. On this very day, Georges Dedoyard began his initial survey for the monument, even though the land was yet to be purchased, nor was a financing program in place.

Through the Belgian government-in-exile and the Belgian Economic mission in Washington, the United States supplied the Belgian Congo with significant financing, machinery, and troops during the German occupation of Belgium. This wartime aid kept the colony running smoothly and ensured a constant flow of strategic raw materials from that region to the United States. Among other war-critical imports, the uranium ore mined in the Belgian Congo required defense from German seizure. That ore eventually formed the fissile core of the Hiroshima A-bomb.

As a result of these Lend-Lease exchanges and further charges for Belgian lodging, manpower, and goods post-operation Overlord, Belgium was the only enemy-occupied nation that ended 1945 as a creditor to the United States. In this favorable economic position, Belgium could negotiate that any US debt incurred to Belgium after September 2, 1945, would be remitted directly in US dollars. This position found further enhancement by an immediate US commitment of 100 million dollars in loans to help rebuild the Belgian economy. One should note that the ABA was organized precisely at this time (1945) and consisted primarily of the same power brokers who had engineered Belgium's financial success during the war. Interestingly, there was anecdotal evidence that many Belgian citizens were either unaware of or utterly disinterested in the monument or its stated purpose. They simply strove to reconstruct their own lives and the local economies on which they depended.

The Mardasson Memorial experienced many construction delays. The most significant setback suffered was the unilateral decision by architect Dedoyard to add three memorial altars below the monument in March of 1949. This change occurred well after the bulk of the memorial's completion. This sudden revision resulted from a group of American women who approached the United States embassy in Belgium, requesting "a suitable area for contemplation ." Whoever those women were, their opinions evidently carried much weight within the ABA and Dedoyard. Subsequently, three separate altars were blasted out from under the edifice, individually representing Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. All three mosaic frescoes surrounding the altars were completed in a style describing "the homage paid by American women to their heroes."

The Mardasson remained the property of the Kingdom of Belgium and was maintained solely by that nation until the summer of 2019. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, the United States government paid for the complete restoration and cleaning of the monument. In July 2020, the Mardasson ownership shifted from the Kingdom of Belgium to the United States government. The ABMC now operates and maintains the memorial in perpetuity, in close cooperation with Belgian authorities.

While the Mardasson is dedicated to the sacrifices of American veterans of the Ardennes campaign and remains a beautiful memory site for that purpose, the monument's conception tells a larger story. The ABA clearly created the Mardasson as a "triumphant stage for the display of transatlantic politics ." The same politicians and industrialists who conducted Belgian affairs before and during the war sought to place Belgium in an advantageous position. They constructed this monument as an offering of goodwill to the United States to foster the economic prosperity of their nation in an uncertain postwar period.

The stated motives and fundraising for the Mardasson reflected heartfelt sympathy for the US service members who had been maimed or killed liberating the Belgian nation. It stands to reason their true motives were more partisan, as they sought to tightly bind themselves to the one western nation that had genuinely thrived in the aftermath of WWII.

Edited by Laura Bailey

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General George S. Patton was undoubtedly one of the most colorful yet controversial American military leaders of the twentieth century. Appropriately enough, he has been the subject of innumerable profiles, movies, and full-scale biographies during his lifetime and since his death. Many memorials, statues, schools, and museums exist in his honor and dedication to his memory. The name General George Smith Patton Jr. does not necessarily evoke the same memories overseas as in America. While there are many monuments and statues of Patton located throughout the world, only three major locations are 'biographical museums.' Located in Fort Knox, Kentucky, Ettelbruck, Belgium, and Chiriaco, California, each focuses upon the General and his exploits in North Africa, Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany during the Second World War.

The General Patton Memorial Museum in Chiriaco Summit, California, was established in 1988. It is dedicated primarily to honoring Patton and the soldiers who trained there, displaying war items related to the general and the hundreds of thousands of men and women who trained at the facility between 1942-1944. The museum sits within what was once known as 'U.S Army Camp Young,' a swath of desert comprising over eighteen thousand square miles. Even today, it is still considered the world's largest military training installation.

A native of San Marino, California, General Patton returned to his home state in early 1942, shortly after America's entry into World War II, to set up a desert training center for U.S. soldiers heading into combat. The facility's primary purpose was to prepare young men for desert tank warfare before being sent to North Africa and Italy. Although General Patton was only at Camp Young for four months before heading overseas, it continued its heavy-armor tank training until December 1944.

At the camp's creation, history was about to be made in a place where only cactus and scrub survived, where unrelenting heat and sand were the norms of the day. It is here, in the middle of the Mojave Desert in Southeastern California, that this forsaken land would become Patton's "paradise, exactly what he was looking for." Acquiring the land in the desert by the U.S. Army is a tale the locals enjoy relaying to tourists today. The story tells of General Patton personally walking into the Indio office of surveyor Michael Rusche in early 1942, saying, "I hear you've been around here for a while. I hope you can help me out." What soon transpired under the General's direction was the building of eleven separate camps, which comprised the training facility at Camp Young. Patton's headquarters were stationed in the middle and used as the focal point, with the surrounding miles of the desert used to train tank warfare. "We cannot train troops to fight in the desert of North Africa by training them in the swamps of Georgia," Patton was to proclaim. Over the next two years, over one million Americans, both male and female, prepared for battle here under the ghastliest of conditions.

Many first-hand accounts relate, "as the first commanding general of the training facility, Patton certainly stamped his brand on the training center." The hill from which he could observe the wide range of tank exercises was called 'The King's Throne.' It was a lower elevation within the surrounding mountains where he could critically scrutinize the formation of the tanks and motorized units below. Detecting a mistake or way to improve, he would shout instructions into his radio, "many of which were expletives." An official Army historian named Porter B. Williamson wrote, "on a number of occasions, Patton would extoll a particular soldier or unit via his radio communications so everyone could hear." However, more than once, his harsh words would announce something such as, "Colonel Blank, you are removed from command. If you know what is good for you, you will stay away from me for a week," prompting laughter from the men.

The General George Patton Memorial Museum, outside Luxembourg City, in the small town of Hamm, Luxembourg, is also the site of an American cemetery where over five-thousand U.S. servicemen are buried, most of them killed in the Battle of the Bulge. Located among these men is the grave of General Patton. When he died in late 1945, one of his last requests was "to be buried among his men." Luxembourg celebrates General Patton and the American troops that liberated the city every year on the last Sunday in June, calling the holiday 'Remembrance Day.' This holiday was conceived shortly after the war by the townspeople and continues to this day. At the ceremony's close, the city's mayor takes center stage. The concluding remarks remain the same, "Luxembourg will never forget what General Patton and the United States did for us. God bless America, and God bless our little Grand Duchy."

The General George Patton Museum of Leadership in Fort Knox, Kentucky, was once the largest Patton museum in the United States. In the mid-1990s, the outdoor tank exhibits and many statues and monuments transferred to military museums in Fort Benning, Georgia, and West Point, New York. However, the Kentucky museum still garners over 350,000 visitors each year. This complex was developed shortly after World War II and has been "a work in progress ever since." Managed by the U.S. Army Accessions Command in Fort Monroe, Virginia, it contains several of Patton's personal effects, including items from his childhood in California, his revolvers, touring car, and even the 1938 Cadillac in which he took his final ride. Rather than glorifying war, this museum presents Patton's complex, emotional, and intellectual history and armored warfare through the ages. Every July 4, this museum comes alive and celebrates General Patton by hosting a re-enactment based loosely on the type of combat that occurred in Northern Europe in the spring of 1945.

The perspectives of memory vary between these three museums in Luxembourg, Fort Knox, and Chiriaco Summit. From yearly ceremonies in Europe, specifically Luxembourg, we know that Patton is still considered a gallant hero and truly celebrated. But what about in America? Could Patton's 'star power' or popularity in the United States be waning or changing somehow? Does the recent movement of 230 large Patton artifacts from the Fort Knox museum in Kentucky to a more secular and less-visited army base at Fort Benning, Georgia, suggest in some way that Americans today feel differently about Patton?

Mirna Flores, Director of the California memorial, has been with the Patton museum for over twenty years. Although she was not aware of what the Fort Knox museum had done, she is confident that "although Patton was a complicated military figure, the museum believes his star has not tarnished in any way." In recent decades, the museum enjoyed record yearly increases in visitors to the facility. When asked how the museum has changed, grown, and evolved during her tenure, she noted she was most proud of two things: securing a very hard-to-find original German Tiger Tank and formatting a school children's tour. Flores added, "Education of the war itself along with Patton's life has always been the focus of the museum," but fashioning the information for young children became a goal and a reality for the museum in just the last few years.

Remembering Camp Young in the California desert historically and through collective memory is equally as important as honoring the countless men and women trained there. The soldiers who initially trained at the camp became the first American forces deployed to combat against the Germans in North Africa.

In 1988, over four decades since the end of World War II, many old soldiers and their families returned and gathered in the hot California desert for the dedication of the Patton Museum at Chiriaco Summit. Two aging veterans, Charles Jeglinski, 74, of Venice, California, and Frank Carroll, 75, of Phoenix, Arizona, pulled aside a couple of journalists covering the event. They both had trained at Camp Young with Patton and followed him into battle in North Africa and Europe. Said Carroll to the journalists, "Here's a picture I bet you fella's don't have." They went on to say General Patton told them he was going to do this when they arrived in Germany, and they both claimed he always kept his word. The photograph showed a smiling General Patton on a small hilltop as he urinated into the Rhine River below.

(edited by Laura Bailey)

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