For 75 years, US Marine Private First Class Alfred Edwards was unaccounted for following a fierce battle against the Japanese on the island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll during the Pacific campaign of World War II. Now, he is resting among heroes at Arlington National Cemetery.
Nearly 6,400 Japanese, Koreans, and Americans died in the fighting, mostly on and around the small island of Betio, in the extreme southwest of Tarawa Atoll. US casualties were 1,696 killed in action and 2,101 wounded in action.
The Battle of Tarawa was the first American offensive in the critical central Pacific region. It was also the first time in the Pacific War that the United States had faced serious Japanese opposition to an amphibious landing. Previous landings met little or no initial resistance, but on Tarawa the 4,500 Japanese defenders were well-supplied and well-prepared, and they fought almost to the last man, exacting a heavy toll on the United States Marine Corps. The losses on Tarawa were incurred in just over 4 days of fighting.
Showing posts with label Arlington National Cemetery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arlington National Cemetery. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Monday, November 3, 2014
Buffalo Soldier and Medal of Honor Recipient deserves Arlington Burial
A Bellevue man says a buffalo soldier and Medal of Honor recipient who was buried in Nebraska needs to be moved to Arlington National Cemetery. U.S. Rep. Adam Smith may clear a path for him to do just that.
The headstone of 1st Sgt. Emanuel Stance, a buffalo soldier and Medal of Honor recipient, has stood in Fort McPherson National Cemetery in Maxwell, Neb., for over a century. The site is about 1,400 miles from Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where 75-year-old James Nelson, of Bellevue, thinks Stance deserves to be buried.
Nelson, who first ran across Stance’s name on a sales trip to Nebraska almost five decades ago, said Stance should have been moved a long time ago “by people with more power and better means than I have.” “They didn’t leave Custer out there, did they?” he said.
Nelson — a self-professed “old white geezer” — is fascinated by the history of the buffalo soldiers, black servicemen who served in segregated regiments from 1866 to 1951. He has made it his mission to do whatever it takes to have Stance’s remains exhumed and laid to rest at Arlington, the nation’s most prestigious burial ground. Nelson says he would pay all reburial costs himself, if necessary.
At first, Nelson sought out potential relatives for permission, a difficult task given that Stance enlisted in the Army right after the Civil War and never married or raised children. Current federal laws forbid disinterment from national cemeteries without permission from the deceased’s nearest kin.
After a year of research turned up nothing but dead ends, Nelson lobbied U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, to add an amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act that would create a way for people like Nelson to relocate the remains of military personnel with no living or known family.
Smith followed through, adding the amendment to a defense-budget bill that has passed the House of Representatives. Yet even if the Senate approves it, too, the National Cemetery Administration, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Army still have to decide whether they will allow such reburials.
So far, military officials have shown no interest in allowing Nelson to relocate Stance or a Medal of Honor buffalo soldier buried in Vancouver, Wash., that Nelson recently decided he wants to take to Arlington as well.
Sara Elton, chief of operations for several national military cemeteries in the Midwest, said officials in charge of Arlington National Cemetery are against moving Stance. The prestige of being buried at Arlington is largely overblown, she said, noting that most of the nation’s 3,492 Medal of Honor recipients are buried all over the country in private cemeteries and national ones. Arlington didn’t become a popular burial ground until the late President John F. Kennedy was buried there in 1963, she added.
“Being buried at another national cemetery isn’t a second choice — it is the choice,” she said. “It’s not a travesty that Stance isn’t buried at Arlington. I want to hug this veteran for taking this on as a cause, but I promise: We are taking care of Emanuel.”
Stance’s 21-year career in the Army’s Ninth Cavalry included fights and demotions, but also a Medal of Honor, which he was awarded in 1870 after leading a mission to rescue two kidnapped white children from a tribe near Fort McKavett, Texas. He was among the first black soldiers to be awarded that honor.
He had enlisted in the service after the Civil War, along with other emancipated black men who found that the Army was their best ticket out of the South, where most freed slaves became sharecroppers still at the mercy of white plantation owners.
Called buffalo soldiers, the black servicemen were on the front lines of some of the military’s toughest missions on the Western frontier, including ultimately futile attempts to keep white settlers out of Indian territory.
According to BlackPast.org, an online black-history archive, authorities suspected it was Stance’s own men who shot him to death on Christmas Day in 1887 near Fort Robinson, Neb., but no one was ever charged for the murder.
When Nelson first learned about Stance in 1966, he knew then he wanted to do something to rectify what he considers a dishonor. He has even sought support from Pope Francis. He has an ally in Jackie Jones-Hook, executive director of the Buffalo Soldiers Museum in Tacoma, who agrees that Stance should be reburied — if only to raise greater awareness of all the other buffalo soldiers.
“The buffalo soldier story is such an untold story about people who were mistreated, but still showed a great love for America,” she said. “Being buried at Arlington is an American tradition — it’s one of the highest honors that there is,” she added. “Burying him at Arlington would be the proper way to give him honor and respect.”
In 2009, Cpl. Isaiah Mays, another buffalo soldier, was moved to Arlington from the graveyard in Arizona. That reburial was easier to process, though, because Mays was in a hospital cemetery, not a national one — and he didn’t even have a headstone with his name on it.
Stance, in contrast, had an honorable burial at what Elton, the military cemeteries official, called a “gorgeous national shrine.” Still, Nelson is unsatisfied. “I’m a nobody, and I don’t know exactly what I’m doing,” he said. “But nothing is going to stop me from giving these heroes the honor they deserve.”
The headstone of 1st Sgt. Emanuel Stance, a buffalo soldier and Medal of Honor recipient, has stood in Fort McPherson National Cemetery in Maxwell, Neb., for over a century. The site is about 1,400 miles from Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where 75-year-old James Nelson, of Bellevue, thinks Stance deserves to be buried.
Nelson, who first ran across Stance’s name on a sales trip to Nebraska almost five decades ago, said Stance should have been moved a long time ago “by people with more power and better means than I have.” “They didn’t leave Custer out there, did they?” he said.
Nelson — a self-professed “old white geezer” — is fascinated by the history of the buffalo soldiers, black servicemen who served in segregated regiments from 1866 to 1951. He has made it his mission to do whatever it takes to have Stance’s remains exhumed and laid to rest at Arlington, the nation’s most prestigious burial ground. Nelson says he would pay all reburial costs himself, if necessary.
At first, Nelson sought out potential relatives for permission, a difficult task given that Stance enlisted in the Army right after the Civil War and never married or raised children. Current federal laws forbid disinterment from national cemeteries without permission from the deceased’s nearest kin.
After a year of research turned up nothing but dead ends, Nelson lobbied U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Bellevue, a ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, to add an amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act that would create a way for people like Nelson to relocate the remains of military personnel with no living or known family.
Smith followed through, adding the amendment to a defense-budget bill that has passed the House of Representatives. Yet even if the Senate approves it, too, the National Cemetery Administration, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S. Army still have to decide whether they will allow such reburials.
So far, military officials have shown no interest in allowing Nelson to relocate Stance or a Medal of Honor buffalo soldier buried in Vancouver, Wash., that Nelson recently decided he wants to take to Arlington as well.
Sara Elton, chief of operations for several national military cemeteries in the Midwest, said officials in charge of Arlington National Cemetery are against moving Stance. The prestige of being buried at Arlington is largely overblown, she said, noting that most of the nation’s 3,492 Medal of Honor recipients are buried all over the country in private cemeteries and national ones. Arlington didn’t become a popular burial ground until the late President John F. Kennedy was buried there in 1963, she added.
“Being buried at another national cemetery isn’t a second choice — it is the choice,” she said. “It’s not a travesty that Stance isn’t buried at Arlington. I want to hug this veteran for taking this on as a cause, but I promise: We are taking care of Emanuel.”
Stance’s 21-year career in the Army’s Ninth Cavalry included fights and demotions, but also a Medal of Honor, which he was awarded in 1870 after leading a mission to rescue two kidnapped white children from a tribe near Fort McKavett, Texas. He was among the first black soldiers to be awarded that honor.
He had enlisted in the service after the Civil War, along with other emancipated black men who found that the Army was their best ticket out of the South, where most freed slaves became sharecroppers still at the mercy of white plantation owners.
Called buffalo soldiers, the black servicemen were on the front lines of some of the military’s toughest missions on the Western frontier, including ultimately futile attempts to keep white settlers out of Indian territory.
According to BlackPast.org, an online black-history archive, authorities suspected it was Stance’s own men who shot him to death on Christmas Day in 1887 near Fort Robinson, Neb., but no one was ever charged for the murder.
When Nelson first learned about Stance in 1966, he knew then he wanted to do something to rectify what he considers a dishonor. He has even sought support from Pope Francis. He has an ally in Jackie Jones-Hook, executive director of the Buffalo Soldiers Museum in Tacoma, who agrees that Stance should be reburied — if only to raise greater awareness of all the other buffalo soldiers.
“The buffalo soldier story is such an untold story about people who were mistreated, but still showed a great love for America,” she said. “Being buried at Arlington is an American tradition — it’s one of the highest honors that there is,” she added. “Burying him at Arlington would be the proper way to give him honor and respect.”
In 2009, Cpl. Isaiah Mays, another buffalo soldier, was moved to Arlington from the graveyard in Arizona. That reburial was easier to process, though, because Mays was in a hospital cemetery, not a national one — and he didn’t even have a headstone with his name on it.
Stance, in contrast, had an honorable burial at what Elton, the military cemeteries official, called a “gorgeous national shrine.” Still, Nelson is unsatisfied. “I’m a nobody, and I don’t know exactly what I’m doing,” he said. “But nothing is going to stop me from giving these heroes the honor they deserve.”
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Green Berets pay tribute to JFK at Arlington National Cemetery
Though the Special Forces existed before JFK took the presidential oath, it was JFK who authorized the cap as the official headgear of the U.S. Army Special Forces. “The challenge of this old but new form of operations is a real one and I know that you and the members of your Command will carry on for us and the free world in a manner which is both worthy and inspiring. I am sure the Green Beret will be a mark of distinction in the trying times ahead,” Kennedy wrote to Gen. William Yarborough at Fort Bragg in October 1961.
Pictured at left is MOH Recipient Bernie Adkins and BG Darsie Rogers, Commander of Special Forces Command.
Kennedy visited Yarborough and toured Fort Bragg shortly before he wrote that letter to him in 1961, when he presented the Special Forces with the Green Beret. Among the soldiers who spoke with him in 1961 was Clair Aldrich. Aldrich, who was in attendance Tuesday, was at Kennedy’s funeral in 1963. He said it was the saddest day of his life. “The man, you could just look at him and see confidence," Aldrich said. The second saddest day for Aldrich was when he watched the assassination in Dallas over the television.
The Green Berets expanded their force under JFK by adding four additional groups on active duty and four new groups in the National Guard and the Army Reserve, according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
“The Green Beret is again becoming a symbol of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom,” Kennedy wrote to the U.S. Army in 1962.
When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, his family requested the Green Berets participate in the Honor Guard at his funeral.
“(Kennedy) got behind the Green Berets. They are a very highly trained group of people who travel all over the world helping other countries into their freedom process. He was the kind of guy that from his Second World War experience, he just made us so proud that he was behind us. We knew we had a president that was backing us up,” Aldrich said. “His death was just a terrible thing.”
“JFK, what he did in World War II, it just gave us the thrust we needed to go out there and be as much like him as we could. As for how I feel about it today, it makes me so dog-gone proud to come up here and participate in something like this. It’s unbelievable,” Aldrich added.
Article from Stars and Stripes
Monday, November 7, 2011
JFK Wreath Laying Ceremony
U.S. Army Special Forces Command (Airborne) will hold its commemorative President John F. Kennedy Wreath Laying Ceremony, Thursday, Nov. 17, at 10:10 a.m. at the JFK grave site at Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Va. More than 50 years ago President John F. Kennedy met with Brig. Gen. William P. Yarborough and his Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C., on 12 Oct. 1961.
This important visit and the subsequent lasting partnership between JFK and the Special Forces would ensure that these men would forever wear the Green Beret and would be the leading edge and main effort of his campaign to counter insurgency around the globe.
The Wreath Laying Ceremony, near the anniversary of President Kennedy's burial was a regiment tradition for many years. The Fort Bragg based command will renew this tradition as a fitting tribute to both the fallen President and the men he commissioned to be the "Tip of the Spear" as the world’s premier unconventional warfare warriors.
Following the ceremony Regimental Commander Brig Gen. Edward M. Reeder Jr., and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Secretary Michael G. Vickers, will speak at a luncheon honoring the legacy of the Green Berets.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Our National Symbol Standing Guard
Taken at the National Cemetery in Minneapolis on a June morning as it appeared in the Minneapolis Star/Tribune.
Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words!!! It says everything without a single word. This should become an official Memorial Day, 4th of July, and/or Veterans Day remembrance photo,....truly “Our national symbol standing guard”
Thanks Dave for sending to us.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Memorial Day 2011
May everyone get a chance, really a honor, to visit the Arlington National Cemetery. Truly humbling and very challenging to keep a dry eye.
The Old Guard and their perpetual honor of and at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier will raise goose bumps on the most hardened souls among us.
Today we honor those who have sacrificed life or limb in defense of this Country and the ideals for which the United States stands for.
The Old Guard and their perpetual honor of and at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier will raise goose bumps on the most hardened souls among us.
Today we honor those who have sacrificed life or limb in defense of this Country and the ideals for which the United States stands for.
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