Graves for 7,862 : Bush Honors GIs Who Died in Italy, Sicily

Santi Bisogni’s legs have not always worked well since that searing day in the North African desert half a century ago, but Sunday he strode purposefully across a broad sweep of lawn to stand with his memories before two flags at half-staff and the President of the United States.

“Who remembers the boys who lie in this ugly but beautiful place?” asked Bisogni, 72.

George Bush remembered them Sunday in an elaborate Memorial Day ceremony at the park-like cemetery here for 7,862 American soldiers who died in the World War II invasions of Sicily and Italy.

Heads for Brussels

Bush left Italy a few hours later for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit meeting opening today in Brussels.

At the cemetery, graves he called a “silent tribute to America’s battle for freedom in this century” fanned out eloquently before him as the black-suited Bush addressed a crowd of American service personnel and several thousand Italians here near the Tyrrhenian Sea, 36 miles south of Rome.

“As I reflect on this scene, and anticipate the dynamic and forward-looking Europe of the 1990s, I think of generations of young people on both sides of the Atlantic who have grown up in peace and prosperity,” said Bush. “With no experience of the horror and destruction of war, it might be difficult for them to understand why we need to keep a strong military deterrent to prevent war and to preserve freedom and democracy.

“The answer is here, among the quiet of the graves,” the President said in a message meant to be heard by missile-chary West Germany and other NATO allies the United States thinks are too dovish toward a reforming Soviet Union.

Bush recounted the conspicuous valor of two Medal of Honor winners who rest here. They died in savage 1943-44 fighting against “an enemy”--Germany--that he never named directly.

“The cost of maintaining freedom is brought home to us all when tragedy strikes--as it did last month on the USS Iowa,” the President said in a 12-minute address before a columned visitor’s building where the names of 3,094 missing war dead are carved in white Carrara marble. “The loss of those fine sailors--and the tears of their families and loved ones--reminds us all of the risk and sacrifice in human terms that security sometimes demands.” Forty-seven sailors died in a gun turret explosion aboard the battleship.

In an address of his own before joining Bush for a wreath-laying ceremony, Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita reaffirmed Italian support for the Atlantic Alliance “in this world which is opening to detente and disarmament.”

“We wish a united Europe, and we wish a Europe which is a friend and an ally of the United States,” De Mita said, insisting that weakened transatlantic ties “would ultimately weaken the very foundations of Europe’s own security.”

On a bright, cloudless Sunday morning that tasted of approaching summer, the shirt-sleeved Italians who greeted Bush and his wife, Barbara, were friendly, with the exception of about two dozen neo-Fascists who hurled flyers asking “Anzio 1945: Were They Liberators or Invaders?” The protesters vaulted barricades in an attempt to halt Bush’s motorcade. They succeeded in delaying its arrival at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery by about three minutes before police manhandled them away. The Secret Service said they had posed no threat to the President.

The minutely orchestrated, White House-perfect ceremony offered unspoken counterpoint to the chaos of violence that claimed the young men Bush had come to honor. Grass trimmed as if by micrometer and tight-measured camera angles seemed cumbersome antithesis to the short life of Pfc. Lavern L. Hendricks, 15th Infantry, a Wisconsin boy, who lay near the podium under a fresh red carnation and small plastic flags of the United States and Italy.

“This place does honor to American prestige,” said Rosaria Grecco, a 40-year-old Romana moved more by the trimmed ranks of crosses and Stars of David than by rhetoric.

Memorial Day amid the pines in a military cemetery was a time for personal recollections Sunday.

Bush had his. As Allied troops drove north toward Rome from the bloody Anzio-Nettuno beachhead in 1944, Bush recalled, he was a 19-year-old torpedo bomber pilot aboard the carrier Jacinto in the Pacific. In fact, after the ceremony, the former Navy pilot and his wife paid a surprise visit to the helicopter carrier Guadalcanal off the Italian coast, there to encounter a red-faced sailor emerging from a shower dressed only in a towel.

Santi Bisogni had his memories, too: fighting near Tobruk; a wound that would leave him disabled for life; three years in a British prisoner-of-war camp. “Bush is a man I admire. I wanted to see him in person,” Bisogni said, and never mind that the Italian army in which he fought was once at war with the United States.

Deep in the crowd, only a single front tooth remaining in his top jaw, 52-year-old Carlo Urbani also remembered. He was born in Nettuno. “I was only a boy but it is still like yesterday; the ships with mouths that flipped open to let off men and tanks; the thunder. Water, electricity, we had nothing when they came, and what little there was went all to hell in the fighting. Now, I suppose, to a point, we are rich.”

In fact, peasants’ land by the Mediterranean that was a devil’s cockpit for four brutish months in 1944 is now prized in Nettuno and neighboring Anzio by middle-class Romans seeking summer residences.

Forty-five years later, the Americans who fought in Nettuno are remembered here in words, wreathes--and other ways. In Sunday’s crowd, bright motes of red and orange, stood attentive dozens of Italian children and teen-agers who had come to the cemetery in the well-cut uniforms of Nettuno’s youth baseball leagues.