Clinton Honors GIs Who Fought in Italy

He came on a mission of remembrance, a young man paying homage to the sacrifice of so many young men who died to make a world free.

President Clinton arrived at the beautiful, mournful Sicily-Rome American cemetery here on a muggy, cloud-dappled day to give thanks to the thousands of GIs who survived the bloody campaign to liberate Italy--and to the 7,862 dead who are buried here.

To the crash of cannon and the haunting strains of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” a somber Clinton saluted the more than 1,000 military veterans and guests at the Nettuno memorial service.

“You cannot leave memory to chance,” he said. “We are the sons and daughters of the world they saved.”

Friday’s ceremony was the first of three major commemorative events to mark the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the end of the bloodiest conflagration in history.

At Nettuno, 40 miles south of Rome, Clinton honored the men who struggled their way from Sicily northward, up the mountainous spine of the Italian peninsula through a winter of ice and mud, hardship and death.

The caps of the aging veterans spelled out the names of the units that shed their blood so that the people of Italy might be free of the blight of fascism and German occupation: the 36th Infantry Division, the 45th, the 10th Mountain, the 14th, the 85th. Their name tags bore the names of places of horror that will live in history: Salerno, Anzio, Monte Cassino.

The Nettuno cemetery lies just inland from Anzio, the port where Allied troops landed in January, 1944, to stiff German resistance. They were pinned down under intense artillery and air bombardment until late May, when they broke out, eventually linking up with other troops that had pushed through the Germans’ fortified Gustav Line and marched into Rome 50 years ago today.

Clinton noted that his father, William Jefferson Blythe, served in Italy and recalled a story told to him about his father, who died in 1946, three months before Clinton’s birth.

“Back home, his niece had heard about the beautiful Italian countryside and wrote him asking for a single leaf from one of the glorious trees here to take to school,” Clinton said. “My father had only sad news to send back--there were no leaves; every one had been stripped by the fury of the battle.”

The leaves have now returned, and the Nettuno cemetery is a lush memorial garden of evergreen holly oak and cypress trees. Row on row of perfectly aligned white marble crosses and Stars of David mark the graves. Before Friday’s ceremony, Italian schoolchildren placed Italian and American flags and a single red or yellow carnation upon each grave.

“We stand today in fields forever scarred by sacrifice,” Clinton said, in one of his most eloquent and briefest speeches as President. “But amid the horror of the guns, something rare was born--a driving spirit of common cause.”

In a gesture of conciliation, Clinton honored his chief nemesis on Capitol Hill, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, who as a 21-year-old platoon leader with the 10th Mountain Division was gravely wounded in Italy. Dole was joined at the Nettuno ceremony by three other Senate veterans of the Italian campaign: Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), who lost an arm to his war wounds in 1945; Ernest F. Hollings (D-S. C.), and Claiborne Pell (D-R. I.).

“We honor what they did for us here,” Clinton said. He called them “each a young American who came of age here; each an American patriot who went home to build up our nation.”

Clinton and Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro laid a wreath at the steps of the U.S.-built memorial, near the base of a statue depicting an American soldier and sailor linked as brothers in arms.

“Why war?” Scalfaro asked in his remarks. “Why destruction and death? And the answer is only one: Because violence and thirst for power prevailed over reason; because the natural and inviolable rights of the human person were transgressed by dictators, with the idea of the hegemony of a ‘superior race’ that kills human brotherhood and generates extermination and genocide.”

He said that Italian history--its embrace of fascism and its alliance with Nazi Germany--cannot be rewritten. But he vowed that Italy would remain committed to a democratic course and alliance with the free peoples of Europe and America.

As the ceremony concluded, three waves of jet fighters roared overhead, some in the missing-man formation. The third group wreathed the cemetery in smoke in green, white and red, the Italian national colors.

Before his speech, Clinton walked among the headstones, pausing at the grave of Ophelia Tiley, an American Red Cross volunteer who was killed in Italy on March 25, 1944.

He was greeted at the cemetery by June Wandry, 73, of Portage, Mich. She served as a nurse in Italy half a century ago. She saluted the President smartly; he answered with a tentative, unpracticed salute. During her wartime service, Wandry not only ministered to wounded GIs but cared for the liberated inmates of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

Afterward, Clinton hosted a reception at the cemetery for several hundred veterans of the Italian campaign.

Later in the day, Clinton spoke to embassy employees and toured ancient Roman ruins. The evening was spent at a formal dinner given by Scalfaro at the Quirinale Palace. It was closed to the press.

While the ceremony at Nettuno was impressive, it was a relatively brief and restrained bit of presidential image-polishing, a mere warm-up for the daylong extravaganza to be staged in Normandy on Monday, the 50th anniversary of the D-day landings.

The comparison evoked bittersweet memories in many of the veterans here, who believe that their suffering and their accomplishments were overshadowed by Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s big show in France two days after the liberation of Rome.

“The trouble is, most people in America and Italy don’t know anything about what we did here,” said Norman L. Myhra of Stevens Point, Wis., an Anzio veteran who lost both hands later in the war.

“Normandy had all the people, all the equipment, all the guns,” Myhra said. “They got all the bread. We got the crumbs.”