speeches
Remarks by Ambassador Benson K. Whitney
Memorial Day Ceremony
May 29, 2006
General Dalhaug Gunnar Sønsteby, veterans, members of the attaché corps, distinguished guests:
No day on the calendar of public events strikes me with such power and emotion as Memorial Day. It is overwhelming to consider the price that has been paid by previous generations and the value of what that sacrifice procured.
No better words could be assembled to describe this event than the inscription at the chapel at the cemetery at Normandy Beach in France. It reads:
THESE ENDURED ALL AND GAVE ALL
THAT JUSTICE AMONG NATIONS MIGHT
PREVAIL
AND THAT MANKIND MIGHT ENJOY FREEDOM AND INHERIT
PEACE
But for the moment I want to focus on what took place years before Normandy: on Sunday, April 21st, 1940. U.S. Army Captain Robert M. Losey approached the Norwegian town of Dombås by train. Twelve days earlier German troops poured into Norway by land and sea. German airplanes filled the skies above this once neutral nation. Captain Losey’s mission was to find a missing group of women and children from the American Embassy that had disappeared twelve days before seeking escape to Sweden.
Losey was an Iowa born son of a traveling preacher. His dream – to become an army flyer. Young and brilliant, he first earned two master’s degrees and then graduated from West Point; he married his love Kay, and then reached his flier’s dream as a commissioned officer in the US Army.
Early in 1940, Captain Losey was ordered to Finland as a defense attaché and
then called to Norway to help Ambassador Florence Harriman evacuate the embassy
mission in Oslo. After getting the Ambassador and her group safely to Sweden,
Losey persuaded the Ambassador to allow him to return to Norway and search for
the second now missing group of Americans. Captain took the Ambassador’s car and
draped it with a large American flag in the hope the Germans might spare the
vehicle of still neutral Americans. He swiftly drove back west through the still
frozen mountains, eventually loading the car on a train to speed his
passage.
That Sunday the train with Losey’s flag-draped car arrived at the rail center of Dombås. German bombers appeared threateningly overhead, the train slowed and stopped, and the passengers ran into a nearby tunnel. Swooping down, the German bombers dropped their deadly payload. Captain Losey, too, had headed into the tunnel, but as a trained air officer doing his duty, he lingered about 30 feet from the tunnel mouth making observations. A bomb suddenly exploded nearby showering fragments into the tunnel. One piece found its deadly mark, hitting Captain Losey directly in the heart.
And so fell the very first American military casualty in World War II. In Dombås, Norway. And as would be repeated hundreds of thousands of times over the next four years, fellow soldiers delivered the tragic news to his young widow, Kay, who collapsed in grief at her loss – of the first fallen.
On this day of memory, we the living beneficiaries of Captain Losey’s sacrifice, must ask what we owe in his memory, and in the memory of the hundreds of thousands before and after who have given their lives and their futures for us.
We honor their memory by bringing our children here and never forgetting to teach them what Captain Losey knew – that in a world where evil still exists, freedom is worth fighting for. That measure of life is not length or possessions, but service for humanity that leads to justice and peace.
We honor these dead by keeping their memory alive; by remembering not just who they were but by simply imagining what might have been but was not. What would Captain Losey have become – a father and grandfather, a teacher, an ambassador?
We do them just honor by living out the truth of President Lincoln’s eloquent statement that the unfinished work of the fallen becomes our duty; that the task of the living is to dedicate ourselves to sacrifice everything to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from this earth.” We must fiercely protect the ideals for which our brave soldiers fought and died – freedom, justice, liberty. The spirit of freedom must stay alive in our thoughts but even more so in our actions.
I want to thank all of you – Americans, our Norwegian friends, including the young men and women of His Majesty the King’s Guard, and the representatives of our many allies, for being here to help commemorate our honored war dead.
In a moment, I will lay a wreath on the U.S. memorial to honor the lives of those fallen through the years in defense of our nation. I then ask that you join me in a minute of silence. One of the poets said, “God gave us memory, that we might have roses in December.” Captain Losey is a rose of freedom today: perfect and beautiful in his service to the loftiest of ideals.
May our lives take up his dreams, his potential, his ambition for a better world, that in our lives we might do something worth remembering.