Sacred Mission
In the late 1920s, a young Army major was assigned to a small federal agency in Washington to work on a guide to military cemeteries and monuments of the Great War. After the 1918 armistice, some 2,400 temporary American cemeteries remained in Europe, many near where doughboys had fallen. Congress tasked the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) with creating cemeteries, chapels and monuments to honor the dead and missing, worthy of families visiting the final resting places of their loved ones.
After the guidebook’s first edition was published, the major went overseas to revise it for the veteran who wanted to “find his way to where he fought.” Originally titled “American Armies and Battlefields in Europe,” it’s still a standard reference. The major who toiled on that assignment? Dwight Eisenhower. As for ABMC, it adopted the motto “Time will not dim the glory of their deeds,” from the words of its first chairman, General of the Armies John J. Pershing.
On Jan. 9, 2018, retired Army Maj. Gen. William Matz – decorated Vietnam War combat infantryman and American Legion life member – became ABMC’s eighth secretary. He takes the post during one of the agency’s busiest years, including the centennial of several World War I battles and the armistice that ended the war.
During a four-decade military career, Matz fought in the Mekong Delta, served on Korea’s DMZ and deployed to Panama in Operation Just Cause. He is an Army Ranger School graduate with multiple tours with the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions and two years with the Navy/Marine amphibious forces during his second Vietnam tour.
Matz also served as executive secretary to two of President Ronald Reagan’s secretaries of defense, Caspar Weinberger and Frank Carlucci – a job he jokes was “a different kind of battlefield.”
President Donald Trump’s naming Matz to lead ABMC is the second time a sitting president has called on him. In 2005, President George W. Bush appointed him to the Veterans’ Disability Benefits Commission. “I don’t look on it as a job,” Matz says of ABMC, “but a calling. It’s an honor to be part of the sole agency responsible for overseeing and maintaining these sacred overseas sites.”
Matz grew up in Lansdowne, Pa., in a family of World War II veterans, including two uncles who served in the Army. One was at Hickam Field, Pearl Harbor, during the Japanese attack and the other fought on New Guinea. A third uncle, a Marine, was wounded on Guadalcanal.
As a Cub Scout carrying the U.S. flag in parades, Matz saw World War I veterans who had been gassed and injured. He faced adversity early in life when, stricken by polio, he was told he would never walk again without a brace or crutch.
“After months of treatment,” he says, “I began to regain use of my leg and relied less on the braces and crutch. Muscle development came slowly, but I persevered. It was my father, a World War II Navy veteran, who said to me, ‘Put that crutch away and stand on your own two feet.’”
He went on to play lacrosse at Gettysburg College, and completed ROTC. “My battle with polio forced me during my formative years to persevere no matter what the obstacle, and to overcome physical challenges,” he says.
GLOBAL PRESENCE ABMC manages 26 overseas cemeteries and 29 memorials. It cares for the graves of nearly 125,000 Americans killed in the world wars, and honors by name more than 94,000 who were missing in action, lost or buried at sea during World War I, World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam wars.
On Matz’s first overseas trip as ABMC secretary earlier this year, he visited five sites, including the Normandy and Aisne-Marne American Cemeteries. During a winter snowfall, he paused to thank French groundskeepers who keep these “national treasures” in “pristine” condition.
Nine of the cemeteries hold U.S. World War I dead. The largest number in Europe – 14,246 – rest at the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. One of the smallest sites is newly acquired by the agency: the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial
Cemetery, in which lie early aviators like Maj. Raoul Lufbery, who fought for France before the United States entered the war in April 1917.
ABMC Deputy Secretary Robert Dalessandro, a retired Army colonel and member of the U.S. World War One Centennial Commission, says the Great War was a watershed cultural moment for American families. Approximately 500,000
immigrants from 46 countries served, with 13 earning Medals of Honor. Tennessee-born Sgt. Alvin York, who at first resented being “throwed” into a melting pot of “foreigners,” went on to dedicate his memoirs to “the Greeks, Irish, Poles, Jews and Italians who were in my platoon ... I jes’ learned to love them.”
This year’s anniversaries honor ties dating to the American Revolution. “France is our oldest ally, and many French know more about the Battle of Yorktown than most Americans,” Dalessandro says. “Many ABMC employees in France are French nationals whose ancestors began with the old Army Graves Registration Service in Pershing’s day. Some French families have worked at these sites for generations.”
While known for cemeteries in Europe, ABMC has overseen the design and construction of the Korean War and World War II memorials in Washington, D.C., both transferred to the National Park Service upon completion. The agency also maintains sites whose locations may surprise some, including Mexico City National Cemetery, Santiago Surrender Tree in Cuba, Corozal
American Cemetery in Panama and Clark Veterans Cemetery in the Philippines. Matz himself has a connection to Corozal: he served with the 7th Infantry Division troops near it in Operation Just Cause.
ABMC’s World War II sites span the globe: 93,000 American dead rest in 14 cemeteries and more than 78,900 missing are named. Each site recognizes U.S. forces near where they fought – including the Philippines, Tunisia, Italy, France, England, Belgium and Luxembourg.
The Sicily-Rome American Cemetery received a historic papal visit in 2017, the first to a U.S. military cemetery. Buried there is posthumous Silver Star recipient Army Nurse Corps Lt. Ellen Ainsworth, killed in action at Anzio while shielding her patients.
Many graves are “adopted” or visited by local families, says Sarah Herrmann, ABMC’s digital communications manager. Belgians participate in the Sentinels of Memory program through the American Overseas Memorial Day Association, while at the Netherlands American Cemetery, every grave and name on the Walls of the Missing has been adopted by a local family – more than 10,000 in that cemetery alone.
ABMC maintains World War II monuments in remote Pacific outposts: Guadalcanal, Midway Island, Papua New Guinea. This year, a memorial will be dedicated to U.S. troops stationed in New Zealand during World War II. Another will honor World War II and Cold War service of Americans in Iceland.
The goal, says Tim Nosal, ABMC’s chief of external affairs and a Navy veteran of the Iraq War, is to “put a face on all those headstones.” During the world wars, he adds, families had the choice of repatriation of remains or burial in overseas military cemeteries. After World War I, some 30 percent of identified servicemembers’ known burials were in ABMC cemeteries; the figure for World War II is around 24 percent.
At a Netherlands American Cemetery Memorial Day ceremony in 2015, Herrmann met a local man, Hank Verouden, who had a story to tell.
“A small piece of his ear was missing,” she says. “In the fall of 1944, when he was a boy, a bullet grazed him as Americans were battling Germans to liberate his small town. More than 70 years later, tears ran down his face as he told the story. Europeans have not forgotten American sacrifices.”
‘PULLS AT MY SOUL’ ABMC is renovating and adding visitor centers at several sites, each with exhibits, photographs, maps, films and interpretive kiosks. This month, a new visitor center will open at the Chateau-Thierry American Monument in France. Last year, two opened at the Flanders Field and Meuse-Argonne American Cemeteries. The Normandy Visitor Center will undergo major renovations for the 75th anniversary of D-Day, and another is set to open at Manila American Cemetery in October 2019.
Since the Korean War, U.S. policy has been for the remains of Americans killed in action overseas to be returned home, Nosal says. But while most ABMC cemeteries are closed to new burials, technology has made possible the identification of remains long marked “unknown.”
In 1944, Navy radiomen Henry and Louie Pieper were killed when their LST hit a German mine off Normandy. One brother was laid to rest in Normandy American Cemetery; the other was buried as an “unknown” in Belgium. In 2016, Nebraska high school student Vanessa Taylor helped untangle the mystery. The next year, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency exhumed remains believed to be Henry’s from Ardennes American Cemetery and confirmed identification. The twins will be reunited this summer near the site of Reagan’s 1984 “Boys of Pointe Du Hoc” speech, and buried side by side at Normandy.
At Honolulu’s National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, ABMC is renovating the Courts of the Missing. Engraved there are the names of 18,095 missing, lost or buried at sea from World War II in the South Pacific and 8,209 from the Korean War. The project will replace discolored limestone panels in the World War II and Korean War courts. In 1980, Vietnam War Courts of the Missing were added, with the names of another 2,504 missing. The Vietnam Pavilion followed in 2012, featuring mosaic campaign maps similar to those depicting World War II Pacific operations and the Korean War.
Honoring the Vietnam War’s fallen and missing is personal to Matz. Fifty years ago, he commanded a rifle company during the 1968 Tet Offensive, and 11 of his soldiers’ names are etched on the Wall in Washington, D.C.
“The tenacity and bravery our infantrymen showed on a daily basis will always stay with me,” he says. “I was in awe of them.” Pinned down, wounded himself, Capt. Matz saved the lives of several men by pulling them to safety.
“Every soldier showed tremendous courage in the face of enemy fire,” says Matz, who received the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star and Purple Heart. “They showed me what battlefield courage and valor were, and what it truly means to be an infantryman.”
This Vietnam War experience shapes Matz’s leadership of ABMC. “Having been an infantryman, I have a feel for the up-close terror, hardship and suffering that these war dead incurred,” he says. “War is often described in big numbers, figures and concepts that erase the personalization of those who fought. But walking through the cemeteries, reading the names and ranks and dates of death and seeing the number of headstones ... it makes these wars very personal – you quickly realize the human cost.”
Matz also appreciates the close ties between ABMC and The American Legion. Pershing played a role in the creation of both organizations, he says, and the Legion “has always supported ABMC’s sacred mission.” Since 2013, the Legion’s Overseas Graves Decoration Trust Fund has provided 81,156 grave-marker U.S. flags for Memorial Day ceremonies at ABMC cemeteries.
Matz is proud to carry that sacred mission forward. “To now be a part of the agency that oversees their final resting place is an honor and responsibility that weighs heavily on me,” he says. “It pulls at my very soul.”
Christian M. DeJohn is a 1/104th Cavalry veteran of Bosnia-Herzegovina and member of Pennsylvania’s American Legion Post 945. A former M1 Abrams tank gunner, he is the author of “For Want of a Gun: The Sherman Tank Scandal of WWII” and the Abrams tank, Bradley CFV/IFV and Humvee volumes in the “Legends of Warfare” series.