May 28, 2006
Media contact: Jeff Schrade (202)224-9093

(Maastrict, Netherlands) Thousands of local citizens near the village of Margraten in the Netherlands turned out Sunday to pay their quiet respect to the over 8,000 American servicemen who died near there more there than 60 years ago. Speaking at the memorial service was U.S. Senator Larry Craig, along with U.S. Ambassador Roland Arnall and General David McKiernan, Commanding General of the U.S. Army in Europe.

"We are gathered in anticipation of Memorial Day, a day we honor the memory of those interred at this beautiful resting place, and in cemeteries across the globe," Craig said. "Those buried here came from nearly every state in the United States ? 32 are from my home state of Idaho."

Before he gave his remarks, Craig was being interviewed by reporters when he noticed the name of Ross C. Bales engraved on a wall designed to pay tribute to those Americans who died but whose remains were not recovered nor identified.  Bales was a captain, from Craig's home state of Idaho and he captained two B-17 bombers during the war.

His first plane he dubbed the Idaho Potato Peeler. It made a wheels-up crash landing, with no injuries, at Chipping Warden, England while returning from a mission in January of 1943. After undergoing extensive repairs it returned to combat only to be lost at sea in November of that year. 

Bales and all members of crew survived that harrowing experience.

His next plane Bales named the Potato Peeler Kids. He and his crew made 35 bombing runs into Europe before their plane was last seen in a tail spin over the North Sea. No members of the ten man crew survived.

"I was born in the year after many at rest in this cemetery died. So it is not lost on me that the blood they shed near this field gave life to the freedoms that I and millions of others have been blessed to enjoy," Craig said.

Following Sen. Craig, U.S. Ambassador Roland Arnall shared with the audience his personal experiences from World War II.

"I was a young Jewish boy struggling to survive the horrors of the Third Reich. The panic, the dread, associated with the word Nazi was unimaginable except to those who also suffered their atrocities," said Arnall, who was born in France and who whose family fled to Canada before settling in the United States. "The Americans were the prospects of a dream come true; and for me and millions of others it did."

General McKiernan told those gathered that they should remember the words of another American, General George S. Patton, who commanded U.S. troops in Europe and North Africa during World War II. "It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived."

Last year in a speech at the same cemetery, President George W. Bush noted that in the Voice of America's radio broadcast from London on the first day of the end of the war in Europe (V-E Day), the announcer asked Europe to "think of these Americans as your dead, too." In Dutch hearts, they already were.

The Americans saw the Dutch spirit in action within weeks of liberation, when this new cemetery marked its first Memorial Day. It was still a time of hardship and want and depravation yet Dutch citizens from 60 local villages collected 20 truckloads of flowers so that every American grave here would be decorated when the sun came up on Memorial Day.

That spirit still continues.

As he wrapped up his time in the Netherlands, Craig had dinner at a restored restaurant and owner Camille Oostwegel who told him the story of a broken mirror under which Craig was seated. It still contained a bullet hole left by an American soldier ? Joseph Ryan. When Oostwegel purchased the building and began restoring it, he began to seek out more about what happened to that young American, who, it turns out is buried at the nearby U.S. Cemetery.

Oostwegel has since adopted Ryan's grave, and now places flowers there in tribute to him and the other Americans who liberated his nation.

Tomorrow Craig and other U.S. Senators traveling with him will be in Normandy for Memorial Day.

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