792 Remember Us; The Greater Journey

·52 min·3 clips

Poet laureate Archibald MacLeish wrote 'The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak' after suffering World War I losses — Edsel reads it aloud.

1. Travel with Rick Steves episode 792 examines American sacrifice in World War II at the Netherlands American Cemetery and the influence of 19th-century Paris on American innovation. 2. Robert Edsel, founder of the Monuments Men and Women Foundation, joins as author of Remember Us: American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom, and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II; David McCullough, who died in 2022, appears in an archive interview about The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. 3. The episode's core argument is that freedom and national greatness both have human costs, and honoring those costs requires active, generational effort. 4. The Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg — ten miles from the German border where World War II in Western Europe began in May 1940 — holds approximately 10,000 American soldiers; the surrounding Dutch community created an organic grave adoption program in 1945. 5. The adoption program began because Dutch civilians who knew American soldiers personally walked and rode bikes miles to place flowers on graves before any organized program existed; the township organized it formally when mail service resumed and hundreds of letters arrived from American families. 6. Emily Michels Van Kestink, mother of 12, took the first plane of her life from the Netherlands to LaGuardia Field in June 1946 and traveled across the United States visiting families with one message: 'Leave your boys with us. We will watch over them like our own forever.' 7. Robert Edsel discovered the grave adoption program through a chance reconnection: while organizing a 2015 Congressional Gold Medal ceremony, he received an RSVP photograph identifying Frida, an 18-year-old who in 1945 had written Harvard University to find Captain Walter Hutchhausen's mother and report she walked five miles daily to his grave. 8. About 61% of American families after World War II chose repatriation; about 39% left soldiers buried in Europe, and at Margraten the figure is closer to 46% due to the Dutch community's active outreach to families about the quality of the site. 9. One war orphan told Edsel her mother's decision to leave her father at Margraten gave his death lasting meaning: 'Where he is now gives his life meaning' — she was grateful every day, because visits to a European cemetery forced ongoing pilgrimage and remembrance. 10. Edsel profiles Jacob Herman, a Lakota man from South Dakota whose family had been displaced three times since Wounded Knee in 1890; though his mother pleaded that America had never done anything for them, he volunteered for the 82nd Airborne, saying his people defend the land when it's attacked. 11. Edsel also profiles Robert Cole, who trained with Lieutenant Colonel Eisenhower earlier in his career and was photographed with General Eisenhower on June 5th on the tarmac before the Normandy drop; Cole received the Medal of Honor for his heroism. 12. The American Battle Monuments Commission, now in its 101st year, maintains 12 World War II overseas cemeteries; the Defense Department's DPAA continues using state-of-the-art DNA analysis to identify remains of unknown soldiers. 13. Edsel expresses concern about potential funding cuts to the DPAA and notes the cemeteries are not expenses but investments critical to international relationships with the countries that host them. 14. A German war dead cemetery at Ysselstein contains 30,000 soldiers in the same area as Margraten's 10,000; the Dutch helped establish it but have not adopted those graves, creating a noticeably more somber experience than Margraten. 15. David McCullough explains that in the 1830s, American painters, architects, and medical students had no adequate schools at home; hundreds crossed the Atlantic by sailing ship to train in Paris, including George Healy (who painted Lincoln's portrait) and Samuel Morse (who conceived the telegraph while in France as a painter). 16. Augustus Saint-Gaudens — described by McCullough as a street kid from New York — became the first American student in sculpture ever admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts and is McCullough's most admired character in the book. 17. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who would teach anatomy at Harvard for over 35 years, studied at Paris's École de Médecine and credited his Paris professor in his Harvard farewell speech decades later; American medical students could not legally dissect cadavers at home. 18. The arc of both segments is reverential and unhurried, with Rick asking open, appreciative questions and both guests delivering detail-rich, emotionally grounded answers. 19. Travelers interested in WWII history, American cultural history, or the Netherlands will find the episode substantive and moving. 20. Listeners looking for travel logistics or destination planning will find little practical guidance here.

As heard by us

A thoughtful hour on Dutch remembrance, American war dead, and the French education that shaped a younger United States.

Travel with Rick Steves pairs remembrance with cultural history in an hour that moves between Margraten, the Dutch town that has kept faith with American soldiers buried there since World War II, and David McCullough's account of 19th-century Americans who traveled to Paris to…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Eighty years after the war, a Dutch town still tends American graves. That promise is the whole story.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Travel with Rick Steves