Mardasson Memorial

The Mardasson Memorial, just outside the city of Bastogne, Belgium, is one of the largest, most stunning, yet under-marketed WWII monuments in the world. It sits atop one of the tallest rolling hills of the Ardennes Forest. The location marks the furthest point of the German advance during operation Wacht-am Rhein, colloquially known in the United States as the "Battle of the Bulge."

The Mardasson Memorial stands 39 feet high and 103 feet across and rests upon .82 hectares of land, circumscribed by law into an area of everlasting pastoral beauty. While the monument itself is of a massive scale and ostensibly dedicated to honoring the 76,890 American casualties of the campaign, the underlying motives for its creation appear to be more partisan. Most documentation relating to the financing and underlying aims of the Mardasson creation remains lost, obfuscated, or undiscovered. It seems the monument was created principally as a diplomatic mechanism to advance post-war Belgian political and economic goals vis-a-vis the United States.

The monument was the brainchild of a group of powerful Belgian politicians loosely grouped as the Belgo-American Association (ABA), who was "...anxious to strengthen the alliance with the powerful American ally". The creation of the ABA in 1945 was more of a continuation of Belgian wartime endeavors than a stand-alone affair in seeking a substantial postwar benefactor in international and economic interests. Belgium had just witnessed the conspicuous destruction of the infrastructure and economies of its closest pre-war allies (France and Great Britain), and the new choice seemed obvious.

Georges Dedoyard, a noted Liege architect who had lost a lung to gas poisoning in the trenches of WWI, designed the memorial. His vision incorporated a massive ten-panel narrative of the Ardennes battle. These panels included the unit names and crests of the US divisions participating in the Ardennes campaign. The final battle narrative carved into these ten sandstone panels points to the insights of US General and WWI veteran S.L.A. Marshall. During WWII, he was a noted journalist and historian. Another interesting design component initially wrapped the frieze of the star with the then-48 states of the United States in large bronze letters. The frieze later included the addition of Alaska and Hawaii as states in 1958-59.

The initial groundbreaking was a simple affair. A few shovelfuls of earth from the top of the barren Mardasson hill were permanently ensconced in a small portable malachite urn and ebony "casket" produced in the Belgian Congo. The earth was extracted on July 4, 1946, after which the casket was wax-sealed by the Burgomaster of Bastogne and flown directly to the United States on the inaugural transatlantic flight of SABENA, the Belgian national airline. This sarcophagus was presented to then-President Harry S. Truman by the Belgian ambassador to the United States on July 10, 1946. The excavation site now exhibits a small marble slab inscribed in Latin that translates as "To its American liberators, the Belgian people who remember, July 4, 1946". Today, that casket rests in the Truman Presidential Museum in Independence, Missouri, and the early memorial slab now occupies the very center of the finished monument. Some sources indicate that the extracted earth had been "soaked in American blood," but there is little evidence of support since there is no known record of American deaths or internment at that location. Instead, a small stele is close to the Mardasson hill, indicating the furthest advance of German patrols, where a German soldier died on December 19, 1944. The stele's inscription reads, "HERE, the invader was stopped, Winter 1944-45". Consequently, the belief that the contrived gesture of American-bloodstained soil being sent directly to President Truman was purely symbolic, as was the transport of that same offering on the first flight directly connecting Belgium to the United States.

An early marketing project for the site was the extension of the Voie de la Liberte' to expand that route to include a final marker directly adjacent to the proposed location of the Mardasson. Conceived as an all-French commemoration route, the Voie de la Liberte' celebrated General Patton's path from his US Third Army from Sainte-Mere-l'Eglise to Metz. The ABA entered negotiations with French officials in March 1946 to extend the track to Mardasson hill, and this last Belgian marker was quickly approved and later inaugurated on July 5, 1947. On this very day, Georges Dedoyard began his initial survey for the monument, even though the land was yet to be purchased, nor was a financing program in place.

Through the Belgian government-in-exile and the Belgian Economic mission in Washington, the United States supplied the Belgian Congo with significant financing, machinery, and troops during the German occupation of Belgium. This wartime aid kept the colony running smoothly and ensured a constant flow of strategic raw materials from that region to the United States. Among other war-critical imports, the uranium ore mined in the Belgian Congo required defense from German seizure. That ore eventually formed the fissile core of the Hiroshima A-bomb.

As a result of these Lend-Lease exchanges and further charges for Belgian lodging, manpower, and goods post-operation Overlord, Belgium was the only enemy-occupied nation that ended 1945 as a creditor to the United States. In this favorable economic position, Belgium could negotiate that any US debt incurred to Belgium after September 2, 1945, would be remitted directly in US dollars. This position found further enhancement by an immediate US commitment of 100 million dollars in loans to help rebuild the Belgian economy. One should note that the ABA was organized precisely at this time (1945) and consisted primarily of the same power brokers who had engineered Belgium's financial success during the war. Interestingly, there was anecdotal evidence that many Belgian citizens were either unaware of or utterly disinterested in the monument or its stated purpose. They simply strove to reconstruct their own lives and the local economies on which they depended.

The Mardasson Memorial experienced many construction delays. The most significant setback suffered was the unilateral decision by architect Dedoyard to add three memorial altars below the monument in March of 1949. This change occurred well after the bulk of the memorial's completion. This sudden revision resulted from a group of American women who approached the United States embassy in Belgium, requesting "a suitable area for contemplation ." Whoever those women were, their opinions evidently carried much weight within the ABA and Dedoyard. Subsequently, three separate altars were blasted out from under the edifice, individually representing Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. All three mosaic frescoes surrounding the altars were completed in a style describing "the homage paid by American women to their heroes."

The Mardasson remained the property of the Kingdom of Belgium and was maintained solely by that nation until the summer of 2019. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, the United States government paid for the complete restoration and cleaning of the monument. In July 2020, the Mardasson ownership shifted from the Kingdom of Belgium to the United States government. The ABMC now operates and maintains the memorial in perpetuity, in close cooperation with Belgian authorities.

While the Mardasson is dedicated to the sacrifices of American veterans of the Ardennes campaign and remains a beautiful memory site for that purpose, the monument's conception tells a larger story. The ABA clearly created the Mardasson as a "triumphant stage for the display of transatlantic politics ." The same politicians and industrialists who conducted Belgian affairs before and during the war sought to place Belgium in an advantageous position. They constructed this monument as an offering of goodwill to the United States to foster the economic prosperity of their nation in an uncertain postwar period.

The stated motives and fundraising for the Mardasson reflected heartfelt sympathy for the US service members who had been maimed or killed liberating the Belgian nation. It stands to reason their true motives were more partisan, as they sought to tightly bind themselves to the one western nation that had genuinely thrived in the aftermath of WWII.

Edited by Laura Bailey

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