Join Steve and Patrick as they remember Memorial Day in Arlington National Cemeteries in the Tomb of the Unknown. Plus, a look at the history of the Jesse Scouts and the role they played in the Mexican-American War.
00:01:00.540We're going to get to Memorial Day, how it came about in the way we commemorate it today over at Arlington National Cemetery in the Tomb of the Unknown.
00:01:09.760But I've got to talk to you about Mexico because Mexico is a fascination of me after the war.
00:01:13.980Remember, at Appomattox, the Army of Northern Virginia surrenders.
00:01:19.260But, hey, out west, once again, they got their own way.
00:03:33.520They're doing also special operations.
00:03:35.440They're destroying some bridges and things like that.
00:03:37.320And then they're demonstrating on the border.
00:03:39.740They're faking that we have all kinds of troops there, more than we even have.
00:03:44.800But these are all part of sort of demonstrations.
00:03:47.300But the main thing is arming the resistance.
00:03:50.120And you have, you know, a lot of things going on here that's really very interesting that involve the Jesse Scouts.
00:03:58.680It's also the beginning of intelligence gathering in the sense that on a grand scale, the transatlantic telegram, telegraph, you know, the cable was laid across the Atlantic several years before the Civil War begins.
00:04:16.340But it was broken through tides and such, and then it gets reactivated in 1866.
00:04:24.280He realizes that this is a potential means that Maximilian is communicating with France and literally puts his men on to crack the codes that they're using through the transatlantic cable to know what his opponent is going to do.
00:05:59.900There's actually like massive colonies down there of Confederates that are also fighting for Maximilian, but also they brought their families down there.
00:07:50.980And she would wait by the mailbox for the next letter.
00:07:54.300And then she would wait – whenever the carriage came into town in Rhode Island, she would wait – she would look for that outside the carriage of her son to come home.
00:08:03.920And that's one of the final scenes in this book.
00:08:07.840Let's talk about today, obviously, Arlington National Cemetery, The Tomb of the Unknown.
00:08:13.420You wrote an entire book that focused on this.
00:08:16.780You're probably one of the living experts in this.
00:08:18.880Walk us through how did we get to this commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery?
00:08:24.000How did we get to the – I would argue the most sacred – civically sacred property in all of our country, which is the Tomb of the Unknown and around it?
00:09:26.060This thing is a titanic battle that begins in September and then lasts all the way to November 11th.
00:09:32.960And it's in the Meuse-Argon sector, and the main goal of it is to pierce the massive belts of fortification that the Germans have built in that area
00:09:44.560and then sever a supply line, the crucial supply line near Sudan, which they're successful in doing.
00:09:53.980But it does not go well at all at the beginning.
00:10:08.760And for combat leadership, not for some staff job.
00:10:11.500I mean he always criticized Pershing, and Pershing had been a combat leader earlier, but Pershing, and particularly General Marshall, his rival, was chief of staff.
00:10:20.040Many of the greats of World War II, including – yeah, you've got – you also have Wild Bill Donovan,
00:10:27.100who receives the Distinguished Service Cross and the Medal of Honor for his actions in World War I, leading a charge.
00:10:34.000And it's that – those actions that I believe –
00:10:36.520So people see the slaughter of six million French.
00:10:39.200They see the slaughter in the United States.
00:10:41.280They weren't – it wasn't celebratory.
00:10:43.680I mean people were glad it was over, but it wasn't like, oh – because there was always these questions of how do we get in this?
00:10:49.160And people should understand that the Zimmerman telegram that they captured was about getting Mexico into the war against the United States.
00:10:58.680And, you know, we've got to get Mexico's ally just like kind of in the Civil War they tried to do also.
00:11:04.600That's one of the triggering events with the Lusitania.
00:11:06.560But a lot of people were not totally convinced, particularly in Wilson.
00:11:11.500They didn't know if they bought into – what they were being sold.
00:11:14.420All they knew is that they didn't want to get back in European conflicts.
00:11:18.960The founders had said we're not going to do this.
00:11:20.880Next thing you know, we have a massive, massive, massive army over there that's dropping hammer blows on guys.
00:11:27.140The Marines fight so well at Bella Wood.
00:11:29.800I think there's a decision made by the Army that we'll never let the Marines go inland like that again because they're too good.
00:11:35.360They've got to do the amphibious landing.
00:11:36.580The Marines have only two regiments, the fifth and the sixth, but they have an amazing PR corps.
00:11:41.400And they do – they certainly do a great job because – and they're also attached to the Army's second division, which is the most elite unit in the –
00:11:51.760The physical destruction by the machine gun and chemical warfare, gas, artillery.
00:11:59.720Really, the biggest thing that was not banned, that would people think, is really artillery shelling was – it's a level that you can't imagine.
00:12:28.240But as a nation outside of maybe the Gettysburg where Lincoln went to dedicate the cemetery, we hadn't come together to do it as a nation like – like England and France were very upfront about this.
00:12:41.440What happens is it's – as you mentioned, it's England and France that begin this tradition of an unknown soldier, of honoring an unknown soldier.
00:12:49.300And there's tens of thousands of soldiers that are in graves in France at this time.
00:12:55.960And the artillery is so intense that it turns bodies – it disintegrates bodies.
00:13:04.220And trying to determine who they were, those individuals were, it was – first it was France and England that come up with the idea of honoring an unknown soldier to honor all of those veterans.
00:13:16.600One soldier, one body that commemorate the millions that they can't identify.
00:13:21.980Right, and it's here in the United States.
00:13:23.700And you need that – I want to go back.
00:13:25.260You need that because of the trauma of the folks back home.
00:13:34.660In England, they lost almost an entire generation and hadn't prepared for this.
00:13:38.140It's the trauma of the folks back home.
00:13:39.740So civic society, the leaders have to figure out what do we need to do in the civic religion here to basically start to allow some healing to begin.
00:13:50.620It's an organic – it bubbles up from organically.
00:13:55.280What happens is the War Department is convinced that they can bring back all the bodies of these men, of these unknowns.
00:14:30.580But then there's a popular uprising to bring the men home.
00:14:36.360This is – this is the United States of America, our Memorial Day, not for our veterans, which I'm honored to be one, but for the honored dead.
00:14:47.460In May of 2024, we will be back with Patrick K. O'Donnell in a moment.
00:14:53.800Can your savings weather an economic storm?
00:15:02.340Think about what you've put away for the future.
00:17:49.200Another amazing woman figure that believes that we need to do what France and England have done, and that is to have a tomb of the unknown to honor all of our dead.
00:17:59.500And this garners support from Hamilton Fish, for instance, as a congressman up in New York, who was an officer with the Harlem Hellfighters.
00:18:09.460This is an African-American unit that fought very valiantly.
00:18:12.900And these in France and England are main events.
00:18:45.300Because I'm sure there's a lot of resistance to this.
00:18:46.940And it's through her paper and through, you know, the power of the media, and it sways people in the population.
00:18:54.740And there is now a belief that we need to have a tomb of the unknown.
00:18:58.840And the book that I wrote is about the process and, you know, how they found, you know, they looked at all the different major battlefields.
00:19:09.580Give me the title because we want to get it up on the screen.
00:20:05.400And our guide, and I was there with him, he said to me and the group that Ernest A. Jansen was the first recipient of the Medal of Honor for the Marine Corps.
00:20:17.880But he was also a body bearer for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
00:20:24.720And that was, I mean, I'm like here with all of our guys.
00:20:27.920And body bearer was a term of our official term.
00:20:30.300It's a term that, it's an honor term to bring, a pallbearer, to bring back the casket or the remains.
00:20:36.500And I immediately was like, that's a fascinating story.
00:21:34.000And they counterattack, and the Germans are setting up their Maxim machine guns.
00:21:40.440And Jansen, you know, lets out this war cry and literally bayonets people and kills several of the Germans as they're setting up and saves the hill.
00:21:49.740And it's a fascinating story because he's got two medals of honor, for one.
00:21:59.060They give him the Army Medal of Honor and the Navy Medal of Honor.
00:22:05.340It's Ernest A. Jansen and Charles Hoffman.
00:22:07.440And he was originally a member of the U.S. Army that we think he went AWOL for a girlfriend and, you know, had disciplinary actions and everything else, but then joins the Marine Corps under another name.
00:22:20.440And he becomes this hero of the Marine Corps.
00:22:41.400You get going with a Tomb of the Unknown.
00:22:43.760How does it get—how does Pershing then execute it?
00:22:47.180How do you actually—one of the questions I've always get asked is how do they know they're unknown?
00:22:52.140How's the whole process of finding these?
00:22:53.880What they do then is they have a special unit, graves registration unit.
00:22:59.200The guy's name is Quackenbush, goes out to the major cemeteries in France where the AEF fought, and they specifically select graves of soldiers that are unknown.
00:23:13.240And they then disintern the grave and bring out the body, and then they make sure that there is no dog tags or diaries or pieces of information or letter, anything that could identify who this person was.
00:23:30.000They go through and do due diligence on the body itself to make sure there's no way—
00:23:33.560There's no way to determine it, and then they literally burn the burial card of the gravesite that Quackenbush unearthed that person.
00:23:41.420So it could be they don't have any idea where in the cemetery it was.
00:23:46.900And how many of those do they—how many of those—how many of those do they take?
00:23:53.280They take a number—a handful of these men, and then they bring the bodies back to Chalun, France, and they're all flag-draped caskets.
00:24:05.940And it's in the middle of the city hall, and they initially planned to have the American Expeditionary Force plans—Pershing plans to have a general officer make the selection.
00:24:18.120But at the last minute, the French say to them, you know, it's the enlisted man that does the fighting in your wars, in our wars, too.
00:24:26.920He should be the one that is given the honor of selecting the unknown.
00:26:53.660But some of these guys that are there literally help strap themselves towards—on the casket to prevent it from going overboard in one scene.
00:27:02.040And they bring it back to the Washington Navy Yard, and it's there that the men that I have in my book greet the remains, and it's brought to the Capitol Rotunda.
00:27:14.160They're selected by General Pershing for their service, but also to tell the story of the AEF through their eyes.
00:27:20.360And it's like Ernest Jansen, but it's also—you have an amazing American sailor that saves his ship from going down that was torpedoed and literally closes the watertight door, is scalded by the boiler, you know, the splashes from the boiler, but saves his ship from going down.
00:27:38.920And these are to represent all the people that fought in the war.
00:28:05.000And people can come in and say, I'll tell you what, let's take a short break and we're going to continue the details of the story from the unknowns on Memorial Day, May of 2024.
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00:29:43.360Our country has trauma from World War I, and obviously nothing like England and France and Germany and others.
00:29:50.720But there's also still trauma from the Civil War.
00:29:54.360The Civil War has not totally been healed.
00:29:56.480Some people say that we fought together in the Spanish-American War.
00:30:00.320It was still had, I think, under Roosevelt in 1933, the 150th anniversary of Gettysburg.
00:30:11.660That's how Ken Burns starts the Civil War.
00:30:15.440Had this woman brought everybody together and have buy-in from the elites in the country and the country itself in this thing called an unknown soldier, the Tomb of the Unknown?
00:30:34.120You also have, you know, Daughters of the American Revolution.
00:30:38.020But there's medals of honor recipients from the Civil War, from the Spanish-American War.
00:30:45.940And just, you know, different walks of society are present at this event, and it's a magnificent affair.
00:30:54.660The body lies in state, lies in state, in the Capitol Rotunda, and then it's removed on a caisson in a very formal ceremony to go across the bridge to Arlington National Summit.
00:31:08.420And there's a film of these men that are next to the caisson as they walk it towards Arlington.
00:31:18.640They follow the caisson all the way down, like President Kennedy.
00:31:22.120Now, and it's in turn, and that's the, does the, does the, the soldier from the Old Guard that stands ready 24 hours a day in all weather, 365 days a year, is that commence immediately?
00:31:42.980What happens is they have an amazing ceremony at the tomb, and many world leaders are there.
00:31:49.940I think, but one of the most interesting persons that presides over the final aspect of the ceremony is Chief Plenty Clues, who's a Sioux war chief that, that provides, you know, his war hammer is there, and he provides a ceremony over the, over the remains.
00:32:06.720It's also kind of a healing between Native Americans and Americans in the, the great conflict that occurred in the West.
00:32:13.000But what happens is the tomb, you know, has this amazing fanfare, and then it just becomes a tomb.
00:32:22.300And what happens is people come there, and they picnic, and they.
00:32:25.900Oh, there's no structure afterwards about the spectrum.
00:32:29.060There's no, there's no guard or anything.
00:32:31.040And people come and picnic, and they've, there's some defacing of the tomb.
00:32:34.180And it's at that point that there is a, you know, a tomb guard takes place, and it's part of the old guard.
00:32:41.420And they've been guarding it ever since, 24-7, no matter what the weather is.
00:32:46.740World War II, then Korea, and then Vietnam gets to be controversial because DNA, the ability to, to, for DNA technology.
00:32:56.200How does this, what happens in World War II and what happens in Korea?
00:32:59.180They bring a, in, in both of those conflicts, they have an unknown soldier that is brought back.
00:33:06.460And they have a, you know, an incredible ceremony.
00:33:09.440They go through the same process of selection.
00:33:13.460And they make a thing that it can never be, they really go out of the way to make sure this thing can, the remains can never be identified.
00:36:02.360When this book came out, he was the, um, I was supposed to be the keynote speaker for the tomb guard, but they said, we've got somebody, we might outrank you a little bit.
00:36:46.400So it was, um, you got the last, it was just very moving.
00:36:49.760And today we, every, you know, every Memorial day, the president, the commander in chief, um, goes up there in our current situation.
00:36:57.140You know, it is what it is, but, um, just, uh, if people have not been to Arlington National Cemetery, if you have not been to the tomb of the unknown, you definitely owe it to yourself and to your children to go see it because it's, it's absolutely extraordinary.
00:37:12.280It's one of the most moving ceremonies you can ever experience as American incredible hallowed ground.
00:37:20.360Uh, where do you, um, you've, you've put your life into these books to bring the stories of these individuals that people that time would have just forgotten.
00:37:34.220And you go back and you read these stories, whether it's about the revolutionary war or about, uh, World War II or the civil war now, and you're just so blown away about your fellow citizens, every one of your books, although it deals with obviously the catastrophe of war, you feel ennobled at the end of it, right?
00:37:53.480Because you're not, you don't do books on Grant or on Sherman.
00:37:57.700I mean, they're, they're, they're participants, Sheridan has a huge role in, in the unvanquished, but you're not doing the stories that people know of these figures and they're going to learn more about what they already know.
00:38:10.100You're taking people you've never heard of.
00:38:12.220And if it had not been for the events that you go through and the documentation, they would have never risen to an occasion.
00:38:19.920They would have been essentially ordinary Americans in every war you look at.
00:38:23.340They were just led ordinary, fulfilling, good, but ordinary lives.
00:38:26.820It's being in these moments that some step up and step into the moment, use their agency and become extraordinary figures, right?
00:38:37.080And others you see are, you know, you've got some people in your books that are quite distasteful, right?
00:38:43.100Because you're in wars and you do a lot of special operations stuff here where, you know, there's a lot of subterfuge.
00:38:50.060Yeah, the book is, the books are filled with ordinary people that do extraordinary things, but it's, yeah, you also have villains.
00:39:00.320You have people that are just scoundrels in some cases that, you know, it's not, we're, I try to, with this history, it's the camera and it just, it tells the story of what it was like.
00:39:12.040I don't try to sugarcoat it, and within that you have different, various, you know, strands of people that are sometimes traitors.
00:39:21.800I mean, one of the individuals in The Unvanquished was one of Mosby's greatest rangers, was a member of the 5th New York Cavalry.
00:39:28.780His name was Big Yankee Ames, and that was his nickname, Big Yankee, because he was this six-foot guy that was this massive from Maine that literally deserts the 5th New York out of Centerville and decides to join Mosby.
00:39:47.300His decision was based upon the Emancipation Proclamation.
00:39:51.020He did not want to fight the war for slavery, and he was...
00:39:55.780That was a big concern at the time, Lincoln and those guys talking about it.
00:39:58.180He did not like that, and he said, I'm not, I'm not doing it, and he literally joins Mosby, and he shows up, and they're like, who the heck is this guy?
00:40:06.980You know, but they felt, Mosby felt the sincerity about him and trust, and his first mission was to go to Centerville and steal a horse.
00:40:14.880This is the power of Lincoln, because when they had the debate about doing it, when he first, after Antietam, because he was waiting for a, he'd actually talked about it before, Antietam was the victory he felt he needed to actually make the announcement.
00:40:27.340When he did it, when he drafted up and pitched the concept of what he was going to do to his cabinet, there were some pretty savvy guys in there who go, well, hang on for a second.
00:41:08.660The war was so, and this is the greatness of Lincoln and the people, the war was so controversial.
00:41:15.400And even with Gettysburg being a year in the rearview mirror, even with Gettysburg being in the rearview mirror, they determined they could not win on a Republican ticket.
00:41:26.000He gets rid of his vice president, Hamby, of the governor of Maine or the senator from Maine, and goes back to the territory where your book's kind of about.
00:41:33.500He goes to East Tennessee, which folks know, the East Tennessee folks, the hardcore Scotch-Irish down there and that whole Appalachian Mountain thing, they ain't a big name in the plantation aristocracy.
00:46:25.300We use red poppy as a tradition on Memorial Day.
00:46:29.540Ways to honor our fallen soldiers are visit a military memorial, fly the American flag, sponsor a person that has passed, provide support, donate a grave for a fellow soldier, and many, many other things.
00:46:44.960We don't want to forget our fallen soldiers.
00:46:47.100You know, when I was in the General Hospital, many of our friends had relatives that passed during the war and the Vietnam and many other wars.
00:46:56.040So we're coming up to Flag Day, and we want to celebrate that also.
00:47:00.900We're going to have a four-hour call on that.
00:47:03.900If you'd like to get on there, give me an email, sstern1024 at gmail.
00:47:14.600We're going to have 24 speakers, rogues, rascals, and ruffins.
00:47:18.360We're going to do the history of the flag.
00:47:20.220The first person is going to speak to the history.
00:47:22.040Every second person for that era is going to talk about what it means today in that history.
00:47:28.020We have some famous people coming on, Jerome Corsi, John Rich, the famous singer, Dave Bratt, Donna Fiducia, Errol Robinson, Emeril Robinson, Jeff Cooner, Chris Widener, Tom Rents, Colonel John Mills, Joni Bryan, and many, many other people.
00:49:28.220And I wrote in The Unvanquished, I uncovered an entire fraud scheme by the Democrats that's really quite interesting.
00:49:36.900This guy, Orville Wood, from upstate New York, who's just an election official, wants to go to near Fort McHenry, where his soldiers are based, and make sure that they're voting the right way, that their votes count, and it's legitimate.
00:49:50.080So he gets there, and then he finds out, you know, there's checker—his quote is, there's checker playing with the ballots.
00:49:58.860And he finds out that almost all of his soldiers are voting for McClellan.