NOVEMBER 2025 – The NYT has never been known for loudly proclaiming its military-related patriotism – it has almost no service veterans on its staff, after all. But the news site today, Veterans Day, published a powerful, poignant and timely essay about the WWII cemeteries in Europe. Former Newsweek political correspondent Jonathan Darman went over to The Netherlands and reported from the Margraten Cemetery, where Dutch citizens regularly pay their respects and maintain the perfectly manicured rows of more than 8,300 gravestones of fallen American servicemen.
Of course it’s all a reminder that the US and Europe have ties that run very deep – and that American policymakers today should live up to that history. As Darman writes:
Walking through these rows of graves, you feel the sorrow the war visited on every corner of American society. A service member from Oregon lies next to one from Pennsylvania who lies next to one from Arkansas. Dumas is next to Ulander, next to Giudice, next to Smith.
But in their beauty, ambition and scale, the cemeteries have also always sent a message to Europeans, a reminder of the costs Americans were willing to pay to ensure the cause of liberty in the world. These cemeteries would be permanent and so too, they seemed to suggest, would be America’s interest in Europe’s affairs.
It is a message that many Europeans took to heart. At the visitors’ center at the Margraten, I was told that the large crowd in the cemetery that day was typical. The vast majority of visitors are Europeans. When I flipped through the guest book, I saw most of the entries were people from the Netherlands, Belgium and other Northern European countries. Many had written the same message: “Thanks, U.S.A.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/opinion/veterans-day-world-war-ii.html