Montfaucon Memorial.
Commemorating the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. America's biggest battle is appropriately commemorated with the tallest monument. |
American Victory 1918. The Big 3 Monuments
Building the appropriate main monuments to the men who served in the US Forces during World War One took nearly 20 years. The USA also honored the Fallen by concentrating burials and reburials in large cemeteries where the Stars and Stripes flies over carefully maintained graves, lawns and walkways. There is a large and imposing monument on each of the Western Front's three main battlefields. In addition there are lesser or more recent structures to be found in other parts of France and in both England and Belgium. Monuments and cemeteries form the most visible and moving evidence of US involvement in the War of 1914 to 1918 and were positioned in places of strategic significance. Each of the combatant nations honored its dead in different styles. The British adopted a traditional 'country garden' style, while the Germans, without a stable government after 1918, were reliant on a charity to finance the tombs and gravemarkers of their war dead. Every French town or village has one or more monuments to its own war dead. |