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Lists! > Ten Fabulous War Memorials
> More Memorials
Honorable Mentions for May List of War Memorials
These are memorials that didn't make the Top 10 List, but are worthy of
posting here because they are unique or special. So as a Memorial Day
special, here's an extra page on War Memorials:
| The Top-10 Plus: These are War Memorials that
could easily make any Top 10 list, and so I'm including them here. |
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| Pegasus Bridge
-- the site of the first British airborne landings during D-Day.
Near the bridge are individual memorials for the three glider pilots that
landed first. The nearby cafe is owned by a woman who was nine when
the British landed and who still remembers the occupation well. |
American Normandy Cemetary -- Normandy, France.
No picture is going to capture what this cemetary means to Americans, the
D-Day invasion remains one of America's proudest military moments, a
sentiment beautiful tapped by the movie "Saving Private Ryan,"
one of my personal all-time favorites. |
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| Marseille,
France -- The city's memorial was beaten out
by Nice (#9) for the big-and-ostentatious memorial award. |
| Holocaust Memorials: Technically not "War
Memorials," but the horrors suffered by Jews and many other
minorities at the hands of the Nazis are uniquely World War II. |
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| Krakow,
Poland -- This picture shows two memorials
side-by-side. The Jewish memorial in the foreground is more
traditional, while the larger memorial in the rear is more abstract (and
therefore not well understood). |
Auschwitz,
Poland -- Poland and Germany have converted
a number of their concentration camps into museums. Auschwitz is
perhaps the best known and best preserved among them. A chilling
testament to our capacity for inhumanity. |
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| Freiburg (Brsg)
-- This subtle traffic sign is perched in the city park of Freiburg im
Breisgau in southern Germany. It points to the city of Gurs in
southwestern France,
a Nazi concentration camp where the city's Jews and others were sent. |
| Independence War Memorials of
a sort -- they don't commemorate the fallen so much a celebrate the defeat
of an oppressor. |
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| Tallinn,
Estonia -- This rock is the Estonian
National Monument of Independence. The inscription at bottom right
was the date of Estonia's release from Soviet rule, 20 August 1991.
Estonia and her Baltic sisters Latvia and Lithuania employed a famous
passive resistance movement called the Singing Revolution and are now
among the most westernized of former Soviet states. |
Jakarta,
Indonesia -- The Irian Jaya Independence
Monument celebrates the defeat of Dutch colonial rule in eastern
Indonesia. The statue is of a man crying out as he breaks the chains
that bound him. |
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| Esch-sur-Alzette,
Luxembourg -- Pictured here is the monument
to the Luxembourgeois Resistance, an active resistance movement that was a
serious thorn in the Nazis side during the early 40s. Using sabotage
tactics and an active underground media, the Resistance movement not only
proved an irritant, they did well at evading capture. |
 | American Military Cemetary, Normandy, France.
Commemorates the American dead from the Normandy invasion and after.
Includes a huge sculpture titled the "Spirit of American Youth Rising
Over the Waves" and huge marbled diagrams of the battles that raged. |
| Irian Jaya Independence Monument, Jakarta, Indonesia.
Symbolically celebrates the war of independence of the island of Irian Jaya
from Dutch control after World War II, depicted as a man breaking away the
chains wrapped around his body. |
| World War Memorial, Marseille, France.
Marseille's is just as large and prominent as Nice's (#9), but is clearly
different in style -- a cement arch with the years of the war sculpted on to
it. |
(c) 2003 Tom Galvin
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