Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot by James B. Stockdale

Author:James B. Stockdale [AUTHOR, FIRST]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Military
ISBN: 9780817993931
Google: OoTkW8YQciQC
Publisher: Hoover Press
Published: 2013-09-01T00:10:17.795523+00:00

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*Copies of the video are available on DVD for $22.95 each from the Stanford Alumni Association via web order.

ANDERSONVILLE

MEMORIAL DAY SPEECH

1994

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN and particularly my fellow prisoners of war: May I welcome you to Andersonville, Georgia, the ceremonial home of all American prisoners of war—past and future. As most of you know, an organization named Friends of Andersonville, under its president, Carl Runge of Atlanta, a former prisoner of war himself, is supporting us in a fund drive to create here a fitting place for our remembrance of our former comrades behind bars and a place where loved ones and descendants of all American prisoners of war of all times may visit, reflect, and remember the sacrifices of their forebears.

This is the right place for such a memorial, for the National American Prisoner of War Museum we plan to complete here. It’s right for symbolic reasons, for historic reasons. First, because by a tremendous margin, our Civil War produced many times more prisoners of war than any other war in America’s history. More than fifty thousand of them died in prisoner-of-war camps, North and South. If their names were on a memorial it would be as big as the Vietnam Wall, where Americans who gave their lives for all causes in that late lamented war are listed. And such numbers would of course exceed American deaths for all causes in both World War I and the Korean War.

And in what camp have more American prisoners of war spent time than in any other in our history? You guessed it, Andersonville, right here. Forty-five thousand of them, at one time or another, in the just less than fourteen months it was an active prisoner-of-war camp for Union soldiers.

So this Andersonville place is our “center of gravity.” This is a national historic site, the only prison ground in America to be so designated, and for our support here we have the National Park Service, with Fred Boyles, our local superintendent. The law providing for this national historic site prescribes that it be a place “to interpret the role of prisoner-of-war camps in America’s history.” And there will be plenty of scholars doing just that when our National Prisoner of War Museum is completed and stocked with archival documents—yours and mine.

People out west ask me, “Why so many prisoners, and why so many prisoner deaths in places like Andersonville in the Civil War?” For fourteen years, I have been working in an office surrounded by books, and they tell me it goes something like this: Almost nobody on either the South or the North side predicted the length or ferocity of the maelstrom that was precipitated by actions at Fort Sumter in mid-April 1861. The firepower of both sides grew to be tremendous as compared with previous wars, the will to win of both sides grew to be furious, and the combat generals became skilled, determined, and (naturally) destructive, particularly in the last year of that four-year war. It got

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