Marvin Gilmore Jr. was 20 when he and other U.S. troops stormed the beaches in Normandy, France, in 1944. Eighty years later, while he says he’s “very, very excited” to spend Memorial Day in Washington, he laments how the country is wracked by division.
Gilmore, 100, and several other World War II veterans will serve as Grand Marshals for the American Veterans Center‘s annual parade, though the total population of WWII veterans continues to diminish every day.
The grandson of slaves, Gilmore served in the 458thAnti-Aircraft Automatic Weapons Battalion and served on D-Day’s Normandy, Utah, and Omaha beaches. While he’s looking forward to the parade and is hoping to reconnect with other WWII veterans, Gilmore lamented the state of the country.
“Nothing really has changed much from 1942 to 2024 and I am very dismayed to see America,” he told the Washington Examiner. “We’re still fighting, in a way, sort of a lost cause. Why did I put myself in harm’s way to make life different and make a better world that the future generation could be?”
He added: “What did I fight for? My legacy, what am I leaving as my legacy? Did I fight for nothing, or did I fight for something?”
This year’s parade coincides with the 20th anniversary of the unveiling of Washington’s WWII Memorial. There were more than 4 million WWII veterans living at the time of the memorial’s unveiling two decades ago, but that number is now close to only about 100,000.
“The parade is a timeline of history,” Tim Holbert, the president of AVC and the producer of the National Memorial Day Parade, told the Washington Examiner. “You have the George Washington from Mount Vernon who comes up, you have reenactors from the Continental Army, you have the World War One reenactors. Someday, there will need to be some reenactment or something of World War II to continue that story when we don’t have these people that are with us.”
Holbert said his grandfather, who fought in WWII, inspired him toget involved withAVC, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to “preserving America’s heroic memory.”
Actors Anthony Anderson and Drew Carey, a Marine Corps veteran, will host this year’s parade for the television special.
Dave Yoho, who was 15 when he walked into a recruiting station for the Maritime Service with a fake birth certificate in 1944, is one of the youngest living WWII veterans at 95 years old.
Yoho was assigned to a T2 tanker and shipped out to the Pacific that summer, shortly before his 16th birthday.
He acknowledged that the United States won World War II “with a lot of stupid young people who did what they were told to do,” and he added, “The price you pay is later, you always pay the price one way or another. So I think it’s a sobering effect to reflect on war intellectually.”
“The truth is we have lost so much of what we fought for,” he told the Washington Examiner. “We fought for dignity, we fought for respect, respecting the rights of other people, valuing other people as individual respect for parents respect for the church, respect for the authority of the teacher in school, all those things are gone.”
Frank Cohn is another WWII veteran who will attend Monday’s parade. When Cohn was a teenager, he fled Nazi Germany with his family to come to the U.S. He was drafted into the Army in 1944 and became a U.S. citizen during basic training.
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“I think I did as good a job as everybody else did,” he told the Washington Examiner. “And I would hope that we learned a lesson from there, that we’re so much stronger when we are all together. And I think that’s the lesson that ought to be preserved.”
Gilmore, Cohn, and Yoho will be joined by several other WWII veterans including: Dick Nelms, B-17 pilot, 447th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force; Col. Joe Peterburs, P-51 ‘ace’ pilot; Ralph Graham, B-17 radio operator, 8th Air Force; Vincent ‘Bill’ Purple, B-17 pilot, 379th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force; Joe Gallegos, C-47 radioman, 8th Air Force; Dr. Martin Raber, Bombardier, 91st Bomb Group, 8th Air Force; Roland Martin, B-17 pilot; John Roman, U.S. Navy veteran of USS Flint in the Pacific; Ken Wells, U.S. Marine Corps; Cletis Bailey, 84th Infantry; Ernie Mogor, 76th Infantry Division; Regina Benson, U.S. Army Nurse Corps; Thomas Scambos, U.S. Navy pilot; Gideon Kantor, one of the famous “Ritchie Boys”; BenderDustin, Jr., Marine Corps fighter pilot in the South Pacific; and Les Jones, U.S. Marine veteran of the Pacific War.
Correction: In a previous version of this story, theWashington Examinerreported that Holbert created AVC. Holbert did not create AVC, but is the president of the organization.
