Life

A Rose in the Shade

It was hot on Sunday when we went to see the National World War II Memorial on the Mall, a week before its official opening. Unlike the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, which offer both shade and even cooler air to visitors, the WWII memorial is decidely open-air, albeit with a large fountain in the middle. The only spot to avoid the noonday sun was the small building to the left of the memorial that contained a single National Park Service employee and two computer terminals with an index of people who served in the Armed Forces.

Behind the building, near the entrance door for employees, were two large wreaths and two single roses, each with a ribbon or card attached. I guess people had left them at the memorial, but the Park Service decided that they didn’t want such displays at the site – an understandable conclusion, since the memorial has no obvious place to put these objects and little room for many of them. The two single roses caught me eye, and as I turned the card over on one of them I saw that it was in memory of the Jedburgh Bugatti team. The Jeds were three-man military intelligence teams comprised of an American and at least one French-speaker that helped stir up resistance in occupied France in the months after the D-Day invasion of 1944.

The Bugatti team consisted of Major H.W. Fuller (U.S.), Capt. G de la Roche and Lt. M Sigaud (both French); sometimes the French soldiers used aliases since they were hardly strangers to the land in which they worked. There is no mention of Bugatti’s mission in Arthur Brown’s history of the Jeds (he was a team member himself), and none of its members appeared to have been killed or wounded in the course of its activities. The American Jeds returned to the U.S. by the end of 1944, Brown says, which means that Major Fuller may have returned home intact. While his activities may never be widely known, Fuller was in the mind of at least one visitor to Washington last week. Come Monday, may Fuller and his fellow soldiers of every generation be in our thoughts as well.