“How did all these monuments and great works of art survive the devastation of World War II?”

You rarely find a major story about World War II that isn’t well known and regularly taught in our schools. But the answer to Robert Edsel’s simple question is unknown to many Europeans- though the looting occurred on the streets they walk today- and is especially unknown to Americans, without whose wartime rescue efforts much of Europe’s great art might not have survived.

“Time and time again during the two and a half centuries of our national existence, our political and intellectual leaders as well as our Average American have crossed the seas to make intimate, firsthand contact with the surviving evidences of past cultures and to draw renewed inspiration there from. No amount of book knowledge by itself can equal the experience of actual contact or association.”           -  Lt. Col. Ernest T. DeWald, Monuments Officer

The beauty and mystery of Europe’s works of art- painting, architecture and sculpture- continue to captivate all of us. But we only have this legacy of genius due to the heroism and vision of the courageous men and women who fought World War II by protecting and rescuing the priceless art treasures of Europe from Adolf Hitler and Nazi tyranny. But for their efforts, the cultural legacy of the West would have been as lost to us as the millions of souls who were consumed in the conflict.

We have all learned about the great battles and campaigns, about the economic devastation and rebuilding of a continent, and about the terrible toll of human suffering due to unprecedented warfare and almost unimaginable genocide. We can easily find out about armaments, timelines, statistics, military heroes, and redrawn boundaries. But how did Da Vinci’s The Last Supper survive the bombing around Milan? Was Michelangelo’s David protected as the Germans destroyed Florence in retreat? Where was the Mona Lisa when the Wehrmacht occupied Paris?

The epic struggle of America and her Allies to defeat tyranny and rescue mankind’s cultural history is an “untold” story full of good and evil, adventure, mystery, beauty, and even plain old organizational “know how”….in it, we all learn how art fires the imagination of both the good and the evil.