Publisher Harper Horizon, 2025
Review by Maj. Gen. Jeffrey E. Phillips, U.S. Army (Ret.)

You may be acquainted with the 2009 bestselling book by Robert Edsel, The Monuments Men, about a detachment of U.S. soldiers who recovered some of the world’s greatest art treasures stolen by the Nazis. In 2014, The Monuments Men was made into a movie, directed by George Clooney and starring Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, and Cate Blanchett among others. 

Robert’s latest effort, his fifth book, is as unforgettable and promises to be just as successful. Remember Us, subtitled American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom, and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II will be published by Harper Collins on April 29, 2025. 

Remember Us, dedicated “To the men and women in uniform who defend freedom,” left me stunned, with its story of an entire town adopting the graves of more than 8,200 American war dead outside the Dutch town of Margraten, just east of Maastricht.

Edsel’s deft hand crafts a story that flows compellingly, drawing the reader in, from page to page and chapter to chapter. It is a story intensely human, with all the elements of drama: conflict and disaster, heroes and villains, and ultimate triumph and redemption.

There is the mother of a U.S. Army Air Forces pilot, who was shot down and aided by the Dutch Resistance, but tragically executed by a German officer during his escape. Upon visiting her son’s fresh grave in 1946, intent on bringing his body home, the mother finds 1,200 Dutch mourners there in the rain, waiting for her visit. I will stop there because what follows will move you to tears. 
 
I found searing the story of African American soldiers who with pick, shovel, and bare hands in the rain and mud, ice and snow, dug the graves for the dead of Operation Market Garden, the battles of Aachen and the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge, and those who fell up to the war’s closing days. This is a story all-but-untold; it offers an unforgettable and important historic contribution.
 
Another story within Remember Us is that of the doctrinaire bureaucrats, uniformed and civilian, who tried to keep the faithful Dutch from watching over the graves of their liberators.  

And there is the Dutch woman who wrote the mother of a fallen soldier in 1945, “He is buried at the large U.S. Military Cemetery in Margraten, Holland, a place 6 miles from where I live. I am taking care of his grave.”

That cemetery is now the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial, and its graves are watched over to this day by the Dutch, who remember. 

Edsel is also a founder of the Forever Promise Project, a partnership between two nonprofit organizations: the Monuments Men and Women Foundation and the Foundation for Adopting Graves American Cemetery Margraten. It was created to realize the objective of the founders of the Margraten Grave Adoption Program: to connect American families with the Dutch adopters of their fallen loved ones. 

Robert Edsel’s Remember Us left me transformed emotionally and uplifted with the experience of towering humanity. The Monuments Men memorialized the heroic salvation of art masterpieces; Remember Us masterfully tells the story of humble townspeople who to this day memorialize those who came from another land to free them, and fell doing so.