Harding buries an unnamed soldier at Arlington as the country falls silent for two minutes
Since Memorial Day, one unidentified American had been moving toward this hour: chosen in France and carried across the Atlantic to lie in the Capitol Rotunda. On November 11, 1921, Armistice Day, President Warren G. Harding officiated at the interment of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. He awarded the Unknown the Medal of Honor, and Americans across the country observed two minutes of silence while the ceremony went on.
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier gave a country that had lost thousands of men with no names attached a single place to mourn them. It became a permanent national memorial and a central site of American remembrance. Unknowns from World War II and Korea joined the World War I soldier there in 1958.
QWhich foreign governments honored the Unknown at Arlington, and what did they bring?
Representatives of other nations presented their countries' highest military decorations to the Unknown, including Great Britain, France, Italy, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Each award went to a man with no name, no unit, and no service record that anyone could cite. President Warren G. Harding's Medal of Honor, the American award, was given in the same ceremony. That makes eight of the highest honors available to a soldier, all of them conferred on someone who could not be identified and who, by design, could not be thanked in person. No citation could be read, because there was nothing to cite but the fact of his death in the war.
QDid the Tomb ever lose one of its Unknowns?
It did, in 1998. A Vietnam War Unknown had been added to the Tomb in 1984, joining the unknown service members from World War II and Korea who had been placed there in 1958. In 1998 that Vietnam Unknown was identified and removed. The change was a reversal of the Tomb's original premise: a man chosen because nobody could say who he was turned out, years later, to be someone who could be named. The earlier Unknowns, including the World War I soldier selected by Sgt. Edward F. Younger in 1921, remained as they were. The 1921 soldier was the first, and the Tomb's roster is not a fixed one.
QWhat does the marble Tomb above the Unknown actually look like?
The Unknown was interred beneath a three-level marble tomb. Its bottom two levels are each made of six granite sections, so the lower structure is built in matching tiers. The top level is made of at least nine blocks and has a rectangular opening in its center. The 1921 structure was built from stacked, regular pieces; the sculpted Tomb added in 1931–32 now carries carved figures and an inscription marking the place where a man who left no name was laid to rest on Armistice Day, 1921, as the country stood in silence.
