The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had reached unprecedented heights in 1950 as the confrontation between Eastern and Western ideologies exploded into a major military conflict on the Korean peninsula. Consequently, formerly solid western alliances gradually disintegrated as Paris asserted greater independence vis-à-vis Washington. Nevertheless, despite the great power struggle unfolding on the international arena, two women in two obscure towns of America and France reached across the Atlantic to offer each other comfort and support at a time of great personal tragedy.

Lt. John Grant Rahill was buried in the temporary US Cemetery of Hochfelden after he was killed in action in Alsace during a German mortar attack on December 2, 1944. At the conclusion of the war, Lt. Rahill’s mother, Mrs. Clara Rahill, of Caldwel, New Jersey, posted a letter simply addressed to the “Mayor of Hochfelden, France” in the hopes of learning any details of her son’s grave site. When Mrs. Lilly Haag, the wife of the mayor of Hochfelden, responded and ensured Mrs. Rahill that her son was being well-cared for by grateful Alsatians at a beautiful site on the outskirts of Hochfelden, international barriers of language, culture, and national politics were easily and immediately overcome. s

Upon learning that the United States government planned to transfer the remains of the 1,000 soldiers buried at the Hochfelden Military Cemetery to a nearby permanent cemetery in Lorraine in 1949, Mrs. Rahill and Mrs. Haag once again worked together to ensure that Lt. Rahill’s remains would not be disturbed and began an inspirational writing campaign that would involve some of the most powerful military men of France and the United States, including the American General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the French General Maurice Force. Having gained the support of such powerful men, these two women convinced the French and American governments to turn over the responsibility of caring for the remains of Lt. Rahill in perpetuity to the town of Hochfelden. What essentially began as an offering of sympathy from a young wife to a bereaved mother of a deceased American GI in 1945 eventually developed into a lasting friendship that produced a moving memorial to commemorate all American sacrifices for the liberation of France from Nazi Germany in World War II when, in 1953, the citizens of Hochfelden inaugurated a massive granite stele over remains of Lt. Rahill.

To this day (and without any support from either the French or American governments), annual commemorations have been regularly held at the site, regardless of the state of affairs between the two nations―even on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the site in the summer of 2003, when relations between France and America had deteriorated to new lows as result of the Iraqi War.