Eisenhower, paratroopers rise in bronze at new memorial to leader
WASHINGTON — In the gray light of dawn, master stonemason Joe Sieiro gently wrapped a white towel around Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s throat.
The general, his right hand raised as if in mid-sentence, his pants perfectly creased, was lying on a wooden pallet, his back and feet cushioned by blue blankets.
The towel was to protect his neck, around which Sieiro then looped a yellow fabric halter, so a crane could lift the 9-foot bronze Ike across the landscape of the new memorial in his honor in downtown Washington, D.C.
At 7:30 a.m. on a recent Saturday, the 500-pound statue of Eisenhower, the World War II general, statesman and 34th president, was lowered into place before a scene from D-Day carved in limestone and the words to his men: “The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”
It was a milestone in the construction of the four-acre, $150 million memorial on Independence Avenue, as the mammoth bronzes of Eisenhower and men from the 101st Airborne Division rose from their pallets and took their places in the nation’s landscape.
Many years and controversies later, the memorial is scheduled to be dedicated May 8, the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe. Other sculptures, depicting Eisenhower as president and Eisenhower as a boy, will be added in a few weeks.
The tableau that Saturday was inspired by a photograph of Eisenhower addressing men of the 101st Airborne Division before they went to battle in Normandy on June 6, 1944.
In the photograph, the men, their faces blackened for combat, their uniforms rumpled, gather around Eisenhower as he gestures with one hand.
The arrangement of the sculptures is similar, with the men in their uniforms, their belts cinched, their pockets packed with gear. The installation was carefully choreographed, with Sieiro, of Lorton Stone, operating the mobile crane and the sculptor, Sergey Eylanbekov, overseeing the action.
Each of the three statue sets had to be lowered so that steel rods protruding from their feet slid into holes drilled in the stone where they were to stand. The two groups of soldiers — one with four men, the other with two men — weighed several thousand pounds each, Sieiro said.
Eylanbekov first sculpted the statues in clay in a studio in Pietrasanta, Italy, studying portraits of Eisenhower and shots of the general with his men the day before D-Day. Molds were made from the clay and molten bronze poured into the impressions.
The statues were shipped to Norfolk and arrived at the memorial site earlier this month.
On the evening of June 5, 1944, Eisenhower had waded into a crowd of men from the 101st Airborne Division, clambering over barbed wire and chatting with the paratroopers before they boarded their airplanes for France.
The photo shows men from the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division at Greenham Common, England, according to the Library of Congress.
In bronze, the faces of the paratroopers appear as if they were modeled on living people.
Indeed, Eylanbekov said an elderly woman who experienced the war in fascist Italy, where the Americans fought the Germans in bitter combat, spotted one of the statues at his Pietrasanta studio and began to cry. “I saw him,” she said, indicating the figure.
“I was very touched,” he said.