45th Infantry Division Honors Military History, Plans New Memorials

This Memorial Day, the 45th Infantry Division Museum in Oklahoma City is working to keep military history alive, despite a year of great loss.

“Within the last two years, year and a half, we’ve taken a great loss for the membership of the association,” 45th Infantry Division volunteer secretary Charles Giddens said. 

The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs currently reports 12,158 known COVID-19 deaths nationwide.

Giddens is a 33-year U.S. Army veteran. He volunteers his time to preserve the history of the 45th Infantry Division. 

Giddens said the head of this division is housed in Oklahoma and has decades of history dating back to World War II.

Giddens is now concerned about the loss of the division’s living history, as COVID-19 claims the lives of older veterans. 

“Just history,” Giddens said. “You’ll never hear about again because they were there. And that’s something that our children nowadays will never hear.” 

At the museum, history survives in artifacts, pictures and in the memory of the soldiers who were there when it happened. 

“I had 33 years and six months in the Army, military. I came out of Afghanistan when I retired. I’ve seen what war does, and what it does to the soldiers,” Giddens said. 

Giddens is dedicated to memorializing the soldiers who never made it home from WWII.

He helped create the Path of Remembrance at the museum. It is paved with custom bricks that served as a fundraiser for another new memorial overseas. 

“Soldiers are still over there now and never did make it home,” Giddens said. 

The new memorial will be dedicated in September to the thousands of U.S. soldiers whose remains are buried in cemeteries in France and Italy. 

“The freedom that we have in America is because of [those] soldiers. We wouldn’t have that freedom without them,” Giddens said.

If you have a veteran in your family you would like to honor, you can purchase a custom brick for the path of remembrance at the museum.