Eighty-one years ago this week, men from the advancing U.S. Army stood in a rain-soaked farm field in Margraten, the Netherlands, and established a cemetery. Over the winter and spring that followed, the bloody final months of World War II in Europe transformed that quiet stretch of land into a huge American cemetery, its soil turned over with thousands of fresh graves. The fields at Margraten would become one of 14 permanent overseas military cemeteries set aside for America’s World War II dead that the U.S. government maintains in perpetuity. These beautiful, haunting places were dedicated by still-grieving Americans in...