D-Day June 6, 2025: Honoring Our Veterans

Tomorrow, veterans and their supporters plan to rise up at the National Mall, in state capitols, and in Coronado to protest massive cuts in VA services and stand for their rights and benefits.

Jun 05, 2025

43,000 Bonus Marchers converge on Capitol Hill, July 1932

This is not the first time veterans have had to speak out.

It was 1932… the height of the Great Depression. Millions of Americans could not find work and faced hunger, malnutrition, and fear of starvation. Soup kitchens and breadlines became common as people struggled to survive.

Veterans from WWI were no exception. They had served in one of the deadliest conflicts in history and were issued promissory notes that they would one day receive bonuses, but not until almost three decades after the war ended.

Given the desperate circumstances, 34-year-old retired Army Sergeant Walter Waters of Portland, Oregon, launched a movement seeking early payments. It was dubbed the “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” a movement that spread across the nation.

Seventeen thousand veterans from across the nation, joined by tens of thousands of supporters, including their wives and children, trekked on foot, by boxcar, in caravans of cars, and piled onto dilapidated trucks to converge on Washington, DC. It was called the “Bonus March.”

Day One of the veteran protest at the Capitol in Washington, DC, July 5, 1932

They built shantytowns and protested every day for seventy-five days, refusing to leave until the promissory notes were paid.

Frank Tracy of Pittsburgh, Pa., and his six children are photographed in front of their tent shelter in one of the Bonus Expeditionary Force's encampments around Washington D.C., June 19, 1932. Left to right is Virginia, 12, Frank, 9, Margaret, 7, Ethel, 4 1/2. In Tracy's arms are Howard, 3, Ruth, 1. They are shown saluting their father as an observance of Father's Day. AP

The Republican administration of Herbert Hoover refused to pay the veterans, and then attacked.

The Hoover administration claimed to have a secret document proving the march was a communist plot. On July 28, 1932, General Douglas MacArthur, along with 1,000 troops wielding bayonets and tear gas, drove the Bonus Army out of Capitol Hill.

Along with numerous injuries, two marchers, both WWI veterans, were killed that day, shot by local police. MacArthur’s men then set the Bonus Army’s shantytowns ablaze.

A federal soldier patrols a burning shantytown on the Anacostia Flats in Washington, D.C., July 29, 1932

Many veterans feel they are under assault once again.

The Trump/Musk Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is now threatening to cut 80,000 jobs from the Veterans Administration, which is already experiencing widespread disruption to medical research, patient care, and staffing due to DOGE.

On June 6th, the anniversary of D-Day, thousands of veterans, military families, and their supporters plan to converge on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to “defend the benefits, jobs, and dignity that every generation of veterans has earned through sacrifice.”

The veterans’ march to the National Mall is on June 6th, the anniversary of D-Day. Similar rallies are planned in state capitols across the country, and there will also be a rally in Coronado at 2 pm.

Postscript: Already reeling from the Great Depression, the assault on the Bonus Marchers finished Herbert Hoover’s reputation. In the fall of 1932, he lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide. The veteran bonuses were paid four years later, nine years earlier than scheduled. The protest is a major reason for the creation of the GI Bill in 1944. There was no secret “Communist” document, as the Hoover Administration claimed. The protestors were American heroes who had served their country with honor.