Colorado veterans: from Dachau to Camp Hale, 13 resolutions and a memorial’s unfinished list 

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

On the morning of April 29, 1945, soldiers of the 157th Infantry Regiment set foot inside Dachau.

The 157th had Colorado National Guard roots and fought as part of the U.S. Army’s 45th Infantry Division. House Joint Resolution 26-1011 calls it the Colorado National Guard’s 157th.

The battalion that went in was commanded by Felix Sparks, a 27-year-old lieutenant colonel, who wrote his own accountof the day decades later. “The initial shock was experienced even before entering the camp.”

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reproduces that line and identifies him as a lieutenant colonel. By its account, three Army divisions converged on the camp that day. The 42nd Infantry, the 45th Infantry and the 20th Armored were all there.

Sparks spent the rest of his working life in Colorado.

By the account in a 2024 resolution of the General Assembly naming a Gunnison River bridge for him, the Delta resident became district attorney for the 7th Judicial District, sat as an associate justice of the Colorado Supreme Court and directed the Colorado Water Conservation Board from 1958 until he retired in 1979.

He also kept serving. He worked up the ranks of the Colorado National Guard to brigadier general and commanded the Colorado Army National Guard until 1977.

In 2001, the Centennial Armory, the Guard’s headquarters, was dedicated in his honor.

Jack Goldman, who was liberated from Dachau by Sparks’s troops, spoke at the ceremony, according to an account of the dedication by Laurie Lips. “We remember our liberation from hell and death, and we remember you, our liberators,” Goldman said to Sparks and his men.

Sparks died in Denver on Sept. 25, 2007, at 90.

That history is in the state’s record this year because of what the legislature did in early February, when it moved 13 consecutive resolutions honoring veterans and not one of them drew a recorded no vote.

511 days

HJR26-1011 honors Colorado veterans on the 81st anniversary of the end of World War II. Its findings say the 157th spent 511 days in continuous combat, including four amphibious landings.

Read that number again. Not 511 days deployed. 511 days of continuous combat.

Lips’ 2001 account puts a cost on those 511 days. About 12,000 soldiers fought in the 157th over the course of the war. Of those, 1,065 were killed and 4,330 were wounded. Another 143 were declared missing and 758 were taken prisoner.

250,000 and 3,586

The resolution widens out from there.

Some 250,000 of Colorado’s sons and daughters served in World War II, it says. More than 3,500 were killed in action or died of wounds suffered on the battlefield.

The resolution puts the dead at 3,586.

Over half of them never came home. Their remains were never recovered, or they lie in American military cemeteries overseas.

HJR26-1011 was carried by Reps. Jennifer Bacon and Scott Slaugh, with Sens. Dafna Michaelson Jenet and Larry Liston.

It cleared the House 60-0 on Feb. 6.

The men who trained here and came back

House Joint Resolution 26-1016 takes up the 10th Mountain Division. Camp Hale sits in a high valley south of Minturn, in Eagle County. The resolution calls it the home base of an elite U.S. Army mountain warfare unit. The division was inactivated on Nov. 20, 1945, at Camp Carson.

Many of the division’s veterans gave the rest of their lives to conservation of Camp Hale and the Tenmile Range area, and they created the 10th Mountain Division Hut Association so that people who came later could use the ground the division trained on.

The resolution also records that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. designated the Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument on Oct. 12, 2022, using his authority under the federal Antiquities Act.

It says the monument will serve as a reminder of the division and its sacrifice for generations to come.

Reps. Julie McCluskie and Chris Richardson carried it with Sens. Dylan Roberts and John Carson.

It passed the House 60-0.

The rest of the slate

Eleven more resolutions moved on the same days and drew the same result.

Four honored veterans by conflict. Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and post-9/11 service.

The Vietnam resolution honors Coloradans who served alongside South Vietnamese soldiers, and it recognizes the challenges many of them faced both while serving and upon returning home.

Four more honored groups rather than conflicts. Latina and Latino veterans, Native American veterans, women veteransand African American veterans.

The last three took up Gold Star Families and POW/MIA, veterans mental health and the 58th anniversary of North Korea’s capture of the USS Pueblo.

All 13 cleared the House on Feb. 6, each with 59 or 60 members voting yes and none voting no. The Senate took them up on Feb. 9 and passed every one of them 30-0, with five senators excused.

By name, in one place

HJR26-1011 closes on a memorial in Aurora.

The Colorado Freedom Memorial was dedicated in 2013, and it honors all Colorado veterans killed in action since the Spanish-American War. World War II accounts for 3,586 of them.

The resolution calls it the only one in Colorado to honor all of the state’s fallen, by name, in one place.

The memorial lists more than 6,000 Coloradans killed or missing in action. It bills itself as the first in America dedicated to all wars and all branches of service.

The memorial is missing biographical information on almost 3,500 of those names. It is asking Colorado families to supply what it does not have, under the banner #TellUsTheirStories.

“We can’t bring them back, but we can make sure they are never forgotten,” the appeal reads.

The 13 resolutions were adopted in February. On Veterans Day, thousands of the names on the memorial still have no story attached.