If you go to the south entrance to Como Park, along Lexington, you can see an unusual statue – an old torpedo on a stand.
It’s a memorial to the crew of the USS Swordfish – an American submarine, built in the waning years of the 1930’s, which fought throughout World War II.
USS Swordfish
Swordfish had been at Pearl Harbor on December 7. It set off on its first war patrol weeks after the attack, sinking Japanese freighers in Filipino waters – the first ships sunk by US submarines in World War II – before helping evacuate the Philippines’ president, Manuel Quezon, and key members of his government and military staffs.
There were eleven more patrols before Christmastime in 1944, when Swordfish set sail for Japanese home waters, with a side mission to reconnoiter invasion beaches on Okinawa.
The torpedo in Como Park is part of a nationwide project to honor the men of the 52 submarines lost during the war with a monument in each state (New York and California have two each).
Nobody in my family ever died serving the country (a great uncle apparently came pretty close in World War I; my father found some dire-sounding letters from the Argonne); my ex-father-in-law served on a destr0yer throughout the war in the Pacific, but close calls notwithstanding (kamikazes, yes, but his biggest injury came when the return spring on an Oerlikon 20mm gun he was maintaining sprang loose, throwing him over a rail to a deck below, injuring his back) he came home.
So most Memorial Days, I stop by Como Park and pay homage to the sub’s crew of 89. Three of the crew were from Minnesota, two from North Dakota, and one from South Dakota.
I get to be first to pay my respects and thank those that have served and are serving my country.
The list:
Army
Navy
Air Force
Marine Corps
Coast Guard
National Guard
Border Patrol
Add to that list:
Police officers
Fire fighters
Emergency medical technicians
First responders
Doctors, nurses, and those who assist them
God bless the United States of America.
Dog Gone
Well said Kermit.
Lovely post, Mitch.
Do you happen to know which of those you listed were from Minnesota and which might be from the surrounding five state area? Some of your readers might have relatives on that list that they didn’t know about.
(One tiny cavet, Memorial Day is the last Monday of the month; today is Sunday. Yeah, I know – a little nit-picky.) The holiday dates back to honoring the civil war dead, but of course we should honor all those who died in military service, past through recent.
It’s nice when we can come together on common ground like this; we have enough divisions between people. Wishing you Mitch and the Mitchketeers a safe holiday.
golfdoc50
Nice piece, Mitch. We’d all do well to take several moments today to remember the fallen.
Kermit
Not just the fallen, those still standing who put their butts on the line every day, often for people who could not care less.
I’ll say it again. God bless the United States of America.
Ben
As the grandson of a WWII vet who got a purple heart in the Battle of the Bulge, today means a lot to me. He lived until 2005 but never talked about his experiences. Not too many people say this but a lot of people who come back from war never really come back, part of them died where they were. Remember Vets today and every day as Kermit put above. And to all those anti-war protesters out there, remember people died for you to have that right, the very thing you protest is the very reason you can protest. /end rant
Ben, everyone that knows someone that has been in the armed forces from WWII, needs to be encouraged to share their experiences before they are gone.
I had uncles that were in WWII that I never got to do so with, but I had that opportunity and only realized it after watching the gutwrenching HBO special “Taking Chance” a couple of years ago. Toward the end of the movie, there was a bar scened where an old Marine, barely able to hold back his tears, told Col. Mike Strobl that he was Chance Phelps’ witness now and without a witness, Chance would have just faded away.
I grew up in a Bloomington neighborhood where several Korean War veterans lived. My dad was one of them. He served in the US Army, but never got out of the US. Obviously, many of my playmates were either my age or within a year or two in age around me.
One of my best friend’s dad was a survivor of the Chosin Reservoir. On one of our many adventures to Nine Mile Creek one summer (I think that I was about 10) this friend and his younger brother confided in me that their dad often had nightmares about the war. It was hard to believe, because their dad was a very successful salesman, treated all of the kids in the neighborhood to popsicles on a hot summer day and was always joking with everyone. At that age though, I was too young to understand that war was not a game that you played in your back yard.
After I returned from Vietnam, I went down the street to visit my friend who was home from college for the holidays. Jim (the dad) answered the door and tears came to his eyes. He hugged me like I was his own son and wlcomed me home! While we waited for his son to come home, we had a couple of beers and he suddenly started sharing the horrific experiences he had as a 19 year old farm kid from Minnesota. I guess that my experience earned me the right to hear them. He told me that he wrestled for years with some personal demons of having had to kill three Chinese soldiers with his bayonet in hand to hand combat when the action of his BAR froze. After about an hour, he paused for several minutes, then said very softly that his deep Catholic faith, the help of an Army Chaplain and his family, were the only things that “kept him from going insane.” I know now that I was Jim’s witness.
So, if you can, offer to be a witness to one of these brave people so that their courage and sacrifices will not be forgotten.
Kermit
Thank you for that Boss.
Ben
Boss, thanks for that and I will. Due to some, ahem, medical conditions I will never be able to serve, even if there is a draft (people who have history of mental illness+ boot camp= bad times for all) so the least I could do is that. Whenever I see a WWII vet and mention that I have/had a grandpa who served in probably one of the most infamous battles of the war they light up. I swear its some interesting intergenerational thing but we connect. Plus being a history major with a focus on WWII I love hearing about history from people who were actually there. Maybe I will collect stories someday, and as a question how do you approach such a sensitive subject? somehow saying “Hey I want to hear about all your experiences in WWII” just sounds callous and cold.
I wrote the following a few years ago and typically featured it on my blog on Memorial Day. Since the blog is barely hanging in, and given the tenor of other comments in this string, I’ll feature it here if that is alright:
I’ve felt like this before. The nausea,
simultaneously sweating and shivering,
knowing that something was about to happen
and it wouldn’t be good.
Then it was being crammed into the landing craft,
Pressing toward Omaha Beach,
held in place by the shoulders of the men on either side of me,
eyes fixed on the door at the front,
with death on the other side as the bullets hissed.
Now it’s more than sixty years later
and the tubes and wires
hold me in place as the machines hiss
as I stare at the door with death on the other side.
Maybe this time, too, I’ll be lucky.
Then we advanced like a wave, and death took us
by the handfuls;
Bombs, machine guns, artillery shells leaving
sudden gaps in the line,
friendships and debts disappearing in an instant,
but we still advanced from hedge to hill, from farm to city.
Storming a farm house we found
the German kid with a couple of bullets
(maybe mine)
in him, clutching a religious medallion and
praying “Mein Gott, mein Gott”
as he bled out.
My God.
My God, too.
I knelt and his lips moved as he looked at me,
I put my hand on the side of his face,
“God, have mercy on him,” I prayed as his
face became peaceful and the light left with his blood.
“God, have mercy on us all.”
At reunions we’d regroup and note
the new gaps in the line;
death now a sniper as we fall one by one
and just as inevitably.
Does He see our faces in the scope
as He lines up the head shot,
or only the meat as he selects
heart, lungs, marrow?
Then we advanced because we had to,
We had to win
We had to make our losses mean something.
We thought we had won, at the end,
but it was only the war and not the battle
and the lives were just a down-payment
on peace and breathing room
until the enemy returns
with installments paid in different ways
in the days and nights to come.
Sometimes in later years
when I felt the moistness of my wife
I would suddenly think of Steinie,
of pushing his guts back inside him
after he was burst by the 88.
Those were the nights, then,
when I would sit up at the kitchen table, smoking
until you kids came in for breakfast,
keeping watch, remembering the faces,
wondering how many others might also be sitting up
that night, remembering the same faces.
I don’t wonder so much anymore.
Meanwhile, the fat sales director,
who sat out the war In England
in the Quartermaster corps, would say,
“Boys, we’ve got to take that hill” and
we would take that hill, fill that quota,
and make another payment on the Dream
because we had seen Evil and had our fill
and thought it was finished and that
the world had been reborn shiny and new.
Surely it had to have been,
given the cost;
surely evil had to have been driven away,
and we came back to build a new world
for you our children,
a world where you would never have to
face what we faced;
see what we saw,
do what we had done.
We were naive, of course,
but don’t blame us
for wanting it to be so.
Did we do wrong, my children?
Thinking no one would dare open that door again,
did we neglect to prepare you,
to give you valuable perspective?
You´ve seen the pictures,
And heard the words,
but you can´t know the smell
or the taste,
of walking into that concentration camp,
so your Hitlers are effigies and
Nazis are bogeymen,
mere cursing but not a curse.
I´m sorry, I´m sorry, I´m sorry.
There’s much I would have you know
things I should have said and
lessons you’ll have to learn on your own.
I don’t know why I’ve lived so long
when so many died around me,
unless it’s because something of their
unused futures was somehow transferred to me
in the spray of their blood.
I’ve tried to use it well.
May you do the same.
[…] I do most Memorial Days – stopping by the memorial to the USS Swordfish, which I wrote about a few years ago – on my way about all the rest of the things the day […]
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