One of the groups sure to be commemorated on Saturday at the commemoration ceremony at the State Capitol grounds will be the group of Minnesotans that fired the first American shots at Pearl Harbor. 

They were part of a group of 40-odd Navy Reservists from Minnesota who made up about a quarter of the crew of the U.S.S. Ward, an obsolete Word War I destroyer that had been saved from the scrapper’s torch by the outbreak of World War II, refitted, and sent to Pearl Harbor less than a year earlier after nearly twenty years in mothballs.

Their story:

It was just after 6:30 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941. The U.S. was not at war — yet — but the Ward had orders to intercept anything that was not supposed to be there.

The order was given to fire, and the first round sailed high. A second shot put a 4-inch shell through the conning tower. Depth charges were dropped, and Lehner watched the sub glide into oblivion.

“We didn’t know whose it was,” said Lehner, one of five USS Ward veterans invited in by the Navy League for the 64th anniversary of the attack. “In fact, the skipper said later: ‘God, I hope it wasn’t one of ours.’ “

The gun in the photo above is on the frontage road south of the Capitol Mall toward the Policeman’s Memorial.  It has stood there since the Navy (which had removed the gun from the Ward when they converted it into a long range escort and refitted it with lighter anti-aircraft guns after the war started) gave it to the state in 1958.  The Ward was sunk by a kamikaze in 1945.

Stop by Saturday and see a piece of history.

There is almost no truth to the rumor that Brian Ward has figured out how to pry open the breechblock, unfreeze the training gear, and loose a round at State DFL headquarters.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 5:50 am and is filed under History And Its Making, NARN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.