The rest of the NARN guys and I broadcast from the site of the Minnesota World War II Memorial, live from the top of the capitol mall on Saturday afternoon.

Although the forecasts earlier in the week called for possible thunderstorms, it was in fact the most beautiful day of the summer so far. 

We were at the top of the Mall, by the end of a long convoy of lovingly-restored WWII-vintage vehicles (of which more later).  The dedication was at the other end, down by the Veterans Affairs Building; the Memorial is in what would amount to the VA building’s back yard – so most of the attention, justifiably, was far from us.  But we had the pleasure of meeting quite a few old vets that made it up to our “studio”.

And I was astounded not so much at how many WWII veterans made it to the dedication, but how well so many of them got around.  We interviewed a number of veterans – including a fellow, Gerry Boe, who as a 19 year old private in the First Infantry Division immediately after the war had been a guard at the Nuremberg Trials.  Fascinating stuff.

After the show, my pal Mark, his girlfriend and I wandered among the WWII-era vehicles parked along the streets the dissect the Capitol Mall, partly to get the vehicles’ owners’ stories (the owner of the Bren Carrier…

…who’d had to fish the vehicle out of a swamp somewhere in southern Ontario was a standout)…

…but mostly to talk with the vets.

I remember a lot of the vets when I was a kid; my home town’s National Guard unit had fought on Guadalcanal, and the one from neighboring Valley City had been in the Battle of the Bulge, so a lot of those guys had been in the thick of things – and they rarely talked much.  Part of it is that war is hard to explain to people who’ve never been there.  Part of it, as Steven Ambrose said, was that that generation just wasn’t a self-aggrandizing bunch. 

But I think that in a lot of cases, as the Greatest Generation gets on a bit, they – or some of them – are talking a lot more.  Especially if they think people are interested. 

And I was.  So I wandered about and listened. 

I listened as a guy who’d been a Sherman tank driver in North Africa, and then across all of Europe, talked about his time in action.  As we stood by another Sherman, another guy – a Mr. Schweigert, from Fulda MN, who’d been in Company B, 1st Battalion of the 222nd Infantry (42nd Infantry Division) told stories about riding on the back of tanks just like that, for about 100 the 600 miles he estimated he’d marched across the continent.  Schweigert, who must have been at or slightly over 80, looked fit enough to hike the whole thing again; his old olive drab uniform jacket still fit him.

After we made our way past the memorial itself – which you should see, if you haven’t yet – we walked out to the other side of the Vets building, on the frontage road, overlooking downtown Saint Paul.  We found “the gun” – the original four-inch gun from the deck of the USS Ward that, hours before the bombings started on December 7, 1941, fired the first American shots of the war.  It was, in fact, this very gun…

…fired by the crew of Minnesota Navy Reservists shown in the photo above.  The Ward was a recycled WWI destroyer; like hundreds of other such obsolete ships (called “Four-Stackers”, because of their four exhaust funnels), the Ward was pressed into service due to a woeful shortage of modern ships capable of escorting convoys and doing other vital work.

Standing at the gun was a guy wearing a hat identifying himself as a crewman on the USS Roper, one of Ward’s sister ships:

My command of immense stores of otherwise-useless trivia finally made itself useful for something besides winning free drinks at Keegans; I knew a bit of the Roper’s story (it had sunk a U-boat in a controversial incident in 1942; I did not know that sci-fi author Robert Heinlein had served on the ship at one point).  That started the guy (whose name eludes me at the moment) talking; stories of convoys across the South Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, getting hit by a kamikaze that was flying right at  his position on the signal platform next to the bridge, until a last-second shot caused the plane to swerve into the #1 gun (on the “forecastle”, in front of the bridge), killing an officer and injuring a dozen of his shipmates.

I was far from the only one, of course, standing and listening to the old guys, many in their old uniforms, telling their stories to crowds of all ages. 

Wish we could do it again.