They called him “Daisy” May when he was one of 700 sailors — most of them kids — on a heavy cruiser named the USS Minneapolis (CA-36) that survived Pearl Harbor to become one of the most decorated warships in the Pacific during World War II, enduring torpedoes, typhoons and kamikaze attacks, and earning 17 battle stars in 25 engagements…This week, May and his remaining comrades will rendezvous in the city for which their ship was named, holding a final reunion and sounding Taps on the story of “The Fighting Minnie,” and themselves.<\/p>\n
“She was the best ship in the Navy,” May said as his shipmates began to gather at the Normandy Inn for their last detail, which ends with a banquet Saturday. “As far as I know, she was the only ship in its class to take two hits from [Japanese] torpedoes and survive.”<\/p>\n
The Minneapolis was conducting training exercises off Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941. The crew thought they were seeing smoke from Hawaiian farmers burning sugar fields until they were ordered to break out live ammo. Practice was over.<\/p>\n
The war had begun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The whole thing is worth a read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If there’s one event I’d love to try to get to in the Twin Cities’ this weekend, it’s the reunion of the crew of the USS Minneapolis.\u00a0 It’s likely to be the last one. But Nick Coleman was there, doing one of those columns he does occasionally – a good one: They called him “Daisy” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}