![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/mn.gov\/mdva\/assets\/uss-ward-gun-framed_tcm1066-223871.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nThe ship – which was built during World War 1, was thoroughly obsolte, and had been pressed back into service to fill the gaps until new ships could be built – was converted into a fast transport in 1942. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The men of that crew are all gone, now – Alan Sanford, the last survivor, died in 2015. And the Ward <\/em>itself didn’t survive the war – it was lost in action off the Philippines, three years to the day after it fired the first shot of the war, on December 7 1944.. The Ward <\/em>was hit by a Kamikaze <\/em>and crippled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In a bit of historical poetry almost too unbelievable to be in a Hollywood script, after the ship was abandoned, the ship was sunk by gunfire from another destroyer, the USS O’Brien<\/em>, who’s commander, WIlliam Outerbridge, had been the Ward’s <\/em>CO at Pearl Harbor. (And, just because I’m a geek for this kind of thing, I’ll note that O’Brien<\/em> was built just down the waterfront from this ship<\/a>, which I wrote about a while back). <\/p>\n\n\n\n But while Sanford, his shipmates and the Ward \u02c6<\/em>itself are long gone, the gun they crewed lives on…<\/p>\n\n\n\n …on the State Capitol grounds, acquired from some naval armory decades ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Wonder what pretense the Walz administration will use for removing it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today is the 82nd anniversary of Pearl Harbor. For those who observe. As I often have over this past few decades, I call out the fact that the first shots at Pearl Harbor were fired by a crew of Navy Reservists from Saint Paul, who’d been mobilized earlier in the year as part of Roosevelt’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86617","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=86617"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86622,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86617\/revisions\/86622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/figure>\n\n\n\n