Remember These Names, How Communities Honor Local Veterans’ Sacrifices

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From his home near Hawk Ridge in Duluth, high above Lake Superior, David R. Wheat’s view is spectacular.

     But on a recent sunny fall day, the retired U.S. Navy commander was looking not into today’s brilliant blue waters but into a darker past, recalling his seven years and four months as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

“You don’t know it’s going to be that long,” he said of his captivity, “so you’re looking ahead every three months. Where are we now? We’re in September, so maybe something will happen by Thanksgiving.”

There are countless stories of courage and sacrifice in every war, with few resulting in medals and recognition, and so it often falls to local communities to honor the individual sacrifices, to keep in memory the service of hometown heroes.

Our Lake Superior region has sent residents to battle, stretching from before the American Civil War. In fact, Joseph Kemp, who entered into the Union army in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for personally capturing the flag of the

31st North Carolina division of the Confederate army.

Most Big Lake towns, large and small, host monuments and plaques that honor local veterans as a group. More rare are the museums and memorials that keep alive the personal stories of some extraordinary individuals who have served in the military (see side stories).

In Duluth, statues of two local veterans from wars decades apart – but whose stories reflect the wider experience of those who served – greet visitors and residents passing through the Duluth International Airport.

David Wheat, 77, is represented by one statue honoring all Minnesota prisoners of war. The late Joseph P. Gomer is represented by another, honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of African-American fighter pilots from World War II.

I got a chance to speak with David at his home and also had a few moments with Joe Gomer at an event about a year before his passing. During this season of family gatherings, I’d like to share their stories of service to represent all of those in the military who cannot make it home for the holidays.

David Wheat, born in Dearborn, Michigan, was in first grade when his family moved from Wichita, Kansas, to Duluth in 1946. For a time, they lived in his grandparents’ house on East First Street.

He and his friends played softball, touch football and sometimes tackle football in Leif Erikson Park where the Rose Garden grows now. They’d go to movies at the old downtown theaters. “We would come out of the

Granada and go next door and have a coney for 25 cents.”

Winter fun often meant downhill skiing. He played hockey as a junior at Central High School, from which he graduated in 1957.

In summer of 1959, David worked as a deckhand on the steamship William G. Mather, leaving him with

vivid memories. “I got on over in Superior and made a trip down to Ashtabula (Ohio). You’re out in the blue water for a day, and that’s where I learned to chip paint.” Some tasks, like opening and closing cargo hatches by hand, was labor intensive, but David remembers that the pay and food were “excellent.” (Today, the Mather is a museum ship in Cleveland.)

In 1963, his senior year in industrial education at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Popular Science magazine featured the new aircraft carrier Enterprise, and later showcased a state-of-the-art F-4 Phantom fighter plane on its cover. David was impressed and decided what he wanted to do after graduation.

He enlisted in the Navy and, after 16 weeks of officer training school in Florida, was commissioned as an ensign. He trained for more than a year in the Naval Flight Officer Program until May 1965. His job: running the radar in the F-4B Phantom. He also learned something he hoped never to need – escape and evasion tactics in survival school, in case his plane was shot down.

As the radar intercept officer, David sat behind the pilot in the F-4, which was designed to fly off an aircraft carrier and engage enemy aircraft. His fighter squadron was deployed to Vietnam the summer of 1965 on the carrier USS Independence.

“The war cranked up; they started hanging bombs on us, rockets and everything else. We were doing bombing runs, we were escorting photo aircraft,” David says of the plane’s various roles.

On his 80th mission, Oct. 17, 1965, Lieutenant Junior Grade David Wheat and his pilot, Lieutenant Roderick Mayer, were supporting a bombing strike on the Thai Nguyen Bridge in North Vietnam. Theirs would be one of three Navy jets shot down.

“We started our turnaround, and I looked to the east and saw this smoke billowing up.” An F-4 was on the ground.

Then, flying low and traveling at 550 mph, their plane was struck by anti-aircraft fire. The pilot rolled the plane 360 degrees, indicating loss of control. Both men ejected, but David never saw the pilot again, nor was his body ever recovered.

David injured his knee when he hit the ground, yet he evaded capture for an hour. Discovered by militia forces, he was placed on a stretcher hanging from a bamboo pole and taken to a hamlet, where villagers spat on him.

“It was so hot and sticky that it kind of cools you off a little. Felt good, but yuck,” David recalls wryly.

For the first nine months, David was by himself in claustrophobic cells in Hoa Lo Prison (the infamous “Hanoi Hilton”) in the center of Hanoi. He would walk back and forth to pass the time.

“You had nothing, zero. You didn’t have paper, you didn’t have pencils. All you had was your mind and your physical body.

“There was good guy-bad guy treatment, where one fellow would treat you well, and the other would put you in a black box for a few hours. In interrogation, there’s torture involved; there was for us.”

Over time, he and other POWs invented a tapping code based on rows of letters from the alphabet. To reach someone down the hall, they used sounds, such as coughing or clearing the throat, to correspond with letters. If they saw another American, finger motions signed messages.

During his confinement, he thought about home “all the time.”

“Sometimes you’d just go back and relive some of the experiences you had (like those days working on the Mather in Lake Superior), remembering things and then making plans for the future and not knowing what lay ahead.”

In his mind, he built “a nice bachelor pad, a house, on a lot overlooking the Lake. And you wanted to be able to lay in bed and the curtains would open up so you could see down to the Lake. You’d be thinking about it: How am I going to do that?”

When David shared a cell with another POW, there were two bedboards, and an additional 3 to 4 feet in the cell. You could walk on the bedboards, or use the other space to go three paces, 1-2-3, then turn around and walk back, 1-2-3.

“The boredom was intense; that’s all you can say,” David recalls. Sometimes even the welcome company of a cellmate meant conflicts. “You’d have a little explosion, and then everything’s fine. I likened it to being married.”

David spent time at another prison near the Chinese border, but was returned to Hanoi. In the later years of his captivity, David was given pen and ink, which he used to draw detailed floor plans for his “bachelor pad” on the thick, rough paper that POWs were given for toilet paper.

Word of the peace talks reached the prisoners.

“They’d have a bombing halt, and every time they had a halt, that just gave the bad guys a chance to rebuild and get everything going again. And you’d have to come in again, and bomb these bridges or whatever,” David says.

Released on Feb. 12, 1973, David went home. He reunited with his parents and siblings at a hospital in Chicago. When they arrived, he bent down and performed a handstand to let them know he was OK.

David stayed in the Navy, went through flight training and became a pilot, flying various aircraft, including the A-6 Intruder, an attack airplane. He retired in 1984 at the rank of commander, after being in charge of the flight simulator facility at Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego, Calif. Returning to Duluth in 1989, David worked for the school district as a tech tutor for a construction class that builds homes – real homes after all those years of building in his head only. He and his wife, Ginger, raised a son and two daughters (their daughters also served in the Navy).

David no longer gives talks about his experience in Vietnam, figuring, modestly, that everyone has heard his story. In recent years, he’s been honored twice, putting him in the spotlight. At UMD, a scholarship fund named in his honor was established for students who are military veterans, active duty members or who serve in the National Guard or Reserves.

At the airport terminal, the sculpture depicts David as a POW with his hands in handcuffs behind him ­– a powerful and painful image. Dedicated in 2015, the Duluth memorial honors “all Minnesota prisoners of war,” including those who died and those still missing from the Vietnam War.

During the Vietnam War, 2,338 U.S. soldiers were listed as missing in action, with 33 Minnesota soldiers still missing there, and 766 Americans were taken prisoner, 114 of whom died there, according to the inscription.

“It means a lot,” David says of the memorial. “I always think, OK, there’s me, but then there’s all these other enlisted people who were in the thick of battle. If you’ve been watching (the PBS documentary “The Vietnam War”), you see what those guys have gone through. Every one of them deserves a statue, in my mind.”

Joe Gomer, or rather a statue of him, stands not far from the David Wheat POW memorial at the Duluth airport.

The impressive life-size bronze sculpture portrays a determined young pilot in his World War II flight suit – Joe as a proud member of the Tuskegee Airmen, serving in the 332nd Fighter Group.

The memorial calls Joe one of America’s heroes, and this statue can be a symbol for all the Tuskegee Airmen, for what they accomplished in fighting Nazi Germany and in challenging their own country’s racism and bigotry. The statue is also the kind of tribute that could make Joe, a modest man, feel a bit awkward.

Joseph P. Gomer grew up in Iowa Falls, Iowa, where

he graduated in pre-engineering from Ellsworth Community College before enlisting in the Army in 1942. The military was racially segregated during World War II, but the Army Air Corps, under congressional order, created an all African-American pursuit squadron in 1941, based in Tuskegee, Alabama.

“The whole thing was African Americans. They wanted us off in the corner,” Joe explained in a 2012 interview with me. “No airbase on the East Coast or the West Coast wanted us, so they had to prepare a place for us.”

After his training at Tuskegee Army Air Field, Joe flew 68 missions in P-47 and P-51 aircraft in North Africa, Italy and Germany. He survived having his plane shot up by a German fighter, and in another incident had to crash land.

Opponents of African-Americans as pilots absurdly argued that they couldn’t learn to fly. The Tuskegee Airmen crushed such words, proving them wrong by protecting U.S. bombers. Joe’s 332nd Fighter Group alone flew at least 312 missions for the 15th Air Force from June 1944 to May 1945, says the Tuskegee Airmen Inc. website. When pilots in the group painted their fighter plane tails red, it led to the nickname “Red Tails,” although the bomber crews preferred “Red Tail Angels.”

A Hollywood movie, “Red Tails,” depicting the Tuskegee Airmen, was screened in Duluth in 2012. Before the showing, Joe remarked, “I never created a lot of attention, you know. And all of a sudden you’re the center of attention, and you’re representing not just yourself, but really the Black Army Air Corps. I’m just a survivor.”

He was quick to point out that the name Tuskegee Airmen means not only the pilots but broadly includes everyone who supported the airmen and their planes, from maintenance and support staff to instructors.

The Tuskegee Airmen, through their success, helped pave the way for the eventual integration of the U.S. military services.

Joe and other Tuskegee Airmen were later invited to the 2008 inauguration of President Barack Obama. “I fought World War II segregated, I trained segregated, I flew segregated and I returned segregated,” the Duluth News Tribune quoted Gomer as saying in 2011. “But today we have President Obama, and never in my life did I dream that I would someday have a black commander in chief.”

After the war, Joe stayed in the Air Force and worked in aircraft maintenance and missile work, becoming a nuclear weapons technician.

He moved to Duluth with his wife, Elizabeth, and two daughters in 1963, and retired from the Air Force as a major the following year. He then worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a personnel officer until his retirement in 1985. Elizabeth would serve on the Duluth Charter Commission and as president of the local League of Women Voters.

Over the years, many accolades would come Joe’s way. He was inducted into the Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame, and in 2007 President George W. Bush presented the Tuskegee Airmen collectively with the Congressional Gold Medal.

In 2013, a second life-size statue of Joe was unveiled on the campus of Ellsworth Community College in his hometown of Iowa Falls, showing him in his flight gear.

In his later years, Joe talked to groups about the celebrated World War II pilots. Minnesota’s last surviving Tuskegee Airman, Joe Gomer died in 2013 at a nursing home in Duluth. He was 93.

Engraved on the pedestal of his statue at the Duluth airport are his words: “We’re all Americans. That’s why we chose to fight. I’m as American as anybody. My black ancestors were brought over against their will to help build America. My German ancestors came over to build a new life. And my Cherokee ancestors were here to greet all the boats.”

The stories of David Wheat and Joe Gomer, though different in time and experience, both reflect the bravery of those who leave home to serve their country.

The two statues at the Duluth airport are just two examples of how local communities preserve the stories of their veterans for generations, remembering not just their service, but also their names. We encourage you to take time to visit in your town the places that honor veterans and read their names.

Such monuments provide more than the fleeting, though heartfelt, sentiment: “Thank you for your service.”

They deliver a deeper commitment,

a community promise:

“We will remember.”

The St. Louis County Historical Society’s Veterans Memorial Hall in the Duluth Depot recounts with photos and stories, the heroism of these five Congressional Medal of Honor recipients from Duluth or northeastern Minnesota.

• Michael Colalillo, born in Hibbing, grew up in West Duluth. On April 7, 1945, under heavy enemy fire near Untergriesheim, Germany, this Army private first class called others to follow him and moved forward, firing his machine pistol. He inspired his comrades, who “advanced in the face of savage enemy fire,” says his Medal of Honor citation. Mike leaped onto a tank. As bullets peppered it, he commandered an exterior machine gun and with blistering accuracy knocked out two enemy machine gun nests. He killed or wounded 25 enemy soldiers and carried a wounded American through heavy fire to safety.

• Henry A. Courtney Jr. of Duluth, an aspiring lawyer, joined the Marine Corps Reserves in 1940 and took part in the battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands as a company commander. The night of May 14-15 in the brutal battle on Okinawa for Sugar Loaf Hill, the major led an assault “boldly blasting nearby cave positions and neutralizing enemy guns as he went. Inspired by his courage, every man followed without hesitation, and together the intrepid Marines braved a terrific concentration of Japanese gunfire to skirt the hill on the right and reach the reverse slope,” reads his Medal of Honor citation. Reaching the crest and seeing a throng of Japanese soldiers less than 100 yards away, he waged a furious battle amid a hail of enemy shrapnel to rally his troops and aid the wounded before being killed by mortar fire.

• Oscar F. Nelson, machinist’s mate first class in the U.S. Navy, was serving on the USS Bennington in San Diego Harbor when its boiler exploded July 21, 1905, killing 67 crew members. He rescued more than half a dozen seamen from the lower decks and was cited for extraordinary heroism. He later lived in Duluth, where he worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

• Donald E. Rudolph of Bovey, Minnesota, was an Army sergeant administering battlefield first aid on Luzon, the main Philippine island, Feb. 5, 1945, when his unit came under heavy fire. He crawled to the culvert from which the shots came and killed three enemy soldiers, then made his way to Japanese pillboxes with machine guns. According to his Medal of Honor citation, he tossed grenades to destroy the first one, then used a pickax to pierce a second pillbox and destroy it with rifle fire and a grenade. He quickly destroyed six more pillboxes. When his unit was attacked by a tank, he climbed on top and dropped a grenade through its turret, killing the crew. Donald, who was promoted to second lieutenant, “cleared a path for an advance which culminated in one of the most decisive victories of the Philippine campaign,” says the citation. He retired from the Army in 1963 and worked for the Veterans Administration. He lived in Grand Rapids.

• Dale E. Wayrynen, born in Moose Lake, was a specialist fourth class with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in South Vietnam on May 18, 1967. While evacuating wounded soldiers in Quang Ngai Province, a battle erupted with the Viet Cong. When the soldier ahead of him was wounded, Dale killed one enemy fighter and dragged his comrade back to their unit. A live grenade landed among the men. Knocking one soldier out of the way, he threw himself on the grenade, saving the others. Dale was mortally wounded and was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously two years later, which cited that “his deep and abiding concern for his fellow soldiers was significantly reflected in his supreme and courageous act that preserved the lives of his comrades.”

The Richard I. Bong Veterans Historical Center on Highway 2/53 in Superior honors all war veterans while memorializing a local hero.

One of our region’s more famous World War II stories is that of Richard Ira Bong, who grew up on a farm in Poplar, Wisconsin, and became a national war hero – America’s Ace of Aces – by shooting down 40 enemy

planes in the Pacific theater in P-38 fighters. It’s a record that still stands.

In 1944, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for shooting down eight enemy planes from Oct. 10 to Nov. 15 that year. Assigned to be a gunnery instructor, and neither required nor expected to perform combat duty, “Maj. Bong voluntarily and at his own urgent request engaged in repeated combat missions,” according to the medal citation. Gen. Douglas MacArthur awarded him the nation’s highest honor, saying that Richard “has ruled the air from New Guinea to the Philippines.”

 Pulled from combat and ordered home after he reached 40 victories, Richard married his sweetheart, Marge Vattendahl, in Superior, on Feb. 10, 1945, with 1,200 guests. Six months later, at age 24, he died while testing the first Lockheed jet fighter. His crash, on the same day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, drew banner headlines.

The veterans center honoring his name has expanded its scope to include all veterans, though its centerpiece remains a restored P-38 Lightning and Richard Bong exhibit.

 This winter, the staff will refresh that exhibit by adding accounts of the flying ace’s activities and tracing his route through New Guinea. Visitors will see excerpts from letters home and mission debriefings using Dick’s own words.

The Thunder Bay Military Museum is housed in the O’Kelly Armoury, named for a Thunder Bay hero from World War I.

On Oct. 26, 1917, Captain Christopher Patrick John O’Kelly would lead a company of the 52nd Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Force, to storm German defenses near Passchendaele, Belgium.

Other units had failed to overtake the enemy positions, suffering heavy losses. The captain and his men advanced about

1 kilometre and captured six pillboxes, 10 machine guns and 100 prisoners. They dug in and held off repeated counterattacks until relieved. Later that day, the company fought off yet another strong counterattack and took more prisoners. That night, they captured a raiding party of 11 soldiers.

In leading men of Thunder Bay’s 52nd Battalion, Christopher, born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, tied into a long history of local units in Thunder Bay dating from 1885. Today the local force is named the Lake Superior Scottish Regiment. Christopher survived the war and was awarded the Victoria Cross, Canada and Britain’s highest military honor. He is the local regiment’s only Victoria Cross recipient.

Inside the Thunder Bay Military Museum, a World War I display features the captain in a trench bunker (the officers mess also has display with a duplicate set of the captain’s medals).

At the Marquette Maritime Museum, the McClintock Annex honors Commander David H. McClintock, whose submarine USS Darter, along with the USS Dace, intercepted a Japanese task force heading into the Philippines at the start of the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944. For the U.S. invasion forces, learning the location of the Japanese force was critical. The subs radioed that information and also attacked. The

Darter sank one cruiser and heavily damaged a second; the Dace, commanded by Bladen D. Claggett, sank another cruiser.

While pursuing the crippled Japanese cruiser, the Darter ran aground on Bombay Shoal, a coral reef, and the Dace rescued the crew. The Darter was then destroyed to keep it from falling into enemy hands. Leyte Gulf, considered the largest naval battle in history, lasted three days and was a decisive defeat for Japan.

The McClintock Annex honors the submariners with an exhibit that features an interactive battle diorama, narrated by David McClintock’s brother, Walter. Visitors can peer through a 40-foot-tall periscope from the World War II-era USS Rasher to get a 360-degree view of Marquette, Lake Superior and the Marquette Harbor Lighthouse. A video shows the Darter on Bombay Shoal after being intentionally destroyed. A replica of its conning tower is at Mattson Lower Harbor Park in Marquette.