Another big airlift for WWII veterans

Program funds trips to memorial

World War II veterans Gerald Noel, 85, of Caledonia, Minn. (second from right), and Melvin McElhinney, 91, of La Crosse, Wis. (right), were among Wednesday's Honor Flight participants. (Nikki kahn/washington post)

WASHINGTON - From Minnesota and Georgia and Wisconsin and Kentucky, they came, arriving in tour buses whose baggage compartments were jammed with folded wheelchairs. Some now blind or hard of hearing or unsteady on their feet, they came with middle-aged children in tow and stories of the distant war.

Jim Rhyne, 84, who helped build bridges for Patton's tanks all across Europe, was there, and Albert Pruett, 88, who was a Marine at Pearl Harbor and had flung thousands of rounds of machine gun fire at the Japanese planes on Dec. 7, 1941.

James "Nick" Nicholson, 92, of Louisville, who toiled through the chest-deep surf at Omaha Beach on D-Day and whose trench foot still bothers him all these years later, was present, and John "Jeff" Settle, 85, who was a "plane pusher" on the flight deck of the USS Yorktown before she was lost after Midway.

Names and places carved in the annals of history rolled from the lips of bent and aged men, and a few women, Wednesday as hundreds of World War II veterans descended on Washington's National World War II Memorial as part of the special Honor Flight program that funds visits to the memorial.

They were men, mostly, who in their youth had served in the Battle of the Bulge or the New Hebrides or the Aleutians, or had been in the 82d Airborne or the 29th Infantry Division or the Third Army, or had run off to the war as teenagers, or had met their wives on a cross-country train, or were married near their base in the fall of 1943.

They wore ball caps with the names of their ships or the names of their bombardment groups. They gathered for photographs, and several from Minnesota doffed their caps and saluted while a bugler sounded taps. All pronounced the memorial beautiful as they walked or were pushed in wheelchairs among the ramps and arches and relief sculptures marking notable scenes of the war.

The Honor Flights are nonprofit programs in which communities across the country raise money and provide "guardians" for single-day trips to the memorial. The flights are the idea of Earl Morse, a pilot and physician's assistant in Springfield, Ohio, who several years ago realized that many of his World War II veteran patients did not have the money or the ability to make the trip.

He said the first flights were made in May 2005, one year after the memorial opened, with 12 veterans transported in small private planes. On Wednesday, about 500 vets from across the country were flown in on airliners, and Morse said the program has brought in as many as 1,100 in a single day.

As Morse, who wore a tie with a Stars and Stripes motif, spoke in the cool, sunny weather Wednesday, veteran Jim Rhyne approached him in a wheelchair to say thanks.

"It is such an honor to get you out here to see your memorial," Morse said, stooping to embrace the veteran.

Rhyne, who is blind, replied: "Oh, man. I'll tell you. This is wonderful."

Nearby, Albert Pruett, also of Rochester, Minn., sat with his two sons beneath a hospitality tent. His brown eyes sparkled as he told of his experience as a young Marine private aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania at Pearl Harbor.

The ship was in dry dock that morning, and he and three other Marines were assembled on the quarterdeck for the raising of the flag. He said they spotted planes diving on other battleships and wondered whether it was some sort of practice.

"But this was Sunday morning. Then we seen fire breaking out," he said. "About that time, here come a torpedo plane coming in, headed for us," he said.

The torpedo hit another ship with a tremendous blast, and when the pilot "tipped his wings," they saw the Rising Sun emblem of the Japanese. Pruett was stunned: "You just didn't think for a while."

Then, over loudspeakers, the sailors and Marines were ordered to battle stations. "This is not a drill," he said the speakers blared. "This is war."