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 tanks all across Europe, was there, as was Albert Pruett, 88, a Marine at Pearl Harbor who had shot thousands of rounds of machine-gun fire at the Japanese planes on Dec. 7, 1941.
James “Nick” Nicholson, 92, of Louisville, Ky., 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, as was John “Jeff” Settle, 85, 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 this week from the lips of bent and aged men and a few women 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 82nd Airborne or the 29th Infantry Division or the 3rd 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.
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.
Rhyne, now blind and in a wheelchair, served as an engineer in the 13th Armored “Black Cat” Division of Gen. George Patton’s 3rd Army in Europe.
“I was thankful to God for taking care of me all the time I was there,” he said. “I was one of the more fortunate ones, very fortunate.”
He recalled hitchhiking to Washington before being shipped out in 1944 and being shown around by a member of the Women’s Army Corps, whose name was Jo Marie. “I can still remember her name,” he said.
What became of her? “I have no idea,” he said.
