Monumental salutes to 'Greatest Generation'



The six men at this month’s reunion for the World War II aircraft carrier Wasp spent much of their weekend at a Point Loma motel. They talked. They listened to a historian. They ate.

And one morning, they took a bus to Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery.

There on a grassy hill, monuments honor three ships sunk during the war and the men who vanished with them. The lost vessels: the St. Lo and the Ommaney Bay, both escort carriers, and the Wasp.

The veterans prayed, laid a wreath, then reboarded the bus. But part of them never left the cemetery.

Going there, said Jim Berry, the Wasp veteran who hosted the reunion, “was the emotional highlight of the weekend.”

San Diego is home to roughly 10,000 World War II veterans — and dozens of World War II monuments. They are made of carnelian granite and copper-clad marble, brick-and-mortar and terra cotta. They vary in size, from knee-high markers to towering sculptures, and in subject matter, from individual heroes to whole flotillas. Some are topped by busts of the famous; others remember men whose names are absent from the history books but ever-present in the family histories recounted by their descendants.

Each monument is as individual as the men, ships and squadrons they honor. But all convey the same message, the one inscribed on the marker for the St. Lo: “We Do Remember.”

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In time, though, no one will truly remember the events of 1941-45. When that day comes, will these memorials still testify to an earlier generation’s sacrifice?

“You know what I hope for?” asked Berry, an 89-year-old Chula Vistan. “That they don’t tear ’em down.”

Lucky ship

When people sat down 10 years ago to figure out what the USS San Diego memorial should look like — what it should honor — there was disagreement.

Veterans of the ship, one of the most decorated in World War II, wanted to celebrate their military success: 34 enemy engagements, 18 battle stars. In their camp, there was talk of anti-aircraft guns blazing.

Sculptors Eugene Daub and Louis Quaintance suggested something quieter. They wanted it to be a place of reflection, more about the ordeal of war, the sacrifice, than the winning.

What finally emerged was a little bit of both. Because of its placement on the busy waterfront, between Seaport Village and the USS Midway, it’s probably seen as often as any World War II monument in San Diego.

The ship went into service a month after Pearl Harbor. For three years it worked the Pacific Theater, traveling 320,000 miles. Kamikaze planes spiraling its way always missed. More than 1,700 men served on the ship. Not one was lost in combat. At war’s end, the San Diego was the first Allied warship into Tokyo Bay for the formal Japanese surrender.

In the late 1990s, some of the ship’s surviving veterans decided they wanted a monument in San Diego. Daub, who lives in San Pedro, and Quaintance, who lives in Berkeley, won a competition to design it.


