By Kristin Holtz, Staff Writer

On the worst night Bob Monnens ever spent in the Army, there wasn’t a shot fired.

His surveying crew was attached to an artillery battery that found itself on the shot-up beach of some South Pacific Island late one afternoon. The battery barely got to work digging a foxhole — a daily task — when dark came. The rain soon followed and the unit huddled in for a miserable night on the bombed beach.

Then it got a worse. As the wind came up, word spread a sergeant could hear Japanese soldiers crawling not far away. Just weeks after Japanese ambushed their camp, the soldiers lay in pure black darkness listening.

Monnens held the pin of his hand grenade all night waiting for the attack to come. The tension was overpowering.

“I was glad to see daybreak. All it was was a [broken palm tree] branch sweeping the ground” when the wind blew, Monnens, 85, recalled from his Shakopee home. “Worst night I spent in the service.”

Tom Melchior of Shakopee is striving to capture Monnens’ and other World War II veterans’ stories before it’s too late. The author and historian has been taking the oral histories of dozens of Scott County veterans to produce a book in cooperation with the Scott County Historical Society.

“I believe so much in the power of stories to reveal what we are and the times and the whole human condition,” Melchior said. “Stories are a unifying factor. They touch the human spirit.”

Melchior, who has written books about the history of Minnesota country school teachers and Scott County baseball, began interviewing veterans for the historical society’s oral history project. Soon, he was interviewing the soldiers exclusively, becoming awestruck by their stories, he said.

“I look it as a real honor to be invited into their homes and have them sharing things they haven’t talked about before,” he said.

After the war, many World War II soldiers refused to talk about their overseas experiences, more interested in getting back to their every day lives. But now, as the country loses 900 World War II veterans a day, Melchior believes the passage of time and a sense of mortality are encouraging veterans to open up and recall what they endured in service of their country.

“It was taken for granted at that time,” said World War II veteran John McCarthy. “The whole world was at war, you know, and oddly enough people weren’t discussing it.”

McCarthy, 85, of Savage, was a top turret gunner on B-25s in Europe during the war. Serving in the 321st Squadron of the 57th Bomb Wing, 12th Air Force, McCarthy flew on more bridge bombing missions than he can remember.

“I’m grateful to be here because I had a couple of close calls when I was on the B-25,” said McCarthy, who earned an Air Medal following a particularly rough bombing of Bologna, Italy.

Melchior said Scott County veterans served in nearly every aspect of the war, from the South Pacific to Europe, the Battle of Peleliu to the Battle of Bulge, from noncombat positions like a baker to infantrymen on the front line.

Soldiers with county ties were at Pearl Harbor and D-Day. Several were prisoners of war, others walked on the bombed remains of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Monnens, who enlisted at age 18 and was assigned to the 205th Artillery in the 41st Division, lived through weeks of combat in the Battle for Biak.

“It’s amazing what these men — they were boys at the time — lived through,” said Kathy Klehr, executive director of the Scott County Historical Society.

McCarthy believes it’s a change in culture which has allowed veterans to open up. So far, Melchior has conducted 68 interviews and is issuing a last call for veterans with Scott County ties.

Through his interviews, he also collected photos from the veterans, too, that will be used in the book.

“I’m no hero. I just did what everyone else did,” McCarthy said.

Read more about the Scott Historical Society's efforts to record the oral histories of the Great Generations (nonveterans included) and transcribe them in digital formats in the Shakopee Valley News print edition.

Kristin Holtz can be reached at (952) 345-6678 or kholtz@swpub.com.