WW II vet checks visit to ship memorial off bucket list

Like most World War II veterans, Edward Lehn came home and got on with his life. He didn’t talk much about what he’d seen and done aboard the USS San Diego, a light cruiser that was the second most-decorated ship of the war.

Now 94, he still doesn’t talk about it. His memory isn’t what it used to be.

But what he can’t articulate he still feels, which is why he started sobbing Monday morning when he rolled in his wheelchair up to the USS San Diego memorial on the downtown Embarcadero.

It was the Arizona resident’s first visit. He saw his name etched in granite alongside those of the men he served with more than 70 years ago. He saw the map on the ground of all the places the ship went, 312,000 zig-zagging nautical miles to storied battles against the Japanese at Guadalcanal, Okinawa, Iwo Jima.

“Being here means a lot,” he said as the tears fell and more than a dozen relatives — children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren — gathered around him. “I can’t really get over it.”

Lehn was 17 and living in Connecticut when he joined the Navy in 1941. That same year, the USS San Diego was built, christened with the ceremonial bottle of champagne by Grace Benbough, the wife of San Diego’s mayor. She’d traveled across the country to the Boston Navy Yard to do the honors, completing a circle that had opened in 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to San Diego for the dedication of the new County Administration Building and the mayor asked him to name a Navy ship after the city.

The cruiser was commissioned in early 1942 and came to San Diego for final training. Then it was off to the South Pacific, where during the next three years it was involved in 34 enemy engagements and collected 18 battle stars, second only to the carrier Enterprise. In October 1944, in action near Manilla Bay, it shot down nine Japanese planes.

The ship may also have been the Navy’s luckiest, dubbed “The Unbeatable” by its crew. It never lost a sailor to enemy action, never got knocked out of commission by torpedoes or kamikazes, although there were plenty of near misses. The good fortune extended even to accidents. One time, in stormy seas, a crewman was washed overboard by a wave — and then washed back onto the deck by a subsequent wave.

When the war ended in August 1945, the USS San Diego was the first American warship to sail into Tokyo Bay for the Japanese surrender. A year later, she was decommissioned.

Lehn returned home to Connecticut and went to work for a telephone company. He got married and had two children. That in turn has led to four grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

His daughter, Pat Gustaitis, said he didn’t tell war stories when she was growing up but he would occasionally bring out yearbooks from his time at sea. “You could tell he was proud, but he never bragged.” Staci West, one of his granddaughters, said it was clear to her, despite his reticence, what the war meant. “It helped shape him,” she said.

Lehn was a storekeeper on the ship. Monday, he recalled moving around a lot. “If they needed you on the guns, you went,” he said. “If they needed you to mop, you mopped.”

Lehn stayed in touch for a while with a couple of other USS San Diego veterans on the East Coast, but he’s outlived them. Nationwide, of the 16 million Americans who served in the war, only about 620,000 were still alive in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Nobody in Lehn’s family knew about the memorial in San Diego — completed in 2004 — until a few years ago. Lehn’s grandson, Jon Gustaitis, who lives in Woodland Hills, came across it during a visit to the Midway Museum, which is nearby. He took photos and sent them to his mom, who showed them to Lehn, who put it on his “bucket list” of places to go.

“It was the only thing on his bucket list,” said his son, Ed Lehn III.

Lehn III lives near Phoenix and recently moved his dad there from Connecticut. That made it easier to think about doing a trip to San Diego, family members said, and the idea took on an urgency because of Lehn’s age and condition.

“We wanted to do it while he still had some memory of the ship,” his daughter said. “It was now or never.”

Monday morning, relatives from Connecticut, Arizona and California gathered at the memorial. Lehn wore a baseball cap and a sweatshirt with the name of the ship — his ship — printed on them. Tears fell as he rolled up to the 28-foot tall monument, which has granite walls filled with the names of approximately 1,800 sailors who served on board. Another wall, done in terra cotta, depicts the ship shooting down a Japanese plane.

Lettering carved into one wall describes World War II as “perhaps the most singular unifying event in the history of the United States. These young Americans set aside their individual hopes and aspirations, left families, homes and jobs in a collective sacrifice to defend their country and their common ideals.”

That’s why her father cried, Pat Gustaitis said. “For his generation, that was their moment. It was a great crusade. There’s pride associated with it.”

And also gratitude. “I’m still here,” Lehn said. “I’m still here.”

john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com