MUSKEGON, MI – More than 100 people stubbornly weathered an outdoor Veterans Day Service Monday in Muskegon despite cold rain.
Attendees of the Nov. 11 service at Veterans Memorial Park joined hands and sang “God Bless America” as droplets of cold rain turned into gobs of soggy snowflakes to close the event.
The event’s speaker was Muskegon’s George Hartman, a World War II veteran and a Muskegon Fire Department employee for 30 years.
In understated language, Hartman told about his wartime experiences. He was a tail-gunner on a B-17 that was shot down over Germany during World War II in Hartman’s 24th bombing raid or sortie.
On his last sortie, his plane spent 21 minutes in German anti-aircraft flak so thick, Harman said, that a person could have played “hopscotch,” jumping from shell burst to shell burst.
“We got off the target and I said, ‘Thank God, thank God,’” Hartman said. But his plane was still shot down.
He survived parachuting to the ground, prisoner of war camps, and a terrible 86-day march during a harsh German winter. In the camps, Hartman said, they lived off of about 800 calories a day, at one point living mostly off of a soup made from potato skins.
“It’s my story and 100,000 other guys’,” Hartman said.
He closed his speech with a surprising pro-peace theme, even criticizing the Air Force’s present-day use of drones.
“Wars settle nothing,” he said. “They just make enemies.”
“I do not know the answer,” he added.
It was the 79th year that a Veterans Day service has been held at the park, and the Monday event was all about tradition: There was a 21-gun salute, taps were played, wreaths were laid in memory of deceased veterans, and the national anthem was sung. The Reeths-Puffer Middle School band and The Shoreline Barbershop Chorus provided music.
A large number of local politicians and city officials attended the event, but did not speak.
Veterans Day began as an Armistice Day celebration in 1918 at 11 a.m. at the cease-fire of World War I in 1918. The federal legal holiday, observed on the fourth Monday in October during the mid-1970s, reverted to Nov. 11 in 1978.