Veterans Day History and Well-Known Minnesota Military Veterans

Veterans Day thanks all who served in the U.S. military, especially living veterans, with parades, church services and sometimes two minutes of silence at 11am. Federal offices close on November 11, or the nearest weekday, while states, schools and businesses decide for themselves. The date recalls the 1918 armistice with Germany; first called Armistice Day, the holiday was renamed in 1954 to honor veterans of every war. A 1968 law moved it to October, but a 1975 law restored November 11 from 1978.

Dr. Harold Brown, born in Minneapolis and a North High School alumnus, was among the original Tuskegee Airmen, the nation's first Black military pilots. After the Tuskegee Institute's segregated flight program he became an Army Air Corps officer in 1944 and flew with the 332nd Fighter Group, attacking ground targets and guarding bombers. Downed behind enemy lines on his 30th mission, he parachuted from his crippled P-51 and was captured.

Born Elizabeth Bridget Wall in Faribault, Minnesota, in 1919, Strohfus discovered flying through a local Sky Club member she met while working at the Rice County Courthouse after high school. In World War II she flew as a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP). In the 1970s she pushed for WASP pilots to be recognized as veterans, and from the 1990s on she spoke around the country about her experiences.

Remembered as the first American soldier in Europe in World War II, Henke was born in 1918 on a McLeod County farm; his family moved to Hutchinson in 1921, and he later worked at his father's café. Rather than wait to be drafted, he enlisted in September 1940 in the 135th Infantry Regiment of the 34th Red Bull Division. His unit was merged into the Iowa National Guard's B Company, 133rd Regiment, during training and left for Europe a month after Pearl Harbor.

Born in Minneapolis in 1922, John W. Vessey Jr. joined the Minnesota National Guard's 34th Infantry Division in 1939 as a high school student, claiming to be older than his 16 years. Mobilized in 1941, the division was the first U.S. division shipped to Europe once war came, fighting in North Africa and then Italy. At Anzio in May 1944 the 21-year-old first sergeant was commissioned on the battlefield and moved forward to call in artillery fire.

Walden L. Ainsworth was born in Minneapolis in 1886 and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1910. After sea duty in the battleship Iowa and the transport Prairie, he joined the battleship Florida in 1914 and served as adjutant of a battalion that went ashore at Veracruz, Mexico. In World War I he served in the transports DeKalb and America, ending the war aboard the armored cruiser Frederick.