LAKE CRYSTAL —
It’s 1945, and Fred Manke is a Marine taking a walk on a beach in Saipan, the Pacific island where he would be stationed for 14 months. Manke and everyone else are waiting for what everyone presumed would be an invasion of Japan.
He comes upon one of the wrecked landing craft known as a Higgins boat that the Marines had used to take the island the previous June.
On the deck, he finds a ball-point pen, and a dog tag belonging to a sailor named Buck Bertram. Aside from an identification number, there was little to identify the man.
So Manke picks it up, decides to keep it. For 65 years.
Earlier this year, he decided to make another try at finding this Buck.
One of his daughters, Kathleen Burnett, used a website called switchboard.com and found four men with the same name. One was 87 years old, like her father, and they guessed correctly that the Buck they were looking for lived in Brookfield, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee.
Burnett invited Bertram to visit Lake Crystal’s American Legion Post 294, and that’s where the two met for the first time Sunday morning.
“It’s wonderful for me to come here,” Bertram said. “It’s like I’ve known him all my life already.”
Despite being only a week apart in age, the two men have their differences. Bertram is big and affable; Manke is a man of fewer words, at least on this particular morning. After the war, Manke helped build the interstate highways, and Bertram drove on them for more than 30 years as a trucker.
The two veterans sat around a table and talked about the war, with fellow vets Ken, Clem and Harry. Manke is wearing both copies of the tags the military gives its soldiers, and Bertram is wearing the one, having lost its companion long ago.
Bertram enjoyed the talk.
“We never talk about our service (history). I don’t know why,” he said.
Such discussions are particularly poignant because the thing about World War II veterans is that no one’s making any more of them. Bertram said his Legion post in Brookfield has lost several hundred members in recent years.
As for why he lost his dog tags, Bertram said he doesn’t know.
“I don’t remember even wearing them. Isn’t that odd?”
The Marines fought a fierce battle to take the island, dramatized in the 2002 film “Windtalkers.”
“The Marines were fantastic,” Bertram said.
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Related Photos
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Fred Manke (left) and Buck Bertram reminisce about their shared experience on islands of the Pacific Ocean during World War II. Manke found Bertram’s dog tag in 1945 and finally gave it back, 65 years later, at Lake Crystal’s American Legion Post 294 on Sunday morning. Joelle Pipal
Long-lost dog tags connect two WWII veterans
The two meet 65 years later in Lake Crystal
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