He helped bombard the Normandy coast during the legendary D-Day invasion. He witnessed the historic sinking of the USS Arizona when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was there for battles at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
He taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Cincinnati, did a fellowship at Stanford, was a 23-year faculty member at Minnesota State University. He wrote poetry, prose and essays, was a certified Master Gardener and a science fair judge.
Doting father. Loving husband. And quite possibly Mankato’s greatest contribution to the Greatest Generation.
Charles Sehe, a war hero and scholar whose contributions to science and freedom are well documented in museums and libraries, died Nov. 1 at age 101 surrounded by family and prayers — and ready to join Lillian, the spouse of 71 years who died just 3½ months ago.
Sehe’s dramatic and heroic life has been documented many times in The Free Press.
In an exhaustive, mid-pandemic story by reporter Mark Fischenich, Sehe recounted harrowing days of growing up poverty-stricken in the Great Depression, delivering newspapers to help his family (and purchase the occasional cinema ticket).
In Sehe’s remembrances from the war, he recalled drawing No. 56 when the enlisted men were being assigned to ships. Numbers 1-55 were assigned to the USS Arizona. Numbers 56 and up, the USS Nevada. The story of the Arizona is well known — more than 1,100 servicemen were killed Dec. 7, 1941— and each year more than a million people visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Honolulu, Hawaii. The closest observers to that horrific day, however, were the men aboard the USS Nevada, including Sehe.
“After the attack ended, we were given galvanized buckets to pick up the numerous isolated body parts strewn around the 5-inch gun casemates within my division area,” Sehe wrote in a history of the battle published by Warfare History Network decades later. “I can never forget finding mangled arms, legs, heads, and knee joints, as well as shoulder fragments and torn, burned body torsos — all unidentifiable because of their blackened, burned condition.”
Sehe remained in the Navy several more years and saw more than his share of action. Toward the end of his service, he and the rest of his USS Nevada shipmates made their way to Normandy, France on June 6, 1944, where they joined more than 130,000 allied troops in the D-Day offensive, the largest amphibious invasion in military history. It was the USS Nevada that fired the first shots.
In September 2020, Sehe’s service prompted Guillaume Lacroix, the French government’s representative to 13 Midwestern states, to travel to Mankato to officially present Sehe with the French Legion of Honor.
“I can’t think of anybody else more deserving of an award such as this as you, Charles,” Mike McLaughlin, a childhood neighbor of Sehe’s, said that day. “Congratulations. You deserve it. You deserve more than we can ever give you.”
Said Lacroix, “Thank you for your service. Merci, monsieur.”
Isabel Sehe, daughter of Charles and Lillian Sehe, said her father didn’t talk much about what he’d seen in combat. But details emerged over the years and, for Sehe, some of those memories were difficult for him.
“That was one of the first things that was really part of his private pain,” she said.
Isabel said that, as her father’s health deteriorated in his later years, his concern was for Lillian.
“His mind was clear to the end; it was his body that was so weak. Toward the end, he couldn’t walk, and that bothered him,” she said. “He held on to make sure Mom was going to be OK when she passed away, but it really was kind of a quiet progression. His body was tired. He was tired.”
She said that, as the end of his life grew near, Sehe made a point to thank the people who had been kind to him, including the medical staff at the VA, the nurses who came by daily to check on him, the family members who stayed by his side.
But being a man of science who understood well the inevitabilities of anatomy and physiology, Sehe knew his days were numbered.
On the day he died, family members say he was serene and pain free.
“We told him, ‘It’s OK, Dad,’” Isabel said. “‘Mom’s waiting for you.”
Sehe pointed toward the ceiling, and seconds later took his final breath.
At the funeral, the family buried him with his wallet. Inside they left a single dollar, in a nod to one of Sehe’s favorite sayings, “In case you run short.” They also left him with a piece of chalk, a symbol of his life in academia, and a pen, a symbol of his love for writing.