The Columbia Heights memorial will honor a World War II airman 80 years after his death

In 1937, Minneapolis motorcycle police escorted twelve-year-old Walter Shimshock and his thirteen-year-old brother Bernie, along with other well-known Tribune carriers, to the Great Northern Depot for an all-expenses-paid trip to Chicago.

Seven years later, Walter was executed by the Nazis in Poland – they riddled the 19-year-old U.S. Army Air Force tail gunner from northeast Minneapolis, fresh out of DeLaSalle High School.

Staff Sergeant Shimshock had parachuted from his burning B-17 bomber, which was dropping supplies to Polish resistance fighters then engaged in a two-month battle with occupying German forces, now known as the Warsaw Uprising. He broke his leg when he parachuted down to the waiting Nazis, who interrogated and tortured him before killing him.

Bernie clung to memories of that Chicago trip with Walter and the Cubs-Dodgers game until his own death in 2005. His brother was just a child when he enlisted in World War II, Bernie told the Star Tribune in 2004.

“The greatest thing we ever did before he came was a trip to Chicago in 1937 to see our first baseball game and ride the elevated train,” Bernie said.

Although he died as a teenager 80 years ago this September, Walter Shimshock will now further strengthen the ties between the twin cities of Columbia Heights and Lomianki, Poland, which are nearly 7,500 kilometers apart.

A memorial to Shimshock and his nine crew members will be unveiled next month in Huset Park in Columbia Heights, a few miles north of Walter and Bernie's childhood home in northeast Minneapolis. The Warsaw Uprising memorial, a triangular obelisk with a plaque, resembles a similar monument that Polish leaders erected two years ago at the crash site of Shimshock's bomber outside Lomianki.

Never mind that Shimshock's B-17 was the only one of 107 Allied bombers shot down on September 18, 1944, during a mission called Operation Frantic 7, when they dropped hundreds of canisters of food, ammunition and medicine over besieged Warsaw.