Interview With Valerie B. Powell

Posted on 03/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Valerie B. Powell of Killeen, TX conducted at the Fort Worden History Center by Pam Clise on July 3, 2002.  Ms. Powell served as Schools Officer in the Operations and Training Office at Fort Worden from 1950 to 1952.  When she and her husband, Theo Powell first arrived at Fort Worden to begin his assignment as Army Signal Officer, most of the men were gone.  He unsuccessfully applied for a transfer to San Francisco, because they wanted to be posted at a place with more people.  Here she relates how she coped with the situation:

“I decided I could go to work.  They said, ‘Oh sure, you could be the Operations and Training Officer’ and gave me the keys to the office and said ’You have a job.’ I didn’t have any background in that area, I could write, so they figured I could do the training manuals.  There was no one in the office when I started. The former training officer had been sent to Korea, I had one enlisted man there to help me but no one to supervise me.                The Army had a program that had training at different schools of different types throughout the nation. Military men could apply to attend sometimes for a couple of weeks or months.  I got acquainted with the officer who ran the school section at Sixth Army Headquarters in San Francisco and asked her how to go about getting applications for the men here.  We started sending more people from this little base than from other bases, because we discovered that this would be very helpful to them when they went into combat or whatever they decided to do.  We even found a diving school in Virginia.  Even my husband decided he wanted to go to Signal Corps school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey for about two or three months.  The men usually chose a school that was close enough to their home, so that after the school term was over they could have a few days at home.  That might have been the last time to see their families before they shipped out to Korea. There was one young man whose application to go to West Point was approved, I don’t know whatever happened to him.  Many did return to say how good the school was or whether they liked it or not.  It was an advantage that was afforded them to get better qualified.  The Chaplin School was very popular, although I couldn’t figure why anyone would want to go to Chaplin School.  I enjoyed working with the Army, it was an interesting time for me, working directly with people who were going overseas.   In 1952, just before they were getting ready to phase out Fort Worden, we were transferred to Fort Douglas, Utah.  I never did work for the Army again after I left Fort Worden.”

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Interview With Paul W. Palmer

Posted on 03/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Paul W. Palmer of Chimacum, WA conducted by John Clise at the Fort Worden History Center on June 25. 2002.  Mr. Palmer served as a cook/baker in the U.S. Army 532 Engineer Shore and Boat  Regiment Company B at Fort Worden from 1946 to 1949. Here he relates an incident that occurred during a visit of Sixth Army Commander General Mark Clark to Fort Worden:

“I baked some cakes and cut them into individual servings and left them in sheet cakes on top of the counter. KP’s came in there and with a knife or pencil wrote (expletive) on every individual piece.   The first sergeant came in to the kitchen (and saw it)  and told the captain, who was angry.  ‘Who was on duty?’ he asked.  ‘Paul was,’ they answered.  I was asleep and the sergeant  came and woke me up and ordered me to come down to the kitchen, ‘What happened here?’ the captain asked.  I said, ‘Yeah, what did happen?’ The three KP’s were standing in the back, acting smart.  They ended up in Fort Leavenworth.  The KP’s must have been in trouble before, they kicked the three of them into the guardhouse here just as quick as they could, and I never did see those guys anymore. I just took some more icing and wiped right across the cakes.  General Clark never knew any difference.”

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Interview With CWP

Posted on 03/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with CWP of Renton, WA conducted by Tim Caldwell by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on November 7, 2006.  CWP was a resident at the Fort Worden Juvenile Diagnostic and Treatment Center in 1967-68 when he was 13 years old. Here he tells of life at the Center:

“There was a code that you didn’t tell on other kids.  You kept your mouth shut about things that you may see or that may have seen other people do, like breaking rules, doing things they weren’t supposed to.  You didn’t tell on other kids.  It wasn’t a well-liked place.  There was a lot of discontentment, especially with the older kids when they would get there.  I remember that I was there for approximately six months and an older kid was discontented with what was going on, and I was a little upset with my counselor at the time, because he had given me some news or something or told me to do something. Back then, when you ran away, it was called rambling.  So, this older kid and I decided to ramble and take off and we ended up over by the cemetery.  I can remember hiding behind one of the gravestones as one of the Fort Worden security staff drove by during the evening, then returning the next day and going to segregation. We had just stayed in the cemetery and it got kind of cold that night and we weren’t prepared for that.”

Telling about how easy it was to ramble:

“The door was open in the evening and they would do kind of counts but not all the time.  Not continuously but only at certain times.  A guy could time a count and after they got done counting, he would know that there wouldn’t be another count for two or three hours.  That would give him a two or three hour head start before the next count.  He could sneak out the door and take off and steal a car and be gone and in Tacoma by the time they knew he was gone.  But, they would catch us all pretty quickly when we would ramble.”

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Interview With Ronald J. Novak

Posted on 03/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Ronald J. Novak of Sequim, WA conducted by Wendy Los at the Fort Worden History Center on June 13, 2006.  Mr. Novak served in the US Army from 1957 to 1960, during his eight months at Fort Worden he was stationed with the Seattle Air Defense Command at the radar installation atop Artillery Hill as Assistant Section Chief I.  Here he describes life on the post:

“Civilians were not allowed up there, there were a few wanderers that would come up there on occasion and we would escort them off.  The only weapons we had were carbines.  They were the M2 type, which could be automatic or semi-automatic.  Automatic out of these carbines was 650 rounds a minute—this is a fast rate.  We had them partly because they were secret equipment and the operation itself was secret information.  We had Q clearance, Q crypto codes for verifying commands given to us or verifying who we were, cryptic keys to certify that we got the right information from the right commands. The whole site itself, the functional, technical site, was located between the two gun pits on Battery Benson, on its ten inch reclining gun bunker.  The base for the radar antenna is still there.   That block held an antenna that was 11 feet high , 30 to 36 feet wide—it was a big antenna.  That was a 200 mile range radar, operated 23/7.  We had two 15 KW Diesel generators in case the power went out.  Our whole plotting room and our equipment was all located right there on the apron.  The men operated in shifts so four guys could keep  the radar going while the other four were off having their free time.  The guys worked this arrangement out among themselves. There wasn’t a lot of military stuff, although we would get military visitors.  A section where we didn’t cut the grass became a helicopter landing pad for the guys coming in, getting their flying time in from Fort Lawton. We were known to be the best damn coffee people in the district and the defense area, so we had quite a few people coming up. We didn’t take these visitors over to the site because we didn’t know if they were clear or not.  They would come into the area where we made our food or to the barracks.   It was just a casual time for them and it was a nice diversion for us. We did keep the military attitude, the military professionalism as we saw it.  We just weren’t very structured”.

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Interview With Inger Mullaney

Posted on 03/18/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Inger Mullaney of Gresham, OR conducted by Sandra Lizut by phone from the Fort Worden History Center on May 18, 2004.  Mrs. Mullaney was born in Port Townsend on May 12, 1914 and died in Clackamas, OR on October 21, 2010.  She lived in Port Townsend until 1950, when her husband Bernard T. Mullaney was transferred to OR.  Her grandfather, Karl Bendixen was the first superintendent of Fort Townsend.  Here Mrs. Mullaney tells how the local paper mill coped with the manpower shortage during World War II and a consequence of the program:

“During World War II, when there were all these soldiers around, they’d be on duty for a while and then they’d have a day off.  They were not very well paid.  At the time, my husband was in charge of the personnel and safety department at the Port Townsend Paper Mill.  They needed workers at the mill, so he would hire them to come out to the mill and work.  After we were transferred to Oregon, I would drive into Portland.  One of the fellows he had hired was in charge of a parking lot in downtown Portland.  I could come in there, and if he saw me, even if there was a big “Full” sign, he’d let me in.”

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Interview With William McIlroy

Posted on 03/16/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with William McIlroy of Rio Vista, CA conducted by Rick Martinez at the Fort Worden History Center on July 11, 2002.  Mr. McIlroy, the youngest child of Chief Warrant Officer Fred W. McIlroy, spent part of his childhood living on Non-Commissioned Officers Row at Fort Worden in the 1930’s.  Here he discusses Army mules and their uses on the base at that time:

“A lot of the post transportation was by mules.  The bread got delivered by mules, the garbage got picked up by mules, the coal got delivered by mules. That also led to another thing—out by the mule barn there used to be a huge community garden where people had certain plots. They would take the leavings out of the mule barn and put them in the garden and everybody had wonderfully amended soil.  Very nice produce came out of that.”

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Interview With George E. Lough

Posted on 03/16/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with George E. Lough of Vancouver, WA conducted by Shelly Testerman Randall at the Fort Worden History Center on May 13, 2002.  Mr. Lough served in the U.S. Army ROTC and CMTC National Guard at Fort Worden previous to World War II.   His military career spanned more than 30 years, and he attained the rank of Lt. Col.  At the time of the interview he was 83 years old.  Here he explains how the disappearing gun at Battery Tolles was operated:

“This was a six-inch disappearing gun, and the projectile weighed about 90 pounds and then had separate powder charges.  These powder bags were made of raw silk, and they contained smokeless powder, nitrocellulose and there were two charges.  There was a main charge and then there was an increment charge, and depending on the range and so on, they would use both or just one.  The firing tables provided for that. The primer which set off the powder was inserted in the breach last.  It contained fulminate of mercury; and so then, when the gun was fired by a lanyard, a hammer would go against the primer and that would ignite the powder, which would then propel the projectile.  The projectile had a soft band around it called the rotating band, and that would engage the grooves, the rifling in the gun and make a seal, then the powder would have its maximum force. The disappearing gun, as the name implies, would disappear below the parapet and was held in place.  The gun would have a counterweight on there and the pit, so that when the gun went up into battery, the weight would go down into the pit.  Then when the gun was fired, the recoil would bring it back down again and a ratchet would hold it.   If you weren’t firing it and you wanted to put it in the battery, you could still trip it, but then you’d have to winch it back down again because you didn’t have any recoil.  It took quite a bit of force to ram that projectile in place and we used a crew of eight persons. After the gun was fired, then you had another device.  It was a long rod with kind of a moistened sponge on the end.  You had to sponge out the powder to make sure there wasn’t any residual burning material in there.  Otherwise, when you put in the next powder, you had a problem.  So that was it—you’d load the gun, fire it, and sponge it out and then go on from there.  That disappearing gun could be fired rather rapidly.  We had what was called time interval bells that rang.  There’d be a warning bell, then there would be three bells; and at the end of the third ringing of the bell, that’s when we pulled the lanyard and the gun was fired.”

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Interview With Harold H. Long

Posted on 03/14/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Harold H. Long of Fort Wayne, IN conducted by Teddy Clark at the Fort Worden History Center on May 10, 2002.  Mr. Long served in the U.S. Army 369th Engineer Boat and Shore Regiment from 1951 to 1953, stationed at Fort Worden.  Here he describes his experiences during the time leading up to the building of the American airbase at Thule, Greenland:

“”The military had to plan how to get stuff up there. (They) had to use ships.  (They) were training a group of people in Washington for the purpose of getting the material that was to be stored on the ships to the shore.  (They) were training a group of men in some base in the East that were operating what was called “Ducks,” open bodied trucks that would go through the water and on the shore besides.  Their job was to haul all the fuel in.  Fifty gallon drums of fuel were loaded on to the Ducks and the Ducks were loaded onto the ships.  The plan was to drop the Ducks into the water, have them  go to the shore, drop off their fuel and return to the ships.  Then they would go around to some of the other ships and pick up fuel and take that in. That was the only way to deliver the fuel.  Next, they needed to bring in all the building materials that they needed to build the airbase, which was a five year project.  They planned it so that we would be working 24 hours a day, since in Greenland there is 24 hours of daylight.  The shifts were around the clock, noon to midnight and midnight to noon.  All the stuff was transported from ship to shore by the landing craft that we operated.  They only had three months to get this done because then the weather would get bad. Our ships got clear up into Baffin Bay and ran into pack ice.  I think we were there for a week, stuck in the ice.  All the ships were in there, they couldn’t move, so they called in Coast Guard icebreakers out of Newfoundland.  They came up and broke a channel through the ice, then all the ships fell into line and we continued on.  They had lost a lot of valuable time, construction time; but they got everything done that they needed to do, and we left and came back.”

In response to a question about what it was like at Thule, Mr. Long responded:

“ My shift was midnight til noon, but it would have been the same thing from noon to midnight, because the sun just made kind of a circle up in the sky and it was kind of weird to think you were working at night when it was bright sunlight.  The working conditions were fairly decent.  On a good day it would get to 30 degrees.  On a bad day, it would be really cold and the wind would blow at 50, 60 miles an hour and sandblast everything.    We lived on a ship and rode a shuttle boat back and forth to work on the beach.  Should you get caught on the beach, which we did several times, you would be stranded if the wind would change.  We either had wind out of the north or wind out of the south; if the wind came out of the south, the icebergs would go back into the bay and the ships would have to leave to avoid being crushed.  If you were working on the beach and the ships left, you were left to sleeping in the squad tents  that we had set up.  For heat we made little stoves out of five gallon fuel drums and a drip system for some fuel oil.  We were 400 miles north of the Arctic circle, probably closer to Moscow than we were to New York City.  Right at Russia’s back door and they didn’t like that too well.  That was pretty scary, really.  That was the Cold War era, and it wouldn’t have taken much to have been blown away.  We had no air support up there, because there was no facility for that yet.”

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Interview With Robert W. Klum

Posted on 03/14/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Robert W. Klum of King City, OR conducted by phone by Patience Rogge on December 4, 2008 from the Fort Worden History Center.  Mr. Klum served in the U.S. Army 369th Engineer Boat and Shore Regiment from 1951 to 1953 at Fort Worden.  Here he describes an incident that proved rather embarrassing for his commanding officer:

“The master boat must have been probably 80 feet long.  It was kind of like a PT boat, very fast, the colonel who was the head of our group rode on it.  They called it a Q boat.  The colonel got himself in big trouble one time.  All the companies (you can imagine how many boats we had) and the Q boat left Fort Worden at 3:00 AM and headed for the San Juan Islands.  I had no idea what we were going to do when we got there, but we went off to Blaine, WA, and anchored the boats just outside Blaine.  You could see the beaches of Canada at night.   We had a little fun sending light messages in Morse code, talking to sailors who were on the beach.  When we woke up the next morning, it was foggy, very foggy.  The Q boat went around and told us which way we were going to go, and then we would all follow.  We were underway about two hours, thinking we were heading toward the San Juan Islands.  All of a sudden, a big Canadian destroyer pulled up alongside us, honking his horn and telling everybody to shut off their engines; that  we were in Canadian waters and we didn’t have permission to be in Canadian waters and we were all under arrest.

The colonel who was on the Q boat that was leading us was very embarrassed and spent quite a bit of time talking to the commander of the Canadian destroyer.  He admitted he’d made a mistake and wanted help to try to find his way back home.”

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Interview With Rosalie Kline

Posted on 03/13/2012 by fwohp4481

From the interview with Mrs. Rosalie Kline of Grants Pass, OR conducted by phone by Patience Rogge from the Fort Worden History Center on January 22, 2008.  Mrs. Kline was the daughter of Captain Miles A. Putnam, who was stationed at Fort Worden from 1940 to 1942 and became the post commander at Fort Flagler in 1942. She married Lieutenant George O. Kline at the Fort Worden Chapel on June 15, 1942.  Here she describes her activities during the early days of World War II:

“We did the things that women could do.  My mother and I joined the Women’s Motor Corps.  She could drive and I had learned to drive when I was 16, so I could drive a car.  At that time there was only one road off the Peninsula.  There were many women who couldn’t drive and there were children as well.  We learned how to change tires and change spark plugs and do minor repairs.  We had to take a first aid course.  We kept a little bag with our first aid supplies and a flashlight, some food, in the coat closet in the living room;  in case we were called we could just pick it up and help evacuate the women and children from the area.  You used your own car, but in case of an evacuation and every man on the Peninsula was mustered into the Army, you would be given a car to drive and get the women and children who couldn’t drive down from the Peninsula to somewhere safer.

In January 1942, I went to work for the Weather Bureau.  I had to take a course, pass a test to become an airway observer.  We took barometer readings and the wind speed, the dew point, the clouds, the ceiling, and so forth.  These observations were all sent by teletype to Boeing field in Seattle from the office in the Port Townsend Post Office.”

Next she describes one exciting evening:

“I was working the 4:00 to midnight shift. If there was a problem of some sort and they wanted to get your attention, a sort of bell on the teletype would sound to tell you to come and read your machine.  It said that the Japanese had bombed Dutch Harbor and we were to go into immediate blackout.  The windows in the Post Office were huge and I couldn’t handle the blackout curtains.  My boss had said if this should happen, just turn off the lights and wait it out.  That was what I did.  I turned the lights off and sat and waited until it was all clear and I could go on with my observations.”

When asked about stories of Japanese submarines entering the Strait of Juan De Fuca, she replies:

“I remember that the submarines had come into the Straits, I remember that they had shelled Victoria.  One evening when my mother and I had joined my father in the Officers Mess at Fort Flagler, he answered a phone call, then stepped back into the room and said, ‘Red Alert,’ and that meant there were Japanese submarines in the Straits.

Whether it was actually so or whether it was a false alarm, I don’t know.  I do know that at the beginning of things, even with the three forts on the Peninsula, it would have been fairly easy for the Japanese to have caused a lot of problems if they had come with a good sized fleet.  The three forts– Worden, Flagler and Casey– were all there was until you got down to Bremerton and Seattle.”

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