|
Harold Babineau calls his World War II military career "something that should have been in the comic books."
Highlights of Babineau's service to his nation include the Army misplacing his orders to
training school for two and a half years, and, as a PFC, piloting an aircraft from Spokane, Washington, to Great Falls, Montana, with 27 deathly ill officer pilots on board.
He managed to make
sergeant once and corporal once, but his inability to refrain from speaking candidly to officers led to two courts martial and a final rank after over three years of service as a private first class.
And, as a final insult from Uncle Sam, when he went to Camp McCoy for final discharge, the Army had no records that he even had been in the service.
_______________
Babineau grew up in
Northeast Minneapolis, although he spent many of his summers on farms near Faribault and north of the Twin Cities. By age 12, he was already six feet tall and strong, and he was judged big enough for
farm work.
"You judged how big a farm was in those days by how many teams of horses they had. The farm in our family had five teams, and I drove one of them. I also had to help milk 25 to 35 cows
twice a day."
Babineau's early life was anything but easy. He father abandoned the family when he was 13, and midway through high school at Minneapolis Edison Babineau was forced to take a job to help
support his mother and sister.
"I would work at the Tank Car Gas Station. I'd work the graveyard shift in probably the worst part of Minneapolis at Hiawatha and Lake where all the bums got off the
railroad cars. Then I'd go to school. I was asleep half the time and the teachers thought I was goofing off."
He also had a fairly severe eye problem. "I never could see the blackboard. I tried to sit
on the side of the classroom toward the windows and the extra light helped."
He finally left Edison in the 11th grade. He was advised to go to Boys Vocational High School in downtown Minneapolis to
learn a trade. "I went down there, but I couldn't find the room, and nobody would tell me. So I went home. That was the end of my education."
Later he worked for the Brede Sign Company, painting
billboards and putting up Christmas decorations, and then he caught on at Stephens Buick as a "jockey," a runner who moved cars from one place to another at the large car dealership.
In November,
1942, Babineau got a call from his mother that a greeting from Uncle Sam had arrived. He decided to take matters into his own hand. "I asked my boss for a few minutes and I went over the Federal Building
in Minneapolis to sign up. The first office I walked into was the Marines, but the guy just laughed at my thick glasses so I told him to drop dead. He said I'd never be a Marine. So I went next door to
the recruiter for the Army Air Corps. When he found out I worked at a garage, they were happy to sign me up. They needed mechanics. I didn't tell him I wasn't a mechanic."
He went to Ft. Snelling for
a physical, and it was there that his unusual relationship with the Army began. "Everybody there was scared to death just like me. Plus I was wearing a red stripe on my leg, part of my uniform from
Stephens Buick, and they all wanted to know what army I was in.
"The doctor was checking my eyes, and he checked my right one and then got called away. When he came back, he checked my right one
again. I didn't tell him he checked the same eye. I wanted to get in the service and do my part. He said, 'Your eyes are fine.' If he'd checked my left eye, I would have spent the war working at a
defense plant and making a lot of money."
Babineau was supposed to be assigned to aircraft mechanics school, but because of a mixup at Ft. Snelling he was instead sent to Midland, Texas, for basic
training and bombardier school.
"I was lucky in basic. They were punishing an officer, and they made him take our training group. Usually it's a non-com. Well, he would simply march us far enough
from base where they couldn't see us and then he'd say, 'Smoke 'em if you got 'em.' And we'd all take a break for several hours. Then we'd march back to base."
On graduation day, both of the other
training groups, which had spent countless hours marching, got messed up in their final review. "But our officer marched right with us and made sure we did it right. The C.O. said over the microphone,
'Now this is what I call a well-trained squad.' We got free passes into town, although I didn't take mine. I didn't have any money and I didn't drink."
Since Babineau didn't have orders to train the
bombardier school, he was assigned to work there. His job was to bring what they called "blue bombs" to the flight line and load them on the 50 or 100 C-45s that would fly that day to train the
bombardiers. The bombs stood five feet tall and weighed 100 lbs., a mixture of 90 lbs. of sand, ten lbs. of black powder and a shot gun shell to set the bomb off when it hit.
"I was picked for the
job of loading the bombs because of my size. So we'd load the bombs all night, and in the morning the planes would take off. Nearly every morning, one or two of them would crack up. They had no glide
power, and one cough from either engine and down they'd go.
"Part of our job was to go out to the planes that had crashed and make sure the bombs were secure so they could take the bodies out. We'd
have to step over the bodies to get to the bombs. I had only been in service a short time then, and that was really hard to do."
One thing that happened at Midland was that another doctor took a look
at Babineau's eyes and determined he should never leave the United States for his duty.
The Army also finally caught up to the fact that Babineau was supposed to be in mechanics school, but in another
snafu they sent him to Ft. Myers, Florida, to gunnery school. "It had nothing to do with the Air Corps."
Again, since he had no orders to train at the school, he was put to work keeping the school
running. He and a crew of six others would drive seven miles into the Everglades every morning to bring fifty and thirty caliber bullets to what was called a "Jeep" range. The ten ranges each had a Jeep
that was self-propelled around a track as future turret gunners practiced their aim at a moving target.
Babineau's job was to haul the 125 lbs. ammo cases to the firing line. The bullets had to be
painted, to determine which crew hit which target.
"We often worked 16 hours a day for seven days a week. They were really pushing a lot of gunners through the school, sometimes 3,000 students would
shoot in one day. One thing I liked was that rank didn't mean anything. If the group that was being instructed was officers, we'd still tell them to come over and unload the truck. Some of those officers
didn't have any muscles, they only had brains. They didn't like it very much.
"And, of course, our ammo truck was decorated with red flags. Everybody gave you the right of way, and I suppose we took
advantage of that a little bit."
While at Ft. Myers, a friend of Babineau's got involved in fist fight over some poker earnings, and Babineau came to his rescue. The next day, Babineau was called in,
and an officer asked him if he had been involved in an incident the night before. Babineau tried to deny it, but the officer had a complete report on the incident.
"Did you know that you beat the crap
out of two of my best boxers?" the officer asked Babineau. Right on the spot, Babineau was signed up for the boxing team.
"You've got remember that all I did all day was carry ammunition cases
around. I was just over six feet tall, I had a 33 inch waist and 17 inch biceps. I weighed 217 lbs. Plus, I was pretty fast on my feet."
For six months, Babineau traveled with the boxing team as they
put on exhibitions across the country. "I never lost a bout. I was too big and too fast, and they never could hit me."
When the men weren't boxing, they trained for possible future duty in helping
pilots escape after crash landings overseas. "The kind of training they gave us had nothing to do with boxing gloves."
Again, a doctor intervened. "I was getting checkup and the doctor asked me if I'd
ever been hit hard on the head. I told him no. He said I was lucky, because one hard blow would completely blind me on the left side. That was the end of my boxing days."
Again, the Army came to the
realization that Babineau was supposed to be in aircraft mechanics school, and again they sent him on his way. When he got to Chicago, though, the train to the mechanics school in Rosecrans, Missouri,
wasn't due for a couple of days. Babineau was ready to settle into the train station for the wait, but a military policeman said he couldn't wait there and would have to take the next train leaving.
"He told me the next train was going to the same place, but it wasn't. The train took me to Las Vegas, New Mexico."
Instead of mechanics school, Babineau found himself back in basic training. Worse
than that, he was dressed in his Air Corps khaki while everyone else in the camp had on their Army greens. "I stood out like a sore thumb."
It took a month to straighten out the mess again, and once
again Babineau was dispatched to mechanics school. It had been two and one half years since he had been first assigned to be a mechanic.
At Rosecrans, he was assigned to a special fast-track class
that was cramming the entire aircraft mechanics program into three months. "There were 12 of us in the group. When they turned the lights out at 8 o'clock, you'd see the flashlights come out. All we did
was study and study."
Babineau recalls one group of planes that came through the field. "A bunch of Grumman Avengers came through on their way to Alaska. They were being flown by women, and I'll tell
you these were a group of hopped up gals. One of them came in for a landing with her nose so far down that sparks flew off the propeller. A bunch of us were standing there watching, and she got out of
the plane and took a bow."
Whenever a plane came through that needed work, it was turned over to the school so the students could work on it. "This B-25 came in and we were all over that aircraft
looking it over. It had an 800-gallon fuel tank mounted inside the bomb bay. One of the students said, 'What's this red handle for?' That tank was released and it crashed right through the bomb bay doors
and all that 100 octane gas filled up the floor of the hangar. We didn't smoke in there for a while. And that student didn't graduate."
Harold Babineau did graduate and was sent to Great Lakes,
Montana, where he would be working on C-47s, the Army's version of the popular civilian DC-3 commercial airliner. His hangar had 14 of the aircraft and three ground crews that worked a 24-hour daily
cycle to keep them flying.
Still a PFC, Babineau was clearing $32 a month. Of that, he was sending home $18 in savings bonds. Another $5 was spent monthly for pipe tobacco. The lack of income
meant that Babineau spent most of his time on the base, even on weekends.
"Whenever they flew the C-47s, and they were just like an airline going all over the country, they had to have a pilot,
co-pilot, radioman and a crew chief on the plane. Since I was always there on weekends, I did a lot of flying. I was the crew chief, although I was a PFC."
Babineau at first found himself not quite
fitting in with his fellow ground crew members because he didn't drink or chase women. And his relationship with his crew chief was even worse. "He was a pre-war Army type who weighed about 500 lbs. and
was even meaner than he was fat. He had established a custom where the new man on the crew would take him to town and buy him a woman and a room. Well, I wouldn't do that."
Also, not long after he was
at Great Falls, Babineau refused to sign the paperwork on a plane declaring it fit for flight. He determined that the temperature was too high on one of the cylinders. "The crew chief wanted that plane
flying, but I told him I wasn't going to do it. He used a lot of foul language and told me my butt was mud if I didn't okay it."
But Babineau refused and the plane stayed on the ground. Babineau was
sent to the base mess hall for two weeks of KP, and the sergeant pulled his Army driver's license so Babineau had to walk wherever he went.
"In the end, they discovered a crack in the block. That
plane would have crashed if it ever went up. And the sergeant got a commendation for finding the crack."
Babineau made his highest elevation in rank when an officer at his hanger found that he was
doing all the weekend flying even though he wasn't eligible to be a crew chief. In order to be a crew chief, he had to be a sergeant. The officer made arrangements to jump Babineau right over corporal
into sergeant, much to the anger of Babineau's sergeant.
The elevation was short lived, though. "Three days later we were standing by when a C-47 was starting up and the left engine caught fire. I
jumped up on the wing with the fire bottle and I was spraying all over to put the fire out, but it caused a lot of damage to the aluminum cowling."
When the fire was out, a discussion ensued between
Babineau and the pilot about what might have happened. It turned out the pilot was routinely squirting a carburetor de-icer into the carburetor before starting the engine. It was supposed to only be used
during very cold weather. The pilot said it made the engine start easier.
The mechanic was incensed that the pilot would do such a stupid thing, and in typical Babineau style, he asked the pilot,
"What farm are you from?"
The next day he found himself in front of a court martial. The court sympathized with Babineau's knowledge of aircraft, but not his lack of respect to authority. "They said,
'Thank you for saving the airplane sergeant, but you simply cannot talk to an officer that way. So, you can now leave the court, private.' I didn't even get a chance to sew on those stripes."
Still,
Babineau said, he did earn a reputation as a top mechanic. "I thought I owned all 14 of those airplanes. They were mine. And I got that reputation in the field. Nobody fools with Harold's airplanes."
One time in 1944, Babineau was flying as part of the crew on a C-47 when one of the engines quit running and the airplane crashed into a mountainside. Everyone on board was killed except Babineau, who
had a badly injured wrist. He said he saved himself from death by running toward the tail of the aircraft just as it made impact. The crash still threw him forward, but didn't kill him.
When the
paperwork on the crash came out, the authorities listed everybody on the flight as dead. Babineau protested, noting that he was still alive, but it turned out that another crew member's name had been
listed on the flight report. "Since I was the only one flying on weekends, they would use my time for the other ground crew who needed hours. I didn't mind."
He never found out what problems the
official report caused for the crew member who officially declared dead.
During his time in, he was on board two other planes that crash landed, but he avoided serious injury both times.
Babineau
had a girlfriend in Great Falls. He met her at the non-commissioned officers club, a place he was allowed to enter because he knew how to fix the jukebox. "We held hands a couple of times. It was really
wild. I was just too shy and bashful to talk to ladies."
Babineau traveled to Detroit to get advanced training on the Pratt and Whitney 1830 engine, and when he graduated, he was promoted to corporal.
His newfound ascendancy was temporary, though. Again, an argument over a check-valve in the brake line of the C-47 brought him into confrontation with an officer. Several days later there was a court
martial and Babineau was again a PFC. He had been right about the check valve, however.
One Friday afternoon, Babineau was hanging out at the base bowling alley, as was often his choice during his
free time. Two MPs found him and said that a plane needed pre-flighting and a ground crewman for a flight. Babineau, as usual, was the only one around.
Babineau inspected the plane and got it ready
for take-off. At that point an Army bus pulled up and 27 officers, all of them fliers, got on the plane. Two of those were the pilot and co-pilot. The destination of the flight was Spokane, Washington.
When the flight landed, the officers got off the plane, got on another bus, and headed off for a destination unknown. Babineau and the radioman were left in charge of watching over the plane until
Sunday.
The men stayed close to their aircraft, only venturing on long walks to the hanger to use the bathroom facilities. Some MPs came by and found out that the two men hadn't eaten anything, and
rustled up some food for them from the officer's mess on the base.
On Sunday, the bus pulled up and the officers got off. "They didn't look very good this time around. All of them were puking, peeing
in their pants, defecating in their pants. They could hardly walk up the ladder, and they were helping carry each other."
It turned out that the entire group had been present at a Sunday meal where
there was food poisoning. Despite the fact the pilot and co-pilot were also deathly ill, they took off for Great Falls.
"I was up in the cockpit. I couldn't even stand to go in the back because it
smelled so bad. The radioman came up and said some of the officers were lying on their stomachs and he was afraid they were going to drown in their own puke.
"The pilot said to me that I should go
back and find out if anybody was able to fly the plane, because he was getting ready to pass out. I went back, but nobody could even stand up. When I got back to the cockpit, the pilot was out. I dragged
him from the seat and I sat down.
"The co-pilot looked at me and said, 'What are we going to do? Can you fly?'"
Babineau was well checked-out on the plane, and he knew every knob and switch and
gauge and rivet there was. And he was used to taxiing the C-47s around the base. But he had never spent one minute flying the aircraft. In the end, the question didn't need to be answered because the
co-pilot leaned forward and became unconscious.
"I dragged him away from the controls. They had set everything up for flying to Great Falls, and all I had to do was to keep her on course. Landing was
going to be a little problem through. When we got near to Great Falls, I radioed the base that we were coming in and they'd better get every fire truck and ambulance they had ready to go. I told them we
had a plane load of sick people who were going to need help.
"The guy in the control tower asked who was flying the plane, and I told him I was. He said, 'Come on, Harold, quit fooling around.' I told
him I was flying the damn airplane, and I didn't think I was going to make a very good landing.
"When we got near I could see the base clearly. They had every light on and every piece of emergency
equipment ready. I began the final approach, and I was actually about 300 feet from the runway when the co-pilot woke up. He said, 'What the hell are you doing?' I said I was landing the plane. He pulled
himself together and got the plane on the runway.
"Afterwards, as they were carrying the bodies off the plane and putting them in ambulances, one of the officers who could walk came up to me and said
I'd never have to worry, they were going to take care of me. I thought I might get a nice commendation out of it."
Not quite.
The next morning, Babineau was awakened by two MPs who told him to put
on his dress uniform. "They said they were taking me to the quartermaster for new uniforms because I was shipping out."
It turned out that the flight in which 27 pilots were safely flown across
several hundred miles of the Great Northwest by a PFC who had never flown before had never happened. The flight had never been logged in, and the officers involved were not about to let news get out
about a flying private and a stolen aircraft.
Immediate orders had been cut for Babineau to be transferred – first to Missouri, and then to Hawaii. By noon, he had left Great Falls.
"Now this was
pretty strange because it said in my file that because of my eyesight I had to stay stateside. But they didn't even let me take my foot locker or anything else. I was just flown out. I think they wanted
me to go into combat and get killed." Babineau never found out what happened to the radioman. He didn't get a chance to say goodbye to his girlfriend.
By this time, in 1945, the war was winding to a
close, but the unit Babineau was sent to was being readied to follow the Air Corps to the South Pacific islands in preparation for the invasion of Japan. In the meantime, he worked on aircraft at Hickam
Field, near Honolulu.
The atomic bombs were dropped shortly after that, and the war ended. Babineau finally got his orders home in February of 1946. The Army had one more surprise for him.
"When I got to Camp McCoy to be discharged, they found that they had no record at all that I even was in the service. They had to go back to Ft. Snelling to verify even that I had signed up."
And even
getting home didn't end Babineau's streak of bad luck. He had been planning for years that all those savings bond contributions he had been sending home since 1942 would buy him his first car. "But when
I got home I found that my mother and my aunt had spent all but $50 of the money. They thought it was theirs."
Babineau went back to Stephens Buick and was put in charge of the runners again.
Eventually, with some additional automobile engine training, he became a mechanic. He retired in the early 80s because of back pain.
Babineau now lives in a house in Columbia Heights with his wife,
Orvella. Two years ago he had quadruple bypass surgery and this past year he had 12 stints put in his chest to help blood flow.
But he says life is good, and he's enjoying the family he inherited
when he married Orvella ten years ago.
(Part of this story was based on an interview Babineau did in 1994 with Harley Schreck, an associate professor at Bethel College.)
|
