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By Al Zdon
Growing up in the tip of Northeastern Minnesota taught Arthur Hedstrom how to fix things.
"I always figured that if somebody could design and build it, I could take it apart and fix it,"
he said.
That resolve and skill enabled Hedstrom to rise from lowly enlisted man to first lieutenant during his World War II service, and to spend much of his later time in the war building a machine
that enabled America to decode the messages of one of our allies – Russia.
Hedstrom was born in 1919 about five miles from Grand Marais in a home along the Gunflint Trail. His father, Andrew Hedstrom,
owned a sawmill that provided much of the lumber for that part of Minnesota.
The Hedstrom home was built at the confluence of a small stream and the Devil's Track River, about five miles from Lake
Superior. He was the ninth of 12 children including eight girls and four boys.
For his first eight years of schooling, Hedstrom attended a three-room school house about a mile from home. Travel to
school was accomplished by walking in the fall and spring and by a sled pulled by horses in the winter.
There were four or five kids in each class, and Hedstrom said it was a good education. "We had
some good teachers."
High school was in Grand Marais, and he was able to hitch a ride with neighbors for the first couple of years, and for his last two years he became the proud owner of a Model T
Ford.
The Ford became part of his education. "I could take the engine out, work on it, and get it back in the car over the weekend."
His greatest challenge, though, was when he was a junior in
high school when he and an older brother decided to provide electricity to the house. The Hedstroms had never had the advantage of electricity and powered their lights with kerosene and gas.
The
brothers first built a water wheel on the nearby stream. It was about 12 feet high and three feet wide, and it had large buckets to capture the water and make the wheel turn.
"We didn't know anything
about electricity, and so we ordered a series of books from McGraw-Hill on the subject."
The first problem to solve was to take a water wheel turning slowly and hook it up through a complex series of
gears to a generator that needed to go about 1,000 revolutions per minute. Once they accomplished that, they needed to control the speed of the water wheel to a constant rate.
"We got an old fly ball
governor and hooked it up." The governor would work a lever that would open and close a gate on the stream that brought the water to the wheel. It worked.
"Sometimes when you turned on a bunch of
lights at once, they would all dim for a few minutes until the generator caught up. But it worked for over 10 years until the REA came along and brought in regular electricity."
After graduating from
high school in 1937, Hedstrom went to work for his father. One job was running a large horizontal saw that made shingles.
"There wasn't a guy who ran that saw that didn't lose his fingers. My father
told me that one time a worker called him over and said, 'I just cut off my little finger.' My father said, 'How did you do that?' And the guys said, 'Well I was just doing this… Oh shit, there goes
another one.'"
During one summer, Hedstrom was running a small logging camp where the men were harvesting cedar for his father's mill. "Not everybody knows it, but cedar can be very toxic. That's why
it makes such good fence posts because it doesn't rot. Well, I didn't react very well to it, and I got a rash all over my body. I didn't think I wanted to continue in that business."
He got a job
working with a carpenter building houses and then went to work for Northwestern Bell Telephone Company. He helped the company put the first telephone line into Grand Portage, Minnesota, and then took
over the maintenance of an international line that went into Canada.
"I must have climbed every pole between Beaver Bay and the Pigeon River."
His next job was to help communities to convert from
the old magneto or manual phone systems to dial phones. Hedstrom worked in Hinckley, Sandstone, Carlton, Eveleth and Chisholm over the next year or so.
The work was fairly routine, but yielded some
interesting encounters.
He remembers going to a house in Eveleth owned by a wealthy car dealer, and he was met at the door by the man's wife. "She asked me what size feet I had and I told her 10 and
one-half. She told me to come back the next day, and she shut the door."
Hedstrom was baffled by her request, but showed up dutifully the next morning. She handed him a pair of slippers she had
knitted overnight. "She had beautiful white carpeting, and she didn't want me tracking it up."
In another case, Hedstrom trimmed away what he thought was old telephone wire from a customer's house.
Hours later, the phone rang and the customer reported no heat. Hedstrom had accidentally removed the family's thermostat wire.
And in one other instance, the lady of the house came into the bedroom
where Hedstrom was working wearing only a see-though negligee. "I had to explain to her that I didn't do that sort of thing."
When World War II came, Hedstrom knew that he would soon be drafted. "My
boss came to us and said they were short of experienced telephone men in the service. He asked us to go in. I've always said that I was kind of "handcuff volunteer."
Hedstrom headed for Ft. Snelling
where he took a series of tests. They sent him back home for about six days and told him to get his personal affairs in order and report back. He would enter the service as a corporal.
At Ft.
Snelling, they issued him and others a summer khaki uniform, and put them on a train to New York. "We were sure that we were going to North Africa because of the light uniforms."
Wrong. In fact, the destination was Iceland.
For the Allies, Iceland was a key station in the defense of the North Atlantic. It had several radar stations and other facilities, but its phone system
was a mess.
Now telephone technology was something Hedstrom was good at. The rest of his military expertise was lacking somewhat because he had gone right from enlistment to his first duty. "I didn't
know how to march, and I didn't know who to salute or even how to salute."
In March, 1942, he landed in Reykjavik, and he was ordered to check over the island's military phone system. "It was the
biggest damn mess I'd ever seen. The first thing I had to do was build a main distribution frame with the lines coming in on the outside and the lines going to local phones on the other side."
By
September, 1942, Hedstrom had helped straighten out the phones in Reykjavik, been promoted to Sergeant, and was sent to the northern side of the island where a new base was being constructed at Akureyri
– 20 miles from the Arctic Circle.
"They told us the camp was all ready, but when we got there all they had done is made a floor for the kitchen."
The men slept in tents, but the mild weather of
summer was about to depart for the 24-hour dark and frigid Icelandic winter. "As the days went by, it got colder, windier and more miserable. I went up to the captain and said, 'Look, we're going to be
here all winter, we're going to have to build this camp ourselves.'
The materials for the camp were available, just not the engineers to build it.
"They were just Quonset huts, just like erector
sets. I figured there wouldn't be any problem putting them up."
First the telephone troops had to get permission from the Corps of Engineers in Reykjavik. They were given permission to build one hut
and have that inspected.
"The officer from the Corps of Engineers came up and looked at our work. He told our captain, 'You can build all the damn buildings you want.'"
With Hedstrom in charge, the
men built about 14 more Quonset huts and settled in for the winter. The base was situated between two radar outposts, and the base's main function was to plot out on maps what the radar stations radioed
in and inform Reykjavik.
The base was considered the headquarters of northern Iceland, and the Army decided to build a large building for that purpose. It was decided that to speed up the process with
the Corps of Engineers tackling one side of the building and the telephone troops the other. The building was to be made of poured concrete, and the forms had to be built for the walls.
"Everyday, the
first lieutenant from the Corps would come over and look over our work. He always said we were using too much wire in making the forms. But I knew how heavy concrete was, and so we used a lot of wire."
The so-call amateurs finished their side of the building first, and so both teams gathered on the day of the concrete pour. It took 20 hours, but in the end the walls were in place.
A couple of
days later the teams began the pour on the Corps side of the building. "We had poured for six or eight hours when you began to hear this squeak and other noises. Not long after, the forms just gave out
and the concrete began to collect in the middle of the building in the excavation.
"It only took about 10 minutes, but first there was a captain, then a major, then a colonel and finally a general.
And then commenced an ass-chewing like I never saw in my life. I never did have the nerve to go up to that first lieutenant and tell him he didn't use enough wire."
The General then viewed the side of
the building made by the Signal Corps. "Right on the spot, he said he would make me an officer in the Corps of Engineers."
Hedstrom declined and told the general that he had already applied for
Officer Candidate School and was hopeful of heading back to the United States soon for training.
In fact, Hedstrom only had to pass one more hurdle – an interview by a group of high ranking officers
in Iceland. "I was the last one to be interviewed, and everybody else had come out of the room with sweat running down their faces.
"When I went in they asked me some tough questions, but I thought I
did all right. Finally, a general said, 'Sergeant, we've had a long, hard day. Why don't you tell us a joke?'
"I can't remember what joke I told, but they all laughed." A few days later, Hedstrom had
orders to the United States.
He boarded an old luxury liner that had been converted into a troop ship. The skipper was a Norwegian captain, and when the large convoy set out from Reykjavik the captain
didn't like how slow it was going. This was in March of 1943, and the Germans still ruled the North Atlantic with their submarine wolf packs.
"He told the convoy he had developed engine trouble and we
returned to Reykjavik. We waited three or four days, and then joined another convoy that was made up of three destroyers, three or four liberty ships and us. The captain was much happier with this
arrangement."
In the first part of the trip, though, it wasn't the Germans who posed a lethal problem for the convoy. It was the weather.
"Our old skipper said that he'd spent his whole life in
the North Atlantic, and this was the worst storm he'd ever seen. I believed it. There were so many of the ship's sailors seasick that I pulled duty standing next to the captain on the bridge.
"It was
so rough, there weren't waves, there were mountains of water out there. The captain would look at his instruments and say, 'If this son of a bitch rolls just five more degrees, we won't come back."
The storm finally abated, and suddenly the ship was in perfectly calm waters. It was much better for the crew, but also much better for the German subs.
"This captain had the most amazing eyesight. He
could see things at sea that nobody else could. One day, he suddenly shouted, 'Ninety degrees left,' and the ship turned sharply. As we looked, we could see a torpedo go right along our side."
It
missed the troop ship, but hit one of the liberty ships, sinking it quickly. In convoys, there's no turning back, and the remaining ships steamed grimly to a port in Rhode Island. By the time the convoy
arrived, Hedstrom said, it consisted only of the destroyers and the troop ship. Between the storm and the Nazi submarines, the liberty ships were all gone.
Hedstrom went to officer's training at
Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey, and his adjustment to stateside service wasn't instantaneous. There weren't a lot of German planes attacking Iceland, but there were some, and when the soldiers there heard a
boom, they were conditioned to dive for the nearest low ground.
On Hedstrom's first day at the fort, he was walking along when suddenly there was a thunderous boom. Without hesitation, he availed
himself of the nearest ditch.
When he looked up he saw everyone else was standing and saluting. It turned out the boom was merely a cannon firing to acknowledge "retreat" at 5 p.m.
Hedstrom had
to explain his strange actions to a First Lieutenant Peelock who turned out to be his immediate officer in charge of his training unit. It was a rocky start to a relationship, that Hedstrom said only
went downhill from there. "There was nothing I could do right as far as Lt. Peelock was concerned."
The months of scrutiny ended, though, when Hedstrom became an officer and a gentleman in the U.S.
Army. His first assignment was to a long line school, teaching officers the intricacies of long distance phone lines.
Because Hedstrom knew more about the subject than the instructor, he was made the
assistant instructor in the class. One of the students was Lt. Peelock.
Payback can be wonderful. "If there was any kind of bad duty, any stinking job, Lt. Peelock got it. Finally, he came up to me
and said he was sorry he had treated me that way in OCS. I told him, 'We're not through with this just yet.'"
Hedstrom said when the class did end, he and Lt. Peelock shook hands.
In December
of 1944, Hedstrom was off to Arlington Hill Station, the American equivalent of the British Bletchley Park, the home of the U.S. codebreaking efforts during the war. It was located just outside
Washington in Virginia. Hedstrom's actual duty was at Vint Hill Farms Station, an intelligence-gathering location that eventually had hundreds of acres of antennas and silos.
For the next two years,
Hedstrom worked on code breaking, specializing in the complicated machinery that was used to simplify the process.
When the Germans were preparing to surrender, Hedstrom and his mates
intercepted a message between Germany and Switzerland that told of the impending event. "We had the message three hours before Washington knew about it. We all decided to drive up to Washington that
night because we thought it would be quite a party. It was."
As the war in Europe and the Pacific came to a close, the cryptographers turned their attention to another code breaking effort that was
critical to the future of the nation – breaking the Russian codes.
Although Russia was officially our ally, it was becoming clear that the post-war world would be a struggle between the Soviet
communist ideology and Western democracy. Knowing what the Russians were communicating was a critical task.
Hedstrom was assigned to create a machine that would duplicate the actions of the Russian
code machine. The code breakers discovered that the Russians used a standard five-letter code, but the task was made more difficult by the fact that the Soviets would send three to five messages at a
time.
It became an all-absorbing problem, and Hedstrom would work on the machine by day, and lose sleep over it at night. "Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and I'd have the
solution to what had been stopping me during the day. It was crystal clear. And then I'd wake up in the morning, and it wouldn't make any sense.
"That's when I started sleeping with a flashlight and
a notepad. When I woke up, all I needed to do was jot down my thoughts. It worked."
It took many months, but Hedstrom came up with the machine the Army was looking for.
The officer in charge of
the project wanted to thank Hedstrom and put something in his file to show how important the assignment was, but in a top secret world, such memos were difficult.
The final letter achieved new
heights of ambiguity: "Your work consisted of helping in the development of a highly classified complex unit of a special type which as assumed considerable importance in the activities of Army Security
Agency." And, "The equipment which was developed is so well suited to the special type of problem for which it was designed that it is being used as a model to construct additional equipments…"
One of
the things that made Hestrom happiest was that the machine he built to replace the Russian code machine could fit on a kitchen table top. Some time later, the Americans captured one of the real Russian
code machines, and it was much larger. Hedstrom had managed to build a better, or at least a more compact mousetrap.
Because of the projects he was working on, Hedstrom was kept in the Army until late
1946. He had to sign papers saying he would not disclose any of the work he had been doing. He had been offered a job on the White House staff at that point, but decided it was time to be a civilian
again.
When he did get home to Minnesota, he took his old job back with Bell Telephone. Over the years he worked at a variety of places, working his way up the company ladder. He ended up in
Minneapolis as the general switching manager at the divisional level. He retired in 1981.
He had married his pre-war sweetheart, Marian, who he had met in Grand Rapids, at the chapel at Ft. Monmouth,
New Jersey, in November 1943. They have two children, two grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
And on Saturday afternoons, Hedstrom and his son and a friend gather to work on a Model T Ford that
they are restoring. It's the exact model of the car he used to drive to school in Grand Marais some 70 years ago.
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