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By Al Zdon
It's usually a good thing to be first – unless it involves your local draft board.
Patrick Hogan Jr. of Gilbert, Minnesota, was a 25-year-old car mechanic working at the
Montgomery Ward's service station on University Avenue in St. Paul when he got the historic communication in March 1941.
Hogan became one of the first men drafted in Minnesota prior to World War II.
For this distinction he received an all-expenses paid trip to Ft. Snelling, a new set of olive drab clothing and his picture on the front page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The picture showed Hogan's
feet being measured with the caption: "Dogs of War Being Measured."
Hogan says he was "quite shocked" on getting the notice. The nation wasn't at war, and he had not made plans to spend time in the
military.
Hogan was born in 1916, the second of six children, in Gilbert. His father had emigrated from Canada to be a steam shovel operator, first in the iron mines near Hibbing, and then later near
Gilbert.
His father later went into the livery business, and then converted his horse business into the area's first horseless carriage business. His father, Patrick Sr., also purchased the first car
on the eastern Mesabi Range in 1911.
"I've always been impressed by what he did," Hogan said in an interview at his Gilbert home. "Here he had a livery barn full of horses, and then overnight he
switched over to servicing cars. He didn't know the difference between a magneto and a coil, or anything else. But he made it go."
Patrick Jr. graduated from Gilbert High School and went to Eveleth
Junior College before finding out there were few jobs on the Iron Range in the late years of the Depression. He eventually took the job in St. Paul.
Hogan's mother and father accompanied him to his
induction in St. Paul, and then he was off to Ft. Leonard Wood and later Ft. Knox for training. "There were openings at Aberdeen (Maryland) for volunteers for bomb disposal training. My friends thought I
was goofy, but I thought it would be a chance to do something a little bit different. I figured you'd never have to worry about making a mistake because you wouldn't be there to find out about it."
At
Aberdeen, Hogan was chosen for officer's training and he completed his bomb disposal training as a second lieutenant.
"There was a lot of training. There were a lot of different fuses you had to
learn. Some of them were not meant to be touched."
When the war started, the Japanese began sending helium balloons across the Pacific with a bomb attached. Hogan's squad was sent to San Francisco for
a short period to be available in case one of these balloon bombs came to rest on the West Coast.
After the bombing of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, Hogan and his team were moved to the desolate
islands that trail down from western Alaska. When the Japanese were ousted from their strongholds at Kiska and Attu, Hogan's bomb squad was sent in to clear the formerly occupied territory of explosives.
"There was a lot of mine sweeping. They had entrenched themselves in the caves, and the caves were full of big gun emplacements. They had railroad tracks where they could roll out the guns to the
cave openings and shell the beach. If they had opposed the landing, it would have been a disaster for us."
Instead, the Japanese departed quietly, leaving the dried fish still hanging in the caves.
The bomb squad initially had to check for booby traps, and then diffuse and destroy the artillery shells. A bonus for the bomb squad was that they had first crack at the myriad of knives, flags, guns and
other souvenirs left behind by the quickly-departing enemy.
Hogan's memories of living on Adak are not pleasant. "It was a very bad environment. For over a year we stayed in tents and slept in
sleeping bags, and they weren't the kind of cold weather bags you see these days. We just had to wrap ourselves in GI blankets."
There was a small pot-bellied stove in each tent, and the men would
have to go down the hill to the beach to retrieve coal the Navy would drop off every now and then.
"When there was a blizzard, you had to follow a rope to get out to the latrine behind the tent. There
were guys who lost contact with the rope, and they never came back.
"Sometimes the wind would blow so hard it would knock the tent down. There wasn't much you could do but just lay there all night in
the collapsed tent and hope you could put it back up in the morning."
Originally the bomb disposal team was slated to head for the South Pacific, but as the United States gathered its forces for the
invasion of France, Hogan's team was given orders to cross the United States and depart for England. They had a few days to stop off in their hometowns along the way.
Earlier, the squad had adopted a
blue fox as a mascot on their Alaskan island, and he had become part of their family. "I drew the longest straw and I got to keep the fox," Hogan said. He concealed the animal in his coat for the long
journey from Alaska to Minnesota. The fox was named "B.D." for Bomb Disposal.
"When I got to Minnesota, they put me up at the St. Paul Hotel. I knew the fox would never be able to handle the warm
temperatures in the room, and so I tied him to the flag pole in front of the hotel."
During the night, some of the hotel's other customers saw the fox and raised a ruckus with the hotel management
about cruelty to animals. Hogan was summoned from his room.
"I had to explain that this was the fox's normal habitat, being outdoors." The upshot was that the Minneapolis Tribune sent a photographer
over, and for the second time in his military career, Hogan again made the front page of a Twin Cities newspaper.
Hogan left the fox with his parents, and one day the fox got loose. He made his way
north and was captured, nearly starved to death, at Winton, near Ely.
"I was very sad when I got a letter from home some months later that a dog had gotten over the fence and had killed the fox. It
was such a beautiful animal."
The bomb disposal squad was loaded aboard the Queen Mary for the trip over the Atlantic. "There was nothing but the best for us going over there."
In England, the
squad was assigned to bivouac with English bomb disposal experts. Following the blitz of England, there was probably nobody who knew more about dealing with bombs than the British. The team lived in
Coventry, just on the outskirts of London.
"They were very hospitable, very nice to us," Hogan recalled. "They taught us everything about bomb disposal. They knew it all. We even went out on calls
with them."
Hogan's unit was called the Fifth Ordinance Bomb Disposal Squad and it was attached to the Third Army. It was not assigned to any particular division or unit, but was moved to wherever it
was needed as the Third Army advanced. Usually, that was right with the front lines.
The unit landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day plus 1. "It was a sad mess. It was a variety of hell. There was still
plenty of action on the beach, and there were still many mines to clear away." Some mines were in the sand, and others were floating in the surf just outside the beach.
Some of the land mines you
could detect with mine sweeping equipment, but for others, the only way was the old fashioned method. "You'd just crawl on your belly and tap the sand in front of you with a trench knife. You'd just
probe gently with the knife, and if you hit something, you knew it was a mine. You'd have to carefully push the sand away. You learned to be very careful."
The bomb disposal expert would then have to
ever so carefully remove the mine from the ground, and, if there was enough room, detonate it with a charge or blasting cap. If there was no room, the mines were simply stacked up and the area was
secured with red tape to warn off any troops.
Some of the mines were wooden or plastic, undetectable by metal detectors. The only way to find them was with the trench knife, and too hard a tap would
reveal the mine in a way that was not approved.
As the U.S. troops moved inland, the bomb disposal people would be the first ones in once a town had been secured. "It was our job to get the troops out
of the weather, and so we had to go through all the buildings looking for booby traps or bombs."
The bomb experts would usually break a window first to visually inspect the inside of a building. If it
appeared that there might be a booby trap attached to the door, plan B went into effect. "We would tie a rope to the door and tie the other end to a jeep and drive it around the corner. If it was a
little bomb, the building might be damaged. If it was a big bomb, the whole building might come down." Once a building was determined to be free of explosives, the GIs could settle in for a night's sleep
out of the rain or snow.
The team was generally in the forefront of the troops, and if a mine field was suspected in the line of a column of troops or tanks, Hogan and his men were called in. "The
infantry would often have to give us covering fire as we tried to clear a minefield."
Once a corridor was made through a minefield, the men would mark it with tape so the vehicles and foot soldiers
could pass through safely.
To dispose of a mine or bomb, a charge was set on it, and electrical wire was run back a few hundred yards where detonation would be safe. "All those explosions for all
those years really took a toll on my hearing."
Sometimes, Hogan was called upon to help out a local farmer. "He might have had a small herd of cows and now he might only have two because they keep
stepping on mines in his field. The dead cows would lay on their backs with their feet in the air. The GIs would use them for target practice, and the cows were so bloated and full of gas that when a
bullet hit them, you could hear the air whistling out."
Often the farmers were so grateful for having their farms de-mined that they would share their precious hoard of food or wine with the
Americans. One time, a farmer served up a delicious meal and then asked Hogan and his men how they liked the food. The farmer used a word the Americans didn't know, and they had to look it up in their
French dictionary. The word was "cat."
"One of my sergeants realized what he had just eaten and his face turned red. He bolted for the half door, leaned over it, and let everything fly. It didn't
bother me, I thought it was very nice that this farmer had sacrificed his pet cat for our dinner."
In France, the bomb team received further instruction from the French underground, also experts in
bomb disposal after five years of war. "They knew about all the fuses. I remember the worst one was "ZZAK." And you didn't touch that one with anything. The Germans were very ingenious on how to kill a
person."
The squad of six people traveled mainly in a jeep and a 4x4 Dodge truck that carried their equipment. In front of the jeep, the men rigged a boom to pick up bombs that were too heavy to lift.
A major portion of the squad's work came with Patton's army was about to cross a river. The team would be called in to make sure a bridge wasn't wired for demolition by the retreating Nazis.
On
one occasion, the team was creeping down a path to a bridge when they heard a snap in the brush beside them. The team reacted quickly and captured a German soldier.
"He was so young. He had on him a
flare pistol, a Luger, and an American .32 caliber pistol that he must have gotten from one of our guys. If we'd gone past him, he could have picked us off very easily."
Hogan relieved the German of
his Lugar and American pistol, two souvenirs he kept after the war. The prisoner was turned over to an engineering company near by. "His job was to fire a flare at night to show the German bombers where
the bridge was."
At another bridge, the squad came under fire from a German 88 artillery piece. "We hid on one side of a wall, and the shells came down on us. We jumped over the wall, and the Germans
adjusted and the shells came down on that side of the wall. That was a very accurate gun, that 88 howitzer."
The work the men did required a great deal of training and know-how, Hogan said. "If you
turned a fuse the wrong way, it would go off."
Bombs that were too big to move had to be donated on the site. "You'd use little blocks of TNT or blasting caps. "We set off one bomb, a huge one, that
instead of creating fragments, flattened out the metal jacket and sent it flying. It was just like an airplane propeller and it went whoosh, whoosh, whoosh right over our heads. It scared the hell out of
us."
When the Battle of the Bulge broke out, Patton's Third Army was heading toward Germany. The army wheeled and headed north to help the 101st Airborne, encircled at Bastogne. When the Third Army
reached Bastogne, the bomb disposal squad was one of the first into the area that had been controlled by the Germans.
"We had to get in fast to clear the buildings and get these guys out of the cold.
It was a sad mess. They didn't have boots like we do today. The boots just soaked up the water like a sponge, and then they'd freeze. I spent Christmas in Bastogne, and they were playing Christmas music.
It wasn't a Christmas I wanted to remember, though."
In some places, the bomb disposal teams found where the Germans had stockpiled socks, underwear and other clothing. "We just threw it out the
windows to the soldiers. And then we got out of there before they caught us."
One day, while heading toward a French village, the jeep hit a small mine. "I went flying up in the air and came down by
the side of the Jeep. The driver got blown the other way. We got up, and you should have seen how fast we changed that tire. We could see activity in the windows of the town. We thought it was Germans.
"Just then an old man came walking down the road, and it turned out he was a priest. He told us that the Germans had left that morning. To me that old priest was just like a saint. I always wanted to
go back and thank him."
Another time, the men were sweeping a field to clear it of mines and a Jeep containing General Patton roared up. Patton took one look at the bomb squad and summoned them over.
"The general wanted to know what we were doing without our helmets on. We told him that we couldn't wear any metal because of the mine sweepers. He didn't care. He said that if we got hurt it would take
six guys to get us off the battlefield, and he didn't want to spare those six guys. He said, 'When I put out an order, I expect it to be obeyed.' We put our helmets back on."
Hogan said that he knows
that many soldiers didn't like Patton, but he had no problem. "He was quite a general. He didn't believe in sitting still. You'd always hear him saying, 'Get those tanks moving.'"
The team made it all
the way to Austria before the war ended in Europe.
"We were very, very lucky. We never lost a man. There was 100 percent wipe out in some squads. They either didn't have the training, or they got a
little careless. I always kept in mind what the English taught us: 'Don't become to familiar with your work. Familiarity breeds disaster.'"
Hogan has some sad memories of the war. "One of the worst
was this mother and her daughters, three or four of them, scavenging for food in an ammo dump. We told them to get out of there, but these people were starving. Well, they must have set off a mine and
set the whole thing went off. It was the complete annihilation of them. We'd always try to give these people food and tell them to get out of the dumps when we could, but they were always scavenging.
They had to."
Another sad memory was toward the end of the war when his squad saw German prisoners being shipped to a POW camp. "There were just truckloads of these young Germans and they were all
just kids. They had run out of troops and they were using Hitler youth by that time. They were so disheartened. They were just dirty-faced young boys. They looked like Boys Scouts coming back from a
camping trip. They were demoralized. They were crying. They had been brainwashed into thinking they were the master race."
And Hogan has a strong opinion on land mines. "I can't believe they didn't
outlaw them after World War II. They saw what happened in France with all these young people without arms or legs. They should never allow land mines again."
Hogan left France at Camp Lucky Strike,
crossed the Atlantic in a liberty ship, and made it to Camp McCoy in Wisconsin where he was discharged. He had spent 36 months overseas.
His father's garage in Gilbert had been closed during the war
because there were no parts or tires to be had. Hogan helped his father re-open the business. Hogan operated it until about three years ago, when a blizzard dropped enough snow on the roof to collapse
the building.
In 1950, he married Gertrude Sevruk of Floodwood. "She was a home ec teacher, and I wanted somebody who could really cook," Hogan said. From another room, Gertrude answered back, "Boy,
did I fool him."
The two have three children, and they now spend the cold weather months in Florida.
Hogan has been active in the American Legion since the war, and has been post commander for the
past 15 years.
A few years ago, Hogan went back to Omaha Beach for the 50th anniversary of D-Day. "It was so peaceful, I took my socks and shoes off and rolled up my pants and walked in the water. It
was so nice. Not at all like I remembered it."
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