They were there …

Take an ordinary snow globe and shake it up. Do this repeatedly for five years. I use this to illustrate how a community in flux must have felt from 1941 to 1945. Oak Harbor, a quiet little town of mostly family farms, had been shaken awake when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the Navy announced it would become a seaplane training facility for men who would fly the PBY Catalina to the Aleutians.

Farmers turned over their property for the war effort and construction couldn’t keep up with the numbers of sailors arriving daily. I have been privileged to interview many of those who were here when the Navy came to town. Although some have gone, their words remain as permanent testimony.

Aviation Metalsmith Third Class MILTON SCHULLE arrived from Sand Point in Seattle in March 1942. He saw a sign at the edge of town that read “Population 379.”

RUSSELL JACOBSON recalled, “You could only drive with your parking lights on at night until you got well past Deception Pass.”

JIM CHESNUTT came from Texas to learn to work on planes and later survived a plane crash in Alaska. It was June 1942. “We went end over end in the water,” he said. The entire bow of the plane was torn off.

BOB WALKER’s job was to sit in the PBY-5A aircraft’s “tower,” the heart of the plane. “That’s where the engines were started and things like the fuel system, wingtip floats and slats were monitored. The PBY took off at 75, climbed at 75 and flew at 75. It was low and slow.”

LLOYD McDONOUGH came from the carrier U.S.S. Wasp which had been lost in the South Pacific. He needed extra clothes when he arrived in the middle of the coldest winter in 90 years. “On Ault Field, which we called Clover Valley, there was lots of sticky mud, but it was some of the richest wheatland they ever had,” he said.

HOWARD BASCH was a torpedoman in 1944 aboard a Torpedo Bomber Squadron 55 TBM-3C. Fate kept him back at the hangar when, “During a low-altitude dummy torpedo run, the pilot got vertigo and instead of pulling back, he pushed forward and went into the water,” he said. The crew was never found. Then he recalled another accident involving his aircraft. “As we were landing, our turret gunner was yelling that another one of our planes overhead was about to land on top of it,” he said excitedly. “The pilot put on the brakes and the plane ended up on its nose, as did the second plane.”

JOHN ALLGIRE supervised the mess in building 13. “We fed 1,500 men daily on the Seaplane Base and 3,600 at the Ault Field Mess, where Personnel Support Detachment is today,” he noted. Allgire also remembered the three-legged dog that could beat bomb trucks going 10 miles an hour on what is now called Torpedo Road. Because torpedoes were difficult to load onto PBYs in the water, crews would hitch up several four-wheel trailers to haul inert ordnance to Ault Field. Seaplanes would then fly from Crescent Harbor, land at Ault Field wheels down, be loaded with torpedoes, fly back over Crescent Harbor to line up their targets, drop them and boat crews would retrieve them to repeat the cycle.

PEARL SEIGER, a clerk recording grades at the base gunnery school in 1944, remembered how a little train pulled targets along a track at Rocky Point at what is now Gallery Golf Course.

GEORGE MORRIS also arrived in 1944 as a GS-2 inventory clerk. “We took the first NAS Supply inventory, counting aviation parts, office supplies, and kegs and kegs of bolts, nuts and screws,” he said.

FRANK JONGSMA remembered when many supplies, including ammunition, were loaded and unloaded from barges or railcars at Whitmarsh or Anacortes. In 1947, Jongsma greased as many as 23 vehicles a day, from cars to trucks and busses, and operated the wash rack.

Seiger said it best. “No one appreciated their country more than the American people. We were one people, one government, one Navy — all working for the same cause.”

If the country needed you in 1943, it needs you even more today. At 63, Naval Air Station Whidbey Island is respected for its geographically unique location and diverse training capabilities. Preparing men and machines to join the fleet is a big job, but so is looking after their loved ones. Families played second-fiddle in World War II. Today they stay abreast of news through their chain of command and their needs are taken care of to the fullest extent possible. This means a lot to the deployed sailor and can affect his decision to re-enlist.

So celebrate, folks. And I’ll be back on Sept. 28. Call me at (360) 675-6611 or email me at lifeonwhidbey@yahoo.com.