I Was a Shepherd in the Coast Guard

“I Was a Shepherd in the Coast Guard”

Subtitle: My “War”

When asked what I did in World War II, I have sometimes responded, “Well, among other things, I was a shepherd in the Coast Guard.” Actually, the fact that I was drafted into the Coast Guard rather than the Army was a big surprise to me.

In late October of my sophomore year in Millikin I rather abruptly lost my energy and became quite ill. It seems that in an intense pushball game between the freshmen and sophomores on Homecoming weekend I had seriously strained myself and developed a duodenum break or ulcer that caused severe internal bleeding. I was living at Uncle Sile’s house and in a few days I became so weak from loss of blood that I could hardly climb the stairs to my room. I was put to bed and given a glass of half milk and half cream every four hours, which worked pretty well. In about a month I was able to go back to a reduced schedule at Millikin, and in the second semester I was again able to handle a full academic schedule.

Early in 1943 I got my first draft notice. Dad went to the draft board, told them of my recent health problem and asked that I not be called up until he had had a chance to “build me up” with a summer of working on the farm. The draft board agreed that a few months deferment would be in the best interests of everyone.

In August of that year I got a second draft call and left from Shelbyville on the 3AM train with about a dozen other Shelby County draftees. The induction center in Chicago processed about two thousand draftees a day. When I was about halfway through the process a bored attendant happened to notice that they had filled seven of the eight slots open that day for the Coast Guard and decided to close out that category. By happenstance he beckoned me out of line and suggested that I sign up for the Coast Guard. I didn’t know hardly anything about the Coast Guard, but decided on the spur of the moment that it sounded better than the Army—and thus I became a sailor. (I think maybe I was the first Baird family sailor since great-grandfather John Baird’s younger brother Henry died in an experimental submarine during the Civil War.)

I went to ten weeks of boot camp at Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn—near Coney Island. Then I was shipped to the Loran school in Boston, operated by MIT. (Loran was LOng Range Aid to Navigation, a new, secret system based on timers that could break a second down into a million parts.) After further training at the Nantucket Loran station I got orders sending me to the Aleutian Islands in Alaska.

I went by train to Seattle and then spent about three weeks at a suburban Seattle country club that had been taken over by the Coast Guard as a “receiving station,” while I was awaiting transportation to Alaska. Part of the Coast Guard’s lease contract specified that they were to maintain the grounds on the golf course, so the Coast Guard had brought in a flock of about forty sheep to keep the grass “mowed.” When they learned that I had been raised on a farm, I was put in charge of the sheep detail. Every morning I was sent out with two or three “assistant shepherds” to tend the sheep on the golf course. I rather enjoyed this temporary duty as a shepherd—it sure beat scrubbing floors or peeling potatoes all day!

It was a beautiful day when I was flown out of Seattle in a Navy cargo plane and I really enjoyed the gorgeous scenery over the inland waterway north of the city—I think it’s called the Strait of Georgia. We stopped overnight in Kodiak, a large island off the coast of Alaska. While in Kodiak my fellow passengers and I learned that: (1) the previous plane to the Aleutian island of Adak, our destination, was four days overdue and presumed lost, and (2) the plane we were on was on its first flight after being repaired following a crack-up on landing. When we woke up the next morning there was a raging snowstorm, so we assumed we would stay in Kodiak until the weather cleared. However, shortly after breakfast we were ordered to get our gear together and board the plane. After waiting on the runway for a couple of hours we took off—even though it was snowing so hard that we couldn’t see the wingtips of the plane. I was scared—but after some reflection realized there was absolutely nothing I could do about it, so I climbed up on a big box of cargo and went to sleep. A couple of hours later we arrived in Adak in bright sunshine. (After that experience I never again worried much about safety on an airplane.)

Adak was a very interesting place. Although the Aleuts had used it for summer fishing and hunting, it had never been permanently settled until the U.S. Armed Forces came to this island in the central Aleutian chain in a big way in 1943. The Navy made it Fleet Headquarters for the North Pacific Fleet. The Air Force drained a shallow lake and built the biggest runway I have ever seen—three miles long and half a mile wide—to handle instrument landings in foul weather, at a time when the technology was in its crude beginning stages. Bombers would take off from Adak, refuel in Attu (the farthest Aleutian island) bomb the northern Japanese Islands, then refuel again in Attu and return to the safety of Adak, which was beyond the range of any enemy planes.

The Coast Guard had built a Loran station on top of the highest hill on the island, but hadn’t yet built a road up to it. Supplies—and passengers--were carried up the hill in a trailer behind a big Caterpillar tractor. There were about thirty of us at the base and we were comfortable in a series of Quonset huts. The food was quite good; our cook was a savvy politician who kept sending cakes and goodies down to key people in the Navy commissary, who then gave us favored supplies.

We Loran operators settled in to a routine of four hours on duty (seated before a screen like a computer monitor), eight hours off duty, then four hours on again—with a two-hour “dog watch” every other day to shift things around so that everyone didn’t stand exactly the same watch each day. We got two days off every two weeks—but there was no place to go. Sometimes it got a bit boring. but it was pretty good duty.

One morning the air raid sirens started blaring and everyone went on “high alert.” Our base commander unlocked the gun cabinets and gave us each our assigned weapons. (The cabinets were locked because the Navy had excavated caves all around the base of out big hill and used those caves for ammunition storage—and nobody wanted some trigger-happy Coast Guard fellow shooting at rabbits around those ammunition dumps. I regularly wore a .45 caliber pistol while on watch, but my assigned emergency weapon was a ………….12 gauge shotgun! Fortunately, I never had to fire it, since a shotgun has an extremely short range as compared to other weapons of warfare. Fortunately, also, the “all clear” sounded after about twenty minutes —the planes in question turned out to be our own.

I was stationed on Adak for fifteen months, then reassigned to the Loran station on Nantucket Island where I stayed for the duration of the war. Being stationed on Nantucket was absolutely ideal duty! I was discharged from the Coast Guard in March of 1946.