Stephenville, NF

1953 – Memories of Stephenville – Philip E Holt

GONNA ENLIST OR GET DRAFTED?

In the early 1950's, hard into the Korean and Cold Wars, young men (boys, really) knew that they had two choices once they reached eighteen years old. You were gonna get drafted into the Army (Infantry, most likely) or you could enlist in one of the other services.

For people like me who washed out of high school before graduation and who had been encouraged by the local judge, it seemed that joining the Air Force and learning a trade offered some chance to break the chain. Lots of my friends had enlisted rather than being drafted – even though a draftee served only two years while the enlistee had to sign up for four years. A very, very long time when you're eighteen years old.

So I enlisted in the United States Air Force. Go through basic training in February at Sampson Air Force Base (right on Lake Geneva in northern New York state) and freeze my cajones off. Tragedy strikes when I finish: Eglin Field in the Florida panhandle is short of people, so instead of following the typical routine of going to some technical school out of basic training, I'm sent directly to Eglin. Fortunately, after a few months at Eglin I get “selected” to go to Ground Control Approach (GCA) Radar Maintenance Technician school at Keesler AFB (3405th Student Squadron) – just down the road to the east in Mississippi.

Ten or twelve months later I graduate with several hundred other folks. I'm a Ground Control Approach Radar Maintenance technician. So where do I get a Permanent Change of Station (PCS) assignment after graduation? To a Ground Control Intercept (GCI) radar site near the east end of the Pinetree line, the 640th AC&W (Aircraft Control & Warning). GCA radars are nothing like GCI radars, but who cares? The 640th is located just outside of Stephenville, Newfoundland, kind of attached to Harmon AFB. But everyone refers to the radar site as “Pinetree.”

GOING TO NEWFOUNDLAND

So I leave Keesler in mid summer of 1953, and after thirty days leave, go to Camp Kilmer, New Jersey (2266th Personnel Processing Group) as a transient for a few weeks (horror show) and finally get on a boat. The Navy people insisted it was a “ship,” but I am positive it was a damn boat. Sometime in September or thereabouts, we set sail for Newfoundland. Eight days later we hit Saint John and find out that all the bars downtown (pubs) don't cool the beer, have separate entrances for women, and have weird operating hours.

Speaking of weird, on the boat the Navy had really weird rules. Before we set sail and while we're still tied up at the pier, a bunch of Air Force guys were lined up at the railing and looking at the water maybe thirty feet down. It's pretty windy and there's a bit of surge on the top of the water. The boat is responding ever so gently (who the hell knew it was “gently” at that time).

There are probably something like thirty or forty Air Force enlisted people lined up at the rail. I'm about ten or fifteen feet behind them on a hatch cover, more amidships. We are all waiting to set sail. Bored to tears. One other rule among many, for some reason, is that the passengers – USAF types – have to be on deck during the day because the Navy needs to do something where we bunk at night. So, we're all up there and no one is too happy. I'm watching these thirty or forty people lined up at the rail. Out of the blue, I hear someone gagging. The first guy in this line, closest to the bow, gags, coughs, chokes, and then barfs real time. The next thing I know, every single one of these people lined up at the rail upchucks over the rail into the water. What I remember most is the military precision of the process. Airman Number One, closest to the bow, upchucks over the side. Airman Number Two next to Airman Number One, then barfs over the side. This causes Airman Number Three to . . . You get the picture. Really spectacular and a source of great entertainment for the Navy crew.

Anyhow, we left Saint John after a couple of days, and then sail to Argentia where the Navy and Coast Guard have some folks and then finally we end up in Stephenville. Now, unlike Saint John and Argentia, there is no pier or dock for us to pull into at Stephenville. Or maybe there was one, but we weren't going to use it. However, we need to get ashore otherwise the whole trip is a waste of time. Besides that, we're all tired of barfing every three or four hours and no way could we stand a trip back to Camp Kilmer on this blasted “ship.” We'd choose to drown first.

But the Navy has a solution. You remember those WWII films of US troops attacking the Japanese-occupied islands in the Pacific? They had these nets hanging over the side of the ship and tiny LCP's (Landing Craft Personnel), something like thirty feet in length, alongside and all you had to do was get off the boat into these very, very small boats for the trip ashore. It's time for another lesson about sea transportation for the Air Force troops.

A very big boat sort of rides through the waves and maintains a more or less even keel (guess where the expression comes from), but a very little boat rides practically on top of the waves. As a result of these nautical facts, when you have six or eight foot waves, the very small boat at the top of the wave is six or eight feet closer to the deck than when it's in the wave troughs. Also, to make the upcoming challenge more exciting, we're traveling with all of our possessions in that well known duffel bag which we are now lugging down that net. That was another weird Navy rule: all you could carry on board the big boat was your one duffel bag.

Over the side we go a few at a time. Climb down the net until we get to where we think we're not too close to the LCP to get caught between it and the big boat when the LCP comes screaming up at us and bangs into the side of the boat. Get your foot caught in between the big boat and the LCP, and it's the last time you'll see that foot. The plan now soon becomes obvious. What you need to do is step onto the LCP deck at the exact moment it is on the top of the wave. If you go too soon, it'll break your ankle. If you go too late, you'll fall at the same rate the LCP is sinking and meet it only when it starts back up again. After you fall eight or ten feet through the air. Everything that could happen, did happen with the Air Force people. Fortunately, no one was killed. This all happened in 1953, but I can tell you that I remember it as if it happened yesterday.

PINETREE HERE WE COME

After this debacle, we finally end up at Ernest Harmon AFB (EHAFB), in the transient barracks again, after what was the first of a thousand rides yet to come in the back of a 6-by-6 GI truck. Things are cool. There's a great PX, NCO club, movies, base gym. Then one day we're told “Hello – you guys are going to Pinetree.” We get to Pinetree after my second ride in the back of a 6-by-6 over dirt roads and up Table Mountain where the site is. Some three thousand feet up.

At the time I arrived, we had one search radar on top of a thirty foot high metal tower and a heightfinder radar also exposed to the weather on top of a tower. The way one got to the radar components located in the towers was by climbing the metal ladder attached to the side of it and then climb up through a hole in the tower floor at the top of the ladder. Other radar components were located in the radar maintenance section and in the Operations Center. Sometimes the wind would blow so hard that it would keep the search radar antenna from rotating. These mostly open-air towers also had another important function for the seasoned troops. Two ingredients were necessary for veteran troops to take advantage of this features: first, one needed bad weather (never a problem), and second, one needed neophyte new arrivals from the States. That way the veterans could, and did, send these new troops from the radar maintenance shack up to the tower for a replacement Fallopian Tube. The people in the tower would then tell the fish that they were out of Fallopian Tubes in the radar tower, but were pretty sure that they had some at the Transmitter Site a good half mile or more away. And so on . . .

The typical tour of duty at these sites was for two years, and life could get difficult very quickly. First and foremost, these sites operated twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. So that dictated that most airmen worked all these shifts. There were no such things as Christmas or Thanksgiving holidays off for these troops. The typical routine was to work three swing shifts (1600 hours till midnight), three mids (midnight to 0800 hours), three day shifts (0800 hours to 1600 hours), and finally have a seventy-two hour break.

The weather at most of these sites, especially during the long winters made life miserable much of the time. Winter days were short. Pitch black darkness from early afternoon until late morning. Snow, snow, snow. Ice, ice, ice. For the troops who had north-facing windows on the first floor in the barracks, they'd face the winter with a wall of snow covering the windows until late Spring. This fact could and did make life tedious.

Neither the operations nor the radar maintenance rooms had latrines. So one typically went back to the barracks for any necessary relief. One early morning about 0230 hours I made such a trip. I did my business and am walking down the hall back to the exit which leads back to the radar maintenance shack when Nate Eady, a cook, comes out of his room on his way to the latrine.

He walks a couple of steps past me, stops, then turns around and asks, “What time is it?”

I look at my wristwatch and respond, “It's 2:30.”

Nate says, “Thanks,” and continues on his way to the latrine. We each take another half-dozen steps when Nate suddenly stops and turns around again.

“Hey,” he says, “Is that a.m. or p.m.?”

True story only a Pinetree veteran could understand or believe! Such was daily life.

And as if that lifestyle wasn't hard enough, toward the end of the tour, radar maintenance technician personnel replacements from the States lagged so badly that the number of radar maintenance crews fell to two instead of the normal four. So, a bunch of us worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week for seven months without a break. I've often wondered if civilians ever appreciated how hard and long many of these troops worked.

PINETREE ENTERTAINMENT

Off-duty life was a bitch unless you could get off the mountain. No television, no enlisted men's club for a long time, no radio during the day, no CD's, no nothing. We got a new movie every week which was shown in one of the barracks day rooms. Most of the time outdoor activity was impossible because of the weather. We even had a buck sergeant, Bob Pendergast, who went AWOL to Harmon AFB! You can only play so much ping pong, pool or shuffleboard.

At night, depending on the atmospheric conditions, we could pick up some stateside AM radio stations. New York City stations often came in as if they were next door when radio hop conditions were just right. We could even listen to a baseball game now and then. But we had many creative minds and some other alternatives were developed. Not the least of which were ham radio, craps and poker for fewer and fewer winning players each three or four days after payday (we got paid in cash every month) and Stephenville's Red Rose Cafe. And then, after beer arrived along with the establishment of an official Enlisted Men's Club on Pinetree, there was Biz-Buzz-Zing. We spent a lot of time playing this game.

ONE - TWO - THREE - FOUR - BIZ

BUZZ - SIX -

- EIGHT . . . and so on.

It gets more complicated for single numbers that are divisible by both five and seven, like 35 which is “BIZ-BUZZ“ and since it reverses direction twice, ends up not changing direction at all. Other tricky numbers are 55 (“BIZ-ZING”) and 77 (“BUZZ-ZING). I think there's also a “BIZ-BUZZ-ZING” number, but I don't know what it is and no one I've ever played the game with has gotten to it. The skill level of the players generally deteriorated significantly as the evening wore on.

BUT IT WAS SERIOUS BUSINESS

The Cold War threat in the early 1950's was seen to be that of the Russians launching an attack on the United States and Canada over the North Pole using nuclear-armed bomber aircraft. This threat was unlike the later threat from missiles, no one had that capability until much later. Each GCI site, depending on a number of factors, could detect aircraft flying within about 150 miles of it. There was also an advantage to being on top of mountains as that improved the radar's line-of-sight range. So, as a consequence, many of the Pinetree radar sites were at least several thousand feet above sea level. The United States and Canada's southernmost set of these sites came to be known as the Pinetree Line and stretched from Newfoundland in the east to Washington state in the west. There were also some shipborne radars to survey areas not covered by ground radars.

Because of its remote location, Pinetree 640th AC&W needed to be able to operate completely independently from the outside world for extended periods of time. Sometimes the weather would be so bad one could not leave or get to the mountain top even though plows equipped with rotary snow blowers operated full time to try to keep the road open. Often it would snow so hard that even a rotary snow blower could not keep the road open. So you better have plenty of fuel, food and water.

My roommate Willy Fons worked in the motor pool. He spent much time on the road driving the squadron's one snow blower plow. One catastrophic early winter evening, I was on my 72-hour break between shifts and was bored out of my skull, so I went with Willy, who had been directed to keep the road open, to plow the road. We had made several trips up and down during daylight hours and had just driven past the perimeter guard shack and into the central area of the squadron. Now toward early evening, and getting dark, we turned around and started down again.

Once more we pass the guard shack, which is the only opening in the high-security squadron perimeter. The guard waves us through. Five minutes later, we've run off the road by mistake because of lack of visibility. The damned snow blower gets stuck and we can't budge it. Willy and I are on the verge of freezing to death, and it is now a full-fledged blizzard. Somehow, he and I finally find our way back to the guard shack. I'm in front of Willy, so I grab the door handle, open the door, and it disappears from my hand. The wind was blowing so hard it took that door off its hinges and into the great white beyond.

There are a few airmen in the guard shack who were waiting for a ride off the hill. They all had their caps down over their eyes, eyes closed, arms across the chest, feet stretched out in front of them trying to grab a nap. Needless to say, the temperature in the guard shack immediately dropped below freezing, and someone yelled at me, “Shut the goddam door!”

“I'd love to, if I could find the fucking thing! ” Shortly after that, we guided each other single file back to the squadron mess hall through that raging blizzard. After the blizzard was over, we went back to look for the plow and saw that the guard shack had disappeared. Gone completely. We didn't find the snow blower until Spring when someone going off the mountain spotted a corner of the plow's blue roof in a snow field about fifty yards off the road.

The squadron's basic mission was to make sure that neither the United States or Canada were attacked. To accomplish this mission required a host of capabilities. First and foremost we had to track every aircraft within range and determine whether or not it was a friendly. Commercial flights filed flight plans in advance and were relatively easily identified. Occasionally an unknown “bogie” would show up on the radar screen and the on-duty controllers would scramble fighters from Harmon AFB to intercept them.

Ground Control Interception required, above all, that the fighters intercept the bogie with the greatest chance of success of shooting it down if it turned out to be the enemy. Most often this required the fighter pilots, when not actually airborne, to sit in their cockpits in the event that they had to launch quickly. Their ground crews faced similar problems.

After the fighters became airborne it now became the responsibility of the GCI Controller to vector them to the bogie. Preferably closing finally on it from directly abeam, that is, off the wingtip. There were also training missions when Strategic Air Command bombers would test the system. These day and night missions were always high pressure situations. Not the least reason being that a fighter or other friendly would suffer an accident and sometimes fall out of the sky.

Bill Rouse and I are at Harmon trying to catch a MATS flight to the States for leave. I'm down off the hill just at the start of my 72-hour break so I can add three days' leave for free. Bill and I are in the transient barracks where the Pinetree folks always were stationed. The weather is bad and most of my 72 hours passes. However, the next day a Navy R5D four-propeller-engine transport plane is leaving Harmon for Westover Air Force Base in Springfield, Massachusetts – sixty miles from where I'm going. Bill's going to Atlanta to see his wife and decides to take the flight. I decide to opt out and try again later. That night I return to Pinetree and go on duty as usual.

I go into the Control Room and tell the Controllers that one of our guys is on a Navy transport going to Westover. A couple of hours into the Swing Shift, sure enough, that plane leaves Harmon and we start to track it.

About a half hour into the flight, the Navy pilot calls, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday” and his flight number. It turns out that he's lost an engine and is turning around to come back to Harmon. The GCI controllers now put the radio audio on loudspeakers that we can all hear since Bill is on that plane, and everyone in the control room knows it. Not five minutes later there's another “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday” call. The aircraft has lost another engine but, tragically, it's on the same side of the plane as the earlier engine: two engines out on the same wing. No more radio transmissions from the Navy plane, but the GCI Controller scrambles two fighters and a helicopter from Harmon to escort the disabled aircraft.

Everyone is watching this aircraft limp back to Harmon on the radar scope. The radar return disappears. That plane is down in the Atlantic where survival from hypothermia is four minutes. We never hear from the aircraft again, and the fighter pilots and helicopter pilots never sight any wreckage though they search for a very long time.

I know from watching everyone in the Control Center that we now understand another part of our mission much more than we ever did before. And I thought to myself, “Better lucky than smart.” I never did take that leave. And those weren't the last US Military sacrifices made by brave people during the Cold War. Welcome to maturity, young men and women.