U.S. Navy

Elmer Boyle

As a coxswain in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Elmer Boyle was stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in a ship repair unit. He was responsible for welding and patching ships damaged from enemy attacks — particularly from kamikaze plane attacks.

Boyle was born in East Millinocket on March 29, 1918. He spent much of his childhood living with his grandparents on a farm in Great Works village — part of Old Town. Boyle helped out on the farm and volunteered at Great Works Baptist Church. He graduated from Old Town High School in 1937

After high school, Boyle attended the University of Maine, where he studied engineering. He transferred to the University of New Hampshire, where he studied welding engineering.

Before he finished his degree at UNH he transferred to a welding school in Kittery and then went to Madison to work for the Great Northern Paper Co. as a mill welder. From there he went to the Bath Iron Works where he did welding on destroyers, then to the Portsmouth Naval Yard to weld submarines.

He achieved “First Class” status as an electric welder.

On July 18, 1944, Boyle enlisted in the Navy. Before leaving for training, he went back to Old Town to say good-bye to his family and from there he traveled to Samson, N.Y., for a 12-week training camp.

Afterwards Boyle was loaded into a Pullman car with other sailors and transported cross-country to San Francisco, and then on to Pearl Harbor.

It was on a freighter to Pearl Harbor that Boyle first encountered the devastation of the war up close. On the second day out from San Francisco a Japanese submarine sank a freighter that passed by the freighter Boyle was on. The other freighter was heading for the states, said Boyle.

“It was the closest they’ve been to the mainland,” said Boyle about the Japanese subs. “They machine gunned everyone except one or two who survived.”

A destroyer escorting the freighter dropped depth charges, trying to hit the submarine. Boyle, meanwhile, was below deck on the other freighter. Most of the sailors were kept below deck, in the dark, listening to the “bang” of the depth charges nearby, said Boyle.

“I waited for a torpedo to come over my head,” he said. “I said, ‘Will I ever see home again?’”

In 1945, while stationed in Pearl Harbor, Boyle remembers another harrowing incident. A fire had broken out in the ammunition storage depot near the base’s fleet of wooden minesweepers, which were at risk of being blown up if any of them caught fire.

Boyle was ordered to tow away one of the minesweepers, which he managed to do.

“They got the fire out finally after I pulled it away,” he recalled.

Boyle was discharged on Jan. 28, 1946. Before being discharged he spent a month in Chelsea Naval Hospital in Massachusetts because of medical problems, including kidney stones and back problems.

After the war he went to work for C.H. Babb and Co. in Bangor, where he did plumbing and heating work. He became the general supervisor of the company, and remained at Babb’s until 1973.

He was responsible for estimating and engineering plumbing and heating jobs in a variety of buildings, including a medical science building at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, and the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.

“I worked in about every kind of building there was,” he said.

In 1973, after helping to finish the medical center in Bangor, Boyle was forced to retire because of health issues.

Now he divides his time between Orland and Prince Edward Island, visiting family.

When his health permitted, Boyle enjoyed working in his garden, snowmobiling and working in his basement on welding projects.

He lives with his wife Edith and has two boys and two girls from his first marriage. His first wife died in 1973.

Turning to current events, Boyle thinks the war in Iraq is “not good.”

“But I guess they can’t do much else now,” he said. “If they leave [Iraq] they’d be worse off. We’d be in an awful mess, I’m afraid.”

— Nick Gosling