U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS Dick Osgood   When the United States entered World War II in December 1941, tens of thousands of young men and woman rushed to join the armed services. Dick Osgood, however, had been wearing an Army Air Corps uniform for four years when America entered the war, earning him the distinction of “Old Army” among World War II veterans. Osgood graduated from George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill in the spring of 1937. That fall, he and three high school pals went to Portland and enlisted in the Army Air Corps. “There was no work of any kind,” Osgood said in a recent interview, referring to his post-graduation days in Blue Hill and his decision to join the Army. After completing basic training, Osgood was assigned to a base in Panama, where, as a member of the 53rd Pursuit Squadron, he maintained the guns mounted on fighter planes. He served in Panama six years. In 1943, he was assigned to the 392nd Fighter Squadron and stationed in Germany and France. As a master sergeant, Osgood was one of the ground officers, or “ground pounders” as the pilots called them. As a section chief with the 392nd Fighter Squadron, Osgood kept the guns on the squadron’s fighter planes in top condition. “We had 12 aircraft coming, 12 going and 12 getting ready to go at all times,” Osgood said. “The kids did all the flying.” He had other duties, however. “General Patton, you’ve probably heard of him,” Osgood said slyly during a recent interview. “I drove a jeep for him for a while. “He had two pearl-handled pistols. He thought he was a cowboy, I guess, but all the boys liked him.” Among the cherished keepsakes of his war experience is a dog-eared letter from Gen. George S. Patton to the officers and men of the Third Army. “The world rings with your praises: better still, General Marshall, General Eisenhower and General Bradley have all personally commended you,” reads Osgood’s favorite passage in the letter. “The highest honor I have ever attained is that of having my name coupled with yours in these great events.” Osgood also cherishes the Bronze Star medal he received. “I’m quite proud of that,” he said. “I got it because I was the armament chief.” Osgood started dating Hilda Henderson in 1947. They were married in 1948 and celebrated their 57th anniversary earlier this year. The couple raised one daughter, who has given them three granddaughters and four great-grandchildren. After returning to Blue Hill after the war, Osgood went to work for Babson & Duffy, a local plumbing company. He worked there for 40 years before retiring in 1984. — James Straub   “I knew my mother wanted to know where I was,” Norwood says today. “A lot of them on the ship would do that. One guy used to send cigars to his father and would write [his location] on the cigar.” Born Nov. 21, 1926, in Southwest Harbor, Norwood, an occasional lobsterman, dropped out of school to work for the Hinckley boat yard. Even though he had a shot at deferment through his employer, Norwood joined the Navy so he wouldn’t get drafted into the Army. He went to boot camp in Sampson, N.Y., then to submarine school in Rhode Island, then to Todd Shipyard in New York, where he first climbed aboard the new 500-foot U.S.S. Aegir, a sub tender. The ship carried 65 submarines, torpedoes, a crew of 1,400, 365 officers, 250 Marines and enough ammo, fuel and supplies to last a month. Their first destination was the Panama Canal. “Going ashore there was quite an experience,” Norwood said. “The Navy had black shoes. We had to have them nice and polished.” Local kids would run around and smear stuff on those shiny black shoes, bringing in a constant supply of business to the shoeshine, in whose employ they would be working. From the canal, the ship traveled to the Golden Gate Bridge and then overseas, to the South Pacific. With a full hospital on board to tend to other ships’ wounded and ill, days on the boat began at eight in the morning and sometimes didn’t end until 24 hours later, Norwood said. “We had a doctor on there who liked to practice and [he] took out all of our adenoids,” Norwood said. The sailors themselves had practice to do — jumping off the bow of the ship, 50 feet into the water, with only a pillowcase or a mattress cover to inflate on your way down. Another activity was target practice, where a dozen men, most around 17 years old, could gather to shoot five-inch artillery at sleeves towed by their airplanes. One time, Norwood said, one sight-setter was a little too excited when he wound his gun around toward the target. “He hit the end of the plane instead of the target,” Norwood said. “So down came the plane. We went and picked up the pilot and the pilot looked at us and said, ‘I’ve towed sleeves for many gun crews but that’ll be the last one I tow for you.’” That was the least of the harrowing incidents. Once, Aegir captured a two-man Japanese sub. Out of fuel and food, the Japanese were hungry for the many K-rations aboard the sub tender. “We had to play cat and mouse in order to get it,” Norwood said. “They figured that we had no guns. We had a mount on there but we never had any gun on it. When they started to surface … we were on top of it with machine guns.” Norwood said the captured men were then taken back to the ship and then flown back to the United States. “A destroyer picked up their submarine,” Norwood said. “That destroyer was hunting for that submarine and they knew that what we was up to, they just stayed out of sight just long enough to see what was going to happen. They got the submarine, we got the men.” Another time, another captured Japanese prisoner pulled a knife out of his boot. Norwood said the engineer, whom he described as “a very rugged man,” threw the prisoner overboard. But the most terrifying moment came while cruising off Tokyo Harbor with a damaged submarine, when they heard the voice of Tokyo Rose, an English-speaking woman who broadcast Japanese propaganda, come over the radio. Norwood said Tokyo Rose went on the air and gave specific information about the Aegir, such as its location, the amount of fuel the ship carrying and how many crew members were aboard. “We were scared,” Norwood said. “We had GQ [General Quarters, a condition of readiness when naval action is imminent] and we stayed on the guns continuously. “We always wondered, everyone you talked to on the ship said ‘How the hell does she know?’ She not only told about us, she told about other ships. Somebody in the United States had to be telling her what went on because there was no way — everything that went off that ship, food, supplies or paper was ground up and went into the water.” Near the end of the war, when it was thought that Japanese and Russian troops would be invading America by way of Alaska, the Aegir was sent there as well. “They issued all new clothes for us,” Norwood said. “We were almost in the harbor and they decided to send us back to Australia.” Never a smoker, Norwood brought his cigarettes home to the fellows in the shipyards. But there was one thing he couldn’t turn down —  fresh watermelon. While stopping in Oakland, Calif., to get supplies, some of the men saw the waters teeming with the bright green melons. A stake had broken on a watermelon barge and dumped them in the sea, Norwood said. “So we decided we’d like to have some of them.  We picked up as many as we could,” Norwood said. “We had a feast. They were the first ones we’d seen for over two years and a half.” Norwood got out of the Navy in 1946 and at 21 married his wife, Pauline Chase, a Dover-Foxcroft native who worked in Southwest Harbor, in 1948. “Chase, that was her last name, and that’s what she did, she chased me.” The two have been married 57 years and have three children, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. After leaving the Navy, Norwood worked as a carpenter for the R.M. Norwood Co., which had no family connection until he bought the company after 30 years, continuing to run it for another 22 years. These days, Norwood is pleased with our progress in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “If this war isn’t fought over there, I think it’d be fought in our own country and even though we’re losing men, it’s much better to lose them over there than over here,” Norwood said. What he takes issue with is the way war is fought. “I think if you are going to fight, you need to fight man to man,” Norwood said. Norwood has been in the American Legion for 54 years. He has been a service officer for 30 years and does much of their cooking. He also is a member of the VFW and so believes in how the military shaped him that he says military service — at least a year — should be mandatory, for discipline. “I knew it done me good,” Norwood says. — Ashley Meeks