U.S. ARMY

William Harrison

They told him, “one year and one year only.”

It was the tail end of the Great Depression, war raging in Europe and unemployment rampant at home when William Harrison of Saco was drafted into the Army in early 1941.

Harrison, now 88, was born in Boston but moved to Maine before the war. He makes his home in Penobscot these days. In 1941, he began to crisscross America for training and maneuvers: “War games, so to speak,” Harrison recalled. “We did a little demolition, simple things. Just enough to keep from blowing your head off.”

He trained for a conflict that did not yet involve the United States.

“I had three months to go. It was on a Sunday, and I was laying on my bunk thinking, ‘Boy, I’ve only got three months to go and I’m gonna go home.’ And that’s when the news broke that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.”

“One year and one year only” would last four years and eight months. In 1944, Harrison headed out to the Pacific Theater. He was a sergeant in the 43rd division. When he made the long voyage to the Pacific, he joined the 41st division, fighting in the 186th infantry regiment. In April, Allied forces began amphibious landings in Japanese-held Hollandia, New Guinea. He was in the first wave that went out.

“You didn’t stay anywhere; you were on the move,” Harrison said. The American troops slept in holes on the island, but they didn’t sleep much. It took days, sometimes weeks, to secure an area, and secure was really only a relative term anyway.

In Biak in 1944, Harrison remembers watching the approach of the ship he knew was laden with the soldiers’ Thanksgiving supplies: turkeys and all the fixings. As it neared the channel, a kamikaze pilot bore down.

“One Japanese plane came down and blew it up, so our Thanksgiving dinner went to the bottom of the sea.” For Thanksgiving that year, they ate normal grub (C rations): a small can of hash.

Harrison will tell you that for his years of service, he received “nothing special” — a good conduct medal, a combat infantry badge, a badge to mark Philippine liberation.

“I dove into a nest of wasps at one time, but that didn’t count for anything.”

Harrison went to the Philippines to fight in March 1945. By the time he got there, the Air Corps had bombed the cities to bits and there wasn’t much to look at besides grass huts.

“A lot of the people had gone into the hills and you’d be surprised what the people took with them. They took pianos and hid them in the hills with them. They were just existing out in the jungle.”

During Harrison’s time in New Guinea, the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, visited the troops. Preparations for her arrival included extreme cleaning of the area and whitewashing of all the tree stumps.

“The ones who got to see her were the ones they [superior officers] knew wouldn’t say anything to her. I was in the back row,” Harrison said. “I give her credit for being there, but it was a pain in the neck for the men, because who wanted to whitewash tree stumps?

“A lot of the things haven’t changed, I imagine now, those people showing up in Iraq; the soldiers have to tell them how great it is and it isn’t because they’re telling us the same thing, come to think of it. One guy says we’re making progress and another guy says we’re not.

“It’s just my personal opinion,” he said, “I’m not completely in favor of it. I think we should try to get our guys out of there as soon as we can. They keep telling us that we’re making progress and I can’t see that we are. We’re losing fellows every day. I feel rather bad to see fellows getting killed.”

Harrison said the war he fought in was different because it was a world war.

“I feel quite strongly that this [Iraq] is a political war. The ones that are trying to make a name for themselves  — the politicians — they won’t hear a shot fired.”

After the U.S. dropped the A-bombs on Japan, Harrison said everybody figured, correctly, they’d be going home soon. Harrison was discharged that fall in Massachusetts. At the start of the new year, he went to work driving a taxi in Boston. He was married in 1948. After working various other jobs, he wound up a Teamster driving 18-wheelers for a trucking company for 30 years until he retired. Harrison’s first wife, Louise, died of cancer in 1976. In 1978, he married his current wife, Carole. They have one daughter and one son, and five grandchildren from Carole’s previous marriage.

— Ashley Meeks