After Archie Harvard was drafted in early 1942, he first went to Galveston, Texas, for nine weeks, and then took basic training for another nine weeks at Fort Bliss, Texas. He was assigned to an anti-aircraft battery.

Archie’s first duty station was in New York City, at Governor’s Island in New York harbor. For 19 months, his unit guarded the city. He also remembers he and his fellow soldiers built their own barracks. (I told Archie that I knew about such barracks, because when I went through basic training at Fort Lewis in 1968, our barracks had surely been built during World War II.) After the stint in New York City, his unit was shipped to Scotland on the liner Aquitania, then the third largest passenger ship in the world, said Archie. (Aquatania was a British ship commissioned in 1913; it was a sister ship to the Lusitania.) Then, by train, Archie’s unit traveled to England, arriving on March 9, 1944.

On June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, and while the Omaha Beach perimeter was still small, Archie and his fellow soldiers arrived at that famous and tragic site. They followed the army across France, providing cover against enemy aircraft attacks. Archie’s anti-aircraft unit employed a 90-millimeter gun, which fired a 41-pound projectile up to seven miles. Archie recalled that they would set up their perimeters so that machine guns covered the lower elevations and the big gun fired over the machine guns. He says that the first German plane they shot down was a Messerschmidt (ME) 109 and the machine guns got it.

Later in 1944 the unit was sent to Liege, Belgium, for rest, and they were still in Belgium when the Germans attacked in the famous Battle of the Bulge of December 1944 and January 1945. Archie believes that his army group was stationed further south than the 101st Airborne Division that was surrounded by German troops at Bastogne. When the Germans broke through the lines, Archie and his fellow soldiers had to pull back several miles. His unit prepared to dynamite some guns to keep them from German hands, but they got the guns out just in time.

The situation stabilized and Archie says that all told his unit shot down five German planes and about 10 buzz bombs. (The “buzz bombs” were also named the “V-1,” and were a kind of guided missile designed to terrorize civilian populations. They were subsonic and so were vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire.) Archie recalls the American anti-aircraft guns were set up so that they could catch buzz bombs shortly after they took off. He also recalls seeing his first jet [most probably an ME 262], used by the Germans to drop bombs. Given permission to shoot at the jet, Harvard and his compatriots blazed away, but missed.

Archie has a lot of memories not related to combat. He remembers working on a project in Belgium in which he had charge of a group of 20 German prisoners of war. He said they were “good kids.” “They were kids like we were. They didn’t want to fight any more than we did.” Perhaps his memories of Europe are especially sharp because it was so dramatically different from the Upper Nowood.

After several false starts, Archie was finally able to get a ship home in November 1945. It wasn’t on a big liner like the Aquitania, though, but a Liberty ship, a small, mass-production vessel. The ship ran into hurricanes and Archie recalls huge waves towering over the ship, and men sliding all the way across big rooms. It took 13 days to reach the United States, but finally Archie was able to make it home to Worland the day before Thanksgiving, 1945, see his 18-month-old son for the first time, and reunite with his wife, Pauline. [Pauline’s maiden name was Waln, not Warren, as I wrote in last week’s column.]

After the war, Archie worked for several outfits, including Marten Martensen and Pure Oil north of Worland. But most of his work life was spent driving big trucks – 18 wheelers – for Geis Trucking, while still working at other jobs.

He retired in 1987, but sadly, his wife died in 2004, after 64 years of marriage. His children decided that he should consider assisted living and two years ago he moved to the Beehive Homes, which he says is a “wonderful place to be.”

John Davis was raised in Worland, graduating from W. H. S. in 1961. John began practicing law here in 1973 and is mostly retired. He is the author of several books.

John and his wife, Celia, were married in 1967, have two adult sons, and several grandchildren. Their home is known as the Worland House and is on the National Registry of Historic Places.