A Call To Arms For Connecticut Regiment

Wwii: Looking Back

Connecticut's 169th

After Call-up, Historic Connecticut Regiment Readies For War

October 01, 1992|By ROBERT J. CONRAD; Courant Staff Writer

Editor's note: When President Franklin D. Roosevelt called up 18 combat divisions totaling 300,000 men in late 1940, Connecticut's historic 169th Infantry regiment was included.

For most of the next two years the regiment trained for combat. Fifty years ago, on Oct. 1, 1942, the 169th sailed from San Francisco to join the war against the Japanese.

Between then and 1945 the 169th fought from Guadalcanal to the Philippines and landed with the occupation force in Japan. It lost much of its Connecticut identity, but never all of it, and in this story and others to follow over the next three years, The Courant will relate the regiment's experiences.

More than 2,000 Connecticut National Guard troops marched through downtown Hartford to the armory in the clear midday cold of Feb. 23, 1941. Rows of silent spectators deadened the brass of military bands.

The 169th Infantry Regiment, the old First Connecticut militia, had been called into federal service three weeks earlier. The men were supposed to get a full year's training and then come home, their military duty done.

Along Capitol Avenue in Hartford, nobody truly expected that.

The day after the parade, the 169th returned to the armory, no bands.

Lt. Gen. Hugh A. Drum, commander of the First Army, administered a new enlistment oath by radio from New York. When he was done, the men of the 169th closed ranks to blurt "I do" into a microphone set in their midst. Their response was broadcast over 12 radio stations to members of the 43rd Division in armories in other New England states.

The two-day call-up ceremonies ended quietly as the soldiers broke into groups to pack. In early March, the 169th boarded trucks and trains for Florida.

"The night we moved out, we kind of had an eerie feeling. You

say to yourself, `Where am I going?' " says Charles Alex of New Britain, who served in a heavy-weapons company. "At this time very few people in the company had gone anywhere.

"You march down to the station and then you kind of get the feeling of the crowd, the mothers, the sweethearts, and sort of an uncontrollable emotion," Alex says. "You get on the train and after we take off it's almost, for about two or three hours, almost complete silence. And then it wore off."

Before 1941, the Connecticut Guard had a small core of career soldiers and recruits interested mainly in the $5 sign-up bonus and the monthly pay. The recruits were poor. They had finished high school or just missed. Either way, they worked mostly in machine shops. The few extra dollars helped.

"The work was slow around here so I figured I'd get another buck a week for bills and like that," says John Roger Lane of Hartford, who was in a service company.

"It was mostly a group of men who joined the Guards more for the payments they would receive," adds Alfred Cassella, a rifleman. "The little stipend they got was something that was needed. You know, the times of the Depression weren't too good."

Frank Bednarz, a communications man from Hartford, joined the Guard in 1939.

"I was working in a factory in Hartford, making tools," he says. "I decided I had enough of that factory work."

Anthony Wassil of Berlin, part of a heavy-weapons company in New Britain, was in trade school.

"Most anybody who was from New Britain worked in the factories," he says. "Those days you had to take up a trade, had to go to trade school to be a machinist."

Harold Dunbar of Bristol was a master toolmaker at New Departure in Bristol. He had joined the Guard in 1927, about the time he became an apprentice at New Departure. By 1941, he was an officer, had a wife and two children and was eligible for a work exemption. He decided to serve the year anyhow.

In peace, a National Guard rifle company had three officers and 63 enlisted men. In war, a company had five officers and 185 enlisted. Draftees filled out the ranks. A regiment would total more than 3,000 men, divided into three battalions with four infantry companies in each. Special units such as engineers or truck drivers were also assigned to regiments.

That was the Guard's role: to give the Army the framework for quickly assembling a fighting force.

The New England troops were assigned to Camp Blanding in Florida, about 45 miles southwest of Jacksonville. This was land where retailer James Cash Penney hoped to establish a cooperative farm community in the 1920s, his dream failing with the stock market crash of 1929.

The camp was built on flat, hot, sandy land next to circular Kingsley Lake. As a Guard camp Blanding had totaled 6,000 acres, but the Army expanded it to 51,000 acres. The camp served a troop population of about 65,000. Each division got its own white sand beach.

"We had visions of going down for a year, you know, and eating oranges and lying under the palm trees and coming home," says John Wilcox, a Hartford native and Trinity College graduate who was an infantry officer. "It was like a desert down there. It was all sand."

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