This is an excerpt from a soon-to-be published book titled: The Watchmaker’s War, by Roger H. S. Schulman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_S._H._Schulman ). Mr. Schulman was a journalist for Newsweek and BusinessWeek who turned screenwriter. He is best known for co-writing “Shrek,” for which he won a British Academy Award and was nominated for an Oscar™. He has also written many animated films for Disney, and run live-action comedies for Disney and the networks.
NOTE: This copyrighted excerpt is distributed solely for the purposes of publication in the blog of Adair Living History. Any other use is prohibited without express written consent of the author.
The Watchmaker’s War
“War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.”
—Ernie Pyle
Many of the young men who arrived at Camp Adair hailed from rural areas and had experience roughing it and wielding a rifle. To my father, a brick-and-mortar New Yorker, roughing it meant sitting on a Brooklyn stoop on a sunny day without a hat on. He had not so much as touched a firearm in his life. But Dad had a plan to leverage his special abilities into a job that would keep him dry and put a gun in his hand as seldom as possible.
As a wristwatch repairer in civilian life, Hyman could pop a loupe in his eye and use a miniature tool to work screws smaller than rice grains. He could clean, adjust, or replace the scores of parts inside a watch to tolerances within a fraction of a millimeter. Spring-powered wristwatches were the smartphones of the day—the one piece of high technology everyone wore and depended upon. Hy figured this expertise would land him a position calibrating and maintaining sensitive aeronautical instruments for the Army Air Force. The plan would keep his hands too busy manipulating intricate gizmos to sling a rifle much. The plan backfired: because of his finely honed manual skills, Hyman was made company armor artificer.
The job meant this: If a soldier could carry it and use it to kill someone, my father had to know how to take it apart, fix it, put it back together, and train others to use it. Four days in, Dad’s captain ordered him to help a lieutenant adjust his gun. The lieutenant had three years’ experience. Dad wrote Mom:
Well honey in about 10 minutes your boyfriend had that part off the gun and explained to the Lt. how it should be done. […] The fellows tried to rib me about being the arms artificer of the HQ co., so all I did was show them that I could hold down that position.
Put in charge of all ammunition and supplies for the company during rifle training, he and the men under him cleaned and prepared weapons until 11 at night, then got up at five in the morning to truck them four miles to the range and distribute them for firing practice. By the end of January 1943, my father had handled more rifles than Annie Oakley, but had yet to be rated as a shooter himself. When the day arrived, Dad had no idea. He wrote:
It was a beautiful day that Wed morning, dark as pitch, raining like a flood torrent and boy was it cold. Here’s exactly what I wore that day. 1 set summer underwear, 1 set winter underwear (long drawers), 1 sweater (your present), 1 shirt, 1 jacket, 1 pr of pants, 1 pr of leggings, 1 pr of overshoes (rubber boots), 1 mackinaw coat, 1 rain coat, 1 wool hat, helmet, 1 pr of wool gloves, and I still was cold during the day.
Hy slogged through ankle-deep mud and knee-deep water, and lay on the wet ground for hours, coaching infantrymen on proper shooting position (how Dad became an authority on this subject in so short a time I do not know).
Then, an hour before the men were due to return to the barracks, Dad was himself ordered to shoot for score. Exhausted, Dad grabbed his M-1 Garand rifle, flopped into the mud, took aim…
It really was important for me to get a good score because I was being kidded by all the fellows in the Co. about what I was supposed to make. Being the armor artificer of the Co. it didn’t matter whether I had ever shot a gun in my life or not, I was supposed to get a good score.
CRACK. The kid from New York scores a bull’s-eye.
Hyman exhales, squints along the sights, holds his breath, tenses his finger…
CRACK. Bull’s-eye. Some soldiers took notice.
CRACK. Bull’s-eye!
Dad’s first three shots were plumb center perfect, and everyone saw it. Unfortunately, being practice shots, these did not count toward his score. By then, it was time to head to the barracks; during the trip back, Dad doubtless heard the phrase “lucky shots” over his shoulder more than once.
Dad was up at five the next morning and headed back to the range. Last up yesterday, he would be first up today. The whole company watched as the armor artificer assumed shooting position, adjusted his sights, and looked down the barrel at the target. It was the second time he had ever fired a rifle for score.
Well to make a long story short, Sweetheart, I got a score of 203, which is 17 points away from perfect and the second highest in the Co. I am therefore qualified as an Expert Rifleman, from which I only get satisfaction in knowing that the fellows and even the Lieutenant who always kids me along can’t say anything about shooting to me now.
“Expert Rifleman” was the army’s highest qualification badge, after Marksman and Sharpshooter. On paper, Mom celebrated this accomplishment. But in her heart, she feared Dad’s increasing expertise was bringing him closer to shipping out before the war was over. Friends, co-workers, pen pal soldiers, newspapers, and newsreels saturated her with news, much of it frightening. She wrote:
I almost forgot to congratulate you on receiving the two medals. I’m oh oh oh so proud of you! I’ll give you a whole bunch of kisses when I next see you. […]
Remember that fellow I’ve been writing to named Leonard Finkelstein — well, I saw in the paper that he is a Jap prisoner – isn’t that awful?
This war — I hate it!
(Cpl. Finkelstein, captured in the Philippines at age 19, spent almost three and a half years in a Japanese POW camp, among the longest imprisonments recorded there. He survived the war.)
Between his marksmanship and his job as an artificer, Dad’s life had to become all about firearms. He spent days maintaining rifles, distributing them to his fellows, supervising their shooting, and practicing his own. Soon he was an expert at virtually every type of weapon the company used, from fully automatic rifles to machine guns, and was dubbed one of its best overall riflemen. And he achieved all this while slogging through conditions that people detest and weapons can’t tolerate: a stormy, muddy mess that prompted the troops to dub the place “Swamp Adair.”
The nickname wasn’t hyperbole. Even comedian Jack Benny knew to put it at the top of his introduction when he broadcast his famous radio show from the camp’s field house. Stepping up to the microphone, he winked, “Fellas, it certainly is great being here at Swamp—I mean Camp—Adair!” The recruits, my dad among them, roared and cheered with recognition. Rain pummeled the pine to such an extent that long before the U.S. Army showed up in Benton County, local farmers had earned the moniker “Webfeet.”
Sat. morning we had the first Division parade in our camp. We put on our best clothes with a raincoat and light packs and stood in review before the Generals of the Camp. You should see 15,000 men walking in mud up to their ankles, falling practically all over themselves, boy what fun.
Bad as it was, rain was the least of the problems for an Adair selectee. Sitting just fifty miles from the Pacific, well within range of carrier-borne fighter planes, the cantonment was classified a combat zone. “We didn’t think they’d come at us like with 9/11,” my mother told me, “but we were afraid on the East Coast, and the California Coast.”
The fear was not without foundation. While my father trained at Adair, a Japanese submarine surfaced fifty miles up the coast and targeted Fort Stevens—the only attack on a continental U.S. military installation during World War II. The Imperial sub’s deck gun did little more than knock out telephone cables and destroy a baseball field backstop, but the boat was able to slip away untouched, leaving behind the message that the homeland was within enemy reach.
Enemy attack aside, a young man could die just practicing for battle, caught by a machine-gun bullet in a live-fire exercise or run over by a half-track. The pressure was unrelenting. Some did not wait for an accident, and preferred to commit suicide.
Photographs of the soldiers in training present an unsettling picture. These men appear less like action heroes than construction workers given a terrible assignment. More precisely, they are destruction workers, trained and equipped with handheld tools and large machines to kill and destroy. “We had a job to do, and we did it,” they would say in letters and postwar interviews, as if describing a trade where hard hats became helmets, jackhammers transformed into bazookas, and plowshares were beaten into swords.
A training ground for violence, Camp Adair was born in violence. The government had decided to build a massive camp in the area in mid-1941, but the military bureaucracy dragged its boots for months. Then Japan launched its air raid on Pearl Harbor, and Congress approved funds for construction within five days. Working even faster, the military zeroed in on Wells, Oregon, as a target for the new cantonment. Uniforms walked into the town’s schoolhouse the morning after the Japanese attack and announced that everyone in town needed to be gone by that afternoon.
Hundreds of farmers were summarily turned out of their homesteads to clear the way. Some landowners, booted off farms their families had worked for generations, died of heart attacks brought on by grief. Even those already dead weren’t spared: 600 graves were uprooted to make way for the military school. The entire town was razed; today, the only thing left of Wells, Oregon, is a single oak tree: weeping moss.
To achieve the frantic construction deadline of six months, workers assembled 1,800 buildings at the rate of one every 32 minutes. The structures were thrown up so quickly that the green wood groaned for weeks as it seasoned, startling occupants. Barracks, post offices, mess halls, post exchanges, and one “gas house” to toughen soldiers against chemical attack. Eleven chapels: even the most agnostic of young men tended to dwell on the possibility of an afterlife once drafted.
Workers engineered earth and poured concrete to replicate the European battlefield, right down to a mock German village to assault, capture, and hold. Within ten months, 500 barracks held 40,000 men—Oregon’s second-largest city. Among them were the 16,000 men of the 104th Infantry Division, the Timberwolves. Dad was one of them.
Yet even after I read his letters, I couldn’t imagine Dad with a gun in his hands. Throughout my childhood and right up until his death, he never so much as mentioned guns. Not to argue that we ought to have one in the house to protect us, or that he’d be damned if his children ever picked one up, or to recall his war days. He owned no guns, read nothing about them, looked at no photographs. The subject was sequestered.
Why? It wasn’t as if Dad was pacifistic; politically, he was something of a hawk. But once his military career was over, he seemed determined to put the weapons of war behind him, and perhaps shield his family from them.
It worked. I’ve touched a gun very few times in my life, most recently when I met Matt Helget, a “living historian” who specializes in Camp Adair. With his lagoon-blue eyes and strong chin—and when he dresses in his authentic WWII infantry gear—Matt looks like a breathing 1940s recruiting poster. He teaches museum visitors about people like my father.
That’s where I met him—inside one of only two remaining original Camp Adair barracks, which he and his organization Adair Living History (ALH) hope to fully restore as a museum honoring the cantonment. He handed me an M1 Garand battle rifle of exactly the type my father used to earn his Expert qualification. As he pulled it out of its bag, my wife and daughter, who were along for the trip, gasped and instinctively stepped backward. “Oh, no, no, no,” my kid, then 12, said. “I don’t like guns.” Elizabeth wrapped her arms around her from behind and asked Matt to make sure it wasn’t loaded (it wasn’t).
The Garand (pronounced to rhyme with “errand” as per its inventor’s name) is by today’s aesthetics a crude-looking and primitive piece. After holding the rifle, I felt for Dad, who had to schlep the 9½-pound thing on hikes with a full pack through miserable weather. A lot of hardwood enrobes the rifle’s steel, creating a look more of lodge furniture than a gun. Yet the Garand was a revolution, a semiautomatic battle rifle that did not require the shooter to throw a lever after each round, giving the G.I. a huge advantage over his German adversary. An American boy could empty his Garand as fast as he could pull the trigger—pow pow pow pow pow pow pow pow!— and the rifle would eject the empty clip with a signature ping! to ready the magazine for reloading. This was the weapon my father scored one bull’s-eye after another with, kept by his side for years, used to wound or kill other young men—and never mentioned a word to me about it.
❦
In a wondrous way, Dad did talk to me about the war when I visited what remains of Camp Adair in Oregon. As my family headed south on Pacific Highway West, a savage downpour hit us. Thunder boomed like artillery. The rain was so thick it pushed down the windshield wipers, then suddenly turned to hail, striking the glass with a sound like bullets. As quickly as it started, the deluge ended, and I had my own little taste of Swamp Adair. I was hoping for something grand and a bit magical to signal my trip back in time, and perhaps the squall was it.
In a designated parking lot, we met Gary L. Richards, more Vietnam-era than WW II, a board member of Adair Living History. He introduced us to Matt, the president of the group, the guy who showed me the Garand rifle. As they talked with my wife, I scanned the area. There was not much to see; it looked to me like a roadside lot you might find off any anonymous highway. Green, scruffy, indistinct. Many of the men’s sentences began with “This used to be.” This used to be the hospital area of the camp. This used to be a training ground. The field house. Lots to imagine; not much to see. I started wondering if the downpour was the most spectacular sight we’d take in and whether this trip, as they used to say during the war, was really necessary.
Matt and Gary escorted my family and me to the pride of ALH, the restored pair of barracks. Each about as long as a gymnasium and one-third as wide, thirteen windows along each length. For some reason, they were now painted pale yellow instead of the regulation olive drab. I yearned to see some evidence my dad was ever actually here, that this really was the land on which he lived for more than eight months as he was put through his paces. Was anything left of Camp Adair, or my father’s spirit in this place? I imagined telling my aging father that I was taking a plane and a car to visit the spot where he went through basic training for his part in World War II. I was sure of his reply: “What? Why the hell would you do that? What are you wasting your time for?”
Inside the barracks, there was little between one end of the building and the other but musty air. I could see the original wood rafters crisscrossing the peaked roof; otherwise, there were just pictures of what used to be, drawings taped to the floor of what might be, and a few plastic utility tables. I was afraid my little girl would quickly grow bored and was relieved when she and my wife left to forage for a bathroom and a latte.
Gary unrolled a laminated display he had put together showing the boundaries of Camp Adair laid over a map of Oregon. Alongside the map, he had picked a few black-and-white army photos of Camp Adair for interest. I focused on the 66,000-acre sprawl of the cantonment, enough room for more than 700 Disneylands.
My family returned from a nearby drive-through coffee hut whose operator they had convinced to reopen on a Sunday, laden with oversized plastic cups of gourmet iced coffee and numerous white bags of saucer-sized cookies, about as fancy-pants a snack as one could imagine in this government barn. Elizabeth laid the stuff on the table and perused the map while I was engrossed in conversation with Gary.
Elizabeth’s voice cut through my chitchat. She was windmilling her arm:”You’ve got to look at this.” At the table, she pointed at one of Gary’s Signal Corps photographs. A tingling spread through my limbs.
The man in the photo was my father.
In his uniform shirt and garrison cap, he leans into a wall telephone, clutching its pepper mill-style receiver to his ear. Phone calls were precious things in an army camp. Dad would have had to coordinate both ends, wait hours for the connection. Three days of salary to push as much feeling as he could through the wires in three minutes. The person on the other end had to be important. It had to be Mom.
Suddenly I was there, and then. Barracks rose from empty fields. Nurses paraded past Coffin Butte while troops marched to the gas house to sample poison. Boys played basketball in the field house down the road, because that’s what boys do, even if they’re in uniform. Windows pulsed with artillery fire. My father, a boy, I became the old man, watching a smile I had never seen in life or photo, a grin that meant one thing: his gal was on the line. Mom told me their calls were mostly silence: Just breathing and weeping, throats too tight for words. By the time they found their voices, the ever-present operator announced their time was up.
Gary told me he had gotten the photo from the Camp Adair collection at the Benton County Historical Society museum, 15 miles away. He had chosen the image more or less at random; he liked its looks.
The Signal Corps took thousands of photos of Camp Adair. The historical society kept about five hundred. What were the odds I would see this picture, in this empty bunkhouse, now? My mother would have called it bashert—Destiny—the kind of sign she was always looking for, but which I tended to resist as being too wonderful to be true. I looked at Elizabeth beaming at me. She had no doubts. I was never more in love with her than at that moment.
My daughter looked at the photo and asked, “Who is it?”
“It’s my father,” I smiled.
“Wow,” she replied. “And it’s Father’s Day.”
I had forgotten.