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closePATTON TOWNSHIP -- Without Walter Conrad and his fellow mechanics, the American war effort would have ground to a halt.
They belonged to the Seabees, the famous naval construction battalions responsible for building harbors, airfields and bases in Europe and the Pacific.
Now 89 and living in Patton Township, Conrad didn't hammer together any beams for barracks or grade any runways. But, as a first-class machinist mate and later a chief petty officer, he kept vehicles running for those who did.
"Electricians needed trucks. Steelworkers needed trucks," Conrad said. "Basically what I did was keep the rolling stock rolling."
Before posts on Kodiak Island in Alaska and on Guam, he held the same job at the Whiterock Quarry in his hometown of Pleasant Gap.
When war broke out, the quarry was shipping stone to steel mills in Pittsburgh and Wheeling, W.Va. Conrad, part of an essential wartime industry, received several deferments -- until his draft board reclassified him as 1-A the summer of 1942 and a letter instructed him to report for a physical.
"And I thought, 'Boy, I have to do something,' " he said.
Firmly opposed to being drafted into the Army, he hightailed it to the Harrisburg office of one of the quarry's directors, a naval officer.
Conrad, who told the director he wanted to enlist in the Navy, received a note for the local recruiting officer across the street. During his subsequent interview, Conrad revealed that he maintained crushing equipment, trucks and autos for his job -- skills he picked up in his father's garage.
That evening, in Philadelphia, he was sworn in.
Officially, he wasn't a Seabee yet. It took another two months for him to join the brotherhood of men known for their experience and "can-do" attitude.
"Most of the Seabees were married and had families," Conrad said. "They were older people. They pulled them off construction jobs all over the United States."
In the newly formed 41st Naval Construction Battalion, he underwent basic training, having no idea where he would wind up. Then, in January 1943, he was off to Kodiak Island aboard a liberty ship, the Southern Cross.
But first he had to survive winter seas.
"We had a destroyer escort, the Fox, and half of the time we could see that ship, and the other time, you'd be riding up top of a wave and then you'd go down in the trough, and you couldn't see (the Fox)," he said.
The weather wasn't as vicious on Kodiak -- just some fog, blowing snow and rain. None of it stopped the Seabees from building a permanent base meant as a hedge against any further Japanese aggression in the Aleutian Islands chain.
Conrad, a foreman in a truck shop, often ventured out on coastal roads in a modified Dodge flatbed full of tools and spare parts to rescue stranded jeeps, dump trucks and other vehicles before the tide claimed them.
The conditions played havoc on the distributor caps of officers' cars, and Conrad spent many a morning starting them.
"That was a ritual in the wet weather," he said.
What couldn't be fixed outside came back to the shop. There, the Seabees toiled 12 hours a day, seven days a week, under hoods and chassises, often with little supervision.
"I basically never had any contact with the officers," Conrad said. "You were assigned a job, and you did that job."
They knew how to play hard, too.
A few nips now and then were as standard as card games and movies. Marines at the gate checked for contraband liquor, but getting around that was child's play for guys who knew their way around a transmission blindfolded.
One Seabee, assigned to a grease truck for servicing equipment in the field, hid a case where only the most suspicious guard would search.
"Nobody ever thought of looking in a 55-gallon drum of grease," Conrad said.
After 14 months, the battalion left the island. Conrad married Thelma Sones while home on a 15-day furlough. Almost three months later, he shipped out for Guam, where he eventually ended up with the 76th Naval Construction Battalion.
With the island lacking a proper port -- making it necessary for Conrad to disembark down rope ladders -- the Seabees swung into action. Bases, airfields and even a harbor breakwater needed to be constructed.
Conrad, maintaining trucks once more, worked in a repair depot with technical, body, tire and machine shops and many friends -- including a mechanic from Maine who helped rebuild a jeep for running around the base.
"Great bunch of guys, I tell you," Conrad said. "They were the best."
That didn't keep them from razzing Conrad after he walked into the shop one day without seeing his promotion to chief petty officer posted on the bulletin board.
Life was comfortable, sleeping in airy tents, playing baseball and listening to Tokyo Rose's propaganda rants and swing music on the radio. But the war wasn't that distant. Shot-up B-29 bombers would fly overhead returning from raids on Japan, engines on fire, sometimes crashing and exploding.
Then, one morning, Conrad read that peace had arrived.
He stayed until October, returned to the U.S. on a converted refrigerator ship and went back to work at the Whiterock Quarry. In 1965, he retired from the industry.
Alone since his wife died five years ago, he remembers his Seabee days fondly.
"I think it was one of the greatest parts of my life, when all is said and done," Conrad said. "I was doing the things I did in civilian life. What more could you ask for?"
Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.
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