By LESLIE KELLY
lkelly@soundpublishing.com

Burt Boyd always thought he’d be a Navy man.

“When I was drafted, I didn’t expect to pass the eye exam to qualify for the Navy,” Boyd said. “But I wanted to. So by squinting and a bit of memorizing, I did manage to pass.

“I stood in line waiting assignment to the Navy, but before they got to me, they filled their quota. They told us the rest of us would be assigned to the Army.”

That was in early 1944 and, by March, Boyd was headed to Fort Knox, Kentucky for basic training. “I remember the red clay,” he said. “When it was wet, it stuck to our shoes.” His other memory: two hills “aptly named Misery and Agony, which we had to march over to reach the training areas.”

There, he and other soldiers were instructed in the M1 Garand rifle, the carbine, the grease gun (a 45 mm handheld machine gun) and the 30 mm and 50 mm machine guns. “What I recall the most was that there was no ear protection,” he said.

From there, he was selected to attend the Armored Force School for communications.

“While I was in high school at North Kitsap High, I got my amateur radio license,” he said. “So it was an easy course for me to complete.” Soon, he got orders to go to Fort Meade, Maryland, for processing for overseas duty. “It was there that I had Thanksgiving Day dinner in 1944,” he said. Inside a black scrapbook, there it is — the menu for the day, calling for turkey and all the trimmings.

Boyd’s notebook is a collection of memorabilia from his service days. Official duty assignment orders. Photos of him in uniform. Holiday menus. German Deutschmarks and currency from France. It’s all there, along with notes he made when he had time. “We weren’t supposed to keep a diary,” he said of his days in the war. “But when I could, I’d write things down.”

His next move was to his points of embarkation, Camp Shanks and Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York. He spent Christmas aboard the MS Volendam, a Dutch ocean liner converted to a troop ship and leased to the U.S. by the British.

“When I went aboard, I so looked forward to seeing the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “But we were in the middle of the convoy and all I could see from one horizon to the other was ships.”

The food, he said, was “poor.” It wasn’t until GI cooks came aboard to take over the mess that it improved. “And there were British barbers on the ship. They’d stop in the afternoon for tea. That really upset those who were waiting in line for a haircut.”

The voyage to Le Havre, France, took 12 days. There were many rough days at sea, Boyd said. “We disembarked by climbing down rope ladders into personnel landing craft to reach shore,” he said. “The weather was freezing and we had only cots and tents.”

Soon they went by train to Fountainebleau, south of Paris. It was a 12-hour ride. When they got there, they were able to take showers and get fresh uniforms. Then they traveled to Metz, France, where Boyd and about 120 others were assigned to the 707th Tank Battalion. The 707th provided armored support for the infantry.

In January 1945, Boyd became a member of Headquarters Company as a radio operator. He was sent to Epernay, France, for training and then the battalion was sent to meet the 3rd Army. “We crossed the Rhine on a pontoon bridge at St. Goar, the site of the legendary Lorelei,” he said.

By April, he was in Eisennach, and then Gotha, and then passed through Ohrdruf. He saw other cities and then, in the first part of May, the advance was halted. “Except for isolated minor combat, the war ended there,” he said. “The surrender on May 8, a few days later, was just another day for us.”

Boyd recalled that some of the German soldiers surrendered and volunteered to join the U.S. Army. “They had heard that as soon as Germany surrendered, the Russians and Allies were going to fight each other,” he said. “When the war ended, we were in the Russian zone of occupation. As we departed, the Germans begged us not to leave.”

His battalion then got orders to Nuremberg to commence occupation duties. “There was a policy of non-fraternization, which meant we were to snub German citizens,” he said. “If we were seen talking to civilians, we could be picked up by military police.”

Following that, Boyd and others who had a short time left in the service were taken to one of the camps near Le Havre. “The camps were named after cigarettes,” he said. “My destination was Camp Lucky Strike … It was there that we learned that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, leading to the end of hostilities in Japan.”

Boyd got to see many processing depots — Namur, Belgium, Frankfurt, and finally, a Signal Service Battalion in Liege, Belgium. “This was the best I ever had it,” he said. “Two hours of duty every other night, and the rest was free time.”

It was too good to last. He was sent to Le Havre where demobilizing was happening. He was then sent to the Transatlantic Cable head attachment on the west coast of France.

“When I arrived, I was made a mess sergeant,” he said. “Two French cooks prepared the meals, but when they were caught stealing flour, two German POWs took their places.”

For a time he served as a motor pool sergeant and then, in May 1946, he left for home — Keyport, where he, his mother and brother had moved in 1937. After his father died, when Boyd was 12, his mother, who was a stenographer, learned of jobs at Keyport.

“My family was from Spokane and we lived in Wenatchee,” he said. “We lived in Seattle when my father was a salesman, and then, after he died, in Bellingham. Washington has always been home.”

Right out of high school, Boyd took the civil service exam and scored well. He received an apprenticeship as a machinist at the shipyard in Bremerton. That was interrupted when he turned 19 and was drafted. When he returned in summer 1946, he used the GI Bill to take classes at Olympic College, which was in its first year.

“We had our classes at the high school,” he said. “There weren’t any buildings on the OC campus yet.”

He finished degrees in education and psychology at what was then Western Washington College in Bellingham in 1951. “I was counseled to get out of engineering because there were no jobs,” he said. “They told me that there were jobs in teaching.” He taught two years in junior high. Then he got his master’s degree in psychology from the University of Oregon.

“I decided that my real interest was in mechanics,” he said. “So I came back to Keyport.”

At that time there was a critical shortage of machinists. He achieved a journeyman rating and spent years there as an estimator, preparing bids for government contracts. He retired in 1980, but later worked for a local company as a financial analyst.

While in college, Boyd finally did serve in the Navy, as a reservist for five years. “A couple of classmates talked me into it,” he said. “And when it came time to take a (duty) cruise, I was the only one who showed up.”

He and his wife, Doris, married in 1957. They now live in Silverdale at The Cottages retirement community. They have three children.

Today, at 90, Boyd is well known at the Naval Undersea Museum at Keyport, where he’s been a volunteer for many years. In his black scrapbook, there are pages of awards given to him for his hours of service to the museum. It isn’t often that he gets out his mementos of his war days and his military service. But when he does, he’s taken back to a time when life wasn’t easy.

“It was a hard time,” he said. “Everything, everywhere was rubble. There was so much destruction.”

As for his regrets: He never has gotten to see the Statue of Liberty.