Hughes turns 100

Editor's Note: the following story was originally published by the Gillette News Record about Moorcroft's oldest living resident, Bill Hughes, who turns 100 on Wednesday, September 8.

Recalling stories of his father's service during World War II, Doug Hughes begins with a peculiar memory.

"He said they bombed a lot of whales," he said.

He then lets out a sharp, abbreviated laugh, a single "Ha!" as if he couldn't believe the absurdity of the whole thing even as he said it.

"He" was his father, Bill Hughes, now a 99-year-old World War II veteran who lives at the Legacy Living and Rehabilitation Center in Gillette.

But more than 75 years ago, Bill was a flight engineer during the war, flying mostly on B-17 Flying Fortresses.

"They were supposed to be training for submarines because there had been submarine activity," Doug said. "This was around the continental U.S. now, so on their training missions, they did have live payloads and when they thought it was an enemy sub, they dropped them. He thought it was a lot of whales, he always told me."

Toward the end of Hughes's service, he was sent to Okinawa, Japan, to fly in B-29 Superfortresses with the bomber group that contained the Enola Gay, which dropped the world's first atomic bomb in war.

Bill Hughes now lives at the Legacy and dementia has crept in to rob him of such memories. It would be difficult to ask him about the memories he's retained because his hearing is failing him. It's up to Doug to share his father's war stories now.

He's Bill's only child, which makes Doug the keeper of a legacy of one of the state's approximately 699 living veterans from that historic and world-changing struggle. Only two states - Alaska and South Dakota - have fewer living World War II veterans.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that roughly 296 World War II veterans die each day and, in many instances, with them go their stories. From that great mobilization of American military might came more than 16 million troops who answered their country's call. Today, barely more than 325,000 remain.

Holidays are retrospective events, a time for memories and stories, and Veterans Day is no exception. Originally called Armistice Day in November 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson to commemorate the cessation of hostilities in World War I. Then came World War II and Korea.

In 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower, perhaps the most celebrated general-turned-president since George Washington, signed into law a bill that placed what had been renamed Veterans Day on America's national calendar for Nov. 11.

There could hardly have been a better public figure to usher in the transition from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. In a public proclamation, Eisenhower presided over the official change so that "a grateful nation might pay appropriate homage to the veterans of all its wars who have contributed so much to the preservation of this nation."

Eisenhower was talking about the likes of Bill Hughes, and 66 years later, Doug is talking about him, too.

Doug is fighting the good fight to prevent his father's story from slipping from the world completely, but it's a lonely fight.

"The problem is he's outlived all of those types of contacts," he said of Bill's contemporaries. "There would have been a lot of them, but I can think of none that are still living."

Family isn't much help either.

"My cousins would know less than I do," Doug said. "I'm about your only liaison."

Bill Hughes began World War II not in the airplanes that he'd eventually occupy as a sergeant major, but in the civil service stationed in Annette Island, Alaska. He'd graduated from high school in 1939 and attended a few years of college, for a while at Black Hills State University and then at the University of Washington, where he studied business.

Doug said he thought the civil service seemed like a good option for his father.

"He was a business major, and I think it sort of fit with what he'd been studying," Doug said. "He dealt more with personalities."

That's not to say he was far from the action of war. Around the time Bill Hughes arrived at Annette Island in June 1942, the Japanese attacked the continental United States for the first time by striking at Dutch Harbor, Alaska.

But the story that Doug remembers his father telling wasn't one of battle; it was of an airfield crash.

"When he was on Annette Island, they had a USO show coming in," Doug said. "It was a poor airfield, muddy and sort of marshy. Anyway, it was very foggy, and the cargo plane crashed and burned and killed the entire planeload of USO.

"He said it was a pretty bad deal. I don't know how many were on it, but obviously it was a bad memory. It was a wartime casualty, but not from combat and they weren't military personnel either, except for the pilots."

By the time August 1943 rolled around, Hughes knew he needed to enlist if he wanted to avoid the randomness of the draft, and he chose the Army Air Corps. While he didn't know the exact mechanism by which it happened, Doug said his dad's civil service time kept him from going into the Air Corps as a private. He went in as a sergeant instead.

Bill's father, Cecil Clyde Hughes, had served in World War I, so Bill and his younger brothers came by their military service honestly.

"His brother Cecil, a couple of years younger, was in Patton's tank corps," Doug said of his uncle. "He had it a lot rougher. They enlisted together - it's a funny story.

"That might be one of the reasons Dad waited until '43 to actually enlist because, his brother being two years younger, couldn't enlist until then. They enlisted in the Army Air Corps together, but during the physical they discovered that his brother was color blind. They washed him out of the Air Corps, of course, and he ended up in an armored division stuck in a tank."

Some of Bill's stories made it easy for Doug to recognize the man he calls Dad.

"He always talked about (how) he was a ranking NCO, non-commissioned officer, and in the cafeteria at lunches and dinners, nobody could leave the table until the ranking officer left," Doug said. "He was a very slow eater; the guy could chew forever.

"They'd always be sitting there for an extra 30 minutes waiting for him to eat, and it never made them too happy."

Doug laughed at the thought as if he knew their frustrations all too well.

After he was discharged from the Army in 1946, Bill resumed a life that war had interrupted. He went back to college and graduated from the University of Wyoming with a business degree in 1948. He married Iris Bryan of Sundance in 1949.

He taught high school briefly in Buffalo, then went into business with his father-in-law at The Model Grocery in Sundance, first going in halfway as a partner and eventually buying his father-in-law's share of the business. Bill eventually sold the store in 1957, at which time he went to Casper to work for Pan American Petroleum and Transport Co. for three years.

Lifetime of service

Doug is convinced that his military service shaped the man he knew as father.

"It gave him a tremendous amount of organization and dedication," Doug said. "He was a very successful businessman. He was very goal-oriented. He was very public-oriented. He was mayor of Moorcroft, councilman of Moorcroft, school board. I guess he volunteered a lot."

Bill's experience in World War II affected him, made him critical of war.

"I know he was very proud of his service," Doug said. "He hated war. He hated the wars in Vietnam and Korea because he thought we were sacrificing a lot of lives in wars we weren't really trying to win."

Doug himself came of age during the Vietnam War in particular.

"I had a 2-S college deferment," Doug said. "As long as I stayed in school, didn't get expelled and kept my grades up, you had a 2-S. It had changed somewhat because I didn't go to college until 1970, so there wasn't a mandatory draft like the guys from '66 to '70. I never went. I never went into the military."

As a result, Doug has no war stories of his own, only his father's.

While Bill is 99, his son is nearing age 70 and when pressed to think about it, can't remember many other stories about his father's service in the war. It's not because his memory fails him. It's because those were all the stories he was told.

A reluctance to talk about or relive the horrors of war is something many veterans who have seen it have in common.

Could Doug have asked for more? Surely. Should he have asked for more? He's not quite sure.

"That's a tough question," Doug said. "That era of men, it was mostly men then, they didn't talk about it unless asked. Dad talked about some of the things I told you, and maybe that's my fault for not asking him more, but it wasn't a subject that he just brought up."

With his father now in his twilight years, Doug knows new stories won't be forthcoming. He knows his memories represent more than just his own.

"He was a good man," Doug said. "Well, he is a good man. He's just not the same man anymore. He can't really communicate anymore."

Do the stories Doug remembers represent the totality of his father's World War II experience? Most definitely not. Were they the most consequential and important stories? Possibly not. Are they enough, in number, in substance, as a record of one veteran's legacy?

Regardless of the answer, Doug knows they'll have to be.

In 1960, he went into the clothing and furniture business with his father in Moorcroft, in the building that now houses Diehl's Supermarket on North Bighorn Avenue. He eventually also bought his father's share of the business.

Doug said his father in many ways lived an idyllic vision of the American Dream that thrived in the post-war years. He retired young, Doug said, at just 55 years old. The business acumen and frugality he'd exhibited since the war made that possible.

"He sent all of his military paychecks - he kept a tiny amount - and sent them all home to his dad to buy cattle for him," Doug said. "His dad had a tiny ranch."

The cattle were waiting on Bill when he got home from the service in 1946.

"And he sold them as needed to go to school," Doug said.