Norbert E. Hines
Age 90
Born near Guckeen, MN in 1926 on the
family farm
Currently lives in Fairmont, MN
U.S. Navy World War II Veteran
Like many farm boys during the war
years of the 1940s, Norbert Hines joined the military to help in the
war effort. Hines enlisted in the U.S. Navy in May of 1944, just
before graduation from Fairmont High School. He was sent to Great
Lakes, Illinois for basic training then out west to Treasure Island
Naval Base in the San Francisco Bay to attend Navy cook and bakers
school.
Following that stint, Hines was sent to San Diego's Coronado
Island in February of 1945 for training and assignment on the attack
transport ship USS Fillmore APA-83. An interesting side note, the
ship, a Gilliam-class attack transport, was named after Fillmore
counties in Minnesota and Nebraska.
Hines admitted he had never been to sea
before joining the navy. “I decided to enlist in the Navy instead
of getting drafted,” Hines said. “I had heard stories from the
Army guys of having to deal with snakes and having to dig your own bed
every night to sleep.”
Hines eventually earned a deck division
boatswain's mate rating and was put “in charge of everything on the
top side of his ship,” Hines said. “That was quite a jump in
pay,” he added. “As a boatswain's mate 3rd class I was
making $100 per month. When I first went in as a seaman, I was only
making around $25 per month.”
The ship hauled everything from gun
boats to troops and various military cargo. Loaded to capacity with cargo and
passengers, Fillmore sailed from San Francisco April 25,1945,
bound for Lady Bay in the Philippines. Hines remembers the ship being
tracked by a Japanese submarine. “We had to zig-zag to avoid them,”
he recalled. “We were loaded up for the invasion of Japan, and
hadn't yet heard word of the Japanese surrender. Boy, there were a
lot of fireworks that lit up the sky to celebrate Japan's surrender,”
Hines said.
Hines and his shipmates made numerous
voyages across the Pacific Ocean between the South Pacific, Pearl
Harbor and Seattle, Washington carrying returning veteran troops and
supplies.
One of Hines most interesting post war
memories was being part of the 'Operation Crossroads'
atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands during 1946. “It was right at the
end of the war, and most of us had never heard of the atomic bomb,”
he remembered. “The USS Fillmore was one of two ships on the site
of the bomb testing. We were stationed about ten miles out from
ground zero and were part of two different tests of the bomb.”
The
Navy anchored numerous ships at the test site, and some ships even
had live animals on board. The veteran seaman still remembers the
eerie sight of the tall mushroom cloud that rose from the horizon. He
still has a faded and dog-eared photo of the bomb cloud right after
detonation. What they witness once on-board the surviving test ships at ground
zero was also something not soon forgotten, he admitted.
“We had to wait about ten-to-twelve days
before we could go on board those ships to see what had happened,”
he said. "The animals that were on board had died and were frozen
in place from the bomb's massive radiation blast.” Hines said
medics were always checking the men to see how much radiation was in our
blood streams. The 90 year-old jokes that the radiation must of help
him, since he's still feels healthy and is alive and kicking after
his experience with the atomic bomb.
Hines was 21 years old when discharged
from active duty in 1947. He joined the Navy Reserves and returned to
the Fairmont, MN area after that. The Korean War was just starting but Hines never was called up. He got married in 1950 and remained
in the reserves until April of 1952.
Hines summed up his military
experience serving his country. “I never did anything big. No
honors, and I never got into combat. So, I guess I lucked out that
way.”
