Wallerfield and the Road to Hell

The URL of the website got beheaded (we kept the head but threw the body, rest of it, away). God and the gnomes of "Newsday" willing, here it is now: http://www.firstgov.gov/ fgsearch/index.jsp?mw0=Fort+Read%2C+ Trinidad%2C+West+Indies+ World+War+Two&rn=37&in0=domain&dom0=www.army.mil%2Fcmh%2F&parsed=true&Submit=Search. (THIS IS, CORRECT).

Let us move on now to Everard Scott’s reminiscences of wartime in Trinidad. He was eight years old when the American troops first arrived here. He writes that growing up on Frederick Street (#113, directly across the street from Captain Alexis’ family home) was quite an experience.

He recalls one morning a British soldier who’d eaten something that disagreed with him came to their back door asking if he could use the outhouse; he had an accident before he got there, Scott’s mother cleaned up using ashes from the coal pot and asked if he’d like to have a shower. When he’d showered she gave him sandwiches and tea.

Her kindness was rewarded as he called often with all sorts of treats and goodies from the Army canteen; it was he who took the boys to the USO for ice creams so large they couldn’t finish them. Gaylord Kelshall tells there were three USOs on Wrightson Road, one for white troops where, apart from popular ballads, the music was mainly country and western, one for black troops where jazz and blues were played, and one for Puerto Ricans with Latin-American music.

Everard Scott read Captain Alexis’ account of prostitutes being murdered and their bodies burned in an incinerator on Point Gourde with "a pound of salt." He writes that although US Servicemen were not officially subject to local law, he distinctly remembered seeing a US sailor in uniform being brutally beaten by three local policemen because he had whistled at a girl on the street. The sailor was picked up by a Good Samaritan who took the bleeding and unconscious man away for treatment.

He recalls his family got to know quite a few American flyers; he remembers them as being "courteous and respectful to all of the members of our family." Which brings us to Gaylord Kelshall’s account of the US Army Air Corps Base at Fort Read, Wallerfield, and other airfields on Trinidad during World War II (WW II).

Fort Read, the base itself, covered 24 square miles; within that area the airfield at Wallerfield occupied four square miles, which included two runways, parking bays and taxi-strips to and from the runways. The Army Air Corps, as we’ve noted before, was under the command of the Army; this meant that Fort Read was, in effect, an Army base.

The Fort had buildings to house 12,000 men, and a local work force of 15,000 that travelled by train from Port-of-Spain to work each day.

The garrison consisted of five regiments, each regiment consisting of between three and five thousand men; these were the 252nd regiment, the 99th anti-aircraft regiment of black soldiers, the 213th light anti-aircraft, the 33rd infantry regiment and the 135th Combat Engineers.

President Roosevelt was well aware that not all the population of Trinidad would welcome a large body of foreign troops with open arms. He told the Army Chiefs organising the deployment of troops that their men were going to a place older than the USA.

The Army ignored his advice; no wonder there was trouble when uncouth young men who thought they’d been sent to the back of beyond behaved as if they were the lords of creation, that they could do whatever they wanted — and get away with it; so much so that some Trinidadians began to think the cure (to save them from the Germans) was worse than the disease (a German takeover of the colony).

But, as Everard Scott has pointed out, it was some rotten apples in the barrel that earned the US troops a bad name. Many families made friends with the strangers; some young women married their US soldier, sailor or Army Air Corps boyfriends.

However, Gaylord Kelshall relates that many men of the 99th anti-aircraft regiment — and their girlfriends — were a problem. These black troops were being paid more money than most had seen in their entire lives; women flocked to these free-spending soldiers and many were the fights between former boyfriends and the US troops.

Kelshall tells that when the regiment was ordered back Stateside the men were told they were going on manoeuvres in the bush; that they were to pile their heavy kit in the centre of their barrack rooms because they’d only need their backpacks. However, word leaked out that the regiment had its marching orders. Their local girlfriends weren’t about to let the boys of the 99th go without saying goodbye. The train carrying the regiment to the troopship in Chaguaramas was (in Kelshall’s words) festooned with wailing females.

The Army then proceeded to replace the 99th with the Alabama National Guard. They couldn’t have made a worse choice; finally, the Puerto Rican National Guard took over the duties of the 99th.

By the end of 1942 there were no less than 8,000 US servicemen in Trinidad. The majority were in the Naval base at Chaguaramas where there was much coming and going as warships arrived for training cruises, to be replaced by others when they were ready for battle. PC craft patrolled the waters around and about Trinidad, tracking the U-boats, attacking whenever possible.

Anti-submarine bombers and the huge "Spruce Goose" Martin flying boats attacked the U-boats from the air, dropping depth charges to blast them out of the water. (Two of the Martins flying boats survive to this day and are used to drop water and flame retardants, fighting forest fires in Canada — and Indonesia.)

Kelshall relates that the sea floor of the Gulf of Paria is littered with downed WW II planes; some forced to "ditch" after being attacked by the cannon on the U-Boats, others were the planes of young pilots on training flights who failed to make their landing back on the carrier flight decks. One of the planes resting on the sea floor still has the remains of the pilot, a famous baseball player, at the controls... Unexploded ordinance, bombs and shells, and shell casing still rest in the silt below the waters of the Gulf beside the skeletons of shot-up bombers and fighters.

Wallerfield with its two runways, parking bays and taxi-strips was only briefly involved in the fight against U-Boats and possible invasion. Planes landing at Wallerfield brought supplies for the garrison including, incredibly, gasoline, until the Base Commanders here managed to convince Washington (or wherever) that there was actually a Texaco oil refinery producing all the fuel the US forces needed down at Pointe-a-Pierre.

Today we expect to fly direct from New York to London, Paris, Rome, but the planes of WW II had to make at least one refuelling stop en route. To get supplies to US troops fighting in Europe and North Africa it was too dangerous, too insecure to take the direct, Northern route, too besides, the Irish weren’t exactly co-operative when it came to agreeing to grant landing and refuelling rights to US planes carrying wartime supplies to beleaguered Britain.

US planes carrying ammunition, food and equipment took a roundabout route from Miami to Wallerfield to Natal in Brazil (the bit on the map that sticks out towards the East into the Atlantic), then a transatlantic flight to Sierra Leone (the African "bulge" that protrudes westwards into the Atlantic), from there up to Morocco and across the Mediterranean to Europe.

From 1942, when combat aircraft were moved out to Carlsen Field, to 1945 there was a constant stream of supplies coming through Wallerfield. Carlsen Field wasn’t the only small airstrip in use in WW II, Camden Field was another small base and, as we have seen Toco airstrip was one of the many landing strips dotted about Trinidad for planes in trouble to make an emergency landing.

In Fort Read itself the Army, as distinct from the Army Air Corps, drilled and patrolled beaches and trained in the more remote parts of Trinidad. Lennox de la Rosa has already told us of a unit of the 33rd Infantry Regiment patrolling beaches in the North East.

The patrols, be they of the 33rd or other US regiments, took their duties seriously. Seeing lights on East Coast beaches the US servicemen decided these were Nazi sympathisers signalling to U-Boats sending spies and equipment ashore. The US Command organised a huge exercise covering the East Coast to trap the spies. Troops moved in, as planned, on dark night and caught — local lads hunting with lights to catch crabs.

On a more serious note, the few surviving veterans of the 1st battalion 33rd Infantry Division (Merrill’s Marauders) have never forgotten jungle training in Manzanilla, known to the troops as "The Road to Hell" because their training involved the use of live ammunition. It’s said losses averaged four casualties killed every day while troops were out on jungle training manoeuvres in Manzanilla.

It was Merrill’s Marauders’ first, worst taste of jungle warfare. After training, these elite troops were sent to Burma (Myanmar, today) where, instead of making use of their special skills learned in Trinidad, they were sent into action as ordinary infantry, "cannon-fodder" and were massacred . . .

Next week: The arts in wartime, VE day and "bringing the boys home" with Project Green.