From the Wynoochee Valley to WWII

Howard Carter was born April 30, 1923, making him 101 years old today.

He was born on a homesteaded Wynoochee Valley dairy farm of 23 cows where he grew up, one of seven siblings. His great-grandparents homesteaded 240 acres in the valley, where Carter Creek is named. His family raised hay to feed the cows. Howard would get up during his high school years at 4:30 a.m., milk the cows by hand, and catch the 7:35 a.m. bus to school. He would return home and jump off the bus at 4:50 p.m. each school day.

Dairy farming was not glamorous. Before school, on a good day, he would have time to change clothes.

In his senior year at Montesano High School, he turned out for football, making the team playing left guard and earning a letter. He weighed a measly 132 pounds.

“I was fast,” Howard said, during a recent interview at his home overlooking the high school in a home he and his brother built.

Today Howard shuffles with a cane, his eyesight and hearing in decline, with a variety of aches and pains, many of them coming from World War II events in Europe. He’s still sharp and full of vigor.

As a 13-year-old there was a beat down Model T Ford falling apart in the family barn. His dad gave him permission to fix up the car. Soon, a speedster of a driver who later in life was a race car driver, would cruise up and down the valley at high speed — his daughter called him a “Wynoochee road terror.”

“Don’t put that in the paper,” she said.

He graduated from high school in May and by late August landed a job at the Grays Harbor county shop, taking care of pool and police cars.

Drafted

He worked until he was drafted into the war in 1943, barely out of his teens.

“There was nothing to say or do, they just tell you,” Howard said, adding something he repeats over and over. “I was probably one of the luckiest persons ever drafted.”

He was sent to train in the skill of anti-aircraft at a military camp in Virginia.

“We learned to identify aircraft,” Howard said. “I could tell you all — British, American and German — by sight or sound.”

He was then sent to Field Camp Davis in North Carolina for 17 more weeks of training. He honed his skills further in anti-aircraft and then in auto mechanics.

“I took an aptitude test and on being a mechanic, I rated high,” he said, something that would carve a path for his upcoming military career.

He came out of Camp Davis as a three-striped sergeant. They then assigned him to Camp Huton in Palacios,Texas as a motor sergeant. Howard thought it a bit ridiculous that the camp had only six vehicles to service.

As a motor sergeant, he had an office. One day a lieutenant came into his office, a higher rank above sergeant. Howard didn’t stand at attention. The lieutenant took umbrage.

“When you talk to me, you stand at attention,” the lieutenant barked.

“He lectured me and left me standing at attention,” Howard said.

Howard’s captain released him from the standing salute, saying the lieutenant had “a high anger.”

Days later the lieutenant returned, and insisted Howard salute his superior.

Howard replied, “’As far as I’m concerned I don’t see anybody that meets that.’ He started to reach out for me. I rolled back the chair and grabbed an ashtray, stood up and grinned at him. He went steaming out of there. I went up to my captain, I just took off my sergeant stripes and gave them to my captain. He gave them back. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

But that meant Howard had to be transferred out. The captain offered Howard four choices to go to, including the 3508 Medium Automotive Maintenance Company.

“I’ll take that one,” Howard said.

The captain replied, “They’re going overseas in three months.”

Howard said, “Aren’t we all?”

“I stayed there ever since, all the time I was in the service,” Howard said.

He was soon shipped out. His company traveled by train to Boston, about to ship to Europe. In Boston, it was cold — 20 degrees. They gave him two pieces of wool underwear. The wool gave him blisters all over his torso.

The company then boarded a ship to Scotland. He was in a blister nightmare. Howard said the ship doctor tried everything to no avail.

“An old sailor came walking by, looked at me, said, ‘Oh, wool burns,’ then said to cure, take a saltwater shower and don’t dry off. How right he was, took care of that.”

Scotland

They landed in Glasgow, Scotland, with a company of 96 men and four officers, and soon found themselves in a small military camp in Southwest England, in a town about the size of present-day Montesano.

To keep in shape they would take 25-mile marches.

A commander came by one day and asked for six men. Howard was picked as one of them.

The commander asked, “Who can lead them?”

The captain said Howard used to be a sergeant and he was a good one.

“They taught us to drive a tank. Tank driving to me was just like driving a Caterpillar, a tracked vehicle,” something Howard learned on the dairy farm in Montesano.

Howard was told, “Just don’t run it into a tree.”

The crew of six tank drivers were told to be ready to move into the war. They were given a carbine rifle with three clips of ammunition, a canteen of water and nothing else except a “candy bar” that was anything but sweet.

Howard was told, “You be ready to go at a moment’s notice at all times day or night.”

“We wondered what we were in for,” Howard said.

In about three weeks, they were taken at night to a barge in South England and sent to France. On the barge were six tanks for the six drivers.

Omaha Beach

“The next morning we came to the beach in Normandy,” Howard said.

It was just a day or so after the D-Day landing. The barge captain said to the tank drivers, “When this front gate drops, you go off.”

Howard was in the lead tank, the others followed him off the barge and into the shallow water.

They drove up the beach into a small canyon, and followed a Jeep up a thin trail. An officer told the tank drivers to go up the road and into the brush, with the gun barrel hidden from sight, and “stay with your tank day and night.”

The canteen of water and “candy bar” was to last a week or more.

“You didn’t want to eat it all, you’d get hungry,” Howard said.

The men were then told to go down a gravel road and deliver the tanks to a forward crew, then walk back, about a two-mile trek. They ended up supplying tanks for the famous Gen. Patton from south of Paris.

“I remember seeing the Eiffel Tower,” Howard said. “I walked up to the first level, it was locked above that.”

Their job as a company of mechanics evolved into keeping the cars on the supply road running — Jeeps and Dodges and GMCs.

One day, when on the supply road, Howard spotted a German fighter plane flying right at him and his partner while they were driving a Jeep. He was less than a half mile away, at about 1,000 feet in the air. They were driving about 35 miles per hour. Howard jumped out to the left, his partner to the right, just before bullets flew.

The tank was strafed through the windshield, through the seats and into an empty gas can.

Howard landed in a ditch and broke his right knee cap, an injury that still hobbles him to this day. His toes were bent back. An ambulance stopped by, wrapped his knee. His chin was dripping blood. He was asked if he wanted to go back to England to mend.

“I said no,” Howard said. They told him to take it easy for three days. The Jeep, now stuck in a ditch, was still running. Howard backed it out, and drove it back to his company.

“I wanted to be with my outfit,” Howard said.

Later, on a routine road patrol, a German fighter plane started shooting at Howard and his partner.

“I picked a nice foxhole” and he dived in, Howard said, but someone was already in the foxhole.

“I heard gunfire, aircraft machine guns. I got in a ditch. I always said I was the luckiest person, the truck driver beat me to the foxhole, a bomb completely got him.”

Shrapnel from the bomb took out Howard’s three lower and two upper teeth and cut a saliva gland. Medics came by and took his broken teeth out and told him it was “going to bleed.”

“If I ate too much, saliva would run down my cheek,” Howard said.

He said the pain from his knee, his ankle, and his mouth was just something to be endured.

“You get used to it, I think,” Howard said from his Montesano home. “I had so much pain you don’t think anything of it.”

After that, Howard said, the war quieted down for him, and his company took over an airfield. Pilots would come by and refuel. One gave Howard some advice if an enemy plane approached.

“If you get fighter planes, shoot at them coming toward you,” the pilot said. “Shoot at them like a picket fence, so they can’t see the tracers.”

A week later a convoy of seven American trucks approached, driving real slow toward Howard’s company auto repair workshop set up in the airfield. Howard heard three German fighters planes approach.

“I grabbed a gun and put up a picket fence. The first one turned off east. The second one went east. The third one went east.”

A commander exited the Jeep leading the convoy, and asked, “Who was that behind the gun? Do you know what you just did?”

It was Howard.

“I scared off the German planes. Those trucks in the convoy were loaded with troops with no firepower,” Howard said.

The commander replied, “You don’t know how many people you saved.”

Howard said, “I was the luckiest person that ever was drafted.”

For his landing on Omaha Beach, Howard was awarded the Normandy medal, a treasure he still cherishes. He said only seven soldiers in the Northwest earned such an award.

Howard has many stories to tell about his time in Europe during World War II, from conversing with Gen. George S. Patton to being at Hitler’s home.

Back to the farm

When the war ended Howard was in Munich, Germany.

“A command car read off three names, ‘You got 10 minutes to get your stuff together, you’re going home.’ That was the best words I’d ever heard in a long time.”

They took a big ship home, through a storm and rough seas, and Howard was back in Wynoochee. He went back to working for the county motor pool, eventually, many years later, being the supervisor over four Grays Harbor shops.

Already engaged before he left, he married his high school sweetheart upon his return. They met when he was a starter for Montesano football as a senior in high school, she was a yell leader. They married on July 6, 1946. She was 19, he was 23. They rented a house on Church Street in Montesano, then Howard and his brother built the house he still lives in.

He worked for 43 years with the county, eventually becoming supervisor, then retiring in 1984.

He enjoyed hunting, fishing and gardening, shooting deer and elk, and catching salmon in his 19-foot Bellboy, often landing “big kings.”

Today, Howard enjoys a breakfast of Quaker oatmeal, cooked 2O minutes, along with toast with strawberry jelly and bacon. For lunch he often eats soup made with ingredients from his garden, and a peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwich. Dinner is often leftovers. For dessert, it’s a small chocolate Hershey candy bar and ice cream. The candy bar is a far cry from the one from the war.

“I ate very little of that candy bar,” Howard said. “Today I still like to eat.”

His secret to living a long life of 101 years (“I think I’ll live to 112”) is keeping busy and eating regularly.

From the war, he appreciates being highly trained as an advanced mechanic.

If he had to live his life again, Howard said, “I’d do the same things over.”

For advice for kids growing up today, Howard said, “Take an aptitude test with someone who knows how to read ‘em. … If you grade high in an aptitude test, why don’t you study it.”

For Howard, life is still a joy. He still works his 10-foot by 20-foot garden, much smaller from times gone by.

On this day of the talk with Howard, he looked out the window at the weather. It had been raining lately.

“I’m waiting for the weather to change to rototill,” he said.

Howard Carter sitting on a tank in Europe.

While in France, a young girl approached Howard Carter, saying if you supply soap, my family will wash your clothes. The clothes returned, washed and pressed. The next time, Howard and his company supplied the soap, but also left some candy in the soap bag.