World War II

Type	War
Date	December 7, 1941 to September 2, 1945

Billerica's part in the Second World War began before Pearl Harbor. Under the Selective Service Act of 1940 the town gave Selective Service Board No. 11 a room in the Town Hall free of charge, and the board kept its quarters there until the government gave up the lease in 1946. Its chairman through the war was Dr. Orland S. Marshall. In their report for 1941 the selectmen wrote that under his "tireless efforts" the board had "established an enviable reputation for efficiency and fairness, and through this Board, many of our finest young men have been selected to enter the armed forces of our country." They praised in the same report "the various Defense Committees, under the leadership of Colonel Ranlett." Fifteen days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, at a special town meeting on December 22, 1941, with 151 voters present, one more than a quorum, the town transferred $2,350 from the outside relief appropriation "for the use of the Billerica Committee on Public Safety" and $150 toward the erection of an observation post.

The observation post was Post No. 268 of the Aircraft Warning Service, a tower at Nuttings Lake under the First Fighter Command of the Army Air Corps. Built under the supervision of Fred L. Smith with lumber and labor given by local firms and men, it was manned day and night by volunteers from January 8, 1942. The chief observer, George M. Dixon, reported that the post made about 160 telephone calls a month to the Army Report Center, covering some 225 aircraft passing within four or five miles, and that it was only about 80 percent manned, so that many observers stood two or more watches a week. The Committee on Public Safety spent its money in 1942 on sirens, uniforms for the State Guard, medical supplies, arm bands, blackout material, identification cards, whistles, and signs for the wardens' posts and first aid stations. Twenty-five men volunteered in January 1942 for an auxiliary fire department, trained by John H. Dardis, a retired deputy chief from Cambridge, and the department of Chief Ernest N. Bartlett sounded six test air raid alarms in 1942 and eleven in 1943. Because of the dim-out the Christmas trees on the Town Common and the triangle at North Billerica were not lit in 1942. The schools had air raid plans for every building, drawn up on the advice of the state and federal civilian defense councils, and some of the older high school pupils served as air raid wardens and at the report center.

War Price and Rationing Board No. 68 began as a tire rationing board after Pearl Harbor and grew to ration gasoline, fuel oil, food and shoes, with a price panel that watched prices in stores and restaurants. Its first report, signed by Stuart K. Barnes as chairman, counted 7,695 consumers registered for War Ration Book No. 1 (sugar), 1,597 basic "A" gasoline books, 1,400 domestic fuel oil applications and 511 tire certificates in 1942. The teachers carried much of the work: under Superintendent Harold D. Chittim they registered the townspeople and handed out 7,365 copies of War Ration Book No. 2 and 7,456 of Book No. 4 in 1943, and the superintendent reckoned that the rationing programs had cost the pupils about a week and a half of school in 1942. The town voted $600 a year for the board, which was dissolved after the war ended in 1945.

The town and its schools joined the salvage and bond drives. A W. P. A. War Salvage Project in 1942 pulled up 673 feet of old street railway rails on Pollard Street and took down the old iron bridge across the Concord River north of the Boston Road concrete bridge, and the highway department lent men and trucks to the salvage committee; twenty-two high school boys helped man the trucks that collected the town scrap. The schools held drives "for scrap metal, for silk stockings, for keys, for tin cans." Pupils bought $4,722.80 in war stamps and bonds between September 1942 and January 8, 1943, and $23,088.85 in 1943, a total the school committee called "nothing short of phenomenal"; Howe High School raised the price of a "Jeep" twice and of a "Quack" in its contests, and in 1944 the home room of Emma Ruth Belcher bought stamps or bonds every week of the year. The girls of the Tri-Delta Club rolled Red Cross bandages and held stamp dances. The high school added a course in aeronautics, taught by Royal Spaulding Adams, and the manual training classes built 102 model airplanes in 1942. The annual meetings of February 12, 1944 and February 24, 1945 each put $50,000 of free cash into war bonds for a post-war rehabilitation fund under Chapter 5 of the Acts of 1943.

The town reports never printed a total of the men and women who served. The registrars compiled a list of service men and women in 1943 for the honor roll committee, and Chittim, writing from the Army Air Field at Clovis, New Mexico, where he worked on the training of B-29 combat crews, told the town in January 1945 that "hundreds of Billerica men will return home" expecting training paid for by the federal government. The superintendent himself and the teachers Paul F. Albertini, Herbert C. Brenner, George P. Carnie, Rodney C. Dresser and Charles L. Lampson were on leave in the service in 1944, while the retired superintendent Eugene C. Vining came back to run the schools. Twenty-one high school boys who enlisted were given their diplomas with half a year's credit for military service. The welfare board noted in 1941 the "increased demand for man power in defense industry," and the high school in 1943 that in some families "both parents are working in war industries", and the fire department that many of its auxiliary men missed drills "due to working long hours in defense plants"; the town reports say nothing particular about war work at the Boston and Maine shops or the Talbot Mills. A plan of house lots between Rogers Street and High Street in North Billerica, drawn in September 1943 on former Talbot land, was named Victory Park. When the selectmen walked the town bounds in 1945 they found Bound No. 3 on the Wilmington line covered by an airplane runway, part of the field later known as the Billerica - Wilmington Landing Field and Airport.

The annual meeting of February 13, 1943 voted $2,000 for "a suitable war memorial or honor roll of the men and women serving in the armed forces of our country in this present world conflict" on the Common. The committee, Edwin P. Simpson (chairman), Edward T. Morrison (clerk) and Dr. Marshall, worked from the draft board's lists, "checking of names" almost every weekend through the summer, and ordered the board from the Advertising Sign Company of Boston about October 1. It was put up on the Common as winter set in and dedicated in the Town Hall on Sunday, December 19, 1943, with the drum corps of the Chelmsford Legion post, addresses by the town's ministers, the presentation by Dr. Marshall and the acceptance by Frank A. Kelley, chairman of the selectmen. The invited guests were Mr. and Mrs. Herbert R. Crombie, Mr. and Mrs. Dominick J. Flaherty, Mr. and Mrs. Robert H. Solomon and Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Grimes, whose surnames are those of four of the town's dead. Names were added until the Japanese surrender of September 2, 1945, and the grounds were graded and planted in 1945. In 1947 the town voted $100 to move the honor roll from the Common to a permanent place in the Town Hall.

Thomas F. Flaherty was "the first Billerica soldier to be killed in action in the present world conflict," and on February 12, 1944 the town named the square at the junction of Allen Road and Boston Road at Riverdale "Thomas F. Flaherty Square," with $50 for a sign and a request that the veterans' organizations dedicate it on Memorial Day. The annual meeting of February 24, 1945 adjourned after a minute's silence "in tribute to those from Billerica in the Armed Forces who have given their lives in World War II." On February 9, 1946 the town set up a committee of two selectmen and two members from each of the three veterans' posts, one a veteran of each war, to assign squares to "our honored war dead," taking into account "the wishes of the family, the man's war record, and the public demand"; among its members were Selectmen Arthur C. Barnard and Charles L. Howarth and George Dixon. The meeting of February 11, 1950 named the corner of River Street and Bridle Road Joseph M. Walsh Square for Joseph Marvin Walsh, "who gave his life in the service of his country in 1944." On March 10, 1951 the town named Solomon Brothers Square, at the corner of Salem Road and Pollard Street, for Wesley and Albert Solomon, who died in 1942 and 1944 (the warrant had proposed renaming Brown's Corner for them), and the Lieutenant Joseph Raymond Fall Memorial Square at the junction of Colson Street and Elm Street in North Billerica. In 1957, on an article of Post 116, the square at Rogers Street and High Street became the Paul J. Horman Square. The Howe High School class of 1941 gave a plaque in memory of its classmates Harry Newman and Paul Horman, placed in the main corridor of the school in 1948.

The same meeting of February 9, 1946 voted $1,500 for a bronze plaque on a fieldstone boulder bearing the names of all who died in the two world wars, at the square in Billerica Center, which was to be named Memorial Square. The committee, Dr. A. Warren Stearns (chairman), Simpson and Frank Toomey, reported that it could not finish the work while the war had "not yet officially ended" and asked to place the memorial at the south end of the Common instead, which the town approved in 1947. The boulder was moved to the Common, the committee asked the townspeople for "a correct and complete list of the casualties of both wars," and the monument was dedicated on May 30, 1948. More than fifty years later a World War II Veterans' Memorial Committee chaired by Selectman Michael S. Rosa presented a design to the fall town meeting of 2002, which voted $48,500 for a permanent memorial "in honor of the men and women who served our town and country, during the wartime efforts of World War I and II," to carry poems by the Korean War veteran Leonard Buckland. The granite memorial that replaced the boulder was dedicated on Memorial Day 2004 (see World War Memorials). It lists twenty-nine men of World War II: Robert F. Bostow, Walter Broucha, Francis J. Connolly, Herbert S. Crombie, Chandler H. Davidson, Donald F. Davis, James R. Fall, Thomas F. Flaherty, Leslie W. Franz, Frederick D. Gilbert, Cornelius G. Grimes, Paul F. Horman, John C. Hunt, Richard H. Johnston, Robert Landerson, Donald R. Lewis, Edward F. McGinness, Kenneth J. Mears, Joseph P. Miscone, Francis E. Newell, Harry E. Newman, William J. Reagan, Paul R. Sheehan, Irving W. Skaff, Albert H. Solomon, Robert W. Solomon, Richard Valyou, Joseph M. Walsh and Robert F. Willard.

The war left the town with a veterans' department. On the proposal of Post 116, the meeting of February 12, 1944 voted to establish a Veterans' Aid Bureau under a war veteran appointed by the selectmen, and Ralph K. Sandberg was appointed in 1945 (see Veterans' Agent). The meeting of February 9, 1946 accepted Chapter 723 of the Acts of 1945 for a department of veterans' services, and the Billerica Veterans' Service Center opened on February 11, 1946. In its first year it interviewed 334 veterans, helped 33 apply to schools and colleges, 12 apply for G. I. loans and 55 for the state bonus, and recorded 396 discharges, 425 by the end of 1947. The town paid $300 a year toward the quarters of Post 2597, Veterans of Foreign Wars, while Post 116 of the American Legion had its home in the Thomas Talbot Memorial Hall in North Billerica, and from 1948 it reimbursed the posts for the military funerals of men who had died overseas, under Chapter 573 of the Acts of 1946. Two police officers, Reginald F. Horman of the Coast Guard and Archibald G. Lloyd of the Army Air Forces, came back to their old ratings in December 1945. Housing was the other postwar need. The 1947 meeting dismissed an article on "Veterans' Housing" but voted unanimously to allow prefabricated houses approved by the Federal Housing Authority or the Veterans' Housing Authority in residential zones, and in 1948 the planning board reported 75 acres of the Billerica State Forest as potentially available for state veterans' housing projects. The town reports record no veterans' housing project in Billerica.

People

Orland S. Marshall: Chairman of Selective Service Board No. 11 throughout the war; member of the Honor Roll committee and presented the Honor Roll to the town on December 19, 1943.
Harold D. Chittim: Superintendent of schools who directed the teachers' distribution of ration books, then served with the Second Air Force training B-29 crews.
Eugene C. Vining: Retired superintendent who returned as acting superintendent while Chittim was in the service.
George M. Dixon: Chief Observer of Aircraft Warning Service Observation Post No. 268 at Nuttings Lake (1942); later on the war memorial squares committee.
Fred L. Smith: Supervised the building of the observation tower at Nuttings Lake for the Aircraft Warning Service, 1941-1942.
Ernest N. Bartlett: Fire chief during the war, when the town formed an auxiliary fire department and sounded test air raid alarms.
Emma R. Belcher: Howe High teacher whose home room bought war stamps or bonds every week of 1944.
Royal S. Adams: Howe High science teacher who added a wartime course in aeronautics.
Edwin P. Simpson: Chairman of the Honor Roll (War Memorial) committee, 1943-1945, and a member of the committee for the 1948 boulder memorial.
Edward T. Morrison: Clerk of the Honor Roll committee, 1943-1945.
Frank A. Kelley: Chairman of the selectmen 1941-1944; accepted the Honor Roll for the town on December 19, 1943.
Arthur C. Barnard: Selectman and member of the 1946 committee assigning squares to the war dead.
Charles L. Howarth: Selectman and member of the 1946 committee assigning squares to the war dead.
Albert W. Stearns: Chairman of the committee that placed the boulder memorial to the dead of both world wars on the Common, dedicated May 30, 1948.
Ralph K. Sandberg: First Veterans' Aid Agent (1945) and director of the Veterans' Service Center opened February 11, 1946.
Michael S. Rosa: Selectman who chaired the World War II Veterans' Memorial Committee and presented the design of the 2004 granite memorial.

World War II

World War II

People

References