Reardanites in Spruce Squadron

REARDAN - Several young men from LincolnCounty served in Spruce Squadrons during

World War I, including Reardan men August Mahrt Sr., Gustave Wagner and John Hickenbottom.

Most World War I soldiers do not include the Spruce Squadron designation on their tombstones, making them hard to find, so there are probably many more.

There were about 19,000 men serving in Washington and Oregon.

Wagner learned about the Spruce Squadrons while doing his basic training at what was then Camp Lewis.

He saw a poster that said, "Join the Spruce Squadrons and remain in the Pacific Northwest."

Stay here or go overseas? The choice was clear to him.

Squadron was somewhat misleading as the United States military did not take aviation seriously before World War I. When the country finally entered the war, the allies were suffering from large losses of aircraft.

The European allies had been in the war for several years and had advanced the science of flight to where it became a dominating force on the battlefield. The United States had to play catchup.

Aircraft of the day were built with lightweight wooden frames covered with fabric. The wood of choice was Sitka spruce, because it was a straight-grained knot-free wood, which resulted in a lot of strength and little weight.

The U.S. had been shipping spruce to the war effort, but that started to dwindle when the country entered the war and began to take men away from the forests and mills.

To counteract this, the federal government created the US Spruce Corporation, a government agency, to run sawmills for spruce and hemlock and managed manpower furnished by the Spruce Production Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

They raised the production of spruce from 2 million board feet per month to 10 million. Railroads were built into the forests to transport logs to a network of mills.

Most of the activity was centered around the Spruce Division Headquarters at the Vancouver Barracks, including the construction of the world's largest spruce mill for years.

The army managed other privately owned mills as well.

As soon as the armistice was signed, the Army stopped spruce production, although the infrastructure of railroads and mills were in place for use by private lumbermen. The Spruce Division was only active for 15 months.

Mahrt was a mechanic charged with keeping trucks in operation.

In a letter to one of his sisters, he wrote, "I have never seen so much mud."

After the war Mahrt continued being a mechanic in Oregon.

He married Ida Bowen, and had one son, August Jr. [buried in Harrington], before dying in 1922, probably from influenza. Ida remarried August's brother George.

Wagner also died from influenza, leaving a young son.

John Hickenbottom went on to be a carpenter on the Grand Coulee Dam project. When that construction was over, Morrison Knutson took a contract to build an airfield on Wake Island. Hickenbottom was among the 1,220 civilians who went along.

The Japanese attacked Wake Island the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor, on Dec 8, 1941 on the other side of the International Date Line. The Marines held off the attack for 12 days before surrendering the island.

The Japanese had some of the civilian workers complete the construction of the air

base and its defenses. It is not known if Hickenbottom was part of this group.

Most Americans, including Hickenbottom, were eventually transferred to other prisoner of war camps. However, the Japanese believed the remaining 98 captured Americans had provided information for an attack on Oct. 5, 1943.

Those captives were taken to a point and shot, but Hickenbottom was liberated after the end of the war in 1945.