Portraits of Courage: Clarence 'Barney' Furman

In 1944 at the age of 20, Clarence “Barney” Furman was drafted in the Army Air Corps or, as he puts it, “A group of my friends and neighbors selected me.”

Furman was sent to basic training in Atlantic City, N.J., where the trainees where put up in hotels.

“I got real homesick,” he said.

Furman spent most of his military career going from one training course to another. He started by taking an airplane mechanic’s course at LaGuardia Field in New York, the Kasey Jones school of aviation in New Jersey and the final part was at Roosevelt Field in Long Island, N.Y.

Furman was assigned to Wright Field, Ohio, to work on training airplanes: the BT-13 and AT-6.

“It was good training,” he said. “One thing I remember about those planes was that the BT-13 made more noise. The AT-6 made half the noise but had twice the power. I always said the guy that’s hollering might not be the most powerful.”

After three months in Ohio, Furman was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin to study engineering. He enjoyed his time there studying math and science. He remembers a poem they used to say there:

Take down your service flag, mother

For your son’s in the ASTP

He’ll never get killed by a slide rule

So the service flag need not be.

After nine months in the ASTP, Furman said the Army decided it didn’t need as many engineers so they sent him and the other “extras” to Camp Crowder, Mo., to join the signal corps. Furman was able to choose the training he wanted to receive there, with no guarantee he would be sent to it, and he chose radio repairman school. He was chosen to go, but beforehand he spent six weeks in the hospital for a case of athlete’s foot he most likely caught at ASTP.

Furman completed AM radio training and was about to start the FM radio part when he said the Army decided it didn’t need as many radio repairmen but more infantrymen. It was about the same time as the Battle of the Bulge.

He was sent to Georgia for rifleman training but decided there that his eyesight was too poor. Yet, then he was sent to Camp Livingston, La., for rifleman training. He finished the training, but at the end of the course, officials looked at his eyes again and decided he shouldn’t be a rifleman — in fact, he should be in heavy artillery.

“I guess they figured I couldn’t hit with a rifle but I couldn’t miss with a machine gun,” he said.

He trained on the machine gun and mortar rounds at Camp Walters, Texas.

“By the time I was finished with all this, the war in Europe was all finished,” he said. They sent him to Fort Meade, Md., which was the departure point for Europe and then sent him to San Francisco.

“Finally they shipped me out to the Pacific,” he said. “We zigzagged because the war in Japan was still on. However, halfway across the Pacific, the Japanese surrendered.”

Many ships would zigzag instead of traveling in a straight line to avoid submarines.

Furman jokes that the surrender came because the Japanese must have heard he was coming their way.

“You should have heard the cheers and noise on that ship,” he said about when they heard the war had ended.

Furman’s ship landed in the Philippines the day the peace treaty was signed in Yokohama Bay and stayed there for three weeks. Then it was four months in Japan to support the occupation.

Furman was discharged in February 1946 and went to Wisconsin to visit a girl he had kept in touch with during the war.

“Nothing came of that, but it was a nice visit,” he said.

He then went home to New York before coming to Alaska in 1949 as a missionary. He worked with Native Alaskans in the Bush as part of InterAct Ministries.

Furman said his Army training was probably the best for being a missionary in the Bush – from using the mechanical training to fix a boat engine, radio training to fix radios, courses at ASTP for substitute teaching math and science and rifleman training to shoot moose.

“I went to foreign countries and saw different cultures,” he said. “Working with the native people showed me that I didn’t have to go to a foreign country to find different cultures.”