Profiles of Courage: Harold Ward

MAT-SU — A native Alaskan, Harold Ward heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor as a junior in high school in Sitka.

Ward and some of his friends went to the local military base to enlist right after the bombings; however, since Ward was only 17, they wouldn’t let him enlist.

His friends told him to just get a note from his father that said he was 18. His father served in the 3rd Division in World War I and wrote his son a note so he could serve in World War II.

Ward was encouraged to go spend the holidays with his family and then come back and report in, which he did on Dec. 26, 1941.

“A couple days later, I was on a troop ship headed to Tacoma, Wash.,” he said.

He was assigned to a medical group for basic training. After training, he was sent to Bakersfield, Calif., to work at the hospital there as part of Hammer Army Air Field.

“My first job in the service was typing,” Ward said. “They put me in the office of the colonel of the hospital as his secretary.”

After a few months of that, Ward decided he wanted to be a crash ambulance driver, so he took a course and was assigned to that job. After a year and a half, he was transferred to Marfa Army Air Field, Texas, for four to five months driving an ambulance. Then, Ward was sent to Roswell Army Air Field, N.M., and worked both in an office and as an ambulance driver.

As a crash ambulance driver on a training base, Ward would get called out to the scene when a training plane crashed.

“I had a few experiences when I had worked with a crash scenes picking up pieces of fellow veterans who crashed in an airplane,” he said.

In 1944, the Army Air Force was cutting back and Ward was transferred to the Army and sent to infantry training in Louisiana. In March, he was sent to France and Germany. In France, he stopped in Verdun, which is where his father served in World War I.

He was assigned to the 97th Infantry Division, which had been trained as an amphibious unit. Shortly after Ward joined the unit, it was ordered to pull out and reassemble at Fort Bragg, N.C., to prepare for the Pacific front.

“They started discharging based on points,” Ward said. “I had just exactly the right amount of points … and got out of the service in October 1945. I was very lucky there.”

Ward was discharged and returned to Alaska for a few years before moving around the United States. He finally settled back in Alaska in 1965.

“I am enjoying one of the best places in the whole world,” he said. “There isn’t any better place than the Valley to run out the clock.”