By Lorna Thackeray
Of The Gazette Staff
When she was growing up in Wibaux as the youngest of 13 children, eight of whom were serving in World War II, Caroline Bair Braden remembers that her mother asked people not to bang on her door.

“She just wanted people to knock once and come in,” Braden, now 77, recalls. “She was always afraid it was Mr. Hall.”

Mr. Hall was the telegraph operator at the train depot. Mothers all over Wibaux County dreaded his visit and the telegrams he brought with him as war raged around the world.

In a period of less than two years, Mr. Hall had visited the Bair family home three times.
First it was for Arthur, her tall, handsome brother, a Golden Gloves heavyweight at the University of Montana, who had to quit school when the money ran out in the midst of the Great Depression.

He went down with the USS Wahoo, the most storied submarine of the Pacific fleet, in a battle with Japanese air and sea forces Oct. 11, 1943, in the narrow strait that separates the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido and the Russian island of Sakhalin.

Then word arrived that Staff Sgt. Roger H. Bair died Jan. 22, 1944, on Anzio Beach in the Allied invasion of Italy. Roger, 30 at the time of his death, had joined the Army before Pearl Harbor, his sister remembered. Roger was leading his platoon in the initial attack on the Italian beachhead when he stepped on a land mine.

And finally, with war’s end less than a year off, Typhoon Cobra, which witnesses described as the “granddaddy of all typhoons,” hurled Lewis John Bair’s destroyer, the USS Spence, to the bottom of the ocean 380 nautical miles east of Manila.

Lewis, a signal man, and 314 others from the Spence were lost Dec. 18, 1944. Only 24 members of the crew were rescued. Two other destroyers, the Monaghan and the Hull, went down in the storm. In all, 790 sailors died in typhoon-roiled waters of the Philippine Sea.

Of the three brothers, only Roger’s remains made it back to Wibaux for burial.

Alone, Mrs. Braden, then the last child left at home, met the train carrying his body. Her mother, recovering not only from the loss of her three sons, but from the death of her husband, could not bring herself to travel to the depot.

“I cried and I touched his casket and I said a prayer,” Mrs. Braden said. “That’s about all I could do.”

Lewis and Arthur are remembered on a memorial in Wibaux, but their remains rest in the western Pacific.

Several weeks ago, a former brother-in-law called from Las Vegas. The Wahoo had been found, he told her. Then information came fast and furious. A friend from Wahoo, Neb., sent her a copy of a story from her local paper about the found submarine. Material started arriving from groups trying to locate relatives of the 80 men on board.

She couldn’t bring him home, but Mrs. Braden at last knew where Arthur was entombed.

The sea this year seems determined to give up its World War II dead. Three lost Navy submarines have been located or positively identified since June. On each of them was a submariner with Montana connections. Each submarine had its own fascinating story, and we’ve recounted the short lives of the Lagarto and the Grunion in The Billings Gazette recently.

The Wahoo’s story is much longer. The Lagarto and Grunion went down early in their careers. The Wahoo survived six missions before her luck ran out in the Strait of Soya, when Japanese antisubmarine aircraft sighted an oil slick. The Wahoo had apparently been damaged by a mine or one of her own torpedoes and was leaking oil as she headed west through the narrow seaway.

Japanese air and sea forces pounded the fleeing sub with depth charges for hours that morning until aviators saw a gushing of oil and bubbles that proved the sub had been sunk.

I won’t go into the Wahoo’s exploits, or its controversy. It would take too long. Just Google USS Wahoo and an incredible amount of information will pop onto the screen.

The most compelling story to me, at least, was the Montana submariner who went down with her. His sister, Mrs. Braden, and her daughter, Bernette Braden, a teacher in Sidney, contacted me after a story appeared in The Gazette that mentioned Arthur Bair and the Wahoo.

Mrs. Braden’s story turned out to be much more complex than the death of one serviceman. Her family suffered losses I can’t even imagine.

The Bairs were early residents of the Wibaux area. The patriarch, Irvin Lewis Bair, was already there when the woman who would become his wife, May Frisinger, arrived in a covered wagon with her family near the turn of the 20th century. Later, May Frisinger became the first registered homesteader in Wibaux County. The Bairs were married Dec. 7, 1911, and together had 13 children. All but Mrs. Braden’s twin brother, Conrad, survived to adulthood.

Even Mrs. Braden’s birth in 1929 is a story, her daughter said. May Bair started giving birth to Caroline as she crossed a plank that was all that remained of a bridge over Beaver Creek during a flood. The plank was the only way May could get to a car on the other side that was waiting to take her to the hospital. (Mrs. Braden’s twin brother, who lived only a year and a half, was born a half hour later at the hospital.)

The Bairs farmed 25 miles southwest of Wibaux until the Great Depression and her father’s ill health resulted in a move to town.

After the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, seven other members of the Bair family - six brothers and a sister - joined Roger in the military.

“They just all went,” Mrs. Braden said. “None of them were drafted. They all volunteered.”

Roger was the quiet, reserved one, strumming a guitar in a family photo. “He loved his mother dearly,” she said.

Her favorite memory of this brother was his heroic rescue of the family in a terrible winter blizzard. Her father and Arthur were working on construction at Fort Peck Dam in the 1930s when the storm roared in, stranding members of the family on the farm many miles from town.

“We were so snowed in we couldn’t even get the door open,” Mrs. Braden remembered. “We ran out of food and were down to our last pint of beans.”

The younger members of the household pleaded with their mother to open that last jar, she said. But May held fast, fearing that the situation could grow even more desperate as the snow piled higher.

Roger, who was a mail carrier at the time, traveled two days through the storm to get groceries to the family.

“If he hadn’t done that, we would have starved to death,” she said.

Mrs. Braden inherited the journal Roger kept during the war.

“It’s kind of hard to read sometimes, but we do it,” she said.

She didn’t know Lewis well. He had left to find work in Iowa when she was a small child. He drove taxis and buses there, and married a local girl. He and his wife had three children and visited Montana when they could. Lewis was a 31-year-old signalman on the Spence when the typhoon rattled the destroyer for two terrifying days before dealing a death blow.

The Spence was part of the 3rd Fleet supporting the invasion of the Philippines when the storm, packing 145 mph sustained winds and gusts up to 185 mph, caught commanders by surprise. Three destroyers, riding high on the water because their fuel tanks were nearly empty, didn’t stand a chance in the massive waves. Typhoon Cobra damaged 26 other vessels in the task force and destroyed 146 aircraft.

Arthur, 25 at the time of his death and the youngest of the three brothers, seems to hold a special place in his sister’s memory.

“He was happy-go-lucky,” she said.

Filled with promise, Arthur, the jokester, was the first in the Bair family to finish high school, where the towering farm boy had been nicknamed “Griz.”

“He didn’t want to farm. He wanted to go to college,” Mrs. Braden said.

Art stood well over 6 feet and weighed about 190 pounds, she remembered. An athlete, he played football for Wibaux High School and at the University of Montana for a year. When there was no more money for college, he joined President Roosevelt’s Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps. He was on the West Coast looking for work in the Navy yard at Bremerton, Wash., when the war broke out. He joined the Navy.

In his travels around the world, he collected pipes wherever he went, she said. He came home for visits a few times after entering the service, and at least twice after he had been assigned to the Wahoo.

“He always told my mother that if she heard his sub had gone down, not to worry because he wouldn’t suffer,” Mrs. Braden said.

It was months after word arrived that the Wahoo was missing that the family back in Wibaux finally learned that he had been declared lost at sea, she said.

“There was a lot going on that I couldn’t take in at the time,” Mrs. Braden said. “We were just numb. When it first happened, he was just missing. It was like he was going to come back.”

Her mother bore the losses as best she could. After her father died in 1946, May held a memorial service for her three sons in Wibaux. The entire community came to support the family.

Once the war was over, Mrs. Braden married, set up a home in Wibaux and raised 12 children of her own. One of her daughters, Barbara, was making a career in the Navy, and in 1974, was stationed in Japan. When Mrs. Braden visited, her daughter was able to arrange a helicopter flight from the deck of the USS Midway over the Sea of Japan.

“I said ‘hi’ to Art,” she recalled. “I knew he was down there.”

Four other Bair brothers survived the war in battlefields all over the world. Jack, a Marine, was at Guadalcanal. William served with the Army in the India-Burma Theater. Clifford fought in the Battle of the Bulge. Harold spent part of the war in the South Pacific at Munda in the Solomon Islands, but was sent back to the States when officials learned that the family had already lost three brothers. He was pretty mad about the transfer, Mrs. Braden remembered. Sister Mary enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps, hoping to see a little of the world. She got as far at Sioux Falls, S.D., where she was made a cook.

May Bair decorated a wall of her Wibaux home with the service portraits of her patriotic offspring and posted their service stars in the window as each entered the Army, Navy or Marines.

I believe the war required as much courage of her and her generation as it did of their sons and daughters struggling in battlefields thousands of miles from home.

I grew up aware that my father and many of my uncles had served in World War II. My mother was set to enter the fray when the war ended before her nursing training was completed. My uncles all came back, as had the fathers of my friends. My grandmothers, no doubt, agonized over the safety of their children, but when it was over, there was no need for mourning. The war, like the Great Depression before it, was another hard chapter in life. No one talked about it much or reflected on the scope of the loss.

But the world war that defined the 20th century shaped my father more than I realized. In his later years, he dedicated himself to the VFW and other veterans organizations where men and women who shared his experiences could meet on common ground. They knew fellow soldiers who did not come back.

To me, the war was a piece of interesting history, overshadowed in my own formative years by the bloody disaster in Vietnam.

I’ve learned a lot about loss in the last summer. My father died of a stroke in early June. He was sent off in a salute of gunfire from 12 members of the hometown VFW, many of whom he had joined over the past 30 years in honor guards for other Havre-area veterans.

Then there were the losses of strangers.

A colleague told me about a local doctor whose uncle had gone down on the Lagarto, a lost submarine found recently in the Gulf of Thailand. Weeks later, a woman searching for relatives of men who died on another sub, the Grunion, called The Gazette. That boat, carrying a Billings man, Wesley Blinston, was found in the Aleutian Islands this summer. In response to a story about Blinston, the director of education at a submarine museum in Hawaii called. In passing, he mentioned that another missing submarine, the Wahoo, had just been identified in waters north of Japan. A check of the crew roster turned up Arthur Bair from Wibaux.

After mentioning his name in a story, Mrs. Braden and her daughter contacted me, and told their amazing story of loss and remembrance.

Talking with the Bairs and relatives of the other Montana-connected submariners during the past few months has been a revelation. The wars I read about and sometimes write about - from the Little Bighorn to Iraq - may be interesting in their details and fascinating in the grand scheme of human history. But what I really want to know about, what really drives history in its full context, is the stories of all the people who played their part - not just world leaders and big events that set wars in motion, but those who did the fighting, and the ones who carried on at home.

Published on Monday, October 23, 2006.
Last modified on 10/23/2006 at 12:29 am