Small Town America in World War II: War Stories from Wrightsville, Pennsylvania

Chapter 15: Pfc. William “Bill” Haugh

Chapter 15 Pfc. William “Bill” Haugh H Co., 137th Inf. Reg., 35th Inf. Div. Born in Hellam Township just outside Wrightsville on 21 August 1919, William Bill Haugh was a man of integrity and character. During World War II he could have avoided the draft. He had a vital, defense-related job at Riverside Foundry in Wrightsville, and his supervisor, who was a member of the York County Draft Board, offered to get him a deferment . In addition, Bill and his wife Grace had a young son and were expecting their second child at the time he received his draft notice on 16 June 1944. Because he had two brothers already in the service, however, Bill decided that he would have been shirking his duty to accept a deferment . Almost immediately after completing basic training, he was sent to Europe as a replacement troop. By the time he arrived, the Germans had initiated their Ardennes Offensive, and the Battle of the Bulge was already under way. Less than a week after arriving in France, Bill found himself on the front lines in Luxembourg as a machine gunner with the 35th Infantry Division. He later participated in the Rhineland Campaign and the drive across Central Europe. After the war Bill was reunited with his family, including the son whom he had seen just briefly before going overseas, and resumed his career at Riverside Foundry (later renamed Donsco) where he soon became the foundry supervisor for the owner, 284 SMALL TOWN AMERICA IN WORLD WAR II Donald Smith. After retiring from Donsco in 1982, Bill and his sons developed their own foundry, H & H Castings, which is still an ongoing, prosperous enterprise. Bill Haugh died on 24 November 2003.1 Bill’s upbringing on the Haugh farm in Hellam Township closely mirrored the accounts given by his sister Pauline (“Sis”) and his brother Mervin (“Bo”), whose comments also appear in this book: “It was a small farm of about fifty-six acres, and it wasn’t what I would call a successful operation. At least it wasn’t successful as far as I was concerned. It was pretty much a subsistence farm since we used most of what we grew and sold what was left to Wrightsville people. We always had plenty to eat, and we were clothed properly when we went through the Depression. That’s where I started to work when I graduated from high school. I graduated from Wrightsville High School in 1937, and I farmed for a year or two there. I didn’t necessarily want to go into farming, but there were few jobs any other place because of the Great Depression. There were four brothers and one sister in the family, and we all took our turns working on that farm. After his brief stint on the family farm, Bill took a job at Riverside Foundry. He describes how he took an immediate liking to foundry work, which was to become his lifelong profession, and how Riverside began to prosper once again from government contracts during World War II: “At the end of 1938, I went down and saw Donald Smith, and he got me a job at Riverside. I was first making twenty-five cents an hour, which amounted to $2.00 a day, but there were a lot of people working for only $1.50 a day. I was supposed to be learning a trade as a patternmaker, so I was getting that twenty-five cents to learn. Donald’s father insisted that Donald learn the foundry business from the ground up, so Donald and I made patterns together. “The only thing that brought us out of the Depression was World War II. In those couple of years between 1938 and 1941, they were working just three days a week. Years later, I read some of the Riverside literature, Pfc. William “Bill” Haugh 285 and I think it mentioned that they sold only $60,000 or $70,000 worth of castings a year before the war. Once we got into the war, we got busy. You got all the work you wanted, and you couldn’t work enough. For the war effort we made hand grenade castings, and I think we could get six of them in a mold. So, they got this contract to make these grenades, and they machined them. They then painted them and shipped them to the arsenal in...