I remember ..... with Elnor Haugen

            Written by Kathy Anderson

                     

                      Memories can recall happy, sad, and even monumental moments of an “ordinary” life. Memories of

                     veterans are especially poignant, yet rarely shared. It is vital that we hear their stories, for us, for 

                     those to come and even for the vets themselves. In honor of Veterans Day today, we are posting 

                     this 2016 interview with one of our local WWII veterans:

     

Elnor Haugen, “El” to his friends, was born on July 7, 1923. His proud Norwegian roots are similar to many in this area. Sigord, El’s father, immigrated to the United States in 1916 with his widowed mother and three brothers, to join a sister and brother who had come earlier. El and his brother Raymond grew up on a farm in Coon Valley, close to where his four uncles settled in Coon Valley, Chaseburg and Southridge. El’s mother, Minnie, was from Spring Coulee so there was always family around. Both his parents spoke Norwegian and taught him. “It’s hard to find people who can speak Norwegian now,” he told me.

 

On the farm, Elnor remembers having horses and cows, raising hay and corn, and of course, working tobacco. Manure was the only fertilizer used. “Back then, we hoed the corn to keep the weeds down.” El was only 7 years old when Adolph Brye gave him $1.00 to start a bank account. “That’s how I started to learn to save my money.” El’s mother died when he was only 11 years old. He and Raymond were raised by a single father who never remarried and Elnor got the job of caring for the chickens. He kept the egg money but had to pay all the expenses. “What I got from the chickens, I could slip some of that away.” Elnor said it was a good life lesson. 

                

So far, this story is like many in the area, Norwegian immigrant grandparents, farmers, hardships as a family, but this is no “ordinary” story. After graduating from Westby High School, El was attending vocational school in La Crosse when he and four friends decided to join the service. In the fall of 1941, “Tug, Howard, Erling, Leland and I went to the recruiting office to join up.”  All five left for basic training in the Army Air Corp on November 4^th. They stayed together that first year in Milwaukee; then Fort Sheridan, Illinois; then Keesler Field, Mississippi; and finally Fort Logan, Colorado. But the army wouldn’t keep that many boys from the same town together for overseas missions so then they were separated.

El Haugen in uniform, circa 1942

El remembers that monumental Sunday, December 7^th, 1941, when he was on his bunk at Keesler Field (Mississippi) and heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor on the radio. “We beat it in to Biloxi because we were afraid they would quarantine us” and that meant they wouldn’t get off the base for awhile. It was only four weeks after he had left Coon Valley. 

           

After Pearl Harbor, with the United States so involved in the war, El had to finish his training and was sent to Colorado before he could be put to task on a mission. Finally, he left the United States on December 13, 1942, on a boat that took him to North Africa. Crossing the Atlantic was very stormy; everyone got sick. Elnor was ok because he stayed “on top,” on the deck of the boat, for the fresh air. The waves were high, taller than the boat. But he lost his balance and slipped to the edge of the deck before he caught the rail. “I went back down. I didn’t want to fall off the boat.” He chuckled.

 

When they got to Africa, the men had to walk seven miles with their gear and supplies. El remembers the strings on the bags were sharp and hard on the shoulders so after awhile, they just dragged everything. They finally arrived about midnight on Christmas Eve and slept out in an open field. “What a Christmas Eve!” he remembers. The men took over a couple of airplane hangers to do their work but had to build a dining room and the barracks. He remembers January and February were quite rainy.

              

In 1942, US WWII airplanes were transported in pieces by boat to Africa. Elnor had all the information about every airplane and how to put them together. He helped assemble more than 3,000 planes in three years, P-38’s, P-47’s, P-63’s, all fighter planes. He was surrounded by a mixture of many nationalities of people – Spanish, Arab, so many countries. A flatbed truck would take the men from a hanger to the dining hall. It was a very different way to live than what he grew up with in Vernon County. “I enlisted when I was 18, I’d never been out of Coon Valley before this.” Implying that when living in Coon Valley he was young and inexperienced, his adventure in Africa was an eye opener. The servicemen, a company of over 900, had their own radio station.  El remembers that they played “Little Brown Jug” to both open and close the daily broadcast. He explained that they listened to “decent music” on the base, like Les Brown, Tommy Dorsey, other big bands. Today, he likes to listen to Gary Gilbertson on the radio at lunchtime because “he plays good music.”  

                

Elnor’s assignment wasn’t dangerous in terms of battle but it was certainly critical to the war effort. El remembers only once when there was a bombing near the airport. He has many memories of his almost three years spent in Africa. He was stationed very close to Casablanca but the taverns there “were nothing like those” in the Humphrey Bogart movie. Mostly the men went to Fez when they got some time off. He saw many entertainers including Martha Raye and Bob Hope. He got Joe Lewis’ autograph on a French franc note – it was the only paper he had at the time.  He remembers the time the team “took” a B-17 bomber to Marrakesh, about 150 miles south of Casablanca, to play baseball.  He recalled that on the way back, it was the worst airplane ride ever. “We kept bopping up and down like a cork” flying over the desert. Maybe that was payback for taking the plane? Elnor came home to the United States and was discharged just before Thanksgiving in 1945. They all came home after the war ended, all five of the friends who enlisted on that day in 1941. 

                

After El finished college, he went to work for the Farmer’s Union Co-op as an auditor. He tired of traveling so after a year, went to work at Trane in LaCrosse for twenty years, and then Norplex for twenty more years. Elnor and Marjorie Steenberg were married on May 28, 1948. They did quite a bit of traveling in their sixty three years together and greatly contributed to the community as a huge part of the volunteer work force. They spent many hours as charter members of the LaCrosse Good Shepard Lutheran Church, at Norskedalen, at the Westby Area Historical Society and at the Country Coon Prairie Church. Marjorie died 3 years ago, around Christmas, so now El is on his own. At 93, he still drives and keeps busy with mowing his yard.  “You gotta have something to do’” he tells me.  Norskedalen still gets his help making lefse and he is a regular at the Upper Coon Valley Lutheran Church. When I asked him to comment about his life, he said he didn’t think he would change much. “Joining the army was ‘the smartest move I ever made – I never hardly heard a shot.” Lucky for us that he didn’t. Thank you for your service, Elnor! 

El and Marjorie on their wedding day, May 28, 1948.