Reporter Crime Stoppers of Hutchinson County and the Borger Police Department are seeking assistance from anyone who may have information regarding an arson investigation at the Fairlanes Square Apartments.
By Michelle Berry Reporter When it comes to World War II, Meryl Barnett was truly on the front lines.
Barnett shared his story of his experiences during the war during a meeting of the Hutchinson County Republican Women last Thursday. He said he first came to join the National Guard in 1940 because the superintendent of the school where he graduated was a commander of a company in Marlow, Okla. “They called us up on Sept. 1 [1940], and on Sept. 16 with the flick of a wrist, we were in the regular Army,” Barnett said. After serving at Fort Sill, Okla. for a time, Barnett went to Camp Barkley near Abilene, where he worked solid detail as a military policeman. “I got the reputation of being the best MP in the place, because if I found a soldier that was drunk and causing trouble, I’d pick up him up and put him in the jeep and take him over to the bus station and put him in the bus, and tell the driver to lock the door,” he said. “I’d see some of these soldiers on the street, and when they said, ‘Thank you, Mr. MP,” I’d know what they were talking about.” From there, the National Guard went to Fort Devens, Mass. where Barnett ended up meeting his future wife Betty. He was working detail near her hometown and frequented a place called the Wigwam, which sold a variety of items. “There was a cook back there, and I called him Cookie because he was a huge man. I’d go back there and he would fix me a sandwich,” Barnett said. “He said, ‘Meryl, there’s two girls coming around here asking who you were. Tomorrow night they’re going to be here.’” He got a friend of his, known as “Big Jim”, to go with him to the Wigwam. When they arrived, the two young women were in the back area near the kitchen, and Barnett went back and spoke to both of them. “Big Jim started making a ruckus, and that was my cue,” he said. “Here I am a 130-pounder, and this guy weighed 270 pounds. I told the girls, ‘Well, I’ve got to take care of this.’ I went over there and I grabbed him by the finger and I pinned his finger back, and he fell on the floor to his knees and said, ‘Please don’t hurt me.’ He walked on his knees all the way to the door. “When I got to the back, Cookie said, ‘You know what the girls said? Both of them said, ‘That’s my man.’ The first one that signed my little black book was the one I asked [on a date] and that happened to be Betty. You know the rest of the story.” The National Guard was then transferred to Pine Camp, N.Y. which Barnett described as “the coldest place in the world, 30 below zero”. He said by this time he and Betty decided they couldn’t live without each other, so she came up to the area to be with him, forgetting the bottom part of her wedding dress. He said the first order of business was to buy her a wedding dress, which Barnett described as a “bluebird” dress with bluebirds printed all over it. His brother was in the same outfit as he was. The couple made plans to marry in Carthage, N.Y. “The taxi driver was a swell guy,” he said. “For about 15 miles, there was ice all over the road. He drops us off at the county judge’s office, and he said, ‘I suppose you need a license.’ I said, ‘Yes, I need a license. We’re going to get married.’ The judge made out the license for the couple. Barnett tried to pay the judge, but he refused any payment. He asked them how old they were, and he wrote Barnett’s age down as 21 despite the fact that he was 18. He sent the couple to a preacher to make the marriage official. “The only one that got there was Mousy Hall, my best friend, so he stood up with us,” he said. “When we got through, I asked the preacher what we owed him, and he said, ‘Anything,’ so I gave him that five dollar bill and that was it.” From there, the group was transferred to Camp Pickett in Virginia, and Barnett said he knew they were on their way to Europe at that time. A few months later, the officers boarded a ship headed there. The ship zig-zagged all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, leaving the United States in January 1940, and not arriving until July of that same year in Sicily. The ship stopped at a beach head landing in North Africa, where the soldiers trained for a couple of days. The group stayed on the same ship, and made its way into Sicily for what Barnett called “the worst day of his life”. “My jeep wouldn’t start. It had a rundown battery, I guess, and I had to wait. Everybody was gone. I was the only soldier left on there,” he said. “Finally about four jeeps came up. They put a little bulldozer on behind it, and they take me to the beach. This is midnight, and they pushed me in the jeep off into the sand. If they had pushed me about two more feet, I would’ve been in a land mine field.” He said he sat there for what seemed like hours. About early morning, he saw a plane appearing to head straight toward his jeep, finding out later it was an ME-109, and dropped a bomb right as he got over the jeep. “I hadn’t been at war yet, and I thought the bomb was going to go right straight down. It didn’t. It went about 250 yards down the beach. Pretty soon my buddies came down and picked me up,” Barnett said. The men were riding back, and were riding along when they heard a spat, and a big hole came through the windshield. However, the men were unharmed. Barnett said the 82nd Airborne made a parachute drop, and someone miscalculated the way the drop was coming in. “If you fly over the Navy at the night, and they don’t know who you are, you’re going to get shot at,” he said. “These C3s were hauling about 28 men, and flew right in over us, very low.” He said someone dropped a flare, and the flare showed there was a plane over them that was a German plane, interspersed with the paratroopers. “Well, they started getting shot down,” Barnett said. “The plane with the 28 men, all of them perished. Anyway, that was Sicily, and that was a bad day.” Tomorrow: More from Barnett’s experiences on the front lines
