Basic Training
After induction Dad was sent to the Farragut Naval Training Station in, of all unlikely places, landlocked northern Idaho sometime in late October 1943. The copy of the “Farragut News” he kept is dated October 27, 1943, telling us he was there at the latest by the end of October. Naval basic training lasted only six weeks during the war, so he must have completed it sometime in mid-December 1943.
After that he spent time at the US Naval Hospital St. Albans in Queens, New York, engaged in what isn’t known. The form below is written in cryptic military codes and uninteresting, but it does tell us he was there in February 1943 and he enlisted in August of 1942. We also have Dad’s library card from the New York Public Library’s Central branch, set to expire in May 1945.
After completing basic training at Farragut and an indeterminate amount of time at the Navel Hospital, he received his transfer orders to leave Farragut (August 1944) to attend the pre-commissioning school for the Effingham before it was put into service on November 1, 1944.
From February to August, 1944, there’s a six month gap for which we have no information. We don’t know where Dad was but we can make some informed deductions. Part of that time may have been spent receiving additional training as a dental technician at one of the eleven specialized schools also located at Farragut (cooks and bakers, radiomen, quartermasters, signalmen, storekeepers, gunners mates, electrical personnel, shore patrol, instructors, dental technicians, and classification interviewers).
The specialized training lasted between four and eight weeks depending on the school, the more complex pharmacist training lasting 12 weeks. If Dad’s training lasted eight weeks, there’s still a period of four months for which we don’t have information. But if we add a speculative two or three months leave after training, his time is more or less accounted for.
Farragut Naval Training Station
Farragut NTS, located on Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho, about 80 miles NE of Spokane, was opened on October 6, 1942, the last recruit leaving in March 1945. In those two and a half years over 293,000 sailors trained there. Five thousand recruits were processed every six weeks, and with all of the support staff, including 900 German POWs who took care of the grounds and laundry, the camp housed 42,000 people on any single day, making it the second largest training base in the world after the Great Lakes station and the largest city in Idaho at the time.
Dad collected a short history of the base and biographical sketch of Admiral Farragut written sometime in the late 1960s or 1970s (above). On the rear is a description of the Farragut State Park that was created on the land where the base once sat. His 1944 transfer orders after completing basic training are also shown above.
The base’s immensity is hard to grasp from the pictures. Divided into five camps to make managing all those people easier (Dad was in Camp Ward), it covered 4,000 acres, a little over six square miles, with 776 buildings constructed in just 11 months by 22,000 civilian construction workers working 10 hour days at wages that were double the prevailing rate. The cost was $160 million, $2.1 billion in today’s dollars.
Farragut was decommissioned in June 1946 after operating just two and a half years.
Dad took no pictures of Farragut while he was there, at least none that have survived. He took quite a few while aboard the Effingham, so it seems odd that he didn’t document some of his days at Farragut. The pictures below were taken from public sources. The last two are an undated postcard Dad’s long-time friend Bill O’Herrin sent to him at Farragut.
Videos
KSPS, a Spokane TV station, produced a one hour documentary about Farragut–“America’s Landlocked Navy: Farragut’s WWII Memories” (2010)–that captures some of the flavor of life at the base. Watching it is to see some of the experiences Dad must have had while there.
There is also a 1944 naval educational film, “The Duties of a Dental Technician” that was shown to dental tech trainees as part of their training. It is so humorless and serious and narrated so robotically that it’s unintentionally comic. Dad undoubtedly saw it, too.