By BILL WELCH
Morning News city editor
A small, fragile-looking man lives in West Springfield.
He's got small features, an elfen face, a constant smile. He's a gentle man.
And he's a hero ... a big hero.
Chet Harrington tells his stories
matter-of-factly: He was leading a soldier with a head wound back to safety when the high-pitched whine of rocket artillery started....
_ He was pulling a wounded man off a hill in the heat of enemy action when
a German machine pistol ripped into the unlucky paratrooper....
_ He was answering the call for a medic when machine gun fire cut the straps of his backpack.
_ He was joined by a German medic to give care to wounded soldiers.
_ He was hit by shrapnel in the thigh, patched up the wound himself and then went back to work.
Harrington was a medic with the 82nd Airborne
Division during World War II. He served with A Company, 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute infantry Regiment.
He made 24 parachute drops - four of them into combat: Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Holland. Add the
Battle of the Bulge to the list of campaigns, though the 82nd arrived at that one by truck.
Wherever the 82nd went, there went Harrington, pulling wounded comrades to safety, performing tracheostomies in the field,
sewing up mangled bodies, injecting morphine into badly wounded men, dodging bullets and artillery as he made his way to those who needed his help - "Just doing my job," he says.
He did his job, giving aid to a hundred men, maybe more.
"There's 20 I figure saved," he said. Had he not been there to help them, he figures, those 20 would not have made it.
He mourns those he
couldn't save, the ones with wounds that needed more skills than he had learned from the Army or whose wounds were beyond anyone's ability to help.
Even now, 50 years after World War II ended, he still tends to
wounded GIs.
Since his retirement as a letter carrier in the Albion/East Springfield area in 1974, Harrington has logged 12,000 hours as a volunteer at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Erie.
And he's
still ready to help if anyone is hurt in an emergency. He has the field kit with scalpels, suture thread and other instruments, and he still carries it with him.
To take care of his fellow GIs during the war,
Harrington was a walking pharmacy. He had the field kit in a bag, of course. The deep pockets on his paratrooper's trousers were jammed with bandages and medicine; the left one had 25 morphine
surrettes. During winter, he carried inside his blanket or sleeping bag the glass bottles of saline solution used with dried blood plasma; that kept them from freezing. His standard-issue ammunition belt carried
medical items. The pack on his back carried more gear, plus some things unrelated to medical care, such as foreign currency "`confiscated" by the paratroopers from Company A.
Harrington was 20 years
old when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in April 1942. Ten months later, he volunteered to become a paratrooper so he could get out of the hospital where he was working as a surgical technician.
"I wanted to
see some action. This looked like the way I could get it," the retired mail carrier explained. To see that action, he turned down a chance to enter officer candidate school.
One of his early jumps was nearly the end of him.
It was a practice jump. Instead of just hopping out of the C-47 transport, Harrington did a swan dive. His parachute opened between his legs, keeping him pointed
straight down - head-first.
"What saved me from breaking my neck was an oak tree. I landed in it and it broke my fall. But I cracked my helmet, broke my shoulder and lost a bunch of my teeth."
That put him in a hospital for a few weeks, but he got right back into action.
The rest of Harrington's wartime injuries would come from enemy fire, not his own folly.
The 505th Regiment saw plenty of action in
World War II, and Harrington was along for just about all of it.
Before the regiment saw combat, medics were best known as the men who gave the troops their shots, made them take bitter Atabrin pills and put them
through other grief. They were known as "pill-rollers" or worse.
In his history of the 505th Regiment, veteran Allen Langdon said, "Combat changed all of that when it was realized that in the
event of a serious wound a man's very life might well depend on the quick action of one of these troopers, who were right in the thick of every battle armed with nothing more than a redcross armband and a morphine
syringe. After Sicily, they were benignly called `Doc,' watched over, fought for in bars and pubs, and protected as much as possible in combat."
Their work in the September/October campaign in Holland,
Operation Market Garden, was also noted.
"By the time of Operation Market-Garden the medics under Major McIlvoy, had reached a high state of proficiency, and the survival rate of 505ers seriously wounded was
probably better in this campaign than any other during the war.... It was the medic out on the line that kept the spark of life going with his lifesaving techniques..."
Harrington was one of those lifesavers.
On one occasion he was bringing a wounded man back when he was cut off by a German patrol, which didn't see him. But a salvo of German rocket fire hit near him and knocked him unconscious. When he came to,
he got his wounded charge into a basement and waited until the next day when a U.S. patrol came through and helped get him to an aid station. Harrington then went back into action.
He found it. This time troops were
pinned down on top of a hill. "I saw all these men lying down. Snipers had them pinned down. One fella was up there and shot in the back. I crawled out to him and pulled him back 20 yards.
Then we got him on a stretcher and sent him to the aid station."
Not all the men could be saved. Proud as he is of those he saved, Harrington deeply regrets each one that he couldn't.
After one artillery barrage, Cpl. Red Sharver was badly wounded.
"His right leg was off. His left leg was shattered below the knee. Sgt. McIntyre and I pulled him back, carefully. But he went into
shock and we couldn't save him. We put tourniquets on him...."I could save a lot of them, but I couldn't save him.
"I felt bad about losing him. I had known him since Sicily."
Another was lost, but that wasn't Harrington's fault.
It was in the same vicinity as Sharver's loss. A general's son was wounded at the edge of a wooded area and Harrington went to get him out.
The small medic
crawled through grass three to four feet high to get him. "I got him on my back and looped his arms over my shoulder and started dragging him. Then a machine pistol opened up and laced him from
front to back."
The wounded man was dead and Harrington, unhurt, was in a rage.
"I jumped up and hollered every name in the book at them. I wanted to draw their fire so our guys could see them and take
them out. But they wouldn't shoot again; they wouldn't give away their position."
D-Day was the best known campaign.
Harrington's unit was detailed to capture the village of Ste. Mere-Eglise and the
area around it. Combat was fierce from the time they dropped on June 6, 1944, until the 82nd was withdrawn from combat in mid-July. Some two-thirds of his unit were casualties.
In one action, Harrington's
company was leading the way into a German-held village. The battle was joined by German tanks and then American tanks. An artillery shell exploded behind Harrington. His arms and legs were hit with
shrapnel.
He pulled most of the shrapnel out. "One piece was in my thigh and I had to take my scalpel out and cut the wound open. I put sulfa in and then bandaged it with a butterfly bandage and kept
going."
What he got to next was a tree that had fallen on a machine gun team. The men were calling for help. Harrington started trying to get them out when he heard a voice behind him: "Let me give you
a hand there." He turned to see a huge man in the uniform of a German medic, who summoned six more German troops. Harrington and the seven Germans then worked together to free the Americans. Then
the German medic asked for help with his wounded men.
"So we took four of their wounded men, and their medics went back to their lines. Things like that happened two or three times. We could trust
their medics. They were there for the same reason we were - to save lives."
Other Germans weren't so humane.
The 505th met up with a more fanatic unit of Germans in July.
"Until then, the Germans
wouldn't shoot at medics. Both sides honored the Red Cross insignia. But after the 4th of July, we ran into fanatics. Stretcher bearers going out to get a man were shot at by snipers. One medic
was hit right through the red cross on his helmet," he said.
In December, the 505th Regiment was sent to fight what would be a key part in the Battle of the Bulge, holding its position along the northern part of
the bulge, repulsing units from three different German SS divisions that tried to break through.
Harrington remembers the action most for its cold weather. That's when he carried the saline solution in his sleeping
bag to keep it from freezing. When he slept, he put his boots in the sleeping bag so his feet wouldn't freeze when he put his boots back after he awoke.
"It was better than freezing," he said, smiling, "but not a lot better."
Two nights after Christmas Harrington was doing what seemed to be his combat routine - taking a wounded man back to an aid
station. This one was shot in the head. Once again, an artillery barrage landed around him and once again he was knocked unconscious. As he says it, "I got blew up."
He heard the shells
coming in and forced the dazed, wounded soldier into a hole and jumped on top of him. Concussion from the explosive blasts around them, knocked Harrington out. He came to a few hours later, but unable to
hear.
"I got him back. And they sent me back to England, and from there I was sent back to the States. I got to Boston on April 29.''
The war was over for Chet Harrington.
Despite all the hell
recalled here, Harrington also remembers the good times he had with the men of A Company, not all of them exactly legal, such as blowing up safes in liberated towns.
"I had a lot of fun. I got to see
a lot of Europe, even though I was mostly crawling on my belly. I'd like to go back and see it standing up."
He's proud of the lives he saved, of the work he did.
"I was a doctor in the field."
