by B. I. Diamond
It started as a way for a Georgia boy to get into shape for the 1936 football season and became a career spanning three wars.
That Georgia boy was Gene L. Hodges, a kid from Statesboro, Ga., who like many other young Georgia boys took someone's advice and later found it paying dividends in the Pacific or in Europe during World War II.
"My football coach requested that I go to a CMTC -- which was a civilian military training corps -- a month long camp held every year. He wanted me to go so that I could get into shape for the next season.
"After four camps you could be commissioned as an officer, but, after the second one, my coach, who was an officer in the National Guard, talked me into joining the National Guard," says the now retired Army colonel.
So, in 1938 Hodges joined Battery A of the 264th Coast Artillery in Statesboro and photographs of the unit taken that year show the cocked hats, webbed belts and leggings of the time. There are also a few mildly disinterested stares in the formal unit portrait captured three years before Pearl Harbor.
"The most attractive reason (for joining the Guard) was to make some money," Hodges said. "Back in 1938 a fella needed all the money he could get."
"I had a job after school, but it didn't pay much . . . neither did the National Guard, but the combination of the two paid my way through high school and two years of college."
Hodges and his unit underwent two summer camps including one at Pensacola, Fla., honing their skills as coast artillerymen. After the second camp, the 264th was reorganized as the 214th anti-aircraft regiment and that's when Uncle Sam stepped in.
"They inducted the Guard in 1940, consequently, just being reactivated as an anti-aircraft unit, we went on active duty with hardly any equipment."
In fact, the entire Army and National Guard found itself short of equipment; and federal programs targeted at remedying the lack of materiel in every area were still incomplete. As the Axis powers began to march victoriously through Europe, additional funds were appropriated by an anxious Congress to modernize and build anti-aircraft guns, aircraft and tanks.
By 1940, however, new anti-aircraft equipment was in short supply. "Before we went on active duty," Hodges remembered, "we got some equipment, for instance, a height finder. It's an instrument that measures altitude and the azimuth of airplanes and an old, mechanical type director. Those two things would use correct mathematical data to compute the speed of the plane and the height so that you could fire -- but we didn't have any guns."
Hodges left his unit for a five-month "height finder" school before rejoining it at Fort Stewart. Upon his return he found his unit using "logs" as stand-ins for the nonexistent anti-aircraft guns. "We were serving our hitch for a year, then going home and I think everyone felt that way. Of course, prior to the end of the year we knew something was wrong and that they weren't going to turn us loose.
"And, of course, Pearl Harbor came along on December 7. From the day we heard about Pearl Harbor, everybody's attitude changed. Everybody had mixed emotions, a little bit scared and frightened, wondering what's going to happen. That's about the time you started separating some of the soldiers from the boys. Some of them were showing their instability I guess you could call it. They would accidentally fire their rifle ... there for a while we were scared of each other, but everything settled down."
The 214th was a group of men, not unlike other units from other small towns across the nation. "It was mostly farmers and farmers' sons, about 89 percent of 'em were high school students."
In the months after Pearl Harbor, Hodges and the Statesboro unit trained with renewed vigor and in early 1942 they were sent to California to set up an anti-aircraft defense around the Kaiser Shipyards. "We stayed out there nine or ten months," said Hodges.
"Then they shipped the whole regiment, a gun battalion, an automatic weapons battalion and a searchlight battalion, to the southwest Pacific. We landed in New Zealand and after some intensive training there, of about three months, they (the Army) sent us up to New Caledonia." At that point the Army, which was about to replace a tired group of Marines on a little island called Guadalcanal, selected Hodges and several other NCOs to go there, and act as liaison between the two services. "We replaced them (the Marines) by sections. When I got there, I took over the Marine sergeant's duties. We stayed there about two or three weeks before our unit got there. It wasn't secure when we got there. We had daily bombings from the air."
Those daily bombings were the work of Japanese pilots dubbed "Louie the Louse," or "Washingmachine Charley," or "Maytag Charley."
"Charley" is described in the U.S. Army's History of the Guadalcanal offensive as "a difficult target for the anti-aircraft guns since he usually flew high and maneuvered violently when searchlights and guns went into action."
The advice his Marine predecessor gave Hodges was "keep cool." "That was the most scared I've ever been, I hated to see the dark fall, because during the day, we didn't get any raids.
The second or third night I was over there, one of the Marine (airplane) trackers for me says, 'Hodges, me and you and so and so are the only ones that know exactly where that plane is and whether we're gonna get hit or not, you ought not to be worried.' I never thought about that when I was practicing . . . who cared where the plane was, I was just reading altitudes.
"The first time I read the altitude of an airplane and saw the bombay open I froze just as stiff as a board. After that I was scared to death, but I never did freeze up.
"I stayed there for an additional nine or ten months then I was selected to go to OCS. So in 1943, 1 left there to come home and go through school.
"On the way from the southwest Pacific, I stopped long enough to get married and come down with malaria. I think everyone who was on Guadalcanal came down with malaria. For example, within an hour after I reported to the Island, the Marines handed me an atabrine, a little yellow pill, I took one of those every day. You turn yellow and everything and you look like you have malaria, but you don't realize it because everybody else is that color. And, I didn't know I had it till I got home.
"One of the lessons learned by the Marines was that you have to make the men take the pills, 'cause some of them just wouldn't take it. So that's one of the first things I told our commander when my unit got there was that you gonna have to make the men take these pills: [the commander said] 'Oh, I'm not gonna have to make 'em take them,' but after awhile you find out that some of the men wouldn't take them."
Hodges arrived in San Francisco from the Pacific and only "when people looked at you kinda funny" did he realize that he had come down with the disease.
Following OCS, Hodges joined an anti-aircraft battery at Fort Stewart, and later transferred to a combat engineer unit and served with them in Germany following the end of the war.
Following his discharge in 1945, he rejoined his National Guard unit in Statesboro. This time he stayed with the military until his retirement in 1979, some 41 years of Guard service, a career that began with a football coach's suggestion.
| The late Colonel Gene L. Hodges was the secretary of the 214th Coastal Artillery (AA) Regimental Reunion Association. B. I. Diamond is editor of the Journal. |