Aleutian Ayrshire

Sailors build barn to house cow at Alaska base

By John Threlfall
Madison
(Dane County)

I joined the Navy as a freshly commissioned Ensign in June 1943 and was sent to Attu, which is the last of the Aleutian Islands.

My duties were rather vague and I got anxious for some sort of useful and interesting work. When I asked for command of the carpenter and paint shops, which were bogged down with no supervision at all, I was gladly given the job. I put on two shifts so the shop always was busy no matter when anyone came in.
Soon after I arrived, Commodore Gehres moved his entire headquarters and staff to Attu from where he intended to carry the bombing direct to the Kuriles of northern Japan.
My immediate commanding officer, Lt. Cmdr. Louis DeVoe, came to me one morning about the time we had the floor for a new shop building laid with salvaged lumber and driftwood. He said, 'Threlfall, it's finally happened! The Commodore is getting a cow and he wants you to build a shelter for the cow and two dozen hens. And if I know the Commodore, you'd better allow for future expansion.'

I got out my drafting equipment and drew up the plans for a small barn, about 16 feet by 24 feet. Irrelevant to the war effort as it was, I was only too glad to get an assignment for a building of any kind.

The Sea Bee lumber yard got the word to furnish me with the lumber I needed and my crew went to work, if not with enthusiasm, at least with my orders. While I had one group of men pouring a concrete slab and laying a water line for the barn, I had another one prefabricating the wall and roof sections of the barn.
In short order, all was ready. The slab was hard, the panels done. I borrowed a large flat-bed truck and loaded the entire barn on it.

At 8 the next morning, the barn rolled down the Casco Cove road out to the neck, deliberately routed past the Commodore's quarters so he could see the parade as he ate breakfast.
By sundown, the barn was up and the roof tarpapered. A couple of days more and the finishing touches were done, including a weather vane made from the last and only piece of heavy brass sheet we could find on the island.
My men were not at all pleased to be on Attu building a barn while separated from their families, but I was enjoying every moment of the start of my building career.
The Commodore was pleased. Within a few days, the supply ship —I think it was the Avocet — arrived at the dock with one cow in a crate, protected from the effects of rough seas by the liberal use of good Navy mattresses for padding.
The cow, an Ayrshire, surely the only cow ever to set foot on that remote wilderness island, promptly was installed in the barn and one of the sailors was assigned to care for her and the hens.
Not long after their arrival, the chickens began to mysteriously disappear, one by one. Each Quonset hut had an oil stove with a flat top, which, when the cover was removed, made a fine griddle on which the men fried eggs or cooked other evening snacks.
Also, the barn was located on Casco Neck, which was mostly officers' country. Putting all those facts together, one came to the conclusion that certain young officers were enjoying fried chicken. As soon as muster roll in the chicken house indicated that some were AWOL, Commodore Gehres ordered Seaman Gist, who was the dairyman of Fleet Air Wing 4, to sleep in the hayloft. No more chickens were AWOL.
One day an Army Air Force colonel came over from Alexai Point to see the Attu farm. He took one look at the barn with all of its refinements and said, 'This cow has a barn with running water. I'm living in a tent! I'll take the barn and the cow can have my tent.' Needless to say, the Navy takes care of its own and the cow remained snug in her barn.
One day not long after the arrival of the Ayrshire, Commodore Gehres and several of us stood watching the cow.
'You know,' he said, 'with all this garbage from the mess halls, this would be a great place to raise some hogs.' Lt. Cmdr. DeVoe paled visibly at the thought. Not long after, a radio message was sent out to Seattle ordering a sow with a litter of piglets to be sent out on the next supply ship, and also some chicken feed.
Soon after, Commodore Gehres received orders for transfer. Immediately after the Commodore's departure from Attu, his staff officers made their decision to get out of raising livestock. A radio message was sent to Seattle directed to the captain of the supply ship Teal. The message said, 'Scratch all except chicken feed.'
In wartime it is desirable to keep up a fairly uniform flow of radio messages, so the enemy cannot deduce an imminent attack by a sudden surge of radio traffic or the safety of no attack from lack of traffic.

Consequently, useless or dummy messages are sent to increase volume. All messages are in code and the first five letters sent designate the code to be set on the decoding machine.

Dummy messages carry a dummy code identification so they do not need to be decoded, although they usually are because the radio men use these messages to swap stories. By chance some of these dummy messages had consisted of a bit of nonsense using the words 'chicken feed.'
When the Wave at Seattle got the message from Attu, she handed it to the captain of the Teal and told him it sounded like a dummy message, but it did not carry the dummy code. Perhaps he could figure out what it was about.
'I'll say I can,' he is reported to have said. 'It means I don't have to take a bunch of pigs on my ship!'
With hog raising canceled, the Fleet Air Wing 4 staff officers next turned to getting out of the dairy business, something they never had been enthusiastic about in the first place.
They recalled the jealously with which the Army Air Force had looked upon our cow. A deal was swiftly negotiated and the cow was moved to Alexai Point and to less sumptuous quarters.
Sadly to say, some of the flyers had a bit too much to drink one night. They decided the cow needed the congenial atmosphere of their officer's club bar, and in the course of leading her up the steps she was injured and had to be butchered.