A Mainer and a patriot Hampden man looks back on dramatic World War II career

Soldier, mechanical and electrical wizard, and humanitarian: More than 60 years ago, Pat Audet exemplified the American citizen soldier. Today he typifies the Greatest Generation: reluctant to call attention to his wartime experiences, at heart a civilian, and proud that he served his country during World War II.

A Greenville native, Audet, now 85, left Maine in 1939 to find employment in Massachusetts. Educated at New England Welding Laboratories in Boston, he soon exhibited a knack for finding solutions to complicated engineering and manufacturing problems while working for a General Motors subsidiary in Bristol, Conn.

By then, the United States had plunged into World War II. Audet married his Maine sweetheart, Simone Lamontagne, on Feb. 14, 1942. Later offered a draft deferment because he worked in a defense plant, Audet declined, and Uncle Sam inducted him into the Army in August 1942.

Training sent Audet to Virginia, Chicago (where he learned basic electricity and electronics) and North Carolina, where he joined the 110th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Gun Battalion. Audet was assigned to Battery A, which was equipped with four 90 mm anti-aircraft guns.

A few days after Christmas 1943, Audet landed in Scotland. The 110th soon relocated south to Redding, England, and trained to participate in the Normandy invasion.

Scheduled to land at Omaha Beach at 8 a.m. June 6, 1944, the 110th’s soldiers remained offshore until just before dark, Audet said. Inflicting inordinate casualties and damage on 1st Infantry Division components already ashore, heavy German resistance continued through the morning and early afternoon before American units finally advanced inland.

The 110th moved with that advance, reaching Ste. Mere Eglise (previously liberated by American paratroopers) and, on Aug. 8, the city of St. Lo, which, according to Audet “was really shot to pieces” during savage fighting and a massive Allied bombing raid. To cut off retreating German troops and armor, 110th gunners shelled a key highway bridge outside St. Lo.

Through late summer and early autumn 1944, Allied ground forces advanced rapidly across France. On a late August afternoon, Audet and Battery A rolled into Paris “in a densely populated area,” he recalled.

A few days later, Audet was asked to represent the United States Army at a funeral for a slain French Resistance fighter. Taking three enlisted soldiers with him, Audet attended the funeral. His basic French allowing him to understand the eulogies delivered about the dead man, Audet spoke to a large audience. A young Frenchman translated Audet’s Maine-accented English. “I could understand what he was saying [in French],” Audet said with a chuckle, “and I never gave a more eloquent speech in my life.”

The 110th arrived in Spa, Belgium, on Oct. 26, 1944, and deployed to protect 1st U.S. Army headquarters. During the next few weeks, Audet designed and constructed a plotting board that would revolutionize fire control, the technology meshing artillery fire and accuracy.

The plotting board was a flat, map-covered table. Beneath the table was a synchronous motor, mounted vertically so its shaft extended upward through a hole marking the 110th’s deployment site on the map. Attached to the shaft was a needle pointer.

The synchronous motor was wire-connected to the battery’s “684” radar. Whenever the radar antenna turned, the synchronous motor (and the needle pointer) would match that turn “degree for degree,” Audet said. On detecting an approaching plane, the radar would feed data to the battery’s “fully ballistic computer,” a vacuum-tube electronic wonder that performed calculations and transmitted firing ranges, elevations and other information through a junction box to the battery’s guns.

Circles drawn on the map depicted distance in 1,000-yard requirements from the battery. Audet installed gauges on the plotting board to indicate a plane’s altitude, slant range (line of sight) and horizontal distance. Other gauges indicated whether a plane was friend or foe.

According to Audet, the plotting board let 110th gun crews target and fire on German aircraft quickly and accurately. Often firing at night, the battery’s gun crews seldom saw their targets, yet still shot down many German planes. In midwinter 1945, while guarding an Allied bridge across the Roer River in Germany, 110th gunners fired on a fast-moving radar blip one night. “We had never seen anything like it before,” Audet said. “We fired, and it went off the screen real quick. The next night, the same thing happened.”

Radar signals indicated the target had crashed. Working with coordinates and distances determined on the plotting board, Audet and a jeep driver found the wreckage, which belonged to a Messerschmitt 262, a twin-engine German jet fighter. Other Me 262 pilots made bombing runs against the Roer River bridge on subsequent nights, but “they never got by us,” Audet said.

When German forces launched the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, the 110th sent its sensitive ranging equipment “to the other side of Liege,” Belgium, he said. Ordered to accompany the move, Audet volunteered for hazardous duty. Shifting to a tank-destroyer mode, the 110th moved east to support beleaguered American troops, and Audet participated in heavy fighting at Stavelot, Stoumont and Malmedy in Belgium.

“We were tank destroyers. We covered the infantry’s retreat” by firing at German Panther and Tiger tanks, he said. “We ended up at Malmedy” on Dec. 22, 1944. A young American soldier fleeing the Malmedy Massacre stumbled into Battery A’s line near Christmas Day; he briefly assisted Audet as the 110th fought German troops dug in on a nearby hilltop.

The 110th advanced into Germany and eventually wound up near the Czechoslovak border before the European war ended in May 1945. Shipping their cannons and other equipment home, the 110th’s personnel traveled to Ludwigsburg, Germany, a city 47 miles southwest of Frankfurt.

There Audet and his comrades helped guard a prison camp containing 6,000 German soldiers and politicians. As the camp’s supply sergeant, Audet provided materials so prisoners could build a chapel and other facilities. He ran a tight ship; the Germans respected authority and viewed equivocation as a weakness, Audet said.

One day, he “pulled a surprise [barracks] raid” while the prisoners were formed up outdoors. A preliminary sweep discovered spears that prisoners had fashioned from large nails and spikes. Another time, a Nazi politico violated Audet’s orders. Sentenced to 30 days’ solitary confinement, the German became ill, so the camp’s senior officers ordered him released before completing his sentence.

Camp discipline immediately collapsed, with German prisoners turning insolent and unruly. Audet quickly ordered the politician to finish his 30-day sentence. Respecting Audet’s authoritative decision, the other prisoners turned cooperative and respectful.

Audet viewed the prisoners as human beings, not faceless enemies. He “liberated” Singer sewing machines so tailor prisoners could repair tattered German clothing. The Singers lacked bobbins, and when a prisoner revealed that a box of bobbins could be found in his Frankfurt home, Audet traveled there and retrieved them. He gave chocolate bars to the prisoner’s children and reassured the man’s wife that all was well with her husband.

Among the prisoners was Richard Spitz, an artist from Salzburg, Austria. He wanted to paint, so Audet scoured the countryside for supplies. “I could find only a tin with six paint colors, like a child’s paint set, and a single paintbrush,” he said.

Spitz used the supplies to paint Audet clad in his Eisenhower jacket. Done on cardboard and later framed, the painting still adorns a living room wall at Audet’s home.

In early October 1945, Audet sailed from France to the United States. Discharged at Fort Devens, Mass., on Oct. 17, he later hitchhiked to Greenville, where Simone was staying with her parents. The Audets lived awhile in Connecticut, where Pat lost to a fire the service station he had “built up so it was a thriving little business.”

After the Audets returned home to Maine, Pat took a job with New England Telephone in 1946. He worked at various places in Maine, transferred to Bangor from Presque Isle in 1966, and settled in Hampden before retiring in 1978. He and Simone still live in Hampden.

Today, Audet retains a detailed and vivid memory of his wartime service and peacetime employment. He won the Bronze Star – “I think it was because I volunteered for hazardous duty during the Battle of the Bulge,” he said – yet he believes the plotting board “was my biggest contribution to my country.”