Local historian shares lifetime of memories

Bellefonte native recounts second World War, Centre County lore

Hugh Manchester has written a million stories, be it as a journalist, columnist or local historian.

"He is a tremendous resource," said Bellefonte Mayor Candace Dannaker. "I think he has an idea not only of history but of how it affects the future."

Manchester's' life is almost a case study of how history can be a continuum.

World War II, Manchester said, gives him his sense of history and even his education. The GI Bill of Rights provided him with an education, he said.

"For many of us, life was an anticlimax," Manchester said. "They took us out and made us killers, then expected us to turn that off like a faucet. What the hell are you to you do after that? Come home and go to Penn State?"

Eventually, Manchester did go to Penn State, graduating with bachelor's degrees in history and English with the class of 1955.

But, as he admonishes, "we don't want to get ahead of ourselves."

Just getting into the Army was an adventure for Manchester. As he tells the story, the former newsman becomes more animated. He leans his 6 foot 3 inch frame forward in his chair and gestures more frequently, slapping his knee to drive home punch lines.

All of a sudden, he seems younger.

The story begins in a darkened movie theater in August 1942. The 16-year-old Manchester and his friend Claude Glenn, then 15, saw a movie about the heroics of the Royal Canadian Air Force in the Battle of Britain.

"I had been raised with a lot of people who had served in World War I, the Spanish-American War and on the Mexican border and heard all the stories," he said. His uncle, also named Hugh Manchester, died in the second battle of Marne in 1918. "I got a little gung-ho on the military, I guess."

The youths formulated a plan to go to Canada and enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Manchester said.

"Can you imagine kids today telling their parents they are going to Canada to enlist," he said, "and the parents letting them go?"

But they went, arriving in Toronto at 3 a.m., where the pair met a group of Canadian soldiers in the Royal Elgin Tank Regiment. The soldiers fed them and also talked the pair into joining their outfit.

"They got $10 apiece for recruiting us," Manchester said.

The next morning, as a recruit on the exposition grounds in Toronto, a major marshaling point for British colonial troops, Manchester said he found himself in a world he had read about as a boy in "The Jungle Book."

"I thought I was in the middle of Rudyard Kipling," he said. "There were people there from all over the British Empire. Punjabs from India and all sorts of things," he said, holding his hand above his head to indicate a turban.

The pair spent the day drilling and marching with the regiment until the jig was up -- the unit's commanding officer spotted the pair and sent them home.

"He said we should go home at least until we turn 18," Manchester said. "So we had one day's service in the Canadian Army."

Manchester returned home, continued high school on Bishop Street and waited for his 18th birthday.

"The next day I was down at the hospital getting my blood test," he said. "I was all ready to go."

And he was off -- until he went to Altoona for his physical.

"I was waiting there and the man comes back and says 'I'm sorry but we're going to have to classify you 4-F,' " he said. A classification of 4-F means a person is unable to serve in the armed forces.

"I had failed the eye test," Manchester explained.

Poor eyesight sent Manchester on a quest to find some kind of wartime service. He contacted Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces and a British ambulance service. Both would take him, but only if he could get to North Africa.

"That was out of the question," he said. "I didn't have any money."

After reading a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, he and a friend made a return trip to Canada -- this time to join the Royal Polish Air Force that was training in Windsor, Ontario.

"All I remember about that is walking for hours on the Canadian side of the river," Manchester said. "We never did find the place."

Years later Manchester said he saw a parallel between his generation's journey and the next.

"I went through all kinds of things, trying to join these foreign armies and petitioning my disability," he said. "Compare this with what happened during Vietnam when people went to Canada to avoid the service."

- Hugh Manchester, local historian

"This time I knew what to do," he said. "I memorized the eye chart."

After strenuous basic training, Manchester's tank destroyer unit shipped out aboard a British steamer on Thanksgiving Day 1944.

"That first day we had turkey," he said. "I don't know what the hell we had for the rest of the trip."

The food was not the only hazard on the transatlantic voyage. There was a constant danger from Nazi submarines patrolling the North Atlantic. Manchester said there were lifeboat drills every morning.

Then, at 11 p.m. on the last night they were to be at sea, the ship barely escaped destruction. Manchester said he stayed up and was reading in the ship's library -- which was well below the water line.

"There was a loud noise and a terrible shudder went through the ship," he said.

All the men were ordered to their quarters, Manchester said. There the men laid on their bunks for hours, deep below the water line, listening to depth charges exploding on the other side of the hull.

After a few hours the ship continued on its way, he said. Because of wartime secrecy, the men were never told what had happened.

"I thought about that night for 10 years and then, in 1954, I wrote a letter to the British Government thinking they had some sort of ship's log," he said.

The ship's log had been destroyed, he said, and the only way to find out what happened was to contact the only surviving officer so he could write down what he remembered.

Manchester's ship was hit by a German torpedo that failed to explode, the officer wrote.

The ship arrived in England while the Battle of the Bulge was just ending in Belgium, he said. While he arrived on Jan. 22, 1945, too late for the well-known battles, he was on hand to assault the Siegfried line, Nazi Germany's defensive perimeter.

"When we were going up to the front," he said of the Siegfried-line battle, "it looked just like a movie going on all around."

Manchester's unit took heavy casualties in this campaign and the liberation of much of Austria, he said. After the Nazi regime fell American troops took up occupation duty while they prepared to ship out for an invasion of Japan.

That invasion never happened, of course, so Manchester spent the next year occupying German territory.

"Americans can never imagine the devastation that is visited upon a nation defeated in war," he said. "American cigarettes and Hershey bars were the medium of exchange, and if you had enough of either you would have been able to buy a castle on the Rhine and live like a grand duke."

It was during the occupation that much of the ill-feeling of war dissipated.

"The real front-line troops got to meet the German people," he said, "to befriend them."

After two years overseas, Manchester returned home to Bellefonte and a new beginning. Veterans had money available for college, vocational training or the purchase of a home through the GI Bill of Rights.

But the University would have to wait for Manchester to realize a longtime desire first, he said.

"I had to get Baron von Richthofen out of my system," he said. "So I leaned to fly at the Bellefonte airport and didn't start Penn State until 1949."

He graduated in 1954, delayed because his benefits ran out before he had completed a language requirement, he said. While finishing up his degree and then after graduation, he wrote for the Centre Democrat, a weekly newspaper in Bellefonte. That led to stints on the staffs of U.S. Rep. James E. Van Zandt and the Pennsylvania Fish Commission.

Then it was back to the Democrat, this time as editor.

After the paper was sold in the early '70s, Manchester faced a long period of unemployment.

His ties to the community paid off, though.

"I was president of the library board here and we needed a bookmobile driver," he said. "And I thought to myself, 'what am I doing here as president of the board without a job?' So I hired myself and resigned my post as president."

Since retirement, Manchester has kept busy. His column "The Big Spring" appears weekly in the Centre Daily Times, bringing Manchester a certain level of fame.

"I think he was always well known in Bellefonte," said State College Mayor and former Centre Daily Times staffer Bill Welch. "Not nearly as much county-wide notoriety as he has now."

And while Manchester said his work is not meant to be earth-shattering, he still feels it serves an important part in the newspaper.

"It's a nice break," he said, "you read about all these people dying and so on. Plus, old people like to have their memories tested."

When he is not working on his column, Manchester helps people with questions about local history, including a woman who was facing 16 lawsuits and needed to know how wide state Route 55 was when it was laid out in Dec., 1791.

He also keeps up with his reading, often finding mistakes such as Walter Cronkite getting the name of Harry S. Truman's World War I unit wrong in his recent book.

"When you are in the information business, you have to be accurate because there is always someone out there who can catch you," he warned. "That calls your credibility into question and after you lose that, I don't care what you write, you're not worth a damn thing."