Arbon Valley men in uniform, 1941–1946

When the United States went to war in December 1941, Arbon Valley, in Power County south-west of Pocatello, sent its young men into uniform a few at a time. The papers noticed them in a line of an enlistment list or a paragraph of a society column. Read in order, they and one airman's fuller record show some who went and where the war took them.

Pearl Harbor and the first lists

Harold Arbon was the youngest son of Joe Arbon, the first bishop of the Arbon Ward. No newspaper report of his war has been found. His story comes from a website honoring the B-29 crews of the Marianas, compiled by a relative of one of its airmen, and from a shorter encyclopedia page drawn from it.

By those accounts he was born at Malad in October 1919 and grew up on a ranch in Idaho, earning 50 cents a month lighting the one-room schoolhouse stove. The ranch was probably the family's at Arbon, where the 1930 census found them. He had enrolled in the Civilian Pilot Training Program at the University of Utah. On December 7, 1941, he was at his parents' home when the news came from Pearl Harbor, six days before he was due to report in Salt Lake City for induction into the Army Air Corps.

On January 28, 1942, the Salt Lake Telegram printed the enlistments reported the day before by the Salt Lake district recruiting directors. Among the Idaho men joining the Army was William E. Barbour, 22, of Arbon. The Salt Lake Tribune's copy of the list reads "Harbour" in its scanned text. Nothing more about him has turned up.

On October 13, 1942, the Telegram's list of Army enlistments named Frank L. Johnson, 19, of Arbon. He was probably Frank Lynden Johnson, Maurice Poppie's stepson, who registered for the draft at Arbon that year, was farming there in 1950 and died in 2013 (a memorial notice on this site). His recorded birth date, April 28, 1922, would have made him 20, so the match is likely but not certain.

Two officers from the founding families

Harold Arbon won his wings and a second lieutenant's commission at Luke Field, Arizona, on June 23, 1942, and a week later married Ardith Gilbert at Pocatello. He spent about a year as an instructor at Luke Field and then taught on B-17s at Hobbs, New Mexico, before training on the B-29 at Clovis, New Mexico, and Walker Field, Kansas, where he became a first lieutenant and an aircraft commander.

Glenn C. Andersen, a son of John C. and Sena Andersen, was born at Arbon in July 1920. The Arbon column of the American Falls Press of July 16, 1920, probably announced him:

The stork visited the home of Mr. and Mrs. John Anderson Saturday, leaving a boy. All concerned are getting along nicely.

On January 13, 1943, he married Roma Erickson, daughter of William Erickson of Smithfield, in the Logan Temple. The Logan Herald Journal and the North Cache News described him as a senior at Utah State Agricultural College and a first lieutenant in the advanced ROTC. In December 1943 the Herald Journal reported that, on "a leave from army duty at Miami, Florida," he had visited relatives in Mendon with his parents. On January 14, 1944, it said he was "stationed with the air corps" at Amarillo, Texas, and had "recently received his air corps commission in Florida."

The losses

Carl Estep, born at Arbon, went missing in Tunisia in February 1943. Hyrum Buist, a son of the Buist homesteaders, and Sidney Ralph Phillips, born at Crystal, were lost in 1943 and 1944. In January 1944 a training bomber from the Pocatello air base crashed about ten miles south-west of the base, probably toward the north end of the valley, killing seven men. Of the fifteen Power County names on the War Department's 1946 honor list of the Army's dead and missing, Carl Estep's is the only one so far traced to the valley.

Thirty-five missions from Saipan

In December 1944 Harold Arbon's crew, No. 234 of the 882nd Squadron, 500th Bomb Group, flew a new B-29 from Kearney, Nebraska, by way of Hawaii and Kwajalein to Saipan, in the Mariana Islands, from which the B-29s flew against Japan.

On January 14, 1945, over Nagoya, the bomb bay doors failed to open and then a bomb rack malfunctioned, so only one bomb fell on the target. The flight engineer "mistakenly dumped 800 gallons of fuel." Arbon had the crew throw out flak vests, cameras, ammunition, radar and navigation equipment and oxygen bottles to lighten the plane. When they reached Isley Field on Saipan, the log records, "all four engines were sputtering from lack of fuel."

On March 9 his plane set out on what the log calls the "1st low level incendiary raid on Japan," against Tokyo, but turned back with a runaway propeller. From April his usual plane was Z-36, "Lil Abner." Twice he landed on Iwo Jima, once to refuel and once after an aborted mission. He completed 35 accredited bombing missions and came home in July 1945. The tribute's text calls him a first lieutenant; its crew list calls him a captain.

As the war ended

On September 29, 1945, the Deseret News carried a Boise wire item: a son of John D. Price of Arbon had enlisted in the Navy as an apprentice. The scanned text reads "Dees Bowen Pries"; the surname is evidently Price, but the first name is uncertain. John D. "Jack" Price had married D. J. Bowen's daughter Stella in 1913, in the valley's earliest recorded wedding, and the young man's middle name suggests he was Stella's son, though the paper does not name his mother.

In October the Logan Herald Journal reported a dinner in honor of First Lieutenant and Mrs. Glen Anderson of Amarillo, Texas, given by Mrs. Catherine Gibbons of Mendon, who had had Glenn and his parents to dinner in 1943. Mr. and Mrs. John Anderson of Arbon were among the guests.

Harold Arbon spent about another year at Muroc Field in California and was discharged on May 4, 1946. He became a pharmacist and later a dentist, and settled in California. When his sister Delta Arbon Harmon died in 1987, her obituary listed him at Salinas. He died there on August 26, 2019, a few weeks short of his hundredth birthday.

On this site: the Arbon family, John R. Breeze, an Arbon Marine, and the 2013 post on the bomber crash.