When I think of character I think of Max Hebgen, the Montanan who died of pneumonia contracted on the job when he was 45 years old. By then he had designed our early integrated, carbon-free, hydro-electric system and put it into service. He even reached into this own pocket to keep an electricity company going through hard times, because he knew its importance to our young state. He was the first General Manager of a capitalist organization, the Montana Power Company. Thirteen days after he died, the Montana Socialist Party’s newspaper published this salute to Hebgen’s character:

“In the death of Max Hebgen, not only the city of Butte, but the entire state of Montana has lost a good and socially useful citizen. Born and reared in a working class environment and for many years following his trade as a lineman he steadfastly held himself to the purpose of fitting himself for greater responsibilities and wider scope in the exercise of his abilities. He spent most of his leisure hours in the study of electricity, and electrical engineering, and in the course of a few years found himself fitted for the duties of superintendent of the electric lighting and power plant, which was one of the Clark properties in Butte. Nor did he then relax his diligence. On the contrary, with even greater concentration he pursued his studies and increased his knowledge and skill by practical experimentation. He made himself one of the best informed and most reliable authorities in this country, in his chosen field of labor and became the president of the Montana Light and Power Company, which is the largest and most powerful of the electrical industries. Under his guiding genius the operations of this institution were greatly extended and numerous electrical plants in Montana bear testimony to his wise foresight and constructive skill.

Success in his profession never spoiled Max Hebgen. He was, in the best sense of the phrase, a big man. Of vital temperament, he was essentially constructive in his activities. He lived in his work, and his ruling ambition was to create and to make his creations as perfect and enduring as possible. Not exploitation for private gain, but genuine service was his passion, though he would not so have phrased it; perhaps was scarcely conscious of it. Loyalty was another trait in his character, and it manifested itself in his home and all other associations. He was appreciative of good and faithful work on the part of those who worked under his direction, and many are the employees of his company to whom he has opened the way to further advancement. His elevation to a position of power and distinction never destroyed his understanding of and sympathy with the working class. In his dealings with wage-earners he was scrupulously fair and his personal attitude toward the public which his company served was ever generous. He seemed desirous of giving as reasonable rates as was consistent with excellent service, good remuneration for labor and regard for the earnings of capital invested in the enterprises. Not always was he able to execute what he personally favored. The other influences surrounding him in his official capacity frequently overruled; but the will was there.

Yes, Max Hebgen was a truly great man and his life one of social usefulness. He was not what is called a ‘good mixer,’ but the sterling qualities of his nature, his indubitable ability, his indefatigable endeavor toward excellence, his essentially proletarian nature and sympathies greatly endeared him to this who knew best, and the people of Butte, especially the working class, have greater reason for respecting his memory than they, perhaps, have ever known or suspected.”

When Magoo and I drove from Helena to give our presentation in Butte, we followed the Great Falls to Butte Rainbow A and B lines, 126 miles of paralleled, ancient looking towers of angle iron still bearing electricity southwards along today’s Interstate 15., The Rainbow A & B lines were completed in 1910 by crews working for Hebgen, a telegraph lineman turned electricity operations genius. He figured out how to harness the length of the Upper Missouri River extending from a storage lake in the Madison River’s headwaters to the dams of the Missouris waterfalls, once so great that the American Indians riding out of view called them The Sound.” Hebgen’s integrate hydro-electric system supplied power for purifying smelted ore at Black Eagle, smelting ore at East Helena and Anaconda, and mining the unforgiving hard rock beneath the Butte Hill. The lines hanging on those quaint-looking metal transmission towers, like the first ones west of the Mississippi that connected Madison River’s Bear Trap Canyon dams into Butte were always loaded at full capacity. They transmitted millions of kilowatt-hours from a sub-station near the Rainbow Dam in Great Falls to energize four electric motors in the Butte Hoist Compressor Plant near the Missouri Sub-station on The Hill, and motors for giant compressors at The Leonard, The Bell and the Never Sweat mines. Each of these huge electric motors in Butte ran two enormous air compressors for squeezing air to 90 pounds per square inch. When a motor was down for maintenance, backed-out compressed air would bring it up to 75 revolutions per minute before workers turned on its electricity from Great Falls. Like coasting a pickup truck down a driveway to start its motor by catching its gears, using the air motor for starting kept the Rainbow A & B lines from being over-loaded with electric power being drawn in surges for starting requirements. Giant storage tanks or receivers outside the Butte Hoist Compressor Plant were connected to a series of 16 horizontal receivers or air storage tanks a quarter of a mile down The Hill. Miles of eighteen-inch steel lines carried the air across The Hill from these receivers to hoisting engines and to ten-inch air lines going down every shaft. Four-inch air lines carried the air to working places. Large steel air receiver tanks grouped vertically next to each hoisting engine room held sufficient air to cover a stationary twin 2500 horsepower air-powered hoisting engine’s peak energy requirements for moving the many man cages required at shift changes. Heat from the single steam boiler remaining to heat each mine’s locker room, or dry, warmed the compressed air in towers designed to give stationary engineers better control with air that was more responsive. During winter, warmer air in the 18-inch lines criss-crossing The Hill melted their covers of snow, sometimes creating short-cut trails for the miners going on or coming off shift. Butte kids would hang around those miners’ trails hoping to panhandle leftover sandwiches from homeward-bound lunch buckets. A short distance up The Hill above the compressor pant there was an open steel water tank ten feet deep and a hundred feet across. This simple mechanism maintained the hydro-static pressure on all compressed air in The Hill. A column of water dropping from under the tank down The Hill hooked from below into the bottoms of that series of 16 horizontal receivers, as air was being fed from the compressors into the top of the same series of receivers. Thus water pressure maintained air pressure across The Hill, in spite of occasional simultaneous peaking by many hoisting engines. The air pressure could be monitored by watching the rise or fall of water in the hydrostatic tank. Nothing more than stored air energized the hoisting engines of Butte’s eleven largest mines and their rock drills.

This marvel happened because Hebgen had the good judgement to approve the system as proposed by Bruno Nordberg, a compressed air expert from Wisconsin, including increasing the stroke length of the drivers on the steam-powered hoisting engines from 48 inches to 60 inches. This allowed a change of primary energy from coal for steam to water for electricity, which was less expensive and incidentally allowed workers and their families to breath cleaner air in Butte.

When National Defense Authorities ordered all production officials at the various Anaconda Company mines to increase zinc and copper production as rapidly as possible, there began a crash program of facilities enlargement aimed at producing more copper by Spring 1941. Due to submarine interdictions, the U.S. Office of Production Management was more worried in the near term about not having enough manganese or zinc. So, as The Company transferred 400 miners from copper to zinc and manganese production in Butte, in Anaconda The Company started building a manganese concentrator and nodulizer. The output of Butte’s zinc mins rose immediately from 5,000,000 pounds per month to 7,700,000 pounds.

These early pre-WWII preparations included stabilizing the 150 megawatts of electricity supply that would prove essential to The Company’s critically important wartime effort. Stabilizing supplies required helping to form the first eletricity pool in the nation, which in turn required completing a new 161,000 volt transmission line form Grace, Idaho to The Company’s smilers at Anaconda. The new line augmented an existing 161,000 volt line to the smelter from Kerr Dam on the Flathead River. The new power pool gave The Company access to the generation resources of several private companies in other states and electric power generated by the federal government’s Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams on the Columbia River. Everything was renewable, because everything was hydro-electric. This Northwest Power Pool with headquarters in Portland, Oregon, started rescheduling electricity flows in emergencies and during planned maintenance outages.

Throughout WWII these 100 percent renewable electric power flows could be optimized for required uses throughout the combined territories.

Con Kelley had been a boy in Walkerville, Montana. More significantly, he had a solid knowledge of The Butte Hill. During the years he attended law school, he mapped the mines and orebodies of Butte. After his mentor, John D. Ryan died, Kelley waited through the rest of the Great Depression before stepping into the position of Chairman of the Board for The Anaconda Company (The Company). That move was essential to increasing production from peacetime rates to the pitched levels needed for burying the Axis Powers in American guns, equipment, ships and ammunition. A lend-lease program with the United Kingdom (U.K.) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) took shape by March 1941. That’s when Roosevelt proclaimed the United States (U.S.) as the “Arsenal of Democracy.” The U.S. was starting to produce more fighting implements at a modest rate. Tanks, for example, were coming off assembly lines at the rate of 115 a month, while Joseph Stalin was begging for 500 per month.

As German submarines started interrupting normal supplies of chromium, The Company opened the Benbow and Minatt-Sampson chrome mines in Stillwater County and began producing 75,000 tons of chromium concentrate a month.

The crying need for manganese and the uncertainty of interrupted imports by submarine interdiction had already caused The Company to reopen Butte’s Emma and Travonia mines. Each day from June 1941, they produced 2,240,000 pounds of pink rhodochrosite mineral, which was 42 percent manganese, until the demand for manganese abated at the end of WWII. From this lower grade ore, the reduction plant in Anaconda, Montana, annually produced 224,000,000 pounds of 60 percent manganese nodules. Butte and Anaconda eventually produced 537,600,000 pounds of domestic U.S. manganese, enough at 12.5 pounds of hardener and alloy per ton of iron to enable production of more than 43 million tons of U.S. steel. This level of production represented more than 98 percent of the total manganese produced inside the U.S. In 1942, U.S. manganese consumption rose more than six-fold to more than 990,000 metric tons or 2.182 trillion pounds, of which nearly 29 percent was domestic, with the percent growing toward 40 percent. In democracy’s mighty arsenal, Montana’s mines in Butte were critical to the war effort. In the mid-1940’s, the Northern Pacific Railroad published in leading newspapers and magazines that had Butte and its surrounding area been captured or destroyed by enemy forces in 1941, it might have crippled the U.S. war production effort. “The mines in Butte and vicinity worked a miracle of manganese production, using ‘pink ore,’ a former waste material. This manganese has been a mainstay of America’s armament industries.”

And, it wasn’t just manganese for hardening iron into steel. In 1942, for example, while Butte’s miners were annually drilling, blasting, mucking and filling boxes with rocks containing 144 million pounds of manganese, they were also mining 47 million pounds of zinc, and 250 million pounds of copper. As byproducts they also removed 10,000 ounces of gold and 6 million ounces of silver. During all of World War II, as some of the Blue Stars in the windows of hundreds of Butte families turned to Silver for someone being wounded, and Gold for someone deceased, 115 Butte miners were killed while working underground.

Butte’s 12.5 pounds of manganese per ton of steel became part of America’s 29,497 tanks and self-propelled guns, 257,390 artillery pieces, including anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, 105,054 mortars, 2,679,840 crew-served machine guns, 11,750,000 rifles, 1,956,000 sub-machine guns, 2,832,311 trucks, 99,950 fighter planes, 62,444 light and medium bombers, 35,366 four-engine bombers, 3,918 reconnaissance planes, 23,929 transport planes, 57,623, training and miscellaneous planes, 141 ships that carried aircraft, 27 of which were aircraft carriers over 100,000 tons, 8 battleships, 48 cruisers, 349 destroyers, 498 escort corvettes and frigates and 203 submarines.

Besides 12.5 pounds of manganese for every ton of steel, those ships need cadmium paint on their hulls to keep from rusting and copper for hundreds of components. For example, “Each Iowa class battleship contained 3,058,000 pounds of copper. Just one large bronze propeller used 50,000 pounds, heavy cruisers needed 1,407,000 pounds and light cruisers needed 1,279,000 pounds. Aircraft carriers needed 2,861,000 pounds, while their escorts each required 622,000 pounds. Destroyers contained 463,000 pounds, submarines needed 348,000 pounds and submarine chasers used 58,000 pounds. Even torpedo boats like John F. Kennedy’s PT109 each required 18,000 pounds. And, that copper requirement did not include their big guns for hammering shorelines and beaches. Each 6-inch, 8-inch and 16-inch gun mount and turrent needed 18,800, 29,100 and 66,100 pounds of copper, respectively.

Then there was the zinc required with copper for some aircraft. P-38 Lightning fighters needed 1384 pounds of copper and 72 pounds of zinc, P-39 Airacobras, 938 and 25 pounds, P-40 Kitty Hawks, 1001 and 51 pounds, P-47 Thunderbolts, 660 and 87 pounds, P-51 Mustangs, 681 and 125 pounds, B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, 2958 and 181 pounds, B-24 Liberator bombers, 3025 and 132 pounds, B-25 Mitchell bombers, 2010 and 193 pounds, B-26 Marauder bombers, 1545 and 205 pounds, A-20 Havoc bombers, 782 and 95 pounds, and each C-47 or DC-3 Air Transport required 1569 pounds of copper and 95 pounds of zinc.

What about ammunition?

Ammunition consumed one third of all U.S. copper production. Each million cartridges used 28,000 pounds. A single fighter plane fired 2500 bullets in 15 seconds, A flight of 50 planes could fire a half million cartridges in a minute. One hour of firing a single 105-mm cannon, 36 to an armored division, hurled 1000 pounds of copper. The weight of copper in naval gun shells from each gun, increasing in size was 15.2, 27 and 70.5 pounds. Without copper, no torpedo or depth charge could even function.

As far as ground combat machines used in the Battle of the Bulge, a 90-mm anti-aircraft gun needed 80 pounds of copper in the gun tubes, 400 pounds in the recoil mechanism, and 1,000 pounds in the carriage. Each 81-mm mortar carrier, 105-mm self-propelled howitzer, 75-mm self-propelled gun, and 155-mm gun without vehicle, respectively, needed 164 pounds, 250 pounds, 190 pounds and 1350 pounds of copper. One .50-caliber machine gun required at least 10 pounds of copper, and the 7,000 Garand M-1 rifles in a typical triangular division each, like the one fired by Frank Vukassin, used 3/10’s of a pound. Each of the 300 light tanks and 200 medium tanks in a typical armored division used 500 and 900 pounds of copper respectively.

The Anaconda Company’s mines, smelters and refineries in Montana produced 51.26 percent of the total increase of U.S. copper production during WW II. By 1942, 80 percent of Butte’ miners were working six days a week and opting for higher personal production rates as contract miners. Butte’s mines were operating seven days a week to eventually produce 6,800,000,000 pounds of copper during WWII. Adding to this the 1,513,000,000 pounds of finished copper being produced The Company’s other mines at Mountain City and Battle Mountain in Nevada, employees of The Company produced one-third of the copper available to the U.S. for prosecuting WWII.

To help accomplish these massive tasks, underground in the mines of Butte, Montana, The Company erected trees of “No Smoking” signs in sixteen languages.

We have identified 242 Montanans who fought in the Battle of the Bulge. From available information 77 of them could have fought in any of the battle’s four stages: defending against the initial attack, which involved at least 67 indicated by Blue-in place, Green-rapid reinforcing, Pink-KIA, and Orange-captured dots on the attached map, holding out inside the Siege of Bastogne, which involved at least 35, forced marching in contact under Patton against four defending Divisions to relieve Bastogne, which involved at least 33, or mounting the counteroffensive to clear the Bulge, which involved at least 39 more Montanans. After taking our little book to Montana’s towns, we concluded the number of Montanan’s involved was probably larger than we’ll ever know.

Our tour got us thinking about the fates of the nine Montanans who were captured. As already mentioned Mel Mellinger and Kenny Newton of Glasgow were with the 106th Infantry Division’s 423rd Regiment when it was surrounded and forced to surrender at the village of Schoenberg, as were James Dew of Missoula, Keith Ginter of Richey, Howard Akey of Whitefish, and Tom Lawler. Howard Brecktell of Butte, serving with the 110th Regiment of 28th Division on Skyline Drive near the 106th, was captured with them. Mark Osweller of Lewistown serving with the 80th Infantry Division was later captured during the relief of Bastogne and sent to Stalag17B. We know that Helena’s LT Bob Harrison with the 501st PIR was captured when wounded at Wardin near Bastogne but do not know which Stalag he was trying to escape when he was killed. We know Lawler died in Stalag 4B at Muhlberg, Germany on February 2, 1945, and Brecktell died in Stalag 9B at Bad Orb, Germany, on February 6, 1945. We also know that Ginter was sent to Stalag 4B, while Akey was sent to Stalag IIIA.

In Kalispell we met Howard Akey’s two sons and a grandson. Akey was captured in the Bulge with 2800 men of the 106th Infantry Division. They were being held in seven circus tents in Stalag-IIIA, 35 miles south of Berlin at Luchenwald when he met another Montanan. Steve Warner was from Browning on the other side of Glacier National Park. Warner, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe and the 9th Infantry Division had been captured at Kasserine Pass two years earlier. Another Blackfeet soldier, Fred D. DeRoche, was with the 9th Infantry in the 39th Regiments. He enlisted with his cousin Billy Wolftail and made it as far as the Bulge before being Killed in Action on December 21, 1944. Anyhow, Akey’s sons and grandson said their father and grandfather never spoke much of WWII except once in 1980 at family dinner. One of the sons, watching the Iran Hostage Crisis unfold on television, made some suggestion about sending in the US. Marines to rescue diplomatic personnel. Their father surprised them by saying, “Be quiet! You know nothing of war.”

Their father left behind the notes of a story he’d written, titled Time out of Time. He starts by telling about an SS officer nearly shooting him. His lines include: “The lack of food seems to eliminate any problems that could arise from 2800 men condensed without women.” About being bombed by allied planes he wrote, “The talk naturally is of the air raid the night before. The prison camp is located right on the edge of the rail yard outside of Limberg. An American officer’s barracks suffered a direct hit killing sixty-five men and the entire camp is in utter confusion, There had been air raids before but this is the first hit on the camp, I try to rationalize the absurdity of being killed by our own bombs, and from the receiving end it makes no sense. These men have given their lives and it has gained nothing. The ditches where we had taken refuge beside the road have a light cover of new snow this morning, as does the quarry. The route I had taken through the pit looks impossible to negotiate in the daylight. The area is badly pock-marked with bomb craters. I feel very lucky to have survived. As we near the train I can see our car has made it through the air raid without being touched, Some of the others have been damaged but the train is still on the track and appears to be movable. Near the tracks the Germans have gathered the frozen bodies of the men killed by the bombs and stacked them like a woodpile. As we file past this depressing mound I try not to look at the nearly blue faces. I don’t want to recognize anyone. We climbed back into the car from which we had fled in such terror.”

Akey gradually hardened to all the death. During his first days walking behind enemy lines, he passed a burned American personnel carrier. There were two charred bodies in the back, one slumped over a wooden seat that was nearly burned away, the other hanging with his head down over the tailgate. The upside-down American’s hands couldn’t quite reach the ground laid bare by the fire’s heat. There was another body, unburned ten feet away from the truck’s open cab. He’d probably been shot trying to escape the burning. A little farther on the road he saw a German staff car turned upside down in the ditch with wheels in the air. There was a soldier pinned underneath, with the top half of his body nearly face up in the cold water. Akey remembered, “I am becoming more aware of how permanent death is and how fragile life is” He talked about how survival would not have been possible without a friend.

“Lee and I have been together through this whole ordeal. As a matter of act we have been close friends since I joined the outfit in September of 1943 at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, through maneuvers in Tennessee, a summer of training at Camp Atterbury, Indiana and then overseas. It isn’t surprising that we are now sharing every discomfort and every scrap of food or cigarette butt we can find. Our backgrounds are entirely different. Lee comes from a fairly affluent family in New Jersey and attended a private school in New England until the draft caught up with him. He has never hiked in the mountains or fished, hunted or skied while my knowledge of his lifestyle is equally limited. We tolerate each other’s shortcomings and share a deep desire to get back to our own ways of life. We are a team joined by the basic need to share.”

The Whitefish soldier wrote that Russian POWs in Stalag-IIIA faired poorly. “The only nationality in the camp that does not receive Red Cross food parcels is the Russian. They are not members of the International Red Cross Organization. Very often we see a grave detail carrying another victim of starvation out of the Russian compound. There are stories about the Russians back at Stalag-IIIB on the Oder that when the guards turn the dogs into the barracks to get the POW’s out for roll call, as they do if we don’t get out fast enough, the only thing that comes out are the dog hides hung on the fence. “The Rooskies had soup!”

As bad as this might seem, clearly at least one Nazi political prisoner had it worse:

“Most of the near three thousand men walking along the road are doing so on recently frozen feet. Our route takes us by a political prison camp. These prisoners wear loose fitting pants and shirts and they look like they’ve been starving for months. Most of them are behind the barbed wire but some are outside the camp cleaning up the area around the fences and in the ditches by the road They are very weak looking and move slowly. As we pass close by one man cleaning the edge of the road steps into our group in an attempt to escape. His move goes unnoticed by both his and our guards. His clothes are light weight black and white striped cotton resembling summer weight pajamas the kind my mother use to buy for me and I never wore. His bony ankles show between his too-short pants and his too-large shoes which he wears without stockings. His shirt is soaked by the rain and it clings to his gaunt shoulders and shows his skinny arms and ribs. His backbone makes a knobby line down one of the dirty white stripes. His face shows no emotion. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes are sunken in dark sockets.

We keep him in the center of our ranks and rub mud and dirt on his clothes trying to cover his stripes. He can speak no English and none of us can understand what I believe is the Polish he speaks, but it is evident he is a very desperate man. The two or three hours we walk with this man in our midst has my stomach in a knot. I don’t know if I am frightened for him or for what will happen to us when he is recognized.

The guards are turning us off the road into a large farm-yard. The wooden double gate to the farm-yard is hung from stone and cement pillars in each side of the drive. Only the gate on the right side is open and our column narrows down to two abreast to go through the opening. A guard just inside the closed side of the gate recognizes the striped clothes of our infiltrator, grabs the runaway by his scrawny deck and throws him to the ground. With his heavy boot on the back of the striped shirt he holds the man flat in the mud until another guard runs over and together they drag the prisoner off to, God knows what fate. I dislike myself for doing nothing to stop this abuse, but am too terrified about my own safety to do anything but walk on by as though nothing was happening. I ask, ‘Christ, Lee, what do you think they’ll do to him?’ Lee looks sick and answers, ‘I don’t know; I don’t even what to think about it.’

As the Russians liberated Stalag-IIIA, Akey was able to observe, “The Russian Army, as I see it, doesn’t appear to have any organization. They come in hordes….men, women, children….old and young…some in uniform, some not, carrying every make of weapons I’ve ever seen.” Then, after they arrived, “Shortly after, they run the guards down the street and out the other end of town, three Russians come around a building, two of them holding a third between them. We thought he was drunk but as they got closer he appears to be having a fit of some kind. He is drooling and foaming at the mouth and making odd sounds in his throat. His eyes are rolled back in hushed. They take him into an alley, shoot him and leave him there. We have become adept at blending into the scenery and moving away from apparent danger. I will never be able to understand these peoples’ disregard for human life. We decide to be very careful around the Russians. It looks like we will be around them for a few days before we get back to American control.”

Then Akey spoke for all the American POWs who made it home. “The morning of May 28th, 1945, I am awakened early by men shouting and running up the metal steps to the deck above. We are home. I also run out on the deck to see the New York skyline looming out of the morning mist. There she is, Miss Liberty, just as I had seen her in so many pictures. I stand at the rail for more than an hour thrilled with the sight of America and still not quite able to believe I have made it back. We dock at Staten Island and take a ferry to the mainland. The ferry is an old-timer the army leases just to ferry troops across the bay. The entire crew is the captain and the engineer. There are about 200 POWs on board. Out in the middle of the bay a fire starts where the smokestack comes through to the top deck. The smoke is billowing up and other ferries pull up close to help. The captain stops the boat and he and his crew of one get out the fire hose, but every time they turn on the water someone shuts it off or kinks the hose. Everyone feels it would be great climax to our adventure to sink in New York Harbor, after all there are boats standing all around to take us off. Some of the officer on board, however, get the men under control and we help extinguish the fire. We are definitely back under military control. I walk off the ferry and climb on the waiting troop train. Compared to the German boxcars this is sheer luxury. I stow my bag in the luggage rack and sit in the window seat of the old coach. Looking down at my watch, still not running, I know now it will just be a short time till I am walking downtown to get it repaired. My time will start running again. My war is over….My country is free….I have paid my dues.”