York Town News
Honoring those who served: Veterans Day program set for Tuesday, Nov. 14
By Virginia L. Woodwell
Nat Bellantone was just 22 years old and a junior at the Massachusetts College of Art when he enlisted in the Navy to serve in World War II in 1942. Throughout his term of service, Bellantone sketched the scenes he saw there and even continued to paint watercolors. Among those that have survived the war and the years that followed is this painting, named "Final Flight." The pilot did not return from the mission that followed the date of this painting. Bellantone will join several other Sentry Hill residents at the York Public Library this coming Tuesday, Nov. 14, to share their memories of World War II in honor of Veterans Day, which is this Saturday, Nov. 11.
Artwork courtesy of Nat Bellantone
Nat Bellantone, pictured here, left art school to enlist in the Navy during World War II. He is pictured here while serving in the South Pacific, sketching while residents of the village where he was stationed look on.
Photo courtesy of Nat Bellantone
YORK - Sixty-three years ago, in 1943, at the height of United States involvement in World War II, Paul Wentworth, then 26 and married with three children, "volunteered," as he puts it now, "for the draft."
A Maine native, the son of a Methodist minister who'd served parishes in several towns across the state, he would end up, before the end of the war in 1945, on the other side of the globe, in the Philippines, with the Army's 579th anti-aircraft battalion.
This week, from noon to 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 14, Wentworth, who will be 89 next month, will be joining three other World War II veterans and one civilian war worker at the York Public Library to share reminiscences of that time.
The event is the second in a two-part Brown Bag Lunch Series being presented in observation of Veterans' Day. Sponsoring it are the library, the Old York Historical Society and a group of Sentry Hill residents who have been participating in a program called "Remembrances of Wartime," an oral history project conducted by Patricia Burke, director of therapeutic recreation at Sentry Hill.
In the first event, held on Nov. 7, Old York Historical Society Director Scott Stevens read letters home from two York men who served in Virginia in the last year of the Civil War.
Participants in the upcoming event will include, in addition to Wentworth, Nat Bellantone, an artist who served in the Pacific as a Navy Seabee; Margaret Dixon, who worked as a "Rosie the Riveter" at the shipyard in Portland; Arthur Higgins, whose army service included personal experience with the famed General George Patton in Europe, and Arthur Dixon, who was aboard the U.S.S. Missouri when Japan signed the peace treaty there with Allied forces in Tokyo Bay in September, 1945.
Paul Wentworth's trip to the Pacific was by way of Georgia and North Carolina, where he was trained in Morse Code and general communications, and where he would qualify as a high-speed code operator and as an instructor.
After joining the 579th, he'd then be sent to Texas and, for desert training, to Arizona, before shipping out from San Francisco. His Pacific crossing would take 40 days and would end in a large escorted convoy bound from Indonesia to Manila Bay in the Philippines. From there, his outfit moved north for training in the mountains of Luzon prior to what was expected to be a land invasion of Japan.
That never happened, however, for the dropping of two atomic bombs brought about Japan's surrender in August, 1945. Almost immediately, Wentworth says, his outfit went south to Leyte, and from there north to Tokyo Bay for the peace ceremonies.
Within a month of America's beginning its occupation of Japan, Wentworth earned his discharge papers. He would return home to Freeport, where he'd start and run his own successful dry cleaning and alterations business for 31 years, and where he and his wife, Betty, would raise their seven children.
Betty, to whom Wentworth was married for 66 years, died three and a half years ago; Wentworth himself is now an active Sentry Hill resident who plays electronic keyboard twice a week at breakfast for his fellow residents. Two daughters live nearby; Pamela Ferland, who, with her husband, runs four motels on Shore Road in Ogunquit, and Margaret Bowden, who runs the Country View Motel on Route 1 in Cape Neddick.
Wentworth reports that he never saw combat action in World War II, though he was in places that had seen it. The closest he came was that training in Luzon for the invasion of Japan.
"That makes my story pale by comparison," he says.
For Nat Bellantone, who was 22 and a junior at the Massachusetts College of Art when he enlisted in the Navy in 1942, what he saw in three Pacific campaigns stretching across 28 months was "pretty exciting and pretty scary."
Bellantone was with the Seabees - the name coming from their jobs as "CBs," or construction battalions - groups of 1,700 men who, as Bellantone puts it, "put in landing fields, communications, roads, docks."
His group started at a staging area in New Caledonia, then moved on to New Guinea, then to Admiralty Island, then back to New Caledonia for a rest, then, finally, to Okinawa, just south of Japan, from which the atomic bombs were delivered.
Through all this, artist Bellantone managed to sketch the scenes around him, and to paint some in watercolors, and, even more remarkably, to save many of these works beyond the war.
In 1992, in celebration of the Seabees' 50th anniversary, he reproduced eight of them in forms suitable for framing, and it is one of those, called "Final Flight" around which Bellantone will build his talk on Tuesday.
Bellantone is also a Sentry Hill resident, and, according to Burke, was one of two people, along with fellow resident Roland Glenn, who helped organized responses to a World War II oral history project begun by Burke.
The spark for that, Burke said in a telephone interview this week, was a request for such memoirs coming from the Library of Congress. With her prompting, she said, the project "took on a life of its own." In May of this year, presenters held five workshops in which they shared memoirs and memories of the war, and the results of those workshops have since been sent to Washington.
Tuesday's presentation will be a kind of capsule summary of the workshops. The five speakers will talk, altogether, for no more than an hour. The audience will then be invited to linger and share in the memory-swapping.
Participants are also invited to bring their lunches; the Old York Historical Society will provide a beverage. The event is free and open to the public, though donations are welcome. For more information, call Cheryl Farley at the Old York Historical Society at 363-4974 or Patricia Burke at Sentry Hill at 363-5116.
