Boise State U. student’s thesis involves Weiser WWII veterans

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series about Weiser men drafted into a top-secret military battalion that ultimately staved off a German offensive that could have led to a different outcome in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. An exhibit will be unveiled at the Idaho Military Historical Museum on Friday, Dec. 8 at Gowen Field in Boise at 7 p.m. Look for part II in next week’s issue of the Weiser Signal American.

 

 She didn’t quite know what she had in her possession.

 Weiser resident Linda Strain, whose father fought in the European theater during World War II, held on tightly to his military mementos after his passing.

 Among them was a U.S. Army uniform patch that intrigued her cousin Kent Kiser, a graduate student at Boise State University currently  working on his history thesis.

 Kiser, who was fascinated with military history from the time he was a young boy, knows more than the average Joe when it comes to World War II. He has spent years researching and collecting. So, when he saw the patch, he knew he had to look into it.

 “I was at a family reunion in Weiser and brought my grandfather’s stuff to show the family. My cousin, which was my grandfather’s brother’s daughter, brought some of her stuff and one of the patches was very strange. I had never seen it before.”

 The triangular-shaped, blue, red, and yellow-segmented badge features a red lightning bolt that strikes at an angle over the top of a simplistic tank track and solid, black barrel, from right to left. At the top of the triangle, in the yellow segment, are the numbers 526, an odd number for a unit Kiser had never heard of. Inspired by the mystery it presented at the time, Kiser began his research and what he would ultimately find was nothing short of incredible. 

 He later requested documents for his uncle, the late Weiser resident PFC William E. Kiser, from the National Archives in Washington, D.C. 

 “I got his discharge papers, copies of them, and it said he was with the 526th Infantry Battalion,” Kiser said. “I had never heard of these guys. When I looked them up online, I couldn’t find anything except this little website and there was an association for the guys. I found that the association’s leader was Glen Damron, a guy from Pocatello.”

 Kiser reached out to Damron’s daughter Kathleen Damron.

 “He had just passed away; I missed him,” Kiser bemoaned. “He was actually one of the last guys from the unit that was still alive, but I show up to her (Kathleen’s) house and she gives me boxes of papers that this guy had and I started asking questions and she tells me, ‘Oh, a lot of these guys were from Idaho.’ It’s kind of a bizarre unit; I knew I was on to something. This wasn’t just collecting anymore; now I feel I can do something with it.”

 It turns out a student from another university had written a master’s thesis on the 526th.

 “She had a copy of it that was given to her dad by the guy who wrote it,” Kiser related. “He did interviews with these guys and so all of a sudden I had something. It turns out they were under British-American command, and they trained in a secret location in Arizona, using light manipulation as a weapon. It was mounted on tanks and was totally classified.”

 The newest technology of the day was called “Canal Defense Lights,” developed by the British and nicknamed “Gizmos” which were mounted on tanks and emitted 13 million candle power.

 “Translated into watts … well, that’s a lot,” Kiser said. “These lights would suck in all the light from the surrounding area and if it was shining on you, it would flicker six times per second and your eyes couldn’t adjust, so it would blind you, which made it dangerous in that way. They would have different shades of the light; there would be blue and red, and combinations of those two colors, kind of putting them together, which would affect how far the light seemed. It was pretty incredible.”

 Interestingly, the men drafted into the project primarily came from small towns like Weiser and Buhl, and included men from larger communities in California and the Northwest. In 1943, they were sent to Camp Bouse in Arizona where they were trained on the project. Camp Bouse was a secret camp of the U.S. Army, Desert Training Center in Mohave County, Ariz. 

 The camp, built by the U.S. Army’s 369th Engineer Battalion, prepared troops to do battle in North Africa against the Nazis.

 “These guys get pulled regionally, mainly, in March 1943, but according to another historian who is now working on this project with me – his name is Rob Estrada from Arizona – they had to test much higher than the average U.S. G.I. through what is kind of like the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery), but it was different back then, the Army’s test was roughly linked to an IQ test. They gave it to them without them really knowing exactly what was going on and they had to score 20 points higher than the average G.I. would.”

 If they passed that, the men were moved on to Fort Knox where they were separated into an armored battalion.

 “That’s unusual; it’s not a division, it’s not connected to anything,” Kiser said. “It’s an independent armored infantry battalion, which was then shipped off to Arizona where they end up training in the desert.”

 Be sure to read part II in next week’s edition of the Weiser Signal American.