My Father's Wartime Compass

Shortly after publishing WWII Mortarman, which tracked the path of my father’s chemical mortar battalion in the war, my cousin Cindy Norris messaged me with a stunning find. She was visiting with Charlotte Baker, an old friend, who had grown up next door to my parents’ home in Cohasset before we four kids were born, in the early years after the war. Charlotte offered Cindy a precious memento, saying she thought it belonged in the hands of a Gentry. It was a wrist-worn compass, the year 1940 inscribed on the back.

Charlotte told Cindy that my parents were her second family in childhood. She spent all her free time at our house, and when it snowed and Daddy was called out to plow the county’s highways, she'd stay over with Mama. They’d make fudge. Charlotte said that Daddy should have been a teacher: “He could explain a complex subject at a child’s level, so you understood it.” One day, Daddy asked Charlotte to sit down beside him, because he had something to show her. He pulled out the old compass and told her it was the most precious and important item of his wartime gear: “At the battlefront, it’s easy to get lost, and you might find yourself accidentally crossing enemy lines. But if you had this compass, you could always find your way home again. I always say, this compass is what brought me home safe from the war.”

A week later, Charlotte was visiting again, and Daddy again called her over. He asked, “Do you remember the story I told you last week?” She said she did, and he asked her to recite the story back to him. Then, when she was able to do so, he handed her the compass and said, “I want you to have it.”

That would have been the late 1940s, about 75 years ago. Charlotte would have been 10 or 11 years old. She kept that compass all these years, along with the story Daddy told her. Isn't that amazing? Having read the WWII Mortarman book, Cindy decided that she had to pass the compass along to me. She set up a lunch date for us, and on Monday we got together at Charlotte’s home, where she retold the story, gifted me the old compass, and I gave her a copy of the book. My sister Kay was there, too. Both of us were a bit overcome by it all and repaired briefly to another room where our tears could fall in private.

It's still something of a wonderful shock. If you’ve read my book, then you know that two other mementos have survived, an antique dueling pistol that Kay has and a swastika flag signed by Daddy’s company that is framed in my study. That this compass has turned up, as if out of the blue, along with the testimony of what it meant to our father, and that Charlotte had kept it all these decades only to pass it along now, is hard to wrap my mind around. Bless you Charlotte, bless you.

But there’s more.

That night I googled the compass, learning that the dabs of white paint on the pointers were made of glow-in-the-dark radium-paint (gulp). A YouTube video showed me how to operate its push button correctly, and yes, it still finds north faultlessly. But I also discovered that this is not a U.S. Army-issued compass at all. It was made by a Russian company for use by officers and artillery observers in the Soviet army during World War II! In this picture, you can see the name of the company -- MACTEPCKNE AY PKKA -- embossed on the dial (Google says: An ADRIANOFF-type compass made by Мастерские артиллерийские управления Рабоче-Крестьянской Красной Армии (Masterskye Artilleriskoye Upravlenye Raboche-Krestianskoy Krasnoy Army) i.e. the Workshops of the Artillery's Administration of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army).

How did Daddy end up with it?

Your guess is as good as mine. I know that the U.S. provided weapons and other provisions to the Soviet Union’s armies throughout the war, but is it possible that the Soviets, at some point, made compasses for our troops? Seems unlikely. Our father was in the U.S. Seventh Army, which ended its fighting in Southern Germany, near the Austrian border. Though there was a famous meeting of the Soviet and U.S. Armies further north at war’s end, I don’t think they ran into each other where Daddy was, so there would not have been an opportunity to swap compasses with a Russian soldier. One thought, bear with me: Some Nazi troops were pulled from the Eastern Front, fighting the Soviets, to the western front, facing the U.S. Army, towards the end of the war. Is it possible that a German soldier took the compass as booty from a battle there and that Daddy later took it from the German guy?

Well, as with so many of the questions that turned up in researching my father’s war, another confounding mystery. If you have any ideas or guesses, please comment. In the meantime, I need to find a good display case for this astounding family treasure.