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thedrifter
12-07-05, 05:41 PM
MARINE
Albert Dodge
Stephen Fay
Ellsworth American,

Like his father before him, Albert Dodge of Seal Harbor worked for the late John D. Rockefeller.

“He was great for the town,” Dodge said. “You could always work for him.”

Dodge’s father had captained, crewed and cared for a pair of fancy vessels belonging to Rockefeller’s lawyer. Albert, who completed only one year of high school in Northeast Harbor, worked on Rockefeller’s carriage roads back before the roads were turned over to Acadia National Park.

“When I was 19,” Dodge recalled, “I joined the Marines with four friends.”

The date was Jan. 5, 1943. The friends were Harold Huston, Red Dyment, Donald Bryant and Dick Schuman.

“Donald failed the physical but later he joined the Seabees. After boot camp, we all went our separate ways.”

Together with countless other young Marine recruits, he traveled by troop train to Camp LeJeune, N.C., and Camp Pendleton, Calif., for training.

“On Jan. 13, 1945, we loaded onto three troopships,” Dodge said. “It was a convoy with two destroyers and escorts. After 31 days at sea, we pulled into Anawetok Atoll and sat there while a large task force went by. There were thousands of ships — all types — going to Iwo Jima. We watched all day.”

After the war, Dodge learned that two ships in his convoy had been ordered by Gen. Graves Blanchard Erskine, to join the assault on Iwo Jima.

Although Dodge did not know it at the time, he and the other men in his convoy were being prepared for the invasion of Japan.

“The ship that I was on proceeded to Guam, where we were trained for 13 months and made ready to make a push on Kyusho, Japan,” Dodge said. “We all had our shots — one in each arm — from the corpsman and were ready to go. Then the bomb came.

“I did my duty,” he said, “but a lot of men died.

“I had enlisted for the duration, so I was shipped back to the States. I was mustered out as a corporal at Charleston Navy Yard on April 18, 1946.”

Dodge returned to Mount Desert Island.

“I worked for Rocky in the summer,” he said, then migrated south to Florida in the winter to work for MDI summer people.

“On March 21, 1950, I joined the Army and stayed in for 17 years.”

Dodge’s tours included Alaska, New York, Germany, West Point, Virginia and Korea. While attached to the 101st Airborne in Korea, he met and married a Korean woman. He retired Jan. 1, 1967.

They settled in eastern Massachusetts. His wife of 39 years died last year.

Dodge was reluctant to promote his service during the war, partly because no one ever shot at him.

During the Suez Canal crisis in 1956, having learned that American soldiers with families were being sent to the hot zone, “I wrote Margaret Chase Smith saying that I could take another man’s place … that I could go for a man who had children.”

The U.S. senator from Maine responded that that wasn’t the way it worked, that assignments weren’t made that way.

“If they hadn’t dropped the bomb, I would have seen action,” Dodge said.

Ellie