NAHANT — Johnson School students learned about a military base that once existed where their school sits today thanks to a World War II veteran who was stationed there.
“If I were to take you on a tour out there (at Battery Gardner) today, I’d get lost,” said Major John Murphy. “That’s how different it is.”
Fort Ruckman was built between 1904 and 1907 on about 45 acres at Bass Point. The southwest side of the peninsula was an ideal defensive location to protect the northern approaches to Boston Harbor.
During WWII, it housed the group command post for the northern district of the harbor defenses of Boston.
Murphy was 14-and-a-half when he was ordered to active duty with the U.S. Army and to report to Fort Ruckman on Sept. 10, 1940. He altered his birth certificate in order to join, and remained in the military for 24 years.
To this day, he remembers looking for his barracks as he came to the end of the causeway, but instead he was greeted with a tent city. The barracks had not yet been constructed.
He was trained to use small weapons and seacoast artillery, and handled the two long-range guns of Battery Gardner.
On the drive back from a three-day trip with four other soldiers on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Murphy was pulled over by a state trooper in Framingham who asked what they were doing, driving in full uniform. The men told the trooper they were looking for a bite to eat.
“He said ‘this country is at war’ and that was our first report of the bombing in Japan,” said Murphy. “We didn’t have a radio in the car. We were ordered to return to base immediately. It was pretty scary. We were at war.”
He was ordered to report to Sagamore Hill Military Reservation at Sagamore Beach to protect the northern entrance of the Cape Cod Canal from possible German submarines carrying saboteurs and spies, he said.
From there, he was trained to use a rifle cannon in Pendleton, Virginia, and later he was ordered to board a ship and travel overseas.
“We were happy to be fighting the Japanese because they were the ones who bombed Pearl Harbor,” he said. “But we had no idea we were going overseas.”
Murphy spent 39 months in the Pacific, visiting nine islands and facing combat on the Solomon Islands, Guadalcanal, and New Guinea.
Students questioned what some of the existing landmarks in town were used for, and whether residents lived in town at the same time.
Julie Tarmy, director of the Nahant Historical Society pointed out what once existed in the places in Nahant they know and explained the town’s rich military history dating back long before World War II.
Next week, she will take the students on a tour of Bailey’s Hill and a close-up look at the two batteries.
