*IN MEMORIAM*

Bob Barney passed away on May 3, 2018 at the age of 98. Click here to read his obituary from the Fresno Bee.

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92-year-old Robert Barney of Fresno, CA appears on episode #217 of Hometown Heroes, airing June 16, 2012. A native of Detroit, MI, Barney was drafted into the Army at age 21, just months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor .

Robert Barney as a young paratrooper. For more photos, visit the Hometown Heroes facebook page.

“It disrupted my life something fierce,” you’ll hear him say.

He had endured the great depression and worked his way into a job with Firestone Tire & Rubber Company. He’d purchased a 1934 Ford and was very optimistic about his future. The draft represented a one-year detour for military service, a journey that the onset of World War II would lengthen considerably. Barney was in basic training at Camp Walters, TX when the Japanese attacked Oahu. You’ll hear him remember what he was doing on that fateful Sunday morning, and how he heard the news. Before long, he found himself volunteering for three days worth of testing, the purpose of which was unclear. “They came into base and said they wanted volunteers,” he remembers. “To go through physical exercises and this sort of thing.” Little did he know that by stepping forward, he was taking the first step toward becoming a pioneering paratrooper. He was one of 24 from Camp Walters to be forwarded for airborne training, and he looks back now and sees that turning point as potentially saving his life.

“The troops that I was training with, which were all draftees,” he explains, “were the first troops into North Africa, and they got annihilated.”

Barney would spend the next two years training in the U.S. before heading overseas in September, 1943. “It took longer for us to get to Liverpool, England,” you’ll hear him quip, “than it took Columbus to get to the United States.” Listen to Hometown Heroes for the parade of complications that turned that seemingly mundane journey into a 44-day travail.

In 2014, Bob participated in an event marking the 70th anniversary of D-Day. You can see his comments about 7 and a half minutes into the video below: