Henry H. Mahier was born in July 1926 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He grew up in the country north of town, on family property where they kept barnyard animals and he milked cows in the evening. His father worked at the Standard Oil refinery as a machinist, a good job that he was able to keep all during the Great Depression. Because his mother died when he was born, he was raised by his father and his extended paternal family. Mahier enjoyed his childhood, particularly playing football with his neighbors. For a brief time he lived in Oklahoma, where he started school, but the family returned to Baton Rouge and he continued his education there. The developing tensions in Europe were talked about to a certain extent in his home. When the war started, Mahier was 15 years old. He remembers the fateful Sunday when he heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He had attended church that day, and had sung with the choir for the services. Afterward, he and other members of the Young People's Service League went to the local drug store for refreshments as usual. He was at the counter getting a straw when he heard the news and he knocked the straw container over. He wanted to join the Navy, but his family talked him into going to Louisiana State University, LSU, where he could enroll in the ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps]. Mahier did well at LSU; he did a little intramural boxing, but said he "didn't get much" out of one year ROTC, so he joined the Navy.

Because he had been in the ROTC [Annotator's Note: Reserve Officer Training Corps], and he liked close order drill, Henry Mahier was made platoon leader in boot camp at Camp Peary in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was 1944, and he was anxious to get out to sea duty and into action, but he was sent to radioman's school, which he didn't relish. He hated Morse code and failed his first test. He tried to get a transfer, but was turned down and had to start class all over again. When he finally got out of radioman school, he was a seaman first class striking for radioman. He asked for submarine service or torpedo boat training, and he got the latter. Mahier was delighted, because radioman in torpedo boats used voice rather than Morse code to communicate. He trained in Newport, Rhode Island on ELCO boats [Annotator's Note: patrol torpedo boats manufactured by the Electric Launch Company, or ELCO], and enjoyed learning all the positions on the craft. Mahier remembered running supplies from the huge base in Bainbridge, Maryland to the outlying chow halls. While he was in training there, he was hospitalized for three weeks for sinusitis. He saw snow for the first time, and got to be buddies with other sailors there.

After training, Henry Mahier was patrolling up and down the east coast of the United States [Annotator's Note: aboard a patrol torpedo, or PT, boat]. He recalls that there was a lot of armament on board his patrol boat, including a loud 37mm cannon on the bow and four 40mm antiaircraft guns on the stern. There were twin 50mm [Annotator's Note: .50 caliber] machine guns on the port and starboard sides. Remarkably, most of the skippers were professional football players. Mahier claims to have been best at shooting the 50s. While in training they had made practice runs at an old submarine, and he was able to set the target on fire with his machine gun. But when the war ended, it was his typewriting skills that won him his next position at Lido Beach, New York working on discharge papers for the Fifth Fleet. It was good duty, with liberty every night, but Mahier said he would have loved to stay aboard a boat. On Saturdays and Sundays, the shore-bound sailors would often play tackle football. He was offered the opportunity to continue with the Navy on the battleship USS Missouri (BB-63) when it sailed to the Mediterranean, but Mahier declined and took his discharge.

He still wanted to be an engineer, so Henry Mahier worked hard to get his degree, while working various civilian jobs. He said the G.I.Bill helped tremendously, paying for classes and books, as well as spending money. Mahier said there was a large number of veterans attending LSU [Annotator's Note: Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana] at that time, but they did not talk about war experiences all that much. Mahier had followed the action on both the European and Pacific fronts all the while he was in training, and knew that many soldiers had a much more difficult experience in the armed forces than he did. Mahier graduated from college in 1950. He feels that his interval in the Navy, although disappointing because he didn't get into combat, did influence his postwar life. He had a varied and rewarding career; he went to Venezuela and met his wife, and managed to bring her back to America.

His most memorable experience of World War 2, according to Henry Mahier, was training on the torpedo boats. It was most interesting, and most enjoyable. The boats were really fast, with three big Packard marine engines, 1800 horsepower in each one. It would really fly along, and when it hit rough water, it was thrilling. He said he enlisted because at that point in the war every man and woman was joining something, lots of them were being drafted, and he was ready to go. Today, it means a lot to him to be called a veteran of World War 2, because it carries a lot of prestige. He believes it important to have institutions like The National WWII Museum, and it is glad it is in his home state [Annotator's Note: The National WWII Museum is in New Orleans, Louisiana]. It demonstrates that if someone attacks our country, its citizens will defend it, and win.