ROCHELLE — Rochelle resident Arch Millotte served in the United States Air Force for 20 years from 1951-1971. 

After receiving his draft notice in 1951 at the beginning of the Korean War, Millotte had his choice of branches due to his degree in science at Northwestern University. He chose the Air Force, and his next 20 years consisted of serving at nine different Air Force bases in the U.S. and a deployment to Japan. 

“After I got my commission in 1953, I had a good friend that was a school teacher and I found out that my salary was very close to his,” Millotte said. “I had the chance to get out of the Air Force in 1953. But I chose to stay in for 20 years. I enjoyed my duties. I was a college graduate with a science degree and got great assignments in the military. I just enjoyed it and I thought it was the best course for my career.”

Millotte’s service began at Sampson Air Force Base in Geneva, New York for basic training for 14 weeks. After that, his first assignment was at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, where he went through 22 weeks of electronic fundamentals training. From there, his field of concentration was early-warning radar. Due to a backlog, he was asked to choose another career field, and chose control tower operator training. After that, Millotte went to Webb Air Force Base in Big Spring, Texas as a tower operator in 1952.

In 1953, Millotte decided he wanted to become an officer, and was appointed to officer candidate school for six months at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Upon receiving his commission, he went back to Keesler AFB and as a second lieutenant, and was able to get into the training program on early-warning radar sets. Upon completion of that, Millotte got his first-and-only overseas assignment to Japan in 1954. 

In Japan, Millotte was a sight radar maintenance officer on a little island off the southern part of Nagasaki for two years. At that time, the U.S. Air Force was training the Japanese Air Force to take over the radar sight in time,  

“My deployment to Japan was very interesting,” Millotte said. “I lucked out by going to the chain of islands off of Nagasaki. The site that the radar sight was on was an extinct volcano. It was very interesting and a beautiful island. It was like a small paradise. I enjoyed my time there. We installed new radar while I was there.”

After his time in Japan, Millotte came back to the United States and the Air Force base in Little Rock, Arkansas and was assigned as a synthetic training devices officer. He worked with equipment used to help train pilots and crews. That site had an altitude chamber, a B-47 flight simulator, a seat ejection trainer, a gunner trainer, bomb navigation trainer and a gas chamber. Millotte also had another duty to help train for any sort of a nuclear attack on domestic soil.

Millotte’s next assignment in 1960 was at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska as an Atlas Missile maintenance officer. He did that for about a year and graduated to becoming a job control officer that handled all of the delivery of propellants.

In 1962, Millotte transferred to Shreveport, Louisiana to Second Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base as a maintenance staff officer for the missile program. After a couple of years there, he decided to leave the maintenance field to go into operations. His first assignment in that capacity was at the Grand Forks, North Dakota Air Force base as an operations officer in the Minuteman Missile program. There, he was commander of a Minuteman combat crew and did that for several years.

Millotte then started to near the end of his 20-year career and held the rank of a major. His final assignment was at Egland Air Force Base in the western Florida panhandle, the largest Air Force base in the U.S. He was sent to one of its satellite bases at Hurlburt Field. 

“We had an island in the gulf that had the launcher for the Bomarc Missile,” Millotte said. “Missiles they had there were no longer used in the Air Force because they were fuel-type missiles and they had gone to solid propellant. They were for shooting down aircraft that came into our country. Since they were obsolete, we used them as a drone and they made an ideal target for gunnery training. The aircraft would come and use them as a target to shoot them down. That was very interesting and challenging.”

Millotte retired in 1971 as a major in the USAF and returned to Rochelle, where he was born and raised, to look after his parents. Now 94, Millotte has spent the years since being active in community organizations including Kiwanis Golden K, the Rochelle Garden Club, church, the Rochelle VFW Post, the American Legion, the Moose, and the Military Officers Association of America. 

He also worked as a scalemaster at Del Monte for 18 years and taught one of his military hobbies, the card game of bridge, at Kishwaukee College and the Flagg-Rochelle Community Park District. He also established a bridge club in Rochelle. 

“I've held every rank in the Rochelle American Legion,” Millotte said. “I was on the committee for the Veterans War Memorial at Lawnridge Cemetery. When I was in the military, I always left my mark through some sort of donation or work I did. In Rochelle, I decided to leave my mark here. If you look across from the former Hub Theater, you'll see a light pole dedicated to Arch Millotte and family. My family had a long history in the Rochelle business community.”

Of all his duties in the military, Millotte said the most unique things he worked on were preparing for a potential nuclear attack on domestic soil and working with the Bomarc missile. He enjoyed working at different Air Force bases across the country. 

“The longest I ever stayed was four years at Grand Forks,” Millotte said. “You see your good friends that you make at an air base leave and you have to make new friends. That was never a problem for me, being a people person. Bridge helped me meet people. I really enjoyed all my work in the service and I visited a lot of bases. I only had one overseas tour and was never in harm's way. It was very interesting work.”

Honoring Our American Hero is a series that will print bi-monthly in the News-Leader. If you know an American Hero you would like to have featured, contact Jeff Helfrich at jhelfrich@rochellenews-leader.com or call 815-561-2151.