107551
Home Front, U.S.A.
Other Books by the Author
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE LusitOJW
LAST TRAIN FROM ATLANTA
THEY SAILED INTO OBLIVION
A WHISPER OF ETERNITY
LONELY COMMAND
THE FIERCE LAMBS
THE GREAT EPIDEMIC
WHO DESTROYED THE Hindenburg?
THE WEEK BEFORE PEARL HARBOR
THE GREAT WAR AT SEA
Home Front, U.SA
A. A. HOEHLING
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY
New York Established 1834
Copyright 1966 by A, A. Hoehling
All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form, except by a reviewer,
without the permission of the publisher.
Designed by Nancy H. Dale
Manufactured In the United States of America
by Vail-Ballou Press, Inc., Binghamton, N.Y.
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66-22416
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Dedicated to my long suffering wife, Mary,
commander in chief of her sector of the home front
during the author's absence on Navy duty.
Acknowledgments
THE AUTHOR owes a debt of gratitude to many persons: first of
all to Martin Mann, former editor of Thomas Y. Crowell Com-
pany, whose original idea this book was, and next, to Hugh
Rawson, his successor, who experienced what must have been
not unfamiliar blood, sweat, and toil in readying this manuscript
for the printers.
Among the very many who aided in the research are Thurman
Arnold, of Washington, Roosevelt's well-known "trust-buster";
Francis Biddle, Roosevelf s Attorney General, who divides his
time between Washington and Wellfleet, Massachusetts; Dr.
Howard C Braenn, of New York; Bainbridge Crist, of Washing-
ton; Edith Cushing, woman's editor of the Evening Tribune,
San Diego; Thomas E. Dewey; Miss Elizabeth B. Drewry, direc-
tor of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park; Jack J.
Friedman, public-relations counsel for the Empire State Build-
ing; Thomas Geoghegan, of the Washington office of the United
States Steel Company; Mrs. Jean Gretsinger, of Detroit, sister
of John Morgan, pilot of Glenn Millefs ill-fated plane; Green H.
Hackworth, of Washington, State Department lawyer in the war
years; E. T. Buck Harris, of Hollywood, public-relations direc-
tor, the Screen Actors Guild; Representative Oren Harris, of
Arkansas; Lieutenant General Lewis B. Hershey, director of
Selective Service; John O. Hjelle, editor of the Bismarck (North
Dakota) Tribune; James Lake, of Washington, of the Automo-
vii
viii Acknowledgments
tive Safety Foundation; C. E. Laechlin, Washington representa-
tive of General Dynamics Corporation; Abe Lastvogel, of the
William Morris Agency, of New York and Hollywood; Harold
Lauth, manager, public relations, Kaiser Industries Corporation,
Washington office; Mrs. Edith Long, of Richmond, California;
Gypsy Markoff, the accordionist, who now lives in Puerto Rico;
Mrs. Francis M. Meilleur, public relations, the Association of
American Railroads; Robert P. McCuen, public relations, E. I
du Pont de Nemours & Co., Wilmington, Delaware; Senator
A. S. Mike Monroney, of Oklahoma; Senator George Murphy,
of California (who is still plugging actors and actresses as "the
greatest goodwill ambassadors ever!") ; Robert R. Nathan, Wash-
ington economist; Kurt H. Peters, of Bismarck, North Dakota;
Ed Plaut, of Greenwich, Connecticut; M. D. Post, manager,
press relations, Bethlehem Steel Corporation; Louis Raphael,
of the Weyerhauser Company, of Tacoma; Leslie Reade, of
London, England; Mrs. Charlene Robinson, public relations
department, Solar Company, San Diego; Ted Rogers, of New
York; Mrs. James Russell, of Arlington, Virginia, the former
Jane Seaver of OCD days; Joseph Salak, of DeLand, Florida;
Leslie Shaw, editor, the Lake County (Oregon) Examiner; R. J.
Showiak, news department, Ford Motor Company, Dearborn;
E. P. Smith, Bourbon, Indiana; Joseph Szageti, the violinist, of
Baugy St Clarens, Switzerland; Mrs. Erl Troynek, of Alexan-
dria, Virginia; Bert Wishnew and others of the USO headquar-
ters in New York, who were all most helpful.
The author also wishes to thank Rear Admiral E. M. Eller,
USN (ret.), director, Naval History; Frederick S. Meigs, his
superlative librarian; Lieutenant Colonel Charles Burtyk and
Lieutenant Colonel C. V. Glines, representing the Army and Air
Force information offices respectively, the Department of De-
fense; and Mrs. Donna Traxler, Signal Corps photo librarian.
The Coast Guard was most kind not only in furnishing its cus-
tomary high-quality photographs but in exhuming a graphic,
brilliantly written report on the Normandie fire.
John Taylor, a senior archivist of the National Archives, dis-
tinguished himself above and beyond the call of duty by digging
out especially relevant reports from the literally hundreds of
thousands of file boxes which represent the last resting place of the
World War n agencies. Thanks to his Sherlock Holmes eye and
researcher's indefatigability, Taylor turned up such bits as the
behind-the-scenes activities in the early months of OCD.
Appreciation is also expressed to the staffs of many libraries
aiding in the research of this book, including the Army Library,
in the Pentagon; the Boston Public Library; the University of
North Carolina Library and Dr. James W. Patton, director of
the Southern Historical Collection; the University of Chicago
Library and Mrs. Ann Colley, special collections; the Library of
Congress and all of its divisions, including photographic, with
a vast collection of OWI prints, and manuscript, where the
Breckinridge Long and Elmer Davis papers were especially
fruitful; the District of Columbia Public Library; the Henry E.
Huntingdon Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California,
holding the Donald Nelson papers; the New York Public Li-
brary; and the Library Association of Portland, Oregon.
Because of the national nature of this book, a seemingly in-
finite number of newspapers, especially weeklies and small dai-
lies in all of the states were consulted for the local "angles" and
moods of the times. A listing would be in itself an N. W. Ayefs
Directory in capsule. For the over-all picture the usual standbys
were again indispensable, led by The New York Times with its
historian's bible, the yearly index and including the Baltimore
Sun, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, St. Louis Post-
Dispatch, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post.
By the same token, quantities of periodicals were consulted.
These included not only the news and popular magazines but
those in trade and professional fields, aimed, as but two small
examples, at the entertainment world and the building groups.
The United States smothered the enemy in an avalanche of pro-
duction the like of which he had never seen or dreamed of.
WILLIAM S. KNUDSEN
Readiness for defense, like war itself, is total.
JAMES M. LANDIS
Give them swing bands, not cold harps, to these our boys.
ELMA DEAN
We will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will
make certain this form of treachery shall never endanger us
again.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
The Chiefs got his fire out ...!
FIORELLO H. LA GUABDIA
Public indifference and apathy are responsible for the present
low standards of physical conditioning.
LEWIS B. HERSHEY
I am so homesick for him. It is Christmas and the photo of his
little white cross . . .
BELLE ELLZEY
*~^ Contents
Foreword 1
1 TOTAL WAR 5
2 DISASTER IN MANHATTAN 16
3 THE UNCIVIL DEFENSE 28
4 A GIANT'S YAWN 47
5 "... THIS STRANGE INNOVATION* 63
6 THE CIVILIAN ARMY 80
7 THE CAPITAL CITY 90
8 IN THE URGENCY OF WAR 103
9 THE ENTERTAINERS 125
10 THE BEST-KEPT SECRET 137
11 DAY OF JUDGMENT 152
Postscript 161
Bibliography 168
Index 170
^^m^^^^^^^^^^^m^^^^^^m^^m^^^^^^^^ illustrations
(following page 114)
Churchill addressing Congress, December 26, 1941
Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, 1939
Firemen spray burning decks of Normandie, February 9, 1942
Normandie, partially submerged, after fire
Niseis await relocation
Child prepares to leave his home
Japanese resettlement camp near Parker, Arizona
Civilian defense students practice using gas masks
Drawing of first draftee's name for Selective Service, October
29, 1940
Sergeant Alvin York with draftee and family
Abortive Nazi plans to destroy essential industries
Hi-fated 1943 USO troupe prepares to leave for Europe
Ford's Willow Run plant
Women workers on airplane assembly line
Typical small-town wartime parade
Mr. and Mrs. Henry J. Kaiser, Sr., addressing workers, 1944
Waiting at the station
Eleanor Roosevelt with Mayris Chaney Martin, 1960
Scrap metal being collected by wartime drive
Uniformed men on college campus at Rice Institute, Houston,
Texas
Roosevelt, two weeks before his death
FDR's death certificate
King Street, Charleston, South Carolina, shortly before the end
of the war
Foreword
THE HOME FRONT has ever been a complex of coinings and
goings, of fevered activity, confusion, giddiness, apprehension,
sorrow, and sometimes, of apathy as welL In the long history of
America's many wars, it has never been as readily definable as
thebatflefront
No lines have been acutely drawn. No organized and coordi-
nated platoons stand ready to answer a sergeant's staccato com-
mand with unquestioning alacrity. While there have usually been
rules or laws or assumed procedures, if only those of moral
weight, their enforcement has been something else again.
The home front has been a viper's nest of limiflessly diverse
and generally unanticipated problems. Nonetheless, it has ines-
capably remained the weflspring of our country's fighting men
and, equally important, of the stuff with which they have f ought
Americans in war after war, commencing with the Revolution,
have rallied to the colors and in their own and often obtuse
democratic fashion managed to forge the tools of victory.
Twice during the first half of this century the comfortable ruts
of peacetime existence in the United States, worn deep as if
forever, were erased suddenly, and in their place was substituted
the home front
The nation approached "the great adventure" of World War I
in a state of exhilaration that verged on hysteria. "Preparedness
Parades," held prior to the declaration of hostilities in April
2 Foreword
1917, paved the way for the emotion-laden Liberty Loan extrav-
aganzas and for the incessant spy and "slacker" hunts that came
after the United States entered the war.
The fighting men "over there" viewed the home front as they
always have in far simpler and warmer terms than did their fel-
low citizens.
"I do not dare let myself think of you and the children too
often/' wrote Lieutenant Thomas Slusser from somewhere on the
Alsatian front on June 15, 1918, to his wife, Martha, in Illinois.
"It is too painful I mean the contrast. But when I do I try in
vain nearly always to picture what you are doing and thinking
and talking about .... we are all caught in this great, swift
current of war and have been swept apart. Whether we will ever
be swept together again all depends on the currents."
From the Marne, in that same spring of 1918, Martin Trep-
tow scribbled in his diary, "America must win this war. There-
fore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure. I will
fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the whole struggle de-
pended on me alone."
The young Vermonter died in July at CMteau-Thierry. His
words crackle with much the same emotion that inspired Alan
Seeger to lyricize:
But Tve a rendezvous with Death . . .
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.
It was scant wonder that the haunting song "My Buddy"
would come to be identified with the nostalgic and often maudlin
mood of that wholly improbable carnage.
In more objective key, Mark Sullivan, the editor and writer,
assessed the meaning of that war to America's hearth and habits.
Its effect on the home front was nothing short of revolutionary,
he concluded:
"The active f ennent which was at all times the condition of
American society was now greatly speeded up. Not only individ-
uals but groups rose or fell .... the type of person that had
composed for a generation almost the exclusive patronage of
Foreword 3
expensive hotels and of Pullman cars on the railroads was diluted
by a class to whom these luxuries were new.
"One stratum of the rich were made relatively poorer . . .
another class of the rich benefited enormously. These were the
owners of factories, the participants in active business, the stock-
holding class as distinguished from bond-holders, and the land
and goods owning class .... in proportion labor benefited
most of all. . . .
"Of the effects of war on America, by far the most fundamen-
tal was our submission to autocracy in government. . . ." 1
As James Truslow Adams phrased it, "In the six months after
our entry into the war the United States had been transformed
from a highly individualistic system . . . into what was almost
a great socialistic state in which the control of the whole indus-
try, life and purpose of the nation was directed from Washing-
ton. It was an amazing transf ormation."
In the twenties, America, disillusioned by her own naivet6
and misguided, stany hopes for shaping a nobler world out of
the debris of yesterday, withdrew into a cocoon. "Isolation" be-
came the nation's tag. Never again would Uncle Sam or 'Un-
cle Sap" as some bitterly thought of the United States' postbellum
image dispatch his young to far-off battlefields.
The home front would become, Americans earnestly believed,
a term relegated to the musty shelves of history. And they de-
voted their efforts to making the twenties as unwarlike and ut-
terly frivolous as possible. Then the crash came, and just like war
itself, it seemed like hell maybe even worse.
The nation, nonetheless, survived the depression. The mid-
thirties proved increasingly bountiful years, with the cost of liv-
ing for the most part attractive. The housewife could purchase
bacon at thirteen cents a pound, grade-A beef at seventeen cents,
coffee at twenty-five cents, or corn flakes at seven cents for a
generous-sized box. In his medium-sized sedan, retailing at about
five hundred dollars, father could and often did bring home a
fifth of bourbon which cost him aH of a dollar bill. Prohibition,
1 Mark Sullivan, Our Times, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1936.
4 Foreword
with its bootleggers and gangsters on an organized basis, was
gone forever.
A comfortable, modern three-bedroom house in the suburbs
could be bought for seventy-five hundred dollars or less. Powder
room on the first floor, electric washing machine, silent wall
switches, and a paneled basement were apt to be among the
bonus inducements, even on a speculation residence.
There was, however, the augury of worse times to come. It be-
came increasingly apparent that the United States would indeed
slog along that same dreary trail of the teens. The shadows of
past times of trial and test lay dark over the nation's doorsteps by
December?, 1941.
Again the home front was roused from its fragile sanctuary
and brittle hopes. It was mobilized in many, often peculiar, and
not always obvious ways. America would once again wave tear-
ful farewells to her sons, even as she had to their fathers, grand-
fathers, and great grandfathers. On the home front they would
leave a void, a sense of waiting and of insecurity that had not
changed since the time of Bunker Hill. And when it was all over,
those who had lived through it would reflect with abiding disbe-
lief, Had it really happened?
In the wake of World War n, however, the gradual changes in
a nation's appearance, life currents, and habits would become
manifest in unmistakable shadings. There would be little doubt
that a colossal struggle for survival had seared the land, even
though the battlefields themselves had been far distant, in un-
familiar and improbable lands, with names which were more
often than not as incomprehensible as they were unpronouncea-
ble.
CHAPTER 1
Total War
THE DAY America went to war started as a quiet, rather ordinary
winter Sunday December 7, 1941.
The formal declaration of the war against Japan would not
come for another twenty-four hours, and three days later against
Germany and Italy. The nation, however, was in the spreading
conflict from the moment the first bomb crashed upon the Pearl
Harbor anchorage.
Not since the firing on Fort Sumter eighty years previously
had the United States been hurled into war without warning. As
President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress, it was a day that
would "live in infamy!"
This war, although more than two years old in Europe,
Africa, and parts of Asia, caught much of the nation psychologi-
cally unprepared, even though some of America's industry was
partially tooled up through the happenstance of overseas orders.
Americans reacted much in accord with their individual natures
only, as one chronicler noted, "more so."
In Lafayette Park, across from the White House, in Washing-
ton, it was Trafalgar Square, London, in September 1939 all
over again. There the people congregated as though half-expect-
ing the Chief Executive to appear, with his reassuring smile and
commanding voice and tell them that they could all go home and
that somehow in some wholly unimaginable way everything
would be all right.
5
6 Total War
The throngs continued to gather in numbers this unseasonably
mild December evening and stare at their country's most famous
mansion. No one, not even the guards, strode out to speak so
much as a word to them. In fact, the presentiments of the hour
became even more foreboding when the customary floodlights
shining against the gleaming white facade winked out, leaving al-
most total darkness.
Like children in trouble and indecision, the people shuffled
about Strangers whispered nervous comments to one another as
though seeking refuge in their very words. Finally the crowds
with curious spontaneity broke into a ragged chorus of 'The Star-
Spangled Banner," then "My Country Tis of Thee," "God Bless
America," and similar patriotic or semipatriotic songs and an-
thems.
The Eghts were not entirely going out in Washington, but they
were being dimmed. The Capitol, quickly taking its cue from the
Executive Mansion, was wholly darkened on the outside, as were
other government buildings.
An unfamiliar clop of heavy boots echoed over the avenues of
the nation's capital as Marines and Army MFs, wearing the
"tin" helmets left by their forebears of a past struggle, marched
in from nearby bases to assume sentry duty around the stone and
concrete mausoleums of government.
Churchgoers in the West that Sunday, where the time was two
or three hours later than in Washington, were still in church or
on their way there when the news flashed to a thousand Main
Streets. Generally as speechless as their parishioners, many
clergymen changed hymns at the last moment, telling organists
to pull out the stops and let such militant tunes as "Onward
Christian Soldiers," "The Church's One Foundation," and "The
Son of God Goes Forth to War" ring out.
While the more reflective "Lead Kindly Light" or "Abide
With Me" sounded from fewer organ lofts than usual, other
Americans neither sang hymns nor went to church but prayed in
the hush of their homes. Many more sought solace in the familiar
panacea of alcohol, especially those in the military reserves or
with a high draft eligibility.
Total War 7
The West Coast, like Washington and other Eastern seaboard
cities, made at least desultory efforts toward a "yellow-out,* al-
though no one in authority, either military or civilian, was en-
tirely certain against what contingency or peril. The sudden
blanketing of the customary garish glare of American cities,
however, at least helped drive home the new reality of wartime.
Alaska swung into a full alert. Anchorage, fearing both sub-
marine and air attack, was almost totally blacked out
Area military headquarters tore open long-sealed orders on
enemy invasion, sabotage, and civil insurrection. Soldiers and
sailors, bayonets on their rifles, augmented by city and state po-
lice and platoons of civilian guards, including pistol-carrying
hordes summoned hastily from detective agencies, took up posts
around airfields, shipyards, and defense factories the length and
breadth of the nation. If some were left over, they were assigned
to protect bridges, railways, reservoirs, and power lines.
Private aircraft were grounded. Ships navigating in and out of
harbor reverted to radio silence an expedient, however, which
was to prove more hazardous than chancing interception by the
enemy.
Censorship was slapped on radiograms and cables. As soon as
the machinery could be set up, no one could post a letter out of
the country without its contents being scrutinized.
That same Sunday night the next morning's extras appeared.
Their inside pages, made up hours or even days prior to the at-
tack, spoke of "gay supper parties" and of the customary
frivolous plans for the nearing Yuletide. They suddenly read like
epitaphs for an era.
At noon on Monday, President Roosevelt delivered a ringing
promise before a joint session of Congress: "We will not only de-
fend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that
this form of treachery shall never endanger us again ....
there is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and
our interests are in grave danger .... the American people in
their righteous might will win through to absolute victory!*
The response was as spontaneous as when grandfather an-
swered another national alarm with a resounding, "We are com-
8 Total War
ing, Father Abraham!" Recreating stations threw open their doors
to a horde. It included along with the young and the fit the
lame, the halt, the squinting, and the overage doughboys of
1917.
An old soldier, General of the Armies John J, Pershing, stalked
with cane to the White House from his suite at Walter Reed
Medical Center. While his highest rank presupposed continual
active duty, at the age of eighty-one the leader of the AEF was
seeking an actual role in the war,
"General," beamed Roosevelt, "you are magnificent!"
World War I was by no means the last conflict to be militantiy
represented by veterans of "righteous might." The commander of
the Georgia Division of the United Confederate Veterans, Major
General H. T. Dowling, aged ninety-two, announced in Atlanta
that his fifty surviving members "are at war with Japan!" He
confessed, "If I was able I don't know of anything that would
afford me more pleasure than to get on to those Japs!"
In Athol, Massachusetts, across the fields from historic Con-
cord, an aggressive group from seventeen to seventy years of age
oiled up shotguns and squirrel rifles to drill as minutemen.
Across the nation in Tillamook, Oregon, a thousand males, as
mixed and motley as those in Athol, took a "guerrilla oath." Led
by a blind World War I veteran, Stewart P. Arnold, the group
was not sanctioned by the Army: Farmers from Whidby Island,
Puget Sound, Washington, patrolled the beaches nightly, armed
with pitchforks, clubs, and shotguns, awaiting the invasion.
On a more elevated level, Wendell Willkie, who had unsuc-
cessfully challenged Roosevelt's bid for reelection in 1940, askecj
for "tanks, not talks!" Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, more
reflective, smoothed his thinning, gray locks and observed, "My
first feeling was of relief that the indecision was over and that a
crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people." The
aging, sick Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, added that the Japa-
nese had been "exceedingly unwise."
Isolationists and foes of the Administration, almost without
exception, rallied to the colors. Their fiery spokesman, Senator
Total War 9
Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, asserted, "The only thing now is
to do our best to lick hell out of them!"
Lots of people were expressing themselves publicly and pri-
vately.
"Golly," sixteen-year-old Mary Critchlon confided to a re-
porter from the Seattle (Washington) Post, "when I heard the
news I cried all morning!" Like thousands of other young girls,
Maty was "going steady 5 ' with a serviceman.
Others, who were older, however, had no time for tears. Mrs.
Lillie Martin, for example, the twenty-five-year-old wife of a dis-
abled World War I veteran, announced she had enlisted in the
American Women's Volunteer Services to drive ambulances. Her
husband, Forrest Martin, planned to play "mother" to four little
children in their Denver home.
The West Coast experienced its initial alert the second night,
December eighth. Police sirens wailed through Market Street and
other thoroughfares of hilly San Francisco. Lights in homes,
stores, and larger buildings winked out Searchlights from the
Presidio fingered skyward. The Golden Gate city on the Pacific
coast became abruptly reminiscent of London, Liverpool, Rot-
terdam, or Berlin.
"Army information sources confirmed today/* reported the
Associated Press, "that two squadrons of enemy planes
numbering about 15 planes to a squadron crossed the coastline
west of San Jose Monday night and reconnoitred the San Fran-
cisco Bay area and other sections of California.
'The Army said the presence of these squadrons of planes in-
dicated in all probability that an enemy aircraft carrier was lurk-
ing off the coast, possibly as far out as 500 or 600 miles."
Brigadier General William Ord Ryan, commanding the
Fourth Interceptor Command, told reporters that his planes had
turned back the enemy at the Golden Gate. He did not qualify
his assertion.
Although there was no real foe to repulse, the West Coast
from San Diego to Vancouver was gripped by fear. More than a
thousand persons in Seattle roamed the streets in wild panic until
10 Total War
long after midnight They smashed windows of stores burning
customary burglar lights. Displays were looted; furniture and
show cases were wrecked. Among the carnage revealed in the
wan light of daybreak was a gruesome reminder of the night's
madness: a beheaded Chinaman, obviously mistaken for a Japa-
nese. His executioners were not found
In San Francisco, a murderously overzealous home-defense
guard on the Bay Bridge to Oakland shot and seriously wounded
a motorist, Mrs. Marie Sayre, who was tardy in halting when he
waved her down. Unlike the victim in Seattle, she did not re-
motely resemble any Asian.
Tragically reminiscent of World War I days, this spurt of in-
sanity caused one minister to recall the Scottish prayer:
From ghoulies and ghosties and loag-leggefy beasties,
And things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us.
The eerie warbling of the air-raid sirens also was heard
throughout greater Manhattan. More than a million school chil-
dren, pedestrians, and office workers hurried to basements until
the all clear sounded. While the Army admitted the alert was
false, the experience pointed up a disquieting truth: this city of
seven million souls did not have one shelter adequate by London
standards.
America's reflexes seemed groggy as she answered the bell for
another war. Surprised and unprepared, the nation exhibited lit-
tle of the brisk assurance of 1917. Flamboyance was lacking.
There was no cheering or much enthusiasm anywhere for this
conflict that had been willed so suddenly. Deep in her prepara-
tions to fight a war in which she was already embroiled and beset
with doubts as to the future, America faced a Christmas season
as ominous as any since the Civil War. Telegrams accumulated,
such as one which arrived at the home of a widower, John F.
Fitzsimmons, in Waterloo, Iowa:
YOUR NEPHEW, CORP. MICHAEL J. CASHEN, DIED AT APPROXI-
MATELY 10 A.M. DECEMBER 7. CASUALTY, GUNSHOT WOUNDS. FUR-
THER INFORMATION WILL BE SENT LATER-
Total War 11
Aged tbirty-f our, Cashen, a graduate of St. Mary's parochial
school, had left his job as a shoe clerk to enlist in the Army Air
Force only the past year. The last the elderly Fitzsimmons had
heard from Mike, he was stationed at Wheeler Field, Hawaii
Older residents recalled that another lowan, Merle Hay, from
the town of Glidden, had been among the first three AEF casual-
ties of World War L Merle was killed in a trench raid in eastern
France, November 1917.
Cashen's death was one of the more than six thousand this
December that projected American homes into sudden mourn-
ing. Added to the casualties from Pearl Harbor were those from
other American outposts in the Pacific. Guam was lost on De-
cember tenth; Wake Island on December twenty-second Wake
would become a new synonym for American heroism.
* The Japanese invaders, a tidal wave of sea power, supported
by thunderous aerial squadrons, swarmed ashore on northern
Luzon and pounded toward Manila. The defenders, gaunt-eyed,
starving, almost depleted of ammunition, fought back stubbornly
as they retreated south towards the Bataan Peninsula. Other
American and Philippine forces dug into the natural rock fortifi-
cations of Corregidor Island, originally used by the Spanish as a
strongpoint in the Manila Bay defenses.
Somehow, in the midst of grief and apprehension, the people
of the United States found a certain heart to prepare for Christ-
mas. There was the sound of carols and the jangle of Salvation
Army bells on frosty sidewalks. Shopping continued if at a
slower pace. Christmas trees, with limited lighting "to conserve
electricity," sparkled from homes, offices, stores, and city parks.
Little girls, such as Arville Dunkard of Kansas City, joined
legions of others who repaired and wrapped dolls and other toys
for the world's homeless or orphaned children. The Red Cross
would endeavor to transport the presents across war-roiled seas
to play proxy Santa Glaus.
The nation hardly had time to concede that it was irrevocably
at war when a distinguished guest, who was the symbol of allied
resistance, arrived at the White House. On December twenty-
12 Total War
sixth, Winston Churchill addressed Congress with words of en-
couragement and humor.
"What kind of people," asked the Prime Minister of Great
Britain, "do they [our enemies] think we are? Do they not
realize we shall never cease to persevere against them until we
have taught them a lesson which they and the world will never
forget?"
Then, with a smile, he told the congressmen, "I cannot help
but reflecting that if my father had been American and my
mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have got
here on my own."
British armor had pushed Marshal Graziani back in North Af-
rica to pound once more into Benghazi. Otherwise, there was lit-
tle enough from which "Winnie" or his friend RD.R. could take
heart. The British crown colony of Hong Kong had fallen on
Christmas Day. Singapore was tottering, invaded not by sea, for
which defense had long been prepared, but through the jungles
of the Malay Peninsula. The new battleship EMS Prince of
Wales, on which the Atlantic Charter had been signed, and the
battle cruiser Repulse were sunk with appalling speed by Japa-
nese dive bombers. The era of the cumbersome dreadnought all
but banged shut then and there. The combined British, Aus-
tralian, Dutch, and United States fleets in the Pacific appeared
hardly a match for the armadas from Nippon.
New Year* s Eve arrived and passed with quiet and sobriety.
The lights in Times Square were too dim to permit the usual dis-
play, featuring a baH of light plummeting down the Times
Tower. Crowds, with military uniforms predominating, nonethe-
less milled on Broadway and Forty-second Street.
Much of industry already had swung over to a round-the-
clock schedule. The example of the Northern Pump Company of
Minneapolis was typicaL Employees took half an hour off at
midnight to blow horns and drink at least for the photographer
coffee and cider, then returned to their lathes and benches.
There was not much in the news to trigger celebration. Two
days later on January second, Manila fell to the Japanese. The
naval base at Cavite had already been evacuated, petroleum
Total War 13
tanks put to the torch, and demolition charges set and detonated
under docks, piers, and other installations. The invader had
overrun all of Luzon in just twenty-seven days.
Ships were being torpedoed off both coasts, sometimes in sight
of residents. The stark spectacle of oil-begrimed survivors strug-
gling onto Florida beaches was becoming all too familiar, as well
as incongruous, with cabanas and millionaires* stucco villas often
providing the background. At night, there was the added accom-
paniment of soft music from bordering patios.
When the American freighter Absaroka "swallowed" a torpedo
off California but limped awash to port, the Navy decided it was
time for publicity of a familiar weave. Jane Russell, the long-
legged actress, posed inside the gaping, jagged torpedo hole in the
vessel. Close to her ample bosom, she held a sign, with an al-
ready familiar slogan:
A SLIP OF THE LZP
MAY SINK A SHIP
For obvious effect, SINE: was crossed out; HAVE SUNK was sub-
stituted.
The loss of a ship or even of many ships was, however, too vast
a canvas, too monstrous for the individual mind to appreciate. It
took the lesser happenings to thrust home the meaning of war.
Such a shock was felt after America had been a fighting par-
ticipant for barely a month. On January fifteenth, Carole Lom-
bard, the thirty-two-year-old beauty queen and wife of Clark
Gable, starred at the Treasury Department's first major war
bond rally in Indianapolis. Herself a Hoosier, from Fort Wayne,
and a former Mack Sennett girl, the blonde, sometimes plain-
spoken actress helped sell a record $2,500,000 worth of bonds.
She was traveling with her mother, Mrs* Elizabeth Peters, and an
MGM publicity agent, Otto Winkler.
At 4:23 A.M. on Friday, January 17, Miss Lombard boarded
TWA Flight Three for Hollywood, via Albuquerque. It was win-
ter. Dark, foreboding clouds hovered over the flat farmlands of
Indiana. Both Mrs. Peters and Winkler, uneasy, attempted to
14 Total War
talk their famous traveling companion into transferring accom-
modations to a train. Winkler flipped a coin, and lost.
He would fly in spite of his profound misgivings.
Accustomed to air travel, in the way that most people then
were to train or automobile, the pretty actress was entirely con-
tent.
Til curl up and take a pill and pff ! I'll be asleep," she told
photographers and reporters at the Indianapolis airport.
That afternoon, fifteen Army ferry-command pilots boarded
the twin-engined Douglas "Sky Club" DC-3 at Albuquerque. To
make room for them, several low-priority passengers were
'"bumped."
Among them was Joseph Szigeti, the talented concert violinist.
During the slow, boring flight from Indianapolis he had "pon-
dered the identity of this strikingly handsome woman."
The artist added (in a letter to the author), "She intrigued me
and I was inwardly scolding myself for not being forward enough
to try and make her acquaintance .... for I kept thinking:
how I would like to know which couturier made that superbly
cut suit .... so I could pass the address to my wife. She
seemed tired, preoccupied, overworked."
Szigeti and the others removed from the plane settled down in
the akporfs drafty waiting room. They were among the first in
these early weeks of hostilities to taste the tedium and incon-
venience which would become entirely symptomatic of wartime
travel, on or above the ground.
The plane taxied away. Its propellers smacked a frosty shower
of light snow into the faces of ramp attendants. They turned their
backs, tightening their parkas.
The airliner made an unscheduled stop at Las Vegas; then
took off at seven o'clock for Los Angeles. Thirty minutes later,
ranchers and forest wardens saw a flaring of light in the direction
of Table Rock Mountain.
Journey's end had come for all twenty-two souls aboard TWA
Flight 3. A familiar, lovely face which could evoke unusual
pleasure and, in millions of men, desire, had been snatched
Total War 15
away. This was a battle death in the commonplace immediacy of
Main Street, the very sort of human tragedy on the home front
that has hammered out again and again for generations of Amer-
icans the hearflessness and horror of war.
CHAPTER 2
Disaster in Manhattan
WAR is WASTE. But its natural destruction is often compounded
by carelessness, ineptitude, and crass human stupidity exagger-
ated in tempo with the times.
A deplorable example occurred on a raw February afternoon
in 1942. It was, as a matter of fact, the day on which "war time"
an hour ahead of normal was commenced as a conservation
measure for electricity.
About 2:30 P.M. that Monday, February ninth, the prospec-
tive commander of one of the world's largest and gaudiest ships
decided to take matters in his own hands. Captain Robert C.
Coman said, in effect, to hell with the chain of command.
This veteran of thirty-three years of commissioned service had
never served on a vessel so unready for sea. The name Nor-
mandie was not sufficient in itself to impress him, any more than
the sum lavished on construction of this pride of the French
Line more than $59,000,000.
On the following Saturday, the liner-transport was scheduled
to sail from New York for Boston, loaded with upwards of ten
thousand troops an entire division or its equivalent plus car-
go, before proceeding into the Atlantic under sealed orders.
"Plug" Coman's long, rather melancholy face grew even more
somber and seemingly increased in length as he picked up the
telephone from the ornate desk of the captain's cabin and asked
the operator to put him through to the White House. His only
16
Disaster in Manhattan 17
hope, Coman reasoned in his fever of wony, was to ask the Pres-
ident himself to cancel the sailing orders. Connections to Wash-
ington, as usual since December seventh, were jammed. The
captain waited.
The 1,029-foot Normandie (exceeded in length only by the
Queen Elizabeth) had dashed safely into New York Harbor at
the time of the invasion of Poland. For the next twenty-one
months she languished at her Hudson River dock, a few blocks
north of Forty-second Street.
Only a skeleton crew was on board to keep her engines from
deteriorating and her superstructure from rusting. Left to the few
sailors were the ship's glories the heavy Aubusson carpet in the
hundred-foot-long grand saloon, the Algerian onyx paneling,
and the great series of glass panels depicting the mythology of
the sea. The gamblers, the hard drinkers, and the perennial ship-
board swains were gone. The bronze doors of the smoking
lounge were closed, apparently for the duration of the war. There
were no audiences to applaud in the Normandie 1 $ theater, no
worshipers to kneel in her chapel. Her modern hospital, complete
to X-ray machines and operating table, empty of patients, had
lost even its telltale reek of carbolic.
The Normandie consumed a thousand dollars a day in berth-
ing charges, while she rested at the north side of Her 88. With no
concern over theft and, apparently, little more against the possi-
bility of sabotage, there seemed but one remaining contingency
to guard against: fire. And yet, her designer, Vladimir Yourke-
vitch, had reason to suggest that the Normandie was as nearly
fireproof as any vessel of her time. The United States Coast
Guard reported: "She had every known device to guard against
fire. Cabin partitions were of asbestos laid on duralumin and
painted with fireproof paint. Drapes and hangings were fire-
proofed and thermostatic controls were installed to record in-
ordinate increase of temperature in any part of the ship. There
was a central fire station equipped with indicators for detecting
smoke, and an alarm system."
As an extra precaution, the French Line paid for a direct tele-
graph line to the central control desk at the New York City Fire
18 Disaster in Manhattan
Department. The city's apparatus could be summoned by the tap
of a key.
On May 15, 1941, almost a year after the fall of France, the
Normandie was taken under the protective custody of the Coast
Guard to 'Insure her security." On December 12, following the
Pearl Harbor attack, Admiral Harold R. Stark^ Chief of Naval
Operations, ordered the removal of the remaining French crew.
The less than two hundred coastguardsmen who replaced the
French were supposed to maintain steam in the engine room,
continue the fire watch already set, and if possible hold the
liner in readiness for the sea. The latter responsibility, however,
could scarcely have been met even by the remnants of the origi-
nal crew, no longer easy with the intricacies of the ship's opera-
tion, i
Custody of the Normandie soon became a week-to-week mat-
ter. On December sixteenth, the United States Maritime Com-
mission took over legal title and possession of the ship. The
Coast Guard remained aboard as a police force.
A week later, on Christmas Eve, the Navy took over from the
Maritime Commission. It did so with some qualms. The depart-
ment's Bureau of Ships had ascertained through inspection and
checking of the French Line's record's that 'the stability of the
ship under certain conditions was questionable and that the
number of troops to be carried, the armament and other features
of the conversion would have to be limited." She suffered from
"a low metacentric height, whereby the shift of small weight
could cause dangerous listing ... a very tender ship." In other
words, the Normandie was top-heavy.
The Army Transportation Service sent its own experts aboard
and found that the cavernous vessel was about as suited to troop-
carrying as a Staten Island ferry maybe less so. Drastic changes
would have to be made in the "berthing and mess" halls and even
in "sanitary facilities," where gleaming porcelain and brass were
no longer as important as sheer quantity.
The Robins Dry Dock and Repair Company, a subsidiary of
Todd Shipyards, was awarded a contract to have its engineers do
what they could to make this garish ark of military use to the
Allies.
Disaster la Manhattan 19
Early in January, title to the Normandie reverted to the Army.
Then, on January twenty-seventh, she was back in Navy hands,
an aquatic white elephant or whale that no one wanted. Four
days later, Captain Coman reported aboard. She was to be com-
missioned as the Lafayette on February eleventh. Irrespective of
his wishes, from that date on, Coman would be fully responsible
for her.
The crew allotted him numbered five hundred, one third that
normally on the Normandie, or about half of a cruiser's comple-
ment. Even a heavy cruiser was less than one eighth the size of
the French ship.
It was apparent to Plug Coman's seasoned eye that months
would be required to make his vessel a proper and "taut" trans-
port. When he received orders to sail on February fourteenth, he
was dumbstruck. But his mounting protestations always arrived
at the same dead end, causing him to conclude that the orders
must have stemmed directly from the White House.
An especial nightmare was the fire-fighting equipment. Out of
666 extinguishers, only 10 met American specifications, and less
than 50 per cent were in good condition or even partly filled.
The fittings for the hose lines were of a French gauge and design.
They could not, by any manner of coaxing, couple with Navy,
Army, Coast Guard, or other American hoses. The hydrants, as
well, were misfits.
To compound a volatile situation, the remaining coastguards-
men, recently arrived Navy crew, and the dry dock company's
workers had each the hazy impression that one of the other
groups was responsible for fire prevention. A reporter from
Marshall Field's newspaper PM, posing as a workman, wandered
about on board for hours and came to the conclusion that out-
rageous laxity had made the ship a pyromaniac's dream. He also
observed that the screening of enemy aliens had gotten out of
hand. But Ralph Ingersoll, the tabloid's editor, decided the
shocked reporter's article would be so damaging to national
morale that he suppressed it
Not only was there basis for assuming that the dry dock com-
pany or the Coast Guard was responsible for the ship, but a
plausible case could be built for the Bureau of Ships, the District
20 Disaster in Manhattan
Materiel Office of the Naval District, the Naval District itself,
and the Navy Department as well. The naval crew had no doubt
that Captain Coman was in full authority, but Coman was dele-
gated "no affirmative duties" other than to "familiarize" himself
with the floating palace.
His general guidelines were contained in a paper entitled,
"General Outline of Duties of a Prospective Commanding Offi-
cer of an Auxiliary Type Vessel. " This document covered in a
laconic manner the daily routine and situations that might occur
on ships not of "the line/* from Yangtze River gunboats to store
and hospital ships (how to stow biscuit tins, dispose of garbage
on inland waterways, bring litter cases aboard, hold deck courts,
and the like). The author, however, had never conceived of the
possibility of a member of the United States Navy being given
command of the Normandie.
The distressed captain wandered, like any passenger, through
the Louis XIV corridors of the Normandie. "From time to time
he consulted with the naval inspector and made suggestions with
reference to the conversion work," according to the Coast
Guard. But no one was obliged to pay any attention to what he
said not until February eleventh.
On February fourth, Coman watched a bulky cargo being
trundled aboard: 1,140 bales of canvas iife jackets. They were
filled with kapok, an oily Javanese cottonlike material, and
packed in bales weighing about thirty-five pounds each. The
highly combustible jackets were wrapped first in tar paper, then
in a cheap, fuzzy grade of burlap.
Someone suggested that the life preservers be temporarily
heaped in the grand saloon. There the panelled figures in the
mythology of the sea could gaze impassively down upon the
bales from the ceiling thirty-five feet in height while the life
jackets awaited stenciling and distribution to lockers about the
ship. Their inflammable nature was recognized since a "No
Smoking" sign was now hung in the saloon. It was generally un-
derstood, as well, that no welding or burning should be done in
the great hall.
On February seventh, Captain Coman, strolling through the
Disaster in Manhattan 21
saloon, decided it should serve much the same purpose for troops
as for first-class ocean voyagers a "recreation area. 5 * He asked
that the magnificent Aubusson carpet, weighing upwards of a
ton, be ripped out and replaced by more utilitarian linoleum.
It was also decided to remove four "stanchions," or columns
each measuring fifteen inches in diameter and weighing about
five hundred pounds from the saloon "as a safety measure to
prevent injury to the troops." No one, apparently, suggested that
tens of thousands of trans-Atlantic passengers had used this same
hall without incurring "injury" from the columns.
The bales of life preservers were now pushed slightly aside,
thus clearing a space around the stanchions of no more than
three feet. ''Burning," with an acetylene torch, a process which
was not supposed to have occurred in any part of this area, was
ordered for the ninth.
Meanwhile, also on Saturday, February seventh, the Chief of
Naval Operations, prodded by the White House, requested infor-
mation on the "possibility" of the ship being made ready to sail
the following Saturday. The District Materiel Officer answered
that it "seemed probable" that "essential items" of the conversion
would be completed by February fourteenth, but it would entail
a "tremendous rushing."
Monday, February ninth, dawned gray, with a hint of snow in
the northwest wind. The thermometer stood at twenty-eight de-
grees. The Bureau of Ships telephoned the Third Naval District
to "proceed on the basis of the ship leaving New York Satur-
day."
The Normandie, with thirty-five hundred servicemen and
civilians aboard, became a chaos of noise. In the grand saloon,
workmen were cutting through the stanchions with acetylene
torches. Asbestos shields had been placed behind the columns,
and a few water buckets set beside the welders. There seemingly
was no fear of setting fire to the bales of life jackets, in spite of
their proximity to the incandescent spit of flame.
By noon two of the stanchions were down, and the crew
knocked off for lunch. At two o'clock the welders were back.
The third stanchion went the way of the first two, and a work-
22 Disaster in Manhattan
man, Clement Derrick of Brooklyn, now placed his torch at the
base of the fourth. He watched the blinding white flame eat
through the steel.
A few minutes after half past two, a shower of sparks far heav-
ier, hotter, and of much more velocity than normal cascaded like
fireworks off the shield and bounced into the nearest bales. The
unusual intensity of the torrent was caused possibly by some fluc-
tuation in the oxygen-acetylene mixture or through a chance im-
purity in the metal. The burlap's fuzz flared up instantly.
An eighteen-year-old ironworker, Charles Collins also of
Brooklyn, immediately tried to beat out the fire, but "the smoke
and heat were terrific." His hands blistered, Derrick picked up
one of the two available water buckets and splashed its contents
on the blaze. It did no good whatsoever.
Someone yelled, "Fire!"
The call was relayed from man to man through the passage-
ways, saloons, and cabins of the ship, stem to stern, from her
lowest vitals to the bridge where Captain Coman banged down
the telephone without ever getting through to his Commander in
Chief.
* Over the loudspeaker system came the order, "Get off the
ship!"
It was repeated in a hoarse monotone. However, the workmen
in the grand saloon were bravely tossing bales about, trying to
stamp out the conflagration. Moving the strapped cotton served
only to fan the flames more brightly.
Within a minute the blaze had enveloped the entire pile of life
preservers and spread to the ceiling, walls and the floor which
was still carpeted. The linoleum, if indeed it had been requisi-
tioned in accordance with Coman's wishes, had not yet arrived.
The ceiling panels disappeared one by one in yellow smoke and
flame. At the aft entrance, the "fire" door was burning like so
much tinder.
Those inside nonetheless continued their efforts to halt the
fire's spread. Two men connected a ship's hose which had been
run into the saloon from the promenade deck and played it on
the flames. Others dragged a second hose over hot cinders and
Disaster in Manhattan 23
the spurts of flame from the seams in the Aubusson carpet only
to obtain at first a dribble of water, then nothing. A third hose
would not produce even that much liquid. There was no pres-
sure.
Still another man aimed a fire extinguisher at the mounting in-
ferno. When nothing happened, he flung the useless container
with an oath at the flames.
The fire spread from the grand saloon to the adjoining main
smoking room and up the grand staircase to the wardroom. At
the same time, the flames, gathering momentum with catastroph-
ic speed, raced out onto the promenade deck where they ignited
the canvas bunk bottoms stored there. Leapfrogging all nonflam-
mable objects in its path, searing and cracking windows, the fire
progressed into more and more cabins and saloons on this long,
broad deck, which had once been a seaborne equivalent of the
Champs Elys6es.
In about five minutes, the entire midsection of the Normandie
was glowing. No one had yet turned in a city alarm.
One of the contributing factors to this disastrous delay was the
difficulty in locating the Coast Guard fire brigade. Its headquar-
ters had been moved from its former location on the main deck
down to "A" deck, two decks below the promenade, and was at
the moment inaccessible even by telephone. Few on board,
other than brigade members, knew of the move.
Not until 2:49 P.M., or at least fifteen minutes after the out-
break of the fire did the New York City Fire Department receive
a "special building call'* an alarm telephoned in by someone on
Pier 88, possibly even a passerby. Three engine companies
quickly trailed by two hook-and-ladder companies and a bat-
talion chief arrived within minutes at the North River slip.
Their trucks had barely stopped crunching over the frozen
slush and cobblestones of West Street when the battalion chief,
gauging the smoke billowing out of almost every aperture of the
liner, called for additional equipment and a second chief.
The firemen moved into a holocaust. The pressure on the
ship's water mains had gone off; the electric system also had sput-
tered out into dead cables. Half-blinded, stumbling toward them
24 Disaster in Manhattan
from every deck were workmen struggling to safety through the
unfamiliar maze of the ship. Many had formed themselves into
human chains, snaking along, each man clutching whoever was
in front of him.
Curiously, it was the very clutter within the caverns of the ship
that enabled the workmen to reach safety. Automatic fire doors
or antiflooding bulkheads and hatches had started to grind shut
only to be kept ajar by scaffolding and other temporary obstruc-
tions. Otherwise, with the electricity failing, scores might have
been trapped and suffocated.
When the second battalion chief reached the pier, he sounded
a third, then a fourth alarm. Soon a fifth, or general, alarm
brought approximately fifty pieces of fire-fighting apparatus to
the North River, together with all available fireboats and private
tugs capable of pumping water under high pressure. Shipping
along the river was brought to a halt.
Admiral Andrews, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, wearing his
familiar corduroy-collared raincoat, and Fire Commissioner Pat-
rick J. Walsh established a temporary headquarters in the pier
shed.
Others swarmed into the tarry interior of the French Line
pier: off-duty policemen, precinct detectives, FBI agents, and the
vanguard of helmeted, rifle-carrying soldiers. Interspersed
among this milling multitude were squads of roving reporters
and cameramen plus a dozen or more special groups of civilians,
including the Red Cross and American Women's Voluntary
Services.
In freshly starched uniforms, the women set up coffee and
doughnut carts just as the disaster manual prescribed. As though
in competition, hot-dog and ice-cream vendors pushed their carts
to the perimeters of the fire lines along West Street.
Cordons of police could barely keep the onlookers out of the
way of firemen whose hoses ran to hydrants many blocks dis-
tant. The smoke, which cast a weird haze over midtown Manhat-
tan, attracted the curious by the thousands.
Radio stations from coast to coast interrupted afternoon soap
Disaster in Manhattan 25
operas, cooking hints, and children's stories with bulletins on the
progress of this spectacular blaze. In drama and shock value, the
Normandie burning was radio fare eclipsed only by the Pearl
Harbor coverage, and certainly on a par with the explosion of
the Hindenburg dirigible at Lakehurst in May 1937. The morbid
carnival aspect of the tragic drama was itself reminiscent of that
attending the entrapment of Floyd Collins in a Kentucky cave in
1925.
A ghoulish, muted chorus of "oh's" and "ah's" occasionally
acknowledged, as if in macabre applause, a particularly brilliant
sheet of flame or thick accumulation of smoke billowing from a
porthole. As the gray paint cracked from one of the funnels, the
black and red French Line colors were nostalgically revealed.
Then gradually, as ton upon ton of water poured onto the muck
and cinders of her once resplendent, holystoned decks, the great
liner began to list away from the pier onto her port side.
Some of the water cascaded again into the flotsam of the icy
river. Enough remained, however, to turn the hundreds of cabins
and saloons of the superstructure into so many reservoirs.
Her tilt increased, degree by degree, and the danger mounted
that the "very tender ship" with the "low metacentric height**
might capsize. Floodlights, piercing the smoky evening, shone off
the gray plates of the leaning vessel. She was like some slowly
dying prehistoric monster, no longer able to support her own
preposterous weight.
Vladimir Yourkevitch, designer of the vessel, had been denied
admission to the pier. He was powerless to convince the soldiers
who he was. But even he would have been unable to save his cre-
ation. Scuttling was suggested by others, then overruled in the
belief that flooding would only hasten her capsizing, rather than
ease her great mass onto the soft mud of the river bottom.
A salvage company official's suggestion that the fire be al-
lowed to burn itself out was also difficult to accept. Besides, the
New York Fire Department had won the battle. By six o'clock
that evening the fire was under control, although the Normandie
was listing at an angle of twenty degrees. At twenty past eight
26 Disaster in Manhattan
Mayor LaGuardia, clutching his corduroy collar, announced
hoarsely, but triumphantly to the platoons of newsmen, "The
Chiefs got his fire out!"
Radio programs from Long Island to Los Angeles were inter-
rupted as announcers excitedly relayed 'the Little Flower's" pro-
nouncement on this fantastically costly marine disaster.
Firemen commenced the tedious, cold job of coiling up miles
of grimy hose and reloading their trucks. Weary Red Cross
workers and other volunteers, their uniforms no longer pressed
and sometimes streaked with dirt and soot, started to close up
doughnut and coffee carts. It was time to go home.
By eleven o'clock the ship was tilting at a bizarre forty degree
angle, seemingly defying gravity. No one understood what kept
her up at all. Almost credible was the somewhat flamboyant ex-
planation of a radio reporter, "Queen that she was, hurt and tot-
tering, the Normandie was proud to the end!* 5
At midnight, those still remaining aboard were ordered off
quickly.
About half past two on the morning of Tuesday, February
tenth, there came a straining and creaking of massive hawsers,
thick as a wrestief s biceps. Then one after another the lines
parted with the report of gunfire. From inside the doomed liner
there reverberated a clattering and banging as anything not
fastened from grand pianos and stepladders to cases of beans
and as yet unmounted three-inch guns slid sideways.
With immense weariness, the fire-scourged Normandie com-
pleted her roll until she lay on her port side. Her three funnels
paralleled the ice-clogged water of the slip.
Everything had been pitted against the vessel. Recent dredging
operations beside Pier 88 had left the river bottom, forty-five feet
down, sloping at a steep angle which assisted the Normandie^
capsizing.
Unreasonable haste to put her to sea combined with gross
carelessness, confusion, and the further ingredient of cruel coin-
cidence to knock the liner out of service as effectively as though
she had been torpedoed* Opportunities for sabotage, a Congres-
Disaster in Manhattan 27
sional Naval Affairs Committee observed, were "abundant." But
sabotage had not been necessary.
Only one person, a ship worker, lost his life. The fatality,
Frank Trentacosta, thirty-six, fractured his skull when he fell
down a ladder. Nearly two hundred others carried cuts, bruises,
and burns or temporary eye and lung irritation as testament to a
wartime loss that should never have occurred, to a dramatic
costly casualty on the home front.
At enormous expense and superhuman effort, the liner was re-
floated. Even this was in vain, a harvest of yet more waste in a
continuing tragedy of errors.
The Normandie had to be scrapped anyhow. Ultimately the
French Line was reimbursed for the colossal blunderings of the
Americans*
CHAPTER 3
The Uncivil Defense
THE ENDING of automobile production sounded as final and as
warlike to most Americans as a bomb. The last car consigned to
the civilian market was trundled off the assembly line in Pontiac,
Michigan, in early February. It was a gray sedan with black ''vic-
tory trim," meaning no chrome.
Ford, Chrysler, Studebaker, Packard, and Nash had already
shut down. Now, with General Motors joining them, more than
half a minion auto workers were left unemployed while the fac-
tories retooled to fabricate tanks, planes, command cars, small
boats, a long list of items in transport, and a few, such as gun
mounts, outside this specialized realm.
As the nation's civilians began to think of civilian problems in
wartime, they wondered how they would be able to buy gas to
run the cars they had, old or new, or keep them in tires or spare
parts. It was already obvious that this taken-for-granted piece of
personal property had overnight assumed luxury status. For ex-
ample, a five-dollar federal tax, demanding a small windshield
sticker, pyramided atop existing state and local motor vehicle
taxes, had already come into being.
However, these stickers and the abrupt halt of automobile as-
sembly lines were but some of the meaningful straws in the wind
in America's newest and largest-scale war. There were the head-
lines like these:
28
The Uncivil Defense 29
3 VESSELS SUNK IN NORTH ATLANTIC
RESCUE 71 ADRIFT 5 DAYS
U.S. SHIPPING ON EAST COAST AGAIN STRUCK
Not even the famous radio message, "Sighted Sub, Sank
Same/ 9 flashed in from a naval patrol plane, quite made up for
the carnage which often occurred within sight and hearing of the
home front. The four-stack destroyer Jacob Jones of World War
I vintage was patrolling off the entrance to Delaware Bay on a
dark, choppy February night when hit by two torpedoes.
All but 1 1 of her crew of 150 officers and men perished in her
rapid foundering within sight of the channel buoys. The de-
stroyer's very name, as a matter of fact, seems to have been
jinxed. A preceding Jacob Jones was sunk four hundred miles off
the French coast in 1917 with comparably heavy loss of life.
A Navy transport and destroyer were swept ashore in a
Newfoundland gale with appalling losses. The 2,216-ton Coast
Guard cutter Alexander Hamilton, one of the largest of this type
of vessel, was torpedoed off Iceland. She sank with almost all on
board.
The war at sea was felt even closer to the home front. On the
late evening of February twenty-third, President Roosevelt deliv-
ered a "report to the nation,*' in which he expressed the opinion
that "this war is a new kind of war."
His remarks were imbued with especial dimension since the
press, at the suggestion of the White House, had reproduced
global maps in that day's editions. Thus the Chief Executive was
able to refer repeatedly to disputed parcels of the earth's surface
with implications wholly intelligible to even the poorest geogra-
phy student.
Among the millions of Americans listening was Lawrence
("Larry") Wheeler, proprietor of an inn on Highway 101, in El-
wood, California, west of Santa Barbara and ninety-eight miles
up the coast from Los Angeles. Twilight shaded the calm evening
waters off the oil-field town. The weather was mild and alto-
gether pleasant.
". . . we have,** noted the President, "most certainly suffered
30 The Uncivil Defense
losses and we shall suffer more . . . . we Americans have been
compelled to yield ground but we wifl regain it. . . ."
Then, Larry Wheeler paused abruptly in his serving of dinner.
"Suddenly," he was to recall, "we heard a loud report followed in
a few seconds by another, another. Some soldiers who were in
my place said it probably was just target practice. . . .
*Ti went outside and walked over to a point from whence I
could see the ocean. It looked like a submarine, about a mile off-
shore, cruising slowly down the coast and firing at regular inter-
vals. I could see the flashes as the gun went off.
"The sub or whatever it was seemed to be aiming at the Barns-
daH Oil Company main absorption plant, located almost on the
beach. They missed with all their shots at this plant, though some
of the shells landed awfully close, throwing up geysers of dirt and
sand near the building.
"One shell hit a well and blew the pumping plant and derrick
to bits .... there must have been 20 or 25 men working in
the field at the time and nobody was injured. One of their shots
whistled over my inn, which is a good mile from the shore line
and burst up the canyon on the Hollister estate across the high-
way * ... their shooting wasn't very good.**
Radio stations on the Pacific Coast from Los Angeles through
Santa Barbara and along the Santa Barbara Channel in the El-
wood-Goleta area went off the air before the listeners could hear
the President* s quoting of Tom Paine, "These are the times that
try men' s souls," or Roosevelt own aside, "Tyranny like hell is
not easily conquered."
Lights were blacked out. Coastal aircraft, including little "one-
lungers** of the Civil Air Patrol, swept out low over the darken-
ing surf. But the enemy had gone.
After twenty-five shells lobbed in nearly twenty minutes, the
Japanese commander still had started no fires, caused no casual-
ties nor significant damage. Half a dozen horses had stampeded
in their pastures and jumped the fence rails to higher, safer
ground. The bombardment had demonstrated, however, the wide-
open vulnerability of the Pacific coast
Further havoc was to come two nights later when, commenc-
Hie Uncivil Defense 31
ing at 2:25 A.M., Los Angeles was blacked out, sirens wailed
their tocsin to seek shelter. Antiaircraft guns barked a raucous
bedlam as searchlights crisscrossed the skies.
"It's a whole squadron!" cried one of many excited residents
of the sprawling city, who adamantly would not remain under
cover.
"No," shouted another, "it's a blimp!"
"Is it thunder?" queried a third, while many exclaimed at the
oddity of aircraft daring to attack on so clear a night Laughter
and the shrill of children in a holiday mood punctuated the sob-
erer obbligatos.
Air-raid wardens, newly appointed and wholly untrained,
yelled at the curious to get off the streets. They banged on the
doors of homes, stores, or offices where any offending light
peeped through. Police cars, in rougher tempo, augmented the
wardens* work. One woman, slow in extinguishing a lower-floor
lamp, was hit over the head by a patrolman trigger-happy with
his nightstick. He whisked her off to jail with the same furious
sense of public service that might have attended the smashing of
the Dalton gang or the cutting down of Dillinger.
Bistros, restaurants, and other nocturnal attractions were pad-
locked until 7:21 A.M. when the all clear finally sounded. How-
ever, the casualties to Angelinos and their property had a bizarre
ring, considering the hurt was self-inflicted. Five persons, includ-
ing an air-raid warden, were dead from heart attacks and traffic
accidents in the wake of the civic turmoil caused by the black-
out.
Windows were broken and roofs dented by the shrapnel siz-
zling skyward from upwards of two thousand rounds of AA am-
munition; greenhouses and convertible automobiles particularly
suffered.
The Western Defense Command maintained that unfriendly
planes had actually droned overhead. Secretary Stimson sup-
ported his local officers, although Secretary of the Navy Frank
Knox scoffed, "Hysteria!" The Los Angeles Times speculated
that a giant plane-carrying Japanese submarine might have
launched the raiders.
32 The Uncivil Defense
While no proof of a threatened attack by enemy bombers or
from any reasonable source could ever be found, West Coasters
vented their fury and frustration in general upon aliens. The
125,000 nisei in the area American-born Japanese became a
prime target.
"Each new hour," commenced a typical telegram to the West-
ern Defense Command, "that a single Jap is at liberty in this
state is an hour we might tragically regret!"
United States Attorney General Francis Biddle pleaded in
vain that the drastic actions engendered by this attitude were nei-
ther legal nor necessary. But hatred and a blind lashing out for
revenge took sway over human reason. The venom directed to-
wards the nisei was the same as that which had already made the
Pearl Harbor commanders, General Walter Short and Admiral
Husband Kimmel, targets.
Fangs were bared. Scapegoats were sought with deadly pas-
sion. It had happened before, most tragically during the Civil
War draft riots in New York City where for a time no Negro
dared show his face on the streets.
Under orders from the military, which had already assumed
power of life and death over the coastal zones, a roundup of
nisei, Germans, and Italians began. All of them were considered
security risks. Austrians, Austro-Hungarians, and Koreans, curi-
ously enough, went unmolested, even those unable to prove citi-
zenship.
Roosevelt himself, the champion of human rights, bowed
under overwhelming pressure and signed an order that left not a
shred of doubt that the War Department could rule wide areas,
of its own designation, with the mailed fist of martial law. With
this the last barricade of physical freedom and self-respect for
many American citizens who had the misfortune to "look like
foreigners** crumbled.
As newspaperman Marquis Childs observed, this was "an ex-
traordinary cession of power, with far-reaching implications of
which most Americans are entirely unaware."
Weekend raids in California and Texas, faintly reminiscent of
the Gestapo's midnight knocks, snared as many as seven hundred
The Uncivil Defense 33
nisei at a time, a few Germans, and a scattering of Italian fisher-
men. Poorly clad, hungry, accorded insufficient time to pack,
whole families were sent to live "for their safety" at Tule Lake
and Manzanar, in California, at Fort Lincoln, Bismarck, North
Dakota, and other areas where resettlement camps were hastily
knocked together.
Manzanar, in southern California's Owens River Valley, be-
came home to seven thousand. The largest of the camps, it in-
cluded a decidedly striking assortment of "guests." They ranged
all the way from fruit-stand merchants to high-paid Hollywood
butlers, a few actors (both good and bad), and even a United
States Army hero of World War I. The latter' s incarceration un-
derscored in unmistakably dazzling colors the idiocy of the
whole procedure.
While the nisei had at least theoretically the choice of volun-
tarily emigrating from the seashore and coastal valleys of Cali-
fornia across the mountain ranges, residents of other areas as far
east as Denver did not want them. They were sent from their
homes by the trainload, a tragic and altogether incongruous
spectacle in a land whose benignity and lofty purpose had long
ago been exalted at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me . . . .
All along the coast, factory communities and fertile valleys
were stripped of sorely needed workers. It was a case of nose-
bitingoff spitefulness. Ever since the railroad builders nearly a
century ago had commenced to encourage the wholesale migra-
tion of cheap Oriental labor, there had been antagonism on the
West Coast and in the West toward the Asians. Small shop own-
ers especially feared and resented competition from industrious
Chinese and Japanese.
Now, the selfish-minded could rejoice in the foolish belief that
there would be no further challenge to easy profit certainly not
for the duration.
34 The Uncivil Defense
New York City set out to register "foreigners.** When the
totals came in, census takers were horrified to learn that the huge
urban area harbored upwards of half a million aliens. Nothing
was or could be done except in the case of a negligible percent-
age certified by the Department of Justice as "dangerous risks/'
The police and federal agents in Manhattan and the other bor-
oughs could only draw in their collective breath and hope for the
best in the vast majority of cases.
This complex home-front equation, involving many factors re-
lating to the enemy, added up to one outstanding need: an effec-
tive civil defense organization. If, for example, it were cast in the
image of Great Britain's successful home guard, it would not
only protect people against real dangers but aid in dispelling
panic like that which gripped the West Coast a few hours after
the Pearl Harbor attack.
Such an agency, the Office of Civil Defense, already existed,
but it was stumbling pitifully in attempting to take its first hesi-
tant steps. Its director was Mayor La Guardia who, one would
have supposed, already had quite enough to do as mayor of the
nation's largest city. The infant OCD was one of a number of
federal emergency committees, offices, authorities, administra-
tions, and boards organized before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
All, however, had set up typewriter desks, file cabinets, and the
familiar governmental "organization charts" under the assump-
tion that the United States would first be locked in a death grip
with Nazi Germany, whatever the incendiary spark. The imperti-
nence of the Japanese had somehow not been envisioned.
The initial efforts of the Office of Civilian Defense met with
reasonable success. In Marion County, Indiana, for example,
twelve thousand citizens answered the call. From school children
to octogenarians, they volunteered as block wardens, nurse's
aides, auxiliary police and firemen, and undertook many other
duties, including baby-sitting, typing, and acting as messengers
and even janitors.
"There'll be no Pearl Harbor here if work and organization
has anything to do with it," a Marion County OCD organizer as-
serted.
The Uncivil Defense 35
New England hammered together 1,287 local OCD councils
overnight, while the 168-year-old Massachusetts Committee on
Public Safely organized a home guard. Middle-aged business-
men, in addition to more obvious and perfunctory tasks, were
handed a manual on guerrilla warfare. Overnight, apparently,
the readers were to be converted into masters of the garrote and
stiletto if the invaders' boots ever echoed over the cobblestones
of Back Bay or Newton Upper Falls.
Positive and constructive reactions to civilian defense were,
however, spotty and often desultory. The Midwest, far removed
even from the war at sea and more concerned with factory con-
struction and agriculture, made a generally dismal showing in
the early months of the war. Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin
combined, for example, could only whip up sufficient local en-
thusiasm to form an inconsequential 251 local defense councils.
And the councils themselves were intended to be but the nuclei
of functioning organizations that were yet to be assembled.
It was true, also, that the Midwest, where isolationist senti-
ment had been the strongest since the outbreak of the war in Eu-
rope, needed some time to warm up to the ugly reality of the
time. On the other hand, from the standpoint of manpower, this
big, major segment of the nation showed from the start that it
would repeat its World War I and Civil War performance in
sending forth its sons to fight
Nonetheless, it was difficult to convince the good citizens of
Crossroad, Indiana, that they should place sand buckets and,
possibly, stirrup pumps under their attic roofs to say nothing of
sitting up in some church steeple the chilly night through, hold-
ing a pair of binoculars and staring at a frosty sky, entirely blank
except for the stars. It all seemed ridiculous to such townsfolk, as
possibly it was.
Opposition or, at best, apathy was not wholly confined to one
geographical region. Block wardens, wearing their distinctive
armbands, had a difficult time almost everywhere in getting the
inhabitants to take practice blackouts seriously. They were
greeted with quips, invited to join parties in progress, or more
often, totally ignored. The attitude with which these conscien-
36 The Uncivil Defense
tious volunteers were greeted was little different from what
church canvassers or solicitors for charity funds have long come to
expect. They experienced an invariable sense of relief if, at least,
they were tolerated.
The above-average-income taxpayers of Westchester County,
New York, proved so obdurate that a campaign was drummed
up to encourage prayer and hymn singing during the air-raid and
blackout drills. The optimistic, if perhaps not wholly realistic,
civil-defense chairmen and chairwomen hoped thereby to bring
the public into a more sober and receptive frame of mind.
The spark, however, which caused the OCD its worst trouble
was the selection of Eleanor Roosevelt to head the Community
and Volunteer Participation Service of the Physical Fitness Divi-
sion. This well-meaning, enthusiastic, and vigorous First Lady
migjht have caused no unusual stir by herself, but she had the
misfortune to make two controversial appointments.
Mayris Chaney, member of the San Francisco ballroom dance
team of Chaney and Fox, was named to a $4,600-a-year post as
director of a physical-fitness program for children. The pretty
dancer, who had performed before royalty, had been a friend
and proteg6e of Mrs. Roosevelt's ever since she entered the
White House. In the mid-thirties, by way of appreciation, Miss
Chaney had introduced a step she named the "Eleanor Glide,"
somewhat inspired by London's the Lambeth Walk although it
never approximated the lattefs popularity.
Congress was already rumbling over the selection of a "strip-
teaser," inappropriate as the label was, to a role in the war effort
when Melvyn Douglas appeared in Washington. Mrs. Roosevelt
had selected the popular actor to head the Arts Council, dealing
with the theater, writers, and artists. Although Douglas declared
that his salary was a dollar a year, some legislators insisted it was
closer to ten thousand dollars. They were doubtless exagger-
ating.
More damning to suspicious minds was Douglas' support of
the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. The American Legion,
too, had long disapproved of the actor's identification with "lib-
eral" causes.
The Uncivil Defense 37
He was, the lawmakers charged, one of the Administration's
"parasites . . . . leeches," a guest at Eleanor Roosevelt's "pink
tea parties." Soon, the Congressmen's anger boiled to the point
where they blocked the use of federal funds for "instructions in
physical fitness by dancers, fan dancing, street shows, theatrical
performances or other public entertainment/'
Jane Seaver, attractive 1941 Mount Holyoke graduate, was
imported to work with Girl and Boy Scouts and other young
groups. (Now Mrs. James Russell of Arlington, Virginia, she
confesses that much of OCD was "pretty far out")
When the Congressmen discovered that there were no less
than sixty-two coordinators for physical fitness within OCD, in-
cluding such unwarlike sports as quoits, horseshoe pitching, Ping-
Pong, and table tennis, their rage was unsuppressible. Newspa-
per columnists themselves jumped heels first into the free-for-all.
"Half the trouble around [OCD]," wrote Raymond Clapper,
"could be got rid of if the President would haul Mrs. Roosevelt
out of the place."
And the normally restrained Walter Lippmann flayed "Mrs.
Roosevelt 9 s talent for sugar-coating the matter with all manner of
fads, fancies, homilies and programs which would have been ap-
propriate to the activities of an excited village-improvement so-
ciety."
But neither of these pundits bagged the biggest quarry within
range. They had forgotten to mention the head of the physical-
fitness program, John B. Kelly, former Olympic sculling cham-
pion and Philadelphia millionaire, who later achieved fame as
the father of the movie star who became Princess Grace of
Monaco.
From the start, his enthusiasm gushed forth like an Old Faith-
ful of athletics as he interpreted athletics. He wanted in Mayris
Chaney*s department, "rhythmics, mass tap dancing, ballet and
gymnastics in a large panorama."
In his' gaudy blueprints tagged "Hale America!" the big, ebul-
lient, former champion with the scull urged golf as "one of the
best forms of exercise." He expressed himself in spite of Mrs.
Roosevelt's own mild suggestion that possibly the upkeep of the
38 The Uncivil Defense
links, the necessity for greens 9 fees, and all the game's costly
paraphernalia did not exactly qualify golf as a sport for the
masses.
Warming to boxing as a solution to the ills of the young, much
as a minister would to prayer, Kelly in one of his many, multi-
signed press releases called upon Jack Dempsey to "preach the
benefits of clean living!" He conceded that fisticuffs was a "tough
game," then added that "soldiering is a tough game too!"
An obviously disgruntled employee was to chronicle in a with-
held report of that period's OCD activities:
"Mrs. Roosevelt had also cautioned him [Kelly] that Ameri-
can parents might not like the idea of having the Government
hand their children over to professional pugilists for training,
"That Kelly showed imagination in planning his program is
beyond dispute. Everything which could be tortured into the
making of health seemed to be held his province; although it
seems odd that he did not advocate a popularizing of polo, the
steeplechase or that ancient English medium of physical fitness,
foxhunting."
La Guardia, already overextended as mayor of New York,
agreed to almost anything in the civil-defense program just to
maintain tranquility. "Let us not stifle imagination," he observed
in tacit blessing of Kelly's "Hale America."
Mrs. Roosevelt seconded Kelly's program with an airy if enig-
matic "O.K." but with the reservation that "posture charts" be
included for wide dissemination. She also urged Americans of all
ages to indulge in "some type of physical activity on two or three
nights a week." For their areas of "activity" she suggested the
churches. Almost as an afterthought, she proposed that "three
hours a week," concurrently perhaps, be "devoted to mass wor-
ship."
She proclaimed a "Dance-f or-Health Week" that would com-
mence on April third. Then the First Lady set an example by or-
ganizing folk dances during coffee breaks and lunch hours in the
enameled corridors of OCD headquarters. This was a comman-
deered apartment building on Dupont Circle, bordering "Em-
The Uncivil Defense 39
bassy Row." She not only arranged the dances; she often led
them*
When word filtered down Connecticut Avenue and then along
Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol itself, the reaction was much
the same as that after a lit powder trail has sparked into the dy-
namite keg.
"Boondoggling!" screamed the Congressmen. *This deadly se-
rious problem is just an excuse for another social experiment!"
Republican Representative Phil A. Bennett of Missouri pro-
posed sarcastically that if "fan dancing'* were necessary for the
defense effort, why not hire a "pro Sally Rand, for a salary of
$25,000?"
"They can't dig any skeletons out of my closet!" Mayris
Chaney retorted, asserting that she was not familiar with fan
dancing. Anyhow, she added, tongue in cheek, "Such a program
was not suitable for children's activities."
The tornado of words and accusations reached a crescendo
when it was discovered that the Treasury Department was con-
tracting with Walt Disney to produce an $80,000 short film in
which Donald Duck would quack his explanation of the income
tax. It was tailored to follow other Disney cartoons on war bond
sales.
Congressmen of limited imagination dubbed Mayris Chaney
and Melvyn Douglas "Donald Duck appointments." It mattered
not to these critics that the Treasury Department had no connec-
tion at all with OCD and less, if possible, with Mrs. Roosevelt
But it was enough to force Mrs. Roosevelt, Melvyn Douglas, and
Mayris Chaney to resign.
"The whole episode was unfortunate," was the First Lady's
wistful reflection. "I had been reluctant to take the job ....
the mounting wave of attack in Congress finally convinced me
that I was not going to be able to do a real job in the OCD
.... by remaining I would only make it possible for those who
wish to attack me. ... to attack an agency which I consider
can prove its usefulness."
Douglas himself noted in valedictory, "The personal attack on
40 The Uncivil Defense
me has broadened into a generalized attack on a fundamental
issue: whether or not thousands of loyal Americans who work in
the creative or entertainment world shall because of their profes-
sion be denied the privilege of helping to win this war."
Miss Chaney returned to dancing and volunteer work in San
Francisco's Stage Door Canteen. Time, however, would not as-
suage her wounds. Now Mrs. Hershey Martin, a Beverly Hills
newspaperwoman, she has written the author:
"I feel that the children's program had great potential. Who
knows, if young people had been taken off the streets, super-
vised, encouraged to work and study there might have been less
delinquency during the many years that have ensued?
4< Had the program been encouraged, even taken up by other
agencies rather than used as a political football, our postwar gen-
eration might have been reaping great benefits. Nothing about
thousands of young men being slaughtered during the fall of Sin-
gapore while Congress fought for two days over Mayris Chaney
has ever been in the least bit amusing to me. Perhaps I just lack a
sense of humor/*
La Guardia was supplanted by a dynamic individual who ex-
uded confidence that he could unearth any ''usefulness" intrinsic
within the amorphous creation, then "prove it" Aged forty-
three, James M. Landis, former dean of the Harvard Law
School, early brain-truster, and Securities and Exchange Com-
mission director, inherited what Mrs. Roosevelt described as "a
pretty prickly problem.' 5 The lean, generally humorless protegS
of Felix Frankfurter (and one of the jurist's 'Tittle hot dogs,"
lawyers quipped) declared that "readiness for defense, like war
itself, is total .... the greatest trouble with Civilian Defense
is that the people have not awakened to the fact that the United
States is at war."
Landis was not alone in this opinion. General Hugh S. John-
son, the former blood-and-thunder NRA (National Recovery
Administration) administrator, put it more strongly. He charged,
"The general public, . . . simply does not seem to give a
tinker's damn!'*
Edward R. Murrow, the CBS commentator back from Lon-
The Uncivil Defense 41
don for a national tour, concluded that most Americans acted
"as spectators with an inadequate understanding of our own re-
sponsibility .... we have not yet acquired the habit of world
leadership. Some of us are reluctant to accept the greatness that
has been thrust upon us."
The convulsions within the civil-defence agency did have their
positive values. In the wake of Pearl Harbor and subsequent de-
feats and revelations of crass blundering, they served as electric
shocks for the shattered national psyche.
'The country," wrote Breckinridge Long, Assistant Secretary
of State, in an unpublished diary, "is just waking up. At first it
was incredulous then stunned. Now it is getting mad. The dan-
ger is it may turn on the administration. Pearl Harbor has
passed. The Normandie made them just plain mad. Press and the
people turned on La Guardia and Mrs. Roosevelt.
*The Congress may turn on the President and on some of the
fringe' in office. It just might be very bad and I will do every-
thing I can to stop it .... the truth is the administration is not
to blame for our unpreparedness, for the apathy of the people,
for the Lindbergh philosophy which was so popular, for our gen-
eral selfishness and softness. It was, and still is, part of a national
state of mind."
As the new head of OCD, Landis got off to a f air start. No
longer did the halls of the Dupont Circle building echo to the
whine of fiddle recordings and the click of heels as secretary and
boss wheeled to the rustic rhythm of folk dancing. He concen-
trated on fundamentals: air-raid shelters, sirens, white hats, arm-
bands, stirrup pumps, sand buckets all the tools associated with
disaster attacking the home front.
To prove that his organization meant business, Landis publi-
cized preparedness. But here again the withering hand of absurd-
ity poked forth from the closet. Photographs and bulletins re-
leased to the press dramatized such unlikely fire fighters as the
Franciscan Monks from Our Lady of Angels Monastery, in
Cleveland, and the caretakers of Mount Vernon.
The well-frocked monks were depicted shoveling sand onto
sputtering models of incendiary bombs. The Mount Vernon
42 The Uncivil Defense
Ladies 9 Association, according to the news item, had not only
equipped the magnificent home, for which they were the trustees,
with emergency fire protection but installed a "hot" line to the
nearby Alexandria Fire Department
The good women boasted they could cany all the historic
treasures, except for the heavy furniture, to the basement or to
other shelters in fifteen minutes flat Period costumes would not
be worn for the duration. Floor-length ruffled skirts or tight knee
breeches would do nothing to hasten the flight of candelabra, cut
glass, paintings, and an assortment of priceless antiques to the
cellar. Outside Mount Vernon, within hearing of residents for
miles along this picturesque bend of the Potomac River, one of
the loudest new sirens was installed. It was nicknamed, not with-
out inspiration, "Screaming Mamie/* According to some, the so-
briquet was in memory of the designer's wife.
In New York City, the Museum of Modern Art rushed to
make ready against the concussion of aerial bombs. Its many
windows were taped, just as London window panes had been
taped more than two years earlier.
But in the furor of the moment it was quite overlooked that
neither the Nazis nor the Japanese possessed a heavy bomber
with an effective radius of much more than one thousand miles.
Nor did the absurdity of selecting either Our Lady of Angels
Monastery or Mount Vernon as targets of even the lowest prior-
ity dim the fevered apprehension. And these were but two of
many defense phantasms. Buildings in New York may more rea-
sonably have been considered in a target area still, who could
bomb them?
The nation's capital also took precautions. False terraces bull-
dozed up on the White House lawns concealed antiaircraft bat-
teries. If just one gun had been fired, every window in the White
House and surrounding government buildings would have been
shattered. Still more AA guns as well as laboriously fabricated
dummies were mounted atop a perimeter of high structures to
afford the illusion of "a bristling def ense."
A steam shovel disgorged chunks of earth and sod on the east
end of the White House grounds. When this operation was fin-
The Uncivil Defense 43
ished, the President and his staff had available an air-raid shelter
as commodious and luxurious as anything short of the RAFs un-
derground command post in London or Hitler's Berlin bunker.
The Chief Executive could live and conduct business there for an
indefinite period, aided by all the accouterments native to his
customary offices.
Meanwhile, upwards of eleven million volunteers were needed
as an OCD spokesman put it, "to prepare 130 million people for
self-preservation." The goal was still not much past the halfway
mark. Among the ranks recruited were the following:
Not quite three hundred thousand "medical personnel," in-
cluding home nurses and hospital aides this was less than two
thirds of the goal.
Approximately seven hundred thousand block wardens: It
seemed to the OCD that there would never be enough women
and older men to blow their whistles in the black of night.
Four hundred thousand auxiliary firemen.
Half a million other "protectors," including guards for high-
ways and waterways, reservoirs, forests, petroleum storage tanks,
docks, warehouses, and for the many public buildings that also
fell within its bailiwick. The volunteers were not armed, how-
ever, and had to rely on their own strength or stout clubs to en-
force their commands upon intruders.
The civilian volunteers responded with unfailing spirit and
vigor during various emergencies. A flood of the Ohio and Alle-
gheny rivers, inundating parts of Pittsburgh and other cities,
proved the tenacity of a hundred thousand volunteer civil-
defense workers. Working side by side with professionals, many
did yeoman service, toiling two or three days at a time without
sleep.
On a misty June morning in 1942, the citizens of Province-
town, Massachusetts, historically accustomed to harvesting the
flotsam of the sea, turned out to help ashore the survivors of a
torpedoed Allied merchantman. Summoned by the air-raid siren,
inhabitants of this town at Cape Cod's very tip quickly rushed
blankets and stretchers to the water* s edge. Pitching tents on
broad, sandy beaches and on the sides of towering dunes, the
44 The Uncivil Defense
New Englanders brewed thousands of cups of coffee, heated
hundreds of meals, and spread sandwich after sandwich.
Doctors, nurses, canteen workers, auxiliary police, block war-
dens, and other Civilian Defense volunteers had answered the
alarm. Landis was so impressed that he publicly commended the
little fishing village, better known to summer visitors as an artist
colony.
Civil defense bit by bit rolled up an inventory of more than
$52,000,000 worth of equipment needed or not needed. But
more and more it seemed as though a capricious fate were deter-
mined that Landis' tenure would witness but further acts in the
Gilbert and Sullivan farce already premiered.
Unfortunately a plethora of projects marched forth from the
seemingly infinite catacombs of Landis* active mind. He organ-
ized classes for veteran truck drivers. Here the former Harvard
Law School dean met with sturdy opposition. Telling these capa-
ble individuals of the highway how to drive, even in convoy, was
analogous to reviewing the scales for a Paderewski.
Other "teachers" from OCD discussed the repair of utility
poles with longtime telephone and electric-light company lines*
men, while even priests, ministers, and rabbis were briefed on
giving spiritual aid and comfort to the wounded and dying.
Surely every contingency was provided for.
The '"block plan" was to prove Landis' Waterloo. The catas-
trophe was not especially surprising since the block warden was
heaped with duties and prerogatives which far exceeded his nor-
mal role. In addition to calling attention to offending lights or re-
minding that air-raid drills were in progress, he or she was sup-
posed to encourage housewives to save fats, conserve sugar, help
draw up car pools, provide the counsel of a veteran agronomist
on the culture of victory gardens, and even boom the WAVES
and WACS to eligible young females.
To many legislators, especially Republicans, these wardens
appeared to be the American equivalent of block "fuehrers," or
leaders, in Nazi-governed towns and cities. The wardens seemed
to be assuming an ever-encroaching role in the nation's home
life, barely stopping short of changing the diapers of the block's
Hie Uncivil Defense 45
infants. Alarmists feared their next step would be to call the po-
litical tune for their captive wards*
Now Capitol Hill sniffed out a sinister plot, by Landis, aided
and abetted by a "Goebbels-like" propaganda ministry. Of
course, theorized the more excitable, the government was print-
ing political propaganda pamphlets while OCD's block wardens,
like swastikaed storm troopers, were distributing them possibly
at bayonet point.
Representative Carl Curtis, Nebraska Republican, stormed in
early 1943, "A year ago we had to step in and abolish fan danc-
ing. This year we have had to step in and abolish fellow travel-
ers!"
It did not help matters when the Communist newspaper, the
Daily Worker, congratulated the OCD for opposing "reaction-
ary" congressmen. This was a "Red" sore spot with the former
law-school dean. The American Legion, in particular, had been
seeking his scalp as "the man who engineered the whitewashing
of Harry Bridges." The basis for this charge was a past finding by
Landis as a White House-appointed arbiter, that the radical labor
leader had not been proven to be a member of the Communist
Party.
Possibly the kindest remark in the new outsurge of congres-
sional rage was that of Representative J. William Ditter, Penn-
sylvania Republican, who conceded, "Dr. Landis may be the
victim of his own innocence and his own ignorance of the reali-
ties of life."
With an enrollment of more than five million volunteers, the
size of OCD was staggering. Easily its most precocious and effec-
tive offspring, the Civil Air Patrol, was snatched away by the
Army in April 1943. Its eighty thousand pilots and ground per-
sonnel kept forty-five hundred light planes flying. They per-
formed many missions, from guarding the lonely lengths of pow-
er lines and pipelines to towing artillery targets, flying blood
plasma, and searching for U-boats in coastal waters.
Frederick J. Lyon, sixty-four, private pilot of a Connecticut
patrol wing, had been rejected as overage for the Army Air Serv-
ice in 1916; he went to France as a captain in the Engineers in-
46 The Uncivil Defense
stead. After almost daily flights over Long Island Sound and out
past the foggy shoals off Montauk Point and Block Island, his
vigil was once rewarded. Below the fabric and plywood wings of
his airplane appeared an unmistakable, elongated shadow sweep-
ing up on a tanker's wake. Lyon's radio call brought a patrol
boat, an Army as well as a Navy bombing plane, and a blimp to
the scene. The result was a "probable" kill and another vessel en-
abled to deliver its needed cargo.
The experience of this past-middle-age pilot was not unusual
in the CAP records. Before writing finis to its war activities the
CAP spotted 173 unidentified submarines and radioed the first
information on 363 survivors in lifeboats or rafts from torpedoed
vessels.
But civil defense was doomed. Not even the reflected glory of
the CAP could reprieve its top-heavy, bumbling parent. Landis
resigned in August 1943. Five months later the Bureau of the
Budget cut the agency's appropriation below eight hundred thou-
sand dollars.
With a skeleton staff, like the night guards at some vast but
nearly empty warehouse, the OCD limped along, failing, de-
crepit, abandoned. No one wanted it; no one cared. In the spring
of 1944, this hard-luck offspring of war joined the WPA, CCC
and NRA all once lusty, squawling progeny of the New Deal
consigned to oblivion.
Epitaphs most critical, some derisive, almost none of them
kind or even nostalgic were penned. Among the more reflec-
tive was this by Henry F. Pringle:
"Some of the activities of (XCJD. seem faintly foolish now, so
swift is the pace of modern war .... the blackouts and dim-
outs, the air raid drills, the boxes of sand and the pails of water
are the remnants of a gigantic false alarm. O.C.D. was the home-
front agency. It stimulated rubber, tin, paper and aluminum sal-
vage drives. It encouraged first-aid training the peril of hus-
bands who had to submit to practice bandages and splints.
(XCJX served a double purpose. Through it millions of Ameri-
cans, anxious to participate in the war, found useful outlets for
their energies."
CHAPTER 4
A Giant's Yawn
THE PITIFUL EXPERIENCE of the Office of Civilian Defense was
all too symbolic of the country's unreadiness for war.
At the time of the invasion of Poland, America had 70 per
cent of the world's automobiles, 53 per cent of its telephones,
half of its radios, and electric or gas refrigerators in six million
homes. Having just experienced a terrible economic depression,
many Americans may have regarded themselves as poor. But
compared to the rest of the world, the nation's standard of living
was opulent. Not until the Japanese planes swooped low over
Diamond Head did this wealth suddenly leave a bitter taste.
America's unpreparedness was revealed in frightening terms.
The Navy was an unenviable third in international rating, sur-
passed by Great Britain and Japan in that order. The Army,
swelled by Selective Service to 1,500,000 men, was raw and unfit
for Nazi-style batfle. The glib threat by the more ferocious of
Hitler's marshals that they would tear whole American armies
into little pieces did not seem totally implausible to some who re-
flected on Poland, on Holland, on France, and on Russia.
The cream of 1941's aircraft 20,000 planes had flapped
off to Great Britain and the Soviet Union like a migration of me-
chanical geese. America's Army Air Corps, denuded, sputtered
ahead with barely a thousand so-called combat aircraft Accord-
ing to the corps' commanding general, H, H. (*Hap**) Arnold,
these planes were "obsolete," lacking sufficient firepower and
47
48 A Giant's Yawn
armament, as well as such innovations as self-sealing fuel tanks.
The Navy with somewhat more modern planes, nonetheless, had
a count of only 850 able and ready to zoom confidently into
battle.
An unimpressive 4,300 tanks clanked sometimes ahead, more
often behind the infantry. This was our plodding armored corps,
a joke to the Germans who could hurl that many into a single
engagement. The Army was so short of these "land cruisers" that
Renaults from World War I had to be towed behind trucks in
maneuvers to afford the soldiers an idea of what tanks realty
looked like. When even these did not total up to impressive num-
bers, ranks were filled out by Ford trucks with big cardboard
placards: TANK.
The more cynical sergeants and corporals obtained the im-
pression that these signs, no matter how big or how black the let-
ters, would not fool the Nazis, maybe not even the Japs, who
Americans had been led to believe over the years, were pretty
stupid.
Neither the rapid-firing BAR rifle nor the far more rapid Gar-
and were being produced in sufficient quantities to replace World
War I Springfield and Enfield rifles. And even the tin helmet
that father wore in the Meuse-Argonne remained in fashion for
his 1942 counterpart, "G. I. Joe."
European orders for arms during the two years before Pearl
Harbor had helped American industry prepare for the tremen-
dous job to come, although the volume had fluctuated with the
mood of Congress and changes in our neutrality laws laws
which by the end of 1941 wholly belied the definition of that
term. Automobile manufacturers, for example, commenced tool-
ing up in the spring of 1940. They built additional plants for air-
planes and aircraft engines, largely for foreign consignment.
Chrysler, a major recipient of early defense orders, earmarked
$20,000,000 for the development of a tank arsenal.
Although an ambitious building program had commenced, the
Navy was compelled to get under way aboard World War I bat-
tleships. Cumbersome, slow and armored in the wrong places for
A Giant's Yawn 49
defense in the air age, they went down at Pearl Harbor like tar-
get rafts. The fleet was slowed by too many similar relics: four-
stack destroyers like the ill-fated Jacob Jones; cruisers whose
firepower could not approximate that of the Germans' ultramod-
ern Print Eugen, for example; and Henry Ford's Eagle boats,
which came off the assembly line just too late in 1918.
Shore facilities,'* as naval administrators tagged their yards,
bases, and airfields, were just as inadequate. While air-training
centers to mass-produce pilots, such as that at Corpus Christi,
Texas, were mushrooming on American soil, the Navy lacked
drydock footage. It also urgently needed no less than seven hun-
dred new depots to stock more than four million different items
in the corner cupboard of naval supplies.
To meet the demands of war, oil production would have to
soar from a daily 3,842,000 barrels to nearly 5,000,000.
"The war abroad/' asserted Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., chairman of
the board of General Motors, "can only be won on the American
industrial front. The American production plant is obsolete."
Donald M. Nelson, a big, bulky man and former president of
Sears, Roebuck and Company, assumed in January 1942 the all-
important directorship of the War Production Board. The organ-
ization, emerging from earlier agencies in the "def ense" period
before Pearl Harbor, was all-powerful, supreme among the emer-
gency departments of the federal government.
This was the "get-it-done" outfit, charged with seeing that the
armed forces obtained all they needed. It could allocate, obtain
priorities, or divert the entire output of, for example, a mine or a
factory to one shipyard if need arose. H (here was trouble, WPB
had an ally with sharp teeth: the Justice Department.
"Just ahead of us," said Donald Nelson, "are the hardest years
we have been through since Valley Forge .... we're going
to build so many planes and tanks that when this is all over those
of us who had anything to do with it are going to be criticized
because we built too much.' 9
Nelson could appreciate that business was "reluctant to stop
peacetime production and convert their factories to war use.**
50 A Giant's Yawn
But once the gauntlet was thrown down, industry simply had to
pick it up. Fortunately the American production plant was not
quite as obsolete as Sloan had gloomily labeled it*
Modern factories were not oddities to the West Coast, the
Midwest, or the industrial Northeast. These could be converted
to war production or spawn complexes of new plants tailored to
the demands of the military machine.
"A company which had canned citrus fruit," Nelson was to re-
port, "began to make parts for merchant ships. A grower and
shipper of ferns learned to manufacture bomb chutes. Manufac-
turers made guns who had a few months earlier made machinery
for processing cotton. A maker of mechanical pencils turned out
bomb parts and precision instruments. Mosquito netting became
the chief product of a bedspread manufacturer. A soft-drink
company, which knew all about loading bottles with liquid, went
into the business of loading shells with explosives."
He might have added to his random selection the shoe manu-
facturer who turned from lasts to small cannon, the oil-burner
company that fabricated fire-control systems and landing gear,
the textile mill that began "spinning" howitzers, or the burial-
vault builder who converted to hundred-pound bombs. The lat-
ter changeover was grimly appropriate, although the company's
specialty was probably just as essential with an annual civilian
need for a quarter of a million of such vaults*
Shipyards expanded with dizzying speed. Bethlehem Steel, for
example, increased its prewar labor force of seven thousand men
thirtyfold in thirteen yards along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
Production was speeded by subcontracting to plants that might
be all the way across the continent from some particular ship-
way. Arthur Barttett Homer, a World War I submarine officer,
supplied much of the impetus in Bethlehem. The corporation's
vice-president in charge of shipbuilding was an executive of
twenty-five years' experience who believed in delegation of au-
thority.
"Every yard manager," he explained, "was a key man in his
home. Bethlehem policy is to give each man his head and see
A Giant's Yawn 51
how far he can go. I was here to encourage them and help keep
them out of trouble."
Hemy J. Kaiser was another giant when it came to mass pro-
duction of almost anything. Kaiser was so ingrained a landlubber
that he spoke of ships' 'front ends," of their "floors" and "win-
dows." Nonetheless, he created in a very few months fifty-eight
ship ways in seven massive new shipyards. In them he introduced
prefabrication at an unheard-of 60 per cent rate. And when he
ran out of steel, he built his own steel mill in San Bernardino,
California.
Liberty ships, the "ugly duckling'* cargo carriers, and in lesser
quantities, transports, tankers, and "baby" aircraft carriers,
which were his special contribution to the science of submarine
killing, slid off his bustling ways.
Before 1942 was quite out, the sixty-year-old Kaiser l invited
reporters to his Richmond, California, yard to observe the as-
sembly of a freighter: Hull 440, the Robert E. Peary. By the end
of the first day, eighteen thousand feet of steel had been welded,
and the hull was complete. Prefabricate had speeded this proc-
ess, even to fittings and the nameplate on the bow.
A writer, Alyce Mano Kramer, described the scene:
". . . Yard Two became hushed in the silent awe that pre-
cedes the most critical engagement. Her people had publicly
promised America a second home front in the form of the fastest
shipbuilding job in history.
"At the stroke of 12, Way One exploded into life. Crews of
workers, like a champion football team, swarmed to their places
in the line. Within 60 seconds, the keel was swinging into posi-
tion. . . . Hull 440 was going up.
"The speed of erection was unbelievable. At midnight, Satur-
day, an empty way at midnight, Sunday, a full-grown hufl met
1 Kaiser, at sixty, was a relative youngster among the wartime leaders
of government and industry. The majority were men in their late sixties or
early seventies. Sloan, for example, was seventy-five at war's onset; Eugene
Grace, the head of Bethlehem, sixty-five; Secretary of War Stimson,
seventy-five; Cordell Hull, seventy; and Frank Knox, sixty-eight
52 A Giant's Yawn
the eyes of graveyard workers as they came on shift. . . . Fe-
verish, yet sure and methodical, was the march against time. Or-
ders were explicit, work was controlled, muscles were strained,
hearts were bursting with hope and pride. . . ."
Engines went in the second day, and on the third, "whirly"
cranes placed the Peary's superstructure, including masts and
funnel, into place. Wiring and piping were completed on the
fourth day. The last tasks were done at night under the glare of
lights. Such accessories as clocks and railings went just where the
blueprints said they should go, and the rich, acrid odor of paint
attested to Hull 440's final "facials."
Before the end of the ninety-six hours of the four-day goal, the
newest Liberty ship slid down the ways in full view of twenty-
five thousand highly impressed spectators who nonetheless half
expected her to sink beneath the muddy waters. How could some-
thing that had been built so fast float?
The answer lay not only in prefabrication and engineering
prowess but in the speed with which workers learned and per-
formed wartime jobs. Among Kaiser* s four hundred thousand
employees was a girl garment alterer who turned to trimming
freighter bulkheads. An ex-wrestler had become a "flanger," one
who "persuades" stubborn sheets of metal into place through
brute strength.
Cast from the same mold as Henry J. Kaiser and, as a matter
of fact, of the same age was Andrew Jackson Higgins, who
created a snub-nosed landing craft in 1930 long before there
was a need for it. The "Eureka" boat, as he first named it, was
to become an indelible memory for any Allied soldier who ever
hit a beachhead. A former Omaha truck driver whose ambition
and ability led him during World War I to operate one of the
world's largest sailing-ship fleets, Higgins was already making his
landing craft in quantity production for the British at the time of
Pearl Harbor. The gruff-spoken industrialist quickly earned the
sobriquet of 'The-Hefl-It-Can't" Higgins, because of his spirited
retort to Navy purchasing officers who questioned his ability to
produce a sample lighter in three days.
*1 operate in a big way and don't give a damn about money,"
A Gianf s Yawn 53
he observed. His two New Orleans plants one near City Park,
with the assembly line on what had formerly been a residential
street, and the other along the Industrial Canal employed
eighty thousand workers. Higgins, thus, carried New Orleans'
largest payroll.
He had constructed a ten million dollar yard at nearby
Michaud for Liberty ships when allocations of steel were cur-
tailed. Possibly by chance, possibly through "Andy's* acute
political acumen, President Roosevelt happened by the wholly
deserted plant. The waste and idleness shocked the Commander
in Chief who arranged for a large C46 cargo-plane contract to
be awarded Higgins. Always flexible, the boatbuilder converted
the empty sheds to aircraft production.
Roosevelt's satisfaction with Higgins was seconded by his top
field commander, General Eisenhower. Following the North
African landings, an enthusiastic "Ike" cabled the New Orleans
boatbuilder that he "praised God" for the Higgins landing craft.
Shipways to aircraft factories American industry had never
experienced such an overnight metamorphosis. Buildings
changed their character and their purpose often with dizzying
speed. A large skating rink in Wifliamsport, Pennsylvania, for
example, assumed the new look before townspeople even real-
ized what was happening. Patrons of this establishment arrived
one night as usual, skates over shoulders, to find the doors locked
although it was strangely bright inside. A "U.S. Government"
sign proclaimed that the rink, in effect, had rolled off to war.
Later the same week uniforms definitely not belonging to the
United States Armed Forces appeared in this medium-sized Ly-
coming Valley city. The British had "invaded" Williamsport.
The newcomers were representatives of the Admiralty, supervis-
ing orders for special torpedo nets for merchant ships. Soon the
clang of heavy machinery echoed where before there had been the
hum of roller skates and the lilting sound of waltz music. A wire-
rope subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel had effected the transfor-
mation.
The process of wartime creation was not, however, always this
smooth or rapid. On the fringes of Chicago, rains combined with
54 A Gianf s Yawn
a loss of steel priority to delay the building of a plant for B-29
engines week after week; it was impossible to pour the cement,
which had been substituted for the metalwork. Finally spirits
sank so low that a Chrysler Corporation executive, Lester L.
Colbert, journeyed to the dismal site a quagmire. "If I hear
anyone say, this plant won't be built .... this engine won't
run . . . . this ship won't fly .... or this plane won't win
the war,' I'm going to ask for his resignation immediately!" he
promised The massive structure was finally built. It ultimately
made amends for a late, uncertain start by fabricating more than
eighteen thousand engines.
Slightly to the north, a shipyard on Lake Michigan, at Man-
itowoc, Wisconsin, completed the first major naval vessel to be
constructed on the Great Lakes. The 1,500-ton submarine Peto,
launched sideways, arrived at its base in New London, Connecti-
cut, after a roundabout journey which commenced on Lake
Michigan and the Illinois River, continued down the Mississippi
and to the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Atlantic Coast.
Factory life itself, as industry struggled to pick up steam, took
on new aspects. Douglas Aircraft's huge plant at Santa Monica,
California, increased its "population" by increments of tens of
thousands so rapidly that personnel officers were hard pressed to
keep an accurate daily tally. The company's publication, Air-
view, wrote in the early months of the effort:
Population tripled in two years!
Few American towns can claim such a record, yet ft actually has
been achieved by a city within a city.
How big is *our town' ? Large enough that its covered working area
alone approximates 1,500,000 square feet Large enough, too, that
modernizing of its lighting system required 8000 of the new mercury
vapor lamps! When that order was placed the astonished manufacturer
declared it was one of the largest contracts for such lamps ever signed
in any country.
So vast has Santa Monica plant become that it recently was neces-
sary to mark it off into streets and avenues, with appropriate signs
placed at the intersections. Starting in the northwest corner of the
factory, the aisles running north and south are numbered as streets,
and aisles east and west are lettered as avenues.
A Giant's Yawn 55
Production created hundreds of thousands of new jobs one
seemingly constructive aspect of war. It virtually knocked out
unemployment, estimated at nearly six million jobless in 1939,
and the recession which had roosted vulturelike over Roosevelt's
entire second term. Almost anyone who so desired could obtain
some sort of job, if only sweeping factory floors.
Engaged in war production by 1944 were 17,500,000 per-
sons, nearly triple the comparable figure of early 1941. With a
goal of almost 8,000,000 more men and women, skilled labor re-
mained necessarily "a little tight*'
A new draft turned up 13,000,000 additional males between
the ages of forty-five and sixty-four who had not before been re-
quired to register. None was qualified for the front lines, or nec-
essarily for activity more strenuous than that of block warden.
The fire-and-brimstone philosophy of "work or fight," which
echoed and reechoed stentorially throughout World War I, was
discarded as wholly unrealistic. A man dragged off to the camps
was as spiritless and ineffectual as one who was forced to sit by a
lathe with the threat of prison bars or worse as his only motiva-
tion.
Giants of industry, anxious to keep their own plants staffed,
repeatedly assured Selective Service it could not expect to have
steel and soldiers, coal and soldiers, or tanks and soldiers. The
tycoons, however, were wrong. With vastly improved armament,
fewer fighting men were required to accomplish military objec-
tives comparable to yesterday's.
Someone suggested "alien" labor be utilized. The proposal
was echoed by many who urged that restraints on noncitizens be
lifted.
"This is a very serious matter,** declared Roosevelt. "It is one
thing to safeguard American industry, and particularly defense
industry against sabotage; but it is very much another to throw
out of work honest and loyal people who, except for the accident
of birth, are sincerely patriotic. Remember the Nazi technique:
*pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against
prejudice .... divide and conquer!* We cannot afford the eco-
nomic waste of services of all loyal and patriotic citizens and non-
citizens in defending our liberties.**
56 A Giant's Yawn
The laws regarding alien labor were relaxed. Next the 150,-
000 convicts in the nation's prisons and reformatories were
allowed to work from behind their steel bars. They were to con-
tribute nearly $25,000,000 in war products by the end of 1944.
Abandoned, however, was a scheme for creating a "Defense
Prison Labor Corporation. 5 ' It was just as well. The country al-
ready had enough of such emergency "corporations."
There were misdirected attempts to beef up the labor pool.
Western gold miners, for example, let out a howl that carried all
the way across the nation to Washington when their mines were
closed by Executive order as "nonessential."
The ill-advised action at once disrupted the economy of a
dozen states, as their treasuries were deprived of tax revenue.
The federal government lost the support of thirty senators, in-
cluding the powerful Pat McCarran of Nevada.
Almost all of the two thousand miners who were affected laid
away their picks and refused to set foot in any other sort of mine.
They registered for relief as displaced laborers. They were spe-
cialists, a proud lot imbued with the spirit of the sourdough of
the last century. They would no more harvest coal than a racing
jockey would hold the reins of a junk-wagon horse.
The ever-swelling army of labor faced a host of other prob-
lems, the need for housing being perhaps the main one. "Defense
cities" sprouted like dragon's teeth in the smoky shadows of great
factories, foundries, and shipyards to bed those who served a
clattering world of machines.
The implications of these new cities were even more impres-
sive than their immediate mission or scope. They altered the liv-
ing habits of almost everybody, especially young married cou-
ples. In fact, (heir very existence served as a spur to matrimony.
AH at once the specter of occupying the cramped and often
dingy spare bedroom with the in-laws was gone. Newlyweds
could feather a nest all their own and at a low, "stabilized" rent.
Here born of the war was the germ of tomorrow's urban revolu-
tion: the "self-contained" community, complete with shopping
centers, fire departments, police precincts, professional people,
including doctors and lawyers, sometimes hospitals, undertakers,
cemeteries a packaged plan for living, from birth to death.
A Giant's Yawn 57
One of the largest of these "instant" communities was Vanport
City, four miles west of Portland a large, if ephemeral, com-
pound for thirty-five thousand souls from Kaiser's shipyard.
Complete with theaters and churches, it grew from nothing in the
late summer of 1942 beside the Columbia River to become Ore-
gon's second largest city. The uniform one-story light frame
structures, mounted on concrete blocks, rented for $7.00 a week
for a one-room apartment, with a maximum of $11.55 for four
rooms.
Reluctant at first to establish branch stores, Portland's mer-
chants finally saw the potential in Vanport. Their signs dotted
the sidewalks, one by one, like stars breaking through. It did not
especially surprise the statisticians (or obstetricians) when the
dry-goods line of baby clothes showed a record 87 per cent in-
crease in sales in the entire Portland area (compared with a 34
per cent increase in the rest of the nation) .
Vanport proved so popular that it became the first "satellite
city 9 ' to sport its own suburb. In a few months East Vanport,
mushroomed out of the swampy earth of the former Peninsula
Golf Course, was home for five thousand additional shipyard
workers. Like its predecessor, East Vanport was constructed by
the Portland Housing Authority aided by the federal govern-
ment. The builder was the owner of the shipyards that made
Vanport necessary in the first place: Henry J. Kaiser.
One difficulty encountered in the Vanports arose from fires,
started by electric heating and cooking appliances. Accustomed
to using wood for fuel, these householders never turned off the
electric switches, leaving the units to scorch and ultimately ignite
whatever was adjacent The dwellers could not easfly be taught
new tricks but asbestos sheathing could be affixed to "critical"
wall areas. And that is just what was done.
"High Point," with thirteen hundred brand-new homes, was
another home front community in the Seattle area. A newly wed
couple, the Robert Devines, were among the earliest to make the
development* s efficiency kitchens ring with the clatter of tinware
together with "victory" cups and dishes, as tough and heavy as a
bride's first biscuits.
"This is just right for everything," Mrs. Devine, a pretty
58 A Gianf s Yawn
brunette, told a local reporter. "Not too close to the road, or too
far away sun coming in the windows, a view of the mountains.
And it is my first home. Tm crazy about it."
Soon, hard hat on his head, lunch pail in hand, Bob Devine
was swinging down the freshly graveled paths toward the Seattle
Navy Yard. Accompanying him were an overalled army of die-
stamped counterparts, his new neighbors, women as well as men.
World War Fs emancipation from the kitchen was virtually
complete for all women who wished it that way. By 1943 there
would be slightly more than three million engaged in jobs di-
rectly related to the war. Sidney HBHman, Donald Nelson's labor
chief, then called for one million more a figure, however,
which could not be obtained. Although the misnomered "weaker
sex" was more than content to be elevated from a prevailing 44.5
cents an hour to the male minnimm of 70.5 cents an hour, the
supply of those with the required skills had been exhausted.
The aviation industry was the first to lower the so-called sex
barrier to permit women to fill almost any job hitherto guarded
greedily by the male as his own. The delicate, exact, and tedious
work associated so closely with aircraft manufacture could be
accomplished much better, it was discovered, by the female. In
fact, one aircraft manufacturer so much liked the feminine way
of doing things, together with the lower absenteeism rate of
women, that a permanent place was reserved for them in postwar
blueprints.
In Marietta, Georgia, at the age of seventy-five, the widow of
Confederate General James Longstreet (who had commanded
the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia) walked each
morning from her cottage to her job on the seven o'clock shift at
a Bell Aircraft bomber plant. The slim, wiry lady worked for two
years without missing a day. While other mothers and grand-
mothers were standing in increasing numbers at assembly lines
throughout the nation, the long-ago bride of "General Lee's
good right aim" was more than double the average age thirty-
three of the woman worker.
At Dover, Delaware, a medium-sized arsenal relearned the
World War I lesson that women are handy at explosives produo
A Giant's Yawn 59
tion. There fifteen hundred women were employed in every type
of job: from careful analysis in the laboratories to the operation
of heavy, complicated presses. Overalled feminine figures were
increasingly commonplace, even in shipyards and tank- arsenals.
The fight, however, was uphill. Old-guard shop foremen were
ready with an impressive list of specifications as to why women
should not march through factory gates. This included a sup-
posed lack of technical understanding and an inability to do
"heavy work** or even comprehend machines. Further there were
not enough ladies' rest rooms a "reason" which made the more
reasonable man laugh aloud.
As it turned out, troubles experienced with the female corps
arose almost solely from super feminists who would not bid adieu
to high heels, who were reluctant to switch skirts for slacks, or
who persisted in the prevalent peek-a-boo hairdo of actress
Veronica Lake. Although a long swatch of tresses drooping over
one eye and down almost to the shoulder might be fetching un-
der the moonlight or in the boudoir, appalling things happened
when hair became snagged in a whirring chunk of machinery.
Vanity, however, was not surmounted by a snap of the finger
or even by that familiar wartime sine qua nan, the directive.
Posters in the wash rooms showing scalped women defeated their
own purpose. They were so gruesome that the girls tore them
down. The breakthrough did not come until Miss Lake, in a per-
sonal sacrifice to the national effort, was photographed with a
new hairdo a bob. Any loss in the box office or to the Ameri-
can male in his vicarious amours was compensated for in the
assembly-line female's gain in permanency of hair and scalp.
Whatever the experiences of World War ITs women in over-
alls, they were ones that would never be forgotten.
"It was the early part of December of 1942," wrote Mrs. Edith
Long of Richmond, California, to the author, "that I made up
my mind I would like to work in the shipyards. The reason I
chose welding was because my husband was a welder and liked it
very much. I went to the employment office. There were just
lines of people waiting to get signed up in all crafts. They sent me
to school for two weeks. Although I went to school on the swing
60 A Giant's Yawn
shift, you could choose your shift and yard after you finished.
My choice was days and yard $4, where my husband worked.
That way we went to and from work together and were home
nights with our 3-year-old son
'TU never forget the first niglt at school: all them leathers! I
felt like I was a deep-sea diver: jacket and overalls, hood which
certainly covered your face and head. A hairdo meant nothing.
You had to have your hair completely covered if you wanted any
left, long gloves (up to your elbows), still those little sparks had
a way of finding you.
* We learned to weld overhead which was quite hard holding
your aims, stinger and enough, welding lead higher than your
head. Of course the longer you welded the more you could weld.
HI admit it was good exercise. Vertical wasn't so hard. A lot of
time we could sit down for Ms. Flat we felt we were sailing
when we had to weld fiat.
"School only lasted two weeks (shortest school I ever went
to). After school they would take you to the yard you preferred.
Gee, but those ships looked big! My first job was on the outfitting
dock. They were pretty well finished. Just pick-up jobs and so. It
included their names (since they had been Christened and sent
down the ways into their first water. Fortunately we didn't have
erne to sink.)
The first ones I worked on we stood on the upper deck and
looked down. They were huge! They carried jeeps and tanks.
The kitchens were all of stainless, small but beautiful. Just as you
would get attached to them they went out to sea. Then we would
start all over finishing another cue which had been launched.
*We changed again and made escort vessels. They sent most
of the women to the plate stop. That was the beginning of the
ships. You could see no progress as we'd weld two pieces to-
gether. This piece was taken to the ways to be put together form-
ing another ship. I didn't caie for the shop at all. It was off to
itself. As soon as I could I asledfor a transfer. I was then put on
lie ways. It was here you could see the ship forming, We did all
but the finishing touches Christened with a bottle of cham-
pagne, sent down the ways into the water. It gave you quite a
A Giant's Yawn 61
thrill to think you were helping win the war .... such a small
part but I was helping.
"I worked as a welder for 32 months, was one of the last
women to be laid off, which was the latter part of July, 1945. It
was nice to be home again, all day with our son.
"We made lots of friends, some of whom we still see ...
every once in a while. We didn't have much social life. Every-
thing was in such a whirl and we had to save our gas coupons for
emergency. Those were days in many ways we'd like to forget,
but we'll always remember. . . ."
Although the American industrial scene had undergone many
changes by the end of 1942, there was still much room for im-
provement. This was recognized by both business and govern-
ment Secretary Knox in a December speech to the National
Association of Manufacturers stated:
"There have been many mistakes. There has been timidity,
hesitancy, inefficiency, confusion, waste and all the other things
the critics say, but contrasted to whaf s been accomplished I
marvel there have not been more."
The year's goals had not been met: forty thousand planes
where sixty-thousand had been sought; thirty-two thousand
tanks, or two thirds of the quota; seventeen thousand antiaircraft
guns against twenty thousand needed. But more than eight mil-
lion tons of merchant shipping went down the ways, approximat-
ing the objective.
Spending had not been held back. In the first fiscal year of
hostilities, twenty-six billion dollars in direct war costs surged out
of the Treasury's gates. The biH was about three hundred million
dollars more than the entire cost to America of World War I.
Even the price tag of frilling had been affected by inflation.
The expense was high, the effort great, even if, as Knox
lamented, there had been misfires. But already the results were
impressive, the spectacle itself often exhilarating. Sidney Shallett,
of The New York Times, wrote:
"It is a thrilling thing to see American industry in action. la a
way, if s a shame that military reasons make it impossible for
everyone in the land to have a look inside a few factories, for all
62 A Giant's Yawn
the words and pictures and movies in the world can't quite cap-
ture and convey the feeling that huge war plant in action can
give you.
"The clackety-clack of acres of machines, the rat-a-tat-tat of
endless rivets being driven home, the fearsomeness of giant
cranes swooping overhead carrying planes, tanks and mammoth
cauldrons of molten steel as if they were so many carpet tacks
under a magnet; then the sight of the sleek, strong planes, the
elephantine tank with their deadly cannon trunks, the millions of
machinegun bullets jumping from the machines like a plague of
locusts . . . * well, they make you feel better!**
CHAPTER 5
". . . this strange innovation"
RATIONING was .incompatible with the easy American way of
life. So were other controls and, of course, the censorship regula-
tions that in normal times are so at variance with the principles
of a democracy.
Such intrusions, while tolerated for the most part, nonetheless
evoked sputterings of complaint from the home front during the
whole length of the war. This was war, however, and a war yet
more total in other countries. The long, dispassionate arm of
Government dared reach into the most private and long-sacred
purlieus of society.
Americans often smarted under many of the restrictions at
home and the excesses of a burgeoning bureaucracy. Even so,
they had to live with them. "There's a war on," was the wearily
repeated phrase intended to explain almost everything or any-
thing.
Citizens had to accustom themselves to an entirely different
feel and look to life as they went about their wartime ways: a
bustle, excitement, and prevailing new sense of purpose; the sight
of military uniforms, almost everywhere, worn by male and fe-
male; the good-bye parties as younger men shut their desks and
hung up their overalls for what apparently was to be a long time,
and possibly forever.
For the great majority of Americans, those left behind when
the transports sailed and the planes roared off towards faraway
63
64 ". . . this strange innovation"
and often bafflingly unfamiliar destinations, the war settled down
to a variegated pattern of light and shade, plenty and scarcity.
There were the letters home, in an ever-swelling torrent:
"Lordy," wrote Captain George Stallings from Guadalcanal to
a friend back in Augusta, Georgia, "how I wish this were all
over .... Broad Street will be the most beautiful place in the
world. I don't want to come until this job is finished but I hope
we can soon finish it. You can bet we will try hard."
His sentiments, common among fighting men in distant
reaches, inspired such wistful songs as "You'd Be So Nice to
Come Home To," "I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,"
"Now Is the Hour," "I'll Never Smile Again," "I Threw a Kiss in
the Ocean," "I Walk Alone," "Spring Will Be a Little Late This
Year," and "I Dream of You."
Before the first winter of the war had warmed into spring,
tragedy had affected a sobering number of American homes,
bringing the war day by day closer to what had once been firm
and familiar. Gold stars spoke their sorrowful message in more
and more windows. Mrs. Walter Ward of Sioux Falls, South
Dakota, and her sister Mrs. Erl Troynek were but two who
would understand the price of war. Thomas F. Ward, the for-
mer's tall, handsome son and one of the first South Dakota
volunteers, was about to receive his wings at the Corpus Christi
Naval Air Station.
The twenty-one-year-old cadet, whose father had been killed
five years earlier in a hunting accident, seemed to excel in every-
thing: studies, athletics, cards, certainly girls, and now, flying.
"Sam Slick," his friends called him, a natural pilot.
All went well until his last flight prior to graduation. High
above the brackish shores and eel grass of Madre Island, just off
the Texas coast, Tom Ward leveled his training plane off. He was
to dive-bomb, with a flour sack as target on this uninviting tidal
blob of sand and coarse vegetation*
He went down, down . . . and never pulled out. His single-
engined aircraft made a bull's-eye right on the target, burying it-
self deep in the soft sandy sofl before blowing into bits, like a
bomb. Something, perhaps, had gone wrong with the controls.
". . . fills strange innovation** 65
Or maybe he had been affected by the hypnotic fascination of the
target rushing up toward him?
Tom's mother and his aunt, who had been planning to go to
his graduation, attended instead the funeral of the first Sioux
Falls boy to perish in the war. Tom was buried on a bitter after-
noon in Woodlawn Cemetery. Laborers had worked all the day
before to shovel away the foot-deep snow and blast into the
frozen earth with pneumatic drills. Spanish-American War vet-
erans formed an honor guard, and old high school and college
friends were pallbearers or solemn-faced attendants.
"I will never forget," recalls Mrs. Troynek, now a resident of
Alexandria, Virginia, "the taps across that cold, snowy ceme-
tery. It was all over. Everything seemed all over."
Even Americans not intimately hurt by the war had cause to
experience some of Mrs. Troynek's emptiness and sense of
finality on May sixth when General Douglas MacArthur issued
from Australia a terse communiqu6: "General Wainwright has
surrendered Corregidor and the other fortified islands in Manila
Harbor."
Amen had been scrawled to what Charles Hind of The New
York Times termed, "The most tragic chapter in the war since
Pearl Harbor."
Somehow, Americans never worried about actual defeat. As
Thomas E. Dewey has observed to the author, *1 do not recall
that I ever considered the dreadful possibility that we might lose
the war though, of course, we had some pretty bad periods."
There 'were pretty bad periods, sufficient to shake public con-
fidence in the prosecution of the struggle. One of the worst after
the surrender at Manila came in the first week of August 1942
when the Navy lost three cruisers and the Australians one at the
debacle of Savo Island. Certainly it made victory appear even
further distant.
One man, the squat, mercurial-tempered Leon Henderson,
head of the Office of Price Administration, appeared to harbor
every gloomy premonition that the war would drag on, perhaps
past living memory if not into the gossamer limbo of a future
generation, or even civilization. Testimony to his Jeremiah out-
6 *. . . this strange innovation''
look was War Rationing Book No. 1, which rolled off the presses
in March 1942 after a slambang production job 190,000,000
copies, each containing twenty-eight consecutively numbered
stamps. Guarded in railway postal cars like gold, these same
books, rushed out initially to apportion sugar, were soon ex-
tended to include shoes and coffee. Unhappily word leaked that
America's favorite drink was going under control. Within hours
grocery shelves were picked clean of cans and packages of the
aromatic South American coffee bean, causing a delay of weeks
before allocation could commence in more orderly fashion.
The storm of protest which raged over Henderson's head had
barely cleared when gasoline rationing was introduced. Three
gallons a week were decreed for the nation's drivers. Secretary of
the Interior Harold Ickes, whose temper exploded about as
quickly as the fumes of the fuel in question, at once charged that
the cuts were too drastic. Ickes, who doubled as Petroleum Co-
ordinator, was seconded by an oil-industry spokesman who
branded the rationing as, "half-baked, ill-advised, hit or miss!"
Standing his ground, Henderson pointed out that tank-car
shipments to the East, although stepped up from three thousand
to twenty-seven thousand weekly, were still far short of compen-
sating for the devastation caused by tanker torpedoings. Con-
trols, he declared, should be yet tighter and extend to still more
commodities. Underlying much of his philosophy and his efforts
was a desire, repeatedly avowed in public by Henderson, to level
out society more equally. He alluded to the change in rich homes
and habits, especially the anticipated extinction of the multi-
servant household.
The well-scarred New Deal hand predicted to a Senate appro-
priations subcommittee that sixty-two billion dollars could be
saved during the next months by applying brakes and inflexible
regulations to prevent the runaway inflation of World War I,
when business charged much what it pleased.
But Americans were attached to their cars. Residents of the
West Coast and of the Southwest, who had oil rigs in their back
yards, were soon among the most earnest of "Czar* Henderson's
tormentors. With no apparent transportation problems and work-
" * . this strange innovation" 67
ers needing jobs at the wells, these citizens questioned the need
for gasoline rationing.
Mrs. Roosevelt was in sympathy. "To tell the people in the
West/' she observed, "not to use their cars means that these peo-
ple may never see another soul for weeks and weeks nor have a
way of getting a sick person to a doctor/*
Motorists throughout the nation were just beginning to adjust
to basic "A/* "B" and "C" coupons when it was discovered that
hundreds of Congressmen had requested and received coveted
no limit "X" cards, which had been intended for such business
and professional people as doctors, policemen, firemen, tele-
phone linesmen.
"With singular lack of a good sense of timing," observed Don-
ald Nelson's press chief, a promising writer named Bruce Catton,
"the Congress had chosen the month immediately after Pearl
Harbor to pass a law providing pensions for retiring Congress-
men. This had aroused a chorus of criticism, culminating in the
derisive ^Bundles for Congress* campaign .... the business of
the *X cards reopened the old wound. . . ."
Henderson attempted to set an example and perhaps even
get Americans to laugh the whole matter off by appearing in
Washington's streets on a <c Victory Bicycle." It was an ordinary
bicycle with a large wire market basket mounted atop the front
mudguard. However, this show of bravado was spiked when
other "czars" shortly decided there was not enough civilian metal
or rubber available for even "Victory Bicycles/* All new bicycles
were "frozen." In theory, so were the prices on used two-wheel-
ers. Only those in the armed forces or in war industry were eligi-
ble to buy the black-painted items fresh off the assembly lines.
Gasoline rationing brought an end to the glassy clatter of the
milkman's truck every morning. Deliveries were reduced to
every other day. Groceries and department stores asked custom-
ers to cany bundles and packages, even those which before
December seventh would have been considered far too heavy or
cumbersome to be trundled by other than gymnasts.
Some businesses attempting to be superconscientious nonethe-
less ran afoul of unimaginative bureaucratic minds. The Ander-
68 ". . . this strange innovation*
son Dairy of Las Vegas, Nevada, for example, rounded up sev-
eral old milk wagons and horses to draw them. Proudly the firm
advertised resumption of its seven-day-a-week home delivery of
milk and dairy products. Neither gasoline nor rubber served as
part of these kon-rimmed, hay-powered vehicles.
Within twenty-four hours, the wrath of the local shop of ODT
(Office of Defense Transportation) was manifest. Arbitrarily,
the dairy was ordered back to no more than an every-other-day
delivery, whether by truck or horse cart.
Commenting on this example of bureaucracy an Anderson
Dairy spokesman observed, <e We thought that we were doing
something to help the war effort by saving gasoline used by sev-
eral hundred customers calling at our plant every day for dairy
products." He indicated that someone at ODT seemed unable to
tell the difference between a self-propelled truck and a horse-
drawn wagon. His customers agreed.
The dairy's futile stab at a make-do conservation helped point
up another shortage: rubber. Gone was the rubber reservoir of
the East The annual production of twelve thousand tons of syn-
thetic rubber would have to soar to nearly five hundred thousand
tons to meet war's gluttony, and later double this amount.
William Jeffers, sixty-nine, director of the American Rubber
Company and former president of the Union Pacific Railroad,
was convinced that he could give the nation rubber if he were
just let alone.
"Too many expediters!" roared the hot-tempered former pres-
ident of the Union Pacific Railroad.". . . Army and Navy men,
commissioned officers. If we can keep the Aimy and Navy and
these loafers out of these plants we will get this production
.... we will keep the country in rubber!"
The shortage of rubber and gasoline made sense, however, to
at least one specialist, Herman Sonderling, registrar of the first
institute of podiatry, at Long Island University.
The automobile has degenerated our feet by nonusage," he
asserted, claiming that nearly 30 per cent of 4-F classifications
were caused by foot imperfections mostly flat! With Americans
". . . this strange innovation" 69
now compelled to walk more, Sonderling felt there would be an
improvement in the nation's feet and a new zip to its stride.
Rationing radiated, and shortages spread Radios for the
civilian market sputtered out of production. Spare parts and
tubes were all but unobtainable. Soon families had to rely on the
good nature of neighbors with functioning sets. There was not,
however, any shortage or lack of volume in soap operas. They
pulsed their lugubrious, dreary tales of misery and disillusion
with ever-increasing tempo. By the flick of a tuning knob, the
housewife could be totally enveloped in a man-wrought shroud
of gloom for nearly three hours in the morning and, after a re-
spite for lunch and a drying of tears, for the same period in the
afternoon. Many could hardly wait for their evening resumption
of airborne masochism.
The names of these programs were so familiar that they be-
came real and palpable within the sobbing intimacy of a kitchen
or the curtained, desolate corner of a living room: "Stella Dal-
las,*' "David Harum," "Portia Faces Life," "Lorenzo Jones,"
"Pepper Young's Family," "Maiy Marlin," "Ma Perkins," "Big
Sister," "Second Husband," "Bachelor's Children," "Joyce Jor-
dan," "When a Girl Marries," "Backstage Wife," and so on into
monotony.
Phonographs disappeared from store windows; typewriters
were 'frozen" as solid as last year's herring catch. They could be
purchased only on a priority which, for the average civilian, was
as easy to obtain as aP-40 fighting plane.
An undeniable shortage of a commodity generally taken for
granted paper and paper products stemmed in part from the
robbing of the lumber camps' manpower. The best loggers and
millhands possessed the kind of health and muscles that made
them desirable to any induction board* They could not be re-
placed by the average 4-F or altogether satisfactorily by POWs,
although the Geneva Convention sanctioned this type of labor
for prisoners if their efforts were modestly reimbursed. As a re-
sult there was a shortage of all sorts of cardboard and paper
throughout the war. Stores urged customers to "bring your own
70 ". . . this strange innovation*
paper bag** a humble item which nonetheless accounted for
some two and a half million tons of paper a year in peacetime.
"From Selective Service registration through to discharge,"
the War Production Board wrote in an unpublished, rather wist-
ful eulogy of paper, "Armed Services personnel moved on
printed orders. Its equipment was made and transported by
means of printed forms and records. Much of its training was
through the medium of manuals of instruction. Its exploits were
recorded in newspapers, magazines, and books.
"Consumer rationing and price control, as well as campaigns
for war bonds, blood donation, waste paper, scrap iron and steel,
pulpwood, waste fats, victory gardens, labor recruitment and
WAC, WAVE and nurse enlistments owed much of their success
to the printed word.
"Although newspapers, magazines and books performed the
essential function of explaining, persuading, inspiring and unify-
ing the people, other kinds of printing were also highly impor-
tant It would have been impossible to cany on war production
or any industry in the absence of functional forms. . . ."
The report in effect gave a nice nonobjective pat on the back
to that essential of big, busy government: paperwork. Its serv-
ants never wanted for paper, even though the "help win the war"
virtues of narrow margins, single spacing, and typing on reverse
sides were extolled and sometimes ordered until many letters,
directives, or especially, press releases became nearly illegible ex-
cept to trained cryptanalysts.
Newspapers and national magazines generally received close
to normal allocations of cheaper-grade paper on the theory that
they served a morale function. Hardly in such an inspirational
category, however, were the 5,500 pints of red ink or the 3,000
spools of red tape (totaling 216,000 yards) which bureaucrats
purchased in the single year, 1943.
Another fiber product, burlap, almost went off the market.
This material had been imported from India, cut off from easy
sea communication in the first years of the war* The American
equivalent was costly, in small production. Farmers found them-
selves reusing burlap grain sacks until even patching something
". . . this strange innovation" 71
armwomen had never done before failed to keep the precious
contents from trickling through.
Rationing seemed to snag some of the most unlikely products.
Millions of American fathers and mothers thought, for example,
the scarcity of diapers and diaper laundries was, at the very least,
capricious. This author himself, between voyages, all but fell to
his knees pleading for service for a newborn. It wasn't that any
of the civilian-goods arbiters in Washington or even overzealous
local boards were really against babies. There were just too
many "critical" items used in the production of diapers, from
manufacture to delivery. Cotton was on priority as an armed-
forces clothing essential, so was spring steel for the pins, and all
of the ingredients involved in transportation, from rubber tires
to gasoline, not forgetting the soap and heat required for the wash
water. But, even though the laundry tub and mother's (or grand-
mother's) scrubbing board plus diapers of less than downy texture
were compelled to limp along for the duration, old-fashioned
methods and materials did not discourage a bumper crop of more
than ten million babies born during the four years of war.
In the nursery, the little stuffed dog and the wind-up train had
to rattle along until peacetime as best they could. With one
devastating slash of his red pencil, Henderson swept toys off the
shelf all but a trifling 7 per cent of normal production. No one
ever fathomed just how he had arrived at that particular per-
centage.
However, the younger generation had plenty of diversions
even without toys. School children picked cellars, attics, public
parks, and back alleys clean of old paper, rags, and assorted
junk. In a five-month period, for example, Chicago youngsters
collected thirty-six million pounds of old paper some sixty-five
pounds for each boy and girl.
In the first year of the war, a million and a half 4-H boys and
girls harvested 3,000,000 bushels of vegetables from victory gar-
dens and preserved 14,000,000 jars of food. On larger farms and
ranges, 4-H children in 1942 raised 6,500,000 chickens, 300,-
000 hogs, and 65,000 dairy cattle* Just to be absolutely sure that
none would accuse them of loafing, these industrious youngsters
72 a . . . this strange innovation"
collected 23,000,000 pounds of salvage rubber, 73,000 tons of
scrap metal, and hawked $6,000,000 in war bonds.
For the urban habitu6, hip boots were as minor a considera-
tion as bear-skin parkas. When its gluttonous rubber content
made this form of heavy footgear virtually extinct, however,
fishermen were not the only ones who suffered. E. P. Smith, a
ration-board member in Bourbon, Indiana, received this ap-
peal for hipboot priority: *T pasture my cows, they go 'cross the
river. The nearest bridge is a mile. If s too damned cold to
wade/' The daiiy farmer obtained his priority and, probably,
his boots as well.
As one assault upon the wool shortage, tailors eliminated vests
from men's suits making them overnight as pass6 as the neck
ruffle or the handkercMef-in-sleeve. Swinging into the spirit,
some haberdashers offered "victory pants," without cuffs. No
one, however, had really estimated just how much cloth was
actually used.
Distilleries, switching almost 100 per cent to the manufacture
of chemicals for explosives, explained that their stocks should
assure almost enough liquor for four years. Beer, while it may
have tasted watery, was "stabilized," commencing at twenty
cents a bottle, depending on the grade.
Even so, it wasn't like old times. The hard drinker, who had to
develop a taste for wine, since he could no longer buy whiskey
alone, and the chain smoker, who had to line up for his pack or
two of cigarettes, could both agree with Sherman that indeed war
washelL
A fittte-heard-of item glass eyes never found its way to the
shady shelves of the clandestine market but remained acutely
scarce. Faced with an annual prewar need of 62,500 eyes, Amer-
ican industry could meet only one third of the demand. The re-
maining two thirds had been imported from Germany.
Plastics and glass, however, came to stay in home and hospi-
tal Brass, for example, used in inhalers and atomizers clattered
off to the war and never marched home again. Nickel and
chrome plating left dentures forever, unable to compete with the
lighter-weight plastics.
" , , this strange innovation" 73
Batteries became rarer than McKinley campaign buttons, be-
cause of the scarcity of lead, copper, zinc, and other ingredients.
An effectively loaded flashlight was so precious an item that the
OCD urged citizens at night to "carry something white." White
garments from head to foot, the OCD added, would be even
more desirable if perhaps somewhat wraithlike.
Hearing aids were inoperable without tiny batteries. More
than three million Americans had to employ every known wile to
keep existing amplifiers powered Those, young and old, who
were not sufficiently f oresighted to have purchased such a device
before Pearl Harbor had to keep leaning closer, with an "Eh,
what?" for the duration.
Senior citizens among their number, nevertheless, enjoyed
favoritism from most war rationing boards. That in Manhattan
for example, which handled as many as fifteen thousand requests
a day, increased allowances for canned fruit juices and other
prepared or concentrated foods whenever the applicant could
show he or she was too weak to squeeze oranges or chop meat
On the other hand, no sympathy was wasted on the middle-
aged spinster who sought a food coupon for her eleven-year-old
cat. "Share yours," she was curtly informed.
This board, typical of those operating in large cities, held day-
long sessions in the severely appointed offices of the General
Motors Building. A teacher, a doctor, and a lawyer presided
over this combination of confessional, clinic, and civil court. De-
cisions often had to be Solomonesque. Authorize a gallon of gas-
oline a month, for example, to a boy with a model plane? Why,
certainly. Interest in aviation was to be encouraged.
Those rejected in their demands sometimes turned on the
board with the ftuy of cornered tigers. "Why," shrieked one re-
buffed woman, "you're not one of those dollar-a-year men!
You're not worth a fifty-cent-a-year man!"
The OPA had nearly sixty thousand paid employees, aided by
three hundred thousand volunteers. With all this watch-dog
force, however, the black market and the cheating were never
fully stamped out. Human nature's penchant for breaking laws
may have been to blame. A choice cut of sirloin from under the
74 **. . * ttds strange innovation"
counter, a "bootleg" pair of nylon stockings, or a full tank of gas-
oline for a three-gallon stamp all sprouted from the same
selfish motives to flaunt governmental edicts.
Racketeers looked upon ration coupons as they formerly had
bootleg liquor. Two tough professional criminals one of them a
murderer were captured on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border
in February 1944 after a blazing gun battle with state troopers.
In the car of Charles Falker and Merle Mercer were almost suffi-
cient coupons, stolen from Altoona rationing boards, to establish
their own rival allocation system. Mercer was returned to the
Reno, Nevada, jail from which he had sawed his way to freedom;
Falker's parole from the Folsom State Prison, California, after a
long sentence for murder, was canceled. Neither would have any
more use for ration stamps.
Others pursued this illegal traffic less violently. In Miami an
enterprising man identified by police as Eugene Brading, aged
twenty-seven, was arrested and accused of masterminding a
black-market ring of gasoline coupons totaling more than two
million gallons.
A similar illicit trade in electric motor bearings and bushings
thrived so robustly that it became virtually an industry within an
industry. The military could count more than three hundred
different uses for electric motors, from turning radar screens and
boosting the controls of large bombers to driving submarines and
moving gun mounts and other parts of their complicated mecha-
nisms. Without their scarce bearings and bushings, the motors
became utterly worthless. They would not even command much
of aprice on the scrap market
As the first year of the war ended, resentment against the OPA
neared a crescendo. Neither civilian nor military officialdom
were in any way satisfied that rationing and controls were either
equitable or efficiently administered.
Congress took notice and formed its own forum for examining
complaints: the Senate Committee on Reduction of Non-
Essential Federal Expenditures, Confounded by the latest, long-
est, and most complex of all OPA's blizzard of forms, representa-
tives of industry descended en masse to testify.
**. . . this strange innovation" 75
"Until this big questionnaire came along, 5 * declared Ernest
Brier of Parke Davis and Company, Detroit, "we were just about
keeping our heads above the water in cooperating in every way,
but we can go no further.**
"We think this subject has gone far beyond anything that is
essential," seconded Eric Johnston, president of the United
States Chamber of Commerce.
Others, less constrained, attacked the agency's "gestapo meth-
ods*' and its "senseless rules, regulations and policies." Small
shop owners claimed that the burden of form-filling coupled with
restrictions on a "fair** markup was putting them out of business.
Worthington Pump and Machinery Company spokesmen
noted they were submitting 545 federal reports annually, which
worked out to one report for every four employees in the firm.
Eastman Kodak Company, charging that 75 per cent of war-
agency reports were "either unnecessary or of doubtful value,"
claimed that the time spent on them was sufficient "to build a
Flying Fortress."
Henderson resigned. Exhausted and suffering from eye trou-
ble, he went West for a vacation. As a swan song, he had ordered
all "pleasure driving** banned in the East. Local police were
asked to enforce an edict which proved to be wholly unenforcea-
ble. Who could disprove that a lady was en route to market, to
the doctor's, to sit with an elderly relative, or that a gentleman
was bound on a matter of urgent business?
Schools throughout the country, however, were happy to co-
operate. Most of them cut off bus service to children who lived
within two miles of their classes. Parents generally hailed the
healthful aspects of the emergency edict.
The rich, the middle-income group, and the poor all felt ra-
tioning, as Leon Henderson had expected. The affluent Breckin-
ridge Long, for example, wrote in his diary: "At Montpelier [his
Maryland horse-breeding farm] we have no fuel oil for the
house only just enough to keep the service wing partly heated.
All driving for pleasure is eliminated. So with a cold house and
no use of the car we are comfortable in the hotel apartment, and
walking to and from places necessary to reach. The farmer has
76 ". . . this strange innovation"
oil enough to keep his house at 50 degrees, but is helped by the
kitchen stove. And, so, the whole east is rationed."
There were shortages and concerns over shortages that winter
more serious than a cold country estate or the drying up of the
old school bus. It was an unusually severe January and Feb-
ruary, especially cruel in New England. Bangor, Maine, shivered
under a city-wide lack of rubber boots for children or adults- To
make matters worse, the Northeast states could not obtain even
enough application blanks to apply for more coupons for any
item.
The poultry supply (after the appetite of the armed forces was
filled) in this big chicken- and turkey-producing area dwindled.
There were few eggs and fewer chickens for the Sunday pot. In-
deed, the facts supported the quip that New Englanders were for-
getting what white or dark meat looked like to say nothing of
the sound of a clucking hen.
Yet more distressing was the discovery that Boston's kerosene
storage tanks were nearly dry. So critical was the prospect that
evacuation was prepared for thousands of thoroughly chilled
families in tenement districts, including those in East Boston,
Somervffle, Chelsea, and Quincy.
J. W. Farley, executive director of the Massachusetts Commit-
tee of Public Safety, warned "the margin is so slight that it will
probably break any minute," but attempted to reassure, "we're
not trying to be alarming.' 9
It required an almost tearful appeal from the City Council
direct to President Roosevelt himself before a tanker was finally
started northward.
"On the [February] day appointed for the arrival of the
tanker," the OPA was to write in an unpublished report, "re-
gional rationing officials waited in the tower of the Customs
House, scanning the outer harbor for the first sign of the by now
urgently needed ship. Night fell with no sign or word from the
tanker. For security reasons, it was impossible to attempt to es-
tablish radio communication with the ship. The only chance was
to wait and hope she had not been sunk by one of the enemy sub-
marines then lurking off the coast.
". . . this strange innovation* 77
"State and public safety (Erectors began to put into operation
previously drawn disaster relief plans. Armories were alerted to
receive the hundreds of families who would soon have no heat
for their apartments. City trucks and every other available means
of transportation were prepared to assist all people requesting
aid in getting to the public buildings in which they would be
housed until fuel oil was available. These preparations included
soup kitchens, food, health protection measures, all the machin-
ery of disaster relief,
"On the following day the tanker arrived. . . ."
The Hub City had been frightened.
Rationing at its best, was never wholly satisfactory. Adminis-
tering it or finding those who would do so was an almost unre-
lieved nightmare. Mrs. Kathleen Plympton, a volunteer super-
visor of Portland, Oregon, Board Number One did not
exaggerate unduly when she told of her own problems. She
worked out a dialogue which she repeated at ladies' meetings
throughout the Northwest:
"Hello, Operator, please get me Atwater 4141 .... yes,
I've tried for fifteen minutes to dial the number. Thank
you ....
"Oh, hello, Mrs. Smith, this is the volunteer supervisor of Ra-
tioning Board Number One. We are desperately in need of vol-
unteers; there are vacancies in almost all of our departments. We
were told by Civilian Defense that you had registered to help. We
would be so happy if you could give us some time.
"What? You really will? Two days a week .... how won-
derful of you! Could you come on Monday?
"Oh, that's wash day. Well, how about Tuesday?
"You iron Tuesday? Then, perhaps Wednesday? You say that
is your club day. Yes, of course I quite understand, Mrs. Smith.
"Could you work it, Thursday? . . . No, you always spend
Thursday with your mother .... well, what about Friday or
Saturday? Yes, I know that is the end of the week family,
home, and so forth.
". . . which day was it, Mrs. Smith, you felt you would like
to volunteer? Maybe Thursday, did you say? Yes, I am sure
78 ". . tills strange innovation"
mother would be willing to give up the day with you to aid in the
volunteer war effort .... oh, but not this week, you say? You
have a hair appointment.
"Shall I put you down for the week after? No, you just re-
membered the dressmaker was coming .... too bad. What
was that? You are taking a trip? The first of next month ....
you will be gone six weeks? Oh, I see, Mrs. Smith. Yes, of course
I quite understand. Yes, I know you are anxious to help. Thank
you so much for the thought. Yes, 111 call you again, sometime
later on. . . ."
Thirty calls a day, averaging ten minutes to a call, adding up
to five hours on the telephone. Mrs. Plympton mused in despair
that from all this effort no more than twelve volunteers would
agree to help. And of this corporal's guard, about five would
finally show up.
"How," she pondered, "to distribute five workers, no matter
how sincere and conscientious through nine departments: pas-
senger gas, track and nonhighway gas, tires, fuel oil and stoves,
shoes, boots, and bicycles, consumer foods and medical diets, in-
stitutional foods, furlough and special rations, and last, but not
least, price control, a whole institution in itself?
'Tor each of these departments it meant a counter to be
waited on, applications to be read and considered; rations to be
issued, coupons to be issued, coupons to be counted and voided;
files to be indexed and alphabetized, mail to be tended to and
surveys to be made.
"Meanwhile the public was standing in line, long lines; the im-
patient ones, the patient, the belligerent and the timid, the rich
and the needy, the honest and the chiselers. Some hoping to gain,
others asking only a legitimate share. All wore a little bewildered
rationing was so new to free America. No one as yet quite
sure whether to curse or bless this strange innovation. So much
depended on the service these long lines in waiting would find
meted to them behind the counter .... day after day the
gray hairs increased in her coiffure as volunteers threw down
their work and went home because some salaried clerk went out
for a soft drink during hours.* 9
". . . this strange innovation* 79
Volunteer workers lived a lifetime in a few months, according
to Mrs. Plympton.
"A customer," she added, "gazed over the counter once at a
group of little Girl Scouts busily stamping envelopes.
" 'My goodness, do you take them as young as that? 9
" *Oh yes,* replied the volunteer supervisor, running her fin-
gers through her thin white hair. "We all started like that a few
months ago. OPA develops one so quickly.* "
CHAPTER 6
The Civilian Army
THE UNITED STATES, not a wholly unwarlike nation, has nonethe-
less never taken to a large standing army. Historically it has de-
pended on its civilians in times of stress to change virtually over-
night to fighting men.
Such a transformation, considering the specialized skills of
modern warfare, has assumed more and more the aura of black
magic. Perhaps, indeed, some form of magic does play a role, for
surely few great nations have so consistently plunged into wars
with such abominable preparation.
World War n snatched from their homes the eligible males out
of the fifty million Americans, aged eighteen to sixty-four, who
registered for Selective Service. Indeed, the nation had never be-
fore mustered so huge a conscript anny in such an orderly fash-
ion. Where, for example, there had been 250,000 desertions
from the World War I draft (men who signed up, then vanished
seemingly forever into thin air), there were but 5,000 in World
WarH.
Selective Service in peacetime was born during the summer of
1940, Mowing severe labor pains. The Administration and War
Department which sponsored the legislation were showered with
abuse from those in opposition. The public was subjected to an
especially virulent spate of Communist propaganda, including
anticaphalist harangues and leaflets reproducing the more grue-
The Civilian Army 81
some photographs to have emerged from World War Fs charnel
house.
"Welcome home!" was the bitter caption under a picture of a
basket case (a multiple amputee) being removed from a hospital
ship.
"Suppose," commenced one sly leaflet, "Bethlehem Steel's
armor-piercing projectiles should meet on the same test range
against the company's projectile-proof armor plate?"
"We refuse to go, over, over there!" asserted another throw-
away. Rallies and demonstrations echoed raucously through the
marbled corridors of Capitol Hill.
Not even the Navy, the Marines or the Air Corps (still a part
of the Army) wanted a draft. These services could obtain their
men "from enlistments," barked proud old officers, from reason-
ing gleaned out of the last war. But they would soon learn about
global war.
Selective Service became the law after a hot debate ended in a
223-114 vote in the House, 47-25 in the Senate, in September
1940. Then commenced the formidable task of preparing to reg-
ister millions of Americans between the ages of twenty-one and
thirty-five. Nearly a million volunteer workers had to equip 125,-
000 registration places and sound the reveille for action. Their
toil lacked even the stimulus of a war in progress.
The draft's big, amiable director, Lieutenant General Lewis B.
Hershey, thought the blueprint "ideal," especially from the
standpoint of objectivity. The operation and policy were con-
trolled by Washington while each registrant was impartially con-
sidered "by other citizens who lived in the same community."
Hershey considered the first few months the "crucial" period
when the whole structure could have crumbled were it not for
the patience and the dedication of the local boards.
Abuses had to be recognized, then speedily corrected before
they mushroomed out of control. For example, there was some-
times a temptation to use the draft as a means of solving commu-
nity or local problems: getting rid of the town drunk or putting
into uniform a husband who was in arrears on alimony.
Somehow 16,500,000 Americans were registered on the first
82 The Civilian Army
call. Ultimately the wheels were spinning in such high gear that
the actual induction of 500,000 men was accomplished in the
same month.
The boards were as varied in their composition and in (he pe-
culiar problems they had to solve as their rationing and price-
control counterparts* The system encompassed the entire spec-
trum of American life, from fashionable neighborhoods in big
cities whose "customers" arrived in chauffeured limousines to
slum areas and their often disreputable flotsam.
There was yet another distinctive type among the 6,400 local
boards throughout the nation: the mountaineer. One (hat
evoked pungent memories of World War I was Board No. 1,
Fentress County, Tennessee, presided over by a tall, heavy
Medal of Honor holder, Sergeant Alvin York. The gangling
youth of 1917 had objected to induction because of religious
convictions "War's agin the Book!" Not too surprisingly, he
was sympathetic toward (hose of similar beliefs. When a draftee
filed an appeal, the fifty-four-year-old York and his mountaineer
board members journeyed to the man's home, or shack, met on
the front porch, and listened to die case.
In 1942 York's feat of killing single-handed 25 of (he enemy
and capturing 132 others tardily won further recognition. The
Army commissioned the Tennessean a major and ordered hitn to
semiactiveduty.
The legendary straight-shooters and hard fighters from the hill
country nevertheless were prone to such disqualifications as bad
teeth and flat feet Illiteracy, as in (he preceding conflict, was
tolerated. If the draftee did not learn to scribble simple words in
training camp and read a few children's stories in big, bold
letters the problem was passed on to his regiment or, if he was
shunted to an always-protesting Navy, (he captain of his ship.
G. I. Joe, although somewhat taller than his doughboy father,
was culled from a group (hat was no healthier than the average
of 1917. Approximately five million young Americans, 30 per
cent of the registrants* were rejected for physical defects the
same approximate rate, as a matter of fact, that prevailed in (he
The Civilian Army 83
Civil War. Indeed had there been compulsory service or records
kept in 1776, the American Revolution might have shown a sim-
ilar percentage of unfit.
The primary reasons for being given a sometimes-coveted 4-F
classification were muscular and/or bone malformations, heart
or circulatory ailments, mental deficiency or disease, hernia, and
syphilis. The lowlands, the seaboards, and the deep south all vied
for the dubious distinction of leading in rejections, often with
rates as high as 50 per cent.
The bad health of so many young men was appalling to Gen-
eral Hershey, who wrote, "I cannot help but feel that our educa-
tional system from kindergarten on through the colleges and
universities has neglected one of its most important responsibil-
ities, that of presenting a balance between the so-called physical,
the mental and the emotional. That balance must be restored."
He criticized "public indifference and apathy 5 ' for its part in "the
present low standards of physical conditioning."
On the more positive side, Hershey cited as a vast low rejec-
tion area "that triangle of States bounded on one side by Wash-
ington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Oklahoma; on another side
by Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin; and on
the north by Canada .... this area got to be referred to as the
health triangle.' "
Not only health but personal conviction, or professed convic-
tion, kept young Americans out of the draft eight thousand all
told, a number disproportionately small compared to the atten-
tion and often clamor they caused. The public, Hershey observ-
ed, considered the conscientious objector as "an abuse of a com-
pulsory system." But the director of Selective Service surprised
many by defending the conscientious objector. His beliefs were
"founded on long traditions in America that a person because
of his religious training and belief could choose to reject the obli-
gation that he should bear arms in defense of his country."
The 152 religions specified ranged from the major faiths to
such less wefl-known sects as the "Home of God" and the basic
"I Am." The Mennonites, represented by 3,562 of draft age,
84 The Civilian Army
were the largest single group to register as objectors. The Jeho-
vah's Witnesses, nearly 4,000 strong, would not report to their
local boards at all. They went to jail for their adamancy.
Attorney General Biddle disapproved of this harsh treatment
as much as he did to that meted out to the nisei. In his view it
was, "a clumsy and stupid way of handling persons whose obsti-
nate and belligerent attitudes almost always could be traced to
early parental cruelty.**
The Jehovah's Witnesses claimed, without corroboration from
the law, that each individual member was a minister. Although
they were model prisoners, their restraint occasionally cracked
under incessant jibes from hardened fellow convicts. One young
man, as recalled by Biddle, finally snarled back, "You just wait
till He comes again. Hell clean up all of you dirty bastards."
Some of Father Divine's large number of followers also gave
thek draft boards trouble. Alvin Payne, for example, a Los An-
geles janitor, aged fifty-six, claimed that after joining the sect, he
was "reborn," as "Jacob Israel," aged eight.
"I couldn't register as Alvin Payne," explained the soft-spoken
janitor, "because in doing so I would have had to reclaim my
now dead mortal self." Uncertain, perhaps, whether to turn the
case over to the juvenile court, the federal authorities finally al-
lowed Payne to return to his place of employment after register-
ing. They observed "he certainly did a lot of work for an eight-
year-old!"
Lew Ayres became the most celebrated conscientious objec-
tor. Aged thirty-four, the slender Hollywood star, who had im-
mortalized the disillusioned German soldier in All Quiet on the
Western Front, shouldered an ax instead of a rifle, working in an
Oregon lumber camp.
Discussing his idealistic principles against killing, the hand-
some and sensitive actor said he was "quite sure" that his role of
young Paul Baumer in Erich Maria Remarque's novel had left its
emotional mark. He conceded that he was risking a promising
career.
National sentiment, or bias, against the "cowardly" conscien-
tious objectors was so strong that many theaters withdrew films
The Civilian Army 85
in which Ayres played a role* One about to be issued, Born to Be
Bad, was shot over again with another star.
The actor, however, asked for rectification to noncombat-
ant duty with the Army. The request granted, Private Ayres was
ordered to Camp Barkley Medical Replacement Center, in
Texas, where he proved so efficient that his commanding officer
observed, "I wish I had a whole battalion of men just like him."
From Barkley, Lew Ayres shifted to duties with the Chaplains'
Corps. Ultimately he distinguished himself under fire in his care
of die wounded and dying during the Japanese bombings of
Leyte.
A conscientious objector who registered and could prove his
sincerity was no fiaunter of Selective Service. But there were ten
thousand court convictions for violating the law, ranging from
failure to register or to cany a draft card, to falsifying informa-
tion or not reporting for induction. Penalties were as low as a
hundred dollar fine, as high as five-year prison terms*
With a complete lack of patriotism and social consciousness,
wayward young and not-so-young men resorted to a grab-bag as-
sortment of ruses, occasionally ingenious, to evade draft registra-
tion.
The law ultimately caught up with a Massachusetts engineer-
ing student who barricaded himself in a remote cabin and threat-
ened to shoot it out with anyone who attempted to bring him to
register. He said he was not a conscientious objector; he merely
wanted nothing to do with this "dishonorable and imperialistic
war."
In New York City, another man went to jail for teaching
would-be draft dodgers how to fake deafness, mental disorders
or heart ailments. And, shades of the Civil War, a twenty-four-
year-old Ohio man paid his fourteen-year-old brother six dollars
to register for him.
A Wisconsin youth of nineteen, claiming to be an hereditary
"chieftain" of the lost and almost forgotten Potawatomi tribe was
ordered into court for failure to register. Unimpressed, the judge
ruled the defendant was truly "a brave" and must get his "war
paint and feathers" within ten days at the "draft board's tepee."
86 Hie Civilian Army
A Los Angeles resident, Edward M. Sheridan, age twenty-
eight, was indicted by a Federal grand jury for listing his horse,
"Mary Ann Sheridan," as a dependent "Whether Mary Ann is a
daughter or a horse is beside the point," he protested, with scant
success. 'The way she eats oats she certainly is a dependent."
Another Selective Service Board in this area had a case that
did Sheridan one better. A mule had been registered for duty,
not as a dependent. And still a third turned up a two-year-old
boy, duly signed up.
Easier to understand was the case of two brothers, Antonio
and Donato Malango, who made their home at Maier*s Corner,
Staten Island, where they shared a farm and a goat. The war was
two years old when the brothers chanced to learn of its existence.
Seeking glass to repair a broken window in their hut, they first
learned of rationing and next of what was responsible for that ra-
tioning. Unable to read English, they existed in a perpetual news
blackout. Both in their forties and ineligible for active service,
they willingly registered and returned to their f aim and goat.
Everett Stewart, who lived in the small Kentucky community
Valley Station, demonstrated a prowess as an impersonator that
rivaled the professional. He changed his voice and his clothes,
and finally, dressed as a woman with a wig and floppy hat, made
a sorrowful call at the draft board to announce that "my hus-
band" is dead. Previously as Stewart's mythical "half brother,"
later as his sister, his father, and his crippled uncle, he had kept
the Selective Service unit informed of the progressive "deteriora-
tion" of Everett Stewart's health.
When no hospital record or grave site, to say nothing of
corpse, could be produced, Department of Justice agents seized
the next best alternative and delivered the draft dodger himself
to court He was sent to the Atlanta Penitentiary for three years.
In Izard County, Arkansas, an entire mountaineer family
waged a pitched battle to keep one of their young men from reg-
istering. The males of the household banged away with shotguns
while the females wielded double-bladed axes, meat cleavers, and
heavy dubs to beat off a sheriffs posse. It took a squad of G-
men, all of them veteran gangbusters, to bag the exaggeratedly
Hie Civilian Army 87
reluctant draftee- The remaining members of the family were
then carried off to prison, burdened with sentences ranging from
six months to three years. Sharing their penal servitude, the
rustic kinfolk presented nonetheless a remarkable example of to-
getherness.
Induction boards also had internal feuds, although such in-
stances were the exception rather than the rule. An entire board
of five volunteers in one New England village, disagreeing both
personally and professionally with each other, locked the door of
the registration office atop the old firehouse and resigned en
masse. The chairman, who now was without a board to preside
over, telegraphed the state director of Selective Service to help
him "find another five men just like except different from those
who resigned.* 5
The board of Washington Court House (Ohio) protested
against labor* s strikes by going on strike themselves. As a result,
several patriotic young men made news by entering an Army re-
cruiting station for the formalities temporarily suspended by the
local Selective Service.
And Joseph C. Salak, chief clerk of Board No. 25 in Chicago,
claimed the uncommon distinction of drafting himself. A tele-
graph operator, he was subsequently serving with the 361st En-
gineers in Rheims when the inevitable finally happened. Another
G.I., tired, unshaven, looking just as though he had stepped out
of a Mauldin cartoon, slouched past Salak, suddenly stopped,
wheeled, and exclaimed, more in surprise than anger: **Hey,
you're the s.o.b. who drafted me!"
The young men, taken from their homes, were the object of
almost staggering assaults by groups who sought to take up
where the maternal wing had perforce to draw back. Ministers
toured the training camps; societies, churches, and well-inten-
tioned individuals deluged the draftees with literally millions of
pocket-sized Bibles.
The donor often wrote his or her own message of bon voyage
and intended cheer on the fly leaf. More often than not, the quo-
tation, or the thought was peculiarly inappropriate to the occa-
sion and the recipient's state of mind.
88 The Civilian Army
For example, a passage from John 14 greeted the writer of this
book, scribbled on the flyleaf of a Bible presented to him before
convoy time: "In my father's house are many mansions. ... I
go to prepare a place for you."
The draftees also proved handy targets for Anti-Saloon
League tracts and related literature. Slogans flew at them with
the profusion and insistence of bullets: "Use your Bible to Battle
the Bottle!" "Two resolutions for 1944: I will keep sweet, and I
will not drink alcohol."
The bone-dry organizations were attempting to duplicate their
predecessors' success in 1917, when similar efforts culminated in
national prohibition. Gene Tunney, a lieutenant commander in
the Naval Reserve (and also a director of the American Distillers
Corporation), tirelessly preached the virtues of sobriety, as well
as of continence.
While the former heavyweight champion must have possessed
some understanding of young men, if only from his own World
War I experience with the Marines, the religious and uplift
groups surely did not seem to.
Swept up in this welling landslide of "do-good" and "think-
good," the Army went to what the horrified old top sarges
branded a disaster-courting extreme. One of George Washing-
ton's own orders to the Continental Army was dragged out,
dusted off, and reproduced, beneath a likeness of the general
astride his white horse, on thousands of barracks walls: 'The
men of the Army will refrain from using profane words, and
from telling dirty stories. . . ."
The Navy, not wholly broken away from the salty tradition of
John Paul Jones, Stephen Decatur, and David Farragut, was un-
willing to risk a mass defection by the boatswain, its strong right
arm. No effort was made to compete with the Army's flood tide
of reform. Its officers, if indeed they were personally of another
mind, turned a deaf ear to swearing.
As to concern for sailors' morals and physical weal, contra-
ceptives and instructions, printed in large type and monosyllabic
words, were issued at the gangplank when the bluejackets went
ashore.
Hie Civilian Army 99
Fun, often on the lusty side, and a heavy coating of humor
whenever and wherever possible helped to make life bearable for
the vast citizen army. Quips, always obvious and often crude,
combining with an objective grousing, like a low-key monologue,
maintained the G.I.s* spirits.
For those left at home, the lighter side of service life was in-
variably emphasized. Authors such as Marion Hargrove, a North
Carolina newspaperman, raked glittering hay out of being
drafted. His See Here, Private Hargrove became a best seller and
was bought by Hollywood.
The products of Selective Service proved veiy funny fellows in
This Is the Army, an Irving Berlin musical, which featured an
authentic soldier cast. There were lesser books, plays, articles,
and a torrent of radio fare purporting to portray or caricature the
barracks, drill ground, and mess lines.
It was the civilian, still identifiable beneath the thin, unfamil-
iar raiment of military uniform, who would win or lose the twen-
tieth century's wars. His was a serious, life-or-death assignment.
And much of his story, contrary to Broadway, did not make es-
pecially funny reading or witnessing.
The growing casualty lists in the daily press, the word in more
and more American towns and cities that someone just "down
the street" had been hurt or killed or in some respects worse yet
reported "missing," the homesick letters postmarked from an
improbable Baedeker of the world's locations, all bore their own
witness to the deadly serious business of war. On the home front,
as on the batflefront, there was no mistaking the message.
CHAPTER 7
The Capital City
TO THE AVERAGE CITIZEN the national capital was a mysterious
Olympus, the sources of ration books and of the draftee's
"Greetings!" from the Selective Service. If he thought of this city
on the Potomac at all, it was much as he might reflect fleetingly
on Baghdad, Singapore, or Shangri-La. Wasn't it a remote, unfa-
miliar never-never land where men pushed buttons, spoke into
microphones, and signed papers which sent other men, ships,
tanks, and planes tumbling off in multiple directions?
In all likelihood, the citizen tended to glorify the well of con-
fusion, misdirection, and cross-purposes which actually was the
kingpin city of the United States and its war effort the not en-
tirely sane or sentient brain cell of an octopus, as it were*
Washington, which had mushroomed in size and prestige as a
national city during the Civil War, made a brave try for interna-
tional honors after America's entry into World War I. However,
Paris, London, and even in defeat, Berlin along with Vienna
clung firmly to their laurels. But from the outset of World War n
it was apparent that yesterday's fashions in international cities
were undergoing drastic change. After the fall of France, the free
world looked to Washington-London for salvation. As the war
progressed, the first half of that equation assumed dominance.
Swollen with the ever-increasing numbers of those in Govern-
ment, the city on the Potomac was also home to businessmen,
middle-men sprouting like weeds and a burgeoning "international
90
The Capita! City 91
set" that included both accredited diplomats and a potpourri of
hangers-on hitherto native to Paris, Rome, Madrid, Lisbon, and
Ankara*
Dominating all other considerations was the scarcity of hous-
ing f or either overnight or the more permanent variety. Every
morning and evening the classified columns of the city's news-
papers printed plaintive ads such as the following:
WANTED rental 3-bedroom house, for Army captain and
family of two teen-age children. No pets. Sober. No parties*
TeL . . .
SINGLE GIRL defense agency worker recently arrived des-
perately needs to share room with another girl.
BONUS will pay handsomely fear inf carnation leading to the
finding of an Apartment for ....
Hotels were unprepared for this emergency, just as they had
been unprepared for the influx of people that occurred during
World War L Cots were set up in salesmen's sample salons, in
parlors, and even in dining rooms after supper hours. Reserva-
tions made months in advance meant nothing if "brass," swag-
gered in at the last minute, insisting on priority. Once a visitor
had succeeded in gaining occupancy, he could keep his hotel
room for only five days.
This rule of brief tenure, determinedly enforced, resulted in a
"march of hotel patrons.*' Any day of the week, a passerby was
treated to the spectacle of bellboys canying guests' luggage be-
tween the city's hostelries. This practice at least kept the lodging
situation fluid, in contrast to World War I when businessmen had
often been obliged to open their suitcases in poolrooms and in
cul-de-sacs off the lobbies of Washington's hostelries, remaining
in such a state of improvisation for weeks, months, and in some
cases, the duration.
Broadway, presented with a made-to-order motif, staged The
Doughgirls. It dealt with the hotel crisis and its conjectured effect
upon businessmen and their mistresses in Washington. A movie,
similarly inspired, plucked its plot from the housing shortage.
92 The Capital City
Certainly these were boom, beneficent times for lazy script
writers*
Real estate soared. An owner could almost literally name his
price for a house or a cooperative apartment. Stabilization of
rents meant little since landlords often demanded extra "gifts."
Frequently recalled was the legend about the middle-aged
man drowning in the Potomac River who shouted, "Help! Help!"
A passerby, taking off his coat and trousers, leapt in and swam
out to the unfortunate individual. Grabbing his flailing arms and
holding his head out of water, his rescuer asked, "What* s your
name?"
"John Smith," he sputtered.
"What's your address?"
The man told him. With that, the avowed rescuer let go and
swam back to shore as fast as he could stroke. Replacing his coat
and pants, he hailed a cab and drove to the address given him by
the man in the Potomac.
Knocking on the door, breathless, he advised the woman who
opened it that John Smith, her tenant apparently, had just
drowned, and Was his room available?
The woman shook her head. "No."
Incredulous, her caller demanded, "Who could possibly have
rented it?"
"The man who pushed him in," came the matter-of-fact reply.
Current, too, was the story of the man who existed largely
through the vengeful hope that on the day after victory he would
call on Washington's larger hotels, inquiring at each about ac-
commodations. He assumed that the clerk would rub his hands
together, like old times, and favor the potential guest with a pro-
fessional smile, then say ingratiatingly:
"Yes, sir! Now we have a nice one with bath and twin beds on
the fifth floor, but if you wish a larger room . . ."
At that the other man would draw himself up and snarl, "I
don* t want your lousy room!"
Washington, however, would never be the same again. V-E
Day and V- J Day came and went, and still there was a shortage
of rooms. In 1965, with new hotels and motels dotting Washing-
The Capital City 93
ton and its environs, accommodations are still at a premium. The
struggling town which Major Pierre L'Enfant had long ago blue-
printed by the Potomac had become a world metropolis. It would
remain that way.
The national capital was scarcely able to provide even the
armed forces or those who commanded them with adequate
space. The huge, labyrinthine Pentagon, across the Potomac, in
Virginia, was not ready for occupancy at the time of Pearl Har-
bor. When it was, its denizens consumed months learning to
traverse the paths to their offices.
In the meantime, wings and annexes sprouted from the "tem-
porary" buildings of World War I until the mall and other areas
between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol, originally land-
scaped as bucolic grassy spaces, looked like a defense housing
project. Even a few architectural relics, which had served as hos-
pitals or warehouses during the Civil War, suddenly echoed to
electric typewriters and the chatter of the more than eighty-five
thousand who pounded them "the 1440 girls," they were
called, because that was their average pay under Civil Service.
The armed forces sprinted so far out ahead of Washington's
civilian, agencies in the race for space and "bodies" that one
agency director grumbled: "If the Army and Navy could capture
territory as well as they grab office space we might win the
war!"<
Hospital rooms were also at a premium* An expectant mother
could book a room months in advance only to find at the crucial
hour that her bed had been seized by the wife of a brass hat or
perhaps by the great personage himself. At least one woman
(Mrs. Hazel Davidson, wife of a public-relations man) boarded
an earty morning train for New York to have her baby born
there that evening. She had been assured that open maternity
wards, at least, were still available in Manhattan.
The executive branch of the Government attempted to ease
the squeeze for space by moving offices and bureaus not directly
related to the war out of the city. The Patent Office packed up its
desks, chairs, file cabinets (and patents), then entrained for
Richmond. The Rural Electrification Agency of the Department
94 The Capital City
of Agriculture shone its light in St. Louis for the duration, while
the Farm Credit Administration hung out its "open for business*'
sign in Kansas City.
Certain departments of the Civil Service Commission were
transferred to Raleigh, North Carolina, while much of the Social
Security agency left for Newark, Many of the purely reference
offices of other governmental departments were dispersed
throughout the nation. Some, including the Army's personnel
records office which journeyed to St. Louis along with the REA,
would never come home again.
These expedients, although theoretically helpful in solving the
office-space crisis, did nothing to ease the housing shortage. Most
workers were already rooted in the District of Columbia and
nearby Maryland and Virginia. They did not want to move.
They liked the area, the parks, the semi-Southern atmosphere,
the long springs and autumns, and of course, the excitement of a
capital in wartime. Unfortunately for the blueprinters of reloca-
tion, it was far easier for them to find another job than to move
to another city.
Certainly no one had to rush out of town to escape the enemy.
He might have had more reasonable cause for alarm, however,
had he known of the antics going on at the Office of Strategic
Services. Lethal devices tailored for resistance fighters were the
stock-in-trade of this devil-may-care troop of Colonel William J.
("Wild Bill") Donovan. Their laboratories were spread in many
unlikely edifices, from such mansions as stately Dumbarton Oaks
to immediately post-Civil War structures, such as the old Naval
Hospital near the Potomac River.
One afternoon, in a former ward at the latter location, one of
the OSS*s many professors turned "Moriarty" (as Donovan
dubbed them) wished to dispose of a hundred pounds of a flour-
like explosive known affectionately as "Aunt Jemima.'* He
dumped it in the toilet and flushed it until the material was all
gone.
Then, he informed a co-worker, possessed of more chemical
knowledge, what he had done. 'My God!" the man gasped.
lie Capital City 95
"When that mixes with gases and other matter in the sewers well
all be blown sky-high!"
Trying to guess the sluggish course of the powder in the sewers
under Washington, which might even have detoured it perilously
close to the White House, the State Department, the Navy De-
partment, or the War Department, the Moriarty expected mo-
mentarily a deafening blast, a huge eruption of smoke and flame,
and then when the cloud and mess cleared away maybe no
more Executive Mansion.
Happily something went wrong, and "Aunt Jemima'* never
blew.
On other occasions, generals and admirals in combined Joint
Chiefs of Staff sessions prepared to leap for windows when OSS
scientists enthusiastically started to demonstrate explosive foun-
tain pens, pocket watches guaranteed to remove their first
wearer, or a fiendishly noisy but harmless gadget known as
"Hedy Lamarr." Its purpose, like Hedy's, was to distract, not
kill to cover, for example, the escape of an underground
agent.
Less violent was the luminous fox project. Washingtonians
saw these weirdly painted creatures in Rock Creek Park under
leash of their OSS trainers. It was hoped they might cause panic
among superstitious Japanese if loosed toward enemy trenches
on Pacific Islands. This particular scheme, however, never pro-
gressed beyond the borders of Rock Creek Park.
While relatively few were treated to the spectacle of a glowing
fox, there were still thrilla enough to go around. The atmosphere
of the capital city was similar to Hollywood's or Manhattan's ex-
cept that politicians, military brass, and visiting foreign digni-
taries were substituted for movie stars and Broadway enter-
tainers.
At noontime, idlers paused before well-known restaurants
along Connecticut and Pennsylvania Avenues, and on 16th Street,
confident of a glimpse of Admiral King, General Marshall, the
flamboyant Admiral "Bull" Halsey in between Pacific missions,
or Senator Tom Connolly, of Texas, resembling with his long
96 The Capital City
hair and floppy bow tie nothing so much as a casting-office ver-
sion of a congressman.
As an unpredictable bonus, Franklin D. Roosevelt himself oc-
casionally could be fleetingly seen, as he whizzed past in his
black limousine flanked by motorcycles and drenched in the
scream of their sirens. Once or twice Winston Churchill sat be-
side him.
Along with the extravaganza and the confusion of a govern-
ment at war were less apparent but nonetheless significant and
often portentous undercurrents. Government involves a contin-
ual clash of personalities and minds, and the struggle for domi-
nance in Washington intensified during the war years. Bernard
Baruch, himself an expert at such infighting, used the term "ven-
detta" to describe what went on.
True friendship, camaraderie in the broad sense, respect or
admiration for a person for disinterested motives, did not fit
easily into the mold and the character of the national capital.
While the "miracle of war production" was often described, lost
sight of was quite another miracle of magnitude in its own right:
that coordination could actually be wrung from officialdom's
mad tea party of clashing goals, misunderstandings, jealousies,
and hatreds.
Roosevelt had broken with his erstwhile friend and Postmaster
General, Jim Farley. In 1944 he did not request the renomina-
tion of his Vice-President Henry A. Wallace. Yesterday's meteors
could burn into cold clinkers with sobering speed. Political
"brain trusters," as well as second-rate ward heelers and fat cats,
could disappear as abruptly as they had appeared. The dollar-a-
year men who, as a matter of fact, cost the government more
than three thousand dollars a year in per diem and administra-
tive expenses were especially subject to ephemeral careers.
Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes slugged it out with
Henry Wallace, with Roosevelt's confidant Harry Hopkins, and
among many others, with the monolithic Secretary of Com-
merce, Jesse Jones. The latter was flayed by Ickes for "having
too much power." As head of the Reconstruction Finance Cor-
poration and numerous related entities, the towering Jones had
The Capital City 97
been accused of a "penny-wise, pound-foolish reign of tyranny. 5 *
His most unfortunate decision traced back to 1940 when he
would not support synthetic rubber manufacturers because he
thought forty cents a pound exorbitant.
"If the United States loses the war," commented the Nation
magazine, "it will go down to defeat in a thoroughly solvent con-
dition."
The war, far from lost, thundered on. So did Ickes' temper.
Donald Nelson, he grudgingly conceded, "had gotten ahead on
his energy and ability." It was singular criticism. Then, focusing
his wrath beyond Washington, Ickes sought to have the influen-
tial publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Colonel Robert McCor-
mick, "charged with treason." He did not realize his wish.
Nelson was locked in a tussle of will with Charles Wilson,
former president of General Electric, who was heading the Pro-
duction Committee of WPB. Unable to take orders, chafing and
pouting over a thousand differences with the former head of
Sears, Roebuck, Wilson periodically submitted and then was per-
suaded to withdraw his resignation.
With most of the Cabinet officers doubling as board members
of the WPB, Nelson held trump cards. It was manifestly an easier
matter to override other emergency agencies than to keep tight
rein on his own.
Caught up in Washington's own version of nonstop musical
chairs and infighting was Elmer Davis, the well-known diy-
voiced radio commentator from the Midwest whose job was the
immensely important dissemination of war news. Davis, a Hoo-
sier, had been plucked from his microphone by a thoroughly dis-
couraged Roosevelt. Even a whopping thirty-two million dollar
publicity budget in the early months of the war had failed to
bring order and information to the public out of a maze of
governmental propaganda bureaus. Their "blizzard of paper," as
one frustrated newsman wrote, showering from thousands of
mimeograph machines was often the ammunition for interde-
partmental rivalry.
Slogans pouied out at a brisk pace: "Remember Pearl Harbor"
(not a difficult one to devise); or "Remember Pearl, Harder,"
98 The Capital City
devised by a wag who sought to inspire "victory knitters"; "Time
is Short"; "Don't Let Them Catch Us With Our Plants Down!";
or the succinct "Win the War!"
Neither slogans nor information bureaus by themselves, no
matter how dedicated and efficient, could win or come close to
winning the war. But improvement was essential, and the first
step toward this goal was the establishment of a Division of In-
fonnation within the WPB.
It took shape in a gleaming prefabricated plywood structure
hammered together on a triangle of earth at the intersection of
Pennsylvania Avenue and Fifteenth Street, across from the Wil-
lard Hotel and the Treasury Department. This smallish office was
headed by a former Scripps-Howard editor Lowell Mellett,
whose efforts somehow were never accorded a chance for life.
His shop, dubbed "Melletf s Madhouse," was soon reduced in au-
thority to an information kiosk for bewildered, roomless, out-of-
town businessmen.
Elmer Davis then set up the new Office of War Information.
Simultaneously Byron Price, an executive with the Associated
Press, assumed the not entirely enviable role of director of the
Office of Censorship. His post, as he admitted from the start, was
a "dangerous instrument."
A third wartime position in this same general field was that of
the head of the Office of Facts and Figures, presided over by
Archibald MacLeish, the poet and librarian of Congress.
The spotlight, however, was on Elmer Davis. In a way, he had
to sell the war; to explain its unfavorable course to the people
and reestablish a reputation for governmental credibility and
veracity. Staggered by the magnitude of their defeats in the Pa-
cific, the armed forces had been printing half-truths or vague and
misleading communi(JU&,
*lt was not unnatural," Davis observed in characteristic un-
derstatement, "that the American public, unable to mistake the
general trend of events in the first disastrous months, should have
come to the conclusion that while the Japanese radio might exag-
gerate the damage inflicted on us, its news was far more depen-
dable than that issued by our own Army and Navy."
Hie Capital City 99
Publicity officers of the Army and Navy, no doubt with the
best of intentions, obscured the true and unsavory picture by
playing up stories of individual acts of heroism. Roosevelt him-
self, in asking for a record $58,000,000,000 defense budget, plus
"at least" $9,000,000,000 in new taxes, also emphasized these
glowing stabs of light in an otherwise dark, grim canvas. It would
be a little while before the United States took their cue from
Churchill's warning that desperate summer of 1940 that Dun-
kerques do not add up to victory, not by any stretch of the imagi-
nation.
Davis stated that he merely wished to give "the people the
news . ... the background information that will help them
understand what the news is about." For the most part his efforts
would be met by success. Factually and photographically, his
OWI chronicled both the course of the war and the mood of the
home front: from fifth graders 9 victory gardens in Boone, Iowa,
to beachhead assaults in the Solomon Islands.
His greatest trial was presented in the towering shape of a
formidable lieutenant, Robert Sherwood, OWTs overseas direc-
tor. This tall, famous playwright, Davis complained to the White
House, was not only "notoriously slow in answering communica-
tions," but spent "most of his time touring the world.'* Conceding
that Sherwood was "an able propagandist," Davis charged none-
theless that "his administration has led to confusion and ineffec-
tiveness."
He believed it was "pretty hard to sail my craft when the first
mate permits himself to be put at the head of a mutiny against
the skipper,"
So, Davis decided to "relieve" this fractious "first mate" of all
of his "operating duties." In other words, he would be content if
Sherwood retained his job, but with nothing whatsoever to do.
The OWI director, who won his reputation as a newscaster be-
cause of keen powers of observation and analysis, had allowed
his emotions to blur his judgment. Manifestly, he had lost sight of
Sherwood's ties with the White House. The freewheeling author
wrote speeches for the President, was an habitu6 of the Execu-
tive Mansion.
100 The Capital City
The situation finally degenerated to the point where Roosevelt
summoned both to his study, the Oval Room. There, as Davis
was to recall, the President "told us that he wished he had a good
long ruler, the kind schoolboys' hands got slapped with when he
was in school, that he was God-damned mad at both of us. . . ."
The squire of Hyde Park then reaffirmed, using the Navy ex-
pression for banishment, that he did not wish either "to send
Sherwood to Guam" or to accept Davis* resignation. The result
was a cool trace not too unsatisfactory a compromise in a city
rife with crackling hostilities.
Davis couldn't win all of his battles. He lost another in his
efforts to obtain press coverage at the trial of the Nazi saboteurs.
A total of eight had been landed by submarines near Amagan-
sett, Long Island, in June 1942, and at Ponte Vedra Beach, Flor-
ida. They had been apprehended by the Coast Guard, through
residents phoning the FBI and through their own surrender.
After a trial shrouded heavily with secrecy, six of the group were
electrocuted.
The OWI never really possessed the prestige to prevail over an
entrenched department of the Federal Government if it forcibly
asserted itself. In his darker hours, Davis at least had the sym-
pathy of his counterpart in World War I, George Creel, chair-
man of the Committee on Public Information. He wrote from
San Francisco: x
". . . you have a man in the White House who does not like
to see anyone get the blue slip. Particularly when they have paid
him the tribute of personal loyalty .... I am more sorry than
I can say that your control over Army, Navy and State is not real
in any sense of the word .... while you may think you have
established an arrangement that will permit a free flow of the
news, just wait until an issue arises. The whole success of the
CJPX was due to the fact that neither the Army nor the Navy had
the right to sit in arbitrary judgment on what should or should
not be printed. Time after time they disputed my authority and I
won out only because Woodrow Wilson hammered them
down. . . .*
1 Letter in The Elmer Davis collection, Libraiy of Congress.
The Capital City 101
Washington was a city that tested, tried, and often broke its
leaders. Joseph ("Joe") Eastman, Office of Defense transporta-
tion expediter, died in harness in 1944. Donald Nelson left later
the same year, not many months after Leon Henderson resigned.
The WPB boss had made good his promise that if he could not do
the "right kind of job," then "why the hell should I stay and eat
my heart out?"
Nelson's functions were assumed by James F. Byrnes, the all-
powerful director of War Mobilization. The personable, veteran
South Carolina politician was not only a former Senator but a
former Supreme Court Justice as well.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox dropped dead at his Wash-
ington apartment in April 1944 (to be succeeded by his assist-
ant, the New York lawyer James V* Forrestal). Roosevelfs first
Secretary of the Navy, Claude A. Swanson, had also died in
office, as had his first Secretary of War, George H. Dern.
The health of many during the war years amounted to a medi-
cal nightmare. This was true of the President himself, Harry
Hopkins, and Cordell Hull. Marguerite ("Missy") Le Hand,
Roosevelt's faithful and able secretary, had lingered for three
years, after suffering a stroke in 1941.
When those of a documentary turn of mind sought to capture
the often elusive character of Washington, they grasped at statis-
tics in the hopes of etching in the flat lines and conveying life and
dimension to those beyond the capital's borders. They cited the
25 per cent increase in population since Pearl Harbor, the
shrunken fleet of approximately five thousand taxicabs available
to transport a population of nearly a million, the seventeen thou-
sand weekly business visitors (or was it daily? Numbers them-
selves began to blur so and lose all meaning), the twenty-five
thousand cups of coffee reportedly swallowed each day in the
Pentagon's cafeterias, the sixty-one hundred bedroom Arlington
Farms "girls town" to shelter the unattached female population,
in or out of uniform a joy for comparison-minded authors with
their lists of small cities overshadowed by the Arlington design
for female living, the new feeling of neighborliness arising from
the enforced fashion in car pools. . . *
102 The Capital City
Writers of reputation attempted to trap the caprice of the na-
tion's governing city, then hurry this ephemera onto paper before
it should dissolve once again into its peculiarly frustrating limbo.
John Dos Passos, Bernard De Voto, A. J. Liebling, and Bruce
Catton were but a few of this optimistic, quixotic multitude. The
larger magazines, including Time, Lije, Look, the Reader's Di-
gest and an ever-assured Esquire, along with the metropolitan
dailies, sent in successive reporters, like substitutes moving in
and out of a football game.
More than one, male and female, despairingly banged the
desk top down on today to reminisce about a seemingly more
tangible, obvious, and communicative yesterday. They were in-
spired in all likelihood by Margaret Leech's Pulitzer Prize-
winning work, Reveille in Washington. Published in 1941, it was
a graphic, meticulous account of the city during the Civil War.
Possibly therein lay the answer. Another century may have to
pass before a generation, aided by time's perspective, can ade-
quately and truly portray and explain Washington in a later pe-
riod of challengeWorld War n.
CHAPTER 8
In the Urgency of War
THE NATION'S industrial might increased, month by month, al-
though the challenge was Herculean and the way beset by pit-
falls. Almost by the time General MacArthur had established
headquarters in Australia, following his dramatic flight from
Corregidor, nearly sixteen thousand new plants, most of them
government-owned, dotted the productive face of America.
Some were already turning out the implements of war.
Old processes and concepts alike were ripped apart, and new
ones substituted. Steel producers, for example, could build a
blast furnace in six, instead of the customary nine or ten,
months. Round-the-clock shifts and technical shortcuts lopped
off the approximately three additional months*
The time saved meant an additional fifty-five thousand tons of
pig iron, enough to be converted into steel for a bonus of four
aircraft carriers or eight cruisers. Overhaul and relining time of
furnaces was cut from a month or more to approximately three
weeks.
Since transportation of war goods was accorded high priority,
component parts of the finished product whether a small elec-
tric motor or a large warship could be efficiently produced in
plants scattered at the far corners of the nation. Hardly a state in
the Union did not contribute something to the birth of an air-
plane, including protective paper wrappings from Maine, tires.
103
104 In fibe Urgency of War
from Ohio, lacquers from South Carolina, and polishing abra-
sives from Arizona.
Communities which had been quite unfamiliar beyond their
own signposts suddenly blossomed and flourished like the gold-
rush towns of the last century. Springfield, Vermont, home to a
population of no more than five thousand, became a mecca for
purchasing agents. Springfield's specialty was machine tools*
Elkton, Maryland, long the fireworks capital of the United
States, switched its explosive talents toward more serious pur-
poses than Fourth of July celebrations.
Basement lathe shops which had been turning out many of the
products of peacetime, including even gas meters and potato
chip machinery, switched to an unfamiliar catalogue of wares:
gun barrels, firing mechanisms, cartridge cases, periscope
mounts, helmet liners, canteens, a list that covered many pages
in governmental inventories.
The A. C. Gilbert Company, in New Haven, discovered that
tiny electric-train motors could also be used for operating air-
borne navigational instruments. Milwaukee's A. O. Smith Cor-
poration, which had manufactured bicycles in the 1870's, then
shifted to horseless-carriage frames, and during World War I
turned out the first hundred pound aerial bombs, was back at the
old stand in World War H.
The company produced many of the Air Force's highly de-
structive block busters. It also furnished much of the trans-conti-
nental big- and little-inch pipelines for carrying petroleum in a
manner at last impervious to U-boat attack.
Corporations, large and small, were matching then: versatility
against the needs of war. The giants, however, took as well the
giant's share. At the end of September 1944, for example, the
country's hundred largest companies were turning out 75 per
cent of the $175,000,000 so far awarded to the "prime contrac-
tors," numbering altogether 18,539.
Among them, Du Pont, with a history dating back to Revolu-
tionary times, was turning out mountains of explosives. The total
would reach four and a half billion pounds of smokeless powder
In the Urgency of War 105
before war's end an amount 20 per cent greater than the entire
volume used by all the Allies during World War I.
Du Pont erected its Indiana Ordnance Works, one of the
world's largest, near Charlestown, Indiana, in eight months.
Nearly twenty-eight thousand workmen were employed in its
construction. The plant produced more than a billion pounds of
smokeless powder and near the end of the war added a sideline:
rocket propellants.
The same company also declared war on insects and related
pests with veritable batteries upon batteries of DDT sprays. Cel-
lophane to wrap items from hard biscuits to cartridge boxes
became more familiar to G. I. Joe than to the folks back home.
Du Pont also aided his health with vitamins and his recovery
from wounds with antiseptics. More than forty million gallons of
paint and other finishes flowed from the company's many plants.
Among its vast offering of synthetics, Du Font's rubber substi-
tute, neoprene, and the adaptable nykm remained much in de-
mand by the military. Nylon replaced silk for parachutes and
fabric cords in vehicular and aircraft tires. Twice as strong as
manila rope, it was also used for glider tows, anchor cables, and
moorings for barrage balloons, as well as in self-sealing hose
lines and fuel tanks, shoe laces, armor vests, jungle hammocks,
boots, and in tooth and paint brushes.
General Dynamics, a younger giant on the American scene,
believed the ability to train unskilled workers for skilled opera-
tions had much to do with the war of production. A privately
printed and distributed history of its many subsidiaries has
noted:
The answer lies in the American genius for systematic planning
and organization. As applied to the aircraft industry, this meant a
division of labor so elaborate that most tasks could be performed by
unskilled workers. In 1942, nearly 40 per cent of Consolidated Vul-
tee's workers were women new to industry. There was also the air-
craft industry's system of "flexible mass production* 5 which avoided
the standardization of World War I by flsmg removable jigs and fix-
tures on standard machines to allow for frequent design changes while
106 In the Urgency of War
in production. To accomplish a quick expansion of facilities, consumer
goods plants, especially in the automotive industry, were converted to
aircraft production, and a nationwide system of subcontracting was
worked out which even embraced small parts "household feeder
shops," a system started by Convair to utilize the labor of people near
their own homes. Finally, individual aircraft firms cooperated in every
aspect of production through regional councils.
Aircraft production was augmented by the automobile indus-
try. Ford turned out Liberator bombers at a half-mile-long as-
sembly plant Willow Run west of Detroit Studebaker built B-
17 and B-29 engines for Wright Aeronautical. Packard arranged
to construct six thousand Rolls Royce engines for Great Britain,
three thousand for the United States.
New shops of old aviation concerns dotted the country. Boe-
ing of Seattle flowed over into an annex at Renton, Washington;
Martin did the same at Omaha far from its Baltimore headquar-
ters. Consolidated opened a huge plant at Fort Worth.
Recalling changes within the youthful industry, Solar Aircraft
Company of San Diego, major producer of engine manifolds,
wrote in its magazine, the Blast:
Time-docks appeared, signalizing the end of the happy family time-
keeping era. The PBX house phones continued to malfunction . * .
To these basic buildings, shortly to be knit together by an overhead
camouflage net of turkey feathers which made everyone sneeze and
itch, were added penthouses, sheds and outbuildings to house oxygen
tanks and pickle vats. The bay came right down to the back of the
plant, and at lunch you could dangle your toes in the water and watch,
unknowing, the carriers and transports assembling for the big battles
to come .... at night, the rats took over, monstrous creatures that
scorned in and out of a murderous-looking sump by the pickle shed.
Sump and sheds disappeared when caustic descaling was introduced
mid-war; dredgers and the new Harbor Drive finished the cozy dock-
side luncheons (there was also a memo about not throwing rocks at
the sea gulls) . ... the ghosts of the fish canneries lingered late at
San Diego. . . .
... as the draft calls bit deeper and deeper and Solar men re-
ported for duty, the lines realty began to fill up with women. There
were already more women than men at the Des Moines plant, still
ID the Urgency of War
racing to get equipment and tooling. In San Diego, 30 Indian girls
from the Sherman Institute were certified out from the growing San
Diego Vocational School and took their places at the welding benches.
Housewives, teachers, wives, and sweethearts with men in service
they added a colorful note to the cigar-chewing, clattering man's world
in Solar shops. And problems, too. The business-like little figure of
the Duchess Viele Hardy began to move through the benches,
easily spotted by an ever-changing tiara of flowers. Babies, transpor-
tation, housing, rides she listened to aH the women's worries with a
sympathetic but firm ear ....
The naval battles in and around the slot of Guadalcanal were bitter
with heavy losses to both the Japs and to us, and every Solarite in
the two cities was conscious that the parts we were making mani-
folds for the B-24's, B-17's, P-38's and PBM*s were a vital part of
the struggle.
Auxiliary first-aid classes were now being organized on an three
shifts and the whole San Diego plant was training fire-fighting
crews .... transportation problems were being met with the offer-
ing of 90 bicycles to employees at the now nostalgic price of $28 each.
Solar's rationing office came into being, through which went endless
arguments on *B' and *C gas books, tires and pairs of rubbers. We
lived with stamps and red coupons and marched sleepily off to work
in creaking car pools and responded with banner quotas to the many
bond drives. . . .
Energy of this caliber was translated into a peak aircraft production
in the 1943-44 twelve-month period of 90 thousand aircraft (34.5
per cent fighters and reconnaissance, 21 per cent medium and light
bombers, the remainder training, cargo, transport, and other types of
utility planes.
Aviation industry quotas were later cut back, partly because
of lower than expected combat losses. This was likewise true in
the aluminum industry where 1943's output of 1,100,000 tons
was reduced 10 per cent for 1944's quotas. And the synthetic-
rubber goals were also exceeded
Perhaps in this battle of production the nation's transportation
network was too much taken for granted. While motor vehicles
and cargo planes gained in importance, the same system that
aided the Union armies in winning the Civil War carried the bulk
of the load: the railroads* They transported more than forty-
108 In the Urgency of War
three million members of the armed forces, sometimes as many as
a million a month, and hauled nearly one third of a billion tons
of freight.
"The longest continuous miracle in transportation history"
was the Association of American Railroads' understandably
prejudiced estimate of their membership's wartime performance.
The group added: "Many doubted it could be done. A decade
of depression had weakened the railroads, forced one-third of
them into bankruptcy. But they hung on, their plant was pre-
served. As the world soon learned, capacity of that plant sur-
passed belief,
"Hurriedly, the trains rolled again. By 1943, the whole burden
of national war effort sat squarely on ribbons of steel. New cars
and trucks were a thing of the past; tires and gasoline had disap-
peared .... 97 per cent of the troops and 90 per cent of all
military materials and supplies moved by rail,"
Extra sections were Mtched on to what already were tagged
"extra sections" to handle troop movements as well as the multi-
tudes of servicemen traveling under individual orders to new
duty stations, ports of embarkation, or merely on furloughs.
Produced during the war were nearly 168,000 freight plus
2,800 troop and Army kitchen cars, as well as 2,907 new loco-
motives, also 8,000 locomotives and 103,000 freight cars con-
signed for overseas. The railroads, however, never seemed to
stay really ahead.
About half of the new equipment was replacement for worn-
out stock. All through the war there was also a shortage of nearly
a hundred thousand railroad men, snatched away by General
Hershey's seemingly insatiable Selective Service. And after the
war it would be downgrade again for the railroads as their rivals
on the highway and in the air chipped away more and more of
what even in father's time had been pretty much an unchallenged
business. The popularization of the powerful and highly efficient
Diesel locomotive and of the light-weight, quiet-riding passenger
car were not in themselves sufficient to reverse the trend to other
forms of transportation.
The Government was slower in answering the priority wants
In the Urgency of War 109
of city transit operators. By the end of 1942, the backlog of
buses and trolleys was exhausted. The armed forces were taking
all large vehicles for their own use. It seemed that more and
more cities would follow the example of Washington where so
many men and women were bicycling that the nation's capital
was being dubbed, "Amsterdam on the Potomac."
The Bus and Electric Railway Section of the WPB found to its
considerable distress that others in the emergency warrens of
Government had the remarkable notion that private automobiles
could operate ad infinitum on recapped tires covered by a few
ounces of camelback, while "mass production vehicles with high
load capacities'* were profligate with their precious rubber.
By scraping and scrounging for materials that had been over-
looked, this section accomplished what had seemed impossible in
the desperate, improbable early months of 1942, Whereas new
street cars had slumped to an insignificant total of thirty in 1943,
nearly three hundred were built in 1944, together with almost
enough parts for the old models. Once again young lovers were
able to sit on cane seats and hold hands, while the trolleys clat-
tered off to midnight shifts in the defense plant.
Bus production soared from 1,546 in 1943 to nearly 5,000 in
1944, even though community transportation had been and re-
mained a stepchild as far as priorities were involved.
Farm machinery, too, was a touch-and-go matter. Interna-
tional Harvester, one of the fanner's mainstays in the twentieth
century, had received the largest single order for light tanks
aggregating thirty million dollars. This diverted both factory
space and workers away from other production.
"As war areas expanded," reported the WPB, "more and more
material was transferred from boats to beaches, then to trucks,
and from trucks to depots. The greatest need was for the rubber-
tired cranes which moved quickly from one lift to the next. The
annual production of rubber-tired cranes and shovels increased
steadily from approximately 250 machines in 1939 to 3,000 in
1944, but no active theater of operations had an adequate
supply."
Each crane, in effect, represented a tractor or some other
110 In the Urgency of War
heavy piece of farm machinery that some former would not get
Only 35,000 of the 209,000 tractors called for in 1943 were
actually manufactured. Production of plows and cultivators
lagged in proportion.
"Victory model" substitutes were faintly proposed but howled
down by the customers who would have had to use them. They
envisioned cheap working parts, soft metals, and very likely,
wooden bumpers and mudguards. Fanners wanted no part of
second- or third-grade machinery.
However, after the Normandy invasion, when a vital new opti-
mism was infecting Washington, 361,000 tons of carbon steel
were "unfrozen" from virtually inaccessible priorities. Farm im-
plements began to reappear on the market.
Radio and electronics experienced, not too surprisingly, a
robust growth in the war. This relative newcomer to American
manufacturing had mushroomed by 1943 into a two billion dol-
lar business.
By prewar home standards, the prices seemed exorbitant.
Where a tube might have cost twenty-five cents, at the most a
dollar or two, similar parts for a military set ranged from five or
ten dollars to hundreds of dollars for the intricate, large cathode
rays in radar sets. Even the most basic electronic paraphernalia
was compelled to meet exacting armed services* requirements.
Many items had to tolerate temperature fluctuations ranging
from a bone-chilling minus forty degrees centigrade to a broil-
ing plus seventy degrees centigrade, and at the same time with-
stand the abuse that only a speed-maddened young G.L jeep
driver could dish out over, say, the rocky Burma road.
The electronics industry would be ready for a postwar world
of cheap radios and not-so-cheap television sets. Plastics would
also blast off from their wartime launching toward apparently an
infinite galaxy of markets. There were obviously many other ex-
amples of positive results from endeavors aimed at otherwise de-
structive goals.
But the war effort did not pound unerringly ahead with the
dynamic and patriotic singleness of purpose the posters might
have led the naive to believe. It jumped the track often.
Ill the Urgency of War 111
From a well-packed Pandora's box sprang strikes, manage-
ment piques, housing shortages, and bottlenecks in production
and transportation that seemingly defied solution. These vexa-
tions kept federal coordinators and others burning their office
lights into the dawning hours.
One of the crucial problems was public housing. A National
Housing Agency was put together to aid the hopelessly swamped
Federal Housing Administration. Before long, no less than six-
teen federal bureaus had a finger in the bedding and shelter prob-
lem. The result of this mass effort, as one observer wryly com-
mented, was a "formless heap/'
A new one-billion-dollar building program, personally or-
dered by Roosevelt, succeeded in erecting more than four hun-
dred thousand housing units. This did not begin to satisfy the
needs. Migrant labor, as most of it was in defense plants, no mat-
ter how eligible for housing, had to make do. Men, women, and
families were compelled to squeeze into second-class apartments
and drab rooms in ancient boarding houses. It was World War I
on the home front all over again.
Clusters of trailers, unsightly and frequently flimsy contrap-
tions, mushroomed on the fringes of such booming areas as Nor-
folk, with its huge shipbuilding yard and Navy base; San Diego,
with its Navy installations and aircraft factories; and Detroit,
producer of tanks and other heavy vehicles as well as airplanes.
The demand for trailers was so great that they became black-
market items. Their value soared until a worker, flush with over-
time pay, was happy to put several thousand dollars down and
sign a note for hundreds more. It did not even seem to matter
much that the trailer might have already been used, the beds
"warm" and dirty dishes still cluttering the sink.
One contractor conceived the notion of a "canvas camp"
almost as bad as its uninviting nom de plume. This settlement,
which consisted of two- or three-room units of plywood construc-
tion set on concrete piers, in place of cellar, with flat, tar-shingle
roofs, was located next to a magnesium plant. The workers,
many of whom had been placing their doormats before tents and
trucks, were happy to pay three thousand dollars apiece for these
112 In the Urgency of War
drafty, tinderlike contrivances. Although these "houses" could
last only three or four years without warping and probably col-
lapsing, their main drawback was that the speculator had located
this newly formed community downwind from the plant. When
there was any breeze at all, it seemed to the residents that they
were only short gasps away from asphyxiation by chlorine gas.
"Pref abs" came into their own, more durable than some of the
jerry-built wartime housing but generally eyesores in their own
right. Occupants preferred to think of them as "demountables"
optimistically implying they could be "demounted" and
burned after the war.
It was a tribute to local health officials that no serious epidem-
ics ran amok in these plywood and canvas "jungles" and trailer
parks. Sanitation left much to be desired; sometimes it was al-
most nonexistent. And the inadequacies of the workers' homes
helped keep the poolrooms, saloons, and brothels in nearby com-
munities playing almost around the clock to capacity crowds.
The most successful emergency housing was adapted from
Army barracks architecture, which was, if nothing else, a long-
proven blueprint. On the hard Tennessee soil Army engineers
created almost overnight the state's fifth largest city Oak
Ridge where lived the seventy-eight thousand who called the
hush-hush Manhattan Project their own as they pioneered the
infinitely complex atomic bomb. Far from resembling barracks,
some of the houses were built of imitation stone, and placed in
landscaped surroundings at angles that interrupted the monotony
of mathematically straight patterns. This imaginative warborn
community was obviously tailored, as well, for peacetime.
There was, however, discord on the home front far worse than
housing bottlenecks, priority imbroglios, shortage of critical ma-
terials, or Washington's perennial personality collisions. Cer-
tainly among the most shameful and deplorable blots was the race
rioting that occurred during the steaming summer of 1943.
On a hot Sunday afternoon, June twentieth, in Detroit, a
Negro and a white started to fight. Such an incident was not un-
usual in this industrial city where former sharecroppers from the
Da the Urgency of War 113
South, attracted by high wage rates, had swollen the population
to two million. Neither black nor white was prepared for the de-
gree of overcrowding that this massive migration of workers
forced upon the community. This fact had been underscored
bloodily enough the previous year when soldiers were summoned
to quell a riot in the city's Sojourner Truth Housing project.
The personal tussle spread quickly beyond all proportion or
reason to mass fighting in the streets and alleys. A policeman
who tried to intervene was knocked down, disarmed, and shot six
times with his own revolver. In a few hours, the teeming north
and east sides of town were rocked by a full-grown riot. It did
not abate that night or with the dawning of Monday.
On Tuesday martial law was declared by Governor Harry
Kelly. Steel-helmeted troops from Fort Custer with fixed bayo-
nets and tear-gas shells in their belts took command of the strick-
en, battered city.
Twenty-five Negroes and nine whites were dead many of
them from police or state troopers' bullets. Hundreds were in-
jured. Five hundred were arrested, of whom more than one hun-
dred would stand trial
The United States had not witnessed so serious a race riot
since World War I. It was matched in virulent intensity only
by the Civil War's draft riots.
Beaumont, Texas, was already under martial law at this time.
Rioting had broken out on June sixteenth, following the alleged
rape of a white woman by a Negro shipyard worker. Much dam-
age had been done to person and property by the time the au-
thorities ascertained that the woman had not really been as-
saulted after all.
Mobile, Alabama, was shaken by a "hate" strike as it was
properly labeled. In Marianne, Florida, a Negro murder suspect
was hauled from jail and lynched. In Chester, Pennsylvania, five
Negro worker-demonstrators were shot and wounded by overly
apprehensive shipyard guards.
In early August five were killed and four hundred wounded in
Harlem in a riot touched off by complaints over exorbitant rents
114 In the Urgency of War
and inadequate housing. Before state guardsmen marched in and
a curfew was proclaimed by Mayor La Guardia, five million dol-
lars in damage was done.
Racial overtones were also evident in the civil strife triggered
by the zoot-suiters of Los Angeles. These were predominantly
Mexican youths, with some Negro disciples, between the ages of
sixteen and twenty. They wore absurdly long coats with padded
shoulders, porkpie hats completed by a feather in back, watch
chains so long they almost touched the ground, and peg-top
trousers tapering to narrow cuffs.
The zoot-suiters were undoubtedly the most preposterous of
all who defied law and order. At best, as one pundit observed,
they were "not characterized primarily by intellect." They
formed themselves into bands with flamboyant names: the "Ma-
teo Bombers," "Main Street Zooters," 'The Calif a," "Sleepy La-
gooners," "The Black Legion," and many more.
Their targets for physical harm were members of the armed
forces, with a special predilection for sailors. The latter fought
back with devastating spirit The situation quickly deteriorated
to the point that the Navy declared Los Angeles temporarily out
of bounds. The city council outlawed the wearing of zoot suits
for the duration and the city simmered down.
There was much difference of opinion on what caused the
summer's bloodshed on the home front. Explanations ranged
from professional analysis of a sociological nature to blunt asser-
tions that Nazi agents and far rightists were the instigators. The
riots did have some positive effects. National and local councils
were formed to study and, if possible, prevent future outbreaks.
Governors, mayors, ministers, civic leaders, and much of the
press and radio assumed an active lead in more than a hundred
groups organized overnight. The largest of these was the Ameri-
can Council on Race Relations, established in Chicago.
Whether or not the so-called seditionists, many of whom came
from the Great Lakes area, had directly or indirectly incited the
riots, the Justice Department in 1944 made a determined effort
to send twenty-six American fascists and extremists to jail. In-
dicted on formal charges of sedition were a motley lot that in-
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT LIBRARY
Prime Minister Winston Churchill addressing Congress on Decem-
ber 26, 1941. With memories of Pearl Harbor still vivid, Churchill's
words brought some encouragement to a nation not yet quite ready
for war.
Right, firemen hose down the French luxury liner Nor-
mandie, in flames at the Forty-Second Street pier in
Manhattan. The fire broke out on February 9, 1942, just
two days before she was scheduled to go into wartime
service.
U.S. INFORMATION AGENCY
Carole Lombard and Clark Gable photographed together when their engage-
ment was announced in 1939. Miss Lombard met her death in an airplane
crash in January 1942, en route to Hollywood from a war bond rally in In-
dianapolis.
Right, the Nonnandie lies capsized on the North River's
mud bottom after the fire.
U.S. COAST GUARD
U.S. ARMY
Fears of "enemy aliens," generated in large measure by wartime
hysteria, reached a climax in mid-February 1942. More than
100,000 niseis Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast
were forced to leave their homes, jobs, and businesses, and move to
relocation centers farther inland. Here the evacuees assemble in San
Francisco for their assigned destinations.
Right above, a little boy waves good-bye just before
setting out for his resettlement camp. Right, Aerial
view of a Japanese relocation center near Parker, Ari-
zona. Japanese-Americans lived here under martial
law> guarded by American troops.
U.S. ARMY
ARMY
U.S. ARMY
Left, efforts were made to prepare the civilian popu-
lation for a possible enemy gas attack. The masks these
civilian defense students are using date from World
War I.
TENN. CONSERVATION DEPT,
Sergeant Alvin C. York, World War I hero (shown here gesturing
with his hand) headed the Fentrns County, Tennessee, Selective
Service Board. If a draftee appealed his case, York and his fellow
board members would often discuss the matter with the man on his
own front porch.
Left, with FDR and other officials assembled to watch
the drawing, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, blind-
folded, prepares to draw the name of the first Selec-
tive Service draftee on October 29, 1940.
VITAL WAR INDUSTRIES MARKED FOR DESTRUCTION
BY GERMAN HK3H COMMAND
FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
In two separate landings, one in Florida, the other on Long Island,
a small group of enemy agents entered the United States in June
1942. They planned to sabotage strategic industrial centers. Eight of
these agents were quickly captured; six received the death sentence
in a trial from which the press was excluded.
uso
On February 21, 1943, this USO troupe posed before boarding a
Pan-American Clipper for Europe. They are, standing in the back
row, Tamara (Swann), a Russian-born singer; Yvette (Elsa Har-
ris), vocalist; Roy Rognan and Lorraine Rognan, who made up a
comedy dance team; and, seated, Jane Fr&man, popular singer;
Gypsy Markoff, accordionist; and Grace Drysdale t puppeteer. The
next day, the airplane crashed in the River Tagus, Lisbon, killing
Tamara, who made famous "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes "'and Roy
Rognan. Miss Froman and Miss Markoff were seriously injured.
FORD MOTOR COMPANY
Wartime demands for planes, tanks, and other materiel created a
r\eed for additional production plants and manpower thus virtually
ending the unemployment problem of the 1930's. Above, Ford's
much-publicized Willow Run bomber plant is shown. Below,
women work at jobs formerly reserved for men.
DOUGLAS AIRCRAFT COMPANY
Parades along Main Street took place throughout the war. But they
lacked the enthusiasm and patriotic fervor of the Liberty Loan
marchers in 1917-18. Below, Henry L Kaiser, Sr., introduced new
techniques and methods to speed the building of Liberty ships and
other vessels. He is shown here with his wife, Bess, addressing Kaiser
shipyard workers in 1944.
OWI
Railroads were the keystone of
the transportation system, but
despite the addition of new roll-
ing stock, they never fully re-
covered from the depression of
the 1930's. Transportation of
troops and essential supplies
received priority and travelers
like these in Pennsylvania
Station, New York City,
learned to accept long delays.
Eleanor Roosevelt's appoint-
ment of Mayris Chaney, the
dancer, to head the children's
division of a physical-fitness
program aroused opposition
from some members of Con-
gress. Below, Mrs. Roosevelt
with Mayris Chaney Martin
at the 1960 Democratic Con-
vention in Los Angeles.
RANDOLPH FISHER STUDIO
BOYS ACTIVITIES
SOtttMEW
U.S. ARMY
Scrap metal drives, frequently organized by local Boy Scouts, were
a familiar sight in cities and towns throughout the land. Old license
plates, worn-out bicycles, and other metal objects eventually found
their way into the nation's war machinery. Below, college campuses
across the country assumed a new look even before the passage of
the first veterans' G.I. bill. These young men in naval unifonn are
students at Rice Institute, Houston, Texas.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT LIBRARY
This photograph, taken March 29, 1945, in Washington, D.C., is
probably the last of FDR. Two weeks later he was dead.
CEHIinCATE OF DEATH
uefKausn OP PUBLIC HEALTH
County file KG.:
7QL
<) > , Tien- ?ork
(&* A. **
PrnkUn 3elno Roosevelt
a. S3k!L__JUlll
P.rk.
M.***,.. President of United 5tUa
| ;_ &
. *+***_. Hiram A
cxinruo oe7
Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945. The
death certificate notes a cerebral hemorrhage as the primary cause
of death with arteriosclerosis as a contributory cause.
U.S. ARMY
Men in uniform, a federal windshield sticker prominently displayed
on every motor vehicle, ration stamps to buy gasoline, tires, sugar,
shoes, meat, and coffee were everyday reminders that the nation was
at war. Here is King Street, Charleston, South Carolina, several
months before V^J Day.
In the Urgency of War 115
eluded among others William Dudley Pelley, sporting a Van
Dyke beard and the uniform of his militantly anti-Semitic Silver
Shirt Legion; George Deatherage, West Virginia sponsor of the
Knights of the White CameHia;*the Reverend Gerald B. Winrod,
publisher of the viciously racist magazine Defender; Lawrence
Dennis, Harvard graduate, "outspoken follower of Hitler", and
publisher of the 'Weekly Foreign Letter"; Joseph E. McWil-
liams, one of the youngest and probably the handsomest of the
defendants, chief proconsul of the Christian Mobilizers, who re-
ferred to President Roosevelt as "the Jew King"; Elizabeth Dil-
ling, enthusiastic participant at the 1938 Nuremberg Nazi Party
Congress, who caused incalculable damage to some broadcasters
with her book The Red Network; Ellis O. Jones, hailed by his co-
horts for a poem, "Beware the Wily Jew," which might have
been penned by Joseph Goebbels himself; Gerald L. K. Smith, of
the America First party; James True, publisher and distributor of
hate literature who sought to "return the United States from a
Talmudic dictatorship to the original Republican form of gov-
ernment," agreeing with the other seditionists that "the present
war was planned and started by Jewish influence") and Lois de
Lafayette Washburn, a fragile, birdlike lady from Chicago who
founded the National Liberty party, enjoyed giving Nazi salutes
in public, and frequently lashed out at photographers* cameras
with her umbrella.
The trial, as Attorney General Biddle observed, "turned into a
concentrated effort to wear out Judge [Edward C.] Eicber." It
lasted from April to November 30, 1944, when the Washington
jurist, exhausted, dropped dead. The dreary, frustrating episode
thus ended in an anticlimactic mistrial.
A rather large number of spies and peddlers of hate literature
were not so successful in escaping the net cast by Biddle's depart-
ment and other governmental agencies which put snooping and
eavesdropping on a mass scientific basis.
The Canadian-Austrian Grace Buchanan-Dineen, for exam-
ple, went to prison for attempting to funnel Willow Run produc-
tion figures to Germany. The attractive twenty-four-year-old
admirer of the Nazis, who sometimes tagged herself baroness and
116 In the Urgency of War
admitted she was "a sort of Mata Hari," had committed the un-
pardonable professional blunder of using a code so obvious that
a smart schoolboy could have broken it in an evening.
Far more bizarre was the case of fifty-year-old Mrs. Velvalee
Dickinson who managed a doll and doll-repair shop in New
York City. The diminutive, gray-blonde was charged with violat-
ing the censorship laws by attempting to convey to the Japanese,
via a South American go-between, information of naval and
convoy operations.
Her first letter came into the hands of the FBI through a curi-
ous circumstance. She had given as a return address on the enve-
lope the name of a San Francisco woman, picked at random
from the phone book. It had been returned from Buenos Aires
marked "Addressee Unknown," after Velvalee carelessly misad-
dressed it
When the San Francisco woman disclaimed any knowledge of
the contents, Federal agents stepped into the case. A significant
phrase, "Siamese Temple Dancer,'* finally was decoded to mean
"aircraft carrier warship," and referred to Navy sailings out of
San Diego. It was subsequently concluded that "doll" itself was
used for any warship.
Mrs. Dickinson's own spitefulness caused her discovery and
arrest. A second returned letter and then a third found their way
into the hands of the censor and then to FBI laboratories. The
return address on the last letter was that of a woman with whom
Mrs. Dickinson had once quarreled over some dolls. The
woman whose name was maliciously used told the agents that she
could think of no one who would have done such a thing other
than Mrs. Dickinson.
The colorful if traitorous "doll spy" as she came to be known,
was arrested in New York. Her defense, that she was carrying on
the espionage work of her late husband, failed to melt the judge's
heart who sentenced her to ten years' imprisonment after a
tongue-ladling on betrayal of one's country. 1
1 She was released from the Women's Reformatory, Alderson, West
Virginia, in April 1951. Since her periodical reporting under the proba-
tion laws was completed three years later, nothing has been heard of
her.
ID the Urgency of War 117
Biddle rounded out his campaign against rot by causing ninety-
five 'Vermin" newspapers, organs of anti-Semitic, anti-Negro,
and other race-hatred groups, to cease publication. A ninety-
sixth, Father Coughlin's Social Justice, stopped publication vol-
untarily after the Attorney General branded it "seditious." The
demagogic reign from the Shrine of the Little Rower at Royal
Oak, Michigan, thus ended. Its demise was brought about not
through legal machinery but by a firm word from the radio
priest's superior, Archbishop Francis Mooney of Detroit, a good
friend of Roosevelt's.
The Government also had to combat dissent on the industrial
front. When continuing labor disputes culminated in the seizure
by the United States of Montgomery Ward in April 1944, Board
Chairman Sewell Avery refused to relinquish the company helm.
The seventy-one-year-old industrialist was a director of a num-
ber of giant corporations, including U. S. Steel and had never
hidden his animosity toward Franklin Roosevelt.
Now Avery went out of his way to precipitate a showdown be-
tween his personal and corporate power and that of the President
of the United States.
Late on the evening of April twenty-sixth, Attorney General
Biddle was ordered to fly to Chicago and take control of Mont-
gomery Ward by force if necessary. At ten o'clock the next
morning Biddle, accompanied by half a dozen helmeted soldiers,
arrived in the board chairman's office.
Sewell Avery, as the Attorney General was to recall, "seemed
to be pretty mad when we told him he had to go. He looked at
me and snapped, "You New Dealer!" To Avery this was obvi-
ously the vilest epithet he could hurl at a human being. Then he
accused the government of "interfering.*'
When Biddle rejoined, "we are not interfering, we are being
interfered with," the mail-order house's chief executive balked
with yet more defiance. "I am the boss. I will not move from this
chair," he snapped. ". . . to hell with the Government!"
Biddle was "deeply shocked." He turned to the troops, who
seemed rather taken aback themselves, and ordered, 'Take htm
out!"
And so the soldiers picked up Sewell Avery still seated in his
118 In the Urgency of War
chair and carried him out of his office into history. The lone pho-
tographer waiting on West Chicago Avenue that cool, early
spring morning captured a unique moment of vanishing, un-
savory Americana. After Avery was deposited by the soldiers be-
fore a "No Parking" sign, as Biddle was to note, the industrialist
"bowed to the crowd, smiled frostily 5 ' and stepped into his wait-
ing limousine.
Poles apart politically from Sewell Avery, but no less irascible
and of more persistent vexation to the government was John L.
Lewis. The face of this bushy-browed, scowling son of a Welsh
miner became all but synonymous with strikes. He led his United
Mine Workers union out on strike in defiance of the mine own-
ers, of the steel industry, which was the major user of coal, and
of the Federal Government. Even before the war began, he had
incurred the everlasting enmity of Franklin Roosevelt when a
mounting series of annoyances as measured by the Chief Ex-
ecutiveculminated in Lewis calling a strike, only days before
the Pearl Harbor attack.
In early 1943 "unofficial" walkouts of the majority of the
Pennsylvania miners compelled the President, as Commander in
Chief, to order all miners to "return at once to their jobs of pro-
ducing vitally needed coal for their country." By June half a mil-
lion of the nation's coal miners were out of the shafts, dissatis-
fied with the new contracts offered them. Even Hany Bridges,
'the fiery, left-wing longshoremen's union president joined the
stone throwers. He denounced Lewis as a "traitor" and "agent of
the fascist powers."
Lewis held his ground in spite of repeated Presidential orders
and entreaties, interspersed with threats to induct the miners into
the Army. Damned as a Benedict Arnold, he fought back, allud-
ing to the "countless" other strikes disrupting war production,
which he branded "shocking in their essential triviality." Bellig-
erently he placed the blame at the White House's door, charging
that "Roosevelt kicked every coal miner in the face."
The Government had to seize the coal mines, just as it had
Montgomery Ward. They were put under the control of Secre-
tary of the Interior Ickes who ultimately worked out a wage in-
In the Urgency of War 119
crease with Lewis of approximately $12.00 a week over the pre-
vailing $45.50. It was not much by other unions' standards.
Management's record of obduracy and greed was as "shock-
ing" as Lewis had said. There was featherbedding and pyramid-
ing in virtually all large industries. The unconscionable grew fat
at the taxpayer's expense. In the name of the war effort, waste,
acquisitiveness, and indolence flourished as barnacles on the keel
of a long-moored ship.
From the start of the war until V-J Day, strikes, especially un-
sanctioned wildcat strikes, became consuming weed patches.
Employees stayed off the job for varied reasons, not invariably
plausible: wages, hours, and overtime, shifts (day, evening, or
on "graveyard")* because they did not like a supervisor, or did
like a fellow employee who had been dismissed, or even because
the man or woman working nearby was Asian (as on the West
Coast) or Negro (as in Philadelphia and Detroit, among other
places).
In March 1942 both William Green, president of the AFL,
and Philip Murray, his counterpart in the CIO, had gone before
the House Naval Affairs Committee to promise "no strikes." "I
say to you," Green announced eloquently, "that I publicly dis-
avow strikes of any kind by an AF of L union for the duration!"
And Murray had seconded, "For the first time in the history of
our government labor has voluntarily yielded its right to strike,"
Management had already promised Roosevelt, prior to the
establishment of the War Labor Board, that there would be no
lockouts, and, like labofs representatives, agreed to mediation
and arbitration of all disputes. The wrangle over the closed shop,
however, which remained as unsettled as before, was tabled until
the end of the war.
But how could Green or Murray or individual heads of great
corporations promise a moratorium in labor disputes with so
many unions, so many laborers, and so many individual and lo-
cal problems and ramifications? A no-strike pledge was unrealis-
tic in its very essence, wholly impossible of execution no matter
how sincere those who promised.
The automobile and aircraft industries won the unenviable
120 In the Urgency of War
distinction of being those most likely to strike. Willow Run hap-
pened to be half on strike at the time of the sanguinary Detroit
riots. That city earned its reputation as the "strike capital of the
world," but its workers were far from alone.
By late December 1943 it appeared so inevitable that the na-
tion's railroads were going to shut down that President Roosevelt
ordered their nationalization. Management had reached an im-
passe with fifteen nonoperating unions, representing more than
one million employees.
An agreement was attained in three weeks, providing for a
nine cents an hour pay increase plus vacations. The roads were
managed during this brief period by their own executives, who
had been given temporary commissions in the Army and were
thus theoretically under the command of Secretary of War Stim-
son. The officers quickly shed their newly issued uniforms and
were civilians again in name and in fact once agreement was
reached.
Strikes in the plants of railroad suppliers, however, continued
to crop up. The Birmingham plant of the Pullman-Standard
Company and the Berwyck, Pennsylvania, shops of the Ameri-
can Car and Foundry Corporation were but two such examples.
Southwest truckers accomplished what their railroad competitors
had been planning before the Government stepped in. They
turned the keys in thousands of ignitions and refused to unlock
them until their demands were met Freight piled up mountain-
ously in Atlanta after a transfer company disgustedly went out
of business. It felt that it could not break the long deadlock in
negotiations.
Sawmills in the Northwest shut down because the lumberjacks
had shinnied down the trees and would not go aloft again until
wages soared in the same skyward direction. The workers in the
Akron rubber and Boston leather industries were infected by the
strike epidemic. The steel workers also struck, not in concert, but
piecemeal on a mill-by-mill basis.
Telephone operators in many cities decided they would not
complete calls until they obtained more pay, and if possible,
In the Urgency of War 121
shorter hours. Radio also was sideswiped in the national running
battle between employers and unions. Stations in the Midwest
sang the blues while the musicians' union picketed their front
doors and their transmitters.
Vice-President Wallace muddied the waters further when he
urged labor, with all the diplomacy of a Sherman tank, to battle
"reactionary" employers. He accused management, which he ap-
parently envisioned as a small army of Sewell Averys, of waging
"sit-down strikes against progress."
But the Federal pendulum swung both ways. Labor was in-
censed occasionally by the arrest of union leaders by the Depart-
ment of Justice for allegedly encouraging slowdowns or flaunting
no-strike pledges.
Men in uniform had a difficult time understanding labor's
strikes on the home front. In 1944 the crew of the carrier USS
Coos Bay collected "pennies for strikers." Then, with a bitter
note, the Navy men mailed the proceeds exactly $412 to the
strikebound Lockland, Ohio, plant of Wright Aeronautical
To keep some unions happy, Government subcontractors
were compelled to hire lavish numbers of workers and workers'
apprentices for the most fundamental of jobs. (The author still
pales at the memory of the shipyard workers who swarmed over
his Liberty freighters whenever they docked in an American port;
they would set up bars for liquor in momentarily empty
cabins; one man to screw in a new light bulb, another to watch,
so many painters "working" in a single foVsle that they were
literally slopping paint over one another, inexperienced welders
flaring their torches into ammunition lockers or gasoline pipes
. . . boasting without shame or restraint that they hoped, "TV
goddamned war will last forever!")
By the late summer of 1945, strikes, walkouts, sit-downs, and
lockouts were averaging close to seven hundred a month and
idling approximately one million workers. Since December 7,
1941, through V-J Day, the appalling total of 36,333,333 man
days had been irretrievably lost squandered at a time of cru-
cial national need. Looking at it another way, the waste was as if
122 In the Urgency of War
nearly twenty-seven thousand workers were absent from their
jobs on any given day during the conflict. It was hardly a statistic
in which anyone could take pride.
In keeping with the general disorder, accidents soared both in
industry and in the home. According to the Department of
Labor, there were nearly 7,000,000 casualties in industry during
the war. In the two-year period after Pearl Harbor, 37,600 per-
sons were killed "on the job," or 7,500 more than those who died
in military service during the same number of months. Fatalities
averaged about 17,000 a year throughout the war.
Approximately 250,000 workers, male and female, with the
former predominating, were disabled for life through accidents
on the job; 4,500,000 were temporarily disabled. It was a record
of personal carelessness and lax group supervision which had
been augured appropriately by the burning of the Normandie.
On the other hand, there was nothing new in individual be-
havior, corporate or union. The Averys had always been and
acted like Averys. Lewis had fought for his coal miners for years
prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Walkouts and lockouts had
been scars across the face of American production for decades.
Race had clashed with race since history started.
The drama and the press of war only accentuated stridently
what already existed. If there suddenly seemed much to deplore
and more, if possible, to rectify, this had always been so.
Government officials were intimately aware of all these facets
even if they were not necessarily able to control or ever "catego-
rize" them in traditional bureaucratic fashion. The WPB, how-
ever, turned to an authority on industrial and human relations,
Thomas North Whitehead of the Harvard Graduate School of
Business Administration. The professor, son of the British phi-
losopher Alfred North Whitehead, was asked to tour the nation
and find out how Americans were reacting to the war. He re-
ported, early in 1943, to the WPB:
"M y most vivid impression of the wide divergence between a
certain lack of public confidence within each district or city, as
contrasted with the high standard of individual responsibility
In the Urgency of War 123
shown by most of the people composing these communities. . . .
"I found very few people whose thinking was not profoundly
affected by the war. The universality of the anxieties .... is
itself evidence of this. From Colorado to Maine the war has
come home to the 'man on the street/ in the sense that he be-
lieves the times to be critical for his nation and for his way of life
and he sincerely wishes his own conduct, and that of his fellow
citizens, to measure up to the occasion .... the good temper
and common sense of most people under restrictions and vexa-
tions was really impressive. . . .
"I particularly noticed the substantial number of men and
women who were good-naturedly undertaking some seemingly
useless unpaid duty or submitting to what appeared to them to be
an unnecessary restriction from a desire to maintain a spirit of
cooperation."
Dr. Whitehead was impressed by the meticulous observance of
dimout by the farmers of Gray, Maine, an agricultural inland
area, even though shipyards to the east stabbed the coastal dark-
ness nightly with "many hundred thousand candlepower." He
summed up: "My own observation is that most people are behav-
ing like patriotic, loyal citizens and that, almost without excep-
tion, they all wish to do so [but] ... it is a matter of common
knowledge that the war effort is being impeded to some extent by
strikes, high labor turnover, slow work, hoarding, black market
practices, luxury buying and similar types of behavior.
"But the capacity of most people to rise above their local cir-
cumstances and public opinion is always limited; and when I
have personally witnessed indifferent or poor behavior it has usu-
ally seemed to me that the people involved were placed in cir-
cumstances which, in their thinking, did not make sense or at
least did not correspond with the demands being made of them."
The professor, in this hitherto unpublished report, felt that
"the intentions or attitudes" of Americans were "above all doubt
or question." For the coming months of the war, he suggested
that "more visible authority be given to local government organi-
zations," to the end that communities would not feel that their
124 In the Urgency of War
own destinies and the outcome of the war were wholly and arbi-
trarily directed by an amorphous, remote, and semicredible co-
lossus in Washington.
And so, for better or worse, with spectacular achievement
leavened by a measure of disruption and failure, the ponderous
and often fantastic war effort ground ahead on the home front.
CHAPTER 9
The Entertainers
NEVER BEFORE had the world of greasepaint been dedicated on
such a wholesale or enthusiastic basis to the fighting man even
to following him almost into his foxhole and never before had
so many actors and actresses, whether in uniform or entertain-
ing, become casualties as in World War n.
They not only kept supplying the ammunition of morale, but
they conveyed by their very presence the feeling of home with all
of its warmth and nostalgia.
This moving of the substance of the home front overseas, as it
were, knew no precedent* Nearly a century earlier Union troops
were served exceedingly somber diversion during the tedium of
the Civil War largely ladled out in basso profundo by a swarm
of evangelists and other preachers who doggedly followed the
armies. They harangued the troops as long as they could find
even a token audience.
Wartime entertainment was improved considerably by 1917.
The petite singer Elsie Janis brought pleasure and a fleeting
memory of Main Street to the AEF cantonments in France.
Grade Fields performed the same role for British Tommies. Sir
Hany Lauder burfd his way through Scotch ballads yet closer to
the front line. Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Mary Boland,
Mary Miles Minter, Charlie Chaplin, and other Hollywood ao-
tors and actresses, along with the composers Irving Berlin and
George M. Cohan, toured American metropolis and whistle stop
125
126 The Entertainers
alike to put Liberty Loan drives "over the top." Cohan's "Over
There!" became inseparably identified with World War I.
Mass amusement for soldiers was born in that global conflict,
sparked by a Commission on Training Camp Activities which
went to work in 1917. Song leaders sloshed through the mud of
sprawling overnight camps such as "Yip-Yip" Yaphank, New
York; Devens, Massachusetts; Dix, in New Jersey; and Sherman,
Ohio, to encourage group singing. Bands were informally
slapped together on the rookies' mere admission that they could
play an instrument. Some "bands" mushroomed into four hun-
dred and five hundred pieces drowning out with their awesome
volume and discord not only the chorus of voices but all adjacent
sounds, including gunfire on the rifle and artillery ranges.
Overseas the story was somewhat different. Although bellow-
ing "Mademoiselle from Armentifcres" from sidewalk cafes
might be entirely de rigueur in Paris or Bordeaux, it was quite an-
other matter on the Western Front, where the enemy was listen-
ing with devastating acuity for the least sound across No Man's
Land. However, General "Black Jack" Pershing, whose own
musical taste was limited to the band marches and bugle calls
standard to old cavalrymen, conceded that subdued singing in
small groups might be the prescription for homesick members of
the AER This was permitted in replacement centers along east-
ern and southern France, including the Lorraine front, and even
in the secondary or reserve system of trenches, dugouts, and
farmhouse billets close to the front
The haphazard fife-and-drum corps of 1776 and the make-do
bands of the Civil War had become relics of history by 1919
when the War Department, with its penchant for "formalizing"
and "implementing," reduced the whole affair to a circular num-
bered specifically 48-L.
This military Magna Carta for morale read: "Both instru-
mental and vocal music should contribute substantially to the en-
joyment of the soldiers. Properly used, it can serve as a most
effective stimulus to enthusiastic, patriotic service. Every post,
camp, and station should have a first-class band and in addition
The Entertainers 127
orchestras, glee clubs, and quartets- There should be a definite
provision for mass singing under competent leadership, concerts,
and various forms of musical entertainment. Singing on marches
and in leisure-time groups will be encouraged/'
During the 1920's, the problem of entertaining the troops
faded. Disarmament became as fevered an addiction as "pre-
paredness parades" had once been. The Army shrank to a size
even less formidable than that of the police force of greater New
York City. The Navy, albeit protesting, scrapped many of its
capital ships. During the four-year Administration of Herbert
Hoover, a Quaker and pacifist, matters of defense received even
lower priorities.
By the late thirties, however, the nation slowly began to
rearm, and the rejuvenating military services again needed diver-
sion. A few months before Pearl Harbor, the Army and Navy,
while remaining as far apart as ever on coordinating plans and
operations, proved they could harmonize when it came to fun.
A music committee of a Joint Army and Navy Committee on
Welfare and Recreation joined hands with civilian groups to pro-
vide assistance in procuring entertainment for America's awak-
ening service camps and centers. This was the germ of the
Army's Special Services.
At about the same time another medium of soldier entertain-
ment was born: the United Service Organizations. It grew out of
an initial meeting between Paul V. McNutt, then head of the
Federal Security Agency, his top military leaders, and President
Roosevelt.
"I want these private organizations to handle the onleave rec-
reation of the men in the armed forces," Roosevelt explained.
"The Government should put up the buildings and some com-
mon name should appear outside, but the names of the agencies
must not appear on the outside of the buildings."
The founding groups included the Young Men's Christian As-
sociation, the National Catholic Community Service, the Na-
tional Jewish Welfare Board, the Young Women's Christian As-
sociation, and the Salvation Army. The American Red Cross,
128 The Entertainers
not a participant, chose to continue to provide independently its
own brand of service to the troops.
USO operations zoomed in the United States until soon more
than three thousand clubs were throbbing as heavy-footed sol-
diers and sailors went through the Lindy Hop, Big Apple, Jitter-
bug, and the Swing. These tribal-like gyrations were introduced
speedily to nearly a hundred USO clubs in thirty-five foreign
countries, where they competed with such native contributions as
the Lambeth Walk and the Hokey-Pokey.
The first production of the traveling shows "hit the road'* be-
fore Pearl Harbor: a full-length revue by Stan Laurel and Oliver
Hardy. The comedians took their cast of sixty-five, including
singer Benay Venuta, to Army and Navy outposts still being
hammered together in the Caribbean.
To the corpulent "Babe** Hardy, every plane trip was a per-
sonal purgatory above and beyond the call of duty. Not only did
he have a mortal fear of flying, he could not fit his amplitude into
the confines of an airplane seat. Standing up during the war, he
covered literally thousands of airborne miles.
The pair's popularity with the Government was dimmed some-
what upon their return when they filmed The Air Raid Wardens.
The OCD had become too thin-skinned to guffaw at its own
lampooning.
USO's sturdy production supervisor, Bert Wishnew, already
experienced in show business, sent an almost endless stream of
performers overseas following the Laurel and Hardy tour. Surely
no one possessed heart so cold as to "say no to the USO."
The stars volunteered their services while the armed forces
were happy enough to supply transportation, lodging, and food.
And there was no dearth of talent. An organization known as the
Hollywood Victory Committee the principal wartime bureau
for state entertainment recruited nearly four thousand players
for almost fifty thousand appearances at home and far away.
Among those who rode the overseas circuit were such head-
liners as singers Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, dancers Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers, actors Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy
Cagney. Joan Crawford, Linda Darnell, Marlene Dietrich, Jinx
Hie Entertainers 129
Falkenberg, and Rita Hayworth also helped keep the boys' minds
off the war. Aging Al Jolson traveled the world over, as did
Enrol Flynn, Spencer Tracy, and the man who immortalized
Frankenstein, Boris Karloff- Keenan Wynn tore up a season's
personal production plans to volunteer, and suave Adolphe Men-
jou spent a solid six months in the camps and foxholes of North
Africa.
They swung into their acts, arranged by themselves, under
atrocious theatrical conditions: stages might be in jungle clear-
ings, where acoustics were nonexistent and lighting was poor, or
on the tail gates of trucks or slightly built-up jeeps.
Show people turned up in the most unlikely places. The front-
trotting Bob Hope, for example, took his comedian assistant,
Jerry Colonna, and a pretty brunette singer, Frances Langford,
even to the Army's Aleutian outpost on Unimak Island. Travels
such as this inspired the sentry quip, "Don't shoot. It might be
Bob Hope!"
When Hope returned from this junket, he received a letter
from the Army commander: "You may tell Miss Langford that
she was the first white woman to set foot on Unimak Island and
that my men now call her Virginia Dare Langford."
Ann Sheridan completed, with disarming facility and agility, a
sixty-thousand-mile tour of the China-Burma-Indk theater. In-
terviewed upon her return, the "oomph" girl told about the
difficulties of keeping glamorous on that rugged, remote front
line. She wore, she reported, "little summer dresses, midriff
style .... but nothing stays crisp and clean in that climate.
Our clothes mildewed and fell apart"
Although glamour may have been ephemeral in the CBI cir-
cuit, it was more enduring in the continental United States. Ann
Sheridan's worshipers manifested every conceivable excess.
Women filed divorce actions, citing her as corespondent, even
though their husbands had never enjoyed anything more carnal
than a pinup acquaintanceship. Of those who tried to establish a
closer liaison the most ingenious was the swain who dashed
through a crowd to handcuff himself to her, then swallowed the
key.
130 The Entertainers
Paulette Goddard, every bit as sexy in her own lithe fashion,
followed Miss Sheridan over the same primitive Asian circuit.
Like her fellow actress, she poked into remote, lofty frontiers of
the world never before visited by white women. Pilots, who
called this former protegee of Charlie Chaplin "Madame Cheese-
cake," drew lots for the honor of flying her "over the Hump."
One of the aviators who lost crashed during his next flight,
on which she otherwise would have embarked. "Dead-end kid,"
purred General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, "because she rode to the
end of our line."
Miss Goddard, experiencing the same deterrents to glamour as
her predecessor, Ann Sheridan, told of how she washed her un-
derwear in steel helmets, using weak tea as the most suitable and
sterile liquid.
The Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence completing a tour of
the South Pacific, a journey of some twenty-five thousand miles,
returned home to remark with undiminished wonder on the rain
"which comes down sideways." The English actress had enter-
tained the Tommies of World War L
What she did not accomplish by personal tours, Betty Grable
more than compensated for in the worldwide distribution of her
famous pinup picture. Foe seized upon them as well as friend. In -
1943, she was voted (by Motion Picture Herald) the leading box-
office star, displacing Abbott and Costello. The same year she
caused global sighs of frustration by marrying the bandleader,
Hany James and inspiring the parody: "I want a girl, just like
the girl who married Harry James. . . !"
Lanny Ross, former "Camel Caravan" leader on radio, took
his show of entertainers to New Guinea and Guadalcanal. He re-
ported upon his return that the troops in that Southwest Pacific
zone were especially warm toward Negro musicians and to hymn
singing.
At home, screen entertainment was more diverse than ever.
Subject matter was scattered all the way from Gorilla Man and
Eagle Squadron to such musicals as The Road to Morocco,
Broadway Rhythm, and Girl Crazy.
The "hiss-and-boo" pictures slunk out from under their stones
The Entertainers 131
where they had been gathering slime since 1918, led perhaps by
Hitler, Beast of Berlin. There had been one similarly entitled
during World War I, only the name of the beast being changed to
put the Kaiser in star billing. Others included "Hitler's Gang,"
"Hitler's Children; 9 "Diary of a Nazi," "Hangmen Also Die,"
and a Walt Disney tour de force, "Der Fuehrer's Face," with a
ditty that became almost as popular as "Roll Out the Barrel" and
"Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition."
Some camp shows proved inappropriate for their audiences.
Katharine Cornell's heavy, pensive The Barretts of Wimpole
Street was perhaps the worst advised. The dramatic star herself
overheard this comment after a London performance while two
baffled GI's trudged back through the blackout: "Well, I guess it
was better than going to a whore house, anyhow."
Despite the notorious bad language of the G.I.'s, show direc-
tors found that the servicemen were rather prudish as to mass en-
tertainment. Off-color jokes or even slightly "dirty" acts did not
go over. The stage humor which scored immensely was typified
by the following story which Bing Crosby repeated all over the
European theater of operations.
It concerned a second lieutenant who nervously asked a sen-
try, "Did General Eisenhower arrive yet?" and was told, "No,
sir."
Ten minutes later, the worried shavetail again asked the same
question, and the sentry again repeated, "No, sir."
This exchange continued for almost an hour. When the su-
preme commander finally alighted from his car, he was eagerly
questioned by the sentry, "Are you General Eisenhower, sir?"
To which the amiable Ike replied, "I am."
Then, mopping his brow, the sentry observed: "Boy, are you
going to catch hell, sir. There's a second lieutenant here been
looking for you for hours!"
Many of the stars put on uniforms for the duration. Among
the more than four thousand associated with the motion-picture
industry who went on active duty were the cowboy star Gene
Autry; Richard Barthelmess of silent picture fame; Douglas
Fairbanks, Jr., who started in Navy public relations and ended
132 The Entertainers
up in derring-do against the German Navy off the coast of Cor-
sica (appropriately enough since his last picture was The Cor-
sican) ; Clark Gable, who flew several missions over Germany as
an Air Force cameraman, a challenge for a man nearly forty;
and Raymond Massey who was invalided out of the Canadian
Army after serving eight months as a major. He had been
wounded in World War I with the Royal Canadian Artillery.
Burgess Meredith and Gene Raymond were commissioned as
captains and Jimmy Stewart as a major in the Air Force, while
Jackie Coogan, as a glider pilot, landed the first load of glider
troops behind enemy lines in Burma.
Heroes from the world of sports were also in demand. The
USO often received such requests from the Army as, "Send six
name ball players for a cold climate!" The destination in this
case was Alaska, where temperatures did not pamper pitching
arms.
Dozens of ball players and coaches toured the camps in the
United States and overseas, among them disputatious Leo Duro-
cher (ruled 4-F by the draft board), Fred Fitzsimmons, Frankie
Fritsch, Harry Heilman, Carl HubbeH, Dutch Leonard, Whitey
Lewis, slugger Stan Musial, Joe Medwick, Steve O'Neill, Mel
Ott, and Al Schacht. In uniform were ball-diamond faces fa-
miliar to any boy who had ever matched flip cards: Mickey
Cochrane, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Mickey Harris, Joe Di
Maggie, Phil Rizzuto, "Red" Ruffing, Dan Topping, Ted
Williams enough talent to win any number of pennants.
Football's Tommy Harmon, an aH-American halfback at the
University of Michigan in 1939-40, led a charmed career with
the Air Force. In April of 1943 he survived a treetop parachute
jump into the jungles of Dutch Guiana and nearly a week of
wandering through headhunter country. Later that same year his
P-38 was winged after he had shot down two Zeroes over China.
This time Harmon was fugitive for thirty-two days before Chi-
nese guerrillas rescued him.
Pugilists were heavily represented. Ring champions, including
Joe Louis and Billy Conn, occasionally doffed Army attire to
give exhibitions. Barney Ross, as a Marine corporal, kffled
The Entertainers 133
twenty-two Japs on a single night at Guadalcanal. When his rifle
clicked empty he hurled hand grenades, the only American sur-
vivor of a Marine detachment
The price for entertainment, whether the performers were in
or out of uniform, could be high. The grim precedent was set on
the first day of the war when the entire band of the U.S.S. Ari-
zona perished during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The USO listed a total of thirty-seven performers who died
overseas from air crashes, vehicle accidents, drowning, and even
from one fatal case of pneumonia (on shipboard).
A little more than a year after our entry into the war, on Feb-
ruary 22, 1943, the world lost the little Russian-born singer who
had become identified with "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and
"Love for Sale/' Tamara (Swann) died along with twenty-two
others when a Pan American Clipper, from New York, carrying
forty persons, crashed in the Tagus River, Lisbon. Tamara was
one of a USO troupe which included Jane Froman. Seriously in-
jured, facing operation after operation, the thirty-two-year-old
radio singer later married her rescuer, the plane's first officer,
John Curtis Brun.
Also critically hurt in this disaster was the popular accordion-
ist, Gypsy Markoff, who remembers watching in disbelief during
what presumably was a routine landing: "Part of the plane's wing
pointing and going down, down into darkness like a dark black
pool or pit .... next thing I recall I was under water. . . ."
Not so fortunate was Roy Rognan, of the comedy dance team
of Lorraine and Rognan. While his partner-wife survived, the
master of the soft-shoe technique and the pratfall was lost,
though he was probably the best swimmer on board.
Four months later, one of the distinguished actors of the twen-
tieth century was returning to London after several weeks in
Spain and Portugal. Leslie Howard, fifty-year-old star of The
Petrified Forest, Of Human Bondage, and many other dramatic
vehicles, had successfully promoted British documentary films
before groups of Spanish theater officials, then had delayed his
departure three days to attend the Lisbon premiere of his latest,
The First of Few.
134 The Entertainers
Howard, born Leslie Stainer and wounded in World War I
while serving with the Northamptonshire Yeomanry, typified
British culture and gentility. Since the outbreak of war, he had
been a frequent visitor to American service clubs, troop enter-
tainments, and benefits.
At nine thirty on the morning of June first, he boarded a com-
mercial British DC-3 transport at Lisbon's international airport,
accompanied by his business secretary (known in England as a
chartered accountant), Alfred Chenhalls. The portly associate of
the actor bore a passing resemblance to Winston Churchill who at
the time was working his way homeward from a tour of Malta
and other Mediterranean bastions.
Minutes later, Lisbon air control intercepted a message from
the pilot of Howard's airliner, then over the choppy waters of the
Bay of Biscay: "We are being attacked by several enemy planes!"
Then silence. Nothing more was heard or seen of the twin-
engined aircraft or its sixteen occupants. The presence of an
eleven-year-old girl and her two-year-old sister amongst those
who perished underscored the waste of it all.
The assumption persisted that one of the many Nazi agents in
Lisbon mistook Chenhalls for the British Prime Minister and
flashed the word to Luftwaffe squadrons based in "neutral"
Spain. Despite determined postwar efforts to establish this the-
ory, including interviews with German pilots themselves, the
motive for the wanton attack on an unarmed passenger plane a
type hitherto respected by all belligerents has remained a mys-
tery. The aviators could recall only their orders to shoot down
the DC-3. Sir Winston himself in postwar reminiscences leaned
to the mistaken identity theory.
Mystery also shrouded the death in 1944 of another widely
acclaimed entertainer: Major Glenn Miller, thirty-six, who had
been commissioned in the Air Force in 1942. After conducting a
concert over BBC on December 12, 1944, the popular orchestra
leader packed his suitcase for Paris. He would present a Christ-
mas show there, before returning for a similar engagement in
London.
On a chill evening, December fifteenth, Major Miller stepped
The Entertainers 135
inside the small cockpit of a single-engined liaison plane at an
Air Force base and repair depot near Abbotsripton, west of
Cambridge in the Midlands. The pilot, Flight Officer John R.S.
Morgan, obtained his "go-ahead!" and lost no time in taking the
aircraft, designated as a UC-64A, up off the runway and into
winter night. All of Huntingdonshire was cloaked with fog that
night, so thick it was a marvel that any plane could be aloft.
Nothing was ever heard of Glenn Miller or the light military
plane again. It did not crash in the British Isles or in France;
otherwise, wreckage would have been found. The assumption re-
mained that the aircraft fell or was shot down over the English
Channel or the North Sea but no concrete evidence was ever
turned up to support this hypothesis.
Another entertainer to die in uniform, whose appeal was to
quite another age group, was Lee Berrian Powell, the Lone
Ranger of radio and movies. The thirty-five-year-old Powell, a
former circus performer, was killed on Tinian in July 1944, after
two years of fighting on South Pacific islands as a Marine ser-
geant.
And the war's greatest mass tragedy involving civilian enter-
tainers occurred when the nine members of a USO "sporting
show/' all wrestlers, were killed shortly after the liberation of the
Philippines when their transport plane slammed into a mountain
peak.
Journeying afield was but one of the many ways in which the
acting profession contributed to the prosecution of the war. For
example, George Murphy (who with Gary Grant missed the ill-
fated Pan American Clipper flight to Lisbon by minutes when
they were placed on another plane) was one of a number of
actors who advised the armed services on training films. This
type of visual education was an important factor in reducing the
training period of American fighting men to about one third that
of German soldiers or sailors. The dancing star, even so, was
averaging almost five pictures a year.
Andy Devine, the fat, drawling comedian, whose hobby was
skeet shooting, proved an invaluable consultant on films dealing
with antiaircraft gunnery.
136 The Entertainers
At one time or another, most Hollywood, Broadway, or radio
celebrities auctioned off something personal to aid the Treasury
Department or organizations such as the USO. The items put on
the block ranged from parlor bric-a-brac to the lace panties of
actresses who, like Clara Bow of an earlier decade, possessed the
indefinable quality of "it," or sex appeal.
Cash records were broken when Jack Benny sacrificed his
seventy-five dollar imitation Amati violin, "Old Love in Bloom,"
to a War Bond rally in Gimbel's department store in New York
City. It brought a million dollars.
And like so many others, the stars also donated their blood.
One noteworthy exception to this as to many other general
rules was Tallulah Bankhead, who said no to Red Cross volun-
teers in the most patriotic way imaginable; professing she was,
"So damned anemic my blood would kill a good American sol-
dier. I told them that Td give them quarts of the stuff if they
could put it into the right place: into Japanese soldiers. That
would be more effective than a tank!"
CHAPTER 10
The Best-Kept Secret
CERTAIN EVENTS of World War n or events related to it in vari-
ous ways were to be etched with especially deep shading on
American memories. After the burning of the Normandie, these
included the fall of the Philippines, especially the heartbreak and
the cruelty of Corregidor and Bataan; the invasion of North
Africa, in November 1942; the Cocoanut Grove night club fire
in Boston later the same month (claiming nearly five hundred
lives) ; the invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944; the Battle of the
Bulge in December of the same year. However, a bulletin that
flashed out of a small Southern community, Warm Springs, Geor-
gia, on an April evening in 1945 provided for many people the
deepest personal shock of the war. Although but a single life was
involved, the event was an omega in its own right before the war's
actual climax.
"ROOSEVELT DEAD!" cried the nation's press in the big-
gest, blackest headlines. "Second coming" type, the printers
called the boldface, multipoint streamers. The only President
ever to be elected for four terms had succumbed, from a "mas-
sive cerebral hemorrhage'* at exactly 3:35 P.M. Thursday, April
twelfth, in the "Little White House," at Warm Springs.
The unbelievable, to the minds of the great majority of Ameri-
cans, had happened.
To supporters and opponents alike, the big man from Hyde
Park with patriarchal mien and reassuring smile symbolized the
137
138 The Best-Kept Secret
American Government. An heroic casting of his likeness might
not inappropriately have replaced that of Freedom atop the
dome of die United States Capitol.
A generation of children had known no other Chief Execu-
tive. After thirteen years in office, his tended to be a father's
image. That some people considered him evil was just part of the
picture of Roosevelt, the severe father. At times it seemed as if
some of his Congressional whipping boys had developed maso-
chistic traits.
But obviously the unbeatable candidate was loved, admired,
and regarded with awe much more than he was hated, or he
would not have been returned again and again to office. Citizens
wept at the news of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death.
Pictures reproduced of the President at Yalta in February had
revealed a thin, pale, haggard man, immensely weary from the
mountainous burdens he had been shouldering. Yet most Ameri-
cans, Britons and citizens of other allied nations could not imag-
ine having another leader. Hlogically enough, in spite of the
evidence, all too many felt his leadership would continue forever.
As Senator Hemy M. Jackson of Washington told the author
in 1965, "Since Roosevelt was crippled, we just got used to him
not looking entirely welL We expected him to go on and on. If
there were a tremor in his hands, which there had been for quite
some time, and if he looked drawn and gaunt, as indeed he did
from D-Day on, well, we discounted it. We didn't expect him to
appear in the bloom of health, as someone with full physical
faculties.
"His mind was clear as a bell, alert, right up to the end as far
as I know, and that's what also was deceptive as to the true state
of his health."
Only a few of the White House staff members and high-placed
visitors were aware during the last months of the President's life
how close he was to death. With the possible exceptions of the
Normandy invasion plans and the atomic bomb project, the
health of the Commander in Chief of the United States was the
best-kept secret of the war.
When Roosevelt took the first oath of office, in 1933, he was a
The Best-Kept Secret 139
sturdy, relatively youthful appearing man of fifty-two, in spite of
the permanent paralysis of his legs from poliomyelitis. Physically
he remained so throughout his first term. Toward the end of his
second term, he commenced to age. He put on weight; his jowls
sagged; he developed deep bags under his eyes; his hair grayed
and thinned. He began to snap at correspondents more often
than ever before.
In his third term, after the outbreak of war, he lashed out at
one correspondent with a fury not directed at the Fourth Estate
since General Sherman sought, during the Atlanta campaign, to
hang a New York Herald reporter. He presented an Iron Cross
to John O'Donnell, of the New York Daily News.
Roosevelt had never liked the Daily News nor its Chicago
cousin, the Tribune. The feeling was mutual. O'DonnelTs story
which had triggered this insult and mortification presenting an
enemy medal, even though it ranked in Germany on a level with
the Congressional Medal of Honor, the Victoria Cross, and the
Croix de Guerre was inconsequential. It was merely the latest
of a long list of irritations to strain Roosevelt's measure of ex-
hausted patience.
In the offending article, O'Donnell & veteran, able, and re-
spected Washington correspondent of conservative views had
complained of the overbearing censorship he believed to exist in
the Australia-New Guinea theater. In frustration, O'Donnell
had reported, the newsmen were turning to flutes and piccolos,
"Just to keep their fingers nimble for the time when censorship
lets them beat the keys of their portable typewriters just to turn
out a tell-all story."
The New York Daily News writer, "amazed and bewildered**
at the Chief Executive's body blow, asserted his remarks were
merely "facetious." Roosevelt, however, was obviously not
amused.
The President, tired and testy, had been plagued by sinus
trouble for most of his adult life. The heat and humidity of Wash-
ington had done nothing to help. Vice Admiral Ross T. Mclh-
tire, the White House physician and chief of the Navy's Bureau
of Medicine and Surgery, spent much time puncturing the
140 The Best-Kept Secret
sinuses, hoping to bring relief . Courage and stoicism bore Roose-
velt through many painful bouts under this minor surgery. But
he never seemed entirely free of sinus infection or of recurrent
headaches.
Although Roosevelt was not a well man in 1944, he was as de-
termined to run for the Presidency as he had been in 1940. In
that year he had confided to Eleanor Roosevelt his grave doubts
as to the existence of others qualified for the White House. His
stubbornness and feeling of indispensability again came to
the forefront The joy of political combat once more helped
Roosevelt forget his exhaustion from piloting a nation through
long years of domestic and international turmoil.
Prior to the campaign, as he was to recall in his memoirs, Dr.
Mclntire wondered whether Roosevelt could "stand up under the
strain of four more years." He believed after further reflection
that the Chief Executive was "organically sound,** and decided
therefore that he was up to the challenge.
William Hassett, the Presidential press secretary, was certain,
on the other hand, that Roosevelt was far from well. His clothes
hung on him. His face was lined and gray. Hassett, in his diary,
recalled a conversation in the summer of 1944 with Basil O'Con-
nor, longtime friend and once the law partner of Roosevelt
O'Connor, then chairman of the National Foundation for Infan-
tile Paralysis, observed of the President, "There is no help for
him."
In August, before the campaign for reelection, Breckinridge
Long wrote after visiting the White House, "I was stunned to see
him. He must have lost 50-60 pounds and aged years since I saw
him close up. It was a shock to me to realize he had spent so
much in physical resource."
At the end of an unusually stiff and formal meeting, Long
continued, u . . . his face at first was inscrutable. Then, I smiled.
He smiled, we shook hands and he said, *Mr. Long,' nothing
else. As far as my recollection goes, it is the only time in my
memory he has called me anything but *Breck.' " Long came
away convinced that "there seemed to be a deteriorating of his
whole physical condition.'*
The Best-Kept Secret 141
Just before the election, Dr. Mclntire examined his patient.
On November first, the White House physician issued another of
his periodic communiqu6s. It concluded that although Roosevelt
was tired and underweight, his general condition was "good
... for a man of his age." Declaring that the pulse and blood
pressure of the sixty-two-year-old President was "normal," Dr.
Mclntire reemphasized that Roosevelt was "organically sound."
But this heartening report did not tell the whole story.
In January 1943, unannounced, the President had been
driven to the resplendent stone skyscraper, just west of Washing-
ton, known as the Navy Medical Center. It was in a class with
the Army's nearby Walter Reed Medical Center, the Rockefeller
Institute, Johns Hopkins, the Mayo Clinic, and a few other medi-
cal centers and research institutes. There the President was given
an extremely thorough checkup, on the orders of Dr. Mclntire,
worried about his patient's sinus, headaches, and recurrent stom-
ach distress.
A young heart specialist, Lieutenant Commander Howard C.
Bruenn, of the Navy Medical Corps Reserve, who conducted the
examination, came up with a disquieting conclusion.
"The President was suffering from congestive heart failure,"
Bruenn revealed in an interview in 1965 with the author.
Congestive heart failure, associated primarily with those in
their middle or later years, is generally brought on by chronic
hypertension or by an actual heart attack. While the pressure
usually rises in the pulmonary artery, the congested heart is
nonetheless unable to pump enough blood to supply the needs of
any part of the body, including the brain.
Very often attendant is arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the
arteries, edema, or congestion in the lungs and, conceivably, a
swelling in any or several of the limbs of the body, the ankles or
wrists, for example. According to doctors at the National Heart
Institute, congestive heart failure tends to be a chronic or contin-
uing condition.
One immediate result of the finding was to add Dr. Bruenn as
a regular member of the White House medical staff. During the
next month, February, and continuing into March, Roosevelt
142 The Best-Kept Secret
canceled appointments and at least one speaking engagement.
"Beginning of a head cold," then "intestinal disturbance" were
the explanations given to the press. The news media reported the
information in one- and two-paragraph stories, invariably buried
in back pages with the truss ads and the benefit-supper an-
nouncements.
In October and then in December of 1943, the President had
a "cold" which forced cancellation of appointments and engage-
ments. If staff members and friends other than Bill Hassett were
concerned, they did not show it. Time and again they averred
"the Boss" would "bounce back."
Roosevelt's heart condition persisted. It was relatively un-
changed on June 9, 1944, when Dr. Mclntire announced that
the Chief Executive's health was "excellent in all respects. He is
in better physical condition than the average man his age."
The White House physician's statement was manifestly at vari-
ance with the facts.
A cardiac notwithstanding, Roosevelt polished off Thomas E.
Dewey almost as effortlessly as he had Wendell Willkie. He won
432 electoral votes against his Republican adversary's 99. While
the campaign was an unusually quiet one, Roosevelt took the
New York governor's occasional thrusts personally. They "got
his Dutch up," Hassett observed.
Dewey*s patriotism denied him the use of potential dynamite.
General George C. Marshall himself had implored the Republi-
can candidate not to mention f orewarnings possessed in Washing-
ton, late in 1941, of the impending Japanese attack. To do so,
asserted the chief of staff, would have revealed our breaking of
the Japanese diplomatic code.
"I had heard reports of President Roosevelt's ill health,"
Dewey has written the author. "They were largely second-hand
and I had no direct confirmation. In any event it did not appear
to me appropriate for me to discuss the subject as his political
opponent"
The President rested but little after his victorious campaign,
one which his eldest son James frankly labeled 'Tather's death
warrant." And Walter Lippmann wrote later that Truman was
The Best-Kept Secret 143
nominated, "By a convention which was fully aware that it was
almost certainly choosing a President of the United States. There
was no secret about this during the campaign."
In fact, with true fighter's spirit, Roosevelt had even driven in
an open car through a cold rain in the closing hours of the cam-
paign just to show New Yorkers how sturdy he was.
He rested little afterward. He boarded his Executive Pullman
for Carver Cottage, his summer home near Pine Mountain,
Warm Springs, to continue his custom of sharing Thanksgiving
turkey with his "neighbors/' Then he made a fast tour of South-
ern military bases, returning to the White House in mid-
December long enough to preside at whirlwind conferences with
lawmakers and the Allied chiefs of staff. Next he hurried north
for Christmas at Hyde Park.
Roosevelt, still not sparing himself, was "tired and weary,"
Bill Hassett confided to his diary "I fear for his health despite
assurances from the doctors he is o.k."
"I was distressed to note his [Roosevelt's] appearance,"
Green Hackworth, a prominent State Department attorney, has
informed the author. "This I regarded as a natural result of the
strain to which he had been subjected by the war and the attend-
ant international situation. It never occurred to me to consider
whether he might or might not continue to serve a fourth term."
On January 20, 1945, Roosevelt took the oath of office on the
South Portico of the White House. Senator A.S. Mike Monroney,
then a young Representative from Oklahoma, recalls waiting on
the south lawn of the White House for the ceremonies. He had
heard that Roosevelt was feeling especially badly, causing a de-
lay in the ceremony.
When he did appear, the fourth-term Chief Executive declared
in the shortest inaugural address in history, less than six hundred
words: "We must live as men, not as ostriches, nor as dogs in the
manger."
His hand shook so much that he almost dropped the paper on
which his remarks were typed. But no reporters printed this dis-
turbing intelligence.
His feebleness already was apparent from his signature. It had
144 The Best-Kept Secret
become an embarrassment to ask him to autograph a portrait
He lit his chain of cigarettes with ever-increasing difficulty but
waved away offers of a light.
Reporters who realized what was happening looked the other
way. This was not, however, an isolated "conspiracy of silence,"
according to radio commentator EL R. Baukhage. Rather, he ob-
served, 'Voluntary censorship" of war news already had resulted
in "the greatest conspiracy of silence in the history of journal-
ism." Not reporting news had become a reflexive act by 1945.
Besides, many of those who saw the President frequently had no
inkling of the true state of his health.
*The men," Baukhage told the author, "who saw the President
twice a week at the news conferences or when he was traveling
didn't hardly notice the gradual change.
"I recall that I missed a couple of weeks on consecutive out-of-
town assignments and when I came back took my favorite stance
against the wall far around to the left so that I could watch the
President closely for his gestures meant a lot. I noticed a change.
But when I spoke to the men who had been seeing him regularly
none of them said he looked much worse. It would never have
occurred to me to mention it any more than to repeat what I
knew wasn't to be repeated after a briefing at G~2. Every Presi-
dent I ever covered, including Kennedy and excluding Coolidge,
from Wilson on, aged tremendously in office. In Roosevelt's case
we knew the war-time burdens he was carrying and I guess we
felt they were somewhat greater than our greatest the volun-
tary censorship. Also, regardless of our politics, human decency
may have played some role."
Dr. Mclntire issued another medical report immediately after
the inauguration: <e Everything's fine. He went through the cam-
paign in fine shape and right on through the following months.
He's had no colds this winter and we all feel good about that.
He's carrying a thunder of a lot of work and getting away with it
in grand style."
Others felt differently. Merriman Smith, United Press corre-
spondent, and others covering the White House were surprised to
observe that die United States Secret Service, shortly after the
The Best-Kept Secret 145
fourth inaugural, and apparently on their own initiative, had
established a security guard around Vice-President Truman,
nearly the size of the President's. Even during the war years, the
notion had persisted from a policing standpoint that a Vice-
President was not a high priority target for assassins.
There could have been only one reason for the increased
guard around Harry Truman. The Secret Service had grave
doubts as to the President's life expectancy.
Immediately after the inauguration, Frances Perkins, who had
taken no stock in what she labeled the "whispering campaign"
about the President's health, belatedly noticed his "thin" face,
"gray" pallor, "dull" eyes, all manifesting a "sense of enormous
fatigue." The Secretary of Labor thought Roosevelt reacted at
his initial cabinet meeting as a fourth-term President as if he
were an invalid, who was allowed visitors for the first time and
then was worn out by their tarrying much too long. His hand
shook so that she was hesitant to grasp it in saying goodbye.
Mrs. Roosevelt herself later wrote that at this time "he was far
from well." Even so, the President did not favor himself. He de-
parted within a few days for the Yalta Conference, commencing
February third.
James Byrnes, as War Mobilization Director, was in the offi-
cial party. He was concerned over the President's "general ap-
pearance," wondered why Roosevelt allowed his mouth to droop
open. Mrs. Anna Boettiger, Roosevelt's only daughter, also ac-
companying her father on the long, arduous journey, explained
his sinuses were acting up again and that he could breathe better
through his mouth. This, of course, was long known to be a man-
nerism of heart sufferers.
While the President was at Yalta, discussing with Stalin the
entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan, rumors
arose out of the Vatican Foreign Secretariat in Rome that
Roosevelt was cutting short the meeting and preparing to return
to Washington for reasons of health. The White House "spokes-
man" quickly countered, "All the information we have and every
indication is that President Roosevelt is in excellent health."
Dr. Mclntire was unusually sensitive at Yalta over the Presi-
146 The Best-Kept Secret
dential appearance. He believed the photographers were no
longer "uniformly kind and thoughtful" in posing the President,
"They shot him from every angle and seemed to prefer the pic-
tures that caught him with his mouth open or stooped forward, 5 *
the physician later wrote.
Lord Moran, ChurchilTs personal physician, wrote in his
memoirs, published in 1966, that when he saw Roosevelt at
Yalta, the President appeared so sick that it seemed certain that
he had but "a few months" more of life. The same English doctor
also recalled receiving a letter from Dr. Roger Lee, of Boston,
former president of the American Medical Association, noting
that Roosevelt had experienced "heart failure" in midsummer
1944.
Homeward bound on the USS Quincy, Roosevelt sat on deck
drenched in the Atlantic sunshine for hour after hour. He was
gray and thin tragically reminiscent of Wilson after Versailles.
The President, wrote Merriman Smith, one of the three press
syndicate correspondents aboard, had "aged ten years in ten
days."
The death at sea of Major General Edwin M. ("Pa") Watson,
military aide and close friend, further depressed the President.
Judge Samuel Rosenman, presidential speech writer and another
good friend of Roosevelt* s, was certain the momentous confer-
ence had sapped a "substantial" part of Roosevelt's "remaining
reserves of strength." He had difficulty persuading the Chief
Executive to settle down to immediate business, preparing his re-
port to Congress on the disastrous meeting with Stalin.
All who saw Roosevelt upon his return agreed, as Truman put
it, that he was "plainly a very sick man." The Missourian experi-
enced "a hollow feeling within me," when he looked at the Presi-
dent
Eleanor Roosevelt was surprised at her husband's new custom
of resting in the middle of the day. She found that he was "less
and less wining to see people for any length of time," adding that
"it was clearer every day that Franklin was far from well."
Grace Tully, his secretary, noted the "signs of weariness" were
etched deeply in the President's thinning face. His "normal zest"
Hie Best-Kept Secret 147
for scanning the mountains of morning mail was completely
gone.
When he spoke on Thursday, March first, before a joint ses-
sion of Congress, the Chief Executive himself hinted for the first
time at his mortal weariness. He apologized for being seated
while delivering the address, a rare pose for a man who always
had made a point of standing before audiences, explaining that
he constantly carried "about ten pounds of steel" (his braces) on
his legs. He insisted, however, that the fourteen-hundred mile
journey had left him "refreshed."
It was apparent to those who watched and listened to the ad*
dress that the President was far from "refreshed." Attorney Gen-
eral Biddle, who shook hands with him, was "shocked," observ-
ing that "he had aged a good deal and his hands were cold."
But the President kept going. He either believed he possessed
more reserves of strength than was the case, or hoped there was
yet time to cram in his final lines in the vast drama of war. He
told his staff he wished to attend the opening of the United Na-
tions in San Francisco, then go to London in response to a long-
standing invitation from Churchill. And the President hoped to
come home from Britain the long way around, via the Pacific
war zone.
Dr. Mclntire protested. He reminded the President that he was
"run down," underweight, and had been coughing more heavily
than normal What he needed, declared the White House physi-
cian, was a "real rest," in Warm Springs.
The Chief Executive seemed amenable. He promised to be a
"good patient." However, he could not rest yet. On that timing
he was adamant.
March ticked on. Roosevelt labored at his desk unremittingly.
Basil O'Connor, popping in one breakfast time, looked his
friend up and down with appraising eye, then warned, "Unless
you go away for 90 days and do absolutely nothing there's a
good chance you're not going to be around . . . when the war
is over." That was when Roosevelt would be most needed,
O'Connor added.
On March seventeenth, close friends were invited to a small
148 The Best-Kept Secret
White House dinner to celebrate the Roosevelts' wedding anni-
versary, their fortieth.
A few days later, the President suffered what was described as
another intestinal disturbance. Again, it evoked no special public
attention. Admitting to no organic ailment at this time, Dr. Mc-
Intire would recall that his patient's pulse was "steady," his blood
pressure generally normal and as a bonus there was an apparent
lack of arteriosclerosis. (After death, however, quite the opposite
condition was noted: Roosevelt's arteries were found to be hard
and brittle.)
On March twenty-third, the Chief Executive left Washington
for a week in Hyde Park, with its usual social distractions and
all too close communications with the Government as well as
representatives of the press and radio.
He returned six days later, on March twenty-ninth, to spend
only the day in Washington before reboarding his train for
Warm Springs. But, characteristically, the Commander in Chief
squeezed many appointments into these short hours, starting with
"Jimmy 9 * Byrnes who found the President "unusually nervous."
The South Carolinian, who was about to resign his War Mobili-
zation post, had brought with him General Lucius Clay, the
prospective military governor of Germany.
When Byrnes asked day after the meeting why he had been
so silent, the general replied he was so "shocked" at the Presi-
dent's appearance that he found himself almost speechless. "A
dangerously ill man,'* was Clay's estimate.
Grace Tully, that last, frantic day in the White House, thought
Roosevelt looked so badly that she "almost burst into tears."
And especially dramatic was the reaction of Prime Minister
Mackenzie King of Canada who was so appalled at the sight of
the man before him that "instinctively" he leaned forward and
kissed his old friend (as Biddle has recalled to the author) .
As the afternoon moved on, Cordell Hull arrived to add his
urgings that the President "take more rest." Roosevelt admitted
to his Secretary of State that he was not feeling well and added
that he was especially troubled by recurrent nausea. He at-
tributed the discomfiture to the old sinus infection.
The Best-Kept Secret 149
Hull, unwell himself, came away from this final call with the
impression that Roosevelt "looked like death."
Robert Sherwood had to huny to the Union Station that
Thursday evening to say good-bye before the Presidential train
rolled south. Deeply upset, Sherwood returned home to tell his
wife, 'The President .... in much worse shape than I had
ever seen hfrn before .... he seemed unnaturally quiet and
even querulous/*
At long last, the President apparently did want rest. He asked
Michael F. Reilly, head of the Secret Service detail, to instruct
the engineer of his train not to "set any speed records . . . .
tell him to take it easy."
The next day at the Waim Springs depot, Roosevelt was
helped off the car by "Mike" Reilly who knew something was
wrong. The President was "heavy .... absolutely a dead
weight" He did not or could not assist himself with his powerful
aims and shoulders as he usually did.
However, "the Boss," as he had so many times after illnesses
during his long Presidency, appeared to be "snapping back" in
the next twelve days. Simply being in Warm Springs had the
magically medicinal effect upon F.DJR. that oxygen has for
asthma sufferers. He relaxed and joked with his associates in
familiar obbligato.
He saw visitors including President Osmena of the Philippines
and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Neither
had reason to conclude other than that the President of the
United States was again on the road to recovery.
On Wednesday afternoon, April eleventh, Roosevelt went
riding with Grace Tully and others in the hills around Warm
Springs. She remembered that his conversation included "an
unusual amount of reminiscing about his earlier life: trips, peo-
ple, foods that appealed to him."
That evening, the President telephoned Anna Boettiger in
Washington to inquire about the health of her five-year-old son
Johnny, who had been ill. His grandfather was very pleased to
learn that the boy was on the mend.
Anna noted that her f athef s voice was "strong." He was, as
150 Hie Best-Kept Secret
she had known him most of her life, "full of fun and quips."
Thursday, Dr. Bruenn called Dr. Mclntire in Washington to
report that their primary patient had gained eight pounds since
his arrival. He felt generally fit and was looking forward to at-
tending a barbecue that afternoon. He should, added the heart
specialist, be back in the White House in a week to pick up the
traces where he had wearily dropped them. Everything looked
"good."
The same morning, Hassett found "the Boss" in "good spirits,**
even though he continued to look badly. He complained of a
"light" headache. The press secretary left the President with a
batch of letters and documents to sign.
While he was tending to this official business, a Russian-born
artist, Madame Elizabeth Shoumatoff , was working on a water-
color portrait of him. First she had draped a blue Navy cape over
his shoulders.
Presently he looked up and said to Madame Shoumatoff,
"We've got just 15 minutes more."
Margaret Suckley, a cousin of the President's, also in the
room, was disturbed a few minutes later when he raised his left
hand to his head and then let it fall, in a loose motion. She be-
lieved perhaps he had dropped his cigarette.
When she stepped to his side to ask him if this had happened,
he leaned forward, his eyes closed.
*1 have a terrific headache," he told his cousin. Then he
slumped over. These were his last words.
No medical skin could bring Franklin Roosevelt back. Sud-
denly, one of history's most dynamic, influential and controver-
sial Chief Executives had died. Now there would be tears, reflec-
tions, some brickbats, as well as a salting of recriminations.
1 shall always," wrote Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michi-
gan, Republican power in Congress, "f eel that Admiral Ross
Mclntire* his physician, carries a great responsibility for ever
having allowed him to run a fourth time."
Vandenberg, however, had struck out at merely one of the
factors concerned with the President's demise. The surgeon's
optimistic bulletins, which he must have known were false or, at
Hie Best-Kept Secret 151
the very best, misleading, left the public unprepared for the
abruptness of Roosevelt' s death. But there was also the Presi-
dent's own stubbornness, his preoccupation with destiny, his
consuming sense of indispensability, and the willingness of the
Democratic party to allow its famous standard bearer to remain
in harness.
The Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery has no records of
examinations of President Roosevelt or concerning him in any
respect. This seems surprising in the light of his examination in
January 1943 by Dr. Bruenn. Since Dr. Mclntire was also head
of the Bureau, the only assumption is that he held the reports
himself. There is nothing, however, of this medical nature in the
Surgeon General's papers at Hyde Park.
More than a decade after her husband's demise, Mrs. Roose-
velt must herself have experienced lingering questions. la 1956
she inquired at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery about
records, according to notations still on file. There was nothing
even at that time the Surgeon General was able to give the Presi-
dent's widow.
Long after the patient's death, the clinical privacy of the best-
kept secret remained as inviolate as ever.
CHAPTER 11
Day of Judgment
WARS DO END, even though they may seem interminable in their
darkest hours.
That fateful spring and summer of 1945, World War BE finally
burned itself out In its last flaming gasps, however, the cost in
human life was as extravagant as ever, even reaching to the
lesser canvas of the home front*
Lakeview, Oregon, a small community ten miles north of the
California border, felt a measure of war's sting on Saturday, May
fifth, just three days prior to V-E Day. On that date, the Rev-
erend Archie Mitchell, pastor of the Lakeview Christian Church,
and his wife Elsie, twenty-six, took five children from their Sun-
day School on a picnic-fishing party in a wooded area of Lake
County known as Salt Springs. Mrs. Mitchell unloaded the car at
the recreation spot while the children, ranging in age from eleven
to fourteen, spread out cloths, paper plates, sandwich boxes, and
thermoses.
One of the youngsters, Joan Patzke, wandering a short dis-
tance from the others, stumbled on something she had never seen
before. She called out that she had found ". . , a strange white
object looking like a balloon!"
Barely forty feet away, still parking his car, the Reverend
Mitchell shouted, "Let it alone!" His instant concern stemmed
from rumors of strange balloon bombs the Japanese were said to
have launched into the prevailing air currents toward the North
American continent.
152
Day of Judgment 153
Mitchell had barely stepped from the car when the bomb ex-
ploded. Mrs. Mitchell and the five children died instantly from
the shattering concussion. Her husband was unscathed.
The newspapers reported obliquely that "an explosion of un-
announced cause" had brought the terrible tragedy to five fami-
lies of Lakeview. Not until a month later, with the end of the war
with Japan nearing, did the War Department lift official secrecy
on one of the weirdest weapons of the entire war: the Japanese
balloon bombs. More than 9,000 of these paraffined rice-paper
devices, inflated with hydrogen to thirty-three feet in diameter,
were wafted at altitudes of more than thirty-thousand feet across
the Pacific. First launched in November 1944, prevailing winds
drove them eastward at a rate of nearly 120 miles an hour, for a
crossing of from three and a half to four and a half days. Ap-
proximately 230 of them were actually found in Alaska, along
the Pacific coast from Washington to Mexico, and as far east as
Michigan. Fragments of 75 others were identified. Each balloon
carried five bombs: four incendiaries and a thirty-three-pound
anti-personnel fragmentation (such as killed the picnickers).
Their mission was to set fire to forests and cities, and spread
terror among the populace. Fortunately, there were no droughts
during the winter of 1944-45.
The Air Force sent planes to shoot the balloons down and
actually did overtake and destroy a few. A sheriff popped one
with tracer bullets from a heavy caliber rifle, while a farmer
managed to pry another loose from a barbed-wire fence without
exploding it and turned it over to the FBI. Quite a few were seen
to burst in the air, while one fell on a power line, disrupting serv-
ice for several hours. Yet another plopped in a river at twilight
and sank in view of a number of startled lovers on the banks.
Local health officers, agricultural experts, and even 4-H Club
children were alerted. Decontamination would be necessaiy
should the balloons cany bacteriological bombs to infect cattle
and livestock.
In demanding complete secrecy and censorship of all reports
of the Japanese balloons, the Armed Forces rationalized that it
would be better to risk the loss of some lives than to allow the
154 Day of Judgment
enemy to know that any of the bombs reached their sprawling
target area. The policy paid off. General Sueki Kusaba, in charge
of the unorthodox aerial assault, admitted after the war that the
project was canceled in April 1945, because confirmation was
obtained of only one balloon landing on the American continent.
Ten per cent hits had been predicted.
"Your balloons are not reaching America," he was told by his
superiors. "Americans could not keep their mouths closed this
long!"
(HI luck, however, continued to dog the Reverend Archie
Mitchell. Marrying Betty Patzke, the older sister of two of the
children lost in the blast, he went to Viet Nam as a missionary to
lepers. In 1962 he was captured by Viet Cong raiders and is be-
lieved to be still a prisoner.)
A more devastating and dramatic approximation of war's fury
was sampled a few weeks later on a foggy Saturday morning in
downtown Manhattan eighty stories above the street. That July
twenty-eighth, Stan Lomax, WOR sports announcer, was driving
along Fifth Avenue, noting idly that the upper floors of the Em-
pire State Building were wreathed in mist when: "I heard the roar
of the plane's engines, looked up and then I knew it would crash.
Its course was straight down Fifth Avenue it struck with a
crash like thunder in a nightmare .... the entire floor where
it hit burst into the same golden blinding flame as the plane had
done. It was all like a hideous dream. . . ."
An hour previously, a B-25 bomber, with the name "Old John
Feather Merchant" emblazoned on its nose, had left Bedford Air
Force Base, near Boston, headed for La Guardia Airport. There
were but three aboard: the pilot, Lieutenant Colonel William F.
Smith, twenty-seven years old, a West Pointer and veteran of a
hundred missions over Germany; his copilot; and a Navy ma-
chinist's mate hitchhiking home to Brooklyn on emergency
leave.
The takeoff was not auspicious. The weather was indifferent in
Massachusetts. Aerologists had warned of fog and poor visibility
in the New York area. Minutes after "Old John Feather Mer-
chant" became airborne, the Bedford tower began attempting,
Day of Judgment 155
unsuccessfully, to reach Smith to deliver an urgent message from
his wife, Martha, and bring him back if possible. She and their
year-old son, William, Jr., had no way to return home to nearby
Watertown. Her husband had absentmindedly pocketed the keys
to the family car as he climbed into the B-25*s cockpit
Over La Guardia, the pilot checked in to be told to "hold"
briefly, awaiting clearance. Smith next asked the weather condi-
tions at the Newark Airport. He was told the ceiling there was
over a thousand feet higher than at La Guardia.
Colonel Smith then asked for clearance to Newark and ob-
tained it. In unintentional prophecy, the La Guardia tower
added as a postscript to the pilot:
"... we're unable to see the top of the Empire State Build-
ing."
Journey's end for "Old John Feather Merchant," for all
aboard the twin-engined bomber, and for ten persons within the
world's tallest structure came at exactly 9:43 that misty morning
in a holocaust of flaming gasoline and shrapnel-like flying glass,
metal, and masonry. All ten of those in the Empire State Build-
ing, mostly young women, worked for the National Catholic
Welfare Conference. Their office was on the seventy-ninth floor
where the bomber had rammed at nearly four miles a minute
into the skyscraper's side, punching an eighteen by twenty foot
hole. Damage extended upward into unoccupied offices on the
eightieth floor, while blazing fuel spilled into the corridors and
cascaded down elevator shafts. Molten debris and engine frag-
ments rained down onto thirty-fourth Street, nine hundred feet
below-
One man, W. Paul Deering, the conference's publicity direc-
tor, jumped to his death in preference to the possibility of being
burned alive. A twenty-year-old elevator operator, Betty Oliver,
rode in her car, the cables severed, seventy-nine stories down
and survived, thanks to emergency brakes which checked the
f all A passing coastguardsman, however, had to dig through a
shaft wan in the basement to rescue her from the smashed
elevator.
And in Watertown, stifl without the keys to her car, Mar-
156 Day of Judgment
tha Smith, stunned and disbelieving, told reporters, "... he
bounced the baby on his lap only last night and said, The young-
ster recognized me for the first time since I've been home. Gee, it
makes a man feel big and important to have a son like miner "
The weird and the tragic vied with the dramatic and historic
that fateful summer of 1945. A little more than a week after the
crash of the B-25, August sixth became an unforgettable date.
In Washington, early on that Monday morning, Senator
Hiram Johnson, archconservative Republican from California,
aged seventh-eight, died in the Naval Medical Center. The im-
placable opponent of the League of Nations had waged a losing
battle to scuttle the United Nations as well.
At Lockheed Air Terminal, Burbank, Major Richard Ira
("Dick") Bong, twenty-four, American ace of all time, died in
the take-off explosion of a P-80 jet under test. The victor over
forty Japanese aircraft had come home in February to be mar-
ried and to enjoy a stint of "safer duty."
Over Hiroshima, Japan, the B-29 "Enola Gay" dropped war-
fare's first atomic bomb. . . .
Just three weeks' previously, on July sixteenth, at 5:30 A.M., a
"live" test at the Alamogordo, New Mexico, desert military
reservation had proved that man could successfully unleash the
destructive powers of nuclear fission. The engineer of a Santa Fe
freight train, pounding westward on the far northern fringe of
the secret site, had blinked at the dazzling fireball and wondered
what in the world could have caused so great a conflagration.
The man-made inferno, **beautiful beyond comparison," ac-
cording to another witness, was visible 520 miles away, in Nee-
dles, California. Police, sheriffs, and newspaper offices throughout
an area of tens of thousands of square miles were besieged with
phone calls.
The very few who knew or suspected the source of the blast
could not and would not tell until President Hany S. Truman
announced that an atomic bomb had obliterated Hiroshima, with
eighty thousand of its inhabitants and, in all likelihood, would
end World War n. A second atomic bomb was dropped on
Nagasaki, August ninth, with comparable carnage.
Day of Judgment 157
Truman was characteristically blunt and unequivocal in his
decision to employ the bomb, once perfected. He never enter-
tained "any doubt that it should be used." At the same time he
wanted to be certain it was directed against "a military target"
Hiroshima as a barracks area and "war production center" was
selected after the President conferred with Secretary Stimson,
General Marshall, and the commander of the Air Force, General
a H. ("Hap") Arnold.
Suddenly, unbelievably, it was all over. The farthest-reaching,
most devastating war the world had known had finished, with an
ease and abruptness that were difficult to credit On August four-
teenth, Japanese Emperor KBrohito agreed by proclamation to
surrender unconditionally.
To strive for the common prosperity and happiness of all na-
tions," he declared in an official manifesto of capitulation, "as
well as the security of well-being of our subjects in the solemn
obligation which has been handed down by our imperial ances-
tors and which we lay close to. . . ."
As, almost, an afterthought, the "Son of Heaven" mentioned
that "A new and most cruel bomb" also had something to do
with the obligation.
On August 15, the page-one streamer in the Detroit Free
Press was typical of how newspapers told the story the nation
had been waiting nearly four years to hear, in the largest type:
PEACE PEACE PEACE
Riotous celebrations broke out in many cities that night San
Francisco was by far the most abandoned Soldiers and sailors,
aided by throngs of willing civilians, smashed the windows of
liquor stores and pilfered their stock. Two stunning blondes
stripped down to their earrings and plunged into a lily pond near
the Civic Center. They splashed happily about until police fought
through a highly appreciative audience with blankets.
The unrestrained emotions of the Golden Gate City were
reminiscent of the fever that gripped London following the
Armistice in 1918 when men and women, total strangers to each
other, indulged in public lovemaMng. The California seaport, in
158 Day of Judgment
the lusty tradition of the gold rush a century before, did not
simmer down for three days. Destruction totaling hundreds of
thousands of dollars was left in the revelers' wake.
Chicagoans built huge bonfires from signboards, trash heaps,
anything inflammable. Times Square was like a huge drunken
barroom, as impossible as it was impassable.
Washingtonians stormed the White House fences in enthusi-
asm not so much for Harry Truman, little known as a man, as a
senator, or as a President, but because the Chief Executive sym-
bolized the ending of the war. Only the formalities of surrender
would wait for September second and the signing aboard the bat-
tleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
The "boys" did not have to await these legalities. They had
commenced already their homeward trek from "over there."
Throughout the United States, wherever there was a seaport or
military airfield, there were scenes of mingled joy and heartbreak
as transports, as well as men-of-war, and aircraft landed. Fam-
ilies embraced in uncontrolled weeping at dockside. But there
were also the widows at great naval bases, such as Norfolk and
San Diego, who were waiting in silence for the chance to ask a
shipmate how their husbands had died.
Men stepping at last onto American soil felt they were living a
dream. Reality, in the curious capacity of the human being to
adapt, had become foxholes and island beaches, the steady basso
of artillery barrage, or the long vigil at the guns of a warship.
Now these pungent, acutely familiar associations of daily life
were gone evaporated like yesterday's morning dew. It seemed
unbelievable.
Once again their lives would be punctuated by the old hum-
drum: the smell of morning coffee on the kitchen stove, the cry
of a child turning in bed, the whir of a lawnmower, the chirp of
sparrows, the late-at-night spit and yowl of a cat fight, the specta-
cle of queues of commuters at the corner bus stop, and then the
awareness in late afternoon's traffic push that another work day
in the city was coming to an end.
The servicemen had mused on these homilies for long months,
Day of Judgment 159
possibly years. Now that they were to be attained the prospect
was strangely anticlimactic.
There was sometimes shocking disillusion in the homecom-
ings. One veteran, walking out of a separation center in his new,
poorly fitting "civvies/' remarked wistfully, "I guess Til have to
sleep in a hotel when I get out. My wife couldn't wait for me.
She's getting a divorce."
He was not alone. There were 502,000 divorces in 1945, or
31 for every 100 marriages. The rate was up 25 per cent over
1944, itself a boom year for divorce. With marriages increased in
the same comparative period by only 11 per cent, the nation
which still boasted the loftiest standard of living possessed an-
other superlative: the highest divorce rate in the world.
It would have been scant consolation to returning veterans
like the one compelled to sleep in a hotel (providing he could ob-
tain a room) to know that the previous generation's war had had
a similar disrupting effect. Divorces in 1918 rose 40 per cent
above the 1917 rate, the spiral continuing until 1920.
Returning home along with servicemen and factory hands
were the niseis. Already their neighbors were pondering the pas-
sions of wartime. What madness had prompted them to join the
cry for banishing these Japanese-American families?
Actual aliens and prisoners of war were released week by
week. Many Germans and Italians fought deportation to their
devastated homelands* One of the multitude, Kurt Peters, a Ger-
man merchant-marine radio operator, remained in Bismarck,
North Dakota, after the gates of Fort Lincoln were opened He
went to work on the Bismarck Tribune, feH in love with the
office receptionist, married her, and became the father of three
children.,
Naturalized as a citizen, he joined the United States Navy.
Active in young peoples' groups of the Bismarck Presbyterian
Church, Peters later became circulation manager of the paper
before joining the Montana-Dakota Utilities Company to con-
tinue religious work, lecturing, and traveling.
The autumn of 1945 turned into winter. That there had been
160 Day of Judgment
such a war and that it was all over seemed equally incomprehen-
sible. The home front could not be forgotten, not by a snap of a
finger or by merely willing it so. The home front would persist as
long as there was anguish in the hearts of human beings.
Out of the hundreds of thousands with an indelible ache there
was, for example, Mrs. Belle Ellzey, of Texas, whose son Lieu-
tenant John G. Ellzey, Texas A. and M. graduate and a pre-
ministry student, was killed in France. He fell a few days after
posting his last letter to "Dear Mom," concluding *1 pray you
are o.k."
In privately publishing his letters to her, Belle Ellzey added
the sort of postscript which tens of thousands of other American
mothers could have written, of her generation and earlier ones:
I am so very homesick for him. It is Christmas and the photo of
his little white cross came as a message from him in my mailbox with
many Christmas greetings from my friends . . . . J have missed his
dear letters letters so full of patriotism and courage and sacrifice,
helping me to be brave while he faced the dangers .... I cannot
write to him, putting my tears into words, for my eyes stay strangely
dry.
Postscript
THE FIGHTING MAN came home to an America whose outward
appearance had not changed a great deal. Huge new factories, of
course, and waterfront structures, such as shipyards, had risen
here and there. Sprawling cities of wood, to train the fighting
men, and yet more sprawling aviation fields blotched what lately
had been meadows or plains.
The war bond, "Back the attack," scrap-drive, and food-
conservation posters were still tacked against street posts and
poles, and pasted against walls. But they were faded, peeling,
and no passerby accorded them so much as an idle glance.
The home of this newest veteran of America's procession of
wars looked somewhat shabby. It needed paint The furniture
needed new covering. The appliances which helped cook his
breakfast and wash his clothes were still there. But they did not
work nearly so well as he remembered. His automobile func-
tioned even more disappointingly, and its tires were as smooth as
glass.
The thoughts of Americans, grasping at the old peacetime pat-
terns in the late autumn of 1945, were dominated by separation
centers and a yearning for normalcy. Employment concerns
could be compromised only so long as the individual's wartime
savings held out The four-year boom was abruptly ended. Fac-
tory gates were banging shut all over the land. The golden tinkle
of the paymaster's cash register was stilled.
jLOJL
162 Postscript
In just two weeks following Japan's surrender, two million
workers were released from their jobs. Many left protesting,
especially the employees of Andrew Higgins' shipyard in New
Orleans who could not understand why the Government no
longer wanted invasion barges. Biggins' plant was picketed until
the owner shut down entirely.
The steadying hand of reconversion was yet to be felt. Mis-
guided efforts in that very direction in the spring of 1945 had
been disraptingly premature. Plants had to be reconverted to
catch up with unsatisfied military needs for mines, rockets,
ammunition, and armor plate.
Unemployment compensation claims spiraled half a million at
a time. However, the checks the workers received for these
claims, added to their wartime earnings, were to spark a consum-
ers* spending spree of unprecedented volume and persistence.
These consumers were probably too busy to contemplate how
long it will be before World War n can be stamped "paid in
fulL" The thought, however, is a sobering one.
The Veterans Administration, for example, is now paying
compensation or pensions to nearly 3,500,000 of the nation's
veterans, some of whom go back to the Indian wars. Also on the
organization's payroll are 1,293,000 surviving dependents, in-
cluding children, widows, and parents whose need stems all the
way back to the Civil War (specifically 1,393 widows and 556
dependent children)
On the basis of this experience, Federal disbursing officers will
be actively mindful of World War n for another century. Other
agencies, bom of war's need, disbanded just as abruptly, trun-
dling into the national archives packing boxes containing mil-
lions of pieces of paper and billions of words recounting, if not
necessarily why it happened, what had happened.
A special war-records section of the Bureau of the Budget de-
livered itself of a thick tome bursting with figures, facts, and
quite a few opinions. Discussing war's broad challenges and
ramifications, it stated:
Postscript 163
In World War n the United States faced the greatest administrative
test since its founding. The Government took millions of men from
their homes for the armed services, prescribed how much food the
housewife might buy, determined how much and what land of goods
were to be produced by its mightiest corporations, and went far toward
deciding just where a man might work and what he might receive
for his labor. Yet it managed to do these dictatorial things within the
framework of the democratic system, and even in the forms and
changes of its administrative machinery it preserved the methods of
democracy so that the resolutions of tensions proceeded, if not always
smoothly, yet directly and firmly.
Modern war is not merely a battle or succession of battles between
groups of fighting men. A fighting army is only the cutting edge of a
militarized industrial system. A nation's fighting strength depends on
how well and to what extent its entire resources have been mobilized
and managed toward the ends of war. To accomplish this mobilization
and management, a government adapted to the needs of peace must
be enlarged and reorganized so that it can assume enormous tasks
foreign to its traditions. New departments, new agencies, new offices
must be organized and staffed. Policies must be hammered out in un-
accustomed areas. In the process the most complex and delicate prob-
lems in government and public administration have to be solved.
Problems of wartime administration are not simply problems of the
mechanics and procedures of government The objectives of govern-
ment, even in time of war, are often in warm dispute and the building
of administrative mechanisms must proceed with great urgency in an
atmosphere of conflict about what the objectives should be. The evalu-
ation and leadership of public opinion occupies a position of no less
significance than administrative expertness. In the American democ-
racy, a government, no matter how wise its judgment may be, cannot
for long execute its will arbitrarily against the opposition of substantial
blocs of opinion.
The Bureau of the Budget's backward glance was a not very
subtle tribute, at least inferentially, to a Democratic Administra-
tion, endorsed in a foreword by President Truman. Self-praising
as it was, hinting at the reverent touch of the Democratic Na-
tional Committee, it nonetheless recounted an impressive five-
164 Postscript
year record of war production, commencing with defense efforts
early in 1941.
The major totals were 297,000 airplanes; 71,000 Navy ves-
sels; 53,000,000 deadweight tons of merchant shipping, or 127,-
255 war-built vessels of all types, merchant and naval; 86,000
tanks; 315,000 artillery shells.
The production of nearly half a million Diesel engines for
driving vehicles, locomotives, submarines, and surface craft and
for powering many types of machinery not only was a substan-
tial achievement in itself but foreshadowed their major use in the
future. Within a decade, for example, they would virtually dis-
place steam locomotives from the nation's railroads.
There were disappointments. Willow Run, a slow starter
which was further fettered by strikes, never came close to its de-
signed potential of 7,800 bombers a year. In somewhat more
than three years of production, Willow Run turned out but 8,685
aircraft.
Design faults, under the urgency of worldwide war, cropped
up in various types of planes. Tie wing loading of medium
bombers, for example, was a serious aerodynamic ill. With not
fully adequate power plants, they were prone to deadly high
speed stalk.
Ships, improperly welded, had a distressing affinity for crack-
ing in two. Survivors clung to the stern portion of one Liberty
freighter, for example, for two horror-filled days after the re-
mainder of the vessel had been torn off in a North Atlantic gale.
Tanks overheated; their transmissions "froze"; their treads
snarled; their guns jammed. The war ended before anyone even
drew blueprints for an elementary safety factor: a hatch for es-
caping in a hurry, if hit or disabled.
Wholesale purchase orders were signed before those responsi-
ble had a full opportunity to measure, evaluate, or test their
wares. The Navy, for example, bought upwards of a quarter of a
million .38 caliber revolvers only to discover that the safety locks
were inadequate. The whole lot eventually was recalled and de-
stroyed at the additional cost of several fatalities, which need
never have happened in the first place. The faithful Army .45
Postscript 165
automatic was substituted. The old-fashioned pistol was almost
heavy enough to double for a small boat anchor. But it was safe.
In addition to waste and disruption, greed and graft sapped
monetary resources tagged for the war, though insofar as was
discovered nowhere proportionate to the scandals unearthed in
the wake of World War I.
The most notorious case was that involving former Represent-
ative Andrew Jackson May, of Kentucky, and two brothers,
Hemy and Murray Garsson. They were convicted on three
counts of bribery and conspiracy to defraud the Government and
sent to prison. During a Congressional investigation, preceding
the Federal indictment, it was brought out that Henry Garsson,
who had been commissioned a brigadier general in the Army's
chemical warfare division,* and his brother had created "phan-
tom" corporations.
Amid the destruction and disillusion that are the inevitable
heritage of war were some positive contributions for the United
States, including expansion of the nation's productive capacity,
increased physical and social mobility of its citizens, and inroads
made in interracial problems. Insularism as it was understood in
the thirties dwindled in strength. Men returned to the smallest of
communities with tales of the world far beyond.
Wartime advances in medicine and surgery were especially
notable. In the winter of 1943-44, an influenza epidemic, cen-
tered in the East, closed schools and skyrocketed absenteeism in
war plants as it sent an estimated one million citizens one tenth
of them in the nation's capital to bed. However, though medi-
cal men were apprehensive, this was not a return visit of the
dread Spanish flu of 1918 that killed more than twenty million
humans throughout the world. Doctors now were ready with
vaccines, sulfa drugs, and penicillin, which held fatalities to a
negligible level.
The health of the generally pampered servicemen remained
good, in contrast to their forebears in the AEF. Epidemics during
that war including flu, pneumonia, measles, dysentery, and
spinal meningitis wreaked havoc in the camps. While, for ex-
ample, syphilis among civilians during World War n soared 30
166 Postscript
per cent above prewar incidence, it was down 35 per cent among
the Armed Forces. "Miracle" drugs, the issue of contraceptives,
and the proclaiming of red-light districts out-of-bounds spear-
headed the military's determined assault upon venereal disease.
Biologically Selective Service learned new ABC's about the
American male and established specifications and procedures for
future needs. General Hershey has summed up:
a . ... the lesson was evident that somewhere between 18
and 26 are the ideal ages for initial mobilization .... this
group should be used to the utmost before those 26 to 35, and
that the group above 35, with some exceptions, such as profes-
sionals and semi-professionals, should be left to maintain our
economy and cany out the national health, safety and interest."
In other words, early middle age for American men has be-
come more secure from the aggressions and perils of the military.
As the nation began to relearn the ways of peace, the reality of
America in wartime faded into the shadows of history books to
join Yorktown, Appomattox, and San Juan HBll. Huge encamp-
ments became the playgrounds of squirrels and other rodents.
The control towers of once swarming airfields were soon like
buzzard roosts in the wilderness. Sprawling factories stood empty
and silent, their broken windows open to the weather, to bats,
and to other winged creatures. Nature slowly reclaimed her own.
A flood of the Columbia River in 1948 tore away every ves-
tige of Vanport, Oregon's second largest city. Its 18,500
residents most of them war veterans and students fled for
their lives, abandoning all belongings. It brought a violent end to
one of the home front's more ambitious works.
These "monuments" to the war collapsed, crumbled, rusted,
or rotted. Literal ones would take their place the statuary in
city parks and the memorial plaques on village greens, beside
county court houses, within the hush of churches and synagogues
the length and breadth of the land. Military bases, hospitals,
housing developments, town squares, streets, and avenues would
bear the names of heroes.
But within the short span of even two decades the plaques
would commence to tarnish; street signs would hang askew; and
Postscript 167
a new generation would ask in honest wonderment, "Who was
he? What was it like then?"
Only the widows, the mothers, and others of close and loving
acquaintanceship who stayed home will remember, with the
vividness of yesterday.
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Baruch, Bernard M. The PubUc
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Clay, Lucius D. Decision in Ger-
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Daniels, Jonathan. Man of Inde-
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Davis, Elmer, and Byron Price.
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1943.
Farrington, S. Kip. Railroads at
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1950.
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Mclntire, Ross T., and George
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1955.
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Wade, Herbert T., and Robert
A. Lively. This Glorious Cause,
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1956.
Index
Absaroka, the, 13
Adams, James Tmslow, 3
aircraft:
of avfl Air Patrol, 45-46
crashes of, 13-15, foU. 114, 133-
135, 154-155
early unpreparedness in, 47-48
aircraft industry, 48, 53-54, 58, 61,
105-107, foil. 114, 119-120
war production totals of, 164
airraids:
alerts for, 9-10, 31-32
civil defense program for, 35-36,
41-43, 44, 46
Air Raid Wardens, The, 128
Alexander Hamilton, USS, 29
aliens, 32-34, 55-56, foil 114, 159
aluminum industry, 107
America First party, 115
American Car and Foundry Corp., 120
American Council on Race Relations,
114
American Legion, 45
American Rubber Company, 68
American Women's Volunteer Services,
9,24
Anchorage, Alaska, 7
Anderson Dairy, Las Vegas, 67-68
anti-Semitism, 115, 117
Arizona, USS, 133
armaments (see also industry), 47-49
170
armed forces!
casualties in, 10-11, 64, 89, 135, 160
and the draft, 80-89, foU. 114, 166
early volunteers for, 8
and entertainers, 125-135
health of, 165-166
homecomings of, 158-159
and labor strikes, 121
transportation of, 16-17, 107-108
Army, U.S., 18-19, 47, 48, 81, 82, 85,
88,93,98-100,127
Army Air Corps, U.S., 47
Arnold, H. KL ("Hap"), 47-48, 157
Arnold, Stewart P., 8
Astaire, Fred, 128
Athol, Mass., 8
atomic bomb, 112, 156-157
automobile industry:
strikes in, 119-120
war production conversion by, 28,
48, 106,folL114
automobfles, 28,75, 101, 107, 109
and gasoline rationing, 66-68
Autry, Gene, 131
Aveiy, Sewell, 117-118, 122
Ayres, Lew, 84-85
balloon bombs, 152-154
Bankhead, Tallulah, 136
Barthelmess, Richard, 131
Baruch, Bernard, 96
baseball players, 132
Bataan, 11, 137
batteries, 73
Baukhage, H.R., 144
Beaumont, Texas, 113
Bell Aircraft, 58
Bennett, Phil A., 39
Benny, Jack, 136
Berlin, Irving, 89, 125
Bethlehem Steel Corp., 50-51, 53
bicycles, 67, 107, 109
Biddle, Francis, 32, 84, 115-118, 147,
148
Bismarck Tribune, 159
black markets, 73-74, 123
blackouts, 6, 7, 35-36, 123
block wardens, 31, 35-36, 43, 44-45
blood donations, 136
Boeing Company, 106
Boettiger, Anna, Mrs., 145, 149-150
Bogart, Humphrey, 128
Boland, Mary, 125
bombs, 104-105, 112, 152-154, 156-
157
Bong, Richard Ira, 156
books:
on Army life, 89
paper for, 70
and the Washington scene, 102
Boston, Mass., 76-77
boxing, 38, 132-133
Brading, Eugene, 74
Bridges, Harry, 45, 118
Brier, Ernest, 75
Bruenn, Howard C., 141, 150, 151
Brun, John Curtis, 133
Buchanan-Dineen, Grace, 115-116
Budget, Bureau of the, 162-163
,109
and wartime controls, 67-68, 75
Byrnes, James R, 101, 145, 148
Cagney, Jimmy, 128
California:
attack alerts in, 9-10, 29-31
industry in, 54, 106-107, 111
Index 171
California (cont.)
Japanese-Americans of, 32-33, folL
114
Cashen, Michael J., 10-11
casualties:
from atomic bombs, 156
from balloon bombs, 152-153
among entertainers, 13-15, 125,
133-135
from industrial accidents, 122
mffitaiy, 10-11, 64, 89, 135, 160
Carton, Bruce, 67, 102
censorship, 7, 63, 139,144
Censorship, Office of, 98
Chaney, Mayris, 36, 37, 39-40, folL
114
Chaplin, Charlie, 125
Charleston, S.C., folL 114
Chenhalls, Alfred, 134
Chester, Pa., 113
Chicago, HI., 158
Chicago Tribune, 97, 139
children:
physical fitness program for, 36-40
volunteer work by, 71-72, foil. 114
Quids, Marquis, 32
Christian Mobilizers, 115
Chrysler Corp., 28, 48, 54
Churchffl, Winston, Sir, 11-12, 96, 99,
foil. 114, 134, 147
cigarettes, 72
Civil Air Patrol (CAP), 30, 45-46
civil defense, 34-46, folL 1 14
early home guards, 8, 10
civilians, as military force, 80-89
Civil Service Commission, 94
Clapper, Raymond, 37
day, Lucius, 148
clothing, 71, 72
coal miners, 118-119
Coast Guard, US., 17-20, 23
Cochrane, Mickey, 132
Cocoanut Grove fire, 137
coffee rationing, 66
Cohan, George M., 125-126
Colbert, Lester L., 54
Collins, Charles, 22
Colonna, Jerry, 129
172 Index
Coman, Robert C., 16-17, 19-22
Communism, 45, 80-81
Congress, U.S.:
Churchill's address to, 12, foil. 114
and civil defense program, 36-37,
39-40, 44-45
and gasoline rationing, 67
and wartime controls, 74-75
Conn, Billy, 132
ConnaHy, Thomas T. (Tom), 95-96
conscientious objectors, 83-85
controls, wartime, 7, 63, 66-79, 107,
139
Coogan, Jackie, 132
Coos Bay, USS, 121
Cornell, Katharine, 131
Corregidor, 11, 65, 137
Coughlin, Father, 117
Crawford, Joan, 128
Creel, George, 100
Critchlon, Mary, 9
Crosby, Bing, 128, 131
Curtis, Carl, 45
Daily Worker, 45
"Dance-for-Health Week," 38-39
Darnell, Linda, 128
Davidson, Hazel, Mrs., 93
Davis, Elmer, 97-100
Deatherage, George, 115
Deering, W. Paul, 155
Defender, fat, 115
defense plants, see industry
delivery services, 67-68
Dempsey, Jack, 38
Dennis, Lawrence, 115
Dern, George L, 101
Derrick, dement, 22
Detroit, Mich., Ill, 112-113, 120
Detroit Free Press, 157
Devine, Andy, 135
Devine, Robert, 57-58
De Voto, Bernard, 102
Dewey, Thomas E., 65, 142
diapers, 71
Dickinson, Velvalee, Mrs., 116
Dietrich, Marlene, 128
Dining, Elizabeth, 115
DiMaggio,Joe,132
disarmament, 127
Disney, Walt, 39, 131
Ditter, J. William, 45
Divine, Father, 84
divorces, 159
Donovan, William J. ("Wild Bill"), 94
Dos Passos, John, 102
Doughgirls, The, 91
Douglas, Melvyn, 36-37, 39-40
Douglas Aircraft Co., 54
Dowling, H. T., 8
draft boards (see also Selective Serv-
ice), 81-82, 87, foil. 114
Drysdale, Grace, foil. 114
Dunkard, ArvHle, 11
Du Pont de Nemours, E.I., & Co.,
104-105
Durocher, Leo, 132
East Coast:
saboteurs landed on, 100, foil. 114
submarines off the, 13, 29, 43-44, 46
Eastman, Joseph, 101
Eastman Kodak Co., 75
Eicher, Edward C., 115
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 53
electric motors, 74
electronics industry, 110
Elkton, Md., 104
Ellzey, Belle, Mrs., 160
Ellzey, John G., 160
Empire State Building, 154-155
employment, see labor force
"Enola Gay," the, 156
entertainers, foil 114, 125-136
in OCD program, 36-40
espionage, 115-116
explosives, manufacture of, 58-59, 72,
104-105
Fairbanks, Douglas, 125
Fairbanks, Douglas, Jr., 131-132
Falkenberg, Jinx, 128-129
Falker, Charles, 74
Farley, J. W., 76
Farley, James A^ 96
Farm Credit Administration, 94
farm machinery, 109-110
Federal Housing Administration, 111
Feller, Bob, 132
Fentress County, Term., 82, foil. 114
Fields, Grade, 125
fiie:
and civil defense program, 41-43
on the Normandie, 17-27, folL 114
Fitzsimmons, Fred, 132
Fitzsimmons, John F., 10-1 1
Florida, 13, 100, foil. 114
Flynn, Enrol, 129
food, 66, 71, 73, 76
Ford, Henry, 49
Ford Motor Co., 28, 106, folL 114,
120, 164
Forrestal, James V., 101
Frankfurter, Felix, 40
Fritsch, Frankie, 132
Froman, Jane, foil. 114, 133
fuel oil, 75-77
Gable, Clark, 13, folL 114, 132
Garsson, Henry and Murray, 165
gasoline, 28, 66-68, 74
General Dynamics Corp., 105
General Motors Corp., 28
Germans, 32-33, 159
Gilbert, A. C., Co., 104
Goddard, Paulette, 130
gold miners, 56
Government, the U.S.:
industrial seizures by, 117-118, 120
office space for, 93-94
struggles within, 96-101
and wartime administration prob-
lems, 63, 67-68, 70, 74-75, 162-
163
Grable, Betty, 130
Grace, Eugene, 5 In
graft, 165
Grant, Cary, 135
Green, William, 119
Greenberg, Hank, 132
guns, 48, 61, 164-165
Hackworfh, Green, 143
Halsey, William F. ("Bull'*), 95
Hardy, Oliver, 128
Hargrove, Marion, 89
Index 173
Harmon, Tommy, 132
Harris, Elsa, foil. 114
Harris, Mickey, 132
Hassett, William, 140, 142, 143, 150
Hay, Merle, 11
Hayworth, Rita, 129
health:
and 4-F classification, 68-69, 82-83
of government personnel, 101
and OCD physical fitness program,
36-40
of President Roosevelt, 137-151
of servicemen, 165-166
Heilman, Harry, 132
Henderson, Leon, 65-67, 71, 75, 101
Hershey, Lewis B., 81, 83, 166
Higgins, Andrew J., 52-53, 162
Hillman, Sidney, 58
Hirohito, Emperor, 157
Hiroshima, 156
Hitler, Beast of Berlin, 13 1
Hollywood Victory Committee, 128
Homer, Arthur Bartlett, 50-51
Hoover, Herbert, 127
Hope, Bob, 129
Hopkins, Harry, 96, 101
hospitals, 93
hotels, 91, 92-93
housing, 56-58, 91-94, 101, 111-114
Howard, Leslie, 133-134
Hubbell, Carl, 132
Hull, Coidell, 8, 5 In, 101, 148-149
Hurd, Charles, 65
Ickes, Harold, 66, 96-97, 118
Illinois, 35
"ftirifoffla Ordnance Works, 105
industry, 27, 47-62, 103-110, folL 114,
162
labor force in, 54-61, 105-107,
111-112, 122
labor-management conflicts in, 117-
122
war production totals of, 61-62,
107-110, 164
and wartime controls, 66, 74-75
infliiyjMj 165
information bureaus, 97-100
Ingersoll, Ralph, 19
174 Index
International Harvester Co., 109
invasion, civil patrols for, 8
Italians, 32-33, 159
Jackson, Henry M., 13S
Jacob Jones, USS, 29, 49
James, Hairy, 130
Janis, Elsie, 125
Japan, 11-13, 152-154, 156-157
Japanese-Americans, 32-33, foil. 114,
159
Jeffers, William, 68
Jehovah's Witnesses, 84
Johnson, Hiram, 156
Johnson, Hugh S., 40
Johnston, Eric, 75
Jolson, Al, 129
Jones, Ellis O., 115
Jones, Jesse, 96-97
Justice Department, 114-115, 121
Kaiser, Henry J., 51-52, 57, foil. 114
Kaiser, Henry J., Mrs., f olL 1 14
Karloff, Boris, 129
KeUy, Harry, 113
Kelly, John B., 37-38
Kimmel, Husband E., 32
King, Mackenzie, 148
Knights of the White CameUia, 115
Knox, Frank, 31, 5 In, 61, 101
Kramer, Alyce Mano, 51
Kusaba, Sueki, 154
labor force, 54-61
accident rate in, 122
housing for, 56-58, 111-112
and management conflicts, 117-122
and postwar unemployment, 162
women in, 58-61, 105-107, foil. 114
La Guardia, FioreUo, 24, 26, 34, 38,
40,114
Lakeview, Ore., 152
landing craft, 52-53
Landis, James M., 40-46
Langford, Frances, 129
Lauder, Harry, Sir, 125
Laurel, Stan, 128
Lawrence, Gertrude, 130
Lee, Roger, 146
Leech, Margaret, 102
Le Hand, Marguerite ("Missy"), 101
Leonard, Dutch, 132
Lewis, John L., 118-119, 122
Lewis, Whitey, 132
Liberty Loan drives, 2, 126
Liberty ships, 51-52, 164
Liebling,A.J., 102
Dppmann, Walter, 37, 142-143
liquor, 72, 88
Lomax, Stan, 154
Lombard, Carole, 13-15, folL 114
Long, Breckinridge, 41, 75-76, 140
Long, Edith, Mrs., 59-61
Long Island, 100, foil. 114
Longstreet, James, Mrs., 58
Los Angeles, Calif., 31, 114
Los Angeles Times, 3 1
Louis, Joe, 132
Lyon, Frederick J., 45^46
MacArthur, Douglas, 65, 103
McCarran, Patrick A., 56
McCormick, Robert, 97
Mclntire, Ross T., 139-151 passim
MacLeish, Archibald, 98
McNutt, Paul V., 127
McWilliams, Joseph E., 115
magazines, 70, 102, 115
Malango, Antonio and Donate, 86
Manhattan Project, 112
Manzanar, Calif., 33
Marianne, Fla., 113
Marion County, Ind., 34
Maritime Commission, U.S., 18
Markoff, Gypsy, folL 114, 133
MarshaU, George C., 142, 157
Martin, Forrest, Mr. and Mrs., 9
Martin, Glenn L., Co., 106
Martin, Hershey, Mrs., see Chaney,
Mayris
Massachusetts, 35, 43-44, 76-77
Massey, Raymond, 132
May, Andrew Jackson, 165
medicine, advances in, 165-166
Medwick, Joe, 132
Mellett, Lowell, 98
Menjou, Adolphe, 129
Mennonites, 83
Mercer, Merle, 74
Meredith, Burgess, 132
Michigan, 35, 106, 112^113, 120
Midwest, civil defense in, 34, 35
MiUer, Glenn, 134-135
Milwaukee, Wise., 104
miners, 56, 118-119
Minter, Mary Miles, 125
Mitchell, Archie, 152-154
Mobile, Ala., 113
Monroney, A. S. Mike, 143
Montgomery Ward and Co., 117-118
Mooney, Francis, Archbishop, 117
Moran, Lord, 146
Morgan, John R. S., 135
Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 149
motion pictures, 128, 130-131
training films, 135
Treasury Department cartoons, 39
Mount Vernon Ladies' Association,
41-42
Murphy, George, 135
Murray, Philip, 119
Munow, Edward R., 40-41
Musial, Stan, 132
Nation, the, 97
National Catholic Community Service,
127
National CathoHc Welfare Conference,
155
National Housing Agency, 111
National Jewish Welfare Board, \23
National liberty party, 115
Navy, U.S., 18-21, 47-44 passim, 81,
82, 88, 93, 98-99, 100, 114, 127,
164-165
and medical examinations of Roose-
velt, 141, 151
student training for, folL 114
Nazism, American, 114-116
Negroes, 112-114
Nelson, Donald M* 49-50, 58, 67, 97,
101
New England, 35, 43-44, 76
New Haven, COBOL, 104
Index 175
New Orleans, La., 53, 162
news:
and government control, 97-100,
139
voluntary censorship of, 144
and Washington scene, 101-102
newspapers:
paper for, 70
racist, 115, 117
New York, N.Y., 10, 34, 42, 73, 113
Empire State Building crash, 154-
155
Normandie disaster, 16-27, foil.
114
peace celebrations in, 158
New York Daify News, 139
niseis, 32-33, folL 114, 159
Norfolk, Va., Ill
Normandie, the, 16-27, foil. 1 14
Northern Pump Co., 12
nylon, 105
Oak Ridge, Tenit, 112
O'Connor, Basfl, 140, 147
O'Donnell, John, 139
Office of Civil Defense (OCD), 34-46,
128
Office of Defense Transportation
(ODT), 68, 101
Office of Facts and Figures, 98
Office of Price Administration (OPA),
65, 73-75
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 94-
95
Office of War Information (OWI), 98-
100
ofl industry, 49, 66, 75-77, 104
Oliver, Betty, 155
Omaha, Nebr., 106
O'Neill, Steve, 132
Oregon, 57, 77, 152-153, 166
Osmena, Sergio, 149
Ott, Mel, 132
Packard Co., 28, 106
paper, 69^70,71,74-75
Parker, Ariz, folL 114
176 Index
Patent Office, US., 93
Patzke, Betty, 154
Patzke, Joan, 152
Payne, Alvin, 84
Pearl Harbor, 5, 11
Pelley, William Dudley, 115
pensions, 162
Pentagon, the, 93
Perkins, Frances, 145
Pershing, John L, 8, 126
Peters, Elizabeth, Mrs., 13-14
Peters, Kurt, 159
Peto, USS, 54
Philippines, the, 11, 12-13, 137
phonographs, 69
physical fitness, see health
Pickford, Mary, 125
plastics, 72, 110
Plympton, Kathleen, Mrs., 77-79
PM newspaper, 19
Portland, Ore., 57, 77-79
Powell, Lee Berrian, 135
Price, Byron, 98
price controls, 66, 67, 75
Prince of Wales, HMS, 12
Pringle, Henry F., 46
printing industry, 70
prisoners of war, 159
prison labor, 56
Communist, 80-81
government, 97-100
hate literature, 115
andtheOCD,45 "
Provincetown, Mass., 43-44
Pullman-Standard Co., 120
race riots, 112-114, 120
racist publications, 115, 117
radio, 69, 110, 115, 121
railroads, 107-108, folL 114, 120, 164
rationing, 63, 66-79, 107, folL 114
Raymond, Gene, 132
recreation!
for armed forces, 126-128
and the OCD, 36-40
Red Cross, 24, 26, 127-128
Red Network, The (Dffling), 115
Reffly, Michael F., 149
rent control, 92
Renton, Wash., 106
Repulse, HMS, 12
resettlement camps, 33, foil. 114
Reveille in Washington (Leech), 102
Rice Institute, Texas, foil. 1 14
Rizzuto, Phil, 132
Robert E. Peary, the, 51-52
Robins Dry Dock and Repair Co., 18-
19
Rogers, Ginger, 128
Rognan, Roy and Lorraine, foil. 114,
133
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 67, 140, 145, 146,
151
and OCD program, 36-41, foil. 114
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 5, 7, 8, 29, 30,
32, 53, 55, 96, 99-100, 101, 111-
120 passim, 127
illness and death of, foil. 114, 137-
151
Roosevelt, James, 142
Rosenman, Samuel, 146
Ross, Barney, 132-133
Ross, Lanny, 130
rubber, 68, 72, 97, 105, 107, 109, 120
Ruffing, "Red," 132
Rural Electrification Agency, 93-94
Russell, James, Mrs., 37
Russell, Jane, 13
Ryan, William Ord, 9
saboteurs, 100, folL 114
Salak, Joseph C, 87
Salvation Army, 127
San Diego, Calif., 106-107, 111
San Francisco, Calif., 9-10, foil. 114,
157-158
Santa Monica, Calif* 54
Savo Island, 65
Sayre, Marie, Mrs., 10
Schacht, At 132
scrap drives, 71, foil. 114
Seattle, WaslL, 9-10, 57-58
Seattle Post, 9
Seaver, Jane, 37
seditionists, 114-116
Seeger, Alan, 2
See Here, Private Hargrove, 89
Selective Service, 55, 80-89, 108, foil.
114, 166
4-F classification in, 6&-69, 82-83
Shallett, Sidney, 61
Sheridan, Ann, 129-130
Sheridan, Edward M., 86
Sherwood, Robert ., 99-100, 149
coastal torpedoing of, 13, 29, 43-
44,46
construction of, 50-54, 57, 59-61,
foil. 114, 121, 162
the Normandie disaster, 16-27, foil
114
unpreparedness, 48-49
shoes, rationing of, 66
Short, Walter, 32
shortages, see rationing
Shoumatoff, Elizabeth, 150
Silver Shirt Legion, 115
Sinatra, Frank, 128
Sloan, Alfred P., Jr., 49, 50, 51n
slogans, 97-98
Slusser, Thomas, 2
Smith, A. (X, Corp., 104
Smith, E. P., 72
Smith, Gerald L.K., 115
Smith, Meniman, 144, 146
Smith, William R, 154-156
Social Justice, 111
Social Security agency, 94
Solar Aircraft Co., 106-107
Sonderling, Herman, 68-69
songs, wartime, 64, 126, 131
spies, 115-116
sports:
and OCD program, 37-38
and USO program, 132-133, 135
Stalin, Joseph, 145, 146
StaHings, George, 64
Stark, Harold R., 18
steel industry, 103, 110, 118, 120
Stewart, Everett, 86
Stewart, James, 132
Stflwell, Joseph W., 130
Index 177
Stimson, Henry L., 8, 31, 51n, folL
114, 120, 157
street cars, 109
strikes, 118-122
StudebakerCo.,28,106
submarines, 13, 29-30, 43-44, 46, 100
Suckley, Margaret, 150
sugar rationing, 66
Sullivan, Mark, 2-3
Swanson, Claude A., 101
Szigeti, Joseph, 14
Tamara (Swann), foil. 114, 133
tanks, 48, 61, 109,164
telephone operators, 120-121
This is the Army (Berlin), 89
Tfllamook, Ore., 8
Topping, Dan, 132
toys, 71
tractors, 109-110
Tracy, Spencer, 129
trailers, 111, 112
training fiirag, 135
transportation, 103-104, 107-109, foil
114, 120, 164
civilian, 28, 66-68, 75, 101, 107,
109,folL114
Trentacosta, Frank, 27
Treptow, Martin, 2
Troynek, Erl, Mrs., 64-65
trucks, 120
True, James, US
Truman, Harry S., 142-143, 145, 146,
156-157, 158, 163
Tully, Grac*, 14ft 148, 149
Tunney, Gene, 88
typewriters, 69
unemployment, 55, 162
unions, 11&-122
United Mine Workers, 1 18
United Service Organizations (USO),
folL 114, 127-136
Vandenberg, Arthur, 150
Vanport City, Ore., 57, 166
venereal disease, 165-166
Venuta, Benay, 128
178 Index
veterans, pensions of, 162
Veterans Administration, 162
volunteer workers:
in civil defense program, 34-36,
43-46
for draft boards, 81-82, 87
entertainers as, foil. 114, 128
for rationing boards, 73, 77-79
Wainwright, Jonathan M., 65
Wallace, Henry A., 96, 121
Walsh, Patrick L, 24
war bonds, 13, 72, 136
Ward, Thomas F., 64-65
Ward, Walter, Mrs., 64-65
War Labor Board, 119
Warm Springs, Ga-, 137, 148-149
war production, see industry
War Production Board (WPB), 49,
70,97,98,101,109,122
Washburn, Lois de Lafayette, 115
Washington, D.C., 5-6, 42-43, 9O-
102, 109, 158
Watson, Edwin M., 146
Westchester County, N.Y., 36
West Coast:
air raid alerts on, 9-10, 31-32
aliens persecuted on, 32-33, foil.
114
balloon bombs on, 152-154
submarines off, 13, 29-30
Western Defense Command, 3 1-32
Wheeler, Burton K., 9
Wheeler, Lawrence, 29-30
Whitehead, Thomas Norm, 122-124
Williams, Ted, 132
Williamsport, Pa., 53
WHUie, Wendell, 8, 142
Willow Run plant, 106, foil. 114, 120,
164
Wilson, Charles, 97
Wilson, Woodrow, 100
WinJder, Otto, 13
Winrod, Gerald B., 115
Wisconsin, 35
Wishnew, Bert, 128
women, in war production, 58-61, 105,
106-107, folL 114
World War I:
attitude during, 1-3
draft in, 80
entertainment for troops in, 125-
127
information bureaus in, 100
Washington, D.C., during, 91
World WarH:
costs in, 61, 162
end of, 157-160
entry into, 5-7
reaction of people to, 4, 122-124
unpreparedness for, 40-41, 47-49
Worthington Pump and Machinery
Co., 75
Wright Aeronautical Co., 121
Wynn, Keenan, 129
Yalta Conference, 138, 145-146
York, Alvin, 82, foil. 114
Young Men's Christian Association,
127
Young Women's Christian Associa-
tion, 127
Yourkevitch, Vladimir, 17, 25
zoot-suiters, 114
