The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (13 page)

It was not until government inspectors discovered a rash of defective airplane components after they had received an official U.S. Navy stamp of approval that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was called in. After interviewing scores of employees who had been angered over the conduct of their Bund superiors, the Nazi agents were booted out.

At four plants of the Brewster Aeronautical Company, a large number of supervisors and employees strutted about at work giving the Heil Hitler salute. One of these Bundists was found to have bought over $7,500 (equivalent to $90,000 in 2002) worth of Rueckwanderer marks, which were special funds sold at a discount in Nazi Germany. These were deposited in his name in a Third Reich bank.

By late April 1942, the four Brewster plants had failed to deliver a single vitally needed airplane. Again the FBI was called in, and days later, five supervisors and twenty-seven employees were discharged.
²¹

Blasts Rock Defense Facilities

D
URING THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1942,
the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies were confronted by a deluge of catastrophes that was destroying vital war materials and badly damaging facilities involved with defense. In January alone, a fire gutted an Army administration building at Voorheesville, New York. Another blaze, also of undetermined origin, seriously damaged a building under construction that would make Garand rifles for the Army, at Springfield, Massachusetts.

In February, the mysterious carnage continued. An explosion wrecked a Navy TNT facility in southeast Washington, killing three people and injuring four others. In Dearborn, Michigan, a Ford Motor Company plant being converted to manufacture airplanes was hit by a blaze that broke out in the middle of the night. J. Cohen, a New York City firm supplying lumber to Army camps,

Eastern America Set Ablaze
59

had huge amounts of its product destroyed by a raging fire that erupted at about midnight.

In March, the fourth month of America’s involvement in the war, the series of unexplained calamities accelerated:

• Just as a shift was changing at an ordnance plant in Iowa, a blast killed seven persons and injured twenty others.
  
• Two died and thirteen were hurt when an oil barge exploded in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas shore.
  
• Four were killed and more than one hundred others were injured when a munitions truck exploded outside New York City.
  
• A third ship fire in four days broke out on the Philadelphia waterfront.
  
• The telephone system in southern California was widely disrupted after several key cables were cut.
  
• A blaze badly damaged a San Diego firm manufacturing silk for Army parachutes.
  
• Flames swept a warehouse used by the Army in San Francisco.
  
• Two were killed and five injured when a blast rocked the Welland Chemical plant in Buffalo, New York.
  
• Army officers launched a probe into the origin of a fire at an Air Corps base in South Carolina.
  
• In Easton, Pennsylvania, thirty-one persons lost their lives when an explosion erupted at a quarry under contract to the Army.
  
• The Remington Arms Company plant in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, was shaken by a blast that knocked down several walls.
  
• Fire leveled the Cortland Boat factory that had a defense contract in Connecticut.
  

Officials in the War Department in Washington were astonished by the wave of mass destruction that was striking home-front America from coast to coast. Said Secretary of War Henry Stimson to confidants: “Teutonic efficiency.”
²²

Eastern America Set Ablaze

I
T WAS NEAR MIDNIGHT
on April 20, 1942, when U.S. Forest Service District Ranger J. B. Fortin was patrolling the mountains near his base in Brevard, North Carolina. Suddenly, he looked up to see “perhaps twenty fires” break out on Sunburst Mountain. The veteran forester had never seen anything to compare with the sight that greeted his eyes. Radioing his headquarters, he exclaimed: “All twenty started at almost the same time. It had to be saboteurs!”

This strange happening was no isolated event in western North Carolina. A series of forest blazes continued for a week and wiped out thousands of acres of valuable timber that was earmarked for Army-camp construction.

During that same week raging fires swept through the forests of New Jersey, destroying more than five thousand acres of woodland. One hundred and sixty-eight different fires were reported burning. Much of the woods were cedar and pine, which was in heavy demand for war activities. A force of twenty-five hundred soldiers, fire wardens, and volunteers finally brought the conflagrations under control.

District Fire Warden John Wiley noted that, in addition to the destruction of huge amounts of badly needed timber, the fires had been set by saboteurs at a time the wind was blowing toward a large Army post in New Jersey.

A few days after the New Jersey blazes were finally brought under control, ten or twelve forest fires broke out in Rhode Island along a fifty-mile wide swath. Governor J. Howard McGrath was deeply alarmed, and he proclaimed martial law in four towns and collected a fire-fighting force of some three thousand soldiers, sailors, and forest service wardens.

After the blazes were extinguished, James R. Simmons, district supervisor of the Forest Service, noted that the suspicious fires had been burning in a region where nearly 2 million feet of timber to be used for defense production were stored in several lumber yards.

“It seems strange to me that these fires would suddenly spring up where the United States government has such a huge amount of lumber stored,” Simmons told a Providence newspaper.
²³

The Mysterious Shangri-la

S
UDDENLY, PROGRAMMING ON MILLIONS
of American radios was interrupted. After several moments of silence, a voice said that President Franklin Roosevelt would have an important message to deliver at 10:00
A.M.
(eastern standard time). It was April 20, 1942.

Listeners braced for another bitter dose of disastrous news from the Pacific, as had been the case since Uncle Sam had gone to war more than four months earlier. Many feared that California had been invaded. Instead, the president was barely able to keep the glee out of his voice.

A force of bombers led by Lieutenant Colonel James J. “Jimmy” Doolittle had lifted off from Shangri-la and bombed Tokyo, the president stated.

Americans were electrified. Spirits soared. Japan’s greatest city, the capital of its empire, had been attacked from the air.

Actually, Doolittle’s sixteen, twin-engine B-25 bombers, after practicing the revolutionary technique on land many times, had taken off from the air

Disaster Impacts Two U.S. Towns
61

craft carrier Hornet, part of Admiral William “Bull” Halsey’s task force, which had sneaked to within a few hundred miles of Tokyo.

In the wake of the raid, the people in Tokyo were near panic. They had been assured many times that no American planes would ever get near the homeland. A spokesman for the government now spoke over the radio to assure the nervous citizenry that this “mistake” would never happen again.

Doolittle’s men dropped bombs on Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagoya, and Yokosuka, causing minimal property damage, but the psychological impact on the Japanese home front was devastating. Curiously, the raid had taken place on the 167th anniversary of Paul Revere’s fabled ride.

In Tokyo, the Imperial General Staff was bewildered by Roosevelt’s mention of Shangri-la, unaware that it was a mythical Himalayan retreat in James Hilton’s novel, Lost Horizon. Scouring maps, the generals concluded that Roosevelt had used the code name for Midway Island, the nearest U.S. post, twenty-one-hundred miles east of Tokyo.
²⁴

Comic Strip Puzzles Tokyo Warlords

I
N THE WAKE OF
the surprise bombing of Tokyo, Japanese warlords were trying to unravel the mystery—and significance—of a full page of comic strips that had appeared in hundreds of American newspapers on the same day that Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders struck.

That comic strip—by an amazing coincidence—featured the hero American pilot, Barney Baxter, sneaking his airplane through Japanese defenses and bombing Tokyo.

Apparently the Japanese leaders believed that the comic-strip artist was somehow connected to the cloak-and-dagger operations and that he had a direct pipeline into the office of General George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, in Washington. Many puzzled Americans had reached the same conclusion.
²⁵

Disaster Impacts Two U.S. Towns

I
N THE SPRING OF 1942,
America suffered its worst military disaster in history. Racked by disease, starving, exhausted, and out of ammunition, some 75,000

U.S. and Filipino soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor in the Philippines were forced to surrender.

Despite their pitiful physical condition, the POWs were forced to trudge on foot for fifty-five miles in what came to be known as the Death March. During the trek to a prison camp, 2,300 Americans and about 9,000 Filipinos perished from being bayoneted, shot, or tortured.

Only later would the citizens of two small towns tucked away in obscure corners of America feel that they had been struck by some biblical plague. Salinas, California, with a population of 11,596, had contributed 152 men to the tragedy of Bataan and Corregidor, and Harrodsburg, Kentucky, population 4,673, had lost 76 of its sons.
²⁶

“A Date with Destiny”

A
WEEK AFTER
the American tragedy in the Philippines, Secretary of War Henry Stimson telephoned thirty-seven-year-old Oveta Culp Hobby, an executive with the Houston Post in Texas. Congress had been shocked into realizing that the United States was fighting for its existence and would have to fully mobilize. Consequently, on May 13, 1942, it authorized the creation of a Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), and now Stimson asked Hobby to take charge of the new organization.

Hobby promptly accepted and became America’s first woman colonel. Her role was to train members of WAAC for certain army jobs to free able-bodied men for combat duty.

Colonel Hobby plunged into the demanding and frustrating task of building the WAAC from scratch. Often she met hostility rather than cooperation from the War Department. Male reporters at her first press conference bombarded her with irrelevant questions. “Can officer WAACs date men who are privates?” “Will WAACs underwear be khaki?” “What if an unmarried WAAC gets pregnant?”

For months to come, newspapers and magazines carried stories about America’s new “petticoat army, Wackies, and powder magazines.” Despite the boos and catcalls, Hobby persevered, and within weeks she had recruiting, staffing, facilities, uniforms, and training programs operational.

Hobby set the tone when she addressed the WAAC Officer Candidate students at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in July 1942. “You have taken off silk and put on khaki,” the colonel said. “And all for essentially the same reasons—you have a debt and a date. A debt to democracy, a date with destiny.”
²⁷

A Tumultuous Homecoming

E
ARLY ON THE MORNING
of May 8, 1942, Alice Bulkeley drove to La Guardia Airport with her father-in-law, Frederick Bulkeley. Alice was the wife of Navy Lieutenant John Bulkeley, who two months earlier had rescued General Douglas MacArthur from Japanese-surrounded Corregidor island in the Philippines.

After American and Filipino forces had been forced to surrender, Lieutenant Bulkeley escaped to Australia. Now he was coming home.

A Tumultuous Homecoming
63

Alice hoped to have a private reunion with her husband, who had earned every decoration for valor—some of them twice—that the United States had to offer. Soon her hopes were dashed: awaiting the arrival of the PT-boat squadron skipper was a throng of many thousands, including a herd of reporters and photographers, along with camera teams from Paramount and Movietone News.

At 10:22
A
.
M
. a United Airlines plane rolled to a stop, and out hopped Bulkeley and two other PT-boat officers, Lieutenants Robert Kelly and Anthony Akers. An enormous roar from the crowd echoed across La Guardia and into adjacent locales.

Alice noticed her husband, who had been a boxer on the West Point team, looked thin—he had lost thirty pounds since Pearl Harbor. He explained: “You don’t get fat on a steady diet of salmon and tomcat.”

Bulkeley was dragooned (as he later would term it) before the newsreel cameras and bombarded with questions. His resolute spirit was still intact. “The Japs are tough, courageous fighters,” he declared. “But one of our boys can lick hell out of five them!”