The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (14 page)

A squad of hard-pressed but smiling New York City policemen escorted the Bulkeleys through the milling throng to their private automobile. On the drive home, the Navy officer said he was looking forward to a “few days of peace and quiet.”

Tranquility would have to wait. When the Bulkeleys arrived at Alice’s apartment, hundreds of people had gathered in the street, and their rousing cheers rocked the neighborhood as John stepped from the automobile.

In the days and weeks ahead, the Navy hero, who was preparing to return to the Pacific with a new squadron of PT boats, was trailed everywhere by reporters and photographers. Two days after reaching home, he was honored with a parade in the New York City borough of Queens, riding with Alice in a car followed by three thousand marchers and scores of floats.

On May 13, New York City gave one of its rousing welcomes to the Wild Man of the Philippines. Some 500,000 cheering men and women, ten rows deep, lined both sides of Seventh Avenue. John and Alice rode in a convertible. Ticker tape and confetti streamed down from the windows in towering buildings.

A huge sign stretched across Seventh Avenue: “All New York Welcomes John D. Bulkeley.”

Four days later, on May 17, 1.3 million men, women, and children (by police estimate) stood shoulder to shoulder in New York’s Central Park mall and overflowed onto Fifth Avenue and Central Park West. They were there to honor John Bulkeley on “I Am an American Day.” Public officials said it was the largest crowd ever assembled in one place in the nation’s history.

Along with Bulkeley, the speakers’ platform was loaded with celebrities: heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis; composer Irving Berlin; Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black; operatic stars Lily Pons, James Melton, and Marion

Lieutenant Commander John D. Bulkeley receives the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Oval Office of the White House. (Courtesy of Alice Bulkeley)

Anderson; orchestra leaders Fred Waring and Andre Kostelanetz; and a host of Hollywood stars.

As each celebrity was introduced, the crowd applauded vigorously. But a thunderous roar went up for John Bulkeley. For nearly five minutes, rousing cheers echoed around mid-Manhattan.

Paul Muni, one of the great names of stage and screen history, recited an anonymous poem dedicated to the dead of Bataan, which said in part: “They are what this war is about / Do not ask them why they died / They wouldn’t know how to tell you, were they alive / They were just plain fighting men— who died for you.”

Elsewhere in New York City, Dave Elman, a popular WABC-radio personality, had been conducting a Victory Auction at 9:00
A
.
M
. each weekday. Elman solicited personal items from celebrities to be sold on the air, and the winning bidder paid by buying War Bonds in the amount bid.

At the request of Elman, John Bulkeley contributed his PT-boat tie clasp and the collar rank insignia of a lieutenant that he had worn at the time he had rescued General MacArthur. These items had a combined monetary value of perhaps two dollars. Bidding was furious. Finally, the two small items were purchased by Arthur J. White, a New York City restaurant owner, for the War Bond equivalent of $16,000 ($185,000 in the year 2002).
²⁸

Lord Haw-Haw and His Spies
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Lord Haw-Haw and His Spies

C
OLONEL EDSON D. RAFF
was seated in his small, spartan office at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, perusing orders he had just received from Washington. His crack 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion was going overseas. It was mid-May 1942.

Before departing for the New York City port of embarkation, Raff informed his five hundred paratroopers that the entire trip to their yet unknown destination would be conducted under the utmost secrecy. Therefore, they would have to shed their “badges of honor”—parachute wings, jump boots, paratrooper patches on caps, and the word “parachute” sewn to sleeves at the shoulders.

The reason for this covert action was to conceal from German agents the fact that the first American paratrooper outfit to go overseas was bound for the British Isles.

Under the veil of night, Colonel Raff and his paratroopers boarded a train, whose crew had been sworn to secrecy about the trip, and headed for Fort Dix, New Jersey.

On June 4, wearing the unadorned uniforms of regular soldiers (straight legs, the parachutists called them), the battalion climbed onto another train at Fort Dix. After a short ride across the New Jersey flatlands and into bustling New York City, the train halted at a pier along the Hudson River. Then the troopers climbed aboard a huge, gray-painted ship, the peacetime British luxury liner Queen Elizabeth.

Converted to a troop transport after war had erupted in Europe, the ship carried 14,000 soldiers. Due to its speed, the Queen would cross the Atlantic unescorted—hopefully avoiding German U-boats.

A few days after sailing from New York harbor, the Queen arrived at Greenock, Scotland, the port of Glasgow, in the Firth of Clyde. Still garbed as regular GIs, the paratroopers debarked onto the dock and boarded yet another train. A friendly Scot official asked the battalion surgeon, Captain Carlos C. Alden Jr. of Buffalo, New York, “What kind of an outfit are you?” Replied Alden: “We’re USO entertainers.”

Soon the train was racing southward and finally reached the battalion’s new home: Nissen huts on the grounds of the estate of U.S.-born Lady Ward, at Chilton Foliat in Berkshire, England.

Still in plain uniforms, the troopers tuned in Radio Berlin, over which the British renegade, William Joyce, broadcast Nazi propaganda using the name Lord Haw-Haw.

“Welcome to England,” Lord Haw-Haw said pleasantly. “You men of the 509th Parachute Infantry have come to die in [British Prime Minister Winston] Churchill’s war. I want to particularly welcome your leader, Colonel Raff.” Then the propagandist gave a facetious greeting to other officers in the battalion by name.

Among the paratroopers there was no doubt how Lord Haw-Haw had obtained such detailed information about their outfit: Nazi spies in the United States were alive and well.

A day later, Colonel Raff told his men that they could put back on their badges of honor.
²⁹

Part Three

A Sleeping Giant Awakens

Invasion Target: California

D
URING THE SPRING OF 1942,
generals and admirals in Washington were astonished by the power, speed, and skill of the Japanese blitzkrieg (lightning war), which dwarfed Adolf Hitler’s remarkable conquests in Europe and the Mediterranean. A grim conclusion was reached by the Army and Navy: with full mobilization of American manpower and resources, and at a frightful cost in lives, reconquering the Pacific would take at least ten years.

Japan’s 36 million citizens were in a state of euphoria. Hakko-ichiu (bring the eight corners of the world under one roof) had become the national slogan. Emperor Hirohito, whom most Japanese revered as a god, now reigned over one-seventh of the globe. His empire radiated from Tokyo for five thousand miles in several directions.

Japan’s war of “liberations” (as Tokyo called it) had only begun. The warlords were planning an invasion of California. First, however, they would have to capture Midway Island, as a base for the next leap to Hawaii, eleven hundred miles to the southwest. Then it would be on to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

However, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Harvard-educated commander of the Combined Imperial Fleet and architect of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, was unaware that the United States had cracked Japan’s “unbreakable” navy code. So when Yamamoto sent a formidable naval force to seize Midway, two American armadas, which included three aircraft carriers, intercepted the Japanese fleet near Midway on June 4.

The smashing American triumph had not been cheap. The U.S. carrier Yorktown and a destroyer were sunk and about one hundred and fifty airplanes were lost. But for the first time since Pearl Harbor, six months earlier, the warlords’ dreams of capturing Los Angeles and San Francisco had been turned into a nightmare.
¹

Washington: Chaotic Capital

D
URING THE EARLY MONTHS OF 1942,
Washington, D.C., skyrocketed into a boomtown and a center of monumental chaos. Hordes of people flooded into the city on every bus and every train—every hour. Washington’s population rapidly soared from some 700,000 to double that figure.

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Throngs of employers arrived in search of juicy defense contracts. Business executives by the thousands descended on the city to take up wartime appointments in the government. Many were known as dollar-a-year men. Wags held that most of them were worth every penny of it.

Starry-eyed teenaged girls and young women flocked to the capital, mainly from small towns across America, looking for the only commodity not in short supply—jobs. They had come in response to pleas of the U.S. Civil Service Commission to help in the war effort—and to collect fatter paychecks. There were thousands of positions paying $1,440 a year, perhaps three times what these girls and women had been earning.

Also arriving by the hundreds to take advantage of what promised to be a financial bonanza was another coterie of women of all ages—prostitutes.

Washington residents were confronted daily with a wide variety of shortages. However, there was never a scarcity of paper generated by the new people who came in to help run the war. Each night of the week, a thirteen-car train chugged out of the Washington railroad yard with a cargo of wastepaper.

“Where were these mountains of paper going?” an enterprising newspaper reporter asked a railroad official. “Can’t comment on that,” he replied. “Security. There’s a war on.” No doubt the German and Japanese warlords would have been aided greatly in their strategic planning should they learn where wastepaper was being dumped.

Soon office space for the mushrooming government was almost unobtainable, even though large contingents of carpenters began throwing up ramshackle temporary structures. Military officers, many wise in the capital scheme of things, jumped in and seized much of the available office space. Growled the head of one large new civilian agency: “If the Army can capture territory as well as it grabs office space, the war will soon be over!”

In an effort to alleviate the acute shortage of office space, the government took over several large apartment buildings and converted them into makeshift offices. Even the bathrooms were used as work space. This was achieved by laying a sheet of plywood over the bathtub. On it was placed a typewriter. A cushion was put on the toilet seat to provide a chair for the typist.

Sleazy nightclubs sprang up in and around Washington. The booze was expensive—and awful. Few customers complained. Entertainers at these joints were billed as being “direct from Broadway”—meaning Broadway Street in Paducah, Kentucky, or West Overshoe, Montana.

A degree of fantasy soon began to color wartime Washington, mainly in Hollywood patterns. In Tinsel Town, a favorite pastime was to dine at the chic Brown Derby or Chasen’s and rubberneck as Hedy Lamarr, or Mickey Rooney, or Bob Hope strolled in regally. In Washington, the dining rooms at the Mayflower, Statler, Willard, and other major hotels were jammed with people who craned their necks when Secretary of War Henry Stimson, General George Marshall, or Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau arrived.

A Young Reporter Is Awed
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Legends began to circulate about the housing shortage. No one recognized this critical need more than President Roosevelt, who fancied himself as an architect. Despite shouldering burdens heavier than ever had to be carried by a president, he found time to sit at his desk in the White House Oval Office and use a pencil to design on paper his version of temporary housing.

Roosevelt’s designs were called “absurd” by one White House official who pleaded anonymity. No one ever said anything to the president about his creations, and he may have conjectured to himself on occasion why nothing he designed was ever built.

Innovative classified advertisements appeared in Washington newspapers: “Urgently needed, two room apartment. Will leave my wife as security.” “Returned wounded infantry office desperately needs house for self, wife, and one infant. References on everything, including infant.”