The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (32 page)

To keep the Germans confused about Allied strategy and plans, casualties were kept secret. A month after the landings, Bedford received a colossal jolt. The Pentagon disclosed that fourteen families in the town had loved ones killed on Omaha Beach on D Day. More deaths of Bedford men would follow when the savage fighting moved inland.
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Calamity at Port Chicago

F
ORTY MILES NORTHEAST
of San Francisco, Port Chicago was the site of a huge ammunition depot to which black and white sailors were assigned as stevedores to load ships bound for the Pacific battlefront. On July 17, 1944, the men were putting nearly a million tons of incendiary and fragmentation bombs onto the Quinault Victory and E. A. Bryan when a gargantuan blast erupted.

The monstrous explosion killed 323 sailors, 202 being black, and destroyed five ships, a locomotive, and sixteen boxcars loaded with munitions—and the town of Port Chicago. Damage occurred in twelve other towns as far away as seventy-five miles.

It was one of the most destructive disasters in maritime history. An official investigation reported that the precise cause of the holocaust would never be known. But civilians in the Port Chicago region felt that they knew the cause—saboteurs in the employ of Tokyo and Berlin.

A month after the explosion, hundreds of the Navy stevedores were ordered to report for duty at a nearby ammunition depot outside the town of Vallejo. Three hundred and thirty black sailors refused the transfer. The Navy commander, Admiral Carleton Wright, threatened to have them arrested, court-martialed, and shot for mutiny. Fifty of the strikers still refused to accept the transfer order.

One of the resistants, Joseph Small, was called into his office by the admiral. “Small, you are the leader of this bunch,” the officer declared. “If you don’t go to work, I’m going to have you shot!” The young sailor replied angrily: “You bald-headed old [bleep], go ahead and shoot!”

The fifty resistants were put on trial on October 24, and after an hour and a half’s deliberation, the panel of officers found the defendants guilty of mutiny. They were sentenced to fifteen years in prison and given dishonorable discharges. In January 1946, most of the black sailors were released from prison.
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Secret Project in a Movie Studio

D
URING THE SUMMER OF 1944,
most Americans were anxiously following developments in Europe after Allied forces established a solid bridgehead in Normandy. Others on home-front America, however, had loved ones in the Pacific where a savage battle was raging in Saipan, a small island located sixteen hundred miles southeast of Tokyo.

In the final tally after Saipan was pronounced secure by the U.S. commanders, 23,000 Japanese had been killed and American marines and soldiers had suffered some 3,500 dead and several thousand wounded.

America’s youth had paid a horrendous price for a tiny patch of desolate real estate. But Saipan was to serve as a base for huge B-29 Superfortresses to strike at Tokyo and other targets in Japan.

Meanwhile, far from Saipan, in Culver City, a suburb of Los Angeles, Captain Ronald W. Reagan was deeply involved in a top-secret project to train B-29 crews for raids on Japan. On a movie sound stage, special-effects men had built a detailed mock-up of Tokyo. Above the display was rigged a crane and camera mount.

From a perch above the miniature Tokyo, the special-effects men photographed various locales to show how the targets would look to bombardiers from different altitudes and speeds under varying weather conditions.

Captain Reagan, a Hollywood actor in peacetime and a future president of the United States, served as narrator for the training films, guiding pilots to their Tokyo targets.

Later, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, leader of the Army Air Corps, credited the special-effects project as being “a highly useful tool” for briefing Superfortress crews.
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WASPs Test New B-29

A
T EGLIN FIELD, FLORIDA,
in the fall of 1944, flight tests for the huge new B-29 Superfortresses were launched under the most intense secrecy. These

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were the planes that would bomb Tokyo and other cities in Japan. A B-29 had a wingspan forty feet wider, was twenty-five feet longer, and was twice as heavy as the B-24 Liberators and the B-17 Flying Fortresses that pilots had been accustomed to using.

Men would fly the B-29s in the Pacific and suffer the casualties. But two women, members of Jacqueline Cochran’s WASPs, would test the B-29.

Male pilots had been dubious about flying a Superfortress because of the plane’s immense bulk and a rash of the engine fires that had broken out after the planes had been hastily manufactured. Consequently, Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr. recruited two WASPs, Dorothy Johnson and Dora Daugherty, both in their early twenties. Tibbets did not inform them of the engine fires.

After several days of intensive training and briefings at Eglin Field, the two WASPs climbed into a Superfortress. On its nose was a tribute to the test pilots; Tibbets had technicians paint the name Lady Bird. Then the B-29 lifted off routinely for a long flight to a bomber base at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Tibbets, it would be said, intended to demonstrate to doubting male pilots that “even women” could handle the bulky bomber.

For a week, Daugherty and Johnson flew male pilots and crewman around the southwestern United States. The B-29 designers apparently had worked out the kinks, and no fires broke out in the engines.

When the two WASPs flew back to Eglin Field, Colonel Tibbets seemed to have accomplished his unspoken goal. In light of future developments, Johnson and Daugherty were convinced that they had played a role in bringing victory in the Pacific.
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The Fable of Fala

W
ITH THE APPROACH OF FALL 1944,
Franklin Roosevelt confounded the ghosts of America’s Founding Fathers and his Republican foes by announcing that he would seek reelection for the third time in November. It was clear to most observers in Washington that Roosevelt was in poor health. But his personal physician, Vice Admiral Ross T. McIntire, pronounced the incumbent “fit for duty.”

Roosevelt’s opponent would be Republican Thomas E. Dewey, who had made a big name as a racket-busting special prosecutor in New York City before being elected governor of the state in 1943.

As a warm-up to the campaign, Dewey’s supporters spent a great amount of time trying to ridicule Roosevelt by turning the spotlight on his Scottish terrier, Fala, who was the world’s most publicized dog.

Fala was what journalists call “good copy.” When his master was present for the launching of a battleship, Fala sat at his side. Press photographers snapped more pictures of the black Scotty than they did of the president.

When world leaders, such as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, called at the White House, they always asked about Fala and insisted on seeing the cocky little dog. When Fala once got into a noisy hassle with a female Scotty, it was front-page news.

This flood of publicity about the White House pet was bound to generate rumors. None was more ridiculous than the one claiming that Roosevelt, during his travels, had absentmindedly left Fala on some island. The story never named the place. When the president returned to Washington, so went the fable, he immediately dispatched a warship to pick up the canine, at great expense to the American taxpayers.

There had not been an iota of truth in the story. But Roosevelt, the consummate politician, used it to turn the tables on Dewey’s campaign. At a rally carried nationwide by a radio hookup, the president brought up Fala and the rescue by a mythical warship. A gifted storyteller, he had his listeners guffawing by reciting invented details of the Great Rescue of Fala from a nonexistent island.
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Roosevelt’s Foe Keeps a Secret

A
LTHOUGH GENERAL GEORGE MARSHALL,
the Army chief of staff in Washington, kept a neutral stance in the bitter 1944 presidential campaign between the incumbent, Franklin Roosevelt, and his Republican challenger, Thomas Dewey, he watched developments closely to see how they might affect the war effort. It was said that Marshall had always been so intent on remaining detached from partisan politics that he would not vote for fear that his stance might leak to the media.

One morning Marshall received shocking news. A culprit in the Navy or State Department had smuggled supersecret information to Dewey about Magic, code name for the interception and translation of Japanese messages. American cryptologists had broken the Japanese code four years earlier.

General Marshall feared that Dewey might disclose the existence of Magic, causing the Japanese to change codes. That would have destroyed a huge American strategic advantage, cost thousands of American lives, and prolonged the bloodbath in the Pacific.

Marshall found himself skewered on the horns of a dilemma. If he failed to contact Dewey and explain the crucial value of Magic, he would be derelict in his duty. If he approached the Republican nominee, the general would be charged with injecting himself in the presidential campaign to curry favor with Roosevelt.

After consulting with Admiral Ernest King, the Navy chief, Marshall decided to send a Pentagon intelligence officer, in civilian clothes, to deliver to Dewey a top-secret letter explaining Magic. The two men met secretly in a hotel room in Tulsa.

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Dewey, a seasoned old pro, suspected the scenario was a scheme hatched by the cagey Roosevelt to silence the Republican. Dewey snapped at the Pentagon emissary, “He knew what was happening before Pearl Harbor and instead of being reelected, he ought to be impeached.”

On election night, Missouri Senator Harry Truman, Roosevelt’s selection to be his vice president, and several cronies from Truman’s artillery battery in World War I, gathered in a suite in Kansas City’s Muehlebach Hotel. Truman played the piano, there was much elbow lifting, and ears were tuned to election reports on the radio.

It was a long night. Clearly, the election was close. Then, at 3:45
A.M.
, Governor Dewey conceded. He had never as much as hinted that the secret Japanese code had been cracked by the Americans prior to Pearl Harbor.
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A Father-and-Daughter Spy Team

I
N THE AUTUMN OF 1944,
tiny Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, was a peaceful oasis seemingly far removed from any connection to the slaughter abroad. A few months earlier, one of its residents, sixty-one-year-old soft-spoken Simon Koedel, had left his home on Riverside Drive in New York City to escape the big-city turmoil, he told neighbors.

Left behind in New York was his twenty-six-year-old foster daughter, Marie Hedwig Koedel, who liked the bright lights of New York and refused to flee to a “hick town” in the wilds of West Virginia. Attractive Marie made a living as a clerk in a clothing store.

Harpers Ferry is situated on the Potomac River, fifty-five miles northwest of Washington. The town had been made famous by John Brown’s raid in 1859, just before the Civil War erupted. Brown led a group to seize a Union Army arsenal at Harpers Ferry, but he and eighteen of his followers were captured and later tried and hanged.

Soon after Koedel’s arrival, with most of Harpers Ferry’s young men gone to war, he got a job as projectionist in a movie theatre. A friendly type, he made friends, but generally kept to himself.

Just before dawn on October 23, 1944, Koedel was deep in slumber at his rooming house when he was awakened by sharp rapping on the door. Answering the summons, he was confronted by two strangers. One flashed a badge and said, “FBI.”

Neighbors in Harpers Ferry were stunned to learn that this outwardly gentle man, who was masquerading as a theater projectionist, had been one of the most productive Nazi spies in the United States.

Born in Germany, Koedel had come to the New World in time to serve three years in the U.S. Army in World War I. In 1935, he returned to Germany on a visit and, excited over what he considered to be the bright promise of