The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (39 page)

Despite his travails, Dole clung to his highly developed sense of humor. He began referring to himself as “the soldier who disobeyed orders and wouldn’t die when he was supposed to.”

A Rain of Explosive Balloons
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Bob astonished doctors by eventually regaining the use of both legs and what he called “my good arm.” His right arm remained useless, and he was advised there was nothing more Army surgeons could do for him. So he sought a civilian surgeon, Dr. Hampar Kelikian, who specialized in bone and joint surgery, in Chicago.

Dr. Kelikian had served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Perhaps he felt a kinship to Dole because the doctor’s brother had been killed during the war while fighting in Italy, near to the location where Dole had met his own disaster.

After studying Dole’s voluminous medical charts, Kelikian agreed to perform surgery on the lieutenant, perhaps even regaining for him partial use of his right arm. Dole had no money, however, but Kelikian, a refugee from Armenia, agreed to charge no fee. Much later, the surgeon recalled: “To me, young Dole symbolized America. He had the faith to endure.”

Although Kelikian had waived his fee, the Chicago hospital needed an advance for the use of its facilities. Word got around Russell that the Dole family had almost no money, so the folks at Dawson Drug Store, where Bob had worked as a teenage “soda jerk,” put out an empty cigar box. A label “Bob Dole Fund” was glued to it. Eventually, quarters, dimes, and nickels added up to the needed $1,800, a sizable sum at the time, and a grateful Bob Dole left for Chicago.

Dr. Kelikian performed seven surgical procedures on Dole’s right arm and hand. Amazingly, the operations, along with the Kansan’s vigorous exercising, recovered 50-percent use of the arm.

After spending thirty-nine agonizing months in military hospitals, Bob Dole, who had been promoted to captain, was discharged from the Army and returned to Russell, a driven man, grimly determined to make up for lost time. That obsession would never leave him. Just the daily ordeal of buttoning a shirt reminded him that “I have to keep pushing because I’m not quite a whole person.”

Dole planned to gain a law degree at Washburn College in Kansas and then enter politics. A lifelong friend said to him: “Bob, I wouldn’t be surprised if one day you become the Republican nominee for president of the United States.”

Both men had a good laugh over that far-fetched possibility.
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A Rain of Explosive Balloons

M
AY 5, 1945, WAS A BEAUTIFUL SPRING DAY
in Oregon as the Reverend Archie Mitchell and his wife Elyse were preparing to leave on a fishing trip in the mountains just north of the California border. Only two weeks earlier they had arrived in the small town of Bly as representatives of the Christian and Missionary Church.

The Reverend Mitchell was thirty-three years of age and Elyse, who was five months pregnant with the couple’s first child, was twenty-six. Going on the outing with them were a girl and four boys from the church.

Only a day earlier, Elyse had decided not to go on the jaunt, because she decided she was too weak to keep up with the boys. But Saturday dawned with such beauty that she changed her mind and climbed into the couple’s 1939 automobile with the group. They brought along fishing gear and picnic lunches.

After driving up into the mountains, the party found the narrow road blocked. A Forest Service road grader had slid into a ditch, was bogged down in thick mud, and several workers were trying to pull it out with a pickup truck. The Mitchell couple learned from one of the men that the nearby stream was far too muddy for fishing. Moreover, the road ahead was impassable.

All the passengers got out of the automobile, and the Reverend Mitchell backed it off the road to find a parking space.

Elyse and the youngsters meandered into the nearby woods. After Mitchell had gotten out of the car, he heard his wife call to him to come and look at the strange objects they had discovered.

After he had taken two steps, an explosion rocked the area. Along with three Forest Service men, Mitchell dashed into the forest and was greeted by a horrible scene. The five children, chopped up and bloody, were dead. Elyse was barely alive, and her clothes were on fire. Mitchell badly burned his hands trying to snuff out the flames. She died moments later.

Hanging from tree branches above the five mutilated bodies were bits and pieces of paper and twine. Markings on the debris seemed to indicate the material was of Japanese make. Scattered around the victims were chunks of shrapnel, an unexploded incendiary bomb, and an array of metal rings.

Elyse Mitchell and the five children had a unique but tragic distinction: they were the only casualties from enemy bombing on home-front America. Because of wartime secrecy, citizens would not learn until months later that the northwest United States was under attack by ingenious bomb-laden balloons.

Beginning in the fall of 1944, at the same time President Roosevelt was being elected for the fourth time, forest fires began raging. Tens of thousands of acres in Oregon, Washington, and northern California were destroyed.

Many people living in the region felt that careless smokers were causing the infernos. Skeptics countered that if that viewpoint were true, much of the population of the Pacific Northwest apparently was engaged in pitching lighted cigarettes into thick, dry forests.

In Washington, only President Roosevelt and a few top military and government officials knew the true reason for the conflagrations. Under the code name Fugo (windship weapons), the Japanese had been launching balloon-borne bombs into the high-altitude jet streams. The devices took sixty-eight hours to cross nine thousand miles of the Pacific.

Paratroopers in Operation Firefly
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Commanded by Major General Sueki Kusaba, Fugo would eventually launch nine thousand balloons, carrying thirty thousand bombs. Tokyo warlords were convinced that the barrage would have a demoralizing effect and create widespread panic on home-front America.

Constructed with laminated tissue paper, each balloon had some six hundred separate pieces. The armament mechanism was quite complicated. Each balloon had three explosives. The first bomb was to kill people; the second, an incendiary bomb; and the third was to self-destruct the entire apparatus. The balloons were guided by unique Seiko timing devices and Toshiba electrical systems.

Filled with hydrogen, the balloons were thirty-two-feet in diameter and seventy feet tall. Navigation was not precise. One bomb was found in a Detroit suburb, another fell on a street in a town in Idaho.

One of the airborne bombs came close to inflicting a major calamity on the United States. A balloon loaded with explosives got tangled in power lines just outside a supersecret plant near Hanford, Washington, where fuel was being refined for a revolutionary device known as an atomic bomb. A short circuit in the power for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps ensued, but backup equipment restored power rapidly. Had the cooling system been off much longer, a reactor might have collapsed and exploded, killing many workers and destroying much of the building.

Japan had no spies in the Northwest to report on the results of the balloon-borne assault, and the American media cooperated with Washington by not mentioning a word of the blazes. To do so would have informed Tokyo that Operation Fugo was a success and caused more balloon bombs to be launched.
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Paratroopers in Operation Firefly

W
HILE THE FIRES WERE BURNING BRIGHTLY
—often out of control—in the Pacific Northwest, a unit designated by the Army as the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion (Colored) was training at Camp Mackall, North Carolina, and looking forward to taking an early crack at the Germans or Japanese. Known as the Triple Nickels, the outfit was a pioneer, America’s first black paratroop unit.

Although men of the Triple Nickels were willing to put their lives on the line for America, they were reminded daily that they belonged to a Jim Crow army. However, to a man, they were deeply imbued with black pride and a grim determination to be the best parachute unit in the Army.

Lieutenant Bradley Biggs, who had grown up in a Newark, New Jersey, black ghetto and had played professional football with the New York Brown Bombers, recalled when the Triple Nickels were training at Fort Benning, Georgia:

It wasn’t easy. A proud black lieutenant, sergeant, or private with polished boots and parachute wings, still had to sit in the back of the bus, use the “colored” toilets and drinking fountains in the railroad stations and theaters, and go out of our way to avoid confrontations with red-necked white police in the towns. Black captains and lieutenants found post officers’ clubs closed to them. But we endured to prove ourselves as paratroopers.

In early 1945, the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion received secret orders to report to Pendleton Air Base in Oregon for a “highly classified mission.” They would play a major role in Operation Firefly, battling raging forest blazes.

After arriving at Pendleton, the battalion took a three-week crash course in forest-fire fighting by parachute, including demolitions training, tree-climbing techniques, survival in heavily timbered and mountainous locales, and the touchy business of dismantling live Japanese explosives.

In the weeks ahead, teams of paratroopers jumped into tiny clearings, often studded by boulders, where they could become trapped in the center of a conflagration. Although their dangerous mission was highly important, the Triple Nickels were deeply disappointed that their lot in the war was fighting, not the Germans or Japanese, but roaring infernos.
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A Purple Heart Parade

I
T MAY WELL HAVE BEEN
the most distinctive and emotion-racked parade in American history. Some 500,000 people lined Fifth Avenue in New York City to watch a succession of two hundred jeeps roll past. In each vehicle sat three or four soldiers, sailors, or marines. Many had bandages wound around their heads. Some had no arms. Others were missing a leg or two. It was June 15, 1945.

This event was known as the Purple Heart Parade and had been organized by the City of New York to honor men wounded in the war. On each jeep one or more signs told the throngs in what locale the GIs had been wounded:

BATAAN, MIDWAY, SICILY, ITALY, UTAH BEACH, OKINAWA, IWO JIMA, CORAL SEA

Few other activities during the global conflict brought to the home front the horrible price the flower of America’s youth was paying. Those watching were choked up and far too emotional to even cheer. Or does one “cheer” a mutilated young man? On occasion there would be sudden bursts of polite applause. Mostly the crowd stood and watched in silence.

It was eerie. For thirty minutes the procession crawled past. About the only sound was the grinding gears of the jeeps.
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A Invasion of German Scientists
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Plane Crashes into Skyscraper

O
N JULY 28, 1945,
Army Air Corps Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith Jr. was approaching the jungle of skyscrapers in Manhattan at the controls of his twin-engine B-25 bomber named Old Feather Merchant. He was on a training mission. A graduate of West Point in 1942, Smith had completed two years of combat in Europe and had been awarded two Distinguished Flying Crosses and four Air Medals before being routinely rotated back to the United States.

Towering among the concrete giants was perhaps the world’s best-known structure, an architectural masterpiece called the Empire State Building. Built in 1931, the edifice has one hundred and two stories and is more than a quarter-mile high.

Now, on this summer day, Colonel Smith’s B-25 winged in closer to the high-rise jungle. Moments later, a horrendous crash echoed throughout Manhattan. The aircraft had struck the Empire State Building between the seventy-eighth and seventy-ninth floors. An operator opened the door of her elevator just as the engines of the bomber exploded. The force blew her into a burning hall, her clothing aflame. A quick-witted woman slapped out the fire and pulled the operator into the elevator.

The woman shut the door, then turned the handle to start the elevator downward. A loud crack: the heat had snapped a cable. The elevator plunged seventy-five stories and smashed into the basement. Hours later, rescue workers used heavy tools to get inside the elevator, and they carried the two women out of the wreckage. Each had suffered a broken leg—but both were alive. A safety brake had slowed the descent of the elevator a few floors before it hit bottom.

Fourteen people, including Colonel Smith and his crew, were killed and twenty-five persons were injured seriously. Within a couple of hours, squat New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia huffed and puffed up seventy-five floors of steps to comfort the surviving victims.

It would never be known what caused a highly experienced pilot, who had dodged German antiaircraft shells over Europe countless times, to fail to evade such a gargantuan obstacle as the Empire State Building.
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