The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (4 page)

A pin could have been heard had it dropped in the room. Roosevelt then went on to describe the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and Army Air Corps fields in Hawaii. “As commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense. Always will our whole nation remember the character of the onslaught against us,” he said.

Suddenly, as though some supernatural force had pressed a button, those in the chamber leaped to their feet and began cheering and applauding madly.

Eavesdropper in the German Embassy
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As the speech continued, Roosevelt was interrupted numerous times by heavy applause. Finally, he said, “With confidence in the armed forces, with the abounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God!”

In closing, the president stated: “I ask that Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

Roosevelt slowly closed the notebook. The chamber exploded with hand-clapping, shouting, whistles, and rebel yells.

Only one vote kept the verdict from being unanimous. Sixty-one-year-old Republican Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, voted “present.”

Across the land most Americans applauded, too. Roosevelt had articulated what was in their hearts. In most instances, people reacted with one enormous angry voice. Partisan politics and beliefs were tossed aside, at least for the present.

Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who had long been one of the staunchest isolationists, summed up the collective view of his colleagues: “Now all there is to do is whip the hell out of the Japs!”
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Eavesdropper in the German Embassy

A
MONG THE PEOPLE
who had been glued to radio sets during Roosevelt’s call for war against Japan was Hans Thomsen, at the German embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. Inside the dreary old brick building, Thomsen, whose title was chargé d’affaires, had built up in recent years the most conspiratorial den of spies found in any Third Reich embassy in the world. Undercover operatives were planted across the land.

Earlier the clever Thomsen had cabled Berlin that “a close friend” of the

U.S. attorney general was providing him information. Through this mole, Thomsen had been sending Berlin a steady stream of reports on what had been transpiring in Roosevelt’s cabinet meetings and elsewhere in Washington’s corridors of power.

Now, in a cable to Berlin, Thomsen detected a ray of light in Roosevelt’s address: “The fact is that [Roosevelt] did not mention Germany with one word shows that he will try to avoid war with us.”

That night, the Nazi spymaster fired off another upbeat cable: “War with Japan means transferring all U.S. energy to its own rearmament, a corresponding shrinking of guns and war accoutrements to England, and a shifting of all activity to the Pacific.”

No doubt tipped off by a high-ranking mole in the Roosevelt administration, Thomsen’s observation had been entirely accurate. It was indeed the administration’s plan to focus on licking Japan with all available resources.

When Roosevelt had been conferring with confidants on what to include in his address to the joint session of Congress, there had been pressure on the president to include Germany and Italy in his call for a declaration of war. But the cagey Roosevelt vetoed the recommendation. He decided to wait and see if the often impetuous führer, Adolf Hitler, might declare war on the United States. Such an action by Hitler would solidify opposing American factions behind the war, Roosevelt envisioned, for it would establish Nazi Germany as the “aggressor” against the United States instead of the other way around.

Four days later, on December 11, Hitler performed precisely as Roosevelt had predicted. Before a cheering Reichstag (parliament), he thundered that Roosevelt had provoked the war in order to cover up the failure of his (economic policies).

When the führer, a spellbinding orator, began to announce that he was going to war against the United States, the frenzied deputies leaped to their feet and drowned his words in bedlam.

Later that day, Benito Mussolini, the bombastic Italian dictator and Hitler’s close crony, also declared war on the United States.
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A Television Pioneer

W
HILE PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT
had been galvanizing a divided America into one with his historic six-and-a-half-minute address to Congress, the largest radio audience in history—estimated at 90 million people—had ears glued to Philco and Atwater Kent sets. At the same time, a newfangled electronic apparatus known as television had carried the speech—but not the president’s image.

Television cameras and equipment were so bulky that they were immobile. So to give the Roosevelt telecast “picture,” an American flag was placed before the studio camera and an unseen whirling electric fan caused Old Glory to flutter majestically while the president was speaking.

At the time, there were only six television stations operating in five U.S. cities: New York (two), Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Schenectady. Only some two thousand television sets were scattered about the nation. Most were playthings for the rich. Programming was primitive and sporadic.

A few months prior to Pearl Harbor, the CBS television station in New York City had sprung a novelty on whatever viewers may have been watching— a fifteen-minute newscast. Richard Hubbell was the “news narrator” (the exalted title of “anchor” was a decade way). Hubbell, a true television pioneer, was on the screen each day, but hardly anyone outside the studio recognized him, except perhaps for his family.

War news was the principal fare. Hubbell stood in front of a wall map, and with the aid of a pointer explained what was happening on the battlefronts of the world.

Instant Psychologists
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It made no difference if the narrator was pointing at the correct locale— TV sets were so crude and screens so small that viewers could barely make out Hubbell, much less the map.

After Roosevelt’s speech, American industry was ordered to cut back sharply on any production not vital to the war effort. Construction of new television sets ceased, and operating outlets cut down televising from four to five nights a week to one. The six U.S. television stations had virtually gone out of business “for the duration,” the popular phrase of the era.
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Instant Psychologists

I
N THE WAKE OF THE JAPANESE STRIKE,
a confused, humiliated, and furious home-front America was trying to discern the reason for the Pearl Harbor disaster. Radio and press “experts” who had no true facts, gazed into crystal balls and blessed America with their analyses.

In Iowa, Paul Mallon wrote in the Sioux City Journal: “The Hawaiian attack was obviously a demonstration designed more for psychological effect than for military damage.” A classic example of pure guesswork.

Other media geniuses stated that the bombing had been done by madmen. “And how can one make sense of the motives of madmen?” it was reasoned.

Many reporters thought it would have been impossible for Japan to pull off such a gargantuan caper on its own. The Chicago Times declared: “Had it not been for Adolf Hitler, Japan would never have ventured on such a suicide course.”

That stark declaration would have come as news to the führer. He had been as surprised as U.S. leaders about the bombing. New York PM agreed with the Hitler-ordered-the-attack theory. “The German government is masterminding the Japanese policy,” PM proclaimed.

The clones in the U.S. media jumped aboard the Hitler-did-it bandwagon. Because of the surprise and daring of the air attack, declared the Tulsa Daily World, “Japan had been carefully coached in such proceedings by the Germans.”

Columnist Upton Close declared that the Pearl Harbor bombing might have been as big a surprise to Emperor Hirohito and his government as it had been to President Roosevelt and official Washington.

Billed as a Far East expert, Close elaborated: “It is very possible that there is a double-double-cross in this business. It is possible . . . that this is a coup engineered by the Germans and with the aid of German ships in the Pacific.”

Other columnists also became instant psychologists. At least three analysts pointed out that the Japanese were suffering from the “Runt’s Complex.” Boake Carter declared the Japanese had “suicidal tendencies.”
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Strange Doings across the Land

A
CROSS THE WIDTH AND BREADTH
of America, millions of people were swamped by rumors and often reacted in strange ways. In Washington’s Tidal Basin an incensed man chopped down four Japanese cherry trees. Bellboys on the roof of the Statler Hotel in Boston used gallons of black paint to hide the huge arrow pointing to the airport.

In upscale Scarsdale, New York, mothers spent long, tedious hours sitting in parked cars outside of schools, ready to spirit their children home if bombers were to appear. In Norfolk, Virginia, site of the major U.S. naval base, the chief of police had his men round up and jail all fourteen people of Japanese ancestry living in that city.

In Denison, Texas, the mayor and city council convened in emergency session and were debating buying a machine gun for the police department. An excited man rushed into the chamber and called out that New York City was being bombed. So the mayor proposed that, instead of one machine gun, the city buy two.

Various local governments organized armed civilian bands to thwart potential saboteurs, and the vigilantes stood watch over likely targets: bridges, railroad trestles, water reservoirs, docks, tunnels, dams, and public buildings. Most of these modern-day Minute Men were armed with a motley collection of weapons: antiquated pistols, shotguns, hunting rifles, even knives. Few had had military training.

A woman driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge failed to hear a challenge by a band of armed civilians, one of whom shot at and seriously wounded her.

On Lake Michigan, sentries shot and killed a duck hunter and wounded his companion.

The public safety director of Newark, New Jersey, ordered police to board trains and arrest “all suspicious Orientals” and “other possible subversives,” leaving it up to the individual policeman to determine who “looked suspicious” and who did not.

North Carolina’s governor ordered state police cars to be painted black (presumably to make them inconspicuous at night) and instructed his officers to make arrests without warrants, otherwise they could not act “even if they saw an offender preparing to blow a bridge.”

Oregon’s governor proclaimed a state of emergency, although he explained he didn’t know what kind of emergency he was heralding.

In Galveston, Texas, a civilian guard thought a blinking light in a house was flashing signals to unseen enemy ships offshore, so he fired a rifle round into the building.

“San Francisco Is Being Bombed!”
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Farmers armed with shotguns posted themselves at each end of the Missouri town of Rolla and carefully inspected each passing vehicle, halting those that “looked suspicious.”

In the northeastern United States, a week-long spy scare erupted after the Army released aerial photographs showing fields that appeared to have been plowed in such a way that arrows pointed in the direction of several aircraft factories. Law enforcement officers took into custody two farmers and grilled them for several hours.

After three days, the badly frightened “suspects” were released when it was found that the photographs were a hoax perpetrated by an Army public-relations officer who was gifted with more zeal than brains. He explained that his goal had been to shock Americans into realizing that Nazi spies could be everywhere.

At the same time on the Pacific shore sixty miles north of Los Angeles one night, a man, his voice dripping with anxiety, telephoned the local police department. A spy was sending signals with a flashlight to Japanese submarines.

Two policemen rushed to the scene and detected the subversive—an elderly woman who was prowling around in the dark outside her house in search of her cat.
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A Stop-and-Go Railroad Trip

A
LMIRA BONDELID, A SOUTH DAKOTA SCHOOLTEACHER,
was married to a marine taking boot training at Parris Island, South Carolina. On the day after Pearl Harbor, her husband telephoned and asked her to come there immediately. A few hours later the young bride was on a train rolling southward.

The trip was frustrating. Each time the train approached a bridge, the engineer halted the train while the crew got out to see if a bomb had been placed on the span.

After crawling around under the bridge for a period of time, the crew would get back on the train, and it would continue to the next bridge.

This stop-and-go technique was followed all the way to Chicago, where Almira changed trains. The remainder of the trip to South Carolina was routine.
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