The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (40 page)

An Invasion of German Scientists

I
N THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1945,
President Harry Truman was seated in the Oval Office of the White House poring over a lengthy memorandum from John Franklin Carter Jr., who had been an unofficial intelligence advisor to Franklin Roosevelt during the war. A graduate of Yale, Carter had worked in
U.S. embassies in Rome and Constantinople, as well as in various top offices

in Washington. Carter’s document stated in part:

American armies have captured a number of top German scientists. Many of them are willing to come here and work under any terms laid down for them. However, our top [scientists] say that none of them should be brought here for fear of arousing professional jealousy. Instead, they proposed to lock up the Germans in France and say, “Work!”

At the time Washington was engulfed in preparations for an invasion of Japan, another “war” was raging behind the scenes over the topic of bringing the German scientists to the United States. Even before a decision was reached in the White House, the Pentagon began smoothing the way for offering contracts to and importing one hundred German scientists and engineers who had developed the powerful thirteen-ton missiles that had nearly destroyed London during the war.

Under a heavy veil of secrecy, Herbert Wagner, a German scientist who had designed airplanes with the Henschel Aircraft Company, was sneaked into Washington by four U.S. Navy officers in civilian clothes and registered under a phony name at a major hotel. Wagner had been “recruited” by the U.S. Navy Technical Mission, one of the several American groups that were combing the chaos in Germany in search of rocket scientists.

A report had been sent to the Pentagon explaining that Wagner’s knowledge of the Hs 2T3 (a radio-controlled air-to-air missile) could be fully exploited for the war against Japan if he were brought to the United States.

For four weeks, Wagner was interrogated by Navy experts in the Washington hotel suite. Then he was taken to a secluded estate on Long Island, outside New York City, to work on a Navy top-secret missile project.

Secretly bringing German rocket scientists to work in America was endorsed by Army Chief of Staff George Marshall after he read a top-secret report from U.S. technical experts who had interviewed many of the rocket experts in Germany. “The thinking of these men is twenty-five years ahead of us,” the report stated. “These [Germans] could be put to work refining a revolutionary rocket for use in the Pacific war.”

Marshall dispatched two colonels to call on Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Lyon on a delicate mission. They informed Lyon that the Army planned to bring German rocket experts to the United States and, because they would technically be prisoners of war, State Department visas would not be necessary.

Moreover, Lyon was told, American intelligence in Europe had uncovered evidence that German missile blueprints and a mass of other technical materials

Curious Happenings in Utah
205

had been passed along to the Japanese high command prior to the German collapse. So it was crucial that the German scientists and technical experts be brought to the United States to beat the Japanese in rocket development.

Most of the American scientific community was stridently opposed to the Army plan. One scientist expressed the fear that the “Nazi” group would “organize underground cells in the United States” and spread propaganda to “foment an uprising against the government in Washington.”

On July 6, 1945, before an official decision had been reached, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved Operation Overcast, a plan to import “no more than three hundred and fifty” Germans (including one hundred missile experts) to the United States. Fearful of a massive public outcry against “bringing Nazis into the country,” Overcast was wrapped tightly in a veil of secrecy.

The plan stipulated that the Germans would not be treated as prisoners but rather as free men who would voluntarily come to the United States to pursue rocket research. They would be paid six dollars per day, and receive free medical care, food, and housing.

For their part, most of the rocket men were eager to come to the United States for six months. Their future in chaotic Germany was bleak indeed, including the distinct possibility of being kidnapped by the Russians and hauled off to the Soviet Union.

Pointing out that the successful prosecution of the war against Japan was uppermost in his decision, Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. gave Overcast the green light on July 19. No doubt he had the approval of President Truman.

The first twenty German scientists and technicians disembarked in Boston. They were wearing coveralls. As they strolled down the gangplank, a reporter for the Boston Globe asked an Army officer, “Who are those Germans?” The reply: “They’re truck drivers.” A day later the newspaper carried the story.

Overcast was concealed by a tight web of secrecy. It would be more than a year before the American people knew about the project.
¹⁸

Curious Happenings in Utah

F
OLKS LIVING IN
the region of Wendover, Utah, a barren expanse of desert about one hundred and ten miles from Salt Lake City, were extremely curious about what was going on at a nearby air base. In recent weeks perhaps as many as fifteen hundred Air Corps officers and men had descended upon the broad, treeless flats and trained under the utmost secrecy.

Only a handful of top officers in the Pentagon knew that this group was led by twenty-nine-year-old Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr., who later told his wife
that he felt as though he had been set down on another planet. He had been briefed on the intricacies of a scientific theory called an atomic bomb.

The airmen at Wendover were almost as puzzled as the natives in the region. Tibbets had each one take a pledge of secrecy, but they were not told what it was they were not to reveal. Flight operations were unlike anything they had ever known. In practice runs, each plane dropped only one tenthousand-pound bomb from precisely thirty thousand feet.
¹⁹

A Haunting Prediction

I
N LATE JULY 1945,
leaders in the Pentagon were shaken after receiving a prediction from General Douglas MacArthur in Manila: a million American casualties would be suffered to conquer the Japanese homeland. That figure would be as many as U.S. forces in all branches had sustained throughout the war. Twice as many Japanese soldiers and a few million civilians would perish, MacArthur concluded.

Magic (the secret interception and decoding of Japanese messages by American monitors) seemed to confirm that awesome analysis.

“Even if the war drags on and it becomes clear that it will entail much more bloodshed, the whole country will pit itself against the [American] invaders,” Foreign Minister Shinegori Togo declared in one Magic intercept.

In another intercept, War Minister Korechika Anami declared that the Japanese armed forces would “fight to the death.”

Fanatical Japanese generals and admirals were preparing Ketsu-Go (Operation Decision), the last-ditch defense of every foot of the home islands that all Japanese held sacred, having fallen as drops from the sword of an ancient god. There were some 2.5 million soldiers, all deeply imbued with the warrior’s Shintoist code that held it a duty and an honor to die in battle for Emperor Hirohito.

There would be 32 million civilian militia (including women and children) ready to die. Their weapons were ice picks, muzzle-loading rifles, butcher knives, and bamboo spears. Children were taught to strap explosives around their waists, roll under American tanks, and blow themselves to smithereens. Five thousand kamikaze (suicide) pilots were ready to crash planes into the American invasion fleet.
²⁰

Proposed Use of Disabling Gas

G
ENERAL GEORGE MARSHALL
was among the Pentagon brass appalled by the frightful bloodbath that was going to be inflicted on the flower of American youth to conquer Japan. Although the use of poison gas would be in violation

“Let’s Take a Second Day Off!”
207

of the Geneva Convention, of which the United States had been a signatory in the 1920s, Marshall proposed “disabling gas” to drive the Japanese soldiers from their bunkers, caves, and foxholes. Then they could be wiped out by standard infantry weapons and artillery.

Marshall argued that gas was no more inhumane than were white phosphorous shells and flamethrowers. However, the suggestion was quietly dropped.
²¹

“I Was Thinking about Our Boys”

M
AJOR GENERAL LESLIE GROVES,
the hulking officer who had longed for a combat command and instead had been designated to direct a project to build history’s first atomic bomb, was a bundle of nerves. In the Pentagon, the cavernous structure he had been in charge of constructing prior to that assignment, he telephoned the communications room every fifteen minutes. “Any word yet?” he asked. Always the reply was the same: No. It was the night of August 6, 1945.

Like a handful of other key leaders in Washington, Groves knew that a B-29 Superfortress piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets was to drop an A-bomb on the industrial city of Hiroshima. But no one knew whether the apparatus would explode or if Tibbets had been able to reach the target.

At 11:29
P.M.
Groves received a terse radio flash from Tinian, the flyspeck island in the Pacific from where the B-29 had lifted off on the monumental mission: “Successful in all respects.”

Soon after dawn, Groves met with Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. Groves was jubilant. But the low-key Marshall cautioned against excessive celebrations because so many Japanese had died.

“I was not thinking about those casualties,” the outspoken Groves replied. “I was thinking about all of our boys who were murdered by the Japs on the Bataan death march!”

That was the precise view held by 98 percent of those on homefront America.
²²

“Let’s Take a Second Day Off!”

I
N THE WHITE HOUSE,
President Harry Truman was huddled with his top military advisors when word was received that Domei, the chief Japanese news agency, began its radio broadcast to the United States: “Japan will ignore the unconditional surrender demand made by the warmonger Truman. . . . ” Consequently, the American president gave the green light to drop a second nuclear device, which hit Nagasaki.

On the morning of August 15, 1945 (Tokyo time), forty-four-year-old myopic Emperor Hirohito, a figure so sacred to the Japanese that they had never heard his voice, took to Radio Tokyo with a recorded message to his people: “The enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is incalculable. I have ordered an end to hostilities at

4:00
P.M.
today.”

Within minutes word of the Japanese surrender flashed across home-front America. In Washington, a huge, boisterous crowd gathered in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. Many joined in conga lines. Car horns honked. Thousands surged across Pennsylvania Avenue and pushed up against the iron fence that surrounds the White House.

At about 7:15
P.M.
Harry and Bess Truman came out of the White House and strolled to the fountain on the north lawn. The president walked along the barrier, flashing a wide grin and tossing out V-for-victory signs in the manner of Winston Churchill. Enormous cheers echoed for blocks.

Truman went back into the White House and telephoned his mother in her home in Grandview, Missouri, not far from Kansas City. Then he called Eleanor Roosevelt and said that he wished it had been her husband who had announced the surrender news to the nation.

Truman proclaimed a two-day national holiday. “Tomorrow, August 16, 1945 [U.S. time] will be the official Victory Over Japan Day,” he told the media. “But let’s also take a second day off on Thursday, August 17. No school for the kids. No work for everybody.”
²³

A Nation Goes Wild

A
TUMULTUOUS CELEBRATION,
the like of which the nation had never known, erupted across home-front America on V-J Day. Workers left their jobs, whistles blew, church bells pealed, crowds filled the streets, total strangers embraced. Less exuberant citizens went to churches and synagogues to pray, and to give thanks for victory and for peace.

In Times Square in New York City, more than a million people congregated in a wild orgy of drinking, kissing, screaming, shouting, and fondling.

In a Los Angeles neighborhood, a woman, otherwise a modest person, ran down the street shouting in a loud voice: “There’s toilet paper at the A & P! There’s toilet paper at the A & P!” After three years of rationing, this was an important discovery.

In Victory Square in Seattle, Mrs. Viola Lander sat on a bench, crying quietly. A passerby asked why she was not celebrating. “For mothers like me,” she replied, “the war will never be over. My nineteen-year-old son, Ted, was killed in Okinawa in May.”