This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (15 page)

In March, DCD began a series of “indoctrination” lectures. The first attracted 400 persons; many of them had signed “Count Me In” cards at Alert America. More introduction than indoctrination, the evening featured a stump speech on the need for civil defense and a panel of the deputy directors of the civil defense services.
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The respectable turnout was an encouraging sign, but to audience members who had visited Alert America, the event offered familiar material. How many lectures and films would they sit for until they concluded civil defense in the District was all talk and no
action, not even rehearsal? If Fondahl wanted a thriving civil defense program, he needed these people off their seats and in the streets.

Or on rooftops. In 1950, the United States and Canada had begun planning an early warning radar network that stretched across Alaska and Canada, but it couldn’t pick up every plane crossing into U.S. air space. Aircraft flying at an alti
tude below 5,000 feet could pass undetected; mountains and the earth’s curve made blind spots unavoidable. The Air Force itself assumed “that the enemy will utilize surprise to maximum advantage and employ heavy initial strikes, and that little or no advanced warning of hostilities may be expected.” As a backstop for radar, the Air Force’s Air Defense Command oversaw the creation of an all-volunteer ground observer corps, hoping to have 500,000 volunteers dispersed throughout 19,400 observation posts in the United States. That goal was never met, but by October 1952, the Air Defense Command had more than 117,000 volunteers and 3,523 observation posts, making the Ground Observer Corps a rare civil defense success story.
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Many posts looked like the one at Wading River, in Long Island, New York: a wooden platform on posts with a shack housing rain gear, observation logs, and a telephone. Posts in urban areas were usually placed on building rooftops. Observers typically volunteered for two-hour shifts, using binoculars to watch for aircraft such as the Soviet Tu-4. Handbooks provided drawings and descriptions of various aircraft. Whenever they spotted military and commercial planes, observers called in the sightings to their area Filter Center. Here more volunteers and Air Force personnel used tabletop grids and tall tabs of stiff paper called “raid stands” to mark the type, altitude, and coordinates of the aircraft. Filter Centers relayed these details to the nearest Air Defense Direction Center, staffed entirely by Air Force personnel, who checked the sighting against known flight plans. Fighter pilots stood ready to intercept unidentified flights, with jets such as the North American F-86D or the Lockheed F-94C Starfire waiting on runways.
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Washington was among the first major cities to have a ground observer post. It stood on the roof of J.C. Nalle Elementary School at 50th and C Streets SE, in the Marshall Heights neighborhood. Located in the area’s highest point, Nalle offered a sweeping vista. Lorenzo Miller, resident man
ager of the George Washington Carver Gardens, a nearby housing complex, organized the post in the summer of 1951 (figure 5.2). Miller recruited observers from his tenants, eventually putting together a team of 40 volun
teers. In June the post took part in a 33-hour national exercise staged by the Air Force for ground observers. Beginning at 9 a.m. on June 23, crews of five climbed Nalle’s stairs and took turns working two-hour observation shifts until 6 p.m. the next day. By dusk of the first day, the post had identified 125 military aircraft (all American) and reported them by telephone to the Filter Center in Baltimore. Given the District’s proximity to military air bases, the number of aircraft crossing the skies in a ten-hour period wasn’t unusual, “just enough to keep the spotters alert,” said Miller.
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Miller and all his volunteers were African American, making the post the only all-black one in the country at the time. The post wasn’t officially segregated; its ranks reflected the neighborhood’s racial composition. The residents of

Figure 5.2
Lorenzo Miller, founder of Washington’s first ground observer post, takes part in Operation Skywatch, which placed posts in 27 states on round-the-clock duty beginning in July 1952. Miller and his crew of observers, all of whom were black, had trouble attracting new “spotters” to the post due to its location in the eastern corner of Washington, far from the homes of other civil defense volunteers. Later that year, the post folded. Copyright
Washington Post
; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library.

George Washington Carver Gardens were black, and Nalle Elementary, part of Washington’s segregated public school system, only enrolled black students. Fondahl didn’t mention race when he announced Miller’s appoint
ment as the post supervisor, but to one of the nation’s most widely circulated black newspapers, Miller and his team demonstrated the patriotism of African Americans. “More than forty Negro patriots have banded together in the
nation’s capital to form a unique organization dedicated to protecting our country from a sneak attack by enemy bombers,” declared the Washington edition of the
Pittsburgh Courier
in September 1951. A self-effacing man, Miller took the attention in stride. “I remember in one of our first tests,” he said, “one of the observers spotted a plane out to the north and we began a report. Later, when viewed through powerful glasses, the ‘plane’ turned out to be a buzzard!”
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Miller apparently didn’t consider his efforts extraordinary. If he didn’t help defend his hometown, who would? Civic-minded, selfless, and a successful recruiter, Miller was just the sort of person DCD needed. However, much of the city wasn’t as magnanimous as Miller and his men, who could train their binoculars on the roofs of downtown restaurants, theaters, and stores where they were unwelcome. In July 1951, the Board of Commissioners announced they wouldn’t enforce an 1873 law prohibiting racial discrimination in restaurants. Hecht’s Department Store barred blacks from its cafeteria until November 1951. Most hotels refused black patrons, movie theaters too. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, theaters and concert halls had employed Washington’s first “spotters”: blacks paid to watch for light-skinned blacks passing as white.
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An all-black crew of volunteers made Washington’s post unique, but like every other ground observer post in the country, it faced the ceaseless challenge of maintaining spotters’ interest and dedication. The ennui was constant, even when watching the busy airspace above Washington. By the time the Alert America convoy arrived in January 1952, Miller and his vol
unteers had stopped scanning the skies. H.P. Godwin, Fondahl’s right-hand man, privately predicted months would pass before DCD could reestablish an observer post in the District.
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He was right. Not until July did the post re-activate, just in time for Operation Skywatch, an ambitious campaign to place observer posts in 27 states on 24-hour active duty. On Monday, July 14, 35 volunteers began round-the-clock observation from the Nalle rooftop. To maintain that schedule, the post needed at least 100 additional volunteers. The indoctrination courses inspired by Alert America had now enrolled more than 800 persons; surely some “skywatchers” could be found among their ranks.
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But the post’s location was a problem. Nalle Elementary lay in the eastern corner of the District, but most civil defense activity took place in Northwest Washington. Robert Totten, the District’s most effective warden, found his volunteers in neighborhoods like Cleveland Park (see chapter 3). The city’s ground observer post was in a part of town they rarely, if ever, visited. Could Fondahl coax Northwest residents to cross the Anacostia River and join the other observers for just a few hours each week? After all, the Nalle post served the whole city, not just Marshall Heights, and, as Totten and Miller show, white and black alike worried about the Soviet Union leveling their home
town with atomic bombs. Or should we say
hometowns
? The thought of bombers overhead was frightening, but in the bustle of everyday life and worries, easy to forget. Not so Washington’s color line; and the DCD was, in effect, asking volunteers not just to cross town, but to also cross that line.

Many would-be spotters who signed up never reported for duty, citing the post’s location.
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By the fall of 1952, Operation Skywatch had 1,210 posts listed on 24-hour duty, but Washington’s wasn’t one of them.
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In an intriguing coincidence, the skies over Washington attracted citywide attention just five days after Operation Skywatch began. Late on the night of Saturday, July 19, the assistant chief of Washington National Airport’s control tower spotted a zigzagging, unidentified blip on his radarscope. Then the veteran pilot of a commercial flight leaving National reported a series of bright lights “like falling stars without tails.” Air traffic controllers tracked the same lights on their radarscopes. Although the District’s skywatchers didn’t report anything unusual, the next night a sergeant at Andrews Air Force Base saw lights moving erratically in the sky. The Air Force sent up an F-94 to investigate, but the lights (objects?) disappeared. A week later, several pilots in Washington airspace spotted strange lights.
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The Washington UFO scare was underway. Stories about the sightings filled local papers, the federal government scrambled to explain the lights. At a July 29 press conference, the director of Air Force Intelligence attributed the lights and radar blips to atmospheric abnormalities known as temperature inversions, which played havoc with radar beams.
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The explanation did the trick; press coverage tapered off. Still, the Washington sightings, along with a rash of others across the country, piqued the CIA’s interest. In January 1953, it convened in Washington a small panel of accomplished scientists under the leadership of physicist H.P. Robertson. He recruited a nuclear physicist, a geophysicist, an expert in radar, and an astronomer. The Robertson Panel concluded most of the sightings, including those in Washington, had reasonable explanations, and by “deduction and scientific method it could be induced (given additional data) that other cases might be explained in a similar manner.” The Panel also noted the “lack of sound data in the great majority of case histories.”
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Although the panel didn’t think aliens had penetrated American airspace, it believed reports of UFOs posed several dangers to the nation, including “being led by continued false alarms to ignore real indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority.”
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That is, the Soviets might start spreading false rumors about UFOs, fueling national panic and making a first strike easier to execute. The CIA shared this concern. Since America’s warning system depended on both radar and visual observation, at “any moment of attack, we are now in a position where we cannot, on an instant basis distinguish hardware from phantom.”
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Worries about
potential
Soviet propaganda, however, overlooked the propaganda already out there:

. . . in this new age in which hostile forces are known to possess long-range bombers and atomic weapons, we cannot risk being caught unprepared to defend ourselves. We must have a trained force of skywatchers. If an enemy should try to attack us, we will need every minute and every second of warning
that our skywatchers can give us. In that awful eventuality, the margin of warning may make a critical difference in the effectiveness of our air and ground defenses, and in the efficacy of our civil defense measures—it could save many lives and facilitate protection of vital services and production.

So said the President on July 12, referring to Operation Skywatch.
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Of course, neither Truman nor the Air Defense Command intended to nurture a “morbid national psychology.” But continual warnings that the Soviets could strike like a bolt from the blue, combined with official statements about the importance of the observers, spurred expectations, even if sub
conscious, of seeing
something
. Especially at night. Operation Skywatch put posts on 24-hour active duty, and if observers in Washington and elsewhere regularly read magazines and newspapers, then they might very well have anticipated seeing something strange in the sky.