This Is Only Test How Washington Prepared for Nuclear War (4 page)

The Chaney and Douglas activities didn’t accurately represent the scope of the OCD, but the uproar forced it to concentrate on defensive measures. The First Lady’s husband might have created the OCD, but Congress funded it. At the same time, La Guardia’s lackadaisical attitude denied the agency much-needed leadership. (La Guardia sometimes flew to Washington to attend Cabinet meetings, then left without even visiting the OCD.) The President replaced him with Harvard Law Dean James M. Landis. Landis immediately
made it clear that the OCD would provide firefighting equipment and train
ing, recruit “spotters” to watch for enemy aircraft along the coasts, and develop emergency rescue teams. He fired Chaney; Eleanor Roosevelt quietly resigned in March 1942. Yet the OCD’s troubles continued. Despite his efforts, Landis failed to integrate the agency into the federal bureaucracy or to curry Congressional favor. The Bureau of the Budget blocked several of his proposals; furthermore, a plan to set up a nationwide network of volun
teers to help with salvage campaigns aroused the suspicion of Republicans, who smelled an attempt to lace the country with New Deal partisans. (Considering the use of the WPA to aid the campaigns of favored candidates during the late 1930s, this concern wasn’t unfounded.)
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The OCD hoped to make civil defense in Washington a national model, but this proved difficult. Poor planning hampered recruitment. Three thou
sand residents answered a call for air raid wardens, but the District’s Civilian Defense Committee wasn’t prepared for such a crowd. It simply conducted a mass swearing-in and promised to mail identification cards to everyone.
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Roosevelt signed a law authorizing blackouts in the District, but tests exposed a lack of compliance in unlikely places. After reminding his colleagues of an upcoming blackout, Rep. Karl Mundt (R-S.Dak.) observed that the House’s office buildings lacked dark curtains. Landis, much to his embarrassment, once noticed lights burning in the OCD’s headquarters during a test. The blackouts were of little use anyway, since the Mall and its monuments provided excellent landmarks for pilots.
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After this halting start, the District implemented a modest civil defense program. By May 1942, 55 warning sirens and horns were installed citywide. Defense workers used sandbags, plywood, and corrugated metal to construct shelters; basements and windowless corridors were cleared to provide addi
tional protection. The
Washington Star
published instructions on how to curtain windows, get to a shelter, extinguish fires. Women at American University formed a fireguard brigade. The Board of Commissioners distrib
uted 20,000 helmets and whistles to air raid wardens who surveyed their neighborhoods during blackouts, checking for compliance. At night, drivers covered their cars’ headlights with tape and the Park Service shut off the Mall’s floodlights. Downtown, the Potomac Electric Power Company practiced evacuations of its headquarters. Wardens directed coworkers and customers to stairs and exits, while others hurried to stations equipped with hoses and extinguishers. To protect the District’s water supply, the commissioners hired 230 guards.
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The OCD, intent on promoting national unity, established a race relations division and actively recruited African Americans, especially in Washington. Photographers for both the OCD and the Office of War Information (OWI), which disseminated news and propaganda at home and abroad, diligently searched for opportunities to record—and stage—black Washingtonians’ civil defense activity. Dr. Charles Drew obligingly appeared in one picture. A promi
nent African American surgeon, Drew taught at Howard University, and, in 1941, set up the nation’s first blood bank for the American Red Cross. As a
volunteer for the OCD’s Medical Corps, Drew posed with a young black nurse during a first aid drill in Washington: the two blanketed an air raid “victim,” also black, and trundled him into a waiting ambulance. For an OWI photograph, nine black men of varying ages gathered around a base
ment table. Standing in front of an American flag, two older men pointed to a map outlining civil defense zones as their young comrades, white warden helmets buckled on, watched intently. Most wore stylish suits and ties, even though they were putatively engaged in an air raid drill. Such photographs composed an image in which blacks enthusiastically answered the call to civilian duty in the wartime capital.
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But how convincing could such propaganda appear to Ruth Powell, Juanita Murrow, and Marianne Musgrave—three black women who were arrested in January 1943 because they refused to pay a surcharge for hot chocolate in a Pennsylvania Avenue store? After the women told the Howard Law School and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) about the incident, law student William Raines proposed peaceful sit-ins: when denied service, black patrons should quietly but firmly remain seated. In April, a dozen Howard students and members of the NAACP gathered in front of the Little Palace restaurant at 14th and U Streets NW. U Street was the commercial district of black Washington, but the Little Palace’s white proprietor refused to serve blacks. In groups of three, the men and women requested service. When the owner responded by closing, the students picketed. “We Die Together, Why Can’t We Eat Together?” read one sign. The campaign worked—the restaurant dropped its discriminatory policy. Seventeen years before sit-ins swept the nation, black Washingtonians used the tactic to strike at segregation in their hometown, thus advancing the “Double V” campaign. Introduced in February 1942 by the
Pittsburgh Courier
, a leading black newspaper, the Double V called for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home.
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While the OCD worked to bolster Washington’s civil defense, national treasures were quietly removed from the capital. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were taken to Fort Knox. By May 1942, the Library of Congress had moved 4,719 wooden crates of books, catalogs, and manuscripts to college campuses in Virginia and Ohio. Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., held more than half of this total. The Smithsonian and other national museums carried out similar relocations of rare books, scientific artifacts, and Americana. The National Gallery of Art trucked its most valuable paintings to secure sites.
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The war also brought alterations to the White House. To accommodate added wartime staff, the East Wing was constructed and a bomb shelter was installed beneath it. Composed of several rooms fortified with concrete as thick as nine feet in places, the shelter had its own power generator and blast doors designed to withstand 500-pound high explosives. Because the shelter lacked an elevator and a ramp, Roosevelt had to be carried down the stairs for his only visit to the space.
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Meanwhile, the Secret Service set up machine gun nests on the roofs of the East and West Terraces of the White House and issued gas
masks to staff. At Fort Belvoir, 18 miles south of Washington, 250 enlisted men and 4 officers were designated as rescue crews for the White House; their equipment included a steam shovel and wrecking tools. Mike Reilly, the White House’s supervising Secret Service agent, wasn’t too worried about air attacks, though he observed, the “possibility of a flyer deliberately crashing his aircraft loaded with explosives into an object also has to be considered.”
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Overcrowding, shortages, and the pell-mell pace of work quickly pushed aside civil defense concerns in Washington. By January 1943, the OCD was struggling to find volunteers. At the same time, the diminishing possibility of attack prompted those who did volunteer to fritter away their time on non-civil defense activities.
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To revive dwindling interest, the OCD held a recruitment parade in July. A crowd gathered at Scott Circle to watch, but no parade, however festive, could save civil defense in Washington. The OCD was increasingly becoming a publicity agency, churning out pamphlets and posters that most Americans ignored. As Allied victories mounted, even OCD staff searched for things to do: a history of the agency was written before the war ended.
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On May 2, 1945, new president Harry S. Truman— Roosevelt had died on April 12—announced that the OCD would cease operations effective June 30. A few days later, the commissioners ordered the removal of shelter signs and the cessation of air raid signals.
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Like other Americans, Washingtonians looked forward to winning the war against Japan and the onset of peace and prosperity; civil defense, it seemed, belonged to the past. Little did they know that victory over Japan would make civil defense a durable part of the postwar future.

On August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber took off from the Pacific island of Tinian and flew toward Hiroshima, a southern Japanese city with more than 300,000 residents. Mounted in the Enola Gay’s bomb bay was an atomic bomb weighing almost 5 tons; it exploded approximately 2,000 feet above Hiroshima with a force equal to 15,000 tons of TNT. But comparison to conventional explosives is misleading. The blast and resulting fires engulfed a 4.4 square mile area, with temperatures at ground zero surpassing 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Together, the blast and heat instantaneously trans
formed thousands of humans into charred, shrunken torsos; across the city, shadows of people, fence poles, and even tree leaves burned onto pavement and walls. Miles from the detonation, wood structures erupted into flames, rails twisted off track beds. As many as 80,000 people died; by December 1945, the death toll reached 140,000 as survivors succumbed to burns, blast injuries, and radiation sickness. Survivors recalled scenes of stupefying horror: “People came fleeing from the nearby streets. One after another they were almost unrecognizable. The skin was burned off some of them and was hang
ing from their hands and from their chins; their faces were red and so swollen that you could hardly tell where their eyes and mouths were.”
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High above, the Enola Gay flew over its target, now sheathed beneath a gigantic mush-room-shaped cloud. The crew felt the heat and struggled to comprehend the maelstrom they saw. Said Commander Paul Tibbets, “Fellows, you have just dropped the first atomic bomb in history.”
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Three days later, another B-29 dropped the second atomic bomb in history. This bomb exploded over the city of Nagasaki and took the lives of approximately 36,000, a death toll that also climbed steadily in the following weeks. All told, both cities experienced death rates of 54 percent.
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On August 14, Japan surrendered, and Americans celebrated with abandon. Speculation about how atomic weapons would change the world was already underway, but it was overshadowed by the war’s end.
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Celebrants took to the streets of Washington. Firecrackers exploded, alcohol flowed freely, a conga line formed in Lafayette Square, across from the White House. Truman stepped out on the White House lawn and spoke briefly to a gathering crowd. “This is the great day,” he said, “the day we have been looking for since December 7, 1941.”
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And in the days to come, Washingtonians eagerly looked forward to an easing of wartime hardships. Although new cars and housing starts soon appeared, one wartime development remained in Washington: an expanding military and national security establishment.

Washington and the Postwar National Security State

In 1940, the War and Navy Departments shared a problem with District residents—crowding. The military’s lack of space wasn’t new, though; the services had outgrown their shared headquarters by the early twentieth century. Completed in 1888, the State, War, and Navy Building (also called the Old Executive Office Building) was a granite structure with pitched mansard roofs and carved marble fireplaces.
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The building seemed better suited to an era when diplomats used hand-carved pens and naval vessels fired grapeshot. By 1917, the building was too small for all three departments, resulting in the construction on the Mall of “temporary” wartime buildings. Along Constitution Avenue, stretching between 17th and 21st Streets, stood the Munitions and Navy Buildings, comb-shaped, three-story structures of steel and concrete. Both “tempos” still stood 25 years after they were built, and World War II forced the construction of additional tempos. Clustered around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, these wood and stucco structures consumed the Mall’s verdant lawns and were connected by two covered pas
sageways spanning the pool. As if unworthy of names, mere letters identified the buildings: W and N, J and K.

Yet the military needed more space. Even before the United States entered the war, the Army’s Chief of Construction, Brigadier General Brehon Somervell, wanted to end the wasted man-hours resulting from the scattering of 24,000 War Department personnel to 17 different buildings. Somervell envisioned a single headquarters capable of administering the duties of the entire military, but this sensible goal faced stiff opposition. Some brass feared centralization would erode their authority. Members of Congress fretted over the cost, while others questioned the need for a huge military headquarters in a nation seeking to avoid war. Though Roosevelt supported Somervell, he balked at the proposed site next to Arlington
National Cemetery. The idea of the military’s headquarters and a veterans’ cemetery bordering one another unsettled the President, who also disliked the five-sided design. Somervell moved the site farther south, away from Arlington, but the blueprints remained unchanged. Without waiting for final presidential approval, the headstrong general ordered contractors to begin work as soon as Congress appropriated funds. On September 11, 1941, bulldozers began grading the site. By the time someone told Roosevelt, a month had passed.
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