The New York Times Book of World War II, 1939-1945

by The New York Times

  JUNE 4, 1942

  All Alaska Put On Alert

  JUNEAU, Alaska, June 3 (AP)—Governor Ernest Gruening called today for all civilian defense units in Alaska to be on the alert following the first Japanese raid against the northern territory at Dutch Harbor. His statement said:

  “To the people of Alaska:

  “An anticipated air raid on Alaska began this morning with an attack by Japanese planes on Dutch Harbor.

  “Our Army and Navy are rendering an excellent account of themselves. All civilian defense units should remain on the alert. Details, as deemed advisable, will be released in time by the military authorities.”

  A report was received from Ketchikan, 1,200 miles to the south, that it underwent a 20-minute alert at 9:50 A. M., approximately one hour after the raid on Dutch Harbor. [There is a three-hour time difference between Dutch Harbor and Southeastern Alaska.]

  JUNE 7, 1942

  ‘What Can I Do To Help Win the War?’

  By Anita Brenner

  “I am a civilian. What is my place in the war?” This question, underscored by news of America formidably on the move, by the beginning of rationing and by appeals from many different kinds of organizations, is foremost in the mind of a host of Americans. It is a question just beginning to be fully grasped, even by those who went through the last war as adults, for now it is realized that the line between fighter and civilian has been erased and the war job of each is only a matter of circumstance and degree. There are some who put the question the old way, “How will the war affect me?” But the majority turn it actively into this: “What is my job? What can I do that will count most toward winning, and winning faster?”

  How is it answered? To this reporter, who made inquiries among New Yorkers of every degree, has come a wide variety of answers and from all of them one important fact emerges: If the mood of New York is any clue to the nation’s state of mind, there is no apathy or complacence among us. Nor is there fear; there is a complete sense of certainty as to the outcome of the war. Our strength and capacity are taken as a matter of fact. But when we shall win depends, every citizen seems to feel, on how quickly and efficiently every American gets in on the job.

  “We’re on the spot; this is no time for politics,” they say. “We’ve got what it takes—men, materials, plants. We’ve got started at last. Now let’s clean out all the business-as-usual and the politics-as-usual and get a hump on.”

  Along with this forthrightness there is another attitude, a feeling rather than a clear idea, which can be summarized more or less thus: “Why do we have to wait for the government to organize everything? The government has enough on its hands in getting war stuff out and troops going. Let the government tell us what is needed; we don’t have to sit around until somebody behind a desk gets it all set up on paper. Give us the facts. We’ll do the job. Washington hasn’t even begun to tap our skills and resources. What are they waiting for?”

  But most people do not feel that they can find, by themselves, the place where what they can do will count heavily. Some are satisfied with what they have found to do, but many are not, and are asking for more information, organization and direction. Right now they are first of all trying to decide this question: “Shall I continue with my job as usual, and give all left-over time to some volunteer work, or shall I try to shift my work to something directly essential for war and protection?” The answers that many New Yorkers have found depend, of course, on individual circumstances, but here are representative stories of how the question looks to some people and what they are doing about it.

  “I’m Joe Smith. I work in a lunch counter. I’ve got dependents, so I can’t enlist, but it’s plain to me that what I’m doing is entirely superfluous. Sure, people have to eat, but any girl can do what I’m doing. So I’ve been scouting around and I’m lined up now for heavy work in a war industry plant. Pay is about the same, and the job is harder to get to from where I live, but I’m sick of hearing the news and then listening to some customer or other complaining about sugar. Say, some people don’t seem to know how lucky we’ve been, or have any idea of what’s coming. We’d better all pitch in and help keep what we’ve got, or else! Those Japs ain’t doll babies. Sure we can lick ’em, if—if. So I’m shifting.”

  “I’m May Green, I’m an insurance clerk. I work from 9 to 5, been there for some time. I don’t have any family to look after so I have plenty of time, but it didn’t seem to fit in with the hours for most women’s volunteer work. I’d read that in England women were used in plane-detector stations and I thought that’s work I can do at night. I had a hard time finding where to go and how to enroll for training, and finally I wrote a letter to a newspaper and they told me. They were swell. So I’m in now. It’s grand. I work three or four times a week from 4 A.M. to 8 A.M. It’s exciting, and I know I’m doing something useful, so the news doesn’t get me down the way it did.”

  “My name’s Cohen. I’m a manufacturer of children’s clothing. My family’s all grown up, my boy’s in the Army. I’ve been an air raid warden from the start. I’m running the plant. I’ve been looking around to find out how to turn it into war work, but they don’t seem to have got around yet to the little factories, even though I hear we amount to about 50 per cent of the manufacturing in the country. Don’t know how true it is. Anyway, I’ve been thinking of closing up and enlisting in any service that will have me. This is an emergency, there’s an increasing shortage of materials, and I sure don’t feel like sitting around and trying to do business as usual.”

  “I don’t work—I just take care of my mother. We live in a slum section and there are a lot of children in the apartment house. For a long time I’ve felt that those children don’t get much sympathy or attention, so I got into the habit of taking them to the playground, or reading to them, just being with them. I thought I might as well enroll in some courses and learn more about it; I can at least help look after the ones in my neighborhood. I heard that many day-nursery workers now—and I hear the day nurseries are getting crowded and new ones are going to be opened up. I could volunteer there. I heard that many day-nursery workers are rushing off to do war work, but it seems to me taking care of children is just as essential as anything, and it’s certainly something I can do. So I’m training for that.”

  “I’m a school teacher. My husband’s a fire warden and I enrolled in first-aid courses. When I got through, I felt better because I knew something, but in another way I realized that people like me really couldn’t do much for the injured except see that they aren’t moved around, and maybe stop flowing blood. In my apartment house there are twenty tenants. We got together and divided up the work; a chemist took charge of learning about bombs and fires and what to do, and one woman took charge of tracking down rumors and checking them against the news, to help fight fears and panics. I found a nurse on the floor above, and we located a couple of doctors, and we have a real first-aid unit now. Then we set up, in the safest part of the building, a child-care station. I’m the child warden.”

  These and many other stories of civilian defense at the grass—or macadam—roots may not all contain the efficient and desirable answers to the questions that have been raised, but they do reveal that the human essentials for waging and winning a total war, and not losing democracy in the process, are with us. One is told, over and over, in many ways: “We are not children. Morale for us is not something that must be created by propaganda. We don’t need speeches to tell us we are in danger, nor soothing news to make us work, nor Mickey Mouse to sell us bonds and stamps. We’d rather have the facts, know where we are, know what to do, get a chance to do it.”

  One is thus told, by civilians, specifically what civilians think is needed for working together fast and efficiently: (1) organization, with neighborhood bureaus if possible; (2) information, published daily, of what or who is needed where; (3) placement for action. This way of talking and acting reveals, too, what a gulf there is between ourselves and fear-ridden, offici
al-driven peoples. And it discloses again the ultimate sources of American strength—the energy, initiative, common sense and social responsibility of the American people.

  JUNE 8, 1942

  WEST COAST FINISHES REMOVING JAPANESE

  100,000 Sent Inland, Leaving Only the Incapacitated

  SAN FRANCISCO, June 7 (AP)—Evacuation of the Western seaboard’s entire Japanese population, a mass movement described officially as without precedent in American history, has been completed.

  Except for a handful of ill or otherwise incapacitated persons and a still smaller number considered irreplaceable in their work, not one of about 100,000 Japanese remained at liberty today in that roughly 150-mile-wide strip of the three Coast States and Arizona which was their home when war began.

  Most of the 99,770 actually removed were congregated in the seventeen assembly centers, the receiving points established by the Army to make quick control possible pending the slower arrangements for permanent resettlement.

  Some thousands already have gone to inland relocation centers, of which three are ready now. Others are being built and sites for still more are being acquired. A considerable number have volunteered for farm work on private lands well in the interior.

  This is the second phase of the evacuation program, but the first and militarily important step, the actual removal of the Japanese from their homes in the zone where the Army believes their presence might be dangerous, has been achieved.

  Furthermore, said the Wartime Civil Control Administration, the transfer was made “within the time designated, without mischance, with minimum hardship and almost without incident.”

  JUNE 8, 1942

  Report by Admiral King

  By C. BROOKS PETERS

  Special to The New York Times.

  WASHINGTON, June 7—Two battles between American and Japanese naval and air forces are in progress in the Pacific and their final outcome may well decide the course of the war in that ocean, Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet, told reporters this afternoon.

  One of the battles is being fought west of Midway Island, and the other in the vicinity of Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands.

  The Japanese forces that attempted to assault Midway represented the bulk of the enemy’s naval strength, Admiral King declared, and their objective was to capture that vital outpost of the Hawaiian Islands. The islands, he added, “must be held at all costs” because they are the key to our entire Pacific defense system.

  A communiqué received yesterday from the headquarters of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet, said that two or three enemy aircraft carriers had been sunk in the Midway engagement and that eleven or twelve other vessels, including three battleships, had been damaged.

  “In comparison with the losses of the enemy,” Admiral King declared today, “United States losses are inconsiderable.”

  Naval operations are still in progress from the Hawaiian Islands to the Aleutians, Admiral King said. Although the enemy’s forces have taken some hard knocks, he added, “I would not say they have been defeated yet; they have ‘withdrawn.’”

  The situation in the Dutch Harbor area, where the Japanese made an aerial assault last Wednesday, remains obscure, the admiral declared. This was the first official indication that action in that region had continued after Wednesday’s raid.

  The reason for this obscurity, the admiral explained, is that the weather in the Dutch Harbor area has been bad for the last several days and, therefore, contact with the enemy has been intermittent. Also, Admiral King depends on the ability of the local commanders to master situations, along a line set down by general orders issued in Washington, and does not require the relaying to the capital of more than a minimum of information.

  “We have none too clear a picture about what is going on up there,” Admiral King stated, “but it is going on.”

  Most of the admiral’s observations, given in replies to reporters’ questions and in a prepared statement, were devoted to the Midway Island engagement and the events leading up to it. This battle in particular, he declared, may decide the course of the war in the Pacific, but to what extent will depend on the damage inflicted on the Japanese forces engaged.

  Asked whether the Japanese had thrown everything into their endeavor to assault Midway, Admiral King replied: “Perhaps not everything, but the bulk of it. One of their methods of doing things is not to send a boy to do a man’s job.”

  The Commander in Chief said that it was obvious that the losses suffered by the Japanese had weakened them for future offensive action. Both the Midway and Coral Sea battles have reduced the naval strength of the Japanese, he continued, and “their capacity to replace their losses is all too obviously not equal to our capacity.”

  Admiral King indicated, however, that although the Japanese had suffered telling losses in the Midway battle, it was unlikely that our forces would endeavor to pursue them and to assault them in their home waters.

  MOPPING UP IS PERILOUS

  “They still have a great deal of shore-based air power, as they found we had in the Coral Sea victory and at Midway,” the admiral declared. “For us to rush in in a mop-up action might not be well-advised.”

  This point, Admiral King emphasized, is important because, “with 130,000,000 amateur strategists in this country, many would undoubtedly advocate some such follow-up action.”

  Today’s press conference, the first held by Admiral King since he took over command of our Navy, came six months to the day after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor.

  Following the successful bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities in April, the admiral said, American military leaders anticipated assaults on Midway and Alaska.

  “The force they [the Japanese] had at hand and the general military situation could mean nothing but that they would try to break out somewhere because they could not afford to sit idle while Australia and other bastions threatened their existence and grew steadily stronger,” Admiral King explained.

  JUNE 11, 1942

  Nazis Blot Out Czech Village; Kill All Men, Disperse Others

  By The Associated Press.

  BERLIN, June 10 (From German broadcasts recorded in New York)—All men in the Czechoslovak town of Lidice have been shot, the women sent to concentration camps, the children placed in “educational institutions” and the town itself “leveled to the ground” on the charge that the population gave shelter and assistance to the slayers of the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, the Berlin radio announced tonight.

  The announcement, quoting an official statement issued in Prague, gave the population of Lidice as 483. [Czechoslovak sources in London said the population was 1,200.] The town was utterly wiped off the map, the statement made clear, by noting that “the name of the community was extinguished.”

  The German radio said:

  “The following official announcement was made Wednesday evening concerning the extermination of the township of Lidice near Kladno in the Protectorate:

  “‘The investigation of the murder committed on Deputy Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia, S. S. [Elite Guard] Upper Group Leader Reinhard Heydrich, revealed beyond doubt that the population of the township of Lidice, near Kladno, gave shelter and assisted the murderers.

  “‘In addition evidence was found of hostile actions committed against the Reich. Subversive printed matter as well as arms and ammunition dumps, an illegal radio transmitting station and huge supplies of rationed commodities were discovered.

  “‘In addition, the fact was ascertained that inhabitants of this township were in active service of the enemy abroad.

  “‘After these facts had been ascertained all male grownups of the town were shot, while the women were placed in a concentration camp, and the children were entrusted to appropriate educational institutions.

  “‘The township was leveled to the ground and the name of the community extinguished. The inhabitants o
f Lidice near Kladno numbered 483.’”

  JUNE 13, 1942

  Gandhi Seeks to Oust U.S.-British Forces

  NEW DELHI, India, June 12 (UP)—Mohandas K. Gandhi is about to unleash a large-scale “quit India” campaign in which American as well as British forces will be urged to get out of India immediately.

  Reports from his headquarters at Wardha indicated today that he had won for such a movement the unqualified support of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, President of the All-India Congress party. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, most influential party member, a few days ago endorsed the campaign.

  Before launching the campaign Mr. Gandhi wants the formal approval of the party’s working committee, which is expected to meet at the end of this month or early in July.

  JUNE 21, 1942

  The Leaders Meet

  Grand Strategy Studied

  The advance guard of America’s armed might was spread around the world last week. Strong ground units were in Ireland in the Atlantic, Australia in the Pacific. United States airmen were guarding the nation’s coasts and the coasts of the nations to the south, they were fighting in the Aleutian Islands, China, the Southwestern Pacific, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In some places they were few, in others many; but they seemed to be everywhere.

  Against this world-wide background President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met unexpectedly to talk, according to an official announcement, “of the war, the conduct of the war and the winning of the war.” The British leader had arrived suddenly, his time of arrival, the way of his coming, closely guarded secrets. The two statesmen, flanked by their highest generals, opened a series of conferences. The most important question before them was where the full strength of their two nations was to be employed.