Published by The History Press
Charleston, SC 29403
www.historypress.net
Copyright © 2011 by Joseph F. Rishel
All rights reserved
First published 2011
e-book edition 2013
Manufactured in the United States
ISBN 978.1.62584.204.6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pittsburgh remembers World War II / edited by Joseph F. Rishel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
print edition ISBN 978-1-60949-144-4
1. World War, 1939-1945--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh. 2. World War, 1939-1945--Social aspects--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh. 3. World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American. 4. Oral history--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh. 5. Interviews--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh. 6. Soldiers--Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh--Biography. 7. Pittsburgh (Pa.)--Biography. 8. Pittsburgh (Pa.)--History--20th century. I. Rishel, Joseph Francis, 1945- II. Title: Pittsburgh remembers World War 2. III. Title: Pittsburgh remembers World War Two.
D769.85.P41P537 2011
940.53’74886--dc23
2011017848
Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Oral Histories
PART I. THOSE WHO SERVED ON THE HOMEFRONT
Anywhere, Anytime—However They Could Serve: Jean “DeDe” Barnard Anderson,
As told to Danae Brentzel
It Was a Terrible but Romantic Thing: Richard Charles Martin,
As told to Jo Ellen Aleshire
World War II in the “Rocks”: Nora Mulholland,
As told to Marian Mulholland
PART II. MILITARY NARRATIVES
A B-24 Gunner’s Survival in Enemy Territory: Alex Antanovich Jr.,
As told to David Scott Beveridge
The Integrity of a Soldier: Charles Bates,
As told to Stephanie J. Fetsko
Wheeling and Dealing: Sidney Bernstein,
As told to Rocco Ross
A Soldier’s Brush with Death: Raymond Book,
As told to Stephanie J. Fetsko
Where the Hell Is Pearl Harbor?: Bill Gruber,
As told to Sandy Doyle
Faith to Carry Them Through: Frederick T. Seifert,
As told to Karan Kranz
PART III. HUSBAND AND WIFE STORIES
Oceans Apart: James Arthur Krebs and Helen McGrogan Krebs,
As told to Helen E. Krebs
World War II in Pittsburgh, City and County: Ed and Rose Campbell,
As told to Justin Hoffman
Everybody Had to Do Something: John and Sally Smith Haberman,
As told to Heather Newell
Moon Township Memories of World War II: Dave Price and Jean Klixbull Price,
As told to Jennifer Welsh
Bibliography
About the Editor
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book owes its existence to the efforts of the graduate students who are listed as the authors of each of the chapters and to the narrators. The graduate student authors who were selected for this book made determined efforts to capture the thoughts, emotions and experiences of those who had lived through the war, yet it was the narrators’ cooperation and their willingness to be interviewed that made this book possible. These chapters were retained by the Pennsylvania Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and transferred into electronic format by volunteer Diane Holleran under the guidance of the director, Marilyn Holt, to whom I am greatly indebted. I appreciate the efforts of my wife, Helen, who so patiently read and reread this manuscript, and of my daughter, Marjorie, for her technological assistance. I would also like to thank Duquesne University professor Dr. Perry Blatz; Thomas White, university archivist at Duquesne University; and James Duzyk of Robert Morris University for their reading, advice and encouragement. The selection of photographs was facilitated by David Grinnell, director of archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center; Gilbert Pietrzak, coordinator at the Pittsburgh Photographic Library; and Edward Galloway, director of the Archives Service Center at the University of Pittsburgh Libraries. I am grateful to Hannah Cassilly, commissioning editor, and Hilary McCullough, editorial department manager, both of The History Press, for all of their patient guidance and advice. Lastly, I would like to thank the administration of Duquesne University for their support of this project. The publication of the photographs in this book was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
INTRODUCTION
On the first day of September 1939, residents of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, while enjoying their annual county fair, were startled to learn that Germany had invaded Poland, thus beginning the Second World War in Europe. Two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. At the county fair, as its weeklong run continued, several thousand people gathered in a peace demonstration. The reality of violent world events intruded on the Pittsburgh area with an immediacy that the coming years would only magnify.
With a population of 671,659, Pittsburgh ranked as the tenth-largest American city in the 1940 census. It was and is the county seat of Allegheny County, which in 1940 had a population of 1,411,539, making it one of the largest and most important counties in the United States. Its importance is frequently expressed in terms of manufacturing, and correctly so, but even before World War II, the Pittsburgh area was a leader in banking, technology, food processing, electronics, chemicals, education and medicine. Yet it was, of course, an industrial powerhouse, the importance of which was known to America’s enemies even as it was to Americans themselves. That power was manifesting itself to an awesome degree. Like the rest of the nation, the Pittsburgh area was struggling to climb out of the Great Depression, which had afflicted it for nearly a decade. Steel was its lifeblood, and steel-producing Pittsburgh had suffered greatly in the 1930s. Unemployment nationally had been a quarter of the nation’s non-farm workforce, but with 32 percent of its workforce unemployed, Pittsburgh had been especially hard hit. A reaction was inevitable. In 1931, some 5,000 “hunger strikers” paraded through Pittsburgh city streets. The following year, at the bottom of the Depression, Father James Cox, pastor of Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church in the Strip District, led an “army” of 15,000 unemployed to Washington.
By the end of 1940 it was a different story. The memory of those hungry days was only beginning to recede as the economy gained momentum and payrolls in the area picked up. Earlier that year, Congress had voted $18 billion for defense, and Pittsburgh was in for a major share of that expenditure. Every steel company in the area was operating at or near full capacity. Virtually all were planning major expansion of their facilities. By the end of 1940, business activity equaled that of 1929, the last “good” year before the Depression. In 1941, as the war raging in Europe and the Pacific drew inexorably closer to American shores, Pittsburgh’s city council voted for a more stringent smoke control act, but its enforcement was postponed because of the war. A more pressing need required the Steel City’s attention: military production.
On Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941, the America First Committee, the largest group
of isolationists in the country, was holding a public meeting at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Oakland. They were there to hear the arch spokesman of isolationism, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, warn of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s dangerous path of interventionism. The America Firsters alleged that Roosevelt was trying to involve the United States in the war in order to save Great Britain. As the program was about to start, some people entered the hall with the startling news that the American naval and air base at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands had been bombed. The isolationists had heard false news stories before, and the bearers of this “false” news were unceremoniously hustled out of the hall.
The following day, many Pittsburghers were listening to radio station KDKA, the world’s first commercially licensed radio broadcasting station, when President Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war on Japan. Pittsburgh and the nation were aroused like never before in solid determination to win the war. Losing was not seen as an option, but no one knew that they faced three and a half years of extraordinary effort and sacrifice to accomplish that goal.
American entry into World War II abruptly ended the national debate between interventionists and isolationists. The latter group, strong in the Pittsburgh area, was labeled by some as pro-Axis. The Pittsburgh area was home to a large number of Germans and other ethnic groups that authorities had identified as subversive Nazi sympathizers. Germans were an obvious target of both the FBI and of the Pennsylvania Motor Police (i.e., the State Police), as were Italian aliens, but a less obvious Ukrainian American faction also attracted notice. Irish agents were believed to be acting on behalf of German intelligence. Communists had been tireless in the Pittsburgh area in their attempt to gain adherents. After Hitler and Stalin signed their infamous mutual nonaggression pact in August 1939, the communists became even more suspect than they had been previously. In 1940, the FBI planted Matt Cvetic—he would rise to become a recognizable name as an anti-communist during the Cold War—in the ranks of Pittsburgh-area communists as a counterspy. The communists were soon to change their pro-German stance when Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Neither the FBI nor the Pennsylvania Motor Police had sufficient manpower to safeguard all of the vulnerable civic, industrial and transportation soft spots against possible sabotage regardless of the perpetrators. To that end, they turned to the massive American Legion. Its members remained vigilant throughout the war and reported any suspicious activity. There was no real evidence of any acts of sabotage in Pittsburgh from any of these groups during the war. Security remained tight, however, and at times it bordered on hysteria. In 1943, some twenty-nine German aliens in the Pittsburgh area were arrested, apparently on the “evidence” that they were “guilty” of living near war plants. The average civilian, however, was unaware of these “threats,” believing that everyone was working together harmoniously in a united front.
Pittsburghers were busy with the job of manufacturing war materiel and enlisting in the military: 1,200 men volunteered on the very day Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war. They would be needed. The news from the war fronts was not good. By January 1942, German submarines were sinking a ship a day off the coast of North Carolina, and by June of that year “wolf packs” of Nazi submarines had sunk four hundred Allied ships in the Atlantic. Reports from the Far East were even worse. Nearly 90,000 Americans were forced to surrender to the Japanese in the Philippines. Japan proceeded to take over much of East Asia and the western Pacific. They even occupied Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. In the European Theater, the Germans were deep into Russia. In Africa, they were in Egypt and within striking distance of Great Britain’s oil lifeline, the Suez Canal.
Pittsburgh’s manufacturing capability played a vital role in reversing the dismal world picture. Tens of thousands of people were added to local payrolls as industrial production continued to break records. Many of these newly added workers were not originally from the area. The consequent pressure on the local housing stock was enormous. To prevent rising rental costs, in April 1942, the Pittsburgh Office of Price Administration froze rents in Allegheny County and eight surrounding counties included in the “defense rental area.”
To protect the local population, in March 1942, authorities proclaimed the first of many air raid drills for Pittsburgh. In June came the first blackouts. The streetlights were darkened, and even so much as a sliver of light coming out of a home window could provoke a knock on the door from the local air raid warden. Some pointed out the foolishness of the blackouts because the glow from Pittsburgh’s mills could be seen from the air for a hundred miles. Moreover, western Pennsylvania was safely behind the protection of the Appalachians and an ocean away from the battlefronts. Far from the fighting, Pittsburgh’s factories worked unmolested day and night. But it was not without a price. By January 1944, the smoke from local mills, combined with the smoke from the coal-burning furnaces of homes, filled the air with a heavy “smog.” It cut visibility so dramatically that thousands of war workers were unable to reach their places of employment. Much of the smoke was due to the enormous expansion of local industries. The United States Steel Homestead Works was expanded along the Monongahela River, as was the Jones and Laughlin Steel Mill in Hazelwood. Both of these expansions involved the demolition of neighboring homes, further aggravating the housing crisis. The growth of large companies changed America’s workplace environment. In 1939, only 13 percent of American workers were employed by companies having ten thousand or more employees. By 1944, that figure had grown to an astounding 30 percent of the workforce.
The war did not entirely end the tug-of-war between labor and management. Despite a no-strike pledge made by rival labor organizations American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations after Pearl Harbor, there were strikes. By far the most notable was the United Mine Workers strike of 1943, when some half million miners nationwide walked off the job. The strike outraged the public, and President Roosevelt ordered a short-lived seizure of the mines. Despite the government takeover, the steel mills in Pittsburgh closed for several weeks owing to the shortage of coal. The coal strike was not indicative of the larger picture. Work stoppages accounted for only one-tenth of 1 percent of the total work time during the war. The few strikes that did occur were so-called wildcat strikes, spontaneous walkouts by workers, without sanction from union leaders.
Pittsburgh during World War II. Senator John Heinz History Center.
As many as twelve million men were in uniform, resulting in a severe labor shortage. Women had worked before the war and even prior to World War I, but they tended to be in low-paid, gender-specific roles. They also tended to be younger and unmarried. Frequently, getting married meant getting fired. During World War II, these restrictions loosened enormously. The number of working women in the United States grew from twelve million to eighteen million. By far, most of the new female workers were married, and a majority had children. Most important was the fact that women found work in roles heretofore held solely by males. Rosie the Riveter became a national icon. The image of a working woman flexing her muscle—a most unfeminine thing to do in the 1940s—first appeared on a poster at Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in East Pittsburgh. While commonly associated with manufacturing, Rosie appeared in many nonindustrial settings. In Pittsburgh, the first female bus drivers appeared in November 1942. Women also made advances to far higher levels. In 1942, Anne X. Alpern became Pittsburgh city solicitor, the first woman to be named to that position in a major American city. The following year, Judge Sara Soffel became the first woman to preside over an Allegheny County criminal court. After the war, the returning veterans wanted their jobs back and the number of women in local industries declined, but old limits had been tested, thus setting the stage for occupational gains two decades hence.
World War I had cost $32 billion; World War II was to cost $350 billion, with only 40 percent of that cost covered by current income. The War Reve
nue Act of 1942 raised taxes and lowered the threshold income for those required to pay the federal income tax. Those earning as little as $624 a year paid a 5 percent tax. Congress implemented a system of withholding from paychecks as a means of collecting it, but it was not nearly enough to pay for the war. As a result, the federal government sold war bonds, some $40 billion of them. Workers were expected to buy them. Western Pennsylvania repeatedly surpassed its “quota” of war bonds. By September 1943, the western part of the state had purchased $305 million worth of bonds, surpassing its quota by more than $6 million. Sometimes celebrities came to town to sell them. That same month the so-called Hollywood Cavalcade came to Forbes Field and sold $87 million in bonds. Even the dimes and quarters of children were sought. Seldom would they have enough money to buy a bond. Instead, they purchased stamps, which, when their little books were filled, enabled them to buy war bonds.
The bonds and the taxes would be used to support America’s men and women in uniform and to equip them with the tools of victory. All told, some 15.3 million served in the Second World War. Of this number, some 5.3 million volunteered. The other 10 million were drafted. Beginning in 1940, men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six were required to register for the draft. After Pearl Harbor, the age was extended to men between eighteen and forty, but actual drafts in the upper age brackets were variously applied. In Allegheny County, nearly 115,000 men had registered for the draft in the two months following American entry into the war. Many thousands more would follow. For nearly all of them, the war was to be a cosmopolitanizing experience. Before the war, many Pittsburghers hadn’t traveled more than a day’s ride from home, much less to Europe or the Pacific. Their experiences would be life changing.
More than sixty-five years have passed since the Japanese surrendered to the United States on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, ending World War II. That surrender closed a period of more than three and a half years of terrible carnage and bloodshed, taking some 400,000 American lives in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. For millions of Americans who lived through World War II, whether they actually served in the military or stayed on the homefront, the war was the defining event of their lives. For many, it marked their entrance into adulthood in a world transformed beyond what anyone could have imagined. Virtually no one who lived through it remained unchanged.
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