New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  But there were other legacies of New York’s war. German Americans never fully regained their communal confidence; their once-vital presence in the city’s public life receded, almost melted away. When Congress took up the question of postwar immigration, consultants Madison Grant and John B. Trevor were among those redrawing the terms of admission into the United States. The law that resulted, the National Origins Act of 1924, would end a century of unimpeded European immigration. The law limited the number of arriving Southern and Eastern Europeans, including Jews, defining them as undesirables to be kept out of the nation. The new orthodoxy propounded by Grant and other “experts,” and embraced by many American voters and congressmen, sounded few warnings about “Nordic” Germans but instead focused on Jews, Italians, and Slavs as racially inferior and as importers of European radicalism. Thus millions of would-be immigrants, many the kin of New Yorkers, were denied the Statue of Liberty’s welcome and left behind in a Europe torn apart by the Great War’s dark aftermath. Woodrow Wilson’s war to make the world safe for democracy had brought to a climax fears of social contamination that New York most vividly symbolized. Enemies already within the gates—“Huns” in all their threatening guises—would no longer be joined and inflamed by masses of new “enemies” arriving at Ellis Island from distant shores.74

  CHAPTER 8

  Tempting Target

  Global Conflict and

  World War II, 1933–1945

  The squadrons of enemy twin-engine bombers roared through the morning sky over Long Island, heading for their targets on the western horizon. The planes had encountered no resistance as they made their turn toward the distant Manhattan skyscrapers. But now, thousands of feet below them on the ground, civilians trained their binoculars skyward from dozens of observation posts scattered across the landscape. Soon hundreds of calls flooded into the telephone filter stations at Hempstead, White Plains, and New Haven, where evaluators sent the spotters’ reports through to the Army Information Center in the New York Telephone Building on West Street in lower Manhattan. Here, telephone operators and army personnel plotted the reports of the bombers’ progress on large table maps, enabling dispatchers to call up Army Air Corps fighter squadrons based at Garden City and Quogue on Long Island. Within minutes, Curtiss P-40 fighter planes took to the air and came up from behind on the attackers.

  At over three hundred miles per hour, the P-40s flew much faster than the lumbering bombers, and the fighters soon made short shrift of most of the enemy. But New Yorkers were about to learn the lesson Londoners had so recently learned: “Some bombers always get through,” the New York Times conceded. As spotters watched from their post atop the Empire State Building, the paper went on to report, “4,000-pound aerial mines blasted at the foundations of New York’s skyscrapers. . . . ‘Aerial torpedoes’ smashed at their sides and upper floors.” At night the raids continued, the Times explained, but the Sixty-Second Army Coast Artillery swept the skies with searchlights installed at Coney Island, Rockaway, and Fort Totten in Queens, and the unit’s antiaircraft fire prevented the bombers from destroying the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

  The next day “there was a ‘truce’ at noon,” the Times informed its readers, “when both bombers and pursuits returned to Mitchel Field [at Garden City] for lunch.” The bombs, of course, were imaginary. So were the enemy aircraft carriers supposedly cruising off Jones Beach on these cold days and nights in January 1941. The “air raid” was part of a four-day exercise organized by the army’s recently established Air Defense Command, the first major test of civilian ground-to-air plane spotting for national defense. While thirty-five B-18 bombers and twenty-one P-40s really did crisscross each other in the skies, they fired no bullets and dropped no “aerial torpedoes.” Nor did the Sixty-Second Regiment actually use its antiaircraft guns, although its powerful searchlights did sweep the skies.

  On the other hand, the plane spotters spread across eastern New York and lower New England were very real. Some ten thousand civilian volunteers and Coast Guardsmen, the former organized in relief relays by the American Legion, manned seven hundred observation posts throughout the Northeast during the test. Nine of these posts were in the city itself. The observation deck of the world’s tallest building, the Empire State, provided a vantage point for scanning the skies. So did a hotel roof in Coney Island, a dock at City Island, and an Elks Club in Elmhurst. World War I veterans, the mainstay of American Legion membership, manned most of the observation posts, but other civilians, including women, took part as well.

  The army generals who had organized the operation conveyed a mixed message about its outcome. Yes, the system worked: spotters had phoned in sightings in time to permit fighters to take off in successful pursuit. But there had also been problems. Numerous spotters called in inaccurate sightings, even though they had been trained to jot down the direction and altitude of the incoming bombers. Further training and drills, the Times averred, would surely strengthen the system, for the army had announced its intention of making civilian observation permanent and extending it up and down the East Coast and to other parts of the country.1

  The world was a dangerous place in early 1941. Adolf Hitler’s Blitzkrieg had created a new German empire stretching from Poland to France. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had signed a nonaggression pact; only Great Britain stood against the Nazi domination of Europe. The German Luftwaffe, the air force that had reduced Guernica and Rotterdam to rubble, now was busy trying to do the same to London and other English cities. Germany’s Axis partners were also at war. Italian Fascist soldiers and airmen had already given Ethiopia and Albania to Mussolini and with their Nazi counterparts had helped Francisco Franco overthrow the Spanish Republic; now they fought to conquer Greece. Josef Stalin, for the moment Hitler’s ally, had thrown the Red Army into eastern Poland, Finland, and the Baltic republics. In Asia, the Japanese Empire continued its bloody, intermittent offensive in China and had begun to move troops into French Indochina.

  Many New Yorkers continued to see Europe’s and Asia’s wars as distant conflicts, somebody else’s bad dream. The brief U-boat attacks and air raid drills of 1918 were long forgotten. The city’s very vastness seemed to render it invulnerable. Hard hit by the Great Depression (with four hundred thousand men and women still unemployed in 1941), New York not only remained the American metropolis, the hub of the nation’s financial and cultural life, but was also the world’s second largest city, after London. New York’s 7.5 million people inhabited a space that stretched across 322 square miles. In the shadow of its skyscrapers, in its residential districts that filled thousands of blocks, many felt insulated by the sheer solidity and size of the city.2

  New York’s military defenses offered extra reassurance to those who needed it. Long-range guns installed during or after World War I faced the Atlantic from the shores of New Jersey and Long Island, defying any invasion fleet bent on taking New York. On Sandy Hook, Fort Hancock’s twelve-inch guns had a range of almost 20 miles; the massive sixteen-inch guns at Fort Tilden near Rockaway Beach could hurl a one-ton shell nearly 28 miles out to sea. Forts Terry, Wright, and Michie at the eastern tip of Long Island would prevent an attack by way of Long Island Sound. From Miller Field on Staten Island and from the Long Island fields, radio-equipped Army Air Corps planes patrolled out to sea, reporting on incoming vessels and, if need be, helping coastal artillery spotters to optimize the accuracy of their fire. The Sixty-Second Regiment based at Fort Totten in Queens could move its mobile antiaircraft guns and spotlights around the city by truck as needed. The New York Times noted confidently that, in the event of a real war, “the Army’s new and secret aircraft detector” would warn of enemy planes 150 miles out to sea. Indeed, by 1942, radar antennae faced seaward from Fort Hancock, affording New York City an early-warning system akin to the one that helped defeat the Luftwaffe over England.3

  As ever, the city’s remoteness from Europe’s battlefields seemed the strongest guarantee of safety. (As for the Japanese threat,
that was the concern of West Coast cities facing the Pacific, and New Yorkers worried less about an attack from that direction.) Because no bomber could carry enough fuel to cross the Atlantic, make its attack, and return, the Times’ military expert, Hanson Baldwin, contended that the worst East Coasters might expect would be “a small surprise raid, which could do little damage . . . undertaken by a plane or two from a ship at sea.” Baldwin deemed even this unlikely, given the vigilance of navy, air corps, and coast guard patrols.4

  For many New Yorkers, however, the danger remained real, even when they tried to push it out of their minds. A suppressed anxiety came pouring out of people when the right button was pressed. On Halloween Eve, 1938, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air dramatized H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and managed to convince at least one-fifth of an estimated six million listeners that the Northeast was under attack. In Manhattan, frightened people crowded police stations and public parks, snarled traffic on Riverside Drive in an effort to flee, and flooded the New York Times switchboard with frantic requests for information. Some, perhaps, fled their homes to save themselves from the Martian advance through central New Jersey that Welles’s actors conveyed so grippingly. But others had a different threat in mind. Running out into the street, a Newark housewife shouted, “New Jersey is destroyed by the Germans—it’s on the radio!” That fall, after all, Hitler had brought Europe to the brink of war during the Munich Crisis, when he demanded—and ultimately got—the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia for the Third Reich. Such fears proved prescient; ten days after Halloween, on “Crystal Night,” Nazi mobs would rampage through the cities of Germany and Austria, burning synagogues and beating and killing Jews.5

  By the time of the mock “air raid” in January 1941, New Yorkers and other Americans had entered an even tenser period than that which preceded the outbreak of war in Europe. Hitler now controlled Western Europe and threatened to conquer Britain. Despite the opposition of isolationists, Franklin Roosevelt had managed to commit the nation to a program of pro-British military preparedness. Congress enacted the first peacetime draft in American history in September 1940, and sixteen million men had registered. Meanwhile, the Lend-Lease Program and the direct sale of American arms and supplies were helping to keep Britain in the war. Was the country—and its largest city—on an irrevocable collision course with Germany?

  Anticipating such a collision, officials called for both preparedness and the avoidance of panic. “New York City is the logical and most attractive and tempting target for a foreign enemy,” Mayor Fiorello La Guardia declared in June 1941. He was echoed by New York State’s lieutenant governor, Charles Poletti: “Who can say that 3,000 miles of ocean are sufficient insulation against attack by those who, we know, hate America?” Despite the distance, New York’s leaders warned, the attack—however minimal the possibility—might come. As early as the previous summer, after France fell to the Germans, La Guardia had revamped the city’s Disaster Control Board, turning it into a preliminary coordinating group for defense planning. In March 1941, President Roosevelt appointed him director of a new nationwide Office of Civilian Defense. Corralling city councilmen; the police, fire, and health commissioners; and representatives of the utility companies and mass transit lines, La Guardia sought to make New York a national showcase for effective civil defense.6

  In June 1941, the mayor announced the formation of the city’s Air Raid Warden Service, a voluntary organization for men and women exempt from the draft. With bases of operation in each of the city’s eighty-two police precinct houses, the service would carve up the city into districts staffed by volunteers who would enforce blackouts, direct civilians to safe shelter during raids, report all bombings and fires, administer first aid, and help people trapped in damaged buildings. By September 1941, one hundred thousand New Yorkers had voluntarily joined the Air Raid Protection Services in one capacity or another.7

  La Guardia urged calm, repeatedly asserting that there was only a 3 to 5 percent chance of an aerial attack on his city. (The mayor neglected to explain how he had arrived at this very precise-sounding percentage.) But throughout 1941, an array of institutions reinforced the mayor’s broader message. New York firemen just back from a fact-finding tour of London publicly demonstrated the proper technique for rescuing residents from burning tenements during an incendiary attack. As the city’s public schools began conducting air raid drills, the Upper East Side’s elite, private Dalton School “evacuated” one hundred students and fifteen teachers to Connecticut to “test the possibilities of carrying on school work in the suburbs while New York City is theoretically the target of bombers.”8

  Much of New York’s preparation was playacting, to be sure. But such double vision—a sense of the city as probably safe but possibly at risk—had been the response of countless New Yorkers during earlier wars. As in those bygone conflicts, some—probably a minority—worried about an attack, others dismissed such fears as groundless, and still others leaned one way or the other as global and personal circumstances moved them. Over the next five years, this dual awareness of safety and risk would shape the way New Yorkers experienced a new world war. As their city became the outlet for Franklin Roosevelt’s “great arsenal of democracy,” as it became a port of embarkation for three million Americans bound for the battlefields of North Africa and Europe, New York’s people measured in their mind’s eyes the vast stretches of ocean and sky—vast enough, they hoped—separating them from Hitler’s fleets and planes.9

  As New Yorkers looked eastward across the ocean, the rise of dictators and new wars in Europe and Asia generated tense undercurrents that divided city dwellers from each other. In the years before the United States entered World War II, ethnic loyalties and new ideologies—sharpened by harsh economic times—brought the city’s people into collision, once more raising the prospect that New Yorkers themselves were importing distant conflicts. Though the National Origins Act of 1924 had drastically reduced immigration into the country, in 1940 some 2 million New Yorkers had been born abroad; another 2.7 million claimed at least one foreign-born parent. This also meant that millions of New Yorkers had living relatives in Europe. By the mid and late 1930s, well before Hitler’s troops marched into Poland, the tensions dividing Europe had reached New York’s street corners. The rallying chants of clashing allegiances resounded down the avenues and through the parks.

  Mayor La Guardia (left) watches as city air raid wardens demonstrate the removal of casualties from a mock bomb site, c. 1941. PHOTO BY FOX PHOTOS / GETTY IMAGES.

  The most provocative of the militant groups in Depressionera New York was the German American Bund, the American version of the Nazi Party. In marches through Yorkville on the Upper East Side, at banquets in Ebling’s Casino in the Bronx, and during rallies in their compounds at Camp Nordland in New Jersey and Camp Siegfried on Long Island, Bundists unfurled the swastika next to the stars and stripes. New York’s first Nazis had organized in the Bronx in 1922, only three years after German extremists formed the party in Munich. By 1936, various splinter groups had consolidated under the leadership of Fritz Kuhn, an immigrant chemist who ran his nationwide Bund from offices on East Eighty-Fifth Street in Yorkville. Estimates of Bund national membership ranged from 8,500 to 25,000. The one indisputable fact was that more Bundists lived in the New York metropolitan area than anywhere else.10

  Parroting his German role model, the führer of East Eighty-Fifth Street urged “Aryan (White Gentile) Americans to stamp out Jewish-Atheistic Communistic International Outlawry!” New York Nazis also warned of the “Black Danger”—the masses of “subhuman” African Americans who did the Jews’ dirty work. In his speeches and in the pages of the bilingual Bund newspaper, the Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter, Kuhn demanded that the United States remain neutral while Hitler extended the boundaries of “the New Germany.”11

  For many German New Yorkers, the Bund was an uncomfortable presence. The German Workers Club openly denounced the American Nazis, wa
rning that “democracy . . . will be destroyed in Yorkville, if the people of Yorkville are not vigilant.” Others maintained a careful public silence. Whatever they might have thought of Nazi racism and the rise of the one-party state, it was hard for many German Americans not to feel pride in the resurgence of their homeland. Above all, however, they feared a return of the anti-“Hun” fervor of 1917–1918, and consequently most avoided any overt identification with Kuhn’s and Hitler’s New Germany. The majority of Kuhn’s recruits remained recent émigrés, young down-and-out Germans who had taken advantage of the relatively generous quota accorded them under the National Origins Act to flee financial turmoil in Weimar Germany. Frustrated by New York’s Depression economy, they felt no stigma in looking homeward for political inspiration.12

  In their jackboots and armbands, the Bundists were out to get attention—and they certainly succeeded with the city’s Jewish population. Many of New York’s two million Jews had expressed their out-rage from the very beginning of Hitler’s accession to power. On May 10, 1933, for example, one hundred thousand people marched from Madison Square to the German consulate at the Battery to protest the new Nazi government’s forced retirement of Jewish civil servants, its establishment of restrictive quotas on Jewish enrollment in German high schools and universities, and its call for all Aryans to boycott Jewish businesses. Mayor John O’Brien reviewed the march from the steps of City Hall, and numerous Christian politicians and clergymen took part. But most marchers were members of Jewish organizations and Zionist clubs; the Jewish Undertakers’ Union brandished a banner reading “We Want Hitler.”13