New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  Equally unsuccessful were plans by Germany’s partners, Japan and Italy, to bring the war to New York in order to intimidate America and to build morale on the Axis home fronts. Following Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy had begun developing a prototype submarine, the I-400, large enough to carry planes for bombarding American coastal targets and the Panama Canal. The I-400, in fact, was the world’s largest submarine at the time. One Japanese plan envisioned a fleet of I-400s approaching the West Coast, launching the bombers to attack coastal cities and then rounding Cape Horn and dispatching the refueled planes against New York and possibly Washington. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, believed the attacks might sow such panic that Americans would lack the will to mount a full-fledged war in the Pacific. However naïve that expectation may have been, three of the massive submarines were actually built. By the time they were seaworthy in 1944, however, the Japanese navy was fighting a defensive war, and the American coasts were beyond their range.85

  Meanwhile, in 1943 the Italian navy began training crews for attacks on New York harbor. In one plan, a transatlantic submarine would release midget subs to slip through coastal minefields to torpedo shipping in the Upper Bay. In another scheme, special torpedoes manned by divers—already used to devastating effect by the Italians against British ships in the Mediterranean—would be dispatched from submarines or Cant Z.511 transatlantic seaplanes flying from the German-occupied French coast. Undeterred by the defensive gate at the Narrows (their comrades had shepherded torpedoes through a similar gate in the harbor of Alexandria, Egypt, and sunk two British battleships), the divers would steer the torpedoes into New York harbor on or near the sea’s surface at night. The Italians would attach the torpedoes’ warheads and timed detonators to the hulls of ships before swimming away to safety on the shore, either to hide or surrender. Refueling from a German U-boat off the south shore of Long Island, the seaplanes would return to Europe. Not to be outdone, Mussolini’s air force also drafted plans to use the Savoia-Marchetti SM.95, an Italian equivalent of the prototype German long-distance bombers, to drop small bombs on Manhattan to terrify America. The withdrawal of Italy from the war in September 1943 put an end to these dreams. For both the Japanese and the Italians, the lure of bringing war to America’s (and arguably the Allies’) most powerful city, of puncturing its bubble of apparent invulnerability, proved tantalizing enough to send military engineers to their workshops and secret combat teams to their training grounds.86

  In the war’s final months, the threat of transatlantic attack did provide Nazi leaders with propaganda to bolster the morale of their war-weary, nearly defeated population. In November 1944, the US Navy received reports from spies in Europe suggesting that U-boats might soon carry rockets and missiles on their decks to bombard America. Then in early December, Albert Speer, head of Hitler’s war production, announced that a new intercontinental rocket, the V-3, would soon “be ready for firing against New York.” Speer’s lie alarmed American intelligence officers. In January, Admiral Jonas Ingram, commander in chief of the Atlantic Fleet, caused a sensation when he announced from his Manhattan headquarters that an impending German “attack on New York or Washington by robot bombs,” launched from U-boats or long-distance planes, was a probability. “The thing to do is not to get excited about it,” Ingram told reporters. “It might knock out a high building or two. . . . It would certainly cause casualties in the limited area where it might hit.” The Times found the city full of “talk of robots, buzz bombs, rockets, V-3’s,” and noted that conflicting alarms and reassurances from officials and scientific experts were confusing the public. The Times’ editors worried about the fate of treasures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library—masterworks that had been removed from the city for safekeeping after Pearl Harbor, but that had recently been returned to their institutions. “It is just as well to assume that an attack may be made even though the amount of damage would be small,” the Times advised its readers.87

  When, in April 1945, during the European war’s final weeks, British intelligence reported that six U-boats were heading west across the Atlantic, Admiral Ingram was ready for them and for the rocket attack he believed they might launch. He dispatched two aircraft carriers and some twenty destroyers from Newfoundland, and the ships tracked down and sank three of the submarines in mid-ocean. Taken to the naval base at Argentia, the surviving captain and several crewmen of one of the U-boats were repeatedly beaten (in at least one case, with rubber truncheons) by American interrogators bent on extracting the truth about the planned rocket attacks they believed imminent. But the prisoners could tell them nothing: the six U-boats had been on a routine mission to sink convoys.

  The plan to bombard New York remained what it had always been, an unrealized fantasy. New Yorkers survived the war without the air raid many of them at least half-feared. The city’s only major airborne disaster would come in July 1945, when an American B-25 bomber accidentally crashed into the seventy-ninth and eightieth floors of a fogbound Empire State Building, killing fourteen.88

  But what of the ethnic and political “powder keg” William Goodwin had warned of in 1941? In truth, the war became a great harmonizing force on New York’s home front, as elsewhere. As Norman Dworkowitz ran messages to plane spotters in Borough Park, boys in Little Italy, Yorkville, and Harlem were doing the same. New Yorkers of every ethnic group and social class participated in patriotic scrap metal and rubber collection drives, and in practice blackouts, meant to test the city’s ability to elude Luftwaffe “night marauders.” Fritz Kuhn’s Bund had been eviscerated by prosecutions targeting financial fraud within the organization, and Kuhn himself had been in prison since 1939 for embezzling funds. Stunned when Mussolini declared war on America after Pearl Harbor, most Italian Americans immediately pledged themselves to the American and Allied war effort. “Now we know where we stand. We are all together, this unites us all,” declared grocer Al Cazazza.89

  There were darker aspects of the city’s response to the war, to be sure. Some Japanese, suspected of being spies or saboteurs, remained imprisoned on Ellis Island. Although the mass internments that took place on the West Coast never happened in New York, La Guardia refused to let Japanese Americans participate in “New York at War,” a patriotic parade up Fifth Avenue in 1942, or in other civic events. Italian emigrants who were not U.S. citizens had to carry humiliating identification cards until October 1942, when the Justice Department decided the threat of their “disloyalty” was negligible. But more conspicuous than the arrests and restrictions were the enthusiastic War Bond rallies in Italian neighborhoods, the parties for German-American draftees bound for basic training, and demonstrations by small groups of Nisei and Issei who renounced their homeland’s imperialism. The city’s leading Italian American did his part as well. “This is your friend La Guardia speaking,” the mayor announced in Italian in anti-Fascist radio broadcasts transmitted from New York into Italy by the Office of War Information.90

  Yet if the simmering pot did not explode, it did boil over in episodes fueled by anger and resentment. The city’s African Americans, for example, waited restlessly for the wartime economic boom to reach their burgeoning communities in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. But jobs for blacks were slow in coming. Numerous defense plants (including Sperry Gyroscope) turned blacks away or found ways to discourage their applications; when blacks were hired, pay and conditions were often less than equivalent whites enjoyed. Black trade unionists managed to persuade Sperry to embrace a racially egalitarian hiring policy for the war’s duration, and A. Phillip Randolph, the World War I dissenter who now headed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, launched a successful drive from his Harlem headquarters to pressure FDR to establish a federal Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to guarantee equal hiring in war industries for all Americans, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin. But wartime bigotry persisted, exacerbating the Depression-era poverty and joblessness that b
urdened black neighborhoods more harshly than white ones. If the FEPC rectified instances of discrimination, it did not create an egalitarian workplace. Although several hundred black men and women were hired in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Lucille Kolkin recalled that “there were a lot of racist remarks and it was almost impossible for a non-white to receive a promotion.”91

  While fifteen thousand Harlem residents volunteered as air raid wardens, the columns of black newspapers bristled with reports of insults and violence suffered by black soldiers across the country. From Camp Stewart, Georgia, members of the all-black 369th Engineers wrote home to Brooklyn, describing how white authorities demanded that their visiting wives and girlfriends carry passes certifying that they were not prostitutes. Closer to home, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, German POWs enjoyed the privilege of sharing a chow line with white soldiers, while black GIs did not. White soldiers and civilians beat, shot, and killed black servicemen in confrontations on and near base camps. In a letter to the New York Age, a black paper, one soldier blasted “these part-time Americans who . . . are tearing to tatters and ripping to rags the American flag’s meaning of equality.” In 1943, the liberal magazine Nation averred that Harlemites “have asked the question, ‘What will the war bring us?’ The answer, as most of them see it, is ‘Nothing.’”92

  The tinder box needed only one spark. On August 1, 1943, when a white policeman shot and wounded a black serviceman after an altercation in the Hotel Braddock lobby on West 126th Street, a false rumor spread through Harlem’s streets that the soldier had been killed. By night, furious mobs were smashing store windows, overturning and burning cars, and hurling stones at police and firemen. La Guardia, well liked in the black community, made a police precinct house on 123rd Street his base of operations for mobilizing Harlem leaders to help him end the mayhem. Riding through Harlem in a sound truck, NAACP head Walter White found that pleas for calm were “greeted with raucous shouts of disbelief.” By the time the riot ended the next day, over $3 million in property had been destroyed or looted from stores, 606 people were under arrest, 189 injured, and 6 blacks were dead, most of them shot by police. The young James Baldwin, a witness to the riot’s aftermath, moved “through a wilderness of smashed plate glass. . . . The spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us.”93

  An overturned vehicle burns on a Harlem Street, August 1 or 2, 1943. THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK.

  New York’s Jews experienced their own frustrations during the war. True, the United States had finally committed itself to the war to vanquish Hitler, and the city had become a sanctuary for Hitler’s foes and victims. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, tens of thousands of European refugees found safe haven in the city, creating enclaves in Washington Heights and elsewhere. Their numbers included some of the world’s great artists, scientists, and thinkers, including the Jews Claude Levi-Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Leo Szilard, Erich Fromm, Kurt Weill, and Marc Chagall, and the anti-Nazis Jacques Maritain, Enrico Fermi, Bertolt Brecht, Béla Bartók, Andre Breton, and Piet Mondrian. “Hitler is my best friend,” quipped Walter W. S. Cook, director of the city’s Institute of Fine Arts: “He shakes the tree and I collect the apples.” This intellectual migration would help make New York the world’s postwar arts capital, supplanting Paris. “If Aristotle were alive today he would be a New Yorker,” the columnist Max Lerner proclaimed proudly.94

  For all the US government’s willingness to take in limited numbers of refugees, New York’s Jewish leaders were exasperated by Washington’s unwillingness to do more. Immigration policy remained guided by the National Origins Act of 1924, which intentionally restricted the number of Eastern Europeans who could legally enter the country. The State Department also limited the number of visas awarded to German and Austrian refugees. While Roosevelt openly deplored Nazi anti-Semitism, he did little to widen the entryway for its victims. Opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans, Depression-weary and suspicious, opposed taking in a flood of new émigrés.

  Increasingly, leaders of Jewish organizations faced a dreadful truth: the Nazis intended to wipe European Jewry off the face of the earth. In August 1942, Stephen Wise, rabbi of the Free Synagogue on West Sixty-Eighth Street and president of the American Jewish Congress, received from a Jewish activist in Switzerland a telegram that warned that the Nazis appeared to be implementing a systematic extermination plan “to resolve once for all Jewish question in Europe.” When the State Department finally permitted Wise to make the news public in November, it galvanized Jewish leaders, although they disagreed on a course of action. Some feared that pushing too hard would merely increase domestic anti-Semitism. But Wise and his allies pressed the Roosevelt administration to take an assertive role. Surely, with American newspapers publicizing German atrocities, something would be done. (In early 1943 a New York Post headline screamed: NAZI FRENZY THREATENS MURDER OF 5,000,000 JEWS BY END OF YEAR.)95

  Yet the efforts of Jewish leaders to elicit government action on behalf of their European brethren seemed fruitless. In October 1943, four hundred rabbis, many from New York, journeyed to Washington to present a petition to Vice President Henry Wallace calling on the United States and the Allies to save Europe’s Jews and ease immigration to British Palestine. Their effort helped convince Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau to press for the creation of the War Refugee Board, an organization that helped save tens of thousands of lives in 1944–1945. But for many New York Jews, especially those with loved ones stuck on the other side of the Atlantic, it was too little, too late. Combating genocide failed to become a priority for the American and Allied war effort.96

  Frustration with Washington was matched by trouble at home in New York. The war saw a nationwide upsurge in anti-Semitism as many Gentiles (seemingly forgetting Pearl Harbor) blamed Jews for entangling America in a war against the Axis. “We do not hire Jews,” some New York employers admitted, and Jews outnumbered blacks in lodging FEPC job discrimination reports. Embittered by the social stresses of the war, a minority within the Irish population targeted Jews. In Washington Heights, Fordham, and Tremont, gangs of mostly Irish teens and young men threw stones at families leaving Sabbath services, painted swastikas on synagogue doors, and broke shop windows while yelling “Kill the Jews.” For every group of Irish neighbors disgusted by the attacks, Jewish community spokesmen charged, there seemed to be a policeman looking the other way. “We are damned sick and tired of watching the sick Hitler-like grin” on the face of “Captain McCarthy (or O’Brien) . . . and hearing the usual answer: ‘Ah, the boys are just playing.’” By January 1944, one Brooklyn Jewish periodical asserted that “the streets of New York have become unsafe for Jews and—who knows?—pogroms might be in the making.”97

  Adina Bernstein was the young widow of a rabbi, a US Army chaplain killed in North Africa in 1943. One day she sat in a northern Manhattan park near “two Irishwomen” who “were complaining that over in Europe Christian boys were fighting to save the Jews in Germany. It went on and on and on and on, Christian blood being spilled. Finally, I couldn’t take it, and I said ‘Did you lose anybody in the service?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, I did. Do me a favor and just go away so that I don’t have to hear you or see you.’ They got up, but she had the last word. ‘It’s still a goddamn Jewish war.’”98

  Around 7 PM on August 14, 1945, the news flashed along the electric ribbon encircling the New York Times Building at Forty-Second Street and Broadway: “Japan Surrenders.” Within minutes, the intersection was jammed with a throng of thousands, bringing traffic to a halt in every direction. Confetti and streamers rained down from office buildings. Within two hours, the Herald Tribune reported, “two million yelling, milling celebrants of peace were jammed into the area bounded by Ninth and Sixth Avenues and Fortieth and Fifty-Third Streets.” That spring, New Yorkers had experienced over the course of three weeks the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the execution of Benito Mussolini, and the suicide of Adolf Hitler, followed a week later by Allied victory in Europe
. Already the troop ships were disgorging servicemen and women onto the West Side piers by the hundreds of thousands. Now the long war was finally over. In Times Square, Life magazine’s Alfred Eisenstaedt, watching as a sailor engulfed a nurse in a rapturous kiss, snapped the moment’s signature photograph. That night, as the citywide party continued, thousands flocked into churches for services of thanks and remembrance.99

  Once again, New York had escaped the full brunt of a catastrophic war. True, tens of thousands of its servicemen and merchant seamen had lost their lives or been wounded in Africa, Europe, the Pacific, or the Atlantic. But the city itself was spared, despite the fears of many of its people and the intentions of the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the Abwehr, and Hitler himself. The city’s ethnic and political tensions, inflamed as always by global conflicts, erupted in sporadic moments of violence, but the unifying momentum of the war effort and of renewed prosperity had prevented a reprise of anything akin to the Civil War Draft Riot.

  The end of the war left New York stronger and more important than ever. With Europe’s great cities in rubble, Manhattan was now definitively the global capital of commerce, finance, and culture; emblematic city of the world’s richest and most powerful country; and a fitting home for the new United Nations (which opened in temporary quarters at a Sperry Gyroscope plant on Long Island in 1946, before moving to its permanent site along the East River five years later). New York lawyers, financiers, and labor leaders—Henry Stimson, John McCloy, Averell Harriman, Bernard Baruch, and Sidney Hillman—had played pivotal roles in mobilizing Roosevelt’s Washington and the nation for global war; Wall Street once more had been crucial to funding the war effort. A distinctive New York style of liberalism, one in which politicians, union heads, and businessmen embraced or at least accepted an expansive vision of government intervention to improve urban conditions, carried the impetus of the New Deal through the war and beyond. With support from Washington and Albany, Fiorello La Guardia had presided over the construction of new public housing for union members and minorities and a health insurance plan that provided medical coverage to thousands of city residents. Federally mandated rent control implemented during the war continued into the postwar years. As veterans availed themselves of GI Bill benefits to go to college and buy homes in the outer boroughs or suburbs, the postwar depression many had feared failed to materialize—even as many women and African Americans lost their wartime factory jobs to returning white veterans deemed to have seniority. Factories that had cranked out mortar shells resumed production of consumer goods; vacationers replaced GIs on the floating hotels steaming in and out of Liner Row.