The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (19 page)

All the while, John Bulkeley sat silently. Then Joe wanted to know if the Navy commander had the clout to get Jack into PT boats. Bulkeley replied that soon he would be at Northwestern recruiting potential skippers, and that Jack would be among those considered.

“If your son can measure up, I will recommend his acceptance,” Bulkeley declared.

The lunch turned into a marathon endeavor—the conversation continued until eight o’clock that night. When Daddy Kennedy bid farewell to his guests, he said to Bulkeley: “I hope Jack can be sent to someplace that is not too deadly.”

Twenty-five-year-old Jack Kennedy passed muster with flying colors. In his interview with Bulkeley, he came across as eager, dedicated, and energetic. Moreover, he had sailed his own sloop on Cape Cod since he was fifteen years old.

Weeks later, Ensign Kennedy was ready to ship out for the war zone. It would not be to “someplace that is not too deadly,” as Joe Kennedy had “suggested.” Rather Bulkeley had arranged to send him to one of the hottest locales in the global conflict—the Southwest Pacific.
¹⁶

Wants to Spotlight U.S. Spies

B
Y MIDSUMMER OF 1942,
William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the Medal of Honor recipient from World War I and now chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), had recruited hundreds of agents and was dispatching them all over the globe. Suddenly, he ran into a roadblock. Ruth Shipley, who ran the State Department passport division as though it were her own fiefdom, insisted that Donovan’s men travel with their passports clearly marked OSS.

That edict triggered a grim joke at OSS headquarters in Washington: American agents should also go abroad with a sign hanging on their back. It would state, painted in large letters, the word Spy.

Heated discussions were held at the highest levels before the State Department became convinced that cloak-and-dagger missions cannot be conducted in the glare of a spotlight. Ruth Shipley’s whim was rescinded.
¹⁷

Government Censors Movies

E
IGHT MONTHS AFTER
Uncle Sam went to war, President Roosevelt grew concerned that the American people were not being imbued with the goals of Washington in the great global conflict. He realized that newspapers and magazines were saturated with “war news” but that these stories did not usually give the hoped-for Washington “angle”—meaning propaganda.

Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor were avid movie fans, and often new Hollywood films were flown to Washington for the First Couple to view at night in the privacy of the White House. Roosevelt, the Great Communicator of the Era, knew that 80 million Americans, many flushed with good-paying jobs in the defense industry, were pouring into sixteen thousand theaters each week.

Armed with this knowledge, the president decided that the seductive qualities of the large silver screen could be “one of our most effective means for informing our citizens of the need for patriotism and unity.”

Consequently, in August 1942, a branch of the Office of War Information (OWI) to be known as the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) was established in Washington. BMP’s stated function was to work with Hollywood leaders in the production of wartime films.

Publicly, fifty-one-year-old Elmer Davis, a journalist selected by Roosevelt to head the OWI, insisted that his agency’s only goal was to “tell the truth.” Privately, he confided to aides that the “easiest way to propagandize people is to let a propaganda theme go in through a [movie] when people won’t realize they are being propagandized.”

Lowell Mellett, a former editor in the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, ran the Bureau of Motion Pictures from Washington. His number two man,

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thirty-nine-year-old Nelson Poynter, the publisher of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, was assigned as the hard-nosed foreman to ride herd on the hands at the Hollywood corral.

Mellett and Poynter knew virtually nothing about making movies. Poynter had seldom been to a film in a theater and he was unaware of the names of Hollywood’s stars and tycoons. Moreover, Mellett and Poynter were staunch political liberals, as were nearly all of the BMP executives. Most of the Hollywood studio heads, producers, and directors were political conservatives.

Elmer Davis had assured Hollywood filmmakers that Poynter’s function was to advise, not censor. However, the BMP movie-reviewing staff, mainly women with liberal views, produced a forty-two-page Manual for the Motion Picture Industry.

Hollywood bigwigs were flabbergasted to observe the left-wing thrust of the Manual. It stated that Allied victory would promise a New Deal for the entire world, with capitalism regulated by governments and social welfare programs introduced or drastically expanded. Roosevelt had labeled his domestic program the New Deal, which conservatives considered to be socialistic.

King Vidor, a highly successful director with conservative views, was among the first in Hollywood to clash with the BMP. He was developing an epic of the steelmaking industry, An American Romance. In Washington, Marjorie Thorson, BMP chief reviewer, was aghast to read in the script that management was praised and union bosses degraded. The storyline focused on a young, penniless immigrant, Steve Dragos, who became a union-busting automobile manufacturer.

“This story is a deluxe automobile edition of Horatio Alger,” an irate Thorson declared. “And if Henry Ford himself had written the script, it could scarcely express the Ford [antiunion] philosophy more clearly.”

Despite the major “flaws” in the script, BMP felt that it would be beneficial to the war effort to show a movie that depicted that work on an assembly line could be “fulfilling and beneficial.” So the agency demanded that Vidor’s script be “realigned.”

Thorson was especially outraged about the conduct of the immigrant hero, Steve Dragos. When his workers staged a sit-down strike, he brought in armed guards with tear gas to disperse the strikers. “A Nazi tactic pure and simple,” Thorson exclaimed.

E. J. Mannix, production chief at the Hollywood studio making An American Romance, “yelled and screamed” when the BMP “advisor,” Lowell Mellett, handed him Thorson’s long list of “desired” script changes. Washington was trying to strong-arm him and King Vidor into making a “New Deal picture,” Mannix declared.

Despite their anger, Vidor and Mannix bowed to reality, and they agreed to implement enough script changes to make the images of management and unions compatible with New Deal philosophy.

Throughout the Hollywood hierarchy, it had become apparent that, while the government could not legally censor films, the BMP had the moral clout to achieve that goal. If the movie tycoons were to publicly clash with the BMP, a wartime agency, they would be branded as unpatriotic and risk failures at the box office.

Throughout the war years, Hollywood produced scores of films that had been censored by the noncensors of BMP. Never before or since has a private-enterprise communications medium in the United States been subjected to such ironclad, yet subtle, control by the government. As OWI chief Elmer Davis had predicted would be the case, millions of Americans were “propagandized without realizing they had been propagandized.”
¹⁸

Navajo Code-Talkers

A
T THE MARINE CORPS TRAINING BASE
at San Diego, California, in mid-1942, Colonel James L. Underhill gave an introduction speech to a group of unique recruits that had just arrived. “The rest of us in the Marine Corps are Americans,” he declared. “But our Americanism goes back at most no more than three hundred years. Your ancestors appeared on the continent thousands of years ago. Through your ancestors, you were Americans long before your fellow marines were Americans.”

Colonel Underhill was speaking to the first group of Navajo Indians that had volunteered to leave their reservation and to contribute a unique talent to marine outfits in combat: passing along messages in a code that the Japanese could never break—the Navajo language. They would eventually be known and admired by marines as code-talkers.

When America had been bombed into war, countless young male Navajos (as with those in other tribes) had to wrestle with their consciences. Most felt, with merit, that the “white man” had taken away their country long ago. So should they fight for the United States?

One Indian mother asked her son who had just enlisted in the Marine Corps, “Why do you have to go to war? It’s not your war, it’s the white man’s war.”

“Because, Mother, I’m proud to be an American,” the young man replied. “And I’m proud to be a Navajo. We should always be ready when our country needs us.”

Early on, the Navajo recruits were given a crash course on operating a radio. Then the men themselves got together to assign Navajo words to the accoutrements of war. Dive-bombers became ginitsob (hawk), bombs became a-ye-shi (eggs), and observation planes became ne-as-jah (owl), among scores of other words that would be used in combat situations.

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The Navajo language could not be understood or mimicked by the Japanese; the verb forms were so complex that they could be understood and spoken only by those who had grown up with the language.

Eventually 430 Navajo code-talkers would be involved in all the major battles in the Pacific. Messages sent by radio in their unbreakable code carried information to and from field commanders on Japanese troops deployment, artillery positions, strong points, and observation posts. Most of the code-talkers’ activities were highly dangerous, being at or near the front lines—and sometime behind Japanese positions.

A contingent of Navajo marines landed with the assault waves on bloody Iwo Jima in February 1945. Much of the fighting focused on Mount Suribachi, a craggy, 550-foot elevation that dominated the tiny patch of real estate.

After four days of savage fighting, a forty-man marine patrol reached the summit. There Lieutenant Harold Schrier reached into his map case and pulled out a folded American flag that had been given to him earlier by his regimental colonel. Other marines found a long piece of pipe, seemingly a remnant of a rain-catching apparatus. At about 10:30
A.M.
four men began fixing the Stars and Stripes to the pole.

At the time, two code-talkers were a short distance from the summit. They sent a message to a command ship offshore: “Naastsosi Thanzie Dibeh Shida Dahnesta Tkin Shush Wollachee Noasi Lin Achi.”

On the ship the message was rapidly translated by a Navajo—and a mighty cheer erupted from hundreds of men on board. The message had stated that the American flag was flying atop Mount Suribachi. After the last Japanese had been dug out of caves, Iwo Jima was pronounced secure. It had been a bloody victory: seven thousand marines had been killed and eleven thousand wounded. Four of the American dead were Navajo code-talkers.
¹⁹

Popular Orchestra Disbanded

A
MERICA’S MOST POPULAR DANCE BAND,
the Glenn Miller orchestra, was performing before a typical packed house in a theater in Boston. The musical ensemble played a beautiful new ballad, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” Many in the audience, with loved ones in the service and far away, wept copiously. It was September 1, 1942.

An Iowan, Miller had been a trombonist and arranger before forming his own band in the late 1930s. Within months the orchestra had skyrocketed to the top in record sales.

Now, near the end of the show in Boston, Miller told the audience that the band would be no more, that he had received a captain’s commission in the Air Corps and would be leaving soon for active duty.

What Miller did not say was that he had given up a highly remunerative contract with the Chesterfield cigarettes program on CBS radio, as well as a few million dollars more in other income to volunteer his services to his country.
²⁰

Gone with the Wind in Chicago

W
ALTER ASHER,
owner of a grocery store in Rolla, Missouri, received a package from something that had the initials OPA. Only later would he learn that OPA stood for a mammoth wartime agency, the Office of Price Administration.

Asher opened the container and was confused by the myriad of bureaucratic gobbledygook. In nearly thirty pages of small type, a booklet described a food-rationing plan conceived by the OPA in Washington to allocate fairly to Americans the most popular foods, such as meat, butter, cheese, sugar, and coffee.

Grocers throughout the nation claimed that the OPA bureaucrats that had concocted the program didn’t understand it either. However, there were serious penalties for infractions. “I might go to jail and never know what ‘crime’ I committed!” a Des Moines grocer complained.

The logistics of the massive rationing program were mind-boggling. Each family in the United States was registered to receive ration books. Some 5600 ration boards, depending largely on volunteers, were established. But there were 60,000 paid employees.

The OPA apparatus consumed 40 million pounds of paper in printing forms, coupons, and instructions, and as many as 5 billion forms were printed and distributed on the home front each year.