War Stories III (29 page)

With a workforce bolstered with women like Phyllis McKey and Lourelei Prior, the U.S. began to turn out massive quantities of war materiel—overwhelming Hitler and his Axis partners. American farms and industry not only fed and equipped our own rapidly growing armed forces for a two-front war, but did the same for our allies.

When the Americans, British, and Canadians stormed the beaches at Normandy, nearly 30 percent of the food being consumed by the British people originated on American farms—about the same proportion as the bombs and ammunition being used by His Majesty's military. By then, British pilots were flying American-built transport aircraft, every British armored unit was fighting in American-made Sherman tanks, and nearly all of the landing craft that would put them ashore were produced in the U.S.

It was the same for the Soviets. Though the Red Army generally eschewed American aircraft and armor, they still accepted more than 14,500 planes and nearly 7,000 tanks—along with 375,000 trucks, fifteen million pairs of boots, millions of gallons of fuel, more than 2,000 locomotives, and 10,000 freight cars.

 

Women kept the home front running as they became the primary workforce.

By 1944, American shipyards—like the one where Phyllis McKey worked—were turning out Liberty ships in mere days, and warships in a matter of weeks. That same year, America's aircraft plants produced more than 95,000 transports, fighters, and bombers.

Victory gardens, like the one Lourelei Prior had, were so successful that by 1945, some twenty million of them produced approximately 40 percent of America's vegetables. Despite the shortages and sacrifices that most Americans experienced, the U.S. standard of living actually
rose
between 1940 and 1945.

Though food and other commodities were in short supply during the war, the greatest shortage was simple: men. The absence of so many men—more than twelve million were off in uniform—affected not only war production, but it also effectively shut down the American pastime. By 1942, professional baseball had lost so many players who either enlisted or were drafted into the military service that there were too few left for the games to go on. That's when women stepped up to the plate—literally.

The Wrigley family decided that those on the “Home Front” needed some respite from the day-to-day labor of war production, and created the All American Girls Baseball League. One of the teams that Lourelei Prior got to watch, the Fort Wayne Daisies, had an all-star pitcher: Dottie Collins.

Though continental America's “Home Front” was far more secure than that of any other combatant nation in World War II, it was not completely immune to enemy action. Both the Japanese and the Germans attempted attacks on the U.S. mainland, but only the Japanese succeeded.

On 23 February 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced a few hundred yards off Ellwood, near Santa Barbara, California, and shelled a coastal oil storage facility. There were no casualties and only minor damage to a small shed.

The Japanese also tried attaching incendiary and explosive devices to hydrogen-filled balloons and launching them into the jet stream. Several caused nothing more than minor forest fires along the West Coast. But in May 1945, one of these “balloon bombs” killed the wife and all five children of the Reverend Archie Mitchell when they inadvertently detonated the hellish device after discovering it in a meadow during a picnic, 200 miles from the Oregon coastline.

Hitler was even less successful than the Japanese—though the Nazis claimed otherwise. On 9 February 1942, the French liner
Normandie,
in the process of being converted into a troop ship, burned and sank at Pier 88 in New York Harbor. Paul Goebbels, the Führer's loyal propaganda minister, fed suspicions that the ship was the victim of German saboteurs. A lengthy investigation concluded that the fire and subsequent sinking—by water intended to put out the blaze—were the consequence of negligence and incompetence rather than Nazi malevolence.

Yet the Germans did try—at great risk to their agents—to conduct espionage and terror operations inside the U.S. Shortly after declaring war on the United States, Hitler ordered the Abwehr, Germany's intelligence
service, to land saboteurs by U-boat along the East Coast to conduct attacks on defense plants, railroads, and bridges, and to spread panic by putting time-release bombs in movie theaters and other places where the American public congregated. During May and June of 1942, two Abwehr sabotage teams were landed on the coast of Florida and on Long Island. Had it not been for an alert Coast Guardsman named John Cullen, the German agents might well have succeeded.