New York at War (41 page)

In the waters just past the Ambrose Channel, freighters and tankers arrayed themselves in long columns or in a vast square, several miles across, with US and British naval vessels on the periphery and a trawler trailing behind to pick up survivors should disaster befall the ships. After being joined by additional vessels in Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, the convoys would press as fast as they could across the Atlantic to Iceland, England, or Scotland, in whose waters the Royal Navy took over escort duty from the Americans. Some continued on the Murmansk run to the Soviet Union’s arctic ports.

The cargo ships and tankers were manned by merchant seamen: professional sailors whose vital work earned them draft deferments. At the National Maritime Union hiring hall on West Seventeenth Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea, seamen from New York and all over the country lined up to take berths on board the convoy vessels. High wartime pay was an incentive, but most crewmen also were deeply committed to the war’s cause. Moray Epstein, a young seaman from New Jersey embarking on the freighter
John Walker
for Russia in August 1942, wrote expectantly to his future bride, Sylvia, about seeing the land of his parents’ birth and about his duty. “I know that someone has to sail these ships, and that the work we are doing is work that must be done. But it could be so easy,” he added, “so tempting to give this up just to be able to walk with you in East River Park.”
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Seamen were aware of the risks they faced. Many convoys arrived at their destination with six or a dozen ships missing. In March 1943, thirty-eight U-boats converged on two convoys outbound from New York in the mid-Atlantic. Over four days, in a battle zone stretching across six hundred miles of stormy seas, the submarines sank twenty-two out of a total of eighty-nine cargo vessels, despite the defense put up by British escorts; 379 crewmen lost their lives. Most daunting of all was the “Bomb Alley Run” to Murmansk or Archangel, during which convoys braved attacks by subs and bombers from Nazi-occupied Norway.
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Surviving a convoy run could be both harrowing and exhilarating. On board the freighter
Richard Henry Lee
off Norway in May 1942, seaman Sam Hakam from Brooklyn watched as German bombers sank a sister ship: “You could see a lot of blackened heads—the heads of men still alive—on the water. The heads looked like floating bowling balls. Many of those boys weren’t rescued.” Survival occasioned pride as well as relief. “Ambrose Light. Excitement and tension rose,” Moray Epstein jotted down as the
John Walker
returned intact from Archangel in February 1943. “We passed Coney Island. Emotion washed over me when I saw the Statue of Liberty, the symbol that gives meaning to our voyage. I wanted to cry. . . . Did my mother have the same feelings when she came to America?” Epstein mused. “I shall never forget this homecoming.”
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The nautical chain between North America and Europe was vitally important to the Allied war effort, and the men and communities involved paid a heavy price to sustain it. About one in every twenty-six US merchant seamen lost his life, a higher mortality rate than that of any other American armed service during the war. The convoys manned by these men and boys (many were still teenagers) won the war on the western front by bringing America’s industrial might to bear against Hitler. The four hundred Sherman tanks and engines carried by two New York convoys to Suez in July and August 1942, for example, arguably enabled Montgomery’s British Eighth Army to beat Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein. New York convoys also provisioned Allied troops in Britain in preparation for D-Day and continued supplying them as they fought their way across Europe. With up to 540 ships docked or anchored at any one time, and a vessel arriving or departing every fifteen minutes, the port of New York remained a logical target for U-boats and Luftwaffe planning, and for New Yorkers’ apprehensions of sabotage and attack.
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While supplies and armaments flowed day and night, so did GIs. “Liner Row”—the series of piers built during the 1930s between West Forty-Sixth and West Fifty-Fourth Streets to berth luxury ocean liners—became the nation’s prime departure point for GIs embarking on troop transports to Britain and elsewhere. The ships that carried them were liners converted into troop carriers: floating cities like the
Queen Mary
, the
Queen Elizabeth
, the
Aquitania
, and the
Nieuw Amsterdam
, each of which could hold between eight thousand and sixteen thousand soldiers and their gear—more human beings than had ever before sailed on a single vessel. Regiments readied at Camp Shanks in Rockland County, Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, and Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn often arrived directly at the piers by ferry and poured up the gangplanks onto the liners. “There was humanity from end to end,” one awed soldier noted. The fastest ships afloat, these transports counted on their speed (about twenty-eight knots) to outrun U-boats and sailed alone without escort protection. None sank during the war, and by V-E Day they had conveyed over three million American troops from the Hudson River to Europe. No other port came close in manning the Allied North African, Italian, and western fronts. Men slept in steel and canvas bunks often stacked eight high. Seasickness, claustrophobia, and fear of sinking made the voyage miserable for many young soldiers. During a stiff mid-Atlantic storm, a British sailor on the
Queen Mary
listened as GIs screamed “in absolute fear and terror.” But the passage was over in five or six days.
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With a city full of German Americans and Italian Americans just beyond the docks, fears of maritime sabotage and espionage were inevitable. “New York is full of loose talk,” a Canadian seaman complained to reporters after the
Coimbra
sinking. When the majestic French liner
Normandie
burst into flame and capsized at the foot of West Forty-Eighth Street in February 1942, saboteurs were suspected, although the true cause proved to be a fire ignited by workmen busy converting her into a troop carrier. One rumor had it that spies were attaching messages for U-boat captains to the undersides of lobster buoys floating off Long Island. Others worried that the Italian fishermen who brought their boats into the Fulton Fish Market might be loyal to Mussolini, and hence aiding the German raiders. The Office of Naval Intelligence actually enlisted Joseph “Socks” Lanza, the market’s Mafia capo, to help scrutinize the activities of the fishing crews for evidence of disloyalty. But the bleak reality was that by following the shipping lanes and receiving deciphered Allied wireless messages from Doenitz’s headquarters, U-boats cruising offshore didn’t need spies to tell them where to find their prey.
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The city’s material bounty, flowing in ever-greater quantities eastward across the Atlantic, signified just how vital New York was becoming to the Allied war effort. Even before Pearl Harbor, federal spending on military preparation was funneling billions of dollars in war contracts to shipyards, automotive plants, and aircraft factories across the country, putting millions of Americans to work. Alarmed city officials saw that the big contracts were bypassing New York’s thirty-five thousand workshops with their specialized parts manufacturing and going instead to the vast assembly-line factories converting to war production—places like the Ford plant at Willow Run, Michigan, and the aircraft assembly lines of Curtiss-Wright in Buffalo and Grumman on Long Island. By mid-1941, the New York State Division of Commerce was lobbying in Wash-ington to ensure that the state and the city got their share of war largesse. By August, the division was also sponsoring “production clinics” in city hotels where major contractors like Connecticut’s Pratt & Whitney, Pennsylvania’s Baldwin Locomotive, and Long Island’s Republic Aviation could link up with those the
New York Times
described as “the little fellows”—subcontracting firms like the Duro Brass Works on Lafayette Street, which employed fifteen workers, or the S. & W. Sewing Machine Attachment Company on Sixth Avenue, whose twenty employees could shift into making wrenches and other tools for engine production. President Roosevelt, too, belatedly did his part, ensuring in 1942 that his home state’s dominant city—a crucial Democratic electoral bastion—would get a healthy share of war contracts.
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The capsized liner
Normandie
in its berth, West Forty-Eighth Street, February 1942. PHOTO BY HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES.

Larger plants, like Brooklyn’s Murray Manufacturing, Sperry Gyroscope, and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, were soon benefiting along with “the little fellows” from wartime demand, hiring thousands, including many women, to make trench mortar shells, instruments for air force bombers, and penicillin. At the block-long Bell Telephone Laboratories in the West Village, the nation’s largest industrial research complex, scientists designed over one hundred different types of radar equipment for navy and air force use, developed a sonar device for detecting U-boats, and created torpedoes that could seek out Doenitz’s vessels by homing in acoustically on their motors. Out of the factories and warehouses the armaments, drugs, and appliances flowed onto the ships bound for Liverpool, Casablanca, Archangel, and Normandy; into the pockets of their makers flowed government pay. By 1943, the city had attained something approximating full employment, making the last three years of the war a boom time for New Yorkers. In 1945, 1.7 million city residents would be working in factories and war plants.
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For New Yorkers, it was the Brooklyn Navy Yard—a city unto itself—that most dramatically exemplified the city’s role in fighting the war. By 1944, over seventy thousand men and women labored around the clock in ten-hour shifts in a two-hundred-acre complex containing three hundred buildings, thirty miles of railroad track, several dry docks, massive cranes for hoisting gun turrets, and twin thousand-foot-long trenches that served as launching ways for warships. It had become the nation’s—and probably the world’s—biggest and busiest shipyard. During the war the yard’s workers built five aircraft carriers and three battleships, including the
Missouri
, upon whose deck the Japanese would surrender in September 1945.

The yard’s main task was to alter, fit out, and repair vessels by the thousands. Workers converted over 11,000 transport and patrol vessels for naval service, assembled 3,581 landing craft, and repaired over 5,000 vessels. In total, the wartime yard churned out more ships than Japan did. It also became a focal point for an unprecedented influx of women into heavy industry, as males were drafted away from manufacturing in large numbers. By war’s end, six thousand women would be working there. Women never obtained equal pay in the yard, but union pressure led to opportunities for promotions and wages that seemed a godsend by Depression standards. After three and a half years in the yard, Ida Pollack remembered, “I had become a first-class welder, and I made more money than my father.” “I guess I was filled with the spirit of helping to win the war against Fascism,” her friend, shipfitter Lucille Gewirtz Kolkin, later recalled. “I loved the toughness of it, the patriotism of it, the romance of wearing work clothes and having dirty hands and usually a dirt streak across my face.”
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As the war pulled the city out of the Depression, two thousand steel drums sat in a Staten Island warehouse, casting a long shadow into the future. The drums had arrived in the fall of 1940, imported by an émigré Belgian mining executive named Edgar Sengier. They contained uranium ore from mines in the Belgian Congo. More than a year and a half earlier, on January 25, 1939, Professor John Dunning and a team of Columbia University physicists working in the basement of Pupin Hall at Broadway and 120th Street had split a uranium atom. “Believe we have observed a new phenomenon of far reaching consequences,” Dunning jotted down that day, in one of history’s most loaded understatements.

The experiments on upper Broadway were part of an unprecedented arms race. Dunning, his colleague Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, and other physicists had become aware that German scientists were making breakthroughs in atomic physics that might arm Hitler with a weapon enabling him to dominate the world. By January 1940, with Roosevelt’s support and government funding, the ultrasecret Manhattan Project was underway in Pupin Hall, its goal to beat Hitler to the nuclear bomb. Two years later, in need of ever-greater space, the project moved to the University of Chicago, where by the end of the year Fermi, still on Columbia’s payroll, produced the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Manhattan Project officials turned back to New York to fuel further development. By the time of Fermi’s breakthrough, Brigadier General Leslie Groves, bent on securing an ample ore supply so the project could continue, had learned of Edgar Sengier and sent an emissary to Sengier’s Broad Street office. The anti-Nazi Belgian businessman, alert since before the war to the military potential of atomic research, now signed over his 1,250 tons of uranium to the US government and guaranteed further imports from the Congo. Thanks to the Columbia experiments and the Staten Island uranium, New York City can lay claim to being the cradle of the atomic bomb.
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