New York at War (42 page)

The war brought a peculiar dual consciousness to New York, a sense of global conflict as both utterly remote and omnipresent. Nowhere was this truer than in Manhattan’s symbolic town center, Times Square. A visitor to the district, with its dizzying medley of playhouses, movie theaters, nightclubs, bars, shooting galleries, billboards, and neon signs, and its round-the-clock throngs of sightseers, might be excused for momentarily forgetting that the city was engaged in history’s most cataclysmic military struggle. On a given night, a young Frank Sinatra might be crooning to a wall-to-wall crowd of screaming bobby-soxers at the Paramount on Broadway at Forty-Third Street, while on other evenings couples jitterbugged there to the swing tunes of Benny Goodman’s and Harry James’s bands. A few blocks away, in clubs on Fifty-Second Street like the Onyx and the Three Deuces, the black musicians Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were pioneering a new, joyously frenetic jazz called bebop. Cocktails flowed freely into the wee hours at El Morocco on East Fifty-Fourth Street, at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe on West Forty-Sixth Street, and in a score of other midtown clubs.
⁷²

Despite Times Square’s carnival atmosphere, a quick double-take would have convinced any visitor that New York itself was very much at war. A gigantic cash register, joined later by a fifty-five-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty, towered over Forty-Third Street at the Square, both advertising the sale of War Bonds. For eighteen months in 1942–1943, although interiors remained lit, the Great White Way (along with the rest of the city) was darkened at night by an official “dimout” that extinguished Broadway’s marquee and billboard bulbs. The measure was meant to deprive U-boats of the nocturnal coastal glare that could help them target vessels—a belated acknowledgment of the hazard that had so surprised U-boat commander Hardegen—as well as to conserve energy (the nightly dimout was later replaced by a “brownout,” permitting some low-intensity exterior lighting, as the threat from the sea seemed to wane). But the nightly crowds still converged. The fact was that midtown, like the rest of the city, was riding on a flood tide of war prosperity. Gasoline, sugar, coffee, and meat were being rationed, and rental housing was in short supply, but entertainment was not, and war workers with pay in their pockets flooded into the nightclubs and bars to enjoy what the city had to offer.
⁷³

If New Yorkers reveled in the hubbub around Broadway, so did a continuous stream of servicemen and women and merchant seamen from every Allied nation. Soldiers from Camp Shanks on twelve-hour passes; GIs arriving at Penn Station from camps across the country; some of the 150,000 British seamen who passed through New York during the war: all crossed paths in Times Square. War seemed inescapable in the midtown hotels. When George Goldman and forty of his fellow seamen survived the sinking of their tanker by a U-boat, they found themselves back in New York, put up in the Hotel Woodstock by their employer, the Sinclair Oil Corporation. “We were all bearded and burnt black with the sun and we walked into the dining room of this hotel and had a nice steak dinner, everyone was looking at us, we looked like Captain Hook’s men.” The next morning, Goldman remembered, “we walked up to Rockefeller Center where the company’s office was. . . . Nobody stuck their hand out and said, you did a good job, do you need any help. . . . They just gave us our pay, and so long, and we made our way down to the Union Hall and registered for another ship.”
⁷⁴

Many soldiers and seamen came to New York looking for more than just a drink and a show. “The wolf-whistle sounded now in the streets of midtown,” Jan Morris later wrote. “Lean and rangy servicemen shifted their gum to the other cheek as they eyed the sidewalk broads.” For some men and women, wartime New York offered a particular kind of freedom. Accosting groups of soldiers and sailors in Times Square, the young Tennessee Williams recalled making “very abrupt and candid overtures, phrased so bluntly that it’s a wonder they didn’t slaughter me on the spot.” Sometimes his overtures were successful. Gay New York at war had its own covert geography: the Hotel Astor bar and the Plaza Hotel’s Oak Room, where soldiers could meet civilian men; gay brothels alongside straight ones on Sands Street near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But the city also afforded opportunities for lasting relationships. At war’s end, a number of gay men and lesbians formed the Veterans Benevolent Association and held regular meetings in rooms on Houston Street near Second Avenue. Despite its low profile, the VBA was one of the nation’s first gay rights organizations and presaged New York’s role as one of the world’s crucial gay cities.
⁷⁵

“New York in wartime was the sexiest city in the world,” recalled Arthur Laurents, at the time a young soldier. “
Everybody
did it—in numbers. And everybody drank.” Times Square’s giddy freedom embodied how the war was setting millions of young Americans in motion, releasing them from the scrutiny and inhibitions of their home communities and families. But it also revealed something more frantic, the carpe diem energy of young people with money in their pockets, a few hours to enjoy, and great uncertainty as to whether death on a distant battlefield might await them.
⁷⁶

Some 891,900 New Yorkers—over one-tenth of the city’s population—enlisted or were drafted during the war, and for their loved ones back home, the battlefront was never too remote a presence. Husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers were sent across the country or overseas in numbers never approached in previous wars. “One of our [Navy Yard] friends,” Ida Pollack recalled, “her husband was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. . . . It wasn’t a lark.” Ultimately 16,106 New Yorkers would be killed, mortally wounded in combat, die of other causes, or go missing. By 1944 and 1945, many caskets would arrive on ships that unloaded their somber cargoes at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, from which they would be conveyed to mourning families throughout the city and beyond.
⁷⁷

Just as the city offered both distractions from and reminders of the war, there was also a dual quality to the ways in which New Yorkers reacted to the possibility of a German attack. Such an assault was still usually envisioned as airborne. “Enemy Planes!” barked Civil Defense posters from walls and billboards. “Will you be asleep . . . Or helping your neighbors?” Many found the prospect of a Luftwaffe raid hard to take seriously. Cathleen Schurr, an Englishwoman who had survived the U-boat sinking of a passenger liner, felt New Yorkers were merely playing at war. “We lived in Greenwich Village, and you barely knew we were at war. . . . We had sirens going from time to time, and we had signs up saying where the shelters were. A lot of people went around complaining. I never could understand what they were complaining about.” But others worried. “I remember one fellow on the
Times,
a reporter about my age, was scared to death,” newspaperman George Garrott remembered. “He lived in Greenwich Village in an apartment on the top floor of his building, and he immediately canceled his lease and moved into a cellar right after we got in the war. I knew a few other people who did that kind of thing. . . . Personally, I just felt, when it comes, it comes.”
⁷⁸

Many New Yorkers did what they could to prepare for the eventuality of an enemy attack. By war’s end, four hundred thousand men, women, and adolescents—more than one out of every twenty New Yorkers—had become Civilian Defense Volunteers. Some found the whole operation comical or annoying (“people running around in hats, getting in everybody’s way,” Garrott remembered). But for those exempted from the draft—women, teenagers, overage or disqualified men—Civil Defense was a way to contribute to the war effort. In the Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn, teenager Norman Dworkowitz became an air raid messenger, carrying messages between observation posts during air raid drills. “I remember taking the job very, very seriously. . . . We even talked about what would happen if we were bombed and how we would get people to hospitals. . . . In my mind, anyway, it was a very clear and strong threat that something like an air raid could happen, and we tried our best to prepare for it.”
⁷⁹

From the summer of 1942 onward, New Yorkers were kept on their toes by what proved to be the most dramatic Nazi “invasion” of the United States. In the early morning hours of June 13, 1942, John Cullen, an unarmed member of the Coast Guard patrolling the fog-shrouded Atlantic shore at Amagansett, Long Island, came upon a strange scene: four men, one of them wearing a bathing suit and dragging a canvas bag, another in dungarees and a brown fedora hat, at the water’s edge. “Look, I wouldn’t want to kill you. You don’t know what this is all about,” the man in the fedora told Cullen and then pushed $260 into his hand. By the time Cullen had run back to the Amagansett Lifeboat Station to rouse his comrades, the four men had disappeared into the fog. Combing the beach the next day, Coast Guard investigators discovered a hastily buried cache of detonators, TNT blocks, and fountain pens full of sulfuric acid for igniting explosives.
⁸⁰

Six days after the explosives were discovered, a man named George John Dasch turned himself in at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, and told a remarkable story. Dasch claimed to be one of a group of eight men trained in Germany to undertake sabotage missions against key American sites, including aluminum plants in Tennessee and upstate New York, the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Newark, New Jersey, the Hell Gate railroad bridge over the East River, and, if enough explosives were left, Jewish-owned department stores. Dasch (the man in the fedora) and three others had landed at Amagansett from a U-boat; the other four saboteurs were dropped four nights later on a beach near Jacksonville, Florida, by a second submarine. After their encounter with Cullen, the Long Island group had traveled by train to Manhattan, where they booked themselves into midtown hotels under assumed names. But Dasch—along with Ernst Peter Burger, who would stay in Manhattan when Dasch later traveled to Washington—had had second thoughts. Dasch divulged the likely whereabouts of the others to the FBI, and within days his coconspirators had all been arrested in New York and Chicago and jailed in Washington, along with Dasch himself.

J. Edgar Hoover crowed to the press about how his agents had broken a dangerous Nazi sabotage ring, but the actual plot was deeply flawed from the start. Walter Kappe, an officer in the Abwehr and a former German American Bund officer in Chicago and New York, had recruited the eight agents from among repatriated Germans who had once lived in the United States. Dasch, for example, had been a waiter in Manhattan, and Edward Kerling had packed meat in Brooklyn. But the eight turned out to be an unreliable crew. Several were lukewarm Nazis at best, and few seemed to master the explosives training they received in a secret camp near Berlin. Dasch lost his forged American ID papers, including a Social Security card, on a train. In a stopover in Paris en route to the German U-boat base at Lorient, Heinrich Heinck (a “typical German spy, dumb and big mouthed,” Dasch later complained) got drunk and told a barroom full of strangers that he was a “secret agent.” As they crossed the Atlantic toward Long Island, Dasch and Burger were getting cold feet. Later, in the mission’s most surreal episode, Dasch dropped in on a Forty-Ninth Street waiters’ club and played a thirty-six-hour pinochle marathon against a Jewish friend he had worked with years before. Queried by former colleagues surprised to see him, Dasch responded, “I’m here—what difference does it make how I came?” He left for Washington a day later.
⁸¹

None of the eight saboteurs ever got close to their designated targets, but President Roosevelt resolved to make examples of them. A quickly convened military commission found all eight guilty of intent to commit sabotage and espionage. With unusual (and, in the eyes of later legal scholars, unconscionable) haste, the Supreme Court struck down a defense challenge to the proceeding’s constitutionality, specifically its denial of habeas corpus and a civil trial to the defendants. On August 8, six of the men died in the electric chair in a Washington jail. Dasch and Burger received long prison terms; President Truman pardoned them and deported them to Germany in 1948. Six decades later, the Bush administration would cite the tribunal and the Supreme Court ruling as precedents for its own military trial of noncitizens, including Guantanamo Bay detainees, implicated in the September 11 attacks.
⁸²

For all of the mission’s clumsiness, it fueled wartime anxiety. (“We don’t want to be alarmists,” one Manhattanite wrote to J. Edgar Hoover that summer, “but please investigate 306 West 99th Street. . . . Lets men with shortwave sets keep them on all night.”) The sabotage plot also confronted officials with the delicate task of encouraging vigilance while not drawing attention to the porousness of the long American shoreline. Sure enough, in November 1944, the Abwehr tried again, using a U-boat to drop two agents on the Maine coast, with naïve instructions to ferret out American military secrets and transmit them by radio to the fatherland. Recent history repeated itself: once ensconced in the anonymity of the nation’s largest city, William Colepaugh turned himself and fellow spy Erich Gimpel in to the FBI. A military tribunal convened on Governors Island sentenced both to death, but President Truman commuted their sentences to life imprisonment.
⁸³

While they fretted about the dangers of German spies in their midst, New Yorkers remained unaware of another, more ominous reality, one that jibed more closely with the warnings voiced by La Guardia and his wardens. Hitler’s vision of Manhattan going up in flames continued to inspire German leaders and engineers until the very end of the war. In October 1943, contemplating the propaganda and morale value of an attack on New York, Hermann Goering blurted out, “If only we could reach it! With just a couple of bombs we could force them to black out.” Designers worked on prototypes for a transatlantic “America bomber,” an aircraft trailing extra fuel tanks or perhaps capable of being refueled in midair by another plane. By 1944, a model Messerschmitt 264 equipped with four BMW engines was undergoing flight tests in Germany. Another plan envisioned a squad of seaplanes refueling from a U-boat tanker off the East Coast and then bombing New York; Luftwaffe Colonel Viktor von Lossberg suggested either “the Jewish area or the docks” as the prime target. Still another idea, one which engaged Wernher von Braun, posited a rocket launcher towed across the Atlantic by a U-boat, permitting the dreaded V-2 rocket, the scourge of London and Antwerp in 1944, to be aimed at New York. Most visionary of all was the scheme of Dr. Eugen Sanger, who proposed building a rocket-propelled, two-seat “space bomber,” which could rain death on America from 160 miles up in the earth’s atmosphere. But the technical difficulty of these projects, and the depletion of the Luftwaffe’s resources as the war dragged on, consigned them to failure.
⁸⁴