The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (17 page)

The sub fired its rounds. The GIs in the battery laid low. The sub left the scene. But after the story of the episode hit the Portland newspapers, people from around the region flocked to the site to look at the “battlefield.” There was nothing to see, because the shells had exploded in the sands along the beach.

A few enterprising boys, noting the droves of visitors, hatched a scheme. They located an old cast-iron stove and broke it into small pieces with a sledgehammer. Then they stood along the road leading to the ‘battlefield” and sold the items as Japanese shrapnel to eager buyers.

Only after the war would it be found that the attack on Battery Russell was in retaliation for the April raid on Tokyo by Jimmy Doolittle’s bombers.
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German-American Bund Demolished

“
W
E INTEND TO PUT
the Bund out of business!” Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover told the media.

On July 10, 1942, Hoover had sent squads of G-men to haul in twenty-six leaders of the German-American Bund, including Bundesführer Wilhelm

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A year after Pearl Harbor, the FBI apprehended a Nazi sabotage and espionage ring in Detroit. Part of the weapons and explosives uncovered are shown above. (FBI)

Kunze, who had long been under surveillance. Only now had Hoover’s agents collected enough solid evidence to bring him to trial.

In early December 1941, at the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hoover had estimated that there were some 75,000 members nationally. New York City alone had six Bund branches, and there were others in twelve surrounding communities.

There were branches in Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Boston, Portland (Oregon), Detroit, Seattle, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and in Georgia and Texas.

Gatherings of Bund chapters had been comic-opera affairs—except for the fact that the underlying goal was to establish a Hitler-directed government in the United States. Men of the Ordnung Dienst (the Bund version of German storm troopers) had goose-stepped about as members in the audience showered them with frenzied cheers and shouts of “Heil Hitler!”

Marching in precise military formation, these American storm troopers were clad in grayish-blue tunics, with black cuffs and neckbands, black forage caps with silver braid, black trousers, and boots.

The Bundesführer (supreme leader in the United States) had received his day-to-day orders from the Deutches Ausland Instutut (German Overseas
Institute, the Foreign Section of the Nazi Party under Dr. Ernest Wilhelm Böhle) in Berlin.

Supported by Adolf Hitler’s cash register, the German-American Bund had the same structure as that of the Nazi Party in the Third Reich. The United States had three gaue (districts), each with its own gauleiter (leader).

Trained agents, masquerading as staff members of German consulates in the United States, had provided Bund leaders with advice on espionage, sabotage, and undermining the morale of the U.S. citizens. One of the main functions of the Deutscher Konsum Verband (League of Businessmen), a division of the German-American Bund, had been to mail tens of thousands of hate pieces urging the public to boycott American corporations that did not subscribe to Nazi ideals, as perceived by the Bundesführer.

Bund membership had been climbing steadily when suddenly, in December 1941, the United States was at war. Thousands of Bund members, mostly dupes seeking panaceas for the economic ills of the Great Depression, left the organization. Many volunteered for the U.S. armed forces. Fanatic Bund members went undercover to continue schemes to undermine the U.S. war effort.

Now Kunze and his cohorts were charged with conspiracy to evade the Selective Service Act (draft). They were found guilty in a federal court trial and sentenced to various prison terms.

On the heels of the roundup of the Bund leaders and their underlings, a Washington grand jury indicted twenty-seven other Bund men and women for sedition, charging that they had carried on a “systematic campaign of personal vilification of public officials [including President Roosevelt]” in order to convince “citizens and the military that such public officials are traitorous, corrupt, dishonest, incompetent, and mentally unbalanced.”

All except one of these Bund members were convicted and sent to prison.
¹⁰

First Lady Rattles Some Cages

E
LEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS UPSET
and began rattling some cages in Washington. Why, she demanded to know, did the Navy not have a female component like that of the WAAC in the Army?

Perhaps concerned that it would be labeled antifemale, Congress, in mid-July 1942, authorized the creation of the Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES).

In the Navy hierarchy, there were no noticeable demonstrations for the women’s branch. One admiral told confidants that instead of women in uniform, he would have preferred “dogs, ducks, or monkeys.”

Appointed as director of the WAVES with the rank of lieutenant commander was Mildred McAfee, who had been president of Wellesley College. A

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native of Parkville, Missouri, she was a graduate of Vassar and received a master’s degree from the University of Chicago.

At her first press conference, McAfee was beset by hostility from the all-male reporters. She had to handle such questions as: “Will WAVES sleep in ship bunks with men?” “Will WAVES wear blue panties and brassieres to match their uniforms?”

Undaunted by the taunts of the media and sniping by a few admirals, Commander McAfee rapidly built the new organization, which would consist of one thousand officers and ten thousand enlisted women.

Unlike the WAAC, the WAVES would not be sent overseas.

Not long after the birth of the WAVES, the other seagoing service, the Coast Guard, established the SPARS (short for Semper Paratus, that branch’s motto). Dorothy C. Stratton, with the rank of lieutenant commander, was appointed director. From the start, the SPARS had a recruiting advantage over the WAVES, although each wore similar uniforms. Pending construction of the SPARS’ own facilities, recruits were trained at the ornate Biltmore resort hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.
¹¹

“I’m Proud of You, Mom!”

O
N JULY 17, 1942, ZELMA HANSON
and her eighteen-year-old son Richard backed their car out of its garage in suburban Los Angeles and used much of the family’s weekly three gallons of gasoline to drive downtown. There they entered a recruiting station and Richard was sworn into the Army. His orders would send him to Fort MacArthur in California.

Mrs. Hanson kissed her son, told him how proud she was of him, and wished him well. Minutes later she joined the WAAC and would be assigned to Fort Des Moines, Iowa. “I’m proud of you, Mom!” the son exclaimed.
¹²

Horse Racing Flourishes

F
OR MANY MONTHS,
James F. Byrnes, chief of the War Mobilization Board, had been casting a jaundiced eye at the sport of horse racing. Banner headlines were screaming about manpower shortages and war-plant absenteeism at the same time newspaper sports pages were telling of soaring attendance at racetracks.

Almost before the echo of bombs falling on Pearl Harbor had faded, Americans, many flushed with money from defense jobs, had plunged into the horses, and racetrack operators were hauling in hefty profits.

Knowing that they had a once-in-a-lifetime bonanza on their hands, racing moguls hired public relations experts to glorify horse racing’s brave resolve to help the war effort: by elevating morale on the home front.

Soon the horse-racing nabobs came up with a new tack. The fight against Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito was being helped greatly because, by improving the breed of horses, the U.S. Cavalry was benefiting. When cynics pointed out that most of the cavalry in this war rode in tanks, the public-relations thrust was changed to how racing was aiding the infantry.

After gas rationing began in mid-1942, the sight of racetrack parking lots filled with hundreds of cars—most no doubt loaded with black-market fuel— provided foes of horse racing in wartime with plenty of ammunition.

Media criticism rolled off the racing titans’ backs like the proverbial water off a duck, however. Many track owners even thumbed their noses at Uncle Sam. In 1943, the traditional Kentucky Derby was run in Louisville even after the Office of Defense Transportation had urged that the event be suspended for the duration. Another popular track, Narragansett Park, also ignored the ODT request to shut down to save fuel and rubber.

Moguls in the horse-racing field had a billion-dollar business going, and they didn’t want the bubble to burst. So when War Mobilization boss James Byrnes ordered all tracks to close down to save vital gasoline and rubber for the armed forces, such a huge outcry was generated that the White House lifted the ban.
¹³

Psychological Saboteurs at Work

I
N MID-1942,
six months after Pearl Harbor, Nazi psychological saboteurs were still actively engaged in undermining the morale of American civilians and members of the armed forces. Much of this propaganda assault was being masterminded at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, a small, peaceful resort town that billed itself as the “Switzerland of America.”

Back in late 1941, only days before Uncle Sam was plunged into global war, the owners and staff of Scribner’s Commentator moved from New York City to Lake Geneva. Publishers of the slick-page magazine, Douglas M. Stewart and George T. Eggleston, were wealthy entrepreneurs and leaders in the isolationist America First Committee.

This pair of rich New Yorkers had been active in recruiting into America First its most celebrated member, Charles A. Lindbergh—beloved by millions around the world after he had become the first person to fly the Atlantic alone from New York to Europe in 1927.

Lake Geneva became an unofficial headquarters of America First Committee. Another wealthy leader, Janet Ayer Fairbank, the organization’s national vice chairman, left Chicago and moved into an ornate mansion at Lake

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Geneva. Her house was the site of many conferences when distinguished visitors came to town. These celebrities included two powerful U.S. senators, Gerald P. Nye and Burton K. Wheeler.

Other far less notable persons took up residence in Lake Geneva, although most of them and their activities were probably unknown to national leaders of America First.

Ralph Townsend, who allegedly had been a secret agent for the Japanese, came from his base in San Francisco to Lake Geneva to join the staff of Scribner’s Commentator. Louise Carus also joined the magazine’s editorial department after moving from La Salle, Illinois. She was the daughter of wealthy industrialist Edward H. Carus, at whose palatial home G-men had caught up with and arrested Friedrich Ernest Ferdinand Auhagen a short time before Pearl Harbor.

Prior to his falling into the clutches of dogged FBI agents, Auhagen had been masterminding an intensive and widespread psychological campaign on home-front America. Tall, well-groomed, impeccably mannered, Auhagen had an ideal “front” for his clandestine activities: professor of German literature at prestigious Columbia University in New York City.

In late 1939, Auhagen, a naturalized American who had been a lieutenant in the German Army in World War I, organized the American Fellowship Forum that included on its roster a large number of wealthy, educated men with like-minded ideas.

Auhagen received regular, large sums of money on annual trips to Germany from G. Kurt Johannsen in Hamburg before war broke out; then the Forum was given hefty infusions of funds by Ferdinand A. Kertess, president of the Chemical Marketing Company of New York City.

Auhagen’s psychological warfare campaign was closely monitored by Gestapo agents masquerading as diplomats in the United States. Auhagen conferred almost weekly with Friedheim Draeger, who was in charge of espionage-sabotage operations in the New York City area. These treffs, as Germans called secret meetings, took place at Draeger’s home at 90-50 Fifty-third Avenue, Elmhurst, Long Island. Auhagen also held treffs in the suite he reserved on a permanent basis at the Hotel Royalton in New York City.