The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (22 page)

spent nights in troubled sleep, gripped by anxiety. Unlike most other American mothers, Alleta was unique: she had five sons fighting for the country.

Early in January 1943, Alleta, who was nearing her forty-eighth birthday, was especially fearful. All of her sons were on the cruiser Juneau. Since they had departed for training camp almost a year earlier, each had faithfully written to her and their father, Tom. But the letters had stopped coming a few weeks earlier.

Tom was nearing his sixtieth birthday. His had been a hard life. In his teens he had plowed in the fields and later performed hard labor in Colorado mines. In recent years he had been conductor on an Illinois Central freight train.

Tom, too, was almost constantly stricken with pangs of anxiety. Often he took solace in the bottle. Like other parents across the land, both Tom and Alleta tried to hide from each other the agony that gripped them.

In the wake of the sneak Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Sullivan brothers—George, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert—had marched into the Navy recruiting office in Waterloo and volunteered to fight. They vowed to avenge the death of their pal, Bill Ball of Fredericksburg, Iowa, who had been killed on the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor.

The procedure wasn’t all that simple. Before they signed up, the Sullivans told the recruiting officer that they must serve together. That request flew in the face of Navy tradition, a formidable barrier indeed. When brothers were in the same service, they were customarily put on different ships.

“We have always fought for each other,” George Sullivan, the oldest brother, explained. “Now we want to continue to fight side by side.”

Then there was another roadblock to the mass enlistment. Al was a husband and father of a young son, and the Navy was reluctant to accept recruits with family responsibilities. However, the Navy granted Al an enlistment waiver, and, reluctantly perhaps, agreed to assign the five brothers to the same ship.

When the brothers excitedly informed their mother that they had joined up with Uncle Sam, Alleta slipped into the kitchen so that her boys wouldn’t see the tears of pride—and fear—that streamed down her cheeks. Father Tom, a stoic type, outwardly took the news in stride, concealing his own deep worries.

Back in 1937, after three years of drought during which Iowa’s corn crops had been ruined, the two older brothers, George and Frank, had joined the Navy.

A friend, John Draude, had enlisted with them. “Like me, the Sullivan boys were hungry,” Draude recalled. “We’d all quit school in the tenth grade. I worked shoveling snow for the Illinois Central at twenty-eight cents an hour. George and Frank worked as laborers at a Waterloo slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant for the same wages. The Navy paid better, so we joined.”

A day after the five Sullivans signed up, they called on Father Clarence Piontkowski, pastor of the family parish. The brothers had not been the priest’s most devoted parishioners. But now, going off to war, they decided they needed all the help they could get.

Later Piontkowski recalled: “I had known the [boys] over a period of seven years or so while they were attending St. Mary’s grade school. I found them to be not sensational, but pluggers. Now they said they were going to war together and they would come home together.”

That night the Sullivans left for the Waterloo station to catch the train for Des Moines and the induction center. With them was Father Piontkowski, who blessed them as they kneeled in the station. Mother Alleta tried, unsuccessfully, to fight back the tears. Father Tom struggled to maintain his tranquil composure.

Boot camp at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago was fast and furious. After four weeks, the Sullivans were shipped out to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where they were assigned to the new cruiser Juneau.

Although the Sullivan boys continued to write their parents, they were not permitted to disclose the location or destination of their ship. Nine months after enlisting, the five sailors and their shipmates on the Juneau crossed the international date line as they steamed westward across the Pacific.

On August 8, 1942, home-front America, accustomed to one military disaster after another in the Pacific, had been elated by radio news bulletins. Under Major General Alexander A. Vandegrift, the 1st Marine Division had stormed ashore on a ninety-mile-long hellhole of thick, steaming jungles and swamps called Guadalcanal.

“Mom, Keep Your Chin Up!”
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Civilians scrambled for encyclopedias that might give some clue about Guadalcanal. About all they learned was that the island was a throwback to the Stone Age, totally unimpeded by progress.

In Waterloo, Tom and Alleta Sullivan kept tab on the fighting at Guadalcanal. Alleta was convinced—call it a mother’s intuition—that her five sons were taking part in that operation. But she had no way of knowing that on the night of November 12–13, 1942, thirteen U.S. warships had been engaged in a bitter fight with a Japanese armada. At dawn, only six U.S. vessels were able to steam away under their own power.

Early in the morning of January 11, 1943, Tom Sullivan slipped quietly out of bed and dressed. Knowing that Alleta was distraught over the absence of mail from her sons, he told her to remain in bed and that he would cook his own breakfast before getting aboard a freight train bound for Dubuque, Iowa, with a heavy cargo of war accoutrements.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Tom was fussing with a coffee pot when he heard car doors slam in front of the house. Peeking out the front window, he saw three men in Navy dress uniforms coming up the sidewalk. Tom was puzzled. He knew that the Navy sent telegrams delivered by Western Union boys in the event of deaths and wounds.

Tom opened the door and the three men entered. The lieutenant commander introduced himself as Truman Jones, head of Iowa’s recruiting operation in Des Moines. The others were a Navy doctor and a chief petty officer. Tom asked them to be seated and went upstairs to tell Alleta about the visitors. She threw on a bathrobe and slippers, and awakened daughter Genevieve, and Katherine Mary, the wife of youngest son Al.

As the three women came down the stairs, they were gripped by fear. There could be only one reason for the Navy to send three men to the house.

After introductions, Commander Jones, choking with emotion, said, “I’m afraid I’m bringing you very bad news.”

A hush fell over the room. Tom, Alleta, and the two young women were ashenfaced. Finally, Alleta asked in a shaky voice: “Which one was it?”

More moments of silence as Jones swallowed hard. In a quiet tone he replied: “I’m sorry. All five of your sons.”

The family was in shock. All sat quietly. Genevieve and Katherine Mary were near collapse.

Commander Jones and his two men looked on helplessly. In moments, Tom Sullivan, despite his grief, said gently to his wife, “My train’s leaving in a half hour. Should I go?”

Alleta knew the freight train was loaded with war materials. If the cargo didn’t reach the fighting men in time, it might mean that other boys would die, that other mothers might have to face such grief.

“It’s all right, Tom,” she replied. “It’s the right thing to do. Our boys would want you to go.”

Tom reached for his dinner pail, put on a heavy coat and muffler as a hedge against the bitter Iowa cold, kissed Alleta, and left the house.

On the short walk to the train station, Tom passed the playground in the neighborhood where, years earlier, he had watched his boys cavort. With his gloved hand, he brushed away tears.

Meanwhile, back at the rambling old family home on Adams Street, the three women sat weeping, trying to console one another. Maybe the boys will turn up alive, they told one another.

Only much later would the family on Adams Street learn what had happened to the Juneau. On the moonless night of November 12, the cruiser had been standing watch over transports that were unloading badly needed men and supplies on Guadalcanal where 20,000 Japanese were resisting tenaciously.

When radar detected the approach of a large flight of Japanese bombers, the unloading was halted and the Juneau soon found itself under attack from the air. Lieutenant Roger W. O’Neill, a medical officer on the ship, would recall: “A near-miss by a bomb seemed to lift the Juneau out of the water. Our ship was strafed repeatedly. We recovered some of the Japanese slugs and were keeping them as souvenirs.”

But Juneau’s luck soon ran out. A torpedo exploded in a port fire room that killed seventeen men and caused the ship to list. By morning the Juneau was ten feet down by the bow, but her crew began nursing her to safety.

Near midnight, the Japanese submarine I-26 fired three torpedoes at the San Francisco. The lethal fish missed the heavy cruiser but struck the Juneau. Men on other ships were awestruck by the force of the explosion. Only a pall of thick smoke hovered over where the “Mighty J” and her seven hundred men, including five named Sullivan, had been. No survivors were spotted.

News of the Juneau disaster and the deaths of the five Sullivan brother swept across America like a tidal wave, in newsreels, magazines, newspapers, and on radio. Their deaths seemed to galvanize the home front into recognizing that much blood and grief would have to be expended before victory in a global war could be achieved.

Letters and condolences from Americans poured into the house at 98 Adams Street. Each weekday a truck from the Waterloo post office would arrive to deliver a new batch of messages.

In the deluge of mail was a letter handwritten by a man who lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Although he never mentioned the fact, he, too, knew the agony of parents in wartime: he and his wife had four sons in uniform. The message read, in part:

As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I want you to know that the entire nation shares in your sorrow. We who remain to carry on the fight will maintain a courageous spirit, in the knowledge that your sons’ sacrifice was not in vain.

A Glamourous Nazi Agent
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As one of your sons wrote, “We will make a team together that can’t be beat.” It is this spirit which in the end will triumph.

—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Meanwhile, newsreel camera crews descended upon Waterloo and set up shop in the Sullivans’ snow-covered yard. Despite broken hearts and grief that would haunt them the remainder of their lives, Tom and Alleta felt it was their duty to appear before the cameras.

Alleta, still in shock, her face swollen and eyes reddened, faced the cameras and said: “I know now what my five boys meant when they wrote me all the time, ‘Mom, keep your chin up!’ All I can say to you mothers here in America is to keep your chins up, too. Our five boys did not die in vain.”

The deaths of the Sullivan brothers came to symbolize the devotion and sacrifices of all men of the armed forces and their families during the war. These typical young men spurred the home front into even greater effort to bring the global conflict to a successful conclusion.
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Firm Gets Big Payoff

E
XCEPT FOR ISOLATED STRAGGLERS
, the last Japanese soldier had been killed or evacuated from bloody Guadalcanal by February 7, 1943, six months to the day since the marines had landed. It had been a costly victory. War is never totally one-sided. Including the five Sullivan brothers, the Navy had some forty-nine hundred casualties on and around Guadalcanal. Nearly eighteen hundred marines and soldiers were killed in securing the primitive island.

On home-front America, millions of people, each in his or her own way, celebrated the first victory over the Japanese army that had been heading hellbent to invade Australia. Perhaps none rejoiced more than the executives at Lever Brothers, the huge soap-manufacturing corporation.

In an it-could-only-happen-in-America action, the U.S. government shelled out $7 million (equivalent to $90 million in the year 2002) to Lever Brothers for war damage to the coconut groves the firm owned on Guadalcanal.
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A Glamorous Nazi Agent

W
HILE LARGE NUMBERS
of American mothers were enduring agony over the loss of sons, there were other American women trying to sell out their country.

Burton Huffberg (not his real name) had made good money as an employee at the Ford plant in Detroit before being drafted into the Navy in early 1943. Tall, handsome, and well built, the twenty-six-year-old Huffberg
was an ideal employee in the huge factory that was producing mountains of weapons for the armed forces.

Assigned to Navy duty at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn in June, Huffberg carried out his assignment with all the vigor he had shown as a civilian employee. But there the similarity ended. Huffberg was a Nazi spy, and his mission was to collect information on ships and convoys sailing from New York harbor.

Huffberg, in fact, had been a spy for more than a year. At the Ford plant, he had been approached by a Nazi undercover agent working there and offered good-sized sums of money for merely pilfering drawings of war equipment. Huffberg accepted, and his bank account grew steadily.