The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (35 page)

The Germans seemed to be hanging on by their fingernails. Powerful American, British, Canadian, and French forces were deployed along the western frontier of the Third Reich, awaiting the signal to launch a full-blooded offensive that would nail down the Nazi coffin.

Based on the flow of euphoric stories in American media, there was even much talk across the nation that “the boys will be home for Christmas.”

Draft boards were instructed to cut back greatly on the number of inductees, and the War Department reduced orders for the manufacture of weapons. The Pentagon had completed plans for transferring scores of units in Europe to the Pacific for an invasion of Japan.

President Franklin Roosevelt continued to broadcast his highly popular fireside chats that always began with “My Friends . . .” His talks were rife with guarded optimism that the war against Germany was nearing a conclusion.

White-haired, bespectacled Bernard M. Baruch, a Washington fixture for decades and unpaid confidant of Roosevelt, was among those in the capital wearing rose-colored glasses. Described by one White House official as “a royal pain in the ass,” Baruch nevertheless was highly regarded by the president and had entrée to the Oval Office at any time.

Baruch’s experience in wartime economics dated back to World War I when he had been head of the War Industries Board. However, he refused to accept any similar post in the current conflict because, it was said, Henry Ford, the automobile tycoon, had accused him of being a key figure in a Jewish conspiracy to take over control of the economy of the world.

The Führer Staggers America
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Because businessmen were flooding Washington with demands to know when they could resume producing civilian goods now that the war in Europe was virtually over, Bernie Baruch prepared a report for the president on industrial reconversion. In the document, the advisor urged the government to hurry in its preparations to start producing civilian goods, so as to avoid serious unemployment when Germany collapsed.

Most civilians were still beset with shortages of coffee, sugar, meat, gasoline, and tires. And they could not always locate a favorite whiskey, cigarette, or candy bar. Now, it seemed, these “hardships” would soon evaporate.

On the morning of December 17, citizens across the land were scanning their Sunday newspapers, anxious to hear if Germany had collapsed. Apparently the European front was quiet; for one of the few times since the Normandy invasion six months earlier, the Pacific fighting monopolized the front pages. Stated a big, bold headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

AMERICANS CAPTURE AIRFIELDS ON MINDORO

The Chicago Tribune told readers in large letters:

GI’S ADVANCE IN PHILIPPINES

Buried inside scores of newspapers were short items with small headlines that told of minor German probing attacks on the Western Front, which were beaten back.

There was plenty of news—blockbuster news—however. But the Allied high command in Europe had installed a news blackout. Twenty-four hours earlier, at dawn on December 16, tens of thousands of Adolf Hitler’s assault troops and hundreds of low-slung panzers, paced by bands of German soldiers driving captured American vehicles and wearing GI uniforms taken from prisoners, had launched a massive offensive in the Ardennes forest of Belgium and Luxembourg. Later called the Battle of the Bulge, the gigantic attack was the führer’s final roll of the dice to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

From General Eisenhower on down to a private manning a machine gun at an outpost, the Americans had been taken by total surprise. German spearheads smashed through thin and disorganized U.S. positions and plunged deep into Belgium.

In Washington, the White House was in a state of shock. This simply could not be taking place in the bitterly cold and snow-covered Ardennes forest. Hadn’t the Pentagon believed that Germany was on the verge of collapse?

Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s closest and most trusted civilian advisor, rushed to see J. Edgar Hoover, the Federal Bureau of Investigation chief. The hard-driving, high-strung Hopkins breathlessly informed Hoover of an amazing Nazi plot to murder Roosevelt while official America was focusing on the slaughter taking place in the Ardennes.

The gaunt, stoop-shouldered Hopkins said he had authentic information from confidential intelligence sources in London that there was a plan to kill President Roosevelt.

At this time, there were nearly 425,000 German prisoners of war in the United States, and some 75 of them were escaping each month (most were soon recaptured). According to Hopkins’s source, the attempt to murder Roosevelt would be made while thousands of German POWs created enormous turmoil and confusion by a mass escape.

When informed of the plot, Roosevelt scoffed at the idea that a group of hard-core Nazi fanatics, no doubt garbed in civilian clothes, would storm the White House. But Mike Riley, the veteran, astute chief of the White House Secret Service detail, refused to take the threat lightly.

Riley secured the services of an Army unit and beefed up security around the president, who joked about the “rumpus.” When his long-time, middle-aged secretary, Grace Tully, came to work one morning, the president, flashing his trademark lopsided grin, quipped: “Well, Grace, did Mike Riley’s boys frisk you?”

In Europe meanwhile, American correspondents were furious. Because of the embargo on information about the German offensive, they had to sit on one of the war’s biggest stories. A half-million GIs were battling an equal number of German soldiers in a death struggle with no holds barred.

Despite the official news blackout, bits and pieces of information seeped back to home-front America: something was amiss on the Western Front. Concern would have turned to panic had civilians been privy to a notation scrawled in his diary by the customarily upbeat General George Patton: “We can still lose this war!”

Three days after the Germans struck in the Ardennes, the news blackout was lifted—perhaps through the direct order of President Roosevelt. Blaring headlines and bulletins on the radio staggered a complacent home front. Loved ones of Americans battling for their lives in the heavy snows and subzero climate in Belgium hurried to churches to pray.

At the same time in the Pentagon outside Washington, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Army Chief of Staff George Marshall were grimly discussing the unthinkable: What if Adolf Hitler pulled off the enormous gamble and his forces soundly defeated and administered a bloodbath to the Americans?

Always a realist, Marshall declared: “If Germany beats us, we will have to recast our view of the entire war. We will have to take up defensive positions in Europe.” Next, he made a startling observation: “Then the people of the United States would have to decide whether they want to continue the war enough to raise large new armies.”

Marshall and Stimson knew that “raising new armies” would mean the drafting of hundreds of thousands of men who were exempt because they were fathers, above the current draft age, or had physical handicaps. It was conceiv

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able that should the Americans suffer enormous losses, the home front might rebel against feeding more men into the European meat grinder.

After six weeks of savagery in the Ardennes, the Nazi army limped back into the Siegfried Line, a barrier along the western border of the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler’s final gamble had been costly: 120,000 casualties. More than 90,000 Americans had been killed, wounded, or captured.
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Back Home for Christmas

S
NOW WAS BLANKETING
the affluent New York City suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut, in mid-December 1944. In recent weeks, two residents, Prescott and Dorothy Bush, had gone through the torments of the damned after the Pentagon notified them that one of their four sons, Navy Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush, was missing in action in the Pacific.

Prescott Bush was the managing partner of the Wall Street firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Company, an international banking house. So George Bush had grown up surrounded by wealth and influence. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he captained the basketball and soccer teams, played varsity baseball (a left-handed first baseman), and served as president of his senior class.

Young Bush had a slot open for him at Yale University, but he enlisted in the Navy and took flight training at Corpus Christi, Texas, after which he was commissioned. Late in 1943, Bush was assigned to the new aircraft carrier San Jacinto as a member of Torpedo Bomber Squadron VT51 and at the time was the youngest pilot in the Navy.

Bush engaged in heavy fighting in the Pacific. As a pilot in a torpedo squadron, his was one of the most hazardous flight jobs in the Navy. His luck finally ran out and he was shot down but survived in a small raft for several days before he was spotted and rescued by a ship. Hungry, thirsting for water, bedraggled, clothes soaked, he offered up a prayer of thanks.

On Christmas Eve 1944, there was a knock on the door of the Prescott and Dorothy Bush mansion in Greenwich. When it was opened, there stood a grinning Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush, a future president of the United States.
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Episode on a Florida Bus

A
BLACK SOLDIER,
who had served in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, climbed aboard a bus in Tampa, Florida, early in 1945. He was on convalescent leave from an Army hospital and on his way home.

Three white soldiers were in the front seats, and one of them got up and offered his seat to the wounded veteran. But the driver overheard the remark and told the black GI to move to the back of the bus. The white soldier said that there were no empty seats there, and the driver replied: “Niggers can’t sit up front in Florida!”

Still standing, the white soldier said to his two companions: “Does he sit here or doesn’t he?” They called out: “He sits!” Then the white GI told the bus driver: “Either he sits down here and you drive or we’ll throw your ass off the bus and I’ll drive!”

The driver drove away without another word.
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A GI Changes His Mind

S
TAFF SERGEANT JOE MORTON
was standing along the rail of a gray-painted transport ship as it sailed into New York harbor. He was pushing thirty-nine year of age—positively elderly for a combat soldier—and returning home from Europe to be discharged from the Army after having been overseas for two years.

Morton had been made eligible for being separated from the service as a result of a War Department edict that stated GIs thirty-eight years of age or older could get out of the Army. Now, on approaching New York City, Morton was elated over his forthcoming role as a civilian.

In the mists of early morning on the transport ship, Morton caught sight of the Statue of Liberty. For some reason he could not even explain to himself, he suddenly regretted the decision he had made. On reaching nearby Fort Dix, New Jersey, for discharge, the sergeant withdrew his application. A few days later he was back on another vessel, sailing out of New York harbor to rejoin his buddies in his old outfit in Europe.
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Part Six

The Lights Go On Again

A Blaze of Glory

N
EW YEAR’S DAY 1945
marked the beginning of America’s fourth year in a global war that had resulted in the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of her sons. In Washington, President Roosevelt continued to be confronted by countless problems, but he and wife Eleanor, like a few million parents across the land, had their own personal worries. They had four sons in the service, all of them in combat assignments.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was executive officer (second in command) of the destroyer Mayant during the invasion of North Africa in November 1942. Later he commanded the destroyer Ulvert H. Moore, which sank a Japanese submarine off the Philippines.

James, the oldest son, was a Marine Corps officer with Carlson’s Raiders, a commando-type unit that specialized in raiding Japanese positions on small Pacific islands.

The youngest son, John, was an ensign on the aircraft carrier Hornet, which spent fifty-two days under Japanese attack in the Pacific—and never received as much as a dent from a machine-gun bullet or shrapnel.

Elliott, the second oldest offspring, was commander of an Army Air Corps photo reconnaissance outfit that saw action in North Africa, Iceland, and the Normandy invasion.

In late 1944, Colonel Elliott Roosevelt was up for promotion to brigadier general, which would make him one of the few Air Corps officers to achieve that rank without being a trained pilot. Congress was considering the elevation, which seemed to be a certainty, when a convoluting series of events threatened to sidetrack his promotion.

It all began on January 4, 1945, when an eighteen-year-old sailor, Seaman 1st Class Leon LeRoy, arrived in New York harbor aboard a Navy tanker on which he was a gunner. When ashore he learned for the first time of the death of his father, who had been the police chief of Antioch, California, a month earlier. The sailor applied for and was granted an emergency leave to visit his mother.