__________
“Is the kind of America I know worth defending?”
James
G. Thompson
__________
MORE THAN 40,000 men are classified as conscientious objectors
during World War II. Most accept noncombatant duty in the armed forces.
Approximately 12,000 are assigned to Civilian Public Service camps. “The
remaining 6,000, most of whom were Jehovah’s Witnesses, went to prison.”
(1127-103)
*
ELIZABETH “BETTY” CATLETT, the first African American woman to
ever earn an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, moves to New York City. There,
in the quiet heroism of the people around her, she finds inspiration for her
sculpting and painting.
 |
Some of Catlett's work. |
*
WITH FEAR AND ANGER RISING, in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, Fletcher Bowron, mayor of Los Angeles, supports the call to send all Japanese and Japanese Americans living in along the coast to “relocation camps.”
He explains:
The
Japanese, because they are unassimilable, because the aliens have been denied
the right to own real property in California, because of [immigration
discrimination against them], because of the marked differences in appearance
between Japanese and Caucasians, because of the generations of training and
philosophy that makes them Japanese and nothing else – all of these
contributing factors set the Japanese apart as a race, regardless of how many
generations have been born in America. Undoubtedly many of them intend to be
loyal, but only each individual can know his own intentions, and when the final
test comes, who can say but that “blood will tell”? 104/61
The historian Roger Daniels
will later explain how unreasoning fear of Japanese Americans justified their
imprisonment. “[W]hat men believe to be
true is more important than the truth itself because the mistaken belief
becomes a basis for action.”
May 6: Lt. Mildred Dalton, a U.S. Army nurse, and 65 others, are taken prisoner when the Japanese force the last American and allied troops defending Corregidor to surrender. Having grown up poor in Georgia, she had attended nursing school during the Depression, and then enlisted in 1939. “I joined the Army to see the world,” she told a reporter decades later. “And what I saw was a prison camp.”
As The New York Times explained in her obituary, the captured nurses spent most of the war at Japan’s Santo Tomas internment camp for foreign nationals in Manila, “where they faced near-starvation and were ravaged by disease and malnutrition while treating nearly 4,000 men, women and children.”
In the last stages of the war, Mildred “and her fellow nurses subsisted on one or two bowls of rice a day…She lost all her teeth to lack of nutrition.”
“I have been asked many
times if we were mistreated or tortured,” she wrote in a remembrance … “Physically,
no. A few people might get their face slapped if they failed to bow to a
Japanese guard. Humiliated, yes. We would be awakened at 2 in the morning for
head count or searched for contraband.”
“From
time to time they would round up a number of men and take them out of camp and
they were never heard from again,” she continued. “Our internment was nothing
compared to the Bataan Death March and imprisonment our soldiers went through.
They were tortured and starved.”
The 66 nurses, and 11 from the U.S. Navy, kept at another camp, were liberated in the winter of 1945. Dalton and the other army nurses were awarded Bronze Stars.
Mildred went on to meet Arthur Brewster Manning, at a war bonds rally, and they were married on her thirty-first birthday. They had two children, a son and a daughter, and five grandchildren.
Mrs.
Manning told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2001 that she continued
to experience trauma from her war experiences. She feared dark places long
after those grim days and nights in the tunnels of Corregidor, she said, and
she built extra shelves in her home to store staples out of fear that she would
run out of food.
“But
I came out so much better than many of my friends,” she said. “I have never
been bitter, and I have always known that if I could survive that, I could
survive anything.”
*
The “Texas Tornado” takes the crown.
September 12: Jo-Carroll Dennison wins the Miss America contest, including a win in the “talent contest,” where she gave a spirited rendition of “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” while dressed in a cowgirl outfit.
The press labeled the 18-year-old the “Texas tornado.”
Miss Dennison also won the swimsuit contest, but in some ways came to regret her victory. The New York Times explains. She was happy to entertain the troops, to sing and dance as she had been doing in shows since she was a child, but, she didn’t like being a sex symbol.
In
addition to entertaining the troops, her reign as Miss America called for her
to appear in her swimsuit. She felt this would be demeaning, she wrote,
especially in some of the low-rent venues where she was sent; she refused to do
it and even cut her tour short, though this received little public notice. …
While
Ms. Dennison loved certain aspects of being Miss America, she also felt the
title gave people the impression that she was an empty-headed sex object. At
parties, she wrote, it “was more a stigma than an accolade.” She still smarted
years later when she recalled Groucho Marx telling her, “You’re almost
articulate — for a bathing beauty.”
When she
had toured military bases as Miss America, she raised morale but knew that the
soldiers were cheering her as a symbol, not for anything she had done. “But
when working directly with hospice [which she did when she was older],” she
wrote, “I felt that I was fulfilling that purpose and using the Miss America
title in a far better way.”
Later, Dennison talked about being sexually assaulted when she was 12, and the pain she felt at age seven, when her father left her and her mother.
 |
Dennison is at right on stage. |
*
Spring: Joe DiMaggio is coming off a season in 1941 where he hit .357, had a hitting streak of 56 consecutive games, drilled 30 home runs, and drove in 125 runs. Ed Barrow, the Yankees general manager offers him a salary of $35,000 for 1942, a cut of $2,500. “There’s a war going on,” he explains.
In those days, players were not unionized, and owners had the whip hand. Even some former players were not sympathetic to complaints.
Paul Waner explained around this time, “Guilds have no place in
baseball. I was in the big leagues for 20 years and never once figured I was
being underpaid or mistreated. Baseball is very generous and has kept quite a
number of fellows from pushing plows for a living.” (The Ol’ Ball Game,
p. 106)
*
DR. ROBERT N. HALL was working in a
G.E. Lab in 1942, developing a magnetron to jam enemy radar. One day an
engineer at Raytheon noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted near the
magnetron. Raytheon then used this “discovery” to develop the microwave oven.
(NYT obituary, 5/10/18)
Hall first became interested in science after his uncle, Sydney Hall, an early aircraft-engine designer, took him to a science fair. Dr. Hall would later talk about his love for science: “You see there is a problem to be solved and you think about it, and you solve it, and it’s a thrill.”
In 1962 he built the first solid-state laser; it also allows fiber optics to carry data; he spent his entire career with G. E.
*
“Moldy Mary” aids in the hunt for penicillin.
Two
scientists, Howard Florey and Norman Heatley, fly from England to the U.S. to
discuss ways to boost production of penicillin.
In America, the team was quickly set up with a lab at the Department of Agriculture’s Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Ill. The project quickly gained the support of U.S. military officials, who were eager to find a drug that would protect the troops from deadly infections — and of several American drug companies, including Merck and Pfizer.
It
might seem strange that Florey and Heatley were set up in an agricultural lab
when they were working on a medical drug. But Peoria turned out to be the
perfect spot for them. The agricultural scientists had extensive experience
with molds and other soil-based organisms. And the heartland location had one
meaningful advantage: its proximity to corn. The mold turned out to thrive in
vats of corn steep liquor, which was a waste product created by making
cornstarch.
While
the scientists experimented with creating larger yields in the corn steep
liquors, they also suspected that there might be other strains of penicillin
out in the wild that would be more amenable to rapid growth. At the same time,
U.S. soldiers and sailors collected soil samples around the globe — Eastern
Europe, North Africa, South America — to be shipped back to the American labs
for investigation. An earlier soil search in the United States had brought back
an organism that would become the basis for streptomycin, now one of the most
widely used antibiotics in the world. In the years immediately after the end of
the war, Pfizer and other drug companies would go on to conduct major
exploratory missions seeking out soil samples everywhere, from the bottoms of
mine shafts to wind-borne samples gathered with the aid of balloons. In the end
Pfizer collected a staggering 135,000 distinct samples.
The search for promising molds took
place closer to home as well. During the summer months of 1942, shoppers in
Peoria grocery stores began to notice a strange presence in the fresh produce
aisles, a young woman intently examining the fruit on display, picking out and
purchasing the ones with visible rot. Her name was Mary Hunt, and she was a
bacteriologist from the Peoria lab, assigned the task of locating promising
molds that might replace the existing strains that were being used. (Her
unusual shopping habits ultimately gave her the nickname Moldy Mary.) One
of Hunt’s molds — growing in a particularly unappetizing cantaloupe — turned
out to be far more productive than the original strains that Florey and Chain’s
team had tested. Nearly every strain of penicillin in use today descends from
the colony Hunt found in that cantaloupe.
Aided
by the advanced production techniques of the drug companies, the United States
was soon producing a stable penicillin in quantities sufficient to be
distributed to military hospitals around the world. …
Penicillin, alongside the other antibiotics developed soon after
the war ended, triggered a revolution in human health. Mass killers like
tuberculosis were almost entirely eliminated. People stopped getting severe
infections from simple cuts and scrapes, like the rose-thorn scratch that
killed Albert Alexander [the first English patient to get treatment with
penicillin, till doctors ran out]. The magical power of antibiotics to ward off
infection also opened the door to new treatments. Radical surgical procedures
like organ transplants became mainstream.
*
“The beginnings of gender equality.”
May 29: “Rosie the Riveter” (NYT; 4/25/15): Mary Keefe modeled for Norman Rockwell in 1942; she was 19, weighed 110; had never handled a rivet gun, was a Vermont telephone operator and red-headed. “Her picture,” greatly altered, appeared on the Memorial Day cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
Penny Coleman, author of a book about women working in WWII, says the picture is “iconic because it portrays a rarity – an image of a powerful woman with a don’t-mess-with-me attitude.” Chris Coleman, a museum curator says the work “is emblematic of a sea change in American culture.” “Importantly, the artist’s depiction celebrates, even helps to invent, due to mass distribution as a War Bond poster and a magazine cover, the beginnings of gender equality.”
Rockwell added lipstick, rouge, and polished nails to emphasize the femininity of the worker aiding the war effort.
He did 300 + covers for Post. A story about Rosaline P. Walter, a 19-year-old high school graduate who had gone to work for an aircraft factory sparked the idea. First came a song:
All the day long, whether rain
Or shine
She’s a part of the assembly line
She’s making history, working
For victory
Rosie [sound of rat-a-tat-tat]
The riveter.
Rockwell picked it up there, paying Keefe $5 each for two sessions, $5 then is equal to about $144 today. In the finished work her right shoe is placed on a copy of Mein Kampf. She’s holding a ham sandwich and her lunchbox has her name. Rockwell felt bad because Mary took kidding about her “size” when he bulked her up.
He said, “I really thought you were the
most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”
*
June 23: A Japanese submarine surfaces at night and fires 21 shells at Fort Lewis, a U.S. military base.
Little damage is done and this marks the
only time a military target is hit on the mainland in four years of war.
*
“I had to fight like hell for the right to fight for my country.”
Japanese Americans in WWII: (NYT book review, 4-26-15): Theodore Seuss Geisel did a cartoon showing Japanese lined up all along the West Coast, getting packs of dynamite. The caption: “Waiting for the signal from home.”
Eleanor Roosevelt warned the American people not to be hasty in locking everyone up, but her voice was drowned out.
Examples:
Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy: “If it is a question of the safety of the country and the Constitution…why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”
General John DeWitt: “A Jap is a Jap…You can’t tell one Jap from another.”
Governor Chase Clark of Idaho: “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats.”
Young opera star, Fumiko Yaba, packed a bathing suit when she heard she was heading for Tule Lake.
Ben Kuroki was born in Nebraska and grew up in Hershey, Nebraska. He had trouble getting accepted in the U.S. Army. “I had to fight like hell for the right to fight for my country,” he said long after the war. Fight like hell he did. His local draft board gave him the chance – and he enlisted with brother Fred. Ben was soon flying in the U.S. Army Air Force.
“When you live with men under combat conditions for fifteen months, you begin to understand what brotherhood is all about, what equality and tolerance really mean.”
His nickname, given by a fellow crew member, was: “Most Honorable Son.” He flew the required 25 missions in Europe, volunteered for five more, and then flew 28 over Japan. “I have the face of a Japanese but my heart is American,” he said when given approval to fly missions over Japan. Near the end of the war, a drunken serviceman stabbed Kuroki in the head.
Bill Mauldin said of him: “It is the story of a little guy who went through the war, made his buddies proud to wear the same uniform he did and will make you proud to be his countryman.” (Intro to a 1946 book about his life; NYT obit; 9/6/15).
NOTE TO TEACHERS: I tried to teach my students ever year that using dehumanizing
language (like referring to Japanese Americans as “rats,” above), was the
easiest path to cruelty aimed at others. I taught seventh graders, and we had
great discussions on this topic every year. See my post: “Two ‘N’ Words and a ‘D’ Word.”
*
TIME MAGAZINE did a brief article on George Takei, who spent part of his childhood in an internment camp. “Gaman,” Time wrote, is a word often heard in the movie about his life, To Be Takei. He translates it, the critic notes, as “to endure with dignity or fortitude.”
Gaman got his family through time
spent in internment camps for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, to which
Takei, born in Los Angeles, was sent at age 5. He was nearly 9 when the Takeis
were released, only to endure life on L.A.’s Skid Row. When he became an actor,
his fortitude still proved valuable as he was relegated to stereotypical Asian
roles.
In 2005, after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of California’s gay-marriage bill, Takei revealed that he and his longtime manager, Brad Altman, had been partners for nearly twenty years.
They married in 2008.
*
 |
Young Japanese Americans in a camp. |
Satoda was 22 when he and his family were forced to leave their home in San Francisco and head for a relocation camp in Arkansas. “Today was supposed to be my graduation at Cal,” he wrote on May 13, 1942. “Got hell from Mom for fooling around with women,” he noted on May 19. “Hot as hell,” he said on May 20. His diary is now part of an exhibit, “Out of the Desert: Resilience and Memory in Japanese American Internment,” now being shown at Yale.
In 1945 he was released from the camp and promptly drafted into the U.S. Army and hadn’t seen his diary or thought about it since.
Journalists often called the prisoners “evacuees.” George Takei was also imprisoned at Rohwer, not far from Jerome, Arkansas. Satoda was born and raised in California and kept his diary under a pillow so his mother wouldn’t see it. He worked making furniture in the camp and also did some teaching.
Satoda spent two years in Japan after the war, serving as an intelligence officer, and twenty years in the army, retiring as a major in the Army Reserve.
His wife Daisy had been interned at Topaz, she being one of ten siblings. “I look back at the injustice, but when you’re young, you’re not saddled with those responsibilities. It was my parents’ burden,” she says.
He adds: “You know how you go on vacation and have a flat tire?
Fifty years later, you don’t remember the flat tire.” He remembers the bonds of
friendship he made during those years.
*
“Treated worse in Southern towns than German prisoners of war.”
“A Most Dangerous Newspaper” (NYT book review; 1/10/16): Black recruits were turned away in some localities because there weren’t enough segregated units to take them, or confined to units that built roads, loaded ships and dug latrines.
Men who
were eager to prove themselves in battle grew demoralized marking time on bases
that gave them ramshackle housing and confined them to Jim Crow buses and even
‘colored only’ sections of movie theaters. The Pentagon made matters worse (if
such a thing were possible) by intentionally placing black soldiers under the
command of white Southern officers – on the premise that Southerners better
“understood” black people.
As Brent Staples notes in his book review:
The
Negro press warned black men against Navy recruiters who would promise them
training as radiomen, technicians or mechanics – then put them to work serving
food to white men. It made its readers understand that black men and women in
uniform were treated worse in Southern towns than German prisoners of war and
sometimes went hungry on troop trains because segregationists declined to feed
them.
The Pittsburgh Courier came up with the Double V campaign, victory over fascism abroad, victory over racism at home.
That
campaign, by the way, was sparked by a letter a young African American wrote
to the paper. James G. Thompson, 26, from Wichita, Kansas, wondered:
Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? Will things be better
for the next generation in the peace to follow? Would it be demanding too much
to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?
Is the kind of America I know worth defending?”
Other black-oriented newspapers questioned the conduct of the U.S. government during the war. Military units were still segregated; and Jim Crow laws, and more subtle racism in the North, made life difficult for all African Americans – at a time we claimed to be fighting evil around the world. Attorney General Francis Biddle called the publisher of the Chicago Defender to his office in 1942. Biddle told John H. Sengstacke that the black newspapers were flirting with sedition. He would “shut them all up,” if necessary.
Sengstacke responded: “You have the
power to close us down. So if you want to close us, go ahead and attempt it.”
*
HEINZ, a refugee from Germany, is
drafted by the U.S. Army. Better known as “Henry,” young Henry Kissinger will
soon be sent to Europe, where his knowledge of German will often pay off.
*
November 13: A Japanese submarine torpedoes and sinks the USS Juneau, in fighting off Guadalcanal.
Five brothers, the Sullivans, serving
onboard are lost: George, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert. This marks the
greatest loss of life by any American family during World War II.
*
November 28: A fire breaks out at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston. Patrons panic and rush for the exits, many of which are locked. The New York Times reported that “the chief loss of life resulted from the screaming, clawing crowds that were wedged in the entrances of the club.”
By the time firefighters extinguished
the blaze 492 people were dead.
*
 |
Lucky to remain afloat. |
November 30: This blogger had never heard of USS New Orleans, or the Battle of Tassafaronga, in the Solomon Islands, until July 2025. It was at that point that scientists announced they had found an important piece of history, 2,000 feet below the waves, related to that combat.
Wikipedia has all the details required. In a battle with a Japanese destroyer-transport force, ten U.S. warships, four cruisers and six destroyers went into action.
When the flagship Minneapolis was
struck by two torpedoes, New Orleans, next astern, was forced to
sheer away to avoid collision, and ran into the track of a torpedo, which
detonated the ship's forward magazines and gasoline tanks. This explosion
severed 150 ft (46 m) of her bow just forward of turret No. 2. The severed
bow, including Turret No. 1, swung around the port side and punched several
holes in the length of New Orleans’ hull before sinking at the
stern and damaging the port inboard propeller. With one quarter of her
length gone, [she was] slowed to two knots (2.3 mph; 3.7 km/h), and
on fire. Everyone in turrets one and two perished, a total of 183 men killed.
Herbert Brown, a seaman in the ship’s plotting room, described the scene after
the torpedo hit:
I had to see. I walked alongside the
silent turret two and was stopped by a lifeline stretched from the outboard
port lifeline to the side of the turret. Thank God it was there, for one more
step and I would have pitched head first into the dark water thirty feet below.
The bow was gone. One hundred and twenty five feet of ship and number one main
battery turret with three 8 inch guns were gone. Eighteen hundred tons of ship
were gone. Oh my God, all those guys I went through boot camp with – all gone[.]”
Damage control parties managed to repair the ship enough to sail to Tulagi Harbor near daybreak on 1 December
The crew camouflaged their ship from
air attack, jury-rigged a bow of coconut logs, and worked clearing away
wreckage.
The cruiser limped back to Australia, sailing stern first to avoid sinking. The damaged propellor was replace, and a temporary stub bow installed. On 7 March 1943, the New Orleans left Sydney for Puget Sound Navy Yard, “sailing backward the entire voyage, where a new bow was fitted with the use of Minneapolis’ No. 2 Turret.” New radar systems were added, and all battle damage repaired. Numerous 20mm and 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns, after the British model, were added.
The New Orleans took part in the defense of Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, in the battles of the Coral Sea, and Midway, and in fights at Wake Island, Truk, the Philippine Sea, Iwo Jima, Leyte Gulf, and Okinawa. Her guns helped sink several Japanese warships during the war, including the light carrier Chiyoda, exacting revenge for her own losses.
There are many ways to die in combat. In one battle, a disabled plane from Yorktown “flew into New Orleans’ mainmast, hitting gun mounts as it fell into the sea. The ship was sprayed with gas as the plane exploded on hitting the water, one crew member was lost, another badly injured[.]”
NOTE TO TEACHERS: If I
was still teaching, it would probably work to have students do research on the
New Orleans – or other ships – and then write up, or act out “their experiences”
during World War II.
*
A radio operator and gunner on the B-17 nicknamed “Umbragio,” after a Jimmy Durante catch phrase, watches bombs rain down on a German city. “Screw ’em,” he thinks. Then he has second thoughts. “I remember thinking, imagining a table of family, of Germans, sitting around the table as the bombs dropped.”
That man is Norman Lear, a Jew himself, later a famous TV producer, who, one writer explains, will later fight “for his country in his sitcoms,” showing the same kind of empathy for complex characters he felt that day over Germany. (The most famous: “All in the Family,” will lead TV ratings for much of the 70s.)
