New York at War (36 page)

While the war had given New York’s diverse ethnic groups opportunities for self-assertion and pride, One Hundred Percent Americanism had also gained a momentum that carried it beyond the war’s end. Preparedness found a new target: those who supported the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and, by extension, the radical subversion of American society. As veterans and other workers struggled with postwar inflation and an uncertain job market, employers denounced labor unions as “nothing less than bolshevism.” A new organization, the American Legion, demanded the deportation of foreign-born radicals, “this scum who hate God, our country, our flag.” The war’s strident mood persisted, sustained in part by senseless, terrifying acts committed by isolated radicals. Anonymous pipe and letter bombs targeted prominent businessmen and conservative politicians.
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Much as the German government had tainted German America with its wartime sabotage, radicals who resorted to terrorism to advance their causes served only to provoke a backlash against the entire American left. On May Day 1919, roving bands of soldiers and sailors tried to break up a peaceful meeting of garment trade unionists at Madison Square Garden and attacked the office of the socialist newspaper the
Call
, driving staff members into the street and beating them. Seven months later, the New York Police Bomb Squad and federal agents raided the Union of Russian Workers on East Fifteenth Street and rounded up 200 suspected “reds” and “criminal anarchists.” In December 1919, a steamship would carry 249 deported foreign-born radicals, including members of the new Communist and Communist Labor parties and the famed anarchist Emma Goldman, from Ellis Island to Europe.
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Antiradical agents targeted New York’s Jewish community for special surveillance. Despite the sympathy of many Jewish leftists for the new Soviet regime, the city’s Jews as a whole were divided on the merits of the Communist experiment. But by 1919, Captain John B. Trevor and others in the New York office of the army’s Military Intelligence Division were convinced that “Bolshevism is an international movement controlled by Jews.” Trevor’s anti-Semitism had bolstered his wartime conviction that Jews were allies and agents of the kaiser; now he feared a mass radical uprising starting in New York’s “ congested districts chiefly inhabited by Russian Jews.” In May he outlined a secret plan for using army machine gun units to cordon off Jewish neighborhoods in the event of revolution. In response, army headquarters in Washington sent him six thousand Springfield rifles to use against the Jewish Bolsheviks of the Lower East Side. But the revolution did not come, and the “Red Scare” petered out as politicians and journalists increasingly questioned the “Americanism” of midnight raids and wholesale deportations. Millions of New Yorkers were happy to put the war and the witch hunt behind them.
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But there were other legacies of New York’s war. German Americans never fully regained their communal confidence; their once-vital presence in the city’s public life receded, almost melted away. When Congress took up the question of postwar immigration, consultants Madison Grant and John B. Trevor were among those redrawing the terms of admission into the United States. The law that resulted, the National Origins Act of 1924, would end a century of unimpeded European immigration. The law limited the number of arriving Southern and Eastern Europeans, including Jews, defining them as undesirables to be kept out of the nation. The new orthodoxy propounded by Grant and other “experts,” and embraced by many American voters and congressmen, sounded few warnings about “Nordic” Germans but instead focused on Jews, Italians, and Slavs as racially inferior and as importers of European radicalism. Thus millions of would-be immigrants, many the kin of New Yorkers, were denied the Statue of Liberty’s welcome and left behind in a Europe torn apart by the Great War’s dark aftermath. Woodrow Wilson’s war to make the world safe for democracy had brought to a climax fears of social contamination that New York most vividly symbolized. Enemies already within the gates—“Huns” in all their threatening guises—would no longer be joined and inflamed by masses of new “enemies” arriving at Ellis Island from distant shores.
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CHAPTER 8

Tempting Target

Global Conflict and
World War II, 1933–1945

T
he squadrons of enemy twin-engine bombers roared through the morning sky over Long Island, heading for their targets on the western horizon. The planes had encountered no resistance as they made their turn toward the distant Manhattan skyscrapers. But now, thousands of feet below them on the ground, civilians trained their binoculars skyward from dozens of observation posts scattered across the landscape. Soon hundreds of calls flooded into the telephone filter stations at Hempstead, White Plains, and New Haven, where evaluators sent the spotters’ reports through to the Army Information Center in the New York Telephone Building on West Street in lower Manhattan. Here, telephone operators and army personnel plotted the reports of the bombers’ progress on large table maps, enabling dispatchers to call up Army Air Corps fighter squadrons based at Garden City and Quogue on Long Island. Within minutes, Curtiss P-40 fighter planes took to the air and came up from behind on the attackers.

At over three hundred miles per hour, the P-40s flew much faster than the lumbering bombers, and the fighters soon made short shrift of most of the enemy. But New Yorkers were about to learn the lesson Londoners had so recently learned: “Some bombers always get through,” the
New York Times
conceded. As spotters watched from their post atop the Empire State Building, the paper went on to report, “4,000-pound aerial mines blasted at the foundations of New York’s skyscrapers. . . . ‘Aerial torpedoes’ smashed at their sides and upper floors.” At night the raids continued, the
Times
explained, but the Sixty-Second Army Coast Artillery swept the skies with searchlights installed at Coney Island, Rockaway, and Fort Totten in Queens, and the unit’s antiaircraft fire prevented the bombers from destroying the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The next day “there was a ‘truce’ at noon,” the
Times
informed its readers, “when both bombers and pursuits returned to Mitchel Field [at Garden City] for lunch.” The bombs, of course, were imaginary. So were the enemy aircraft carriers supposedly cruising off Jones Beach on these cold days and nights in January 1941. The “air raid” was part of a four-day exercise organized by the army’s recently established Air Defense Command, the first major test of civilian ground-to-air plane spotting for national defense. While thirty-five B-18 bombers and twenty-one P-40s really did crisscross each other in the skies, they fired no bullets and dropped no “aerial torpedoes.” Nor did the Sixty-Second Regiment actually use its antiaircraft guns, although its powerful searchlights did sweep the skies.

On the other hand, the plane spotters spread across eastern New York and lower New England were very real. Some ten thousand civilian volunteers and Coast Guardsmen, the former organized in relief relays by the American Legion, manned seven hundred observation posts throughout the Northeast during the test. Nine of these posts were in the city itself. The observation deck of the world’s tallest building, the Empire State, provided a vantage point for scanning the skies. So did a hotel roof in Coney Island, a dock at City Island, and an Elks Club in Elmhurst. World War I veterans, the mainstay of American Legion membership, manned most of the observation posts, but other civilians, including women, took part as well.

The army generals who had organized the operation conveyed a mixed message about its outcome. Yes, the system worked: spotters had phoned in sightings in time to permit fighters to take off in successful pursuit. But there had also been problems. Numerous spotters called in inaccurate sightings, even though they had been trained to jot down the direction and altitude of the incoming bombers. Further training and drills, the
Times
averred, would surely strengthen the system, for the army had announced its intention of making civilian observation permanent and extending it up and down the East Coast and to other parts of the country.
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The world was a dangerous place in early 1941. Adolf Hitler’s Blitzkrieg had created a new German empire stretching from Poland to France. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had signed a nonaggression pact; only Great Britain stood against the Nazi domination of Europe. The German Luftwaffe, the air force that had reduced Guernica and Rotterdam to rubble, now was busy trying to do the same to London and other English cities. Germany’s Axis partners were also at war. Italian Fascist soldiers and airmen had already given Ethiopia and Albania to Mussolini and with their Nazi counterparts had helped Francisco Franco overthrow the Spanish Republic; now they fought to conquer Greece. Josef Stalin, for the moment Hitler’s ally, had thrown the Red Army into eastern Poland, Finland, and the Baltic republics. In Asia, the Japanese Empire continued its bloody, intermittent offensive in China and had begun to move troops into French Indochina.

Many New Yorkers continued to see Europe’s and Asia’s wars as distant conflicts, somebody else’s bad dream. The brief U-boat attacks and air raid drills of 1918 were long forgotten. The city’s very vastness seemed to render it invulnerable. Hard hit by the Great Depression (with four hundred thousand men and women still unemployed in 1941), New York not only remained
the
American metropolis, the hub of the nation’s financial and cultural life, but was also the world’s second largest city, after London. New York’s 7.5 million people inhabited a space that stretched across 322 square miles. In the shadow of its skyscrapers, in its residential districts that filled thousands of blocks, many felt insulated by the sheer solidity and size of the city.
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New York’s military defenses offered extra reassurance to those who needed it. Long-range guns installed during or after World War I faced the Atlantic from the shores of New Jersey and Long Island, defying any invasion fleet bent on taking New York. On Sandy Hook, Fort Hancock’s twelve-inch guns had a range of almost 20 miles; the massive sixteen-inch guns at Fort Tilden near Rockaway Beach could hurl a one-ton shell nearly 28 miles out to sea. Forts Terry, Wright, and Michie at the eastern tip of Long Island would prevent an attack by way of Long Island Sound. From Miller Field on Staten Island and from the Long Island fields, radio-equipped Army Air Corps planes patrolled out to sea, reporting on incoming vessels and, if need be, helping coastal artillery spotters to optimize the accuracy of their fire. The Sixty-Second Regiment based at Fort Totten in Queens could move its mobile antiaircraft guns and spotlights around the city by truck as needed. The
New York Times
noted confidently that, in the event of a real war, “the Army’s new and secret aircraft detector” would warn of enemy planes 150 miles out to sea. Indeed, by 1942, radar antennae faced seaward from Fort Hancock, affording New York City an early-warning system akin to the one that helped defeat the Luftwaffe over England.
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As ever, the city’s remoteness from Europe’s battlefields seemed the strongest guarantee of safety. (As for the Japanese threat, that was the concern of West Coast cities facing the Pacific, and New Yorkers worried less about an attack from that direction.) Because no bomber could carry enough fuel to cross the Atlantic, make its attack, and return, the
Times
’ military expert, Hanson Baldwin, contended that the worst East Coasters might expect would be “a small surprise raid, which could do little damage . . . undertaken by a plane or two from a ship at sea.” Baldwin deemed even this unlikely, given the vigilance of navy, air corps, and coast guard patrols.
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For many New Yorkers, however, the danger remained real, even when they tried to push it out of their minds. A suppressed anxiety came pouring out of people when the right button was pressed. On Halloween Eve, 1938, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the Air dramatized H. G. Wells’s
War of the Worlds
and managed to convince at least one-fifth of an estimated six million listeners that the Northeast was under attack. In Manhattan, frightened people crowded police stations and public parks, snarled traffic on Riverside Drive in an effort to flee, and flooded the
New York Times
switchboard with frantic requests for information. Some, perhaps, fled their homes to save themselves from the Martian advance through central New Jersey that Welles’s actors conveyed so grippingly. But others had a different threat in mind. Running out into the street, a Newark housewife shouted, “New Jersey is destroyed by the Germans—it’s on the radio!” That fall, after all, Hitler had brought Europe to the brink of war during the Munich Crisis, when he demanded—and ultimately got—the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia for the Third Reich. Such fears proved prescient; ten days after Halloween, on “Crystal Night,” Nazi mobs would rampage through the cities of Germany and Austria, burning synagogues and beating and killing Jews.
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By the time of the mock “air raid” in January 1941, New Yorkers and other Americans had entered an even tenser period than that which preceded the outbreak of war in Europe. Hitler now controlled Western Europe and threatened to conquer Britain. Despite the opposition of isolationists, Franklin Roosevelt had managed to commit the nation to a program of pro-British military preparedness. Congress enacted the first peacetime draft in American history in September 1940, and sixteen million men had registered. Meanwhile, the Lend-Lease Program and the direct sale of American arms and supplies were helping to keep Britain in the war. Was the country—and its largest city—on an irrevocable collision course with Germany?