After Pearl Harbor: The Home Front At War

By Phyllis Appel

They struggled through air raids, U-boat attacks, spies, a second Pearl Harbor attack, high taxes, and scrap collections. The Rose Bowl was moved to Durham, North Carolina. There would be no Thanksgiving Day parades. (Macy’s had donated their balloons to a rubber drive.) Women became Santas now that there was a shortage of men. Golf courses became victory gardens, while the Tri-State Tennis Championship was so short of players that Sarah Palfrey Cooke was allowed to partner with her husband, Elwood, during the men’s doubles.

Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, laughed at the prospect that the United States could “produce as much as we, who have the entire economic capacity of Europe at our disposal.” Americans proved him wrong. More than 100,000 U.S. companies reinvented themselves to produce war goods. Meanwhile, American free enterprise created more than a half million new businesses. Jack Daniel’s Distillery made industrial alcohol. Hanes Knitting Company supplied thousands of soldiers with sturdy one piece "union suits." (The briefs and athletic shirts snapped together to compensate for rubber, elastic, metal, and button fastener shortages.) While Jockey made the first colored underwear, Maidenform Company of Bayonne, New Jersey, manufactured 28,500 pigeon vests so paratroopers could send messages behind enemy lines.
The war changed America. Government became bigger. Companies became wealthier and labor unions grew stronger. Wartime production created and grew towns and cities. New cutting edge technologies like Epoxy, Styrofoam, Saran wrap, plastics, night vision, crash helmets, duct tape, and Teflon were developed. There were innovations in air travel, communications, and life-saving drugs. Machine guns, semi-automatic rifles, anti-aircraft guns, flame throwers, smokescreens, biological chemicals, torpedoes, pesticides, and a host of new types of explosives made World War II the deadliest war in world history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phyllis Appel
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370087662

Phyllis Appel

A life-long resident of Missouri, Phyllis Appel has always loved to learn. That is why for the past 27 years she worked for a large school district in the Show-Me State. Now retired, Phyllis is combining her interest in writing and research to create historical biographies.

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After Pearl Harbor: The Home Front At War

Phyllis Appel

Special thanks to my husband, Craig, for his constant love, encouragement,

and multi-talents. Without his support, I could never have completed this book.

Published By Graystone Enterprises LLC

Electronic rights of this E-book reserved by Graystone Enterprises LLC. All rights reserved by the author. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written consent from the author.

Copyright © 2017 Phyllis Appel

Cover design Copyright © 217 Craig Appel

Book Cover Images from Library of Congress

Special Thanks

William Baehr,Archives Specialist, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

Molly Butterworth, Cultural Site Manager, Museum of Transportation, St. Louis County Dept of Parks and Recreation

Kirsten Strigel Carter, Digital Archivist, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum

Laura Casella (Mason Jars Company)

Consumer Specialist, Kellogg Consumer Affairs, Chelsea R.

Bob Clark, Deputy Director, Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

Cathy Conti Museum Director at Timex Corporation

Scott Cross, Archivist, Oshkosh Public Museum

Erin Dillenschneider Revlon Consumer Information Representative

Pamela Elbe Collections, Archives & Exhibitions Coordinator of National Museum of American Jewish Military History),

Washington, DC

Alan R. Finegan, Director, Marketing Gleason Corporation

David Gallagher, Co-Founder Wartime Press

Lynn O. Gamma, Archivist HQ AFHRA/RSA (Air Force Historical Research Agency/Research Agency)

Margaret Hallinan, Collections Associate, Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute

Tammy L. Hamilton, Archivist, Hershey Community Archives, Hershey, PA

Rita Hargrove, Revlon Senior Consumer Information Representative

Daniel L Haulman, PhD, Chief, Organizational Histories Branch Air Force Historical Research Agency

Timothy P. Hayes, Librarian, MSLS, US Army Corps of Engineers, New England

Dennis Kelly, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

John Koch, Park Ranger 3,Fort Stevens State Park,Oregon Parks & Recreation Dept.

Cassidy Lent, Reference Librarian, National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, NY.

Alexandra Levy, Program Director f the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C.

Virginia Lewick, Archivist, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library

Paul Morando CIV (US), Dogs and National Defense

Christopher A. Morrison, Ph.D., Chief, Policy Studies Division, Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State

Robert Nissly, Former President of Michigan Ladder

Cheryl Parker, Account Specialist, Formica Group, Formica Corporation

Mike Pierson, General Manager, General Patton Memorial Museum

Rae Proefrock, Director and Bette Largent, Herschell Carrousel Factory Museum, North Tonawanda, NY

Sita Rattan, Consumer Affairs Representative Crayola

Randy Sowell, Archivist, Harry S. Truman Library

Brandon Stephens, Curator The National WWII Museum, New Orleans

Jason D. Stratman, Assistant Librarian, Reference, Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center

JuDene Stroud, Executive Assistant | Sager Creek Vegetable Company

Jenny and Colleen, 3M Traffic Safety Systems Division

Trevor, Anheuser-Busch

Therese Terry at Cross.com

After Pearl Harbor: The Home Front At War

"Not all of us can have the privilege of fighting our enemies in distant parts of the world… But there is one front and one battle where everyone in the United States-every man, woman, and child-is in action, and will be privileged to remain in action throughout this war. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives, in our daily tasks" ----- Fireside Chat President Franklin Roosevelt April 28, 1942.

Introduction:

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) watched helplessly as the fighting in Europe grew steadily closer. Although most Americans were relieved that they were an ocean away, the president feared the war could lead to the end of democracy. Should the Nazis overtake Great Britain, they would have access to Canada, putting them at the U.S. border. FDR wanted to prop up the Allies to keep the war from reaching American shores, but the Neutrality Acts Congress had adopted after the Great War (World War I) prevented him from aiding the warring nations.

Three days after Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland, his Chief of Staff, General George Marshal, urged the president to begin preparing for combat. But where should he begin? The nation was hopelessly unprepared. The army’s budget had been cut so drastically that it had shrunk from the fourth largest military force in the world to eighteenth. Just behind Romania. Their soldiers were so ill-equipped that they trained with stick rifles and stove pipe mortars. Most of the Army Air Corps’ 2,755 planes were obsolete and the Navy’s vessels were in no better shape. Meanwhile, armament companies had stopped producing weapons after being branded merchants of death. This left the military with outdated munitions. Even the few tanks they owned were falling apart. Brigadier General Patton was so desperate for parts that he ordered the nuts and bolts to hold his 325 tanks together from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

Roosevelt moved cautiously to strengthen the country. To keep U.S. banks, businesses, and foreign agents from sending money, war materials, and defense secrets to Germany, he expanded the duties of the FBI to include foreign dealings within the country. He also used a secret account to create the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) to monitor the activities of German expatriates living in South America. Despite these efforts, Nazi and Communist agents were learning nearly all the country’s military secrets and technology.

On September 29, 1939, FDR persuaded Congress to modify the Neutrality bills. Now Great Britain and France could purchase arms on a cash-and-carry basis. Under the guise of putting citizens back to work, Roosevelt was able to earmark funds for warship construction and naval shipyards. He chose William S. Knudsen, the president of General Motors, as his director of industrial production. It was a thankless job to convince businessmen who had lost money after World War I to modernize their obsolete factories to mass produce war goods for a war that might never come.

Roosevelt’s proposals to start the nation’s first peace time draft met swift opposition. Americans of German and Italian descent opposed any measure that could lead to an attack on their ancestral homelands. Meanwhile, Irish Americans refused to support aiding Great Britain, a nation that denied their countrymen freedom. Senator Claude Pepper, a champion of the draft law, was hanged in effigy by the Congress of American Mothers, while thousands of members of the Mothers’ Neutrality League knelt in their black mourning dresses offering prayers that the bill would fail to pass outside Congress. The dispute got so heated that Representatives Martin Sweeny and Beverly Vincent had a fistfight on the House floor. Thirty-three amendments later, the Selective Training and Service Act (Burke-Wadsworth Act) finally passed. However, high standards set by military leaders rejected 40% of the first million men as being physically unfit.

Once France fell, a bankrupt Great Britain grew desperate. Fears of an invasion had the Queen practice shooting her revolver, while the newly appointed Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, kept his Tommy gun ready to down German paratroopers. Once reelected to an unprecedented third presidential term, Roosevelt proposed a lend-lease program to supply England with the war materials it could no longer afford. Meanwhile, Congress approved $4.8 billion to provide equipment for the growing U.S. Army and the two-ocean Navy now needed after the Royal Navy could no longer guard the Atlantic.

Although the European war seemed far away, Americans found it affecting their daily lives. Fold-down matches began to vanish. Silk stockings were in short supply while zippers, which had just recently been introduced, now disappeared from the flies on trousers. Copper shortages had telephone companies postponing their dial conversions in hundreds of cities and by winter many parts of the country were experiencing shortages of coal and oil.

Chapter 1: The Bombing of Pearl Harbor

On December 7, the White House operator connected an urgent call from Frank Knox to the president. The frantic Secretary of the Navy informed Roosevelt of a surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The naval base had been so exposed that the Japanese pilots were able to tune into local radio stations to guide themselves toward the island. Reports stated that although most crewmen were on leave that Sunday morning, more than 2,400 U.S. servicemen and civilians had been killed and another 1,178 wounded. Most of the Pacific fleet was in ruins and nearly 350 planes had been destroyed or damaged. Fortunately, the fleet’s three carriers and seven cruisers had been away from port, the ground storage tanks holding fuel suffered little damage, and the Hawaiian island had not been captured.

While the Japanese newspapers claimed to have reduced the U.S. to a third-class power, Roosevelt immediately held meetings with his cabinet, close advisers, and congressional leaders. He had little time to glance from his window to see the growing crowd gathering across from the White House or hear their voices sing The Star-Spangled Banner and God Bless America.

That evening Eleanor Roosevelt addressed the nation on her weekly radio show. Trying to calm her 45 million listeners, the first lady noted that her own son was on a destroyer somewhere at sea while her two others sons were in coastal cities in the Pacific. Many of you all over the country have boys in the services who will now be called upon to go into action…You cannot escape anxiety... and when we find a way to do anything more in our communities to help others, to build morale, to give a feeling of security, we must do it. Whatever is asked of us I am sure we can accomplish it.

* * *

Roosevelt declared the territory of Hawaii a war zone and placed it under martial law. Intelligence reports were gathered on 450,000 Hawaiians. When raiding the Japanese consulate, police found officials burning reams of documents. All outgoing mail was censored, while long distance phone calls were required to be in English so military personnel could monitor them.

Worried that even a lit cigarette, pipe, or cigar could send a signal to the enemy, a curfew was ordered. Anyone disobeying the blackout was subject to arrest. To keep Japanese agents from disrupting U.S. currency, Hawaiians holding U.S. paper currency had to exchange these for bills with Hawaii printed on the back. No one was allowed to withdraw or carry more than $200 from their bank in a month. (Roosevelt suspended martial law on October 24, 1944.)

* * *

Sixty million anxious listeners sat by their radios to hear Roosevelt address a joint session of Congress at noon on December 8. Declaring December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy the president confirmed that Wake Island, Guam, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Philippines had also been struck and just that morning Midway Island had been attacked. Condemning the actions of the Imperial military, he then asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. Thirty-three minutes later, Congress passed the declaration with Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana casting the only dissenting vote. However, no Congressman was willing to expand the declaration to include Germany and Italy. Great Britain and China also declared war on Japan.

* * *

To keep spies from relaying messages, no one of Japanese ancestry could place international calls. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) cancelled 55,000 licenses of ham radio operators. (Radio stations would later drop their Man on the Street interviews and song request programs fearing these could contain coded messages.)

FDR’s Presidential Proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527 classified German, Italian, and Japanese nationalists as enemy aliens. Borders were closed to all persons of Japanese ancestry. Attorney General Francis Biddle then signed orders for the detaining of 3,946 German, Italians, and Japanese aliens. (They were held in at least forty-six sites.)

Government officials locked the doors of Japanese banks, department stores, produce houses, and newspaper offices. The Treasury Department impounded $242 million of Japanese assets. Houses were searched for weapons and treasonous documents. Thousands of radios and cameras were confiscated.

In New York, FBI agents rounded up 200 Japanese deemed dangerous. After questioning, they were taken to Ellis Island. Over the next few months, 9,121 enemy aliens were detained. Many in custody were ministers, teachers, and journalists. Commercial fishermen were also included since they could conceivably signal enemy ships. Biddle assured the press that each person in custody would receive a hearing.

Suspicion towards citizens of Japanese descent rose after it was learned that three Japanese locals on the privately owned Hawaiian island of Niihau had aided an Imperial pilot who had bombed Pearl Harbor. This had fearful members of the Chinese consulates wearing buttons stating, Chinese, not Japanese please.

* * *

On December 8, all pilots not flying for commercial airlines had their license revoked. National Guards were sent to the country’s 2,200 airfields to ensure that only government planes and those of the nation’s seventeen airlines took off. (Aircrafts owned or operated by aliens were later impounded while essential parts from private planes were removed.)

* * *

Army officers in Washington had been wearing civilian attire to keep Congress from becoming aware of the growing military population. They were now ordered to report in full uniform. This had many officers discovering that their uniforms were too small or lacked the current insignia for their rank.

* * *

Although military bases, bridges, and defense plants were guarded against sabotage, General Marshall discovered the shoreline was inadequately protected. The navy had few patrol or reconnaissance craft, while most of the 700 cannons guarding the nation’s three coastlines predated 1910 and the enemy battleships would be out of range. Despite two monster guns posted on both sides of the Golden Gate Bridge, their untrained crew had little ammunition to fire them. Meanwhile, army units only had enough ammo for a few days of fighting. To bulk up the West Coast, a hundred fighter planes awaiting shipment to England were rerouted from a New York airfield, while a consignment of anti-aircraft guns headed towards the USSR was called back to port.

* * *

Along the west coast, people were skittish about an attack. Radio stations in Washington, Oregon, and California, were taken off the air to keep their signals from being used as direction posts. Americans armed with shotguns and pitchforks formed patrols. Prison inmates in Georgia protected the coast, while Midwesterners studied caves and mine shafts as possible bomb shelters. Other cities rigged searchlights and put gunmen on rooftops, while the runway in Orlando, Florida’s airport was painted with a fake grove of orange trees for camouflage. Almost 1,000 people swarmed the streets of Seattle. They kicked in windows and broke neon signs of merchants who failed to observe the blackout. Before they could be stopped, their patriotism had shifted to looting.

With no air raid warning system, fire sirens went off three times in California. The Associated Press reported that two squadrons of enemy planes were seen crossing the coastline west of San Jose. Believing one squad was approaching the Golden Gate Bridge, fifteen huge anti-aircraft searchlights lit up the sky across the bay. Security checkpoints were set up. After a blackout was ordered, a string of accidents followed. One woman was shot for failing to break her car fast enough after a skittish National Guardsman ordered her to stop. Still no planes were found.

* * *

Stocks dropped hundreds of millions of dollars in the worst slump since the collapse of France.

* * *

On December 9, President Roosevelt gave his first wartime fireside chat. In it, he explained the crisis and assured Americans that through their efforts a steady stream of tanks and planes, of guns and ships and shells and equipment had been built over the past eighteen months. Now every war industry needed to work on a seven-day week basis to speed up production. He reminded them that, We are now in the midst of a war, not for conquest, not for vengeance, but for a world in which this nation, and all that this nation represents, will be safe for our children. We expect to eliminate the danger from Japan, but it would serve us ill if we accomplished that and found that the rest of the world was dominated by Hitler and Mussolini.

* * *

After Great Britain’s battleships Repulse and Prince of Wales were sunk on December 10, Japan had command of the Pacific. President Roosevelt appointed Admiral Ernest King to the newly created post of commander-in-chief of the U.S. Fleet, while Admiral Chester Nimitz became commander-in-chief of the battered Pacific Fleet. Desperate to meet its commitments across the globe, rusted old crafts from dry dock were returned to duty, while privately owned shipping lines took over routes to help ensure delivery of vital defense materials. Yachts served as patrol vessels and sailing ships were used for scouting. Approximately 28,000 reservists were called up to serve at the newly leased bases in Brazil and Chile and to man ships that were still under construction.

The navy commandeered forty-nine wooden diesel-powered tuna clippers and the army requisitioned three. This represented about 55% of the entire tuna fleet. Although too slow to fight in combat, these vessels became the errand boys of the Pacific. They were lightly armed, painted grey, and marked with YP (Yard Patrol) to designate their patrol boat status. Lack of qualified sailors to man these boats had 600 fishermen in San Diego, California, volunteer to crew them through dangerous war zones. They transported fuel, ammunition, and food to naval stations that were inaccessible to naval warships. Seventeen of these ships were sunk by the enemy, wrecked by storms, or lost by accidents.

* * *

Although Hitler was under no obligation to declare war on America, he was angry that the U.S. Navy had been harassing German U-boats. Believing that Japan would easily defeat the United States and then help him conquer Russia, the Fuhrer embraced fighting in a global war.

On December 11, the German ambassador presented Secretary of State Cordell Hull with a declaration of war. Italy followed suit. Hours later, Congress declared war on both countries. That same day, Roosevelt met with representatives from labor and management to draft a wartime no-strike policy. Soon after, he signed executive order 8985 establishing an Office of Censorship to prevent military information from reaching the enemy. This wartime agency reviewed press articles, radio broadcasts, mail (both in and out bound), cables, telephone calls, and foreign communications.

* * *

Five days after Pearl Harbor, employees at the Hatfield Wire & Cable Company in Hillside, New Jersey, insisted two factory workers be fired for refusing to salute the flag at the lunch-hour flag raising ceremony. In San Francisco, California, the city Park Commission ordered the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park to fly the American flag, required their female employees to dress in American garb, and their restaurant to sell coffee and donuts.

* * *

To conceal Roosevelt’s itinerary the White House flag was no longer lowered when the president was away. Meanwhile, blackout restrictions kept the two flags flying over the Capitol Building from being illuminated.

* * *

Eleanor Roosevelt had flown to the West Coast to quell public hysteria. When she returned to Washington, she was shocked to find that the White House had been turned into a fortress. No longer could visitors roam the grounds. Identity cards were now required for access and the house guards had been doubled. Helmeted men with fixed bayonets guarded the Capitol doors and corridors, while sentry boxes appeared at all the gates. Lacking machine guns, the