In a nation of dog lovers, this attack drew blood. A member of the Democratic National Committee concluded afterward that the race was between “FDR’s dog and Dewey’s goat.”18
As the dinner broke up at 10:30 p.m., two young navy lieutenants were unlucky enough to be caught on the mezzanine outside the ballroom. Suddenly they found themselves engulfed in a crowd of well-lubricated and belligerent teamsters who demanded to know whether they were Democrats or Republicans, and whether they were for Roosevelt or Dewey. Lieutenant Randolph Dickins Jr., a 23-year-old veteran of the Battle of Midway, replied that it was “none of their business.”19 A scuffle broke out. According to Dickins, the teamsters demanded to know what servicemen overseas thought of unions, and accused the two officers of being “disloyal to the service and to our commander-in-chief.”20 Punches were thrown. According to some reports, Dickins landed a blow on Daniel J. Tobin himself, knocking the teamster boss to the floor. Dickins was held from behind by two goons while a third punched him repeatedly in the face, “blackening his eyes so badly that several stitches were required to close the wound.”21 Bellhops intervened and were roughly handled for their trouble. The hotel manager called in the shore patrol, who finally put a stop to the brawl. As Dickins was hauled away, a teamster allegedly told him that he had knocked down a personal friend of the president of the United States, and would suffer the consequences.
This “Battle of the Statler Hotel” was featured prominently in the anti-Roosevelt press. The teamsters denounced the story as a libel calculated to defame organized labor, and flooded Washington with more than a hundred sworn affidavits blaming the two officers for provoking the fight.
After the Fala speech, campaign oratory grew vitriolic on both sides. Dewey’s running mate, Governor John W. Bricker of Ohio, charged that unions and big-city political machines were in the grip of “forces of communism linked with irreligion.” Dewey declared that FDR was “indispensable to Earl Browder,” leader of the American Communist Party.22 But as polls hardened in the incumbent’s favor, those attacks had the whiff of desperation. Allied forces continued to advance victoriously against the Axis on all fronts, and FDR dispelled concerns about his health with a show of vigor on the campaign trail. On November 7, Roosevelt won reelection with 53.4 percent of the popular vote, securing an electoral landslide of 432–99.
With peace in sight, an “over the hump” mentality took hold among the American people. War industries were winding down. Rationing measures were gradually relaxed on such goods as canned foods and meat. The War and Navy Departments issued hundreds of cancellation notices to contractors. Tens of billions of dollars previously appropriated by Congress were held in reserve accounts to be returned to the treasury. In June 1944, the total number of workers employed in the munitions industries had declined by about a million in six months. Newspapers were full of news about the unwinding of complex procurement contracts, with attendant legal wrangling over such details as contract termination fees, low interest financing for plant retooling, accelerated depreciation schedules for tax purposes, and the disposition of inventories. Jeeps and other surplus military assets were sold in civilian markets. Refrigerators and other large household appliances were advertised for sale for the first time since 1941. The U.S. Mint resumed production of copper pennies. Blackout restrictions were eased in major cities and then eliminated altogether. Newly discharged servicemen were coming home. People began dressing in formal clothes again for Broadway premieres and other such events. The race tracks reopened and the betting windows took in unprecedented sums. Strikes were threatening to hit critical industries, as union leaders concluded that such stoppages could no longer cripple the war effort.
From the top to the bottom of the economic ladder, most assumed that the end of the war would bring a return to the Depression conditions of the early 1930s. The syndrome was even given a name: “depression psychosis.” At the height of the war, the economy employed 55 million civilian workers. Another 12 million were in uniform. Demobilization of the armed services and the cancellation of munitions contracts would occur simultaneously. Together, these shocks might eliminate as many as 20 million jobs. The immense army and navy surpluses would have to be reabsorbed into the economy without disrupting existing markets. Many economists warned that a postwar employment crisis was inevitable. New Dealers demanded a return to mass publicly funded employment programs. Business leaders wanted the federal government to subsidize the cost of “reconversion” to civilian industries.
The timing of the end of the war was thought to be a critical variable. Germany was expected to collapse in early 1945, but the generals and admirals freely admitted that they had no idea how long it would take to subjugate Japan. According to one panel of economists, if Japan unexpectedly threw in the towel, “the United States would find itself largely unprepared to overcome unemployment on a large scale.”23 A war correspondent wrote that a sudden and early end to the Pacific War would be “a Pearl Harbor of peace.”24 In strictly economic terms, therefore—without reference to the human costs—it was considered desirable that the war in the Pacific should continue at least several months after the fall of Nazi Germany. One even heard such sentiments among ordinary civilians. Peggy Terry, who worked in a munitions plant in Kentucky, recalled hearing a coworker say that she hoped the war “didn’t end until she got her refrigerator paid for. An old man hit her over the head with an umbrella. He said, ‘How dare you!’ ”25
In November 1944, in the wake of FDR’s reelection, Secretary of War Henry Stimson warned that American civilians on the home front were relaxing prematurely. A disappointing harvest brought calls to reimpose rationing. A national service bill, introduced in Congress but not enacted, would have empowered the federal government to draft civilian workers and to impose employment freezes in war industries. The German counteroffensive called the Battle of the Bulge had set back hopes for an early termination of the war in Europe. General Eisenhower wrote FDR to warn against expectations of a “clean-cut military surrender of the forces on the Western Front.”26 The letter was promptly released to the press. In a joint letter to the president in January 1945, Marshall and King warned of looming manpower shortages in both the army and navy, and asked for 900,000 more draft inductions to replace “casualties and war-fatigued men.”27 Stimson grew alarmed by signs of deteriorating morale in the military ranks. If the war was to last longer than expected, would servicemen demand to be brought home? He lobbied the president to reimpose austerity on the home front, even if such measures were largely symbolic.
On January 3, 1945, a federal order shut down the operations of all horse and dog tracks. The stated purpose was to reduce the burden on roads and mass transit systems. But the real purpose, as government officials acknowledged in off-the-record comments, was to eliminate the unseemly spectacle of war-enriched civilians betting their newfound wealth at the tracks. The following month, a midnight curfew order was imposed on bars and nightclubs. In this case, the ostensible purpose was to save electricity and fuel oil, but the measure was really “an instrument for meeting what is perhaps officially felt to be a shortage of ‘war awareness’ by civilians.”28
By early 1945, servicemen overseas and civilians at home were in broad accord on at least one point: all were heartily tired of the war, and yearned for a return to the ordinary routines of peacetime. Newspaper columnist Robert M. Yoder looked forward to the day when “It will be all right to suggest to a few thousand volunteer morale builders and duty-explainers that they go soak their heads. And you can uproot the victory garden and throw the turnips at the block captain.”29 In a similar spirit, a 1st Marine Division corporal just wanted to “go home to my wife, get my job back driving the mail truck, and be left alone.”30 Postwar expectations were modest. For millions of homesick servicemen, paradise was a simple, ordinary, boring life in a free country where no one was ordering them around or trying to kill them. When they dreamed of home, commonplace amenities and rituals assumed exagger
ated significance—privacy, leisure, a cup of coffee at a dime store counter, a walk in the park, the company of women, pushing a child on a swing, physical safety, a soft mattress, and a good night’s sleep. Whatever their pent-up resentments against the “folks back home,” the fighting men had learned to love and appreciate their country more than they ever had as civilians. They conjured up elaborate visions of their futures—of the wife they would marry, the house they would live in, the children they would raise. “A very smart man I once knew said that anticipation was sixty percent of life,” said the soldier Elliot Johnson. “There was this anticipation of returning to this beautiful girl. And fantasies of kids and jobs. It was absolutely sustaining.”31 In the same spirit, Marjorie Cartwright passed her idle hours daydreaming about life after the war, when her husband would return from the Pacific and be mustered out of the navy. They would build a two-story brick house with a grand entrance hall, a winding stairway, and enough bedrooms upstairs for five children: “I just loved that house and carried those plans around in my mind for years and years.”32
AT THE START OF 1944, the U.S. Navy had 27,500 airplanes in service, a tenfold increase since 1940. As the assembly lines at Grumman, Douglas, Martin, and Curtiss reached peak production between March and June of that year, the navy’s inventory of new planes swelled so rapidly that it threatened to become an unmanageable glut. The service accepted delivery of 24,000 new combat aircraft during the 1944 fiscal year, a figure that exceeded the totals for the previous three years combined.33 That was a high-class problem, one that any other combatant nation of the Second World War would have been glad to face. But the admirals faced an immediate decision: How to resolve the mismatch between surging production and a bloated inventory? In February, Admiral King signed an order fixing an upper limit of 38,000 planes in service, and adamantly refused to relax that edict.34 The production lines began ramping down steeply in the summer of 1944—but the plants could not be permitted to shut down entirely. To preserve the physical capital and know-how of this strategically vital industry, it was thought necessary to keep them turning over at a reduced rate. Admiral McCain, then serving as deputy CNO for air, proposed a plan to assign only the newest aircraft to frontline service, and to return older units to the United States for training or other purposes. In September 1944, the navy adopted a more radical plan—to junk thousands of older planes, including those already deployed in the Pacific, to make room for newer units. The word went out to all commands: get rid of older aircraft by any means necessary.
As a measure of the industrial might of the United States in 1944 and 1945, the subsequent whirl of destruction told a better story than a thousand pages of statistics. If a plane needed minor repairs, it was pulled off the flight line and junked, and a shiny new replacement unit flew in to take its place. Hundreds of airplanes were flown into remote Pacific island airstrips, parked in a vacant clearing, and abandoned. Many such aircraft “boneyards” were later used for target practice by U.S. bombers on training missions. Scrapped airplanes were bulldozed into pits, and the wreckage compacted by running tanks over them. Marginally damaged carrier planes were pushed off the flight decks into the sea, and new replacement units flown in from escort carriers. This mass-junking of perfectly serviceable warplanes occurred at the height of the war, when the Japanese were falling well short of aircraft production targets and struggling to keep their assembly lines in operation at all.
Mass-producing pilots was an entirely different sort of challenge, one that the navy was never willing to outsource to private industry. Admiral Towers and his fellow brownshoes had anticipated the problem in the 1930s, laying the groundwork for a training command that could scale up rapidly in the event of war. And so it did: the navy awarded “wings of gold” to 3,112 new flyers in 1941, 10,869 in 1942, 20,842 in 1943, and 21,067 in 1944. This phenomenal growth was accomplished without compromising training standards. Indeed, the reverse was true—the rookie crop of 1944 arrived in frontline squadrons with an average of six hundred flight hours, including two hundred hours in the service planes to which they were assigned, and the veterans rated them as more skilled and combat-ready than any previous generation of aviators. This feat was made possible by the expansion of the navy’s main training complex at Pensacola, Florida, and the establishment of twelve new naval air stations around the country. The largest, which would rival Pensacola’s in size, was constructed on flat scrub land south of Corpus Christi, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico. Texas congressman Lyndon B. Johnson worked behind the scenes to have an initial $24 million cost-plus-fixed-fee building contract awarded to his major campaign contributor, the Brown & Root construction company of Houston. The cost of building NAS Corpus Christi would eventually balloon to $100 million.35 The massive project had the indirect effect of supercharging Johnson’s political career and sending him on a trajectory for higher office.
In earlier eras, Annapolis graduates had provided most of the navy’s flight students. But as the threat of war loomed in Europe, new recruitment channels were opened. The Naval Aviation Reserve Act of 1939 aimed to train 6,000 new pilots; a supplementary law in 1940 raised the goal to 15,000 new navy and Marine Corps pilots of all types. Recruiters fanned out to universities across the nation, setting up tables with brochures in classrooms and quadrangles. The navy wanted engineering students but would even settle for an English major, provided that the man was in excellent health, with perfect 20–20 vision, unmarried, not a father, no shorter than five feet four inches tall and no taller than six feet two inches, and had completed at least four semesters of coursework. (Later the navy began accepting qualified high school graduates.) Vision tests and physical examinations were provided on the spot. Would-be recruits took a math-heavy intelligence test and were questioned closely by a psychiatrist. If they made the cut, they signed induction papers and were sent to a small rural airfield called an “E-base,” where they received thirty days of basic instruction in a small, single-engine Piper Cub.
“E” stood for “elimination,” and that was precisely the point. At the cockpit controls of the little fabric-covered Cub, which one trainee compared to a “kite with a small engine in it,” the recruits either demonstrated basic flying aptitude or were eliminated from the program. Samuel Hynes did his elimination flying in Denton, Texas, at a grass airfield that was barely distinguishable from the surrounding farmland. There was a small hangar, a post and rail fence, and a pole with a wind sock. Sheep grazed on the airstrip, which doubled as a pasture. As the Cub taxied out to the field, the pilot maneuvered the aircraft to chase the animals out of the way.
Natural flyers took quickly to the controls, and were soon flying the little plane confidently and well. Others were washed out of the program, as the instructors judged that they would not provide a good return on Uncle Sam’s training investment.
E-base survivors went on to preflight school, where they would undergo several months of basic training and classroom instruction. Most were placed in programs established at civilian colleges and universities around the country—the largest were at the Universities of North Carolina, Iowa, Georgia, and St. Mary’s College in California. But any notion that the preflight trainees were college students was quickly set aside. They were issued uniforms and shorn of most of their hair. They had enlisted as seamen, second class, placing them at the bottom of the navy’s pecking order. Washouts would be sent to the fleet as ordinary whitehats and “mop jockeys.” Dormitories leased by the navy were converted into barracks where the trainees slept in bunk beds with their personal belongings in a foot locker. Boot camp discipline was enforced by chief petty officers who turned them out of bed at 0600 for calisthenics, close order drills, and a long run. Everywhere they went—to the mess hall, the classroom, the parade ground, the pool—they marched together in column. On their first day at the pool, they were told to climb to the top of the high dive and jump in. To a trainee who explained that he could not swim at all, an officer replied, “I didn’t ask you if yo
u thought you could swim. I said jump in, and we’ll tell you if you can swim or not.”36
At night, the petty officers put them to work scrubbing their barracks until all was spotless. They swabbed the “decks” (floors) until they were as clean as unused dinner plates. Robert Smyth recalled scrubbing a toilet while a CPO stood over him and shouted, “Get your arm down in there and scrub the bottom of that crapper—and when you get this one polished, go back and redo the ones you finished!”37
About half their time was spent in classrooms, where they completed courses on aeronautical engineering, mathematics, physics, communications, navigation, and aerology (the science of the earth’s atmosphere). Much of the work involved rote memorization, with frequent tests to measure their progress. They learned to communicate by semaphore and Morse code until they could receive thirteen words per minute. Working with photographs, silhouettes, and small toy-like airplane models, they learned to recognize and identify every type of aircraft flown by every combatant nation in the world. They studied the fundamentals of aircraft engines and how air flowed over an airplane’s control surfaces. Hal Buell estimated that preflight school crammed the equivalent of one full year of college study into four months. He called it a “grueling grind.”38 Many aspiring navy flyers were shipwrecked on those classroom shoals, and flunked out of the program before reaching primary flight training.
At Pensacola, a graceful old Spanish town at the western tip of the Florida panhandle, buses carrying each new crop of aviation cadets entered the base by a grand stone entrance gate. They drove along avenues of elegant officers’ houses, where moss-draped live oaks were evenly spaced on manicured lawns. On the flat scrublands to the west were more than a dozen airfields, large and small, lined by handsome red brick hangars. Throughout the daylight hours, and often at night, the skies above were crowded with low-flying airplanes. Fatal accidents were unexceptional, and empty pine coffins were stored in stacks against the walls of the hangars. At the height of the war, there was an average of one crash per day at Pensacola. Planes lost altitude on takeoff and crashed at the end of runways. Planes collided in midair. Cadets died because they flew too tentatively and stalled out, or they died because they flew recklessly—for example, by skimming treetops and hitting a power line. When a body was recovered, the medical corpsmen tied cords around the sleeves and cuffs of the flight suit, explaining, “That’s to keep him from sliding out of his flight suit. . . . The body is like jello, not a bone left; it’ll slide right out.”39
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