by A. J. Baime
Four white boys drove in their car shouting, “Let’s go out and kill a nigger!” They spotted fifty-eight-year-old Moses Kisko waiting for a streetcar that would never come. The sound of a gunshot was the last thing Kisko ever heard.
Another white mob roamed hunting for “fresh meat,” as garbage and busted glass crunched on the pavement beneath their feet. One rioter later said: “Jesus, but it was a show! We dragged niggers from cars, beat the hell out of them, and lit the sons of bitches’ autos. I’m glad I was in it! Those black bastards damn well deserved it.” Said another white man: “There were about 200 of us in cars. We killed eight of them. I saw knives being stuck through their throats and heads being shot through. They were turning over cars with niggers in them. You should have seen it. It was really some riot.”
As hospital emergency rooms filled with casualties suffering gunshot and knife wounds, the completely white state and city police force turned on Detroit’s black population. Walter White, head of the NAACP, rushed to the Motor City and what he saw stunned him: “Not even in the South had I ever seen so total a breakdown of law enforcement.” Caucasian police officers were beating and shooting black men in Paradise Valley.
When the sun set, police hunting for murder suspects set up searchlights in front of the Vernor Apartments on Cabot Street, inside which innocent black families huddled. The officers opened fire, shooting bullets and tear-gas canisters through windows. Black snipers climbed up on the roof and returned gunfire.
“Word got around pretty fast,” said one black man. “Those police are murderers. They were just waiting for a chance to get us. We didn’t stand a chance. I hate ’em. Oh God, how I hate ’em. The fellows who had guns were ready to go. They were saying, ‘If it gets tight, get two whites before you go.’”
Roosevelt was enjoying a post-dinner cocktail with the First Lady and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands at his home in Hyde Park, New York, when the call came through, at 9:45 PM on Monday, June 21. Michigan governor Harry Kelly was on the line, pleading for federal troops. Detroit was on fire.
The news was no surprise. For months, authorities had warned the White House about racial tension on the home front, especially in Detroit. America before World War II was still largely a Jim Crow nation. The war had forced the issue of integration like nothing ever had before. Decades of progress had been shoehorned into two short years, but not everyone was ready for it. That very day, Eleanor Roosevelt had written a newspaper column about race in America. “The domestic scene is anything but encouraging,” she wrote. “And one would like not to think about it, because it gives one a feeling that, as a whole, we are not really prepared for democracy.”
At midnight on June 21, the President signed a proclamation mobilizing federal troops. His statement ordered rioters to “disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes.”
“It shall be lawful for the President of the United States . . . to call forth the militia. . . .”
Within the hour, the 701st Military Police battalion came sweeping across Detroit’s ravaged streets in Jeeps and trucks with machine guns at the ready—about thirty vehicles and 3,800 men. By sunrise, the cooled streets had fallen quiet.
Three days of violence claimed thirty-four lives. The Detroit Race Riot of 1943 was the bloodiest racial standoff in America in over twenty years. An estimated seventeen of the dead were killed by police, and all but nine were black. Some $2 million worth of property was destroyed. As for man-hours lost in the war plants, they numbered in the many millions.
The NAACP’s Walter White wandered the streets in the aftermath, amazed at what he saw. “Not long afterward,” he said, “I was destined to see bombed-out victims of Nazi terror in Europe. In Detroit I found the same bewilderment at senseless human cruelty on the faces of Negro victims of the same foul hate which Hitler had spewed upon Europe and the world.”
All week Detroit’s race riot was front-page news. The nation was horrified that hatred so murderous could rear its head on the home front among citizens who were supposed to share the common goal of winning the war and proving that democracy was superior to fascism. Who was at fault? Many pointed at Nazi saboteurs.
“We have no definite knowledge that any axis agents or propaganda inspired this trouble,” Mayor Jeffries said. “If we did those agents would be in jail. But if I were an axis agent I would be rubbing my hands in glee over this.” Others in the national press attacked the First Lady, who had argued for some time to use the war as an impetus for integration. “It is blood on your hands, Mrs. Roosevelt,” Mississippi’s Jackson Daily News declared.
As the city returned to work on Thursday morning, many feared that the rioting was no climax but a foreshadowing of something more catastrophic on the horizon. At Willow Run and the Rouge, several thousand black assembly-line workers filed through the gates beside their fellow white citizens for the morning shift on June 23. In Ford’s Administration Building offices, executives feared the worst. Sure, they were a few miles from downtown Detroit, where the rioting occurred. But the sweltering factories could erupt in violence at any moment. Henry II seemed as rattled as ever, and Harry Bennett had his men at the ready. “This rioting was a frightful experience for everybody,” Sorensen remembered. “They brought in tanks and ran them through the streets in the danger zones.”
Said one Detroiter: “When the army leaves, who knows what will happen?”
27
“The United States Is the Country of Machines”
Fall 1943
We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.
—ADOLF HITLER, December 1944
“I’M NEARLY DEAD,” Roosevelt told his secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. He was sitting in the White House on September 1, 1943, complaining of exhaustion. The Prime Minister was visiting from Britain, and he always kept the President up late. Churchill was an impulsive and indefatigable houseguest. “I have to talk to the PM all night,” Roosevelt told Perkins, “and he gets bright ideas in the middle of the night and comes pattering down the hall to my bedroom in his bare feet.
“I have to have my sleep,” Roosevelt said.
The war was taking its toll on everyone in Roosevelt’s administration. The President’s closest aide, Harry Hopkins, who had come to stay a night in the White House three years earlier and had never left, had to be confined to his bed after he collapsed. Hopkins slept in a second-floor bedroom with his new wife, the former Paris editor of Harper’s Bazaar. He had lost his eighteen-year-old son Stephen in the war. Churchill had a cold flare up and was attempting to douse it with sherry. A close friend of Roosevelt’s described the sixty-one-year-old president as “tired, with dark rings under his eyes.” He was also suffering from hypertension and serious heart problems. His doctor described his condition as “God-awful.”
Still, Roosevelt and Churchill could be found in their makeshift White House map room gazing at the world at all hours. The President had converted the ladies’ cloak room in the basement into his top-secret map room, with maps filling the walls detailing every theater of combat. The two Allied leaders plotted deep into the night. And each morning Roosevelt’s valet, Irvin McDuffie—a Southern black man who suffered from his own form of exhaustion (he was an alcoholic)—came to lift the weary president from his bed and help him dress.
When he was not entertaining visitors or traveling, Roosevelt spent hours alone in the Oval Office, working through his mountains of memos. His cabinet members and confidants were amazed at the President’s ability to consume information and instantly commit facts to memory. Among those many memos was one he received around the time of Churchill’s September visit—a classified report from Donald Nelson, chairman of the War Production Board, on the progress of production on the home front. Nelson had been the subject of some argument recently. There were those who questioned his ability to do his job. He was a nice guy—and that was no compliment in Washington. In this memo, however, the President liked wh
at he was seeing.
After Pearl Harbor, Nelson wrote,
a flexible productive system, geared to the needs of total war, had to be improvised almost overnight. . . . I need not tell you that we have met with some disappointments and have made some errors in achieving the results. But the record certainly makes it clear that the American industrial system can be justifiably proud of an astonishing display of economic muscle. Today, we are turning out nearly as much material for war, measured in dollar value, as we ever produced for our peacetime needs. The essence of the report is that, in the main, the productive achievement of the American war economy in 1942 met the requirements of our war strategy; and that the prospects for 1943 are for a quantity and quality of production that will realize to the full the tremendous potential of American industry.
The President turned the page and studied the report. Shipyards were turning out eight aircraft carriers every month. Before the war, America’s shipbuilding industry was minuscule. Now it was the biggest in the world. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Britain’s military was larger than America’s. Now the US fighting force was twice as large as the British empire’s and was making four times as many munitions. Production of raw materials was tremendous. Chromite—up by almost 700 percent. Aluminum—up 77 percent. Magnesium—up 220 percent. Molybdenum, tungsten, vanadium—these were the raw ingredients of modern warfare. Production of each was skyrocketing.
Roosevelt was so pleased with Nelson’s production figures that he told Nelson to give them to the newspapers. So Nelson did. The news went global, reaching across the ocean, where Nazi leaders consumed these production figures with disbelief.
“Donald Nelson has issued a report about American armament production,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary. “It exceeds all previous American exaggerations. We simply must do something to offset this American munitions propaganda.”
Of all the figures moving across the Oval Office desk, few must have pleased Roosevelt more in the fall of 1943 than the memos showing airplane production. A year and a half had passed since he had called on the nation to produce 60,000 airplanes. During those eighteen months, the President had on many occasions expressed his fury over deplorable production numbers. “The only answer I want to hear is that it is under way,” he’d told his military leaders. “Get the planes off with a bang next week.” Now a new flying machine was being born in the United States every five minutes.
According to a top-secret document from Donald Nelson’s office, four-engine bomber production—B-24 Liberators and B-17 Flying Fortresses—rose from 5,376 total in the fourth quarter of 1942 to 8,321 in the first quarter of 1943, to 11,928 in the second quarter of 1943. Medium bomber production spiked similarly, from 7,603 to 15,213, during the same period.
Air Corps chief Hap Arnold had slaved so doggedly to organize the Air Corps and launch American airpower that by the fall of 1943 he had survived the first of four heart attacks he would suffer during the war. Before World War II, the US Air Corps consisted of about 20,000 men. Now it numbered 2.4 million personnel in all ranks.
One amazing story that illustrated the ingenuity of the Air Corps took place on the tiny Mediterranean island of Gozo, off Malta. The isle was covered with trees and hills, and yet it was situated in a prime striking zone from which to launch aircraft on missions over Axis territory. An American engineer told Britain’s air marshal, Keith Park, that he could clear the terrain and build an airfield in ten days’ time. Park thought this notion preposterous, but asked, “When can you start?”
“As soon as my equipment can get here.”
Soon ships landed, delivering bulldozers and trucks and mechanical shovels. Thirteen days after that equipment arrived, airplanes were taking off from runways on Gozo.
The Air Corps was also experimenting with faster, bigger, more destructive weapons. The summer of 1943 saw the first missions of the new P-51 Mustang, soon to be universally regarded as the best single-engine fighter developed during the war by any nation. (“It’s the best handling pursuit plane I’ve ever flown,” Lindbergh wrote in his journal after his first test flight at Willow Run.) Finally, the Allies had a fighter escort with the agility and speed to outmatch the Nazi Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Japan’s Mitsubishi Zeros, as well as the range to accompany heavy bombers on their long missions. The majority of the P-51 Mustangs were powered by Merlin engines built by Packard in downtown Detroit.
At the same time, the army’s new “superbomber,” the four-engine Boeing B-29, was readying for its first missions. The B-29 was even larger than the B-24, with better range and a bigger payload. With its pressurized cabin, it could climb safely to higher altitudes, and it featured remote-controlled machine gun turrets. Hap Arnold had big plans for the B-29.
Things in the White House map room were looking better by the day. Armed with good news from the war theaters and Nelson’s production figures, Roosevelt and Churchill began to plan another key summit meeting. They would gather with Joseph Stalin in person for the first time, on some safe middle ground. Soon the meeting was set—for Tehran in November.
In September 1943, Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments, gathered Nazi leaders at Germany’s Air Force Experimental Center in Rechlin am Müritzsee to discuss the latest intelligence on American aircraft production. There, his top technical assistants showed charts that mapped the numbers of B-24 Liberators and B-17 Flying Fortresses rolling off American assembly lines compared with the number of bombers rolling off the Nazis’ own lines. For the Nazis, the charts told an unnerving story.
“What alarmed us most were the figures on the future increase in four-motored daylight bombers,” Speer recalled.
When Speer asked Hitler to consider these production numbers, the Fuehrer brushed them off.
“Don’t let them fool you,” Hitler said. “Those are all planted stories. Naturally those defeatists in the Air Ministry fall for them.”
The Air Corps’ four-engine bombers were now, however, hitting targets in Nazi Germany. As the destruction mounted, it became impossible for Hitler to ignore. The American heavies came in swarms, and their destructive capacities were unprecedented, hitting a submarine factory in Wilhelmshaven, the Focke-Wulf airplane factory in Bremen, and a ball bearing factory in Schweinfurt (where the Air Corps was hit with heavy anti-aircraft resistance and casualties). Each mission aimed to level a strategic target, to cripple Hitler’s war machine. But invariably, bombs destroyed civilian homes and buildings nearby.
“The day raids by American bombers are creating extraordinary difficulties,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary. “Industrial and munitions plants have been hit very hard. . . . Some eighty to one hundred thousand inhabitants without shelter. . . . The people in the West are gradually beginning to lose courage. Hell like that is hard to bear.”
Throughout 1943, the Allies’ Combined Bomber Offensive moved deeper into Nazi-occupied territory, the British striking cities by night and the Americans hitting strategic targets by day. Hamburg, nearly incinerated in a firestorm by Operation Gomorrah, had taken the worst of it, with 40,000 killed. By this time, Hitler’s health had begun to seriously decline. His hair was graying, he slumped and limped, and his left hand trembled uncontrollably. Those closest to him recognized a shell of a man, one who seemed as though he might shatter to pieces on the floor if tapped on the shoulder.
It became increasingly undeniable that the Nazis were losing the race to roll airplanes off of assembly lines. With this failure, Goering was cast off by the Fuehrer, left to his drug-induced lethargy on the political sidelines.
The closer the air raids moved toward the heart of Berlin, the more Hitler saw morale around him plummet. When the Americans sent a bomber mission over the city of Aachen, inside Germany near the Belgian border, the engagement left an American fighter plane in pieces in the city. When a Nazi official reported the news to Goering, he refused to believe a fighter plane could penetrate that deep into Nazi-occupied territory. Pacing the halls of the Air Mini
stry, Goering unleashed his fury.
“Don’t let them fool you,” Goering said. “Those are all planted stories. . . . What’s the idea of telling the Fuehrer that American fighters have penetrated into the territory of the Reich?”
Goering’s junior officer explained that anti-aircraft gunners had shot a plane down. It was still there, an American fighter plane, in pieces on the ground, in Aachen—proof that the fighters had penetrated.
“I officially assert that the American fighter planes did not reach Aachen.”
“But, sir, they were there! Herr Reich Marshal, they will soon be flying even deeper.”
“I hereby give you an official order that they weren’t there!” Goering screamed. “Do you understand? The American fighters were not there! Get that! I intend to report that to the Fuehrer!”
In November 1943, Roosevelt sat aboard a US Army plane flying low over the pyramids in Egypt. He was en route to Tehran for what would be one of the twentieth century’s most memorable political events—the Tehran Conference. Over Egypt, he asked the pilot to circle the pyramids, so that he could witness their magnificence from above.
“Man’s desire to be remembered is colossal,” he said aloud.
Soon Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were in the Russian embassy in Tehran discussing military strategy. It was the first time the three Allied leaders had gathered in one place, and the first time Roosevelt had met Stalin in person. The American president wore a suit and tie, while the two other leaders came in military uniform. Spirits were high, and glasses were raised.
