by Oliver North
About that time there was a story in the newspaper about jobs in defense plants opening up for women in Fort Wayne. I applied for a job at the GE aircraft engine plant and was accepted. We all moved to Fort Wayne so that I could work at the GE plant and take care of them.
When I started at GE the first thing they did was to send me to school to teach me how to read blueprints and operate a diamond-tipped lathe and a thread-mill. After the training, I was put to work making electrical armatures for aircraft engines. At this plant they had three shifts, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Those gentlemen at GE treated me like a jewel. Because I had to look after my mother and brother, they gave me a day shift.
I had several different jobs during the time that I worked at the GE plant. My first job was to cut armatures from steel stock using the lathe, then wind copper wire onto the armatures. I was responsible for the whole piece, from set-up to completion. Each armature had to be made to very exact specifications—so it required a lot of attention to detail. And each one weighed about sixty pounds, so I had to be pretty strong. It was hard work, but satisfying to help the war effort and it paid a good wage and allowed me to support my mother and brother. It’s also how I met my husband, Herbert.
The machines we used at GE had safety guards around them and Herb was responsible for maintaining the machinery and tools we used in my part of the plant—and making sure that the safety guards were in place to protect people. One of the other gals told him I was single and he started to come around a lot to check on my machines and safety guards. One day when the diamond tip broke off my lathe, the supervisor roped off the whole area and Herb and I and several others had to crawl around to find the diamond tip. Afterwards he asked me out.
We dated for a few months and decided to get married. This wasn’t an easy time to be a new bride because everything was rationed. Only one person from each family was allowed to register for a “War Ration Book” with colored stamps in it that allowed you to buy certain amounts of food, clothing, shoes, coffee, gasoline, tires, fuel oil, coal—just about everything—all based on the size of your family.
As I recall, Red Stamps were used for meat, butter, fat, cooking oil, sugar, milk, and cheese. Blue Stamps were for canned fruits and vegetables, juices, dry beans, soups, baby food and the like. But having a ration stamp didn’t guarantee that something would be available. We all learned to use everything very sparingly and not waste anything. Even razor blades had to be re-sharpened. In almost every store there were posters with slogans like, “Do with less so they’ll have enough,” and “Pledge to save food.”
One of the scarcest things was butter—and someone invented a vegetable-oil substitute—margarine. It was white and came with a capsule of food coloring to mix into the margarine to make it look like butter.
We couldn’t get stockings either—all the silk was used for parachutes and nylon hadn’t been invented yet. Now, stockings didn’t matter at the plant. There, all the gals wore tight clothing and pants and a hat and safety glasses—and no jewelry—because of the heavy machinery. But no gal or new bride wants to be seen in a skirt without stockings! So when I would go out with Herb, sometimes to make it look like I had on stockings, I would draw a black line up the back of my legs with an eyebrow liner pencil to make it look like I was wearing silk stockings.
In our house we didn’t grumble about the shortages. We just thanked God for what we did have—and I had four brothers-in-law who were in the service. If giving up a little bit helped the boys “over there” and would bring them back sooner, it was fine with us.
Some people got scarce things on the black market and there were men who could have served but didn’t. Men with children who worked in a defense plant and those who were sole providers didn’t have to go. But Herb wanted to serve and we talked a lot about that and so just a few months after we were married, he joined the Merchant Marines.
While he was gone, my mother, brother, and I made do and helped the war effort as best we could. We had a “victory garden” for fresh vegetables and we canned the extras in Mason jars for winter. We saved anything we didn’t need for the “scrap drives” and recycled everything: tin cans, newspapers, magazines, cardboard, clothing, tin foil, bits of rubber, broken glass, paper sacks. The Boy Scouts would come to the door once a week or so to collect it or we would turn it in at our church.
At the GE plant we were all encouraged to buy War Bonds. We could either get stamps for a “War Bond Book” at the post office, or have the money for the bond deducted from our pay. That’s how I did it—and every three months I got a new bond.
Very few people in those days had cars—and during the war, there were no new cars made because all the carmakers were building jeeps, trucks, tanks, and planes. Those people who did have a car had a hard time getting gasoline and tires. Nobody had a spare tire so everyone with a car had a tire patch kit, rubber cement, and a hand-operated air pump.
These shortages and rationing and all really didn’t bother us much. I got up every morning before six—and walked to the plant to be there before seven. We got a half hour for lunch. I would usually work until five—sometimes later. There was a time—it went on for about two months—when we worked seven days a week without any days off. During the war I never took any vacation. It just wouldn’t have felt right to me—taking a vacation with my husband and all those boys off at the war. They didn’t get any vacation.
Before Herb left we would occasionally go out to a movie or dancing. We also went to a few of the Fort Wayne Daisies baseball games together. But while he was gone, it just didn’t seem right. I figured we would celebrate when he got home. And we did!
When the war ended, there was a big parade in Fort Wayne. Herb and all the other boys came home and he went into the heating, roofing, and sheet metal business. That’s when we started our family.
The war was a hard time for a lot of people—but I look back on those days and can say that we did our part. I felt like I had done something for my country and was blessed that my husband made it home. Nobody came up and said “thank you,” for being a “Rosie the Riveter.” They didn’t have to. Herb was grateful. That’s all that mattered.
With a workforce bolstered with women like Phyllis McKey and Lourelei Prior, the U.S. began to turn out massive quantities of war materiel—overwhelming Hitler and his Axis partners. American farms and industry not only fed and equipped our own rapidly growing armed forces for a two-front war, but did the same for our allies.
When the Americans, British, and Canadians stormed the beaches at Normandy, nearly 30 percent of the food being consumed by the British people originated on American farms—about the same proportion as the bombs and ammunition being used by His Majesty’s military. By then, British pilots were flying American-built transport aircraft, every British armored unit was fighting in American-made Sherman tanks, and nearly all of the landing craft that would put them ashore were produced in the U.S.
It was the same for the Soviets. Though the Red Army generally eschewed American aircraft and armor, they still accepted more than 14,500 planes and nearly 7,000 tanks—along with 375,000 trucks, fifteen million pairs of boots, millions of gallons of fuel, more than 2,000 locomotives, and 10,000 freight cars.
Women kept the home front running as they became the primary workforce.
By 1944, American shipyards—like the one where Phyllis McKey worked—were turning out Liberty ships in mere days, and warships in a matter of weeks. That same year, America’s aircraft plants produced more than 95,000 transports, fighters, and bombers.
Victory gardens, like the one Lourelei Prior had, were so successful that by 1945, some twenty million of them produced approximately 40 percent of America’s vegetables. Despite the shortages and sacrifices that most Americans experienced, the U.S. standard of living actually rose between 1940 and 1945.
Though food and other commodities were in short supply during the war, the greatest shortage was simple: men. The absence of
so many men—more than twelve million were off in uniform—affected not only war production, but it also effectively shut down the American pastime. By 1942, professional baseball had lost so many players who either enlisted or were drafted into the military service that there were too few left for the games to go on. That’s when women stepped up to the plate—literally.
The Wrigley family decided that those on the “Home Front” needed some respite from the day-to-day labor of war production, and created the All American Girls Baseball League. One of the teams that Lourelei Prior got to watch, the Fort Wayne Daisies, had an all-star pitcher: Dottie Collins.
DOTTIE COLLINS
Fort Wayne Daisies
14 May 1945
My dad was a big baseball fan and taught me to throw a curveball when I was a kid. I was five feet seven inches—tall for a girl in the ’40s—and when the Wrigley family started up the league, one of the scouts had me throw some pitches. After I tried out, they offered me a job—pitching for the Fort Wayne Daisies.
The idea of a women’s league was a good one. Because all the men were gone, there were empty ballparks all over the country. And everybody knows that being outside at a ballpark on a summer afternoon is healthy. Starting a league of women ball players seemed like a good way to get people outside in the fresh air and have some good, all-American fun. It was also a good way to use something that was entertaining to help keep up morale and raise money for war bonds at the same time.
When the league was formed a lot of us tried out and the competition was pretty fierce. Many of the girls had played in school or college, but I was the only one with a curveball. And I did all right—I had a career record of 117 wins and 76 losses with a 1.83 earned run average.
Our coaches were all professionals and told us right from the start that we were “ladies first.” Of course our theory was, if you’re going to play baseball, you can’t be a lady. But in addition to practice in batting, fielding, base running, how to steal and slide—all the stuff of making a good baseball player—we also had to do things like walk with a book on our heads to teach us poise, the right way to wear make-up, and how to act like ladies. We traveled all around the Midwest and were very carefully chaperoned. When we weren’t on the field we were told to use proper manners and etiquette and dress “like a lady.”
The people who ran the Women’s Baseball League insisted that everything we did be geared to entertainment. From the moment we arrived in town for a game, everything was carefully orchestrated. There were press conferences and lots of cameras as we got off the bus—and then out on the field during warm-up—just like in Major League Baseball. Even the way we dressed was part of the production.
Just before our first game they handed out our uniforms—they were these one-piece, sleeved dresses—that were hemmed below the knee. When we said, “How do you play baseball in a dress?” we were told, “You either wear this uniform or you don’t play.” Well, by the second game, most of us had shortened them—though about all we could get away with was a hem right about the middle of the knee.
Let me tell you, sliding into home plate wearing a dress can be a very painful experience. But as you might imagine, our male fans were very enthusiastic. We had a lot of fun—and in our own way did our part for the war effort on the home front.
Though continental America’s “Home Front” was far more secure than that of any other combatant nation in World War II, it was not completely immune to enemy action. Both the Japanese and the Germans attempted attacks on the U.S. mainland, but only the Japanese succeeded.
On 23 February 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced a few hundred yards off Ellwood, near Santa Barbara, California, and shelled a coastal oil storage facility. There were no casualties and only minor damage to a small shed.
The Japanese also tried attaching incendiary and explosive devices to hydrogen-filled balloons and launching them into the jet stream. Several caused nothing more than minor forest fires along the West Coast. But in May 1945, one of these “balloon bombs” killed the wife and all five children of the Reverend Archie Mitchell when they inadvertently detonated the hellish device after discovering it in a meadow during a picnic, 200 miles from the Oregon coastline.
Hitler was even less successful than the Japanese—though the Nazis claimed otherwise. On 9 February 1942, the French liner Normandie, in the process of being converted into a troop ship, burned and sank at Pier 88 in New York Harbor. Paul Goebbels, the Führer’s loyal propaganda minister, fed suspicions that the ship was the victim of German saboteurs. A lengthy investigation concluded that the fire and subsequent sinking—by water intended to put out the blaze—were the consequence of negligence and incompetence rather than Nazi malevolence.
Yet the Germans did try—at great risk to their agents—to conduct espionage and terror operations inside the U.S. Shortly after declaring war on the United States, Hitler ordered the Abwehr, Germany’s intelligence service, to land saboteurs by U-boat along the East Coast to conduct attacks on defense plants, railroads, and bridges, and to spread panic by putting time-release bombs in movie theaters and other places where the American public congregated. During May and June of 1942, two Abwehr sabotage teams were landed on the coast of Florida and on Long Island. Had it not been for an alert Coast Guardsman named John Cullen, the German agents might well have succeeded.
JOHN CULLEN, USCG
Amagansett Lifeboat Station
13 June 1942
In the summer of ’42, I was just twenty-one years old and had been in the Coast Guard just six months. I was stationed at Amagansett Lifeboat Station, on Long Island. There were about fifteen of us there. We did lifeboat training, and patrolled a three-mile stretch of beach every night.
I used to walk down by the surf, where I could make better time. On the night of 13 June, I was on patrol, maybe 200 yards from the lifeguard station, when I saw two men, just above the high water line.
I called out and asked, “What are you doing?” And one of these guys turned and walked toward me. He said, “We’re fishermen and our boat ran aground. We intend to stay here until daybreak.”
I said, “That’s hours away. Why don’t you come up to the Coast Guard station, have some coffee and wait there?”
He said, “No, thanks, we’ll be all right here.” Then he said, “Do you have a mother and father?”
I thought, that’s a strange thing to ask, but I said, “Yes I do.”
The man said, “Would you like to see them again?”
I told him, “Yes, I would.” Meanwhile, another fellow carrying a sea-bag came up behind me, and said something in German. That’s when I said to myself, “Uh-oh—this isn’t good.”
The first man said to me, “I’ll give you some money, if you forget about seeing us here.”
“I don’t want the money,” I told him. “But, I can forget.”
“Well . . . I’ll give you 300 dollars,” he told me. I only took the money to prove that I met somebody there—because I didn’t think anyone would believe my story.
I didn’t turn around—I backed up when I left. Then I ran back to the station, notified my officer in charge. I told him, “I got paid off by some Germans, and I don’t know what they’re doing, whether they’re coming in or going out.”
The watch officer stayed calm. He said, “We’ll break out some rifles and go back—and see if we can find them.” But they were gone.
We went back to the boathouse, got a couple of shovels, came back, and dug up several large cases that the Germans had buried in the dunes. Inside the cases we found the sea-bag I had seen earlier, along with German uniforms and explosives. All of a sudden, just off shore, a blinker light started going on and off. In the drifting fog we could see a submarine.
So I ran back to our station and notified another Coast Guard unit and told ’em, “There’s a German U-boat out here.” He notified the Army, and pretty soon, the beach was full of soldiers with anti-aircraft guns, trucks, and searchlights.
In the cases that we dug up we found four different types of incendiary bombs and when a Navy intelligence officer arrived and saw that he said, “Boy, we’ve got something big here.” Soon the FBI came. And they took me to their office, grilled me, and then took me into New York and started showing me photos from their files. After looking at hundreds of pictures, I found one of the fellow who spoken English to me on the beach. His name was George Dasch.
For the next few days an FBI agent and I must have visited just about every restaurant, newsstand, shop, hotel, bus station, and train station in the area, trying to locate this man Dasch. He was readily identifiable by a gray streak he had in his hair.
It turned out that Dasch had gotten cold feet. He called the FBI, first from New York and then from Washington, D.C., and turned himself in on June 19. I was brought in to confirm his identity and told that I would have to testify at his trial.
Dasch revealed everything—how they had been trained, what their targets were, and the identities of all involved. By June 27, the FBI had the other three saboteurs who had landed from U-202 off Amagansett in custody—along with a second group of four that had landed from another U-boat on June 17 just south of Jacksonville, Florida.
President Roosevelt and Attorney General Biddle decided that all eight would be tried by a secret military commission. I was told that it was the first such tribunal since the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
I was the first witness called when the trial started on July 8. By the fourth of August, all eight had been convicted and sentenced to death. FBI Director Hoover and Attorney General Biddle appealed to President Roosevelt for leniency on behalf of Dasch and one of the others—a man named Berger—because they had cooperated. Their sentences were commuted to thirty years for Dasch and life in prison for Berger. The other six were executed on August 8.
