The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (24 page)

A Platinum Smuggler’s Demise
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the disaster with her reputation intact, however. A critic praised her by describing the musical as One Artist and Some Models.

After more agonizing weeks and four more operations in the hospital, Jane accepted offers to perform in several of Manhattan’s plush nightclubs. Not wanting to appear using crutches, she devised a mobile, electrically powered piano driven by her accompanist. As the apparatus moved slowly around the floor, she was able to stand and sing.

Just after the war in Europe concluded in early May 1945, Jane startled her mother by blurting out, “I’m going overseas again for the USO.” Anna couldn’t believe her ears. Her daughter was still on crutches with several more operations to go. Why, Anna asked, when there were so many able-bodied entertainers available?

“I’ll sing in the military hospitals all over Europe,” Jane replied. “It’ll be better for the wounded soldiers than speeches on fortitude and patience. When they see a young woman has been able to make up for a crippled leg and other injuries, it will give them hope.”

Jane flew overseas, traveled 30,000 miles, and gave ninety-five shows in three and a half months while on crutches. It was an enormous burden as she toured France, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Only when it was discovered that she had dislocated a bone in her spine did she agree to take the ocean liner Queen Elizabeth back to the United States.

In December, the Newspaperman’s Annual Page-One Ball named Fro-man the Most Courageous Entertainer of 1945. Although a heavy snow blanketed New York City, she went to the gala from her hospital, sang one song with the orchestra leader and composer Duke Ellington, and received the award to a thunderous ovation.

Jane returned to the hospital in an ambulance. In the months ahead, she would endure nineteen more operations.
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A Platinum Smuggler’s Demise

O
NE DAY IN MARCH 1943,
a Federal Bureau of Investigation undercover agent in Quito, Ecuador, sent a long communication to the agency’s chief, J. Edgar Hoover, in Washington. It told about possible platinum smuggling by a man named Harold Ebury.

Probing by G-men in the United States disclosed that Ebury lived in luxury in his California home near the smooth greens of the Monterey Peninsula Country Club. It was found that, from his home, he was orchestrating a massive platinum smuggling apparatus in South America, an operation that was aiding Germany.

Two years earlier, President Roosevelt had directed Hoover to launch a covert action to wipe out a widespread German espionage operation in South
America after it had become clear that major cities on that continent were being used as staging grounds for slipping spies and saboteurs into the United States.

Information on American defense and industrial efforts was being funneled through South America by clandestine radio stations to German espionage posts in Cologne and Hamburg. It was while secret FBI monitoring stations in South America were eavesdropping on German spies that Harold Ebury’s platinum smuggling was uncovered.

Only five nations in the world produce platinum in quantity. The German war juggernaut had a serious need for platinum, and the Nazis reached out to Colombia to obtain the precious commodity. Colombia was the only one of the platinum-producing nations not at war with the Third Reich in 1943.

By agreement with the Colombian government, the United States was supposed to receive all the country’s platinum. Much of Colombia’s platinum came from the big dredges of the Choco Pacifico Company and this haul was purchased by the United States. But the second major source was some 30,000 natives who panned the metal from streams and sold it to the highest bidder. Controlling the native production was the key to keeping platinum from Germany.

In Washington, meanwhile, G-men learned from British intelligence that Ebury, a Briton, was a suspected smuggler. So FBI agents in South America dug into Ebury’s transactions and found that platinum was being smuggled from Colombia to Ecuador and then on to Argentina, an allegedly neutral nation whose leaders were sympathetic to Nazi Germany.

FBI sleuths followed a trail that led to a tailor’s shop in Buenos Aires, and the firm’s frightened owner disclosed that he had received a cablegram from Ebury in California, stating that he would arrive soon by way of Quito.

On July 17, 1943, FBI agents closed in on Ebury at his palatial home on the Monterey Peninsula. The suspect greeted the visitors warmly and invited them into his large living room. He talked at length about his world travels, and, yes, he was going to Quito soon—to establish an import-export business.

As the G-men continued to hammer him with questions, it seemed to be clear to Ebury that the FBI knew a great deal about his operations. Finally, he smiled and said evenly, “Yes, gentlemen, I smuggled platinum to Buenos Aires twice.” But he denied that any of his platinum was being sent to German agents for shipment to the Third Reich and said that his action was not criminal in nature.

Despite his protests that he was but a simple businessman trying to make a few legitimate bucks, Ebury was indicted. In a California court, he again stressed his innocence, but he pleaded guilty to censorship violations, confessing that he had used codes in his letters to South American contacts.

Ebury was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. No doubt the FBI was happy. It could not prove that the platinum had reached Germany by way of Ebury’s operations, but now the smuggler would be ensconced behind bars in a California prison and unable to carry out covert operations.
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“Get Going! Time Is Short!”
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“Get Going! Time Is Short!”

I
N EARLY 1943,
a captain in a U.S. infantry company fighting against the Germans in North Africa was asked by a war correspondent how he planned to take a barren elevation that was heavily defended. “I’m going to let the taxpayers take that hill!” he replied. Soon two battalions of artillery plastered the German force with shells, and the objective was captured by the GIs without the loss of a man.

That isolated incident reflected the goal of President Franklin Roosevelt to amass the most gargantuan panoply of war machines, equipment, and ammunition ever known to spare American life and limb as much as possible. Only a month after Pearl Harbor, he had challenged the nation to produce within two years 125,000 airplanes, 85,000 tanks, and 25 million deadweight tons of shipping.

In Berlin, Adolf Hitler scoffed at Roosevelt’s goals. Propaganda for his home front, the führer sneered.

Despite the skepticism of Hitler—and many American industrial leaders— a near-miracle was unfolding on home-front America. A sleeping production giant was awakening. This massive surge was being energized by Donald Nelson, chairman of the War Production Board, who had been executive vice president of Sears, Roebuck and Company until asked to take his current post by Roosevelt soon after Uncle Sam went to war.

Management and employees alike found themselves absorbed in jobs about which they had known nothing only a few short months earlier. A company that produced canned fruit began to build parts for merchant ships. A grower of ferns learned to manufacture parachutes. A plant that had built machinery for processing cotton began making rifles. A large automobile dealer turned to creating airplane engine parts. Mosquito netting became the product of a bedspread factory. A manufacturer of pencils started producing bomb components. A soft-drink firm went into the business of loading shells with explosives.

Under the pressure of converting to wartime production, inevitable snarls surfaced. Just when a manufacturer thought he had mastered the myriad of problems involved in producing a particular war item, an Army, Navy, or Air Corps officer would burst into his plant and demand a change of design, necessitated by battle experience. Production plans tediously developed over many weeks had to be scrapped. New plans had to be created. All the time the officers were calling out: “Hurry! Hurry!”

Donald Nelson and his aides were saddled with the eternal manufacturing question: What to make first, when, where, and how much? Tens of thousands of separate parts had to be produced to go into tanks, planes, ships, guns, radar, and radios. These components were built in hundreds of plants. Each part had to be available in the right amount at the right time and at the right
place. To be seriously wrong at any point could mean disaster on the battlefield, at sea, or in the air.

Early on Nelson met with one hundred and fifty of the nation’s foremost industrial leaders. The production chief’s appeal was simple: “Get going! Time is short!”

The tycoons complained about the inordinate length of time it took to get a signed contract from the government. So Nelson took a drastic step: on his own volition, he told them to charge ahead without waiting for written contracts and that he would see that they got paid adequately. Such were wartime expediencies.

The tycoons were delighted to comply. They promptly put their plants to work building vitally needed weapons and equipment—contract or no contract.

Along the way there were groans and moans—even screams—from industry as it tried to team up with government to drive war production ahead. An almost magical transformation of American industry evolved. Huge new plants dotted every section of the country. The traditionally agricultural South became heavily industrialized. A new, enormous synthetic rubber industry was created.

If ever there was a production genius, his name had to be Henry John Kaiser. He implemented assembly-line methods that competitors were convinced would not work and became history’s greatest shipbuilder. Most amazing was the fact that Kaiser had no previous experience in that industry.

Kaiser, a Sprout Brook, New York, native, who had dropped out of school at thirteen years of age to go to work, used his past experience in building huge Hoover Dam, which supplied electric power to Los Angeles, to learn how to mass-produce large individual units.

With his enormous drive and know-how, Kaiser was able to reduce construction time of Liberty cargo ships from two hundred and eighty days in the previous war to twenty-two days. At one point he was launching one Liberty ship a day, and would eventually produce nearly fifteen hundred vessels, including an escort aircraft carrier each week.

Prior to the Japanese sneak attack, pioneer automobile manufacturer Henry Ford had been opposed to U.S. involvement in “any foreign wars.” Nearing eighty years of age at the time America went to war, the man who had developed the mass production of Model T automobiles, sold at a price the average citizen could afford, promptly announced that he would build a plant that would turn out one bomber each hour.

Despite the awe with which most U.S. manufacturing leaders held the grammar school dropout, they laughed at his goal. Can’t be done, was the chorus.

Henry Ford had his architects and designers develop a plan for the largest assembly line that history had known. It would be built at Willow Run, near Detroit, and Ford planned to use the same technique that he had created for building automobiles. However, the elderly man, who was not inhibited by a shortage of idiosyncrasies, rapidly ran into difficulties.

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The Willow Run plant would be a mile long, but Ford, a staunch Republican, discovered that part of the building would be in a township controlled by Democrats. Consequently, he ordered a new design in which the entire facility would be in “Republican territory,” even if it meant the assembly line would not run in a straight course, as was originally contemplated.

With the legend’s son, Henry Ford II, being the driving force behind the mammoth project, the company overcame daunting obstacles and the automaker’s eccentricities, and four-engine B-24 Liberator bombers began pouring off the assembly line at Willow Run.

Elsewhere, Chrysler Corporation went from producing automobiles to building and operating the nation’s largest tank factory. Eventually 25,507 tanks would roll out of the Chrysler arsenal.

Packard’s performance in turning out in record time the complicated Merlin aircraft engine was another powerful blow struck against German and Japanese warlords. General Motors also converted operations with remarkable speed and built thousands of Oerlikon antiaircraft guns.

Andrew Jackson Higgins Jr., like Henry Kaiser, was a self-taught production genius, who, it was said, drank a bottle of whiskey a day. Brimming with energy, Higgins built a tiny industry in the New Orleans region to one with a workforce of more than 30,000. In the Deep South and under wartime pressure, his team, as he called it, was integrated—blacks, whites, women, and men.

Higgins Industry’s main product was small craft in which assault troops rode ashore in scores of invasions around the world. They were known as Higgins boats. After hitting a beach, the front would flop down, and the soldiers would dash out. Then the Navy enlisted man steering the boat would back it off the beach and return to the mother ship offshore for more soldiers and weapons.

Andy Higgins had a knack for inspiring his employees to even greater effort. In the rest rooms of his factories, he put photographs of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Emperor Hirohito sitting on toilets. A caption in large type above the pictures stated: “Come on in, brother. Take it easy. Every time you loaf here helps us plenty.” Hanging over the Higgins assembly lines were huge banners: “The Worker Who Relaxes Is Helping the Axis.”