The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (25 page)

So crucial were Higgins boats to the war effort that planning for each invasion hinged around the availability of a sufficient number of these small craft. When one Anglo-American invasion had to be postponed to allow time to assemble more landing craft, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared: “It seems like the destiny of two great nations revolves around something called a Higgins boat!”

Higgins was involved in producing a wide variety of the accoutrements of war, including larger craft known as LCTs (landing craft, tanks) and LCVPs (landing craft, vehicles/personnel). Also rolling out of Higgins’s plants were PT (patrol torpedo) boats that would write a glorious chapter in U.S. naval lore,
C-116 airplanes, water purifiers, newfangled helicopters, smoke generators, explosives, and portable bridges.
¹⁷

Women Flock to War Plants

A
S THE WAR CONTINUED
and the shortage of workers in defense industries grew acute, the War Production Board focused on techniques for augmenting the force of able-bodied white men. The federal agency sent out literature encouraging employers to hire “Negroes, the handicapped, women, China-men, and Spaniards (Hispanics).”

Factories on the home front began to develop a diversified workforce, including more than 3 million women, most of whom probably would not have taken jobs had there not been a war.

Rosie the Riveter was a composite created to inspire women to go to work in defense plants. Supposedly she was based on a genuine aircraft worker, Rosina Bonavits, who, with a coworker, attached some thirty-three hundred rivets on the wing of a Grumman Avenger airplane in only six hours. That feat received wide play in the media and became the subject of a wartime movie, Rosie the Riveter.

Although women flocked into factories, there was an equal number hesitant about taking a job. Consequently, an advertising campaign was launched to urge females to go to work when they had never had a job outside of the home. The thrust of the campaign was to convince women that it was patriotic and also proper to accept employment that previously might have been considered “socially undesirable.”

Orchestrating the program to recruit women was the Bureau of Campaigns, a division of the Office of War Information. Ken Dyke, a former marketing chief at NBC radio and advertising director of Colgate-Palmolive, was head of the bureau.

Dyke and his staff coordinated government policy by means of a monthly War Guide for Advertisers, which told of objectives and promotional techniques, and provided drafts of ad layouts. So important was the recruitment of female workers that the Treasury Department issued a ruling that permitted defense contractors to deduct publicity costs from taxable income.

One magazine advertisement had a puzzled woman stating: “But I’ve never worked before! What kind of war job could I do?” Then the ad answered her question.

Another ad pictured a woman war worker and the headline: “My husband’s in the Army. I’m in a shipyard. We’re in the war together!” A “shock ad” demanded to know of females: “Will it take a bomb to break up your bridge game? Get out and drive a truck, load a freight car, or operate a fork-lift!”

Recruiting the Blind and the Deaf
125

A former waitress worked as a sealer at Kaiser Shipyards, Richmond, California, to help build cargo vessels. (National Archives)

Ads for Crosley refrigerators hailed the “resourcefulness and ingenuity of American women,” and an ad for Eureka vacuum cleaners proclaimed, “You’re a Good Soldier, Mrs. America!”

Bibb Manufacturing pictured men and women in lockstep “marching with determination toward victory,” and Arvin Manufacturing declared that “women are working shoulder to shoulder with men.” An Armco ad featured a pretty young female truck driver: “I got a job when Paul went across. I’m hauling the stuff they fight with!”

Many ads were designed to promote the theme that women were physically capable of performing strenuous tasks. A major utility firm’s ad pictured a dainty female operating a huge machine. The text stated: “Five-feet-one from her 4A slippers to her spun-gold hair. She loves flower hats, smooth orchestras— and being kissed by a boy who’s now [fighting in] North Africa. How can 110 pounds of beauty boss 147,000 pounds of steel? Through the modern magic of electric power.”
¹⁸

Recruiting the Blind and the Deaf

A
LTHOUGH AMERICAN WOMEN
of all ages were going to work in unprecedented numbers, there remained a critical need for even more employees. So the War Production Board reached an agreement with the government of Mexico in which 100,000 laborers came across the Rio Grande River and took jobs in defense plants. Thousands of American teenagers lied about their ages and went to work in armaments factories; supervisors turned a blind eye to the falsifications.

In their search for “draft-proof” workers, labor recruiters for aircraft plants in the Los Angeles region called at government old soldiers’ homes and gave jobs to Spanish-American war veterans sorting nuts and bolts. An organized recruitment of the nation’s physically handicapped resulted in blind people being given jobs packing film in darkrooms or sorting tiny parts.

Unhampered by the constant din around them, deaf people toiled as riveters or in similar noisy tasks. Epileptics, too, went to work; most of them held jobs for the first time. They labored in pairs so that, if one had a seizure, the other could help out.

The War Manpower Commission even gave the green light for defense plants to hire certain people with mental impairments. In one such case on Long Island, New York, a woman believed that she was Queen Elizabeth. As long as she was addressed as “Your Majesty” and spoken to in a manner befitting her lofty regal status, she performed in superior style at her machine.
¹⁹

Offer to a Striptease Artist

G
YPSY ROSE LEE,
America’s most popular striptease artist, was performing in a stage play of sorts, Star and Garter, in New York City. She was packing in the male customers for each performance, except on Sundays. New York officials frowned on women removing their clothes in public on the Sabbath.

One afternoon Gypsy Rose received a telephone call from an old friend, Barney Oldfield, who had worked for Variety (the show-biz newspaper) and was now an Army captain and public relations officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. He was calling from Fort Benning, Georgia. It was February 1943.

Oldfield, who had been a press agent for a young Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan and a promising child actress named Elizabeth Taylor, explained to the burlesque queen that the post commander wanted to sell a large number of War Bonds to soldiers at an Easter Sunday breakfast. Would she be present as the star attraction?

A day earlier, Captain Oldfield had been sent to meet with representatives of the post commander to plan for the affair. Oldfield explained that persuading soldiers to come to a breakfast during which they would be asked to shell out money for War Bonds did not promise to be a rousing success.

Consequently, Oldfield told the planners that he would telephone Gypsy Rose Lee and ask her to fly to Benning after her late-night performance on a Saturday. “With Gypsy Rose present, I feel confident that our boys will suddenly take an eager interest in helping finance the war,” he declared.

Before the artist appeared on stage, Oldfield continued, she would remove all of her clothes and be covered with War Bonds attached by transparent tape. The higher-priced bonds would be strategically placed on her anatomy. Then the members of the audience would be asked to bid on the

The FBI Arrests “Good Old Ernie”
127

bonds. As each was sold, the bond would be removed from Gypsy Rose’s body, eventually leaving her wearing lipstick and earrings.

The officers present at the conference were enthusiastic. The contrivance was worthy of a nimble-minded Hollywood press agent. So Oldfield put in his call to New York City. Gypsy Rose was delighted to have the chance to join in the war effort, and she promptly accepted the invitation.

Word that the famous striptease queen would be present spread around Benning like wildfire. It seemed certain that the post gym would not be large enough to hold the crowd of GIs eager to help finance the war.

Planning progressed until about a week before the extravaganza when the post commander learned of the star attraction. “A striptease artist performing at an Easter morning breakfast!” he roared. The affair was cancelled immediately.

It was Captain Oldfield’s lot to telephone Gypsy Rose and inform her that she would have to boost the war effort in some other manner. Oldfield told a friend: “Then I went out and crawled under the nearest flat rock!”
²⁰

The FBI Arrests “Good Old Ernie”

F
ROM SEA TO SHINING SEA
on home-front America, earnest and dedicated volunteer civilian defense air-raid wardens of all ages and economic status dashed around enforcing blackouts, while spotters, armed with high-powered binoculars, stood on the roofs of buildings and scanned the friendly skies for hostile aircraft. Most of the volunteers were often on duty in pouring rains, subfreezing temperatures, and even in a hurricane that pounded the Atlantic coast.

On occasion, however, the eager-beaver air-raid wardens exasperated professionals. Recalled a New York City police captain: “They did some wonderful things, but it was just by the grace of God that none of them were hurt. Sometimes they were too enthusiastic. During one blackout, a switch got stuck at Coney Island, and the volunteer wardens tried to fix it themselves instead of calling for professional help right away. It was sure nice of them to try, but they didn’t know what they were doing and almost blew up Coney Island.”

Not one of the million and a half wardens ever saw an enemy airplane. But most citizens felt reassured to know that these conscientious civilians were standing guard.

One of the air-raid wardens was fifty-eight-year-old Ernest Lehmitz. “Good old Ernie” was regarded by his neighbors on Staten Island, a New York City borough, as a kindhearted gentleman and a superpatriot who dearly loved his country.

Ernie really took his volunteer task seriously and would bawl out people for not masking lights. And he tenderly nurtured the neighborhood’s largest backyard victory garden in response to President Franklin Roosevelt’s urgent appeal for citizens to raise their own vegetables.

One morning late in June 1943, the Staten Island neighborhood was shocked. Three agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived at 123 Oxford Place and led good old Ernie Lehmitz away in handcuffs. His friends refused to believe that this tall, lean, stoop-shouldered grandfather and superpatriot was a spy for Adolf Hitler.

Neighbors, of course, had been unaware that FBI agents had been on Lehmitz’s tail for weeks. He bore no resemblance to the stereotype of a spy dashing about with a bomb in one hand and a stolen top-secret blueprint in the other. There was no glamour in his life, no beautiful women accomplices. He wore ill-fitting suits and old-fashioned rubbers on his feet, and for his dangerous work he received a paltry forty dollars monthly from the Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s intelligence service.

After his apprehension, Lehmitz was taken to FBI headquarters in Foley Square. At first he was indignant over his arrest. But when the G-men confronted him with a mass of evidence that had been collected, Lehmitz broke down and signed a confession that he was a German spy.

Lehmitz was clearly devastated to learn that the FBI knew of his background in such depth. He had first come to the United States in 1908 as a clerk in the German consulate in New York City. During what came to be known as World War I, he had served as a spy for the German kaiser, but later became a naturalized citizen.

While visiting Germany in 1939, Lehmitz had been recruited by the Abwehr, and after training as a coast watcher in Hamburg he returned to the United States in 1941. His mission was to snoop out information on ship sailings and convoys in New York harbor. His role as a volunteer air-raid warden served as a perfect cover for his treachery.

To carry out his espionage mission, Lehmitz got a job as a handyman at a waterfront saloon frequented by merchant seamen. He sent his reports to a Hamburg branch of the Abwehr through a mail drop in Lisbon, Portugal; sleuths learned that Lehmitz had been signing his letters “Fred Lewis” or “Red Sloane.”