The Air-Raid Warden Was a Spy: And Other Tales From Home-Front America in World War II (36 page)

Soon young LeRoy was aboard a cargo plane of the Army Transport Command (ATC), at Newark, New Jersey. When the aircraft landed at Dayton, Ohio, a large wooden crate was put aboard. It contained, the passengers

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learned, a bull mastiff, weighing about a hundred and thirty pounds. The crate took up the space of three seats.

Anyone boarding an ATC plane had to have papers authorizing his or her presence. The dog was no exception. The animal’s papers had been handed to the flight engineer and included a top-priority A-travel designation. There were also instructions to the crew for the care, exercise, and feeding of the dog. The crate was marked for delivery to Faye Emerson, a Hollywood movie actress—who happened to be the wife of Colonel Elliott Roosevelt.

When Leon LeRoy’s plane took off from Dayton for Memphis, Tennessee, there were two other passengers aboard: Sergeant David Aks, back after thirty months of duty in the Pacific, and a Navy Seabee. Aks was bound for Riverdale, California, on emergency leave, to visit his ill wife. All three servicemen were traveling on C priority, two notches below the A priority of Colonel Roosevelt’s dog, Blaze, who would soon become the world’s most publicized canine.

After the plane landed at Memphis, a monumental hullabaloo began. An ATC officer there examined Blaze’s priority, a designation customarily reserved for the highest military officers and others of exalted eminence. The three combat veterans were “bumped” off the plane because three hundred pounds of a B-priority freight was to be taken aboard. Blaze outranked the cargo, and the cargo outranked the servicemen.

Stranded in Memphis, Leon LeRoy was determined to get home. So he began hitchhiking and slowly reached Dallas. He was angry that the hours of his leave were rapidly being consumed. Somewhere along the route, he lost his leave papers, and in Dallas, the military police took him into custody and held him for two days as a deserter.

LeRoy was released and put on another ATC plane that headed for California. After catching a ride to Antioch, word of his being bumped for a dog reached newsmen in the region. The reporters descended upon him en masse at his mother’s home, and he told them his story.

Almost at once the press services went into action. Here was a news editor’s dream: a dog, a teenage combat veteran, a sexy Hollywood movie star, and the son of America’s First Couple. The whole affair smacked of arrogance and preferential treatment for those in high places.

Reporters all over the nation kept the telephone wires hot. LeRoy’s mother told journalists she was fearful that the Navy might come down hard on her son because of the media stories.

In Granite City, Illinois, Mrs. Ola Nix added more fuel to the fire. She said that her husband, Navy Carpenter’s Mate 2nd Class Maurice Nix, had been home on emergency leave because several members of his family were ill. On returning to his duty station, he could not get on an ATC plane in Dallas because a huge mastiff had had a much higher priority. Nix had to borrow a hundred dollars from the Dallas Red Cross to buy a ticket to San Francisco on a commercial plane.

A Blaze of Glory
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Meanwhile, reporters were banging the doors of the high and mighty in Washington. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, as confused as most Americans, said only that there had been a mistake somewhere down the line. Whose mistake? He didn’t know. General Harold L. George, commander of the ATC, finally admitted that somebody had committed an error of judgment. Who had done so? He didn’t know.

At the White House, Stephen T. Early, press secretary to President Roosevelt and a talented spin doctor, explained that there had been a regrettable series of mistakes. Who had committed them? He didn’t know.

One reporter demanded to know from Early the name of the ATC officer responsible for issuing a top-priority designation to Blaze. Early did not have an answer.

Cornered in Washington, Eleanor Roosevelt, who usually was quite talkative on any topic, said only that any ATC officer would be stupid to bump a serviceman off a plane to accommodate a dog. Who was that “stupid officer”? She was not privy to that information.

A battalion of reporters tried to locate Faye Emerson in Hollywood. Where was she? None of her associates knew—or so they claimed. Enterprising newsmen discovered that she was on a train bound for Chicago, and they pounced on her when it stopped in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Colonel Roosevelt’s wife claimed ignorance, saying only that she did not believe Blaze had a high priority. The first she knew about the dog’s transcontinental safari was when Blaze was delivered to her at her Hollywood home—by an Army major.

In London, reporters finally caught up with Colonel Roosevelt. For some curious reason he had been hard to locate in recent days. He explained that Blaze had been left at the White House in Washington several weeks earlier with a request that the canine be sent to Faye Emerson in Los Angeles if space was available on an empty plane that happened to be going that way.

Meanwhile, the deluge of stories about the Adventures of Blaze triggered enormous tumult and shouting across the land. Genuine war news had almost been crowded off the front pages of newspapers and took second place in radio newscasts.

Amidst the uproar, frustrated Americans found something special to kick around. In Dallas, a center of the hubbub, the Bonehead Club failed in an effort to coerce a local airline into sending to President Roosevelt a large St. Bernard dog wearing an opera hat.

The Bonehead Club passed a resolution to fly three hundred and twenty-four dogs in the Dallas pound around the country, bumping humans from the planes. Another resolution changed Groundhog Day to Ground Dog Day. On this occasion, February 2, all dogs would be grounded so people could get a chance to fly without fear of being bumped.

Now, in a masterpiece of poor timing, the War Department recommended seventy-seven colonels for promotion to the rank of brigadier general.

President Roosevelt, despite the nationwide uproar, had sent the list on to the Senate for approval even though one of the names was that of his son Elliott.

Casual observers felt that the Senate would deny Elliott Roosevelt a star, or at least postpone his promotion. But that was not to be. In their wisdom, the lawmakers concluded that there were more important things to be focused upon in the war effort than a dog. So the promotion to brigadier generals of all seventy-seven colonels was approved.

The Adventures of Blaze brought about one change in the way the Air Transport Command did business. Orders were issued not to transport dogs, cats, mice, penguins, goldfish, gorillas, snakes, or any other species of animal in airplanes.
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A “Byrne-out” Hits the Nation

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ARLY IN 1945,
James Byrnes, head of the War Mobilization Board, triggered an uproar across home-front America when he decreed that business firms would have to conform to a midnight curfew. The purpose was to conserve electricity and coal for a war that might continue for years.

Nightclub and tavern owners and others catering to the after-dark crowds had been cashing in for many months and didn’t want the greenbacks bonanza to end.

Because of its huge size and reputation as the City that Never Sleeps, New York was hit hardest by what was labeled the “Byrne-out.” When some bistros ignored the deadline, the Army and Navy sent in military police and shore patrols to haul servicemen out of the joints and close down the offending establishments.

The majority of citizens and officials across the land soon agreed that the Byrne-out had become a monumental snafu, in the vernacular of the era. However, everyone was stuck with it.
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“It Was His Duty”

I
N SEATTLE ON THE MORNING OF
J
ANUARY 31, 1945,
Mr. and Mrs. A. A. Prince were tuned to a radio bulletin. It was a sketchy report about a bold raid on a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in the Philippines in which a large number of GIs had been rescued. They conjectured that their son, Captain Robert

W. Prince, might have been involved.

An hour later Mrs. Prince answered the phone, and a man who identified himself as a newspaper reporter said, “I guess you’ve heard about your son, Captain Prince.” Her heart leaped into her throat. Had he been killed?

A Battered Warrior Limps Home
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Then the journalist told her about one of history’s most audacious rescue missions. A hundred elite Rangers led by Captain Prince and a small team of Alamo Scouts had infiltrated twenty-five miles through enemy territory to the Cabanatuan POW camp. Inside, were some five hundred sick, emaciated, and weak survivors of the Bataan disaster three years earlier. The Japanese were preparing to murder every POW if General Douglas MacArthur’s army drew near.

After the Rangers stormed the compound at night and killed more than two hundred Japanese guards with the loss of only one man, the POWs were brought back to American positions, most of them being carried in oxen-pulled carts provided by Filipino guerrillas.

Listening to the telephone caller, Mrs. Prince broke out in tears of pride—and relief.

News about the “impossible mission” was broadcast across the land and plastered on the front pages of two thousand daily newspapers. For hours, the Prince telephone rang incessantly when reporters called. “Well, Bob’s role doesn’t surprise me,” his father replied. “It was his duty, and he did it.”

In Oakland, California, Mrs. Miriam L. Picotte, who had been notified by the War Department only two days earlier that her brother had been killed in the Philippines, wept again—this time tears of joy. Her husband, Captain Caryl Picotte, had been rescued from Cabanatuan.

In Chicago, white-haired Mrs. Mary Zelis hurried to the Church of the Immaculate Conception, where she had prayed every day for her son, Louis, during his thirty-two months of captivity. Kneeling at the altar, she gave thanks for Louis’s delivery from death.

In Dallas, the mother of Ranger Sergeant Theodore Richardson, who had shot the lock off the main gate at Cabanatuan to permit his comrades to charge into the enclosure, stared in disbelief at a photo of her son in a local newspaper. The picture was actually one of Captain Prince, who had mistakenly been identified as the sergeant. Mrs. Richardson had not seen her son in nearly three years. She called out in astonishment: “Good Lord, what have they done to Theodore!”

In Oklahoma City, Mrs. Grace Hubbard, wife of Major Ralph W. Hubbard, heard a radio newscast. She ran all the way to a neighborhood school, barged into the first-grade class with tears streaming down her cheeks, and cried out to her son, Joe: “Your daddy’s been rescued! He’s safe!”
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A Battered Warrior Limps Home

E
ARLY IN 1945,
thousands of awed civilians watched as the aircraft carrier Franklin, battered and twisted, limped into New York harbor and on to a berth
in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Because of wartime secrecy few in the public knew the story at the time.

While engaged in offensive operations against the Japanese, the Franklin had been hit by kamikaze (suicide) planes. Bomb and gasoline blasts wracked the huge carrier for hours, leaving her a smoking ruin. It had been one of the greatest single disasters in U.S. Navy history. Seven hundred and twenty-four men had been killed, hundreds of other wounded.

Despite this holocaust at sea, the Franklin’s crew brought her back home— a harrowing trek of twelve thousand miles—under her own power.
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Visit by a Navy Chaplain

A
T HER HOME IN WASHINGTON, D.C.,
on February 26, 1945, Mrs. Charles Anderson responded to the ringing of her doorbell. Opening the door, she saw the grim face of a Navy chaplain. Quickly she asked: “Is it my husband or my son?”

“Your son, Marine Sergeant Charles Anderson, has been killed in action,” the chaplain replied softly.

After a few moments of silence, the mother said: “A force stronger than ours has taken charge.”

That afternoon she climbed into her automobile and drove into a suburb where she was a volunteer at Bethesda Naval Hospital taking care of wounded men.
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“Will I Be Able to See?”

L
IKE THOUSANDS OF AMERICAN WIVES
whose husbands were fighting overseas, twenty-five-year-old Kitty Boswell was living with her mother and father in Birmingham, Alabama. Her husband, Captain Charles Boswell, was in Germany as a company commander with the 84th “Railsplitters” Infantry Division.

Kitty constantly reminded herself that her husband would survive the rigors and dangers of the battlefield. He had been a star halfback on the University of Alabama football team and had once scored a winning touchdown in the Rose Bowl after sustaining a broken leg in that game. Charley had also been an outstanding baseball player for Alabama, and his postwar goal was to break into the outfield of the New York Yankees.