A week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the Lima News published this page of advice from the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense detailing what to do in an air raid.
Courtesy of Allen County Historical Society
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor wrecked the U.S. Pacific Fleet in far-off Hawaii and shook America’s sense of safety at home. On December 7, 1941, the world became suddenly, terrifyingly, smaller.
“Thus far geography protected us,” the Lima News editorialized four days after the attack. “But geography is no longer to be relied on. Longer range bombers, new and deadlier devices at sea, the fall of bases which bring Japanese airfields nearer and nearer, these factors are stripping away the last shreds of our reliance on mere geography.”
America’s loss of faith in the protection provided by distance was demonstrated soon after Pearl Harbor. “The great metropolitan area of New York City was put on an air raid alert twice within an hour this afternoon amid varying and unconfirmed reports of an imminent attack by hostile planes,” the News reported two days after Pearl Harbor. Similar reports came in from other jittery cities, and civil defense, which was seldom mentioned in the newspapers before the attack, became front-page news after it.
In Lima, on December 9, the News reported that about 200 ex-military men would be recruited to “aid in event of enemy air raids or sabotage,” while volunteer firefighters would be trained in “extinguishing incendiary bombs and administering emergency first aid.” George B. Quatman, president of the Lima Telephone and Telegraph Co., was named chairman of Lima’s Civilian Defense Council, which would oversee local preparedness.
“Local defense preparations were spurred by air raid alarms along both U.S. coastlines,” the News wrote. “Scores of communities, abruptly awakened by air raid alarms on the east and west coasts, acted through heretofore dormant local defense councils to train volunteers in firefighting, first aid, and police work.”
The concept of civil defense came of age in Great Britain during World War I as German airplanes, dirigibles and submarines brought the war to non-combatants. The British responded with an organized civil defense effort soon copied in the United States. With little threat of a direct attack on America’s shores during World War I, the U.S. civil defense group watched for saboteurs, encouraged men to join the armed forces and facilitated implementation of the draft.
With war again looming in the Spring of 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt reactivated the nation’s civil defense efforts.
A week after Pearl Harbor, the local civil defense council headed by Quatman issued some preliminary recommendations, which basically urged the public to stay calm and stay indoors. A full page inside that Sunday’s newspaper produced by the U.S. Office for Civilian Defense added more detail to the basic rules such as: “If bombs start to fall near you lie down. You will feel the blast least that way, escape fragments or splinters. The safest place is under a good stout table – the stronger the legs the better.” Variations of that advice would be a staple of civil defense for the next half century.
During World War II, the local defense council coordinated hundreds of volunteer efforts, training civilians in skills from first aid to identifying enemy aircraft. At the end of the war in August 1945, the council was disbanded.
However, almost immediately after World War II ended, the Cold War began and, by the late 1940s, the Office of Civil Defense had replaced the civilian defense council of World War II.
On a Sunday afternoon in November 1950, the effectiveness of four months of civil defense planning and the training by some 7,500 volunteers in Lima and other municipalities in Allen County put to the test with a mock attack. “It will be a test of conditions simulated as near as possible to what might be expected to happen if enemy bombers ever managed to break through the nation’s defenses and reach Allen County,” the News explained November 19, 1950.
“Screaming sirens, racing emergency vehicles and hundreds of white-helmeted Civil Defense volunteers brought a grim touch of war to Lima and Allen County Sunday afternoon,” the News wrote the following day. “The nation’s first countywide Civil Defense test followed closely the pattern mapped during long months of planning – except that bad weather grounded planes which had been expected to simulate the bombing raid on Lima.”
In July of 1952, Lima’s homeland defense was bolstered, as it had been during World War II, by the addition of skywatchers, volunteers who scanned the sky around the clock from a glass-enclosed hut constructed on top the U.S. Naval Training Center on East Liberty Street.
Officially known as the Ground Observer Corps, the group was created by the U.S. Air Force in the summer of 1950 “prompted by the knowledge of Russia’s possession of the atomic bomb and a growing fleet of intercontinental bombers,” the News wrote December 31, 1952. The skywatchers were seen as a supplement to radar, the newspaper noted, adding that the Lima group consisted of 175 members who volunteered for three-hour shifts. The Cold War iteration of the skywatchers was disbanded in January 1959, made obsolete by early warning systems.
Although not on the scale of the 1950 mock attack, Civil Defense drills were held in June and November 1954. In each instance, the News reported December 31, 1954, “top CD personnel reported to the group’s message center, traffic was stopped for five minutes, and local air raid sirens were sounded.” Quatman, who again headed the local civil defense operation in 1954, told the News that no such drills were planned for 1955 but instead “efforts will be pointed toward alerting the public to the necessity of abandoning the city in case of enemy attack.”
That grim scenario came harrowingly close to reality during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, and Civil Defense officials feared the agency was not ready for it. “Allen County Civil Defense has not changed from the paper organization it always has been,” Allen County Civil Defense Director Harry Wright Jr. told the Lima Citizen following a speech by president (John F.) Kennedy on October 22, 1962. “He said the President’s speech found the local Civil Defense unit in excellent shape as always – on paper,” the Citizen wrote.
In that speech, Kennedy revealed the Soviet Union had missiles in Cuba which could deliver nuclear destruction to much of the eastern U.S. Kennedy outlined a plan, which included a naval blockade of Cuba, to force their removal. An armed confrontation seemed imminent, and Wright said years of bickering between city and county over who should oversee the agency left it underfunded and unprepared for the moment.
“The civil authorities have not seen fit to give me anything (money) with which to do anything,” Wright told the Citizen. “Anything” included the designating and stocking of fallout shelters, which were a major push of the Kennedy administration from 1961 to 1963.
Fortunately, the Cuban crisis was defused and the fallout shelters, which were designated by three connected triangles in a circle, were never needed. Today, the tasks of civil defense are handled by the Department of Homeland Security.
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SOURCE
This feature is a cooperative effort between the newspaper and the Allen County Museum and Historical Society.
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See past Reminisce stories at limaohio.com/tag/reminisce
Reach Greg Hoersten at [email protected].
