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Volume 92, Issue 3
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The Day Before
the Day of Infamy:
Saturday, December 6th, 1941 by William M.
Beachly
In the harbor, a dark cloud of smoke towers over the wreckage of many great ships of war. Over two thousand sailors and civilians are dead, and nine thousand are injured. It is December 7th, 1941, and the world has changed.
The Second World
War is a watershed in American
history, a dividing line. In ways no
one could have grasped beforehand, the
United States was going to emerge as a
different society. This paper seeks to
provide a snapshot of the American
heartland on the day before the day of
infamy.
*
* *
December 6th, 1941. It’s a warm
Saturday. The week before, twenty
thousand fans watched the University
of Nebraska Cornhuskers nip Oklahoma
in a nail-biter, 7 to 6. Head Coach
"Biff" Jones would be called to active
duty soon after the attack on Pearl
Harbor. Dad might go hunting pheasants
and the rising sun would feel nice
through his flannel jacket—the crisp
autumn air, the sound of stepping on
fallen stalks, the immediacy of a burr
in his socks—but soon the sun would
also rise in the west. Mother may have
been still dealing with the aftermath
of the previous week's Thanksgiving
dinner, and the feeling may have been
there—when world events lent a serious
backdrop to this year’s gathering—that
we should be especially thankful for
what we have. For things can change so
quickly.
Or, you could escape the world's woes by reading the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts. (1) It was wilderness adventure, philosophy, and science all rolled up in the journals both men kept as they sailed around the coastline of Baja California, wading in tide pools and fishing or, as the River Rat said "just messing around in boats." One reviewer called it "one of those rare books that are all things to all readers." Just consider this quote: […] it is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable...the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things. (Steinbeck and Ricketts 178)
It's Saturday. For
the kids, why not a matinee? You could
choose from Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in The
Corsican Brothers or
Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan’s
Secret Treasure. Or, for the
grown-ups, try Humphrey Bogart in All
Through the Night (though
it was destined not to surpass the
popularity of The Maltese
Falcon, released in October).
The Best Actor Oscar would go to Gary
Cooper for Sergeant York,
based on the moral struggle of a true
hero of the Argonne Forest battle.
Orson Welles' directorial debut Citizen
Kane critiqued the media mogul
William Randolph Hearst and went on to
be a classic, but the Best Picture
Oscar went to director John Ford and
producer Darryl F. Zanuck for How
Green Was My Valley, showing the
struggle of Welsh coal miners to
strike and unionize—a film that was
challenged as unpatriotic in the 1940s
as U.S. coal miners unionized. A
front-page story on Dec. 6th, 1941
states Senator Harry Byrd was furious
at FDR’s administration for not
approving tough anti-strike
legislation passed by the Senate and
House. (2)
In Hollywood’s
"buddy comedies," masters of mayhem
parodied capitalism, fascism, and the
clash of military discipline and the
incorrigibly dim. Abbott and Costello
romped as Buck Privates to the
Andrews Sisters' "Boogie Woogie Bugle
Boy." Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour
poked fun at the first peacetime draft
in our history in Caught by the
Draft. There were other enduring
entropic teams still recalled—Hope and
Crosby, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and
Hardy—but do you know of the "wise
guys" Beadle and Tatum?
In the first week
of December's Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences,
there appeared a study of sac fungi
(ascomycetes) that would answer a
basic question about life's workings.
These fungi have shaped human history:
bestowing brew and bread, penicillin
and pestilence, and prized delicacies.
Beadle and Tatum's study demonstrated
the one gene-one enzyme principle that
is nearly universal, and for which
they were awarded the Nobel Prize in
Medicine and Physiology in 1958. (3)
Thus opened a terra incognita
that Beadle and Tatum hinted at
when they said: "Since the synthesis
of the parts of individual genes are
presumably dependent on the
functioning of other genes, it would
appear that there must exist orders of
directness of gene control ranging
from simple one-on-one relations to
relations of great complexity."
In that week's
issue of less-specialized publication,
the New Republic, we read:
"Will Japan fight? Unless there is
some unlikely error in our information
about the naval situation, war
strategists would never permit Japan
to start such a hopeless war. […] Much
has been said of the mystic
belligerence of Japan's military
caste, which is blind and deaf to
rational calculations of interest and
wishes only to expand the influence of
Mikado's empire. Unwillingness to
endure loss of face, even at the cost
of destruction, might lead them to
plunge ahead" ("What Next in Asia?").
(4)
*
* *
It is well known
that on December 6th Franklin D.
Roosevelt sent a telegram to Emperor
Hirohito urging a peaceful resolution
of developments that contained "tragic
possibilities" for all humanity and
half in jest told Eleanor, "The son of
man has just sent his final message to
the son of God" (history.com). Who but
FDR would send an ultimatum to a
deity? We don’t know if the emperor
ever read it.
Meanwhile, news magazines on America's coffee tables were optimistic about the stalled Nazi offensive in Russia, hard against the resistance of Russia’s determined and winter-hardened defenders (fortified by tins of Spam) as temperatures dropped to thirty below zero. From Libya, there was good news that Rommel's stranglehold on besieged Tobruk was being broken by a new British offensive, but the Brits had no room for the German and Italian prisoners they took in North Africa, so they asked the U.S. to help. By war's end, camps housing 12,000 German POW’s were established at three Nebraska locations: Fort Robinson, Scottsbluff, and Atlanta. Most camps were unfenced, and prisoners helped local farmers for a small wage. (5)
Americans followed
the developments of the new world war
closely, but many hoped the U.S. would
never participate in it. Memories of
the last world war were still fresh,
and Isolationism had become the latest
"ism." It had been German marine
biologist Ernst Haeckel who first
coined the term "Weltkrieg,"
nobody at the time imagining we would
later have to append numerals. (6)
Haeckel was horrified by World War I’s
atrocities; he wrote in a 1913 appeal
to rationalism over nationalism,
"Pacifism is a duty of humanity". Many
Americans felt the same way.
Of World War I, John Dos Passos, the author of Three Soldiers (1921), wrote to a friend: "The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by the lies and self-seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting" (qtd. in Carr 135). His novel about the horrors of trench warfare set the tone for many to follow—and contrasts to Willa Cather's Pulitzer-winning One of Ours, inspired in part by the letters of her cousin, G.P. Cather, who fell in in the Argonne Forest. In that six weeks of General Pershing throwing wave after wave of infantry at a fortified line, there were 120,000 American casualties. The site of the Hindenburg Line and Meuse-Argonne offensive is now a peaceful forest. One would scarcely imagine the bloodshed there in the fall of 1918, when 16-year old Darryl Francis Zanuck from Wahoo, Nebraska served in the Nebraska National Guard (he had lied about his age) or soon afterward, on December 7, 1918, when a nurse from Lincoln, Nebraska, visited Nebraska’s field hospital 49 at Allereye:
*
* *
December 6th, 1941.
In Washington, OSRD director Vannevar
Bush organizes a meeting of top
nuclear scientists. From this would
come the Manhattan Project. Through
our long history, and even our
nation’s short history, there had been
war and peace in spurts. Yet some
dared to dream of an end, either in a
communal society or the all-consuming
weapon. Indeed, some scientists
watching the first A-bomb test at
Trinity calculated if a nuclear chain
reaction on that scale would propagate
without end. It was improbable but not
impossible.
A reporter for the New York Sun named W.C. Heinz is on board the U.S.S. Nevada. Later, he would publish When We Were One is his compilation of news reports as a war correspondent and reminiscences when he returned to Europe afterwards with his son. His stories about the early death of a racehorse and the trials of a boxer won him acclaim as a sportswriter and novelist. His timely encouragement to a young unknown writer named Richard Hornberger would play a role in the eventual publication of a well-known story about another war—M*A*S*H: A Novel about Three Army Doctors, published in 1968 under Hornberger's pen name, Richard Hooker. The film based on the novel would reflect national feeling about yet another war, the one in Vietnam. By fall of 1941 exports to Europe had helped rebuild our economy, and crop prices were good. Nebraska farmers experienced a 25% increase in disposable income and, in December, Congress announced that commodity prices would not be cut should the U.S. enter the war. Government activity in the economy was still a relatively new phenomenon, but it was changing the face of the landscape. Six years earlier, Nebraska businessmen C. W. McConaughy and George Kingsley, who held water in a sort of reverence, planned their own edifice, a system of dams and canals from the Platte to drier plains. One of the enticements for FDR’s Public Works Administration to funnel over 20 million dollars into this project was rural electrification. Water diverted in canals from "Big Mac" cooled the coal-fired turbines at the Sutherland power plant and several small hydro dams were built along other canals. One of the best places to watch bald eagles is from the inside one of these hydro dams south of Lexington. In the 1980's Kingsley Dam was modified as a hydropower source, and now ospreys nest where they can watch the plume of outlet water and pick-off stunned fish. Exactly two years before the day before the day of infamy, on December 6th, 1939, work on filling the vast earthen dam that would be named for Kingsley was nearly finished, and Robert McCoy was in a boat supervising the flow of clay slurry pumped from south of the river. Excess water was drained by a two-foot diameter corrugated metal pipe opening at the crest of the dam. Suddenly, McCoy found himself overboard and being sucked into the opening. He descended 300 feet into the dam, somehow slipped through a ninety-degree elbow, and was spat out 500 feet away at the outlet. His companion in the boat feared he must have been trapped in the elbow, but McCoy managed to stagger back up to the worker's shack. For McCoy, Dec. 6th was a day of infamy, but to his coworkers he was like the disciples' visitor after Calvary. (8) Lake McConaughy itself is a resurrection, the reappearance of an ancient and much, much larger body of water that has been designated Lake Diffendahl, which was created by a sand dune damming the same valley 12,000 years ago. *
* *
After Pearl Harbor,
the inland remoteness, access to
railroads, and supply of electricity
attracted the U.S. Navy to Hastings,
Nebraska. By the summer of ‘42, the
town was booming with new arrivals and
construction. The government had
acquired 76 square miles of farmland
and pasture, largely by eminent
domain, and built the NAD (9), a
sprawling complex of factories and
bunkers for the making of munitions.
Tagged "the most explosive place on
Earth", workers loaded shells and came
home with yellow-stained fingers from
contact with picric acid, an
ingredient that caused some British
women employed in arms factories to
give birth to "canary babies." But the
pay was three times what one could
earn in town, 75 cents an hour, and
you could put in 60 hours a week. Over
the rest of the war, 10,000 civilians
and soldiers would work there, and
some would die there. In 1944 an
accidental explosion left 9 dead, 54
injured and a crater 550 feet in
length. The blast was heard in
Lincoln, 100 miles away. December 7th,
1941 had made Hastings a boom town, in
more ways than one. (10)
As for the NAD, after V-J day much of the land remained as an agricultural research station, and the former prairie around the bunkers was a place where herds peacefully grazed and one of the easternmost prairie dog towns was spared the fate of the surrounding land—the plowing of fields from fencerow to fencerow. Its buffer zone surrounding rows of bunkers remind me of those abandoned DMZ’s, but one that deflected the Corn Belt's dominion over prairies. Our history is as much a product of torsion and stress as it is of unilinear drive…We think these historical waves may be plotted and the harmonic curves of human group conduct observed. Perhaps out of such observation a knowledge of the function of war and destruction might emerge…The safety valve of all speculation is: It might be so. And as long as that might remains, a variable deeply understood, then speculation does not easily become dogma. (Steinbeck, The Sea of Cortez, 218-9). Notes
(1) Very few first copies of this book, published Dec. 5th, were sold due to the Pearl Harbor attack. Viking republished it in paperback ten years later but did not note Rickett's co-authorship. (2) Dec. 6, 1941 happened to be the 34th anniversary of the Monongah mine explosion, which had given birth to the Bureau of Mines, but real reform in mine safety took a long time to achieve. (3) George Beadle was born in Wahoo, Nebraska; today, the University of Nebraska's Beadle Center for Biotechnology is named for him. (4) The New Republic's Dec. 8, 1941 issue was already on newsstands. The Hastings College library's copy was received Dec. 5th. (5) William Oberdieck, a POW at the Atlanta Camp, got a job 200 miles away in the apple orchards of Nebraska City. After the war, he returned to Nebraska and worked for the Kimmel Orchard. He became an American citizen and eventually bought the company. (6) Some say the Nazis used Haeckel's ideas to support Aryan supremacy. In fact, his work was disapproved of by the National Socialists in the 1930s—after all, in one diagram, Haeckel placed Berbers and Jews on the same level as Germans and Italians (Richards). (7) Miss Belle Beachly's (no relation I know of) account appears in http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ne/topic/ resources/OLLibrary/Journals/HPR/Vol02/nhrv02p3.html (8) As reported in the Hastings Daily Tribune, Jan. 1940. http://www.cnppid.com/ from-the-archives-dam-worker-lives-to-tell -story-of-trip-through-pipeline/ (9) Naval Ammunition Depot history: http://www.adamshistory.org. and on display at the Hastings Museum: http://hastingsmuseum.org/exhibits/naval-ammunition-depot (10) Coincidentally, it was on December 6th, 1917 in Halifax Harbor, that a French munitions ship carrying 2300 tons of picric acid and other explosives caught fire after a slow-motion collision with a Belgian relief vessel. The crew was able to abandon the ship but spectators watched it burn for 20 minutes as it drifted closer and closer to town. When it blew, over 2000 were killed and some 9,000 were injured or burned, along with much of Halifax. So, before Pearl Harbor, Dec. 6th was already an infamous date. ("Halifax Explosion") Author's Biography
William Beachly holds M.S. and Ph. D.
degrees in Behavioral Ecology from the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has
been a professor of Biology at
Hastings College since 1997.
His interests and hobbies include trail riding, sharing nature with students, watching spiders, geology, and scuba diving. He has published articles for general audiences in Nebraskaland, Prairie Fire, and Humanimalia, and wrote an introduction for the recently-reprinted Trail of the Loup. He is currently finishing a book about Nebraska's Outback. He is Past President of the Ardyce Bohlke Torch Club in Hastings, Nebraska, where "The Day Before the Day of Infamy" was presented on Dec. 6th, 2016. He may be reached via e-mail at wbeachly@hastings.edu or by phone (269) 953-3946. ©2019
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