Seventy years ago today, U.S. Army Corporal Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector, was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Truman. Doss, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, was drafted in 1942. Because of his religious beliefs, he refused to kill or carry a weapon. He was made a medic in the Pacific Theatre.
When his battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment, it was met by a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar, and machine gun fire, resulting in 75 casualties. Doss refused to seek cover, cared for the men, and carried all 75 casualties, one by one, to the edge of the escaprment where he lowered them on a rope-supported litter. His heroics continued on subesequent days when he rescued injured men forward of the lines.
He was subsequently injured by a grenade, but rather than risking another aid man’s life, he treated his own wounds and waited five hours before litter bearers reached him. Upon seeing a more critically injured man, he crawled from the litter and directed the litter bearers to care for that man first. He was then struck by a sniper’s bullet, suffering a compound fracture. He splinted his own wound before crawling to the aid station.
Shortly before leaving the army, Doss was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which eventually cost him a lung. Doss died in 2006 at the age of 87.
Seventy years ago today, August 9, 1940, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, as shown here in that day’s issue of the Chicago Tribune. If the Japanese needed further convincing to surrender, that day also brought news that the Soviets had declared war on Japan and were attacking Japanese forces in Manchuria.
The video below is a broadcast that day by President Truman promising that the bombings would continue until the Japanese surrendered. The war would be over in a few days.
Seventy years ago today, President Harry Truman sent this handwritten letter to former president Herbert Hoover, inviting him to come to the White House to discuss the brewing humanitarian crisis in Europe. With the war in Europe over, the population would need to be fed.
As Hoover would put it the next year, “we do not want the American flag flying over nationwide Buchenwalds,”
In making this invitation, Truman set aside partisan differences to seek out the man with a proven record in fighting wartime hunger. Both during and after the First World War, he had headed American relief efforts. They started in 1914 assisting Americans who had found themselves stranded in Europe at the outbreak of war. From his own resources, he made loans and cashed checks for Americans. He went on to save millions of lives, first in Belgium, and then elsewhere in Europe at the war’s end.
It was a welcome change. In the days following Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had summoned adviser Bernard Baruch and asked who was best fit to organize the home front. Baruch quickly replied that Hoover would be best suited, but the suggestion was rebuffed. Since Hoover was a convenient scapegoat throughout Roosevelt’s presidency, Roosevelt reportedly replied, “I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not raising him from the dead.”
After Truman’s summons, Hoover approached the problem the same way he had approached it during and after the First World War, as an engineering problem. He set out on a tour of Europe to determined the needs and resources of each country, and saw to it that resources were directed appropriately.
There was a lifetime friendship between the two presidents. Truman spoke at the dedication of the Hoover presidential library in 1962 and told the crowd, “I feel sure that I am one of his closest friends and that’s the reason I am here.” Later that year, Hoover wrote to Truman:
Yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know. I gave up a successful profession in 1914 to enter public service. I served through the First World War and after for a total of about 18 years. When the attack on Pearl Harbor came, I at once supported the President and offered to serve in any useful capacity. Because of my various experiences . . . I thought my services might again be useful, however there was no response. My activities in the Second World War were limited to frequent requests from Congressional committees. When you came to the White House, within a month you opened a door to me to the only profession I know, public service, and you undid some disgraceful action that had been taken in prior years.
Truman had the letter framed and placed on his desk at the Truman library.
Harry, is there something we can do to save the land we love?
Seventy years ago today, April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt Died. Harry S Truman is shown here the same evening taking the oath of office as the 33rd President of the United States.
Milwaukee Civil Defense Director Don E. Carleton and Col. Anthony F. Levno assess damage after simulated attack on Milwaukee. Milwaukee Journal, Jul. 20, 1956.
At 3:10 PM Eastern Standard Time on July 20, 1956, CONELRAD conducted its first (and as far as I can tell, only) nationwide test. At that time, all radio and television stations left the air for 15 minutes, and the only broadcast signals coming from the United States were those of the CONELRAD system on 640 and 1240 kHz.
CONELRAD was obsolete almost as soon as it was put into effect, but the idea was that during an enemy attack, attacking bombers must be deprived of the ability to use American broadcast stations for direction finding and navigation. Aviation routinely made use of AM stations for navigation, and the locations of broadcast stations and their frequencies are still printed on aviation charts. It was a reasonable concern, but it became much less critical when the bomber was replaced by the ICBM as the main component of both Soviet and American strategic war planning.
CONELRAD was created by President Truman in 1951, and hung on until 1963, when it was replaced by the Emergency Broadcast Sytem, in which participating stations continued to broadcast on their normal frequency.
Under CONELRAD, all stations in the U.S. would operate on the same two frequencies. The navigator of an enemy bomber tuning to either of those frequencies would be confronted with hundreds of stations on the same frequency, rendering them useless for navigation. And each station would transmit for only a few seconds or minutes. In smaller markets with only one station, the station would quickly give instructions, and then sign off for a few minutes. In larger cities, the stations would be linked together by telephone lines. A continuous program could be sent, but it would switch quickly from one transmitter to another, hopelessly confusing enemy bombers.
But for those 12 years, CONELRAD was the method by which Americans would be warned of war, and in 1956, it was put to a test. At 3:10 PM Eastern Time, each participating station was to transmit the program which had been delivered by record. The introduction to this broadcast can be heard at the following YouTube video:
In many cities, such as Chicago, the CONELRAD test was conducted in conjunction with other civil defense exercises. The Chicago Tribune for July 20, 1956, details some of the preparations being made there. The next day’s paper reports 325,000 simulated deaths in the Land of Lincoln.
There was surprisingly little reporting on how well the test went: Namely, whether the public was actually able to hear the broadcasts. One of the few actual tests was carried out by Radio News magazine, and reported in the October 1956 issue.
The magazine arranged receiving sites at four locations around the New York area. They were in a steel building in Brooklyn, a steel building in Manhattan, a home about 25 miles from the city, and a home about 50 miles from the city. At each location, writers for the magazine had multiple receivers ready for the test. They then rated the percentage of the broadcast they were able to receive intelligibly.
An outdoor antenna proved to be the greatest asset. At the home 25 miles from the city, the editor reported a 100% satisfactory signal using a Hallicrafters S-40 hooked to an outside TV antenna, and also with a Heathkit crystal set with a 100 foot outdoor antenna. At the same location, a Westinghouse battery portable without external antenna gave only 75% satisfactory reception.
In Brooklyn, the best performer turned out to be the Regency TR-1 transistor portable,
which gave a 100% reliable signal, but with continual retuning as the signal shifted from one transmitter to another. At the same location, the Knight tube portable was only 75% satisfactory, with the remaining signal too weak without reorienting and retuning the radio.
In Manhattan, the transistor portable, a Zenith Royal 500, outperformed the tube portable, with 85% satisfactory reception compared to 65%.
50 miles from the city, a Grundig tube portable gave 85% satisfactory reception, outdoing the Zenith portable, which had only 60% reliability. At this more distant location, the main problem came from interference from stations in other cities’ CONELRAD networks.
It is somewhat surprising that so much “retuning” was necessary. Presumably, the stations all had a crystal for their assigned frequency (the article didn’t state whether New York was using 640 or 1240), so it’s unlikely that the individual transmitters were drifting. More likely, some of the individual transmitters were slightly off frequency, resulting in the need to retune when the signal switched from one to another.
The article did stress the importance of having nondirectional antennas, something that was lacking in most AM portables. Most of the receivers, other than those using outdoor antennas, had to be reoriented when the signal switched transmitter locations. The article noted that extreme sensitivity wasn’t necessarily a good thing, because of the danger of interference from adjacent networks. These two factors explain why the crystal set had such good results in the test.
