For many Americans on the home front, a major contribution to the war effort was participation in bond drives. North Dakota was a long way from Pearl Harbor, but in 1942, these students in Epping, ND, were doing their part by performing “Remember Pearl Harbor” at a meeting of the town’s women to promote bond sales.
The song was likely the same one performed by Sammy Kaye, which was recorded just 10 days after the attack and rose to number 3 on the charts:
In hindsight, the likelihood of air raids against Chicago during the Second World War seems small. But the Windy City, as well as the entire region, was a bit safer thanks to the efforts of the Boy Scouts, as reported by the Chicago Tribune75 years ago today, January 12, 1942. According to this article, the 110,000 Boy Scouts in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan were making plans to distribute air raid instruction posters throughout the region.
According to the article, Chief Scout Executive James E. West had wired civil defense officials that the Scouts “would keep on the job until the nation is blanketed with air raid posters and all communities can join the Boy Scouts in being prepared for the emergencies that war may bring us.”
For more information about Boy Scouts during World War II, see my earlier post.
Shown here from 75 years ago is a blackout light bulb, manufactured by the Wabash Appliance Corp., 335 Carroll St., Brooklyn, NY. The bulb provided a beam of blue light that was projected downward, for use indoors during wartime blackouts. The inside of the 25 watt bulb had a silver reflector to hide filament glare and direct the beam downward.
It is shown here mounted in a socket, from the January 1942 issue of Service magazine.
Shown here in Popular Mechanics, January 1917, is the recently launched USS Arizona passing down the East River from the New York Navy Yard on her first voyage into the Atlantic. The ship had been launched in June 1915 and christened with a bottle of water taken from the first to flow through the spillway of the Roosevelt Dam.
The 608 foot long ship remained stateside during the First World War. She was sent to Turkey in 1919 at the beginning of the Greco-Turkish war, and transferred to the Pacific Fleet for the rest of her career.
It was regularly used for training between the wars, and after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, the ship’s crew provided aid to the survivors. In April 1940, she was transferred to Pearl Harbor with the rest of the Pacific Fleet.
Arizona sunk and burning, December 7, 1941. Wikipedia photo.
During the attack of December 7, 1941, a bomb detonated in a powder magazine, causing the ship to explode violently and sink, with the loss of 1177 lives.
The ship remains a permanent memorial to “be maintained in honor and commemoration of the members of the Armed Forces of the United States who gave their lives to their country during the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.”
Shown here, in the January 1942 issue of Radio Retailing magazine, are resident aliens in Los Angeles lining up at a police station to turn in their cameras, guns, and radios capable of receiving short wave.
The magazine noted that Attorney General Francis Biddle had issued an order that enemy aliens, that is, citizens of Japan, Germany, and Italy, turn these items in to the nearest police station. An alternative would be to have receiver rendered incapable of receiving signals other than those in the standard broadcast band. Therefore, the order “seems to open the way for radio servicemen to render a useful service of eliminating shortwave reception from aliens’ sets–and get paid for it. In this way, the alien may keep his set for regular broadcast listening to U.S. stations, while the police authorities are spared the storage of hundereds of radio sets which they are poorly equipped to handle. And the radio man collects $1 to $2 per radio set altered.
Typically, the modification consisted of removing the shortwave coils, and providing the set’s owner with an affidavit documenting the modification.
75 years ago today, the Chicago Tribune, January 6, 1942, carried an article regarding the status of the order. It reported that local officials found the response so far to be unsatisfactory, since fewer than 2550 cameras, guns, and radios had been surrendered as of the previous night, despite an alien enemy population of more than 50,000 (28,000 Germans, 21,000 Italians, and 250 Japanese).
The Chicago police reported that the items surrendered included several antiques, including an 1878 breach loader. One man was reported to have “embarrassedly handing over a sawed off shotgun, possession of which had been taboo in Chicago ever since the prohibition gang war era. He said that he inherited the weapon from his father.”
One man, not bothering to wait for a receipt, simply drove up to the police station, hurried a radio from his car, and drove away. Another motorist tossed a $100 radio from his car and drove off.
The paper also reported a supplemental order from the Attorney General listing the following prohibited items:
Weapons or implements of war or component parts thereof; ammunition of all kinds; bombs; explosives or material used in the manufacture of explosives; signal devices; codes or ciphers: papers, documents, or books In which there may be invisible writing; photographs, sketches, pictures, drawings, maps, or graphical representation of any military or naval installations or equipment of any army, ammunitions, implements of. device or thing used or intended to be used in the combat equipment of the land or naval forces of the United States or of any military or naval post, camp, or station.
Happy New Year from OneTubeRadio.com!
As we enter 2017, we look back 75 years to January 1, 1942, the first New Year’s Day of the War. The nation’s industry was already largely on a wartime footing, as shown by these night shift workers at the Northern Pump Company in Minneapolis. They took a half hour break to don paper caps and give 1942 a short defiant cheer. Then, they went back to work making anti-aircraft guns for the Navy.
The company was founded in 1929 by the merger of Northern Fire Apparatus Company and the Pagel Pipe Company. It moved to the Fridley plant shown here in January 1941. In 1942, it created subsidiary Northern Ordinance Incorporated. Northern Ordinance continued naval production until 1964 when it was purchased by Food Machinery Corporation (FMC), which operated the site until 1994. BAE Systems currently owns and operates the Fridley site.
Northern Pump currently operates in Grantsburg, Wisconsin.
This photo appeared in the January 12, 1942, issue of Life Magazine.
As a public service, we once again remind readers that Santa takes the naughty list very seriously. This 1942 poster was produced by the War Production Board.
With America’s entry into the war, the nation’s broadcast stations were essential to inform and warn the public, and to maintain morale. As such, they were placed under military protection.
The photo shown here appeared 75 years ago today, in the December 22, 1941, issue of Broadcasting magazine. It shows a military policeman, stationed at Fort Snelling, standing guard over KSTP, St. Paul, MN. The caption notes that the station housed both the 50,000 watt main transmitter as well as an auxiliary 5000 watt transmitter with its own tower. Both transmitters had been equipped for code transmission on Army and Navy frequencies.
The transmitter site remains at the same location today on the east side of U.S. Highway 61 in Maplewood, MN. The modern image here is the Google street view.
The December 1941 issue of Radio Retailing hit the presses after Pearl Harbor, and much of the issue stressed that for the war effort, radio was a necessity. The cover reminded that there was no more essential consumer item than the radio. It noted that millions of Americans had learned anew that the radio in the home, office, or automobile was of prime importance, and that the nation’s radio retailers and servicemen would need to meet the imperative of keeping sets in operation above everything else.
LaGuardia. Wikipedia photo.
The issue provided a quote from Defense Administrator Fiorello LaGuardia for advice during blackouts: “Keep indoors. Lie down. Turn off the lights. Turn on the radio.”
Capt. Colin P. Kelly, Jr. Painting by Deane Keller, via Wikipedia.
Here, Hang Snow sings “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere,”
written in 1942 by Paul Roberts and Shelby Darnell. The song refers to a version of heaven reserved for a pantheon of American heroes, including “Lincoln, Custer, Washington and Perry, Nathan Hale and Collin Kelly too.”
The last named American hero, Collin Kelly, died this day 75 years ago, December 10, 1941. He was one of the first heroes of the Second World War. His was the first American B-17 to be shot down in the war.
On December 10, he took off on a bombing run from Clark Field in the Phillipine Islands. On the return flight, the plane was attacked. Kelly ordered his men to bail out. Moments later, the plane exploded, killing him.
Kelly was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, and President Roosevelt wrote a letter to the President of the United States in 1956, asking for an appointment for Kelly’s infant son. President Eisenhower honored this request by appointing Colin P. Kelly III to West Point.
