Over Here! by Ms. Lorraine B. Diehl

Author:Ms. Lorraine B. Diehl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

SIX MONTHS BEFORE the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mayor La Guardia was urging New Yorkers to volunteer for civil defense. Here he poses with Eleanor Roosevelt and a model wearing the new apron designed for female civil defense workers.

Collection of the author

The La Guardia and Wagner Archives, La Guardia Community College/The City University of New York.

New York City was now in a state of readiness. Everyone from elevator boys in apartment buildings to ferryboat captains plying the Hudson River had a role in the city’s air defense. Volunteer guards rein-forced the regular employees who protected the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and all of the city’s bridges. The Empire State Building, with its eight thousand tenants, had monitors and assistant monitors on every floor drilled in getting their people to the halls and stairwells in the event of an air raid. At Rockefeller Center, nine thousand sandbags along with forty-gallon tanks of water were distributed to tenants to put out fires from incendiary bombs. Macy’s put an elaborate system into place. At the sound of the alarm, all store windows would go dark and “blackout wings” would be drawn across exit doors to prevent light from seeping out as wardens directed customers to safety. A registered nurse presided over the store’s emergency hospital while the emergency repair crew slipped into rubber suits and asbestos gloves in case of fire. In apartment buildings, tenants were asked to designate certain floors they considered to be safest from attack to house residents in an emergency. Blackout posters with instructions on what to do in case of an air raid were on the walls of most office and apartment buildings.

Air-raid drills became part of everyone’s life. Once a week, when the sirens went off, thousands of air-raid wardens in every borough donned helmets, grabbed flashlights and badges, and walked the streets of their neighborhoods making sure that the blocks they patrolled were in total darkness. Brooklyn resident Doris Lipetz remembers them well: “We had to turn off our lights and draw down the shades. Most of our neighbors went downstairs and stood in front of their houses.” Joan Harris, who grew up in Bensonhurst, was terrified that these drills were prelude to a real attack: “We pulled down our blackout curtains and sat frozen around the kitchen table.” Jackson Heights was always a very proactive community. As soon as war was declared they had put their own plan into place, and by January their air-raid drills were exquisitely choreographed ballets that included volunteer house wardens, first-aid and fire wardens, and roof wardens whose job it was to search for approaching enemy planes.

Those roof wardens were part of a larger group of volunteer airplane “spotters” scattered throughout the five boroughs, whose job it was to report on the flights on any given night in the skies over the city. As early as January 1941, a full year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, ten observation posts were designated across the metropolitan area. Equipped with a pair

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