D-Day and the War in Europe at the Normandy Landing Beaches, France

The American Cemetery above Omaha Beach

In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings today, I am posting this chapter from my upcoming history of the U.S. from places where history actually happened.

  

      Unlike the Pacific theater, the European battles in World War II have no National Park Service sites to commemorate the combat. We therefore turn to the American Battle Monuments Commission to recount the brutal conflict that liberated Europe.

Granted Japan had attacked the U.S., but President Roosevelt decided America’s main focus should be Nazi Germany. Even before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had allied with Prime Minister Churchill to support Great Britain in its hour of need. Lend/Lease supplies helped England withstand Hitler’s onslaught during the Battle of Britain in 1940-41, and U.S. destroyers attacked U-boats in an “Undeclared War” during the summer of 1941 to protect merchant ships transporting those supplies.

Allied forces launched Operation Torch against North Africa in November 1942. Troops fought their way west from Morocco and after some reverses, crushed Rommel’s Afrika Corps between the British forces coming out of Egypt.  By mid-May, Allied troops there had won the first military success of the European theater.

They then quickly targeted Sicily and invaded in July 1943. After capturing the island by mid-August, the Allies leapfrogged up the boot of Italy with landings at Salerno and Anzio in the west and at Taranto, Bari, and Foggia on the Adriatic Coast. That winter saw some of the most vicious fighting by U.S. forces in Europe in the Apennine Mountains running up the central spine of Italy.

In particular, Japanese-American soldiers of the 442^nd Infantry Regiment (some volunteering from American internment camps) assaulted mountain tops held by Germans. The 14,000 soldiers in the 442^nd earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, eight Presidential Unit Citations, and twenty-one Medals of Honor. They are the most decorated unit in U.S. military history.

            The landing of Allied troops on French soil is known by various names. In the U.S., it is D-Day. In France, Le Débarquement or Le Jour J. Some Germans call it the Invasion, except when they say that to some Frenchmen like actor Pierre Trabaud, who corrected them by saying “Oh, you mean the Liberation.” D-Day began the last chapter of the Nazi regime and the reestablishment of human rights in many countries.

Whatever name it goes by, this was the largest amphibious military movement of troops and supplies in world history. On the first day alone, 155,000 troops hit the beaches, along with 20,000 jeeps, trucks, artillery, tanks, and assorted materiel. Some 5,000 ships moved these men and materiel across the channel. More soldiers and supplies landed each day afterwards.

Preparations for D-Day began in earnest a year before. Military planners took a page out of Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics and trained airborne light infantry to jump behind enemy lines, developed a highly mechanized ground force, and pursued dominating air power. To choose a coastal landing site, to plan for all the logistics needed (including manufacturing all the arms and armaments), to gather all the ships for the channel crossing, and to train the millions of soldiers, airmen, and sailors for their missions was an enormous undertaking.

            Germans knew the attack was coming. They used 300,000 workers to build “The Atlantic Wall” on the French coast across from England. Some 15,000 concrete reinforced structures housing everything from 155 mm cannons to small machine guns nests guarded the coast. Take for example the Longues-sur-Mer Battery. Here four large casements held 155 mm guns at the confluence of the future landing zones of the American and British forces. These batteries had a range of fourteen miles, posing a serious threat to any Allied ships bringing in troops. The casements had six foot thick walls, and each used 600 square yards of concrete and over 8,000 pounds of steel reinforcement.

German fortifications at Longues-sur-Mer

On the cliff’s edge 300 yards in front of the guns, an observation post hid. Protected by barbed wire and mines, the whole complex held barracks, ammunition storage bunkers, and mortar and machine gun pits. To neutralize such formidable fortifications, from May 28 to June 3 Allied bombers dropped 1,500 bombs on the ten biggest batteries along the coast. Some explosions created craters twenty feet deep. As I approached the Longues-sur-Mer bunkers photographing them, it reminded me of walking around the ruins at Chaco Canyon, phantom relics of a past civilization.

During the night of June 5, another 1,200 RAF heavy bombers targeted Longues-sur-Mer and the other nine batteries. At day break, 1,400 U.S light and medium bombers took over to pummel the sites. Despite the 124 planes that hit Longues-sur-Mer with 600 tons of explosives, its four guns remained operational. Then German batteries and Allied warships blasted each other. By late morning, three of the guns had been knocked out but the fourth continued harassing the fleet. On June 7, the German gunners and their crews surrendered to British forces which had landed on nearby Gold Beach.

            On June 5, paratroopers loaded onto planes and headed to the continent. In all, an armada of 2,350 aircraft and 850 gliders carried troops across the channel, spread out over 300 miles in the sky. For Americans, the first combat action started around midnight on June 6 when over 13,000 paratroopers of the 82^nd and 101^st Airborne Divisions landed behind Utah Beach. Hostile anti-aircraft fire and clouds had scattered the planes, and so drops often went awry, some men landing fifteen miles from their targets. Nonetheless, groups of paratroopers gathered and liberated Sainte-Mère-Église, the first French city freed by Americans. Stephen Ambrose documented their exploits in Band of Brothers, his history of Easy Company of the 101^st Airborne.

Counterattacks by German troops challenged Allied troops although Nazi high command was not convinced that this was the real attack. Hitler and his generals believed that would occur at Calais, a shorter crossing from England. German officers on the beaches had no doubt though. Col. Von der Heydte, the senior German officer at Utah Beach recalled: “All along the beach…were these small boats, hundreds of them, each disgorging thirty or forty armed men. Behind them were the warships, blasting away with their huge guns, more warships in one fleet than anyone had ever seen before.”

Remnants of a bunker overlooking Utah beach.

At 6:30 a.m., soldiers started hitting Utah Beach. The bluffs behind the beachhead were low, but German guns, both in bunkers and inland, targeted troops. When paratroopers secured the roads over marshes behind Utah, soldiers quickly spread into the French countryside.

The landings at Omaha Beach were more difficult and deadlier than those at Utah. Men scrambled onto a five mile stretch of shore with 200 to 300 foot hills towering over them. Chaos and carnage swept across the sand as German pill boxes poured machine gun fire, mortar rounds, and heavier ordinance onto the landing zone. Some men died as they exited their landing craft and floated in the surf as successive waves of soldiers rushed past.

One of the most difficult objectives was the massive fortifications at Pointe-du-Hoc between Omaha and Utah. At 5:30 a.m. on June 6, naval bombardment lashed the point of land, including guns firing from the battleship U.S.S. Texas. Over 200 men from 2^nd Ranger Battalion hit the narrow beach around 7 a.m. and started to scale the 100 foot cliffs with ladders, ropes, even using their bayonets to ascend. Once on top of the cliff, fierce hand-to-hand combat, “more deadly than the climb itself, started in a lunar, crater-strewn landscape.”

Seventy-five years later, the cratered landscape of Pointe-du-Hoc still testifies to the massive bombing attack prior to June 6.

Capturing the bunkers, the Rangers saw logs painted like 155 mm cannons. On April 15, after an intensive bombing raid that destroyed one of these massive guns, the Germans had removed the others to save them. Rangers combed the region and found the surviving four cannons, which they disabled with thermite grenades. Over the next two days, Rangers threw back German counterattacks. Of the 225 Rangers who assaulted Pointe-du-Hoc, only ninety could still fight when they were relieved at D-Day +2 by troops from Omaha Beach. The rest had been killed or wounded.

Naval bombardment played a key role in D-Day. From battleships like the U.S.S. Texas to the landing crafts, all used whatever armaments they had to pummel the German defenses. On my road trip in the states, I visited the battleship Texas, now a museum outside of Houston. My grandfather, Arthur Hoffman, served on her during World War I, and because I donated a copy of his diary to the ship, I got a private tour. I even stepped into a gun turret of one of her 14” guns. These large guns fired 1,400 pound projectiles as far away as thirteen miles. With my back pressed against the wall of the firing chamber, I realized I had only inches between me and the gun as it recoiled after a shot. An inattentive position on the gunner’s part would cripple and even kill him.

German gun fortification protecting the route off of Omaha Beach.

           At Omaha Beach, I wandered at low tide at Saint-Laurent-sur Mer. Two bunkers framed the beach so that a deadly crossfire caught the G.I.s. Eventually, a group of soldiers climbed the steep hills to the west, came down behind one of the pillboxes, and captured it. This then became the first road off Omaha and hundreds of troops scrambled up the small valley away from the killing fields. On top of the bluff, engineers built the first airstrip on D-Day +1, which evacuated many wounded to England.

            On top of the bluff above Omaha, about a mile from Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, is the Normandy American Cemetery. I walked the aisles of gravestones and read the names, units, states, and dates of death of the interred. The 9,385 burials pay silent tribute to the sacrifices that these men and their families made. The day I visited, during the taps ceremony, the lowered American flag was handed to Mr. Weber, who had landed in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and then on June 6, 1944, at Omaha. Several hundred people gathered around and thanked him. A gentle rain mingled with my own tears at the ceremony.

Mr. Weber, a D-Day veteran, receiving the flag during the Taps ceremony in October 2018.

Once beaches were secured, a massive supply effort landed more soldiers and supplies. Just at Utah Beach, “between D-day and the end of the month of October 1944, 836,000 men, 220,000 vehicles and 725,000 tonnes of supplies were landed on the beaches.” At Arromanches, the British constructed an artificial harbor. Engineers sank old merchant ships as a breakwater, supplemented by 115 “Phoenix” caissons (concrete structures made in England and towed over). Some were 200 feet long and as high as a five story building. Once in place, this breakwater provided a five mile long line of protection for the harbor. Jetties on stilts, also towed over from England and dropped behind the breakwater, served as wharves for ships. Floating causeways connected the floating jetties to land, sometimes a half mile away. Until Cherbourg was liberated at the end of June and that port restored as an operational harbor, supplies to troopers in Normandy came off of the initial landing beaches. In particular, at Arromanches, seven ships docked simultaneously, unloading up to 18,000 tonnes a day. 

The sunken ships and Phoenix caissons which created the artificial harbor at Arromanches. 

Oil drove the machines of war, and so at Port-en-Bessin in between the American and British beaches, the Allies created a fuel port. British commandos came overland from Gold Beach and captured this small harbor. Once in Allied hands, the British constructed a seventy mile undersea pipeline called “Operation PLUTO” (Pipe Line Under The Ocean). This delivered fuel to the highly mechanized Allied armies.

            It caught me by surprise that the landing sites were not a continuous beachhead. They occurred along a seventy mile stretch of the Normandy coast with some large gaps in between the landing zones. From Utah Beach and Omaha Beach, a twenty mile break occurs which avoided steep cliffs. As I drove from one beach to another, I realized that this was the largest and densest  historical landscape I have ever encountered. Almost everywhere I went, a cemetery, museum, roadside marker, or stele marked the events of the D-Day campaign.

            These are sacred places but today at the Landing Beaches, villages thrive, farmers plant crops right up to the ruins of the German bunkers, vacation homes crowd the shores. Scattered among all of these normal human activities, tourists tramp over fields in a new invasion as U.S. and British flags fly alongside French ones.

            On the American beaches of Utah and Omaha, 57,500 landed on D-Day with 8,100 killed, wounded, or missing. On the British and Canadian beaches, 75,315 landed on June 6 with 3,120 casualties. Of the almost 22,000 Allied paratroopers that jumped that day, 3,000 were killed, wounded, or missing. In the campaign to liberate Normandy, over 209,000 Allies were killed or wounded while the Germans suffered perhaps twice as many causalities. Estimates of civilian deaths in Normandy range from 15,000 to 20,000, mainly from Allied bombings, especially in Caen.

            The Allied armies faced stiff resistance moving beyond the beaches, but on August 25, Free French forces liberated Paris. By then a second front had opened with the invasion of southern France on August 15. The soldiers sped up the Rhone River Valley, putting more pressure on Germany. After a brutal fall and winter of fighting in France, Belgium, and Germany, VE Day finally came on May 8. Focus then turned to the Pacific.

            The surviving veterans returned to the U.S., mostly jubilant. While many, like my father, had PTSD, they grabbed life. They made America into a robust economy and world power, similar to the contributions of the veterans after the Civil War. In Ambrose’s book on the 101^st Airborne, he writes of their postwar experiences: “They were remarkably successful, primarily because of their own determination, ambition, and hard work, partly thanks to what they taken from their Army experience [where] they had learned self-confidence, self-discipline, and obedience, that they could endure more than they had ever thought possible, that they could work with other people as part of the team.” What Ambrose wrote about the 101^st applied to many other returning veterans from World War II.

            Despite Ambrose’s conclusion about the legacy of the war on the U.S., the renowned journalist Ernie Pyle offered a more sober view in a draft found in his pockets after he was killed by a sniper on an island near Okinawa: “There are so many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches. . . . Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous. Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. Those are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France. We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.”

The American Battle Monuments Commission operates twenty-six cemeteries and twenty-nine memorials in sixteen countries around the world. Just for World War II, at cemeteries in France, Italy, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, and England, there are 68,137 graves of the U.S. dead. Additionally, in Tunisia, 2,841 U.S. soldiers are buried, and in the Philippines, another 17,202 graves mark the final resting place of the U.S. troops who died fighting in New Guinea and the Philippines. For the U.S., over 418,000 (mostly military men) died during World War II.

The French government transferred Pointe-du-Hoc to the American Battle Monuments Commission on January 11, 1979 for “Perpetual care and Maintenance.” The Normandy American Cemetery holds 9,385 burials and has a wall that lists the 1,557 men missing in action. It is the site of the first American cemetery for World War II in Europe, established on June 8, 1944. Around 1,000,000 people visit it each year.

A map showing the Allied landings at the American Cemetery in Normandy.

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Manzanar National Historic Site, Independence, California

At 9 am in mid-June, the sun already blasted the valley in eastern California. I walked through the 90 degree heat to the visitors’ center as dust devils swirled across the desert. A Park ranger raised the flag as I went by, inviting me to go into one of the NPS’s sites of conscience. This harsh land reflects the harsh deeds done in time of a national emergency.

Japanese Americans arriving in Manzanar 1942 (From Visitor's Center exhibit)

Right after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some Japanese-American families at Long Beach, California received visits from the FBI. For teenager Mike Miyagashima, his father did not return from his fishing boat on December 7.[1] Mike did not see his father for 18 months. To legalize the detention without due legal process of American citizens, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Eventually, over 100,000 people of Japanese descent were imprisoned in camps like Manzanar and in Minidoka NHS (which I wrote about on June 3rd). In short, Japanese-American citizens (Nisei) and Japanese immigrants (Issei) along the West Coast were rounded up in the spring of 1942 and incarcerated at “internment” camps. Surrounded by barbed wire and watch towers and patrolled by armed guards, these camps detained citizens and immigrants of Japanese ancestry because they looked like the enemy and their loyalty to the U.S. was doubted.

Anti-Japanese sentiment (Photo from exhibit at Visitors' Center) 

Manzanar was one of ten official War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps used to carry out this detention mandated by Executive Order 9066. The Order eliminated the constitutional protections of due process for citizens and violated the Bill of Rights. Two-thirds of the 120,000 persons of Japanese descent incarcerated in American concentration camps were American citizens, an act that reflected decades of anti-Japanese discrimination and then war time propaganda.

Map of the 10 WRA camps (Map from exhibit)

The stories of the spirit of the incarcerated Japanese-Americans has filled volumes. Imprisoned without court trials with their families torn apart, these mainly citizens lost their land and businesses as they had to quickly liquidate their estates  before and rushing to the train station with only two suitcases. Some Californian fortunes today arose from the bargain priced acquisitions of productive farms and prosperous businesses.

In the movie “Remembering Manzanar” shown at the Visitors’ Center, one Japanese-American said: “It was just a devastating day for all of us. I will never forget. Because I looked like the enemy, I was treated like one.” Another internee speculated that “It must have been difficult for teachers to talk about democracy.”

Japanese American escorted to train for removal to camps
(From exhibit)

Forlorn boys on way to camps
(From exhibit)

Despite the wrenching apart of families who then arrived at camps not yet completed, the internees created mini-cities with many amenities of a normal town. Active farms, retail shops, sports leagues, schools, and recreation halls filled the uncertainties of enforced detention. At both Minidoka and Manzanar, perhaps unbeknownst to each other, the internees created vibrant communities and responded to their prisons in various ways.

Some young men joined the U.S. Army. Six thousand Nisei served in the Military Intelligence Service translating Japanese communications. More than 10,000 more Nisei served in the 100^th Infantry Battalion and the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team of the Army which fought in some of the fiercest action in Europe as they slogged up the Italian mountains in 1944. The Japanese Americans in the  442^nd received more combat awards than any other unit of its size in the Army. In praise of the men who fought in the 442^nd, General George C. Marshall said: “They were superb!.... They took terrific casualties. They showed rare courage and tremendous fighting spirit. Not too much can be said of the performance of those battalions in Europe and everybody wanted them….”[2] Not enough can be said about these Japanese-Americans who fought for a country which had imprisoned them and their families.

Japanese Americans fighting in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in France late 1944.
(Photo from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/442_regimental_combat_team.jpg

Back at the homefront, Manzanar residents made the best of a bad situation. Four thousand people worked at the camp as clerks, chemists, nurses, doctors, accountants, teachers, fire fighter, switchboard operators, and camouflage net makers. At a building in the camp, five hundred people turned out thousands of camouflage nets a month to support the war effort.

Love also flourished as 188 couples married at Manzanar, and 541 babies were born there. For this small city, the 250 bed hospital was the largest one between Los Angeles and Reno. And like at Minidoka, people played the all American sport of baseball.

Playing baseball at Manzanar (From exhibit)

As usual, I arrived at Manzanar without an appointment. I asked to talk with the Chief Interpreter and heard that she was busy. I went through the excellent exhibit and watched the film at the visitors’ center and then asked again. A few minutes later, I met Alisa Lynch, who had broken off what she was doing to spend an hour with me. I’m richer for her time.

Alisa has been at Manzanr NHS for fourteen years, even before it officially opened. She spoke from her heart about the history as well as the continuing relationship that the place has with the people incarcerated here and their descendants. She told me that the site is “conserving history of people who don’t consider themselves part of history.” She talked about all the stories of the people who were here: “This is reminder that history is about real people. I carry 10,000 lives, 10,000 stories. We don’t think of government policies in terms of real people but you can walk here where they walked. We can’t totally recreate 10,000 people in 800 buildings, but history is always relevant.”

Alisa was especially proud of the exhibit on the No-No issue. The WRA had all the internees fill out a loyalty questionnaire. Question 27 asked if they would serve in the U.S. military, while question 28 asked if they would foreswear their allegiance to the Japanese emperor Hirohito. As Alisa noted, that’s like asking “how many of you have stopped beating your pet?” Many of the internees had no allegiance to Hirohito so could not foreswear something they never had. Others did not want to serve in the military of a country that violated their civil rights. So, those who answered “no” to both questions were called No-No Boys. Considered disloyal by the WRA, they were sent to the detention center at Tule Lake. At its height, Tule Lake held 18,000 internees guarded by  1,200 Military Police. Some No-Nos were deported to Japan during the war.  The staff and consultants at Manzanar used diaries, oral histories, and donated artifacts from incarcerated families to mount this exhibit on the No-Nos. To recognize the excellent research, interpretation, and installation of this exhibit, the Organization of American Historians in 2016 awarded Manzanar NHS and Park Rangers Patricia Biggs and Rose Masters the Stanton-Horton Award.

The award winning exhibit about the Loyalty Questionnaire (Photo by Hunner)

Manzanar closed on November 21, 1945. When they left, those incarcerated were given $20 and a bus ticket back to their home city. Because these internees had sold their houses,  businesses, farms in haste, many had no place to return to, and they spent decades rebuilding their lives. Today, an annual pilgrimage attended by up to 1,000 people keeps alive the memories of Manzanar.

In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act which paid former detainees $20,000. In signing the bill, President Ronald Reagan admitted that it was mistake to intern Japanese-Americans. He said: “When we violate that Constitution, we begin to unravel as a nation.” President George H.W. Bush’s apology letter sent to over 82,000 people contained the following: “A monetary sum and words alone cannot restore lost years or erase painful memories; neither can they fully convey our Nation’s resolve to rectify injustice and to uphold the rights of individuals…. But we can take a clear stand for Justice and recognize that serious injustices were done to Japanese Americans during World War II.”[3] The U.S. government has paid over $1,200,000,000 to the former detainees.

Manzanar’s auditorium (today’s visitors’ center) was built by camp residents. It held 1,280 seats and after the war, served as the Inyo County road maintenance shop for forty years. The NPS bought it from the county in 1996, and after a $3,500,000 renovation, the Manzanar NHS opened on April 24, 2004. Almost 100,000 people visited Manzanar last year.

As I left Manzanar and drove through the dry Owens Lake valley on my way to Death Valley, large dust devils buffeted my rig. This is a harsh land.

The Cemetery at Manzanr (Photo by Hunner)

[1] Interview with Mike Miyagashima by Jon Hunner at Las Cruces, NM.

[2] Accessed at the “the422.org” website, July 18, 2016.

[3] Letter from President George H.W. Bush reprinted in Park brochure.

Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front NHP, Richmond, California

Poster from Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront NHP

It’s not too often I get to meet people who helped shape history. Usually, I read about them, even study them, but with historic figures, they are usually longer with us. At the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front NHP in Richmond, California, I luckily met Marian Wynn and Kay Morrison who had just finished a shift talking to visitors about their World War II experiences. They fought on the home front in the most horrendous war in human history. Without people like them, we might not have defeated the totalitarianism of the 1940s. They helped create the world we live in. We’ll come back to Kay and Marian in a minute.

Granted, a lot of people won the war.  Of course, the soldiers, sailors, and air crews who attacked the Axis Powers had the main role. The Merchant Marines who supplied the global war machine served and sacrificed as well. The factories in the United States feed the war effort with tanks, planes, ships, helmets, rifles, boots, uniforms, food, and everything that the fighting forces needed. The U.S. factories and industries supplied not only our military, but the fighting men and women of our allies. This NPS site documents and celebrates the home front which played a vital role in winning World War II.

Before we get to the home front, here’s a brief review of the events that lead to the United States entering World War II. The flawed Versailles Peace Treaty which ended World War I unfairly punished Germany for a war that both sides hungered for. The resultant economic chaos in Germany in the 1920s led to the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party which began to rearm their military in the 1930s. The Great Depression on the 1930s worsened people’s ability to resist extreme solutions like Fascism. Germany tested its new weapons and tactics as it aided Franco in the Spanish Civil War where it fine-tuned the lightning strikes of blitzkreig. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and consequently, Britain declared war on the Nazis. By 1940, Germany had invaded and occupied France, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Netherlands, and parts of Poland.

Meantime, war had erupted in Asia even earlier. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, began ravaging China in 1937, and created the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere which targeted most of Asia. The flag of the Rising Sun spread around East Asia as the Japanese military aggressively expanded its power and captured new territories.

The United States, remembering the shocking devastation of Europe in World War I, remained neutral, although some in government, including President Franklin Roosevelt, saw the war clouds building. They prepared for war. As death and destruction engulfed Europe and Asia, Roosevelt sent war materiel abroad and even provided U.S. Navy escorts for English convoys. These destroyers engaged with German U-boats in the summer of 1941. The U.S. cut off Japan’s oil supply that fall, and with its fuel supply dwindling, Japan launched the surprise attack on Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941 which threw the U.S. into World War II.

The U.S. held a unique and enviable position. It had no common borders with its enemies, and its homeland was safe from serious attack. As a result, its factories remained undamaged and quickly converted to producing the many things needed by the Allied military. Ford automobile plants switched to making jeeps and trucks, factories like the Wadsworth Watch Company began to turn out gun, bomb, and compass parts, and textile mills spun 1,000,000,000 pounds of wool in 1942 to make G.I. uniforms. War work lifted the U.S. out of the Depression while helping to thwart the gains of the Axis powers in Europe, Russia, and Asia.

Workers lined up outside the Kaiser Employment Office at Shipyard #2 (Exhibit photo)

With 16,000,000 men in uniform, who worked in these factories and plants?  Women, of course. Before the war, 12,000,000 women held jobs outside the home. By 1944, that number rose to 18,000,000. Additionally, minorities who could not work in factories before the war found jobs there. By the end of the war, the United States produced more than ½ of the world’s industrial output, thanks to many people, but in particular, to women and minorities.[1]

Richmond, California, north of Oakland, played an essential role in the home front. Henry J. Kaiser built four of the fourteen Richmond shipyards. Part of the Kaiser company's success entailed prefabricating ship components off-site, which increased the efficiency and speed of production. Previously unskilled workers did the repetitive jobs like welding pipes together. This is where Marian and Kay came into the picture.

Kay Morrison and Marian Wynn ending their volunteer shift at the park (Photo by Hunner)

With just two weeks training as a welder, Kay Morrison worked the grave yard shift from January 1943 to August 1945. She told me: “We’re one of the reasons we won the war. We’re FDR’s secret weapon.”[2] Marion Wynn also welded pipes for the Victory ships which were sent to the docks for final assembly. Marion worked at Richmond for the last eleven months of the war and came to the shipyard after her brother died on the beaches of Normandy during the D-Day invasion. Both of these women continue to volunteer at the park as well as do community events around the Bay area. Another woman worker, Marian Sousa, a draftsman at Shipyard #3, perhaps summed up their humble sentiments: “I specifically didn’t do anything great, but I participated in something that was great.”[3]

Kay pointing herself out in the group picture of pipe welders in 1945. (Photo by Hunner) 

The icon of Rosie the Riveter first popped up in a song released by the Four Vagabonds in early 1943: “She’s part of the assembly line/ She’s making history working for victory/Rosie the Riveter.” Norman Rockwell’s famous painting of Rosie appeared on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post on May 29, 1943. Across the country, women started working at jobs previously held by men: welders, machinists, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, and at railyards, gas stations, on farms, in the military. Women even served as pilots and ferried planes across the country from factories to airfields before men flew them into combat.

Norman Rockwell's cover on the Saturday Evening Post (Exhibit poster)

To celebrate Rosie and all of the Homefront workers who helped win the war, the NPS has taken over the old Ford Assembly plant. During the war, this plant made more than 60,000 military vehicles including tanks, Army trucks, half-tracks, tank destroyers, personnel carriers, scout cars, amphibious tanks, and bomb lift trucks.[4]

Other parts of Richmond, especially the other shipyards, played vital roles in building the ships necessary to move troops and supplies for this world war. Richmond launched 747 ships between 1942 and 1945, the most of any shipyard in the country. The U.S. built a total 3,200 Liberty and Victory ships.  

Aerial photo of Shipyard #2 at Richmond. The Ford Assembly plant is at the upper right hand corner. (Exhibit photo) 

Shipyard No. 3 (listed on the National Register of Historic Places) is the only surviving wartime yard in the Bay Area. At Shipyard 3 is moored the S.S. Red Oak Victory. It is a World War II Victory ship built in the Richmond Shipyards in 1944. It carried supplies and troops to the Pacific Theater during the war, and stayed active through the Korean and Vietnam wars. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places to recognize its military, transportation, and engineering significance as an ammunition and cargo vessel during WWII.

U.S.S. Red Oak Victory at Shipyard #3. (Photo by Hunner)

One of Henry Kaiser’s innovations was health care. In 1942, he created the Permanente Health Plan for shipyard workers. This instituted a three-tier medical care system with first-aid stations in the shipyards, a field hospital, and a main hospital. One of Kaiser's original first-aid stations remains intact in Shipyard No. 3. The field hospital also still exists and is now privately owned.  This health care system is now Kaiser Permanente, an integrated health care system that cares for millions of people in California.

Kaiser instituted another innovation at his shipyards-- child care for families working in his shipyards. The child care centers had progressive early-childhood education programming, nutritional meals and snacks, on-site nurses, art lessons, and family counseling. Some of the centers operated around the clock, although most opened at 6 am and closed at 6 pm. Today, the largest Kaiser childcare center --  the Maritime Center -- is owned by the Rosie the Riveter Trust and houses a re-created wartime classroom exhibit.

In most parks that I visit, I ask rangers about climate change. At Rosie the Riveter NHS, Karen (a retired Kindergarten and First Grade teacher who volunteers  at the front desk) replied that she tours visiting 4^th graders along the waterfront. She talks about how these docks at Richmond could be underwater in 100 years.  She tells the students that we need to take care of the planet for future generations just like during World War II, “everyone came together to support the war. We need to do that for the climate today.” Karen emphasized that she wants to make a personal connection with young visitors about climate change since they will inherit this earth.

Shoreline outside of the Visitors' Center at Rosie the Riveter (Photo by Hunner)

By war’s end, the Home Front had dramatically changed the nation. Granted, many women and minorities faced a return to pre-war status as returning vets got their jobs back. Despite the three million women dismissed from their jobs in the immediate post war period, women employment has continued to rise from 16.8 million in 1946 to 31.6 million in 1970. This growing freedom in the job market for women and minorities led to vast social change. As Fanny Christina Hill is quoted in the exhibit: “Hitler was the one who got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.”

In addition to the movement of women into the work force, World War II transformed the population distribution of the nation. Social historian James Gregory says: “World War II set off the greatest sequence of human relocation in American history. At least 57% of the population changed residence during the war years, 21% of them migrating across county or state lines…. California, Oregon, and Washington gained more than three million newcomers during the 1940s.”[5] The American West won big in this migration, ending its colonial status with the East Coast and growing into a powerful region of the country.

Full employment, health care, child care, under-represented people in the workforce, new assembly methods, shifts in demographics, the unintended consequences of the swift changes in U.S. society on the home front proved vital in winning the war. Without Marian, Kay, and millions of Rosies (including my mom, Anna LaShelle), our world might have succumbed to the dark forces of totalitarianism.

Rosie the Riveter/World War II Homefront NHP, 1414 Harbour Way South, Suite 3000, Richmond, CA 94804, (510) 232-5050. It was designated a National Historical Park on October 25, 2000.

Trinidad Gutierrez and Molly Alcanto change lamps and oil cans on incoming trains. (Exhibit photo)

[1] Statistics taken from the exhibit panels and the movie at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front NHS.

[2] Interview with Kay Morrison by Jon Hunner, June 13, 2016 at the Rosie the Riveter NHS.

[3] Exhibit text at Rosie the Riveter NHS.

[4] History & Culture – Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service http://www.nps.gov/rori/learn/historyculture/index.htm

[5] James N. Gregory, “Internal Migration: Twentieth Century and Beyond.” Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 542.

Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford, Washington

It is tricky to get your arms around one of the newest units of the NPS-- tricky because it exists in three states, tricky because it entails challenging scientific information, tricky because the sites are not open to the public, and tricky because of its contested history. The three sites included in the Manhattan Project NHP – Hanford, Washington, Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee-- commemorate one of the crowning achievements of the U.S. which ended the most horrific war in history as well as the places which created a weapon of mass destruction that could end human existence on earth.

On my western road trip through the National Parks, I stopped by the Hanford nuclear site. On the wind swept plains in a loop of the Columbia River, I drove past complexes of gray buildings surrounded by chain link fences and patrolled by security guards in SUVs. That was the closest I got to this historic place which helped create the Atomic Age. The site is not open to the public due to security and health concerns. I then visited the nearby Reach in Richland, a new museum about the area which combines exhibits on the natural beauty of the area with the Manhattan Project. This is a complex encounter.

Outside Area 300 at Hanford, WA. (Photo by Hunner)

In 1938, as the world descended into the Second World War, German physicists in Berlin split or fissioned the atom. This discovery spread through the world’s nuclear scientists like a prairie wild fire. These scientists knew that if the energy released from atomic fission was harnessed into a weapon, the destructive power would be immense. Afraid of that power in the hands of the Nazis, scientists in England scrambled to catch up with their own nuclear research.

After Pearl Harbor thrust the United States into the war, the United States organized the Allied efforts to create an atomic bomb under the Army Corps of Engineers. Many peoples and places contributed to the effort, but the three main sites were the main research and development laboratory at Los Alamos, the uranium enrichment plant at Oak Ridge, and the plutonium reactor at Hanford. We will explore Los Alamos and Oak Ridge in future postings, so let’s focus on Hanford’s contribution.

To split an atom and create an explosion, atoms need to be slightly unstable to begin with. Scientists identified two elements suitable for such work—Uranium 235 and Plutonium 249. Oak Ridge processed uranium ore into the rare isotope of Uranium 235 using massive centrifuges and microscopic filters. Making plutonium requires a different method since it is totally man-made. At Hanford, uranium ore was put into Reactor B, bombarded by neutrons, and like an alchemist’s transmutation, turned into a totally new element, plutonium.

To build a plant to make plutonium, the Army Corp of Engineers had several criteria for site selection. First, the ten by sixteen mile section of land had to be ten miles from the nearest road and twenty miles from the nearest railroad. To cool the reactor, the site needed 25,000 gallons of water per minute. To power the reactor, it needed at least 100,000 kilowatts. The mighty Columbia River with its massive flow and its hydroelectric power fit the bill. Once selected, 137,000 construction workers at the Hanford Engineering Works put up 1,200 buildings in addition to Reactor B.

Reactor B at Hanford, Washington (From exhibit at Reach Museum, Richland, WA.)

According to Reach museum docent and retired nuclear scientist Gary Busselman, the processing of uranium created eight pound rods which when irradiated at Reactor B, produced small spots of plutonium the size of a pen point. An atomic bomb needs around seventeen pounds of plutonium to explode. So, this nuclear process created a lot of radioactive waste. We’ll look at this legacy at the end of this blog.

The plutonium from Hanford was used in the “Fat Man” bomb. Scientists at Los Alamos worked on this unique weapon which imploded—where conventional explosives created shock waves which went inward, compressing the plutonium core, and creating the chain reaction which split atoms and released an incredible amount of energy. The Fat Man bomb was tested at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert on July 16^th, 1945 with the equivalent force of eighteen tons of TNT. Fat Man detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9^th with about 40,000-50,000 dead from the explosion.

Photo of Fat Man Atomic Bomb (From Reach Museum, Richland WA.)

 Three days earlier, the US had detonated a uranium atomic bomb over Hiroshima with an immediate loss of life of 60,000 to 70,000 people. More died in the ensuing months in both cities from “radiation sickness.”  This one-two punch from a devastating new weapon forced the Japan to surrender. World War II killed 60,000,000 people, both soldiers and civilians, maybe more. Perhaps it took such a horrendous weapon to end the most horrific war in human history.

The end of World War II did not end Hanford’s mission. The Cold War with the Soviet Union and the resultant nuclear arms race depended on this site to continue to produce plutonium. In the 1960’s, Hanford churned out 2/3rds of the plutonium for our weapons’ stockpile. Atomic bombs became hydrogen weapons, some 1,000 more powerful than those used over Japan. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had the ability to commit Cliocide, the death of the muse of history and of humanity.

Exhibit at Reach Museum, Richland, WA (Photo by Hunner)

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has edged back from a nuclear Armageddon; however the environmental legacy of creating materials that are toxic for tens of thousands of years remain controversial. At Hanford, the radioactive waste was stored in 177 single shell underground metal tanks. The Reach’s exhibit on the Manhattan Project notes that 7,500,000 gallons of radioactive liquid waste were stored in these tanks with 1,250,000 gallons of toxic sludge that has settled in the bottoms. The Department of Energy which manages all our nuclear facilities is actively removing this waste and remediating the poisonous material in the storage tanks. It is no easy feat.

Storage tanks for radioactive waste left over from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War
(From exhibit at the Reach Museum, Richland, WA.)

Part of the challenge is that plutonium remains toxic for 240,000 years. Other radioactive elements in the waste harmful to humans and other living things, such as Iodine 131, Strontium 90, and Cesium 137 have shorter toxic lives. Despite the rosy film at the Reach which concludes that the remediation is successfully cleaning up Hanford and returning it to a pristine natural reserve, some people  disagree. They note that the DOE has spent $19,000,000,000 only on waste removal from the leaking tanks without a spoonful actually being cleaned up. Leaks continue to make their way to the nearby Columbia River. A saying I heard several times is that ‘the solution to pollution is dilution.” As mentioned in previous blogs, the Columbia River is massive. I fear that its rolling on radioactively is not a good thing.

Waste remediation continues at Hanford (Photo by Hunner)

In November 2015, I participated in a Scholars’ Forum to help the NPS figure out how to interpret the Manhattan Project NHP. For two days, about twenty-five atomic historians, community members, staff from the NPS, the Department of Energy, and the Army Corps of Engineers, as well as two representatives from the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki discussed what should be included in the exhibits.

We discussed the key elements needed to tell the story of the Manhattan Project, including the scientific discoveries, the historical context of World War II, the destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear environmental legacy, and the Cold War and its aftermath. The representatives from the Japanese Atomic Cities were not so interested in discussing those questions that we atomic historians gnaw on—who did what to create these weapons? Did we need to use the bombs on Japan to force its surrender? Why two bombs? The Japanese delegation stated several times with forceful  dignity (and produced letters from their mayors saying the same thing) that they hoped that people would come away from their encounter with the Manhattan Project NHP concluding “Never Again.” Most of us at the table agreed with them. 

As with all new parks, the NPS is now developing an interpretive plan for the Manhattan Project parks which could take several years to finalize. In the meantime, the three communities are exploring their options. For example, Ellen McGhee at Los Alamos showed me a picture of a tunnel used right after World War II to store atomic bombs. She said this might be a place to install an exhibit.

The legacy of the Manhattan Project is manifold. It helped end World War II in August 1945, sparing numerous lives—both Allied military poised to invade Japan’s home islands as well as the Japanese who would resist the invasion. Nuclear weapons then entered the arsenal of some countries at large costs in funding and material. Even today, decades after the end of the Cold War, we spend billions on maintaining our nuclear stockpile. And finally, the environmental legacy of our nuclear production will continue to plague humans and the earth for thousands of years to come.

The Manhattan Project National Historical Parks became part of the NPS on Nov. 9, 2015 with a joint memorandum of understanding between the Departments of Interior and Energy. We will return to these parks in the future when I visit Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. 

Minidoka National Historic Site, near Jerome, Idaho

Minidoka National Historic Site

The reconstructed watchtower at Minidoka NHS (Photo by Hunner)

In south central Idaho, the NPS is restoring a field of dreams. At the site of a World War II internment camp for Japanese-Americans and Japanese residents at Minidoka, NPS staff and volunteers have recently built a baseball field among the worn buildings, the collapsed root cellar, and the crumbling concrete pads that once housed 10,000 “evacuees” who were in fact prisoners of the US government. From August 1942 to October 1945, Japanese and Japanese-Americans from the exclusion zone of Alaska, Washington, and Oregon lived in tar paper buildings and created a community which became self-sufficient. And played baseball.

I visited Minidoka on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. I was surprised by the number of visitors to this isolated rural place. Cars of local people drove up, a group on rugged ATVs stopped by, and many listened to the two Japanese-Americans who had come to remember their past on this weekend of remembrance. Stan Iwakiri had brought his family to visit the site which he does annually. I caught them just as they were leaving. He was three months old when his family got off a train at nearby Eden, rode a bus to Hunt Camp as it was called, and lived for the duration of the war. His father was a logger in the Seattle area and because of Executive Order 9066 signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, got caught in the sixty mile corridor along the Pacific coast  which excluded people of Japanese ethnicity. At the entrance to the historic site, Stan pointed to black lava rock ruins of two adjacent buildings. He said: “One was the police station and the one next door the welcome center.” We exchanged a look, and then we both laughed.

Stan Iwakiri who arrived at Minidoka at the age of 3 months with his family
(Photo by Hunner)

The other Japanese American citizen there on Memorial Sunday asked for anonymity. She was born at Minidoka and invited me to follow her and her friends to the Honor Roll, Block 22, and the baseball field, which she had helped rebuild that weekend.

Minidoka was one of ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps used to carry out the government's system of detention of persons of Japanese ethnicity, mandated by Executive Order 9066. The Order eliminated the constitutional protections for citizens of due process and violated the Bill of Rights. Two-thirds of the 120,000 persons of Japanese descent incarcerated in American concentration camps were American citizens, an act that reflected decades of anti-Japanese discrimination and then war time propaganda.

WRA camps during World War II 

The WRA used Bureau of Reclamation land for this camp. As an instant city, Minidoka by the end of the war was the seventh largest city in Idaho. The Minidoka Relocation Center was a 33,000 acre site with more than 600 buildings. In the spring of 1942, the Morrison-Knudsen Company from Boise received a contract worth $4,626,132 to put up thirty-five residential blocks, each block with twelve barracks. Each 20 x 120 foot barrack had six rooms for families or groups of individuals. Each residential block had a mess hall, a recreation hall, and an H-shaped lavatory building with toilets, showers, and a laundry. The small city also had a 197 bed hospital, a library, two elementary schools, a junior high and a high school with 1,225 students, stores, barber and beauty shops, a watch repair shop, a fish market, sport teams, a recreation hall shared by churches, swing bands, and movies, and two fire stations manned by the internees. Additionally, to provide for the 10,000 internees, the camp had seventeen warehouses, a motor repair shop, and administrative offices. It was in operation from August 1942 until October 1945.

School children at Minidoka (http://historymatters.gmu.edu/)

Wrenched from their homes on short notice and allowed only one or two suitcases, many of these U.S. citizens were in shock when they arrived in Minidoka. As one internee related: “When we first arrived here we almost cried, and thought that this is the land God had forgotten. The vast expanse of nothing but sagebrush and dust, a landscape so alien to our eyes, and a desolate, woebegone feeling of being so far removed from home and fireside bogged us down mentally, as well as physically.”[1]

Unloading from a bus at Minidoka (Courtesy http://arcweb.sos.state.or.us/)

Amazingly, by the fall of 1943, Minidoka was self-sufficient in food production, and even sent excess produce to other WRA camps. The people at Camp Hunt turned a sage brush desert into a cornucopia which that year produced 979,770 pounds of potatoes, 79,325 pounds of carrots, 101,814 pounds of cabbage, and turned out 1,000 eggs a day. The next year, Minidoka harvested 7.3 million pounds of produce. The elders at the camp told others “Shikataga nai,” meaning “There is nothing we can do about it so make the best of it.”

Some of the men in camp enlisted and fought in Europe. These soldiers are recognized at the Honor Roll. Erected among the lava rocks that held a victory garden, the woman who was born at Minidoka showed us the Honor Roll. It was built to acknowledge the young men and women from the camp who served in the military. Despite their and their families’ incarceration at home, Japanese Americans enlisted and fought in Europe and saw some of the bloodiest action in the Italian campaign. In fact, Minidoka had the highest percentage of internees from the ten camps to serve in the military. The Japanese American U.S. Army unit, the 442^nd  Regiment, also earned the most medals of any unit its size with 9,486 Purple Hearts. The Honor Roll at the entrance to Minidoka pays tribute to those who fought and died for a country who had incarcerated them.

The Honor Roll (Photo by Hunner)

One of the ways to make the “best of it” was through playing baseball. Baseball and softball offered an escape for some of the over 10,000 people who lived at Minidoka. Samuel O. Regalado's book Nikkei Baseball states:  ”To the evacuee, sport was not an ‘innocuous aspect of life’; it was an essential component to their mental and emotional survival in the camps.” Local baseball coverage in the camp newspaper rivaled stories about their fellow Japanese Americans in combat.

Newly rebuilt Baseball diamond (Photo by Hunner)

Soon after they arrived, internees started playing ball. Fields sprang up around the Minidoka camp, and youngsters and adults of both sexes hit the diamonds. The camp paper, the Minidoka Irrigator, reported on September 11, 1943: "Yup! Old man baseball reigns supreme among our dads and have helped make life in this camp more pleasant for him. Without the game, he'd be lost and idleness would reign supreme instead of baseball. They also did a swell job in providing some exciting games for us and their sportsmanship and spirit were tops. Hats off to our 'old men’."  That same month, the newspaper reported that young women had organized into softball teams representing their home towns of Portland and Seattle and played against each other. The newly rebuilt baseball diamond recalls an essential part of life at Camp Hunt and evokes its own field of dreams.

Incarcerating U.S. citizens because of their ethnicity violated their constitutional rights. Targeting any citizens, whether they are European-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Native-Americans, Mexican-Americans, or Muslim-Americans denies their rights and harms our country. The diversity of the United States makes us stronger, not weaker, and succumbing to demagoguery because of a national emergency or a political campaign undermines our Constitution and our nation’s ideals. Our best idea, and we have had many, is the declaration that all men are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To subvert those rights threatens our best idea.

Minidoka National Historic Site was created in 2001.

Minidoka's FIeld of Dreams (Photo by Hunner)

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[1] Emory Andrews Collection.