A long war, from Pearl Harbor to victory celebrations downtown: Revisiting St. Louis history

People alive back then remember vividly what they were doing when the word flashed. For the next three years and nine months, their lives would be consumed by World War II. In our history, only the Civil War compares in daily intensity. Certainly, nothing since 1945 has come close.

That afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941, moviegoers booed newsreels showing Japanese diplomats in Washington. Attendance plunged that evening as everyone stayed home, riveted around radios.

The next day, crowds gathered before loudspeakers at the U.S. Custom House (Old Post Office) downtown to hear President Franklin Roosevelt’s address to Congress. Hundreds of hot-blooded young men mobbed recruiting stations. More than 400 applied for the Navy, 40 times the daily average.

FBI agents tracked down 50 Japanese nationals living in the St. Louis area and arrested Tetsu Uyeda, manager of the Bridlespur Hunt Club. National Guard soldiers watched bridges and airports. At Jefferson Barracks, a jumpy sentry fired upon a dairy truck. He missed the driver.

TWO FLYBOY HEROES

War news was grim in those early months. Allied navies were shellacked in the Java Sea. American soldiers in the Philippines retreated to Corregidor Island.

The St. Louis Board of Aldermen renamed the Municipal Bridge in honor of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, but Americans needed more to cheer for.

On Feb. 20, 1942, Navy pilot Edward “Butch” O’Hare, who grew up in south St. Louis, shot down five Japanese bombers while defending the carrier USS Lexington in his stubby Wildcat fighter. The Navy rushed him home as a tonic to America. He and his wife, Rita, a former nurse at DePaul Hospital on North Kingshighway, met in the White House with Roosevelt, who awarded him the Medal of Honor.

On April 25, the O’Hares rode downtown to a joyful ticker-tape parade. Thousands jammed the sidewalks downtown, shouting “Atta boy, Eddie.” The Post-Dispatch report the next day ran four pages.

A week before the parade, Army Lt. Col. James “Jimmy” Doolittle flew the first of 16 B-25 bombers from the carrier USS Hornet, heading for Tokyo. Their bombs didn’t do much damage, but the attack was electric news in America. The boys had slugged back.

California-born Doolittle and his family lived during the 1930s at 4 Beverly Place, near Delmar and Union boulevards, while he was aviation director for Shell Oil Co. downtown.

O’Hare was killed in action in 1943. In 1949, Chicago named its airport in his honor. Doolittle, also a Medal of Honor recipient, returned to St. Louis for a victory parade after the war.

DOING SOMETHING

Eligible men and women joined the military. Local factories hummed in war production, providing jobs after the long Depression. But civilians still wanted to take part.

Many joined the Office of Civil Defense. They watched the sky for enemy bombers — a silly if therapeutic exercise, given that German and Japanese planes couldn’t reach the American coasts. They practiced extinguishing bomb fires, ran air-raid drills and sponsored a demonstration in Forest Park with an “attack” by old Army biplanes. They also organized a big “blackout” on Dec. 14, 1942, when all city exterior lights were doused.

“A blackout at sea was never like this,” said sailor John Sizemore, enjoying a darkened Washington Avenue tavern with Joy Conley.

MAKING DO FOR THE BOYS

Everything, it seemed, went for the war effort. Rationing began in spring 1942 with strict limits on sugar and tires. It was expanded to gasoline on Dec. 1 and then to most foods. Factories turned out jeeps and rifles, not cars or refrigerators.

In October 1942, an army of 150,000 kids in St. Louis and St. Louis County scoured their neighborhoods for the national scrap-metal drive. Schools competed and brought in 7,658 tons of cans, bed frames, iron sinks and stoves. Joann Weber at Richmond Heights School earned credit for a steel safe from an old family business.

It all went into furnaces, producing metal for some of the 18,000 Liberator bombers and 4 million Garand rifles the nation would produce.

By spring 1943, the federal Office of Price Administration allotted rationing points for a long list of meat, dairy, cooking fats and other foodstuffs, even baby food. Families shopped with ration stamps. If they grumbled, it didn’t make the newspapers.

PRODUCTION INCREASES

Local factories already had begun switching to war output before Pearl Harbor. The federal government seized land quickly for a massive small-arms ammunition plant at 4300 Goodfellow Boulevard and a high-explosives works in rural Weldon Spring to make charges for shells and bombs.

The plant on Goodfellow employed nearly 35,000, many of them women, and produced 6.7 billion rifle and machine-gun rounds by 1945. Bus routes were marked simply “Cartridge Plant.”

Emerson Electric Co. converted its new plant in Ferguson to build bomber turrets. General Motors Corp. on Union Boulevard made 105 mm cannon. St. Louis Car Co. in Baden, maker of subway cars, built amphibious attack vehicles called amtracs. General Steel Co. in Granite City cast tank armor. Magic Chef Co., a stovemaker on Kingshighway, made drop tanks for fighter planes. Jackes-Evans Co., near Penrose Park, stamped millions of metal links for machine-gun belts.

Robertson Aircraft Corp., at Lambert Field, built Army gliders. On Aug. 1, 1943, a demonstration flight of dignitaries crashed at the airport, killing Mayor William Dee Becker and nine others.

At Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. on the north side, workers processed a mysterious substance known as uranium. Nobody knew why.

WE WANT TO HELP

Throughout the war, the American military was segregated by race, with Black workers generally consigned to support.

Many war plants also practiced segregation, limiting many Black workers to maintenance and porter jobs.

On Aug. 14, 1942, more than 9,000 people gathered at Municipal (later Kiel) Auditorium to demand more participation.

Theodore McNeal, a Sleeping Car Porters official and future state senator, said, “We resent the Jim Crow setup in the armed forces and war industry.”

Black protestors marched at the Cartridge Plant and at Carter Carburetor Co., which made artillery fuses. But factory integration moved slowly.

THE COST

Each day, newspapers ran lists of the killed, missing, wounded and decorated, allotting each person a paragraph. Accompanying round-up stories were mug shots of smiling men in uniform.

A typical day was July 21, 1944, when Post-Dispatch Page 3B carried the headline, “Four from this Area are Killed in Action,” They were Earl Flanery, 22, a bomber gunner missing over Germany, confirmed dead; Edgar Forster, 26, and Marvin White, 23, killed in action in New Guinea; and John Gantner Jr., 21, killed in action in France. The day’s article reported nine others missing in action, most of them aviators; 13 wounded; two dead of previous wounds; and one confirmed prisoner of war.

By war’s end, more than 2,550 St. Louis-area men would die in military service.

VICTORY AT LAST

Celebration ensued on May 8, 1945, when Germany’s surrender was announced, but war still raged in the Pacific. A weary population braced for a ghastly invasion of Japan. Then came headlines of atomic bombs exploding over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compliments of the mystery matter from Mallinckrodt. When President Harry Truman confirmed Japan’s surrender on Aug. 14, downtown erupted.

Conga lines shuffled through tossed paper on Olive Street. People banged washboards, cans, anything to make a racket. Soldiers from Jefferson Barracks rushed to the fun. At Soldiers Memorial, an Army band played all night. Young women even kissed Mayor Aloys Kaufmann.

At 5228 Wilson Avenue, the family of Sgt. Ernest Pedroli, who had survived, tapped two kegs on the sidewalk for any stranger wandering by.

Doolittle returned to Lambert Field in a B-25 on Nov. 12 to lead a parade downtown. Behind him marched 10,000 soldiers and veterans and 54 bands. It went on for two joyous hours.