Confused & Unprepared

Realizing for the first time the dire possibility of air raids on their country, the U.S. people acted like hens in a barnyard at the rumble of a sudden summer storm. Some were apathetic and carefree, some panic-stricken, many more earnest and eager to be helpful. Everywhere was a great cackling. Little hen-shaped Fiorello LaGuardia, head of the Office of Civilian Defense, glared out over a U.S. that was mostly confused and unprepared.

President Roosevelt flung the Little Flower into OCD last spring. Mr. LaGuardia set up regional councils, which did their best to start State and local councils. All were volunteer groups. About all OCD could do was provide blueprints and fatherly advice.

Its headquarters was in a commandeered apartment house in Washington. Last September, Mrs. Roosevelt, who had been faintly critical, moved in as assistant director. Young (21), dimpled Jane Seaver, dew-fresh out of Mt. Holyoke, was appointed to the task of organizing youth. Other lady colleagues moved in. Mrs. Henry Morgenthau Jr., perched next to Mrs. Roosevelt, mysteriously shuffled papers, kept mum. The Little Flower flapped his wings, screeched orders, left behind many a moist hanky clenched in an angry fist.

"Prolonged Study." Most apathetic spot in the country was the territory served by isolationist Chicago Tribune, where the Tribune's editorials and Charles Augustus Lindbergh's shrill "they can't touch us" had all but drowned out OCD's weak little toot. Last week the Midwest had just begun to yawn and stretch. In Wisconsin it was announced that plans for civilian defense were going to be given "prolonged study." St. Louis declared that it would get around this week to enrolling some 50,000 volunteers which it figured it might need.

The West Coast, while civilian defense was still operating, was a military area (see p. 9). Along the East Coast, where confusion was as thick as anywhere, a horrible example was Mayor LaGuardia's own New York City. City Hall, where the Little Flower was trying to be mayor of the nation's biggest city while he was also heading OCD, was in an uproar. Workmen piled into the mayor's offices, tore up floors, laid wires, erected parti tions. Women in blue-grey uniforms, brass buttons and gold epaulets snapped salutes at one another and the mayor, twinkled off in all directions with Mr. LaGuardia's orders.

Plans for blackouts were made, announced, called off. The mayor said it would "take 27,000 men or women to turn off by hand the street lights. . . . There are 27,000 separate switches." The Board of Estimate appropriated $25,000 for sirens. One horn was tried. Citizens a few blocks away, anxiously listening, heard nothing but a faint moo. Most people heard nothing.

"This is Serious." Air-raid meetings were attended by gay, lighthearted volunteers. At a meeting in an uptown Manhattan high school, citizens giggled at an expert who tried to explain how to blackout streets. Muttered a sad-faced, sad-voiced Frenchman: "How can they laugh? This is serious." Backstreet toughies kidded earnest women block wardens until the tearful and embarrassed women gave up their jobs.

Advice was obscure and contradictory. Skyscraper dwellers were no sooner given the comfortable assurance that they were safe within steel and concrete walls so long as they stayed on floors four down from the top or four up from the bottom than Harry M. Prince, OCD consultant, declared that 98 1/2% of New York City's buildings would be unsafe, that no building was "bomb-proof." School authorities were first advised to send children home at the first warning of a raid, later told to keep pupils in school, off the streets.

Most elaborate--sometimes over-elaborate--jobs of preparing for civilian defense were under way in New England and New Jersey's suburbs, where small towns had taken affairs into their own hands. There local civilian defense councils had organized men & women into first aid, feeding, fire fighting, decontamination, salvage and emergency police units, air-raid wardens, messengers, even intelligence divisions. Serious small townsmen practiced pistol shooting, sniffed gas, spelled each other through 24-hour days watching for airplanes and flashing reports of everything in the skies to Army Information centers.

But even in New England and New Jersey, the program was confused, uncoordinated. In isolated communities, far from dense, industrial targets, women drove furiously around in motor caravans, practiced jumping into fire nets. Energy was scattered in all directions. Unwieldy and sometimes senseless organizations were set up.

Many a critic decided last week that the Little Flower, who already had a lot of eggs under him, had been asked to hatch one that was just too big for him.

To Walter Lippmann, "Mrs. Roosevelt's talent for sugar-coating the matter with all manner of fads, fancies, homilies and programs which would have been appropriate to the activities of an excited village improvement society" and the "desk-thumping, the shrill appeals, the threats and warnings" of Mayor LaGuardia were not appropriate to the "grim business" of civilian defense. It should all be put under the jurisdiction of the War Department, said Mr. Lippmann. "The facts of the situation, and the morale of the people require lucid and authoritative commands." Mrs. Roosevelt should stop confusing everyone by being a minor official in her husband's Government. Mr. LaGuardia "should resign as soon as his successor can be found and installed in the office." Indications were that Mr. Roosevelt thought so too, was getting ready to pluck the Little Flower from OCD.

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