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Chapter 14 – Davenport’s World War II and Its Aftermath

Hanging over the United States for much of the 1930s had been the long shadow of Adolph Hitler’s rise in Germany and the ever-more present threat of a European war.[1]   Yet, even after Germany took over Austria, Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland, our country’s isolationists and American First-ers remained strong and determined

Part of the problem was the feeling that the Atlantic Ocean would protect the United States from even the most horrifying events in Europe.  Part was for many Americans the continuing trauma of the Great Depression, and part had been a growing disillusionment with the earlier hype, sacrifices and ultimate “failure” of World War I and its aftermath.  Franklin Roosevelt’s second inaugural address, in January 1937, did not even mention foreign affairs.[2]  The US Congress passed three Neutrality Acts in succession, 1935, 1936, and 1937, prohibiting the sale of arms and ammunition to any warring powers.  As late as January 1937, seventy percent of the American public—an astoundingly high number—thought that it had been a mistake for the United States to have fought in World War I.[3]

 Nevertheless, under the careful but cautious prodding of President Roosevelt the United States began to rearm and to step up its industrial production for the benefit of France and Britain.  Shortly after France fell in the spring of 1940, Congress permitted Great Britain to have fifty aging (but refurbished) destroyers in exchange of U.S. base rights in British possessions.  Italy joined the war in June 1940 on the side of Germany and soon extended fighting to British Somaliland—the later Somaliland— and Egypt.  Later a huge flow of vital supplies began under the “lend-lease” program.  The United States even began patrolling against German U-boats on the American side of the Atlantic.  These actions to support the Europeans marked the true beginning-of-the-end of our own Great Depression.

In Davenport, even before direct U.S. involvement, one or two young men talked of joining others who were enlisting in the Canadian airforce. 

World War II comes to America, and Davenport.  Few of these events in far-off lands seem to have been widely noticed in Davenport. 

In July 1939 the town agreed to be responsible financially for each fire company called out.  Much attention was focused on the new Route 23 being rebuilt and repaved between Stamford and Davenport Center.  (Interstate-88 was still far in the future.)  The town was beginning to adjust to the closing of its small neighborhood schools and to the new school busses taking former students to the just completed central school.  There must have been some improvement in town finances to afford the upsurge in road equipment purchases from 1938 onward, and dairy prices seem to have been recovering from their recent lows.  It is also likely that the nation’s rearmament activities, affecting both Oneonta and Sidney, were attracting many commuting workers from Davenport.

George Adams, reviewing Oneonta Star microfilm[4] accounts of the early war days for the Davenport Historical Society, was “struck by how matter-of-factly the news from Europe was reported.”

 

“Germany’s taking of Poland in 1939 merited a mere four columns next to the gutter and above the fold.” Adams continued.  “In 1940, the Third Reich overran Denmark, Norway and France, and began attacking Britain…Yugoslavia and Greece were overrun, and Hitler attacked Russia.  All this was duly reported calmly and without apparent alarm, along with the news of the day, politics, milk prices, and crime.  That was The Star’s typical front page until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December seventh, 1941.  The seventh was a Sunday, and The Star did not publish.  Monday, however, the front page changed dramatically.  The aftermath of the sneak attack was trumpeted three lines deep, in seventy-two point type, across the page.”  (George Adams, “Pre-WWII Davenport,” Nov. 15, 2001, typewritten.)

Intimate awareness of the flames in Europe had come to Davenport when the nation’s new draft law began to be implemented in the early autumn of 1940.  The law called for the registration of all males between the ages of 21 and 35, later extended to ages 18-45 for inductees.  (All males to age 65 had to register.)  By the time that World War II ended in 1945, about 270 of Davenport males would have fallen into the 18-45 age group.  More than one-half of that total were to serve in the armed forces.  In the country as a whole, eight out of ten men of draft age enrolled in the armed forces during World War II, according to a study quoted in Paterson (1996).[5] 

Even our earliest days in the war had locally little direct impact.  Most in Davenport and the United States above a certain age can today respond precisely and without hesitation to the question, “Where were you and what were you doing when you heard the news of Pearl Harbor?”  This would certainly have been true in later years for Davenport’s Town Board members at the time, George M. Hillis (Supervisor), Carrie Barnes (Town Clerk), and justices of the peace Ralph Every, George Fitzpatrick, Lewis Nelson, and Arthur Rice.  Yet at the time, the outbreak of war made no new demands upon the town.  The town fathers met on December 29 and 30, 1941, and in four pages of minutes there is no mention of being at war.[6]  (Perhaps no particular surprise.  World War I or its domestic repercussions were never mentioned in the Town Board minutes of 1914-1919.)

The first mention of official involvement did not come until June 4 of the following year when Elmer Moore, the long-serving Superintendent of Highways, was authorized to sign rationing documents for the town.  Sugar and gas rationing began that year, followed later by an outright ban on pleasure driving.[7]  Coffee, butter, shoes, canned goods and meat soon required ration coupons.  Millions of Americans for the first time learned to enjoy sweetbreads, Spam and Philadelphia scrapple.  The Federal government imposed price controls and wage ceiling as well as excess profit taxes and a freeze of wages.  Boy Scouts helped collect metal scrap, old tires, newspapers, and toothpaste tubes.  In Davenport and throughout the country Victory Gardens were planted to supplement scarce food supplies.

 

 

One hundred and fifty Davenport men and women went to war.  This was from a town whose 1940 population was only 1,240.  There were five Davenport deaths: Clifford Beers, Harry D. Jaymes, Warren H. Quigley, Thomas LeRoy Squaires, and Sidney Utter.  Others were wounded.  Horace K. Dunham was a prisoner of war.  Four members from the Ray Edick family served: two sons, Howard and Clarence, daughter, Nina, and Clarence’s wife, Nellie.[8]

 Frederick Buck, one of four sons to serve from that family, logged 750 hours flying over the Himalayas between India and China.  He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals.   Herbert D. Hebbard served on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific.  Crawford Douglass trained with a medical regiment and participated in a number of famous island invasions in the Pacific theater.  Donald Haight saw D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and other actions in Europe.  Robert White ended up in Australia as a statistical control office while Kurt Neunzig, one of two brothers to serve, put his Pine Lake and professional swimming experiences to work as a safety and swimming instructor, teaching water survival skills to downed pilots.  (This is merely an illustrative list of wartime actions by Davenport men and women.  It is limited to those veterans who were available to discuss their experiences at two Davenport Historical Society meetings in 1989.)

While the European activities in World War II had many similarities to those of World War I, for the United States the two conflicts were totally different.  The U.S. entered WWII (but not WWI) feeling directly threatened and grimly determined to avenge its violated shores.  There were few of the flag-waving and band-playing “marching-off-to-war” ceremonies of World War I.  The U.S. suffered through gloomy days of high casualties and the destruction of half its fleet.  Immediately after Pearl Harbor there were little or no naval defenses standing between Japan and the U.S. West Coast.  Citizens became air raid wardens and spotters.

Davenport authorized the purchase of “suitable sirens” for its Air Raid Wardens although only one seems to have been installed.[9]  The Charlotte Valley Central School held air raid drills and offered classes in civilian defense work, particularly in first aid and nutrition.[10]  In February 1944, it also closed “for the rest of the week” because of a coal shortage.[11]

 The other big difference for the United States from World War I was the intensity and scope of our own involvement:

 

By the end of 1943 we were spending money at five times the peak rate of World War I… New Plants were built, and built fast.  The entire automobile industry was diverted from the manufacture of passenger cars into the production of tanks, trucks and weapons.  All manner of new products and devices were assigned to American plants to produce in a hurry—ranging from synthetic rubber to radar, from landing ships to proximity fuses, from atabrine and penicillin and DDT to the Manhattan Project for the atomic bomb.  Always the call from Washington was for speed, speed, speed, and for quantity.  (Allen, 1952, 166-7.)

Frederick Lewis Allen then concludes, “American industry had achieved probably the most extraordinary increase in production that had ever been accomplished in five years in all economic history.”[12]

 For the U.S., the scope of our armed forces involvement in World War II was in most cases at least three times that of the previous World War.   This was true of the months of the nation’s fighting, the number of inducted draftees (10 million vs. 2.8 million), the total number of military personnel (16.4 million vs. 4.7 million), the average months that service personnel served overseas during hostilities (16.2 vs. 5.5 months), and the death and wounded totals.  For deaths in battle, the total WWII numbers exceeded the 3:1 ratio.  World War II deaths came to over five times those in WWI though the numbers per person serving were sharply lower.  As a portion of total personnel in each war, the WWII percentages were also higher, 1.8 percent for that war versus 1.1 percent for WWI.[13]

 

 

Davenport civilians soldier on.  While sons, daughters and husbands were in uniforms around the world, those remaining in Davenport were contributing in more ways than tightening their belts, collecting scrap, and conducting air raid drills.  Even before America’s involvement in the war, defense industries had been sending out their calls for workers.  Men were soon in short supply, and women welded ships’ plate and operated assembly lines.  In Sidney, Scintilla Magneto, in WWII a division of Bendix Aviation Corporation, had begun operations with 12 employees in 1924.  By 1942, the crucial need for wartime engines had increased its work force to 4000.  Women’s wages started at 35 cents, men at 50 cents per hour.[14]  Large numbers of employees came from Davenport and Emmons.

Enterprising drivers such as Harry Beams of East Meredith bought large station wagons to transport workers for a fee to Sidney.  Others operated routes to Schenectady (where General Electric was by then clamoring for workers) and elsewhere.  Many new businesses opened to serve the wartime economy.  Locally, Linn Corporation (coaches, trailers, and powered front drive units for semi-trailers) became an important defense employer and assisted the depression-recovery momentum of the surrounding economy.  Most of the war-related plants hired men and women for three shifts a day.

The Breakstone Brothers in Walton opened an egg powdering plant, shipping each day three freight cars of their product to U.S. Army bases, the equivalent of 8,000 pounds of liquid eggs.  There were many other wartime employers, some lasting longer than others.  Many women worked in the Mica Plant in Oneonta.  Nella Reynolds worked in the Oneonta Glove Company, Alice More worked in a dress factory (the Oneonta Manufacturing Company), and Luthera Briggs worked in an Oneonta overall factory.  Many other local women worked outside the home.

After December 1941 the daily crises in Europe and the Far East meant listening to Edward R. Morrow from London and reading dispatches appearing in the Oneonta, Stamford, and Bloomville newspapers. Males over 17 had registered for possible duty.  Names were chosen by lottery, selective service boards met, and lists of inductees began appearing in the local papers.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt broadcast his wartime “Fireside Chats,” families listening to the war statistics in silent contemplation, a moment in every home of quiet and complete concentration.  Davenport listened.  Davenport residents gave full measure.

Organizations and committees took on the local responsibility for preparing blackout curtains while wardens were appointed to ensure compliance.  Watchers from blacked-out posts searched the night skies for enemy planes.  One such observation post, manned by volunteers, was built atop a Meridale milkhouse.  Every town held public defense meetings.  A Davenport meeting of January 4, 1942, watched the war film, “The Crossroads of the Pacific.”

Groups of women gathered in the evenings to knit helmets and gloves for airmen.  Those less skillful produced miles of knitted bandages.  Women took classes to learn how to change a tire and to do simple automotive repairs.

 

 

The end of WWII and afterwards.   After many bloody battles in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy, and after months of careful planning and ingenious attempts to deceive the waiting Germans, the Allies at last invaded Normandy with a mighty armament on D-Day, June 6, 1944.  The end of the European war was in sight, although subject to discouraging setbacks such as the fearsome German counterattack in December of that year.  The “Battle of the Bulge” produced worried headlines for much of two months and left the Allies with 77,000 fresh casualties.  Then on April 12 of 1945 Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage.  He had provided hope and spirit during the dark days of the war, and his death came as a tragic and personal blow to most Americans.  Finally, just fifty-five days after FDR’s death, Germany at last surrendered.  The end of the war in Europe on “V-E Day” was truly a joyous event.  There was dancing in the city streets.

The war in the Pacific ground on, but with the destruction of Hiroshima on August 6 by an atomic bomb and Nagasaki three days later, Japan quickly capitulated.  V-J Day on August 14 brought another round of wild celebrations and the long-awaited promise of service men and women returning home to joyful reunions and a world truly at peace.

The upside of the war for Davenport had been the recovering economy.  It was in part from the new jobs in industry, especially those providing work for an additional family wage earner.  But it was also a time of a remarkable agricultural upturn.  Wholesale farm prices for milk in the U.S. rose from $1.69 a hundredweight in 1939 to $3.21 in 1944.  Nor did prices cease rising after the war’s end, continuing upward to a peak of $4.85 a hundredweight in 1952.[15]  The farmers in the postwar period benefited when wartime price controls were relaxed.  Costs went up too, but dairy farmers were still better off than they had been at the end of the 1930s.

A more subtle change came about through the sheer physical movement and experience of so many Davenport men and woman in other places, whether Schenectady or North Africa, and in other occupations, whether operating a drill press or flying the “hump.”  These were transforming experiences, and life for many in Davenport would never be the same thereafter.

These changes did not stop with the coming of peace, and one of the biggest adventures (and opportunities) came with postwar veterans’ benefits, the famous GI Bill of 1944.  This bill provided a year’s unemployment benefits, technical training, and help with home buying.  (See sidebar.)  It created an educational boom from trade schools to colleges.  “Colleges and universities were nearly swamped… The influx jolted faculty and administrators who had to reach out beyond the predominantly upper-middle-class-young people whom they previously had served, to deal with older students, to offer married housing, to accelerate instruction, and to provide a range of more practical, career-oriented courses.”[16]

From the fire to the frying pan: the Cold War.  But there was to be no true peace.  The United States and the Soviet Union had been uncomfortable allies during the war and emerged from the war as wary, and sometimes snarling, competitors.  In many ways the tensions of the Cold War, especially after the USSR developed the atomic (1949) and hydrogen (1953) bombs, were more personally frightening times for many Americans than had been World War II itself.  This time it was nuclear annihilation rather than an occasional offshore U-boat that inspired nightmares.  Some homeowners built and stocked bomb shelters.

First came the Soviet takeover of what became known as Eastern Europe and then the lowering of the Iron Curtain.  The British passed along to the U.S. the responsibility for defending Greece and Turkey.  America responded with the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and ultimately the creation of NATO.  A new crisis loomed in 1948 with the isolation of Berlin and the long struggle to maintain the Allied presence there and eventually, in the 1970s, to relieve the Berlin Blockade. 

Already in 1947, tensions had led the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover to brand the U.S. Communist Party (still legal) as a subversive “fifth column.”  The first of two modern witch-hunts began, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).  By 1951, “more than 2,000 government employees had resigned and 212 were dismissed.”[18][19]

This anxiety over subversives in our midst produced what Prof. Reeves termed the “Great Fear…felt in virtually all walks of American life.  Untold numbers of Americans lost their jobs, their reputations, their freedom, even their citizenship… Loyalty oaths were required of millions.  ‘Subversive’ literature was banned and destroyed in untold numbers of local libraries.  In 1949, thirty-eight states had general sedition laws and twenty-two states required oaths of allegiance for teachers…”[20]

Beginning in 1950, the formidable Senator Joseph McCarthy became the leading campaigner against the potential evil doers amongst us.  He proved extraordinarily adept at listing the numbers of Reds to be found in high and sensitive places, but he also proved singularly inept at substantiating his charges.  He and others were nevertheless more than successful in rousing the country and instilling at least a “great fear” throughout much of the nation.

In Davenport, as had been the case in previous times, the effects of national strain were hardly noticed.  There were not many Reds to be found in town, or even in neighboring communities.  Subversive literature was not seen as a problem in the CVCS library.  The inhabitants of Davenport were comfortably distant from the Communism fears elsewhere.

And then, at the beginning of what was soon to be called “McCarthyism,” on June 24, 1950, came the Korean War.  The North Koreans, a Communist state after the Soviet withdrawal from Korea in 1948, invaded the South.  The United States was able to arouse the United Nations in South Korea’s defense only because the Russians with their Security Council veto had been boycotting the UN.  That war, far from being cold, led to the mobilization of more US military personnel than in World War I—although resulting in only half the number of WWI casualties.  (US Bureau of Census, 1960, 735).  The war lasted for three years, until the cease-fire of July 1953.

Several young men from Davenport and East Meredith were soon called to the Korean War.  A number of local men enlisted or were already in military uniform, and the Selective Service Law was still in effect.  Here are three who did not return.

Corporal Marshall VanHoesen was killed in action in Korea on August 13, 1950.  He was the son of Isaac VanHoesen of Davenport and served in the Tank Division of the 5th Infantry.  Corporal VanHoesen had served five years in World War II stationed in Hawaii.  He was survived by his brothers Lee and Alfred and a sister, Mrs. Robert Conklin.

Pfc. Brice Cargin on January 15, 1951, was killed in action in Korea.  Pfc. Cargin was born July 4, 1926, the son of Gilbert and Elizabeth (Brownell) Cargin of East Meredith.  He graduated in 1949 from Manlius Military Academy and enlisted on April 2 of that year, seeing service in Guam and Korea.  His father had been severely wounded in battle during World War II.

W. Robert Burns was born on Quaker Hill, Davenport, February 1, 1930, and graduated from Charlotte Valley Central School in 1947.  He moved to Philadelphia and in 1949 enlisted in the Army where he was assigned to the Engineers’ School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.  He died in guerrilla warfare in the Philippine Islands, January 29, 1951, another victim of the pervasive and far-flung “Cold War.”

Still more wars and conflicts.  In the fifty years after the end of the war in Korea, the United States maintained an active role in disputes around the globe.  It invaded Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), sent troops to Lebanon (1958), Iran (1979), Somalia (1992) and Haiti (1994-96), dropped bombs on Kosovo and Serbia (1999), and fought short-lived battles in Iraq (1990-91 and again in 2003-04) and Afghanistan (2002).  Davenport men have participated in the bombing of Libya and have served in Saudi Arabia (Stephen Johnson) and in Afghanistan (Jason Waid and Jurgen Schuman).

The conflict causing the most domestic trauma was the protracted struggle in Vietnam.

During Lyndon Johnson’s early years in the White House, as had been true for most post-WWII presidents, foreign affairs were not a priority.  Vietnam had seemed an insoluble problem.  The French had tried to reassert their colonial authority after World War II and for nine years until their defeat in 1954 had been involved in ugly guerrilla warfare with the League for the Independence of Vietnam, the Viet Minh.  After about 1950 as part of its evolving Cold War strategy, the U.S. began to support the French and by 1954 was paying about 80% of the French war costs.  The country was divided after the French defeat into North and South Vietnam, but civil conflict led finally to the U.S. sending a small contingent of troops, under President Kennedy in 1961, to support the South.

Pressure grew on President Johnson to resolve the conflict, and a controversial 1954 incident in the Gulf of Tonkin provided an excuse for a full-scale war effort without ever actually declaring war.  Johnson greatly increased America’s troop involvement in what soon became a nightmare struggle with shadowy but well-led forces of the, by now, communist Viet Mihn of North Vietnam.  The undeclared war ultimately extended to the secret bombing of neighboring Cambodia.  It led to increasingly strident protests at home and abroad, to the 1960’s era of unrest and turmoil among America’s youth, and to President Johnson’s decision not to seek a second term. The conflict ended with the withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces following a peace agreement in January 1973.  More than 47,000 Americans died in the conflict[21], as did more than a million Vietnamese from the south and the north.[22]  All involved would bear scars for a long time in the first war that the United States could not claim to have won. 

As with McCarthyism, the turmoil in the rest of the country seemed to have had little effect on the youths of Davenport—although some of their parents began to question sending their children off to fight on the other side of the world.  There were student protests in Albany.  Four thousand angry protestors showed up on the steps of the capitol, leading the redoubtable Senator Edwyn E. Mason, of such help to Davenport in the recent great dam fight, to call for “much deeper” cuts than he had originally favored in the State University system.  “If this is the level of education our schools are giving,” then the Senator said they should have their budgets trimmed even more.  In an earlier interview, Mason suggested that the state consider closing the State University system.[23]

 

 

In Oneonta, there were at least two student demonstrations against the war.  After the May 4, 1970, killings by the National Guard of four students at Kent State, 2000 students marched through the streets and afterwards picketed classes at the State University College at Oneonta.  A number of SUCO faculty members also joined the student strike.  On May 6, the SUCO faculty adapted a strong anti-war resolution, calling on President Nixon to immediately end the war.[24]  Two years later, on May 19, 1972, students took to the Oneonta streets to protest resumed bombing of Vietman and the mining of the North Vietnamese port of Haiphong.[25]

Many local young men served in the conflict.  Lawrence W. Breitnitz of Fergusonville was inducted into the Army in July 1967, and went through the Non-Commissioned Officers Candidate School in Fort Benning, Georgia.  He left for Vietnam in July 1968.  Sgt. Breitnitz, age 21, died in a Vietnam hospital on September 24, 1968, of a bullet wound in the stomach.  It was the second time he had been wounded.[26] 

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