All in Fun

The tanned young men were strangers in those parts. Some carried bulky paper bags. The pockets of their civvies sagged with hidden burdens. All day they appeared in steadily increasing numbers on the streets. The good people of Anderson, S.C. (pop. 19,424) tried not to notice the strangers, but like them could not suppress an occasional grin. Everybody knew what was coming, but nearly everybody was excited.

At 7:30 that evening, it came. Factory whistles whuffed and screamed. Warning bombs exploded. From their paper bags and pockets, the young men snatched Army forage caps, cartridge belts, pistols. In prearranged squads, they converged on Radio Station WAIM, on the airport, the courthouse, the light plant, the water works. Down Main Street, from both ends, uniformed troops marched into the city, laid out 18 smoke pots which soon had Anderson in a dimming fog, also had newscameramen cursing an excess of realism. In the night sky a lone plane circled, dropped portentous pink warnings to the citizens of Anderson.

At 7:40, his face browned with suntan grease paint, the resplendently uniformed commander of the invaders strode into City Hall, arrested Mayor William C. Johnston. Waggling false sideburns and moustache, "General W. B. Squarehead" then reviewed his goose-stepping troops, parodied a Nazi conqueror's speech to 2,000 townsmen, farmers, children. The Anderson Daily Mail published a Blitz Extra with a creepy proclamation sup pressing civil rights, demanding hostages, imposing penalties for any & all opposition "in a manner fitting to the offense."

It was all in fun. It was also good training for 1,200 R.O.T.C. cadets who were boning for Army commissions at nearby Clemson College. For the placid folk of Anderson, it was a demonstration of nonexistent home defense (75 "Home Guards" were captured, immobilized in the first minutes of the Blitz). And some where in the world of 1941, with no fooling, it was happening every day.

Fading Flower? The job of making Anderson and the whole U.S. conscious of home defense belongs to New York's Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, one of whose three jobs is National Director of Civilian Defense. Consensus of Washington official dom is that on this job the Little Flower has faded. As a national leader, charged with building and bolstering national morale, other defense officials in Washington rate Mr. LaGuardia a good air-raid warden.

In voicing the judgment, the Mayor's critics saddled on him a responsibility which belonged first of all to his boss, President Roosevelt. They also overlooked the great wall of civilian inertia which Director LaGuardia had to surmount. Aside from his own irritating impetuosities, Fiorello LaGuardia's worst handicap last week was the fact that for millions in the U.S. World War II was still no nearer than Charles Lindbergh and Senator Wheeler said it was.

Near Mr. LaGuardia's own Manhattan, in Suffolk County, L.I., a black-out practice was postponed until fall, because it might interfere with vacation business. In Philadelphia's suburban Whitemarsh a policeman, a horse breeder, a groom, a couple of factory hands had organized a mounted home-defense troop. Last week they had disbanded, at least for the summer--nobody was interested any longer, horsed parashots seemed slightly absurd anyhow. Everything considered, it was a triumph for Director LaGuardia when in three weeks 50,000 of New York City's 7,000,000 citizens registered for air-raid precaution duty.

Small Beginnings. On the Eastern seaboard, nearest to Europe's hell, there was a real beginning of real home-defense organization. New York City police and firemen have been schooled in fighting bomb fires, preventing or controlling mass panic, combating gas. In addition to volunteer air-raid wardens, 15,000 auxiliary police and 60,000 auxiliary firemen are being enrolled for emergency duty. But even on Director LaGuardia's home base, there were no public bomb shelters (excepting unsafe basements and subways), none of the thousands of sand-buckets, mobile pumps, other elemental apparatus necessary for effective A.R.P. work. Congress had shown no interest whatever in putting up the $4,000,000 which minimum equipment for New York City alone would cost. The city's best air-raid warden was still the Atlantic.

In New Jersey, where arsenals, shipyards, factories would surely attract enemy raiders, Budget Commissioner Audley Stephan was remarkably well along. Emergency laws, conferring arbitrary powers on authorities who would have to handle a real emergency, had been quietly passed by the Legislature. Civilian volunteers have been trained to instruct local wardens and the public in the elements of A.R.P. Connecticut's State Defense Council had day-and-night schools going (at Hartford and New Haven) for A.R.P. volunteers.

Last month some 1,300 citizens of Massachusetts were awake enough to travel to Boston from 351 communities, take courses in air-raid precaution. Oddly, Boston itself, with its Navy Yard and Squantum air base, was less alive to home defense than was rural Massachusetts. Energetic Governor Leverett Saltonstall set up a Committee for Home Defense last year (when France was invaded). Behind him was a sound Massachusetts tradition: the first Committees of Home Defense sprang up in Massachusetts in 1776.

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