The Epic of New York City (94 page)

The B-25's were medium Martin bombers. Their racks were emptied of bombs, and guns were installed. Then up zoomed the bombers. Up, too, flitted Aircobras, cannons snouting from their black muzzles. In less than 20 minutes 280 planes gashed the sky over New York and the Atlantic seaboard. Mitchel was at war. But the warning about enemy aircraft had been false, just as London's first air raid alert had been an error. Later a pilot sat in a hangar at Mitchel Field and told how it felt to defend New York. Lieutenant Lennon Blackman said slowly, “It's kind of hard to explain. You sit in your plane and look down, and you feel kind of warm at the people below you. It's New York you feel.”

Although the city never was bombed, it took no chances. Its very magnitude made it so complex that it was as sensitive as a Swiss watch, and the problem of defending it was staggering. Defense measures struck grisly undertones. The fire department sent three battalion chiefs to London to see how incendiary bombs were handled. New Yorkers were told what to do in the event of a gas attack. Temporary morgues were set up here and there in the city, and volunteers were taught how to dispose of bodies. A local funeral director bought radio time to suggest, “You never know when to expect bad news, so be prepared. Buy a family lot.”

London had evacuated most of its youngsters, and New York learned from this experience. More than 1,000,000 identification tags were made for New York's public and parochial schoolchildren, and an evacuation camp was built for them at New Milford, Connecticut. Fortunately, the camp never had to be used. But air raid drills were held in the city's schools, and little boys and girls stretched face down on the floor while teachers read aloud to them.

When German submarines began attacking American ships near the Atlantic seaboard, sight-seers were barred from the Woolworth Building tower, which provided a clear view of the harbor. Because U-boat crews could see silhouettes of vessels against the glow of the
city's lights, blackouts were ordered. In Foley Square the thirty-two story Federal Building had a pyramidal roof covered with gold leaf; because this glinted on moonlit nights, black paint was daubed onto it. The torch atop the Statue of Liberty was turned off. No longer did the electric bulletin board around the Times Tower flash the news of the day. Air raid wardens patrolled the streets and bellowed up at apartment windows lacking black window shades.

Television, becoming popular just when war began, was used to train the wardens and the police. Pedestrians were kept off East River bridges so that explosives couldn't be dropped onto passing ships. Subway lockers were bolted shut to prevent anyone from placing time bombs in them. Nazi saboteurs were caught before they could blow up the Hell Gate railroad bridge over the East River or disrupt the city's water supply by blasting holes in its Westchester County reservoirs. Fourteen members of a German spy ring were convicted in a Brooklyn court of espionage and failure to register as German agents. Nazi propaganda was disseminated by a Nazi agent, whose luxurious apartment at 305 Riverside Drive was decorated with a portrait of Hitler.

As war's tempo increased, LaGuardia became so overburdened with work that his performance as mayor began to fall off. In addition to trying to run the nation's largest city, he served as director of the Office of Civilian Defense (with the right to attend Cabinet meetings) and as chairman of the American section of the Joint Permanent Defense Board. His duties forced him to commute between New York and Washington. In the national capital he had an apartment in the Dupont Circle apartment building. In New York he lived with his wife and two adopted children in a modest apartment at 1274 5th Avenue, between 108th and 109th streets. Like all previous New York mayors, he lived in a place of his own choosing and paid his own household expenses.

This seemed unfair to certain municipal officials, who now proposed that the city buy and maintain an official residence for LaGuardia and the mayors who would succeed him. They favored the Charles M. Schwab palace on Riverside Drive between Seventy-third and Seventy-fourth streets, a seventy-five-room French château that was considered one of the most impressive mansions in the world. A man of simple tastes, LaGuardia squeaked, “What! Me in
that
!” He preferred Gracie Mansion on the shore of the East River in Carl Schurz Park on East End Avenue just off East Eighty-eighth Street.

This fine old house stood on a point of land called Horn's Hook, for the village of Hoorn in Holland. A fort dating from the American Revolution was a landmark there until 1794, when the property was bought by Archibald Gracie, a wealthy merchant born in Scotland. He tore down the fort, and about 1799 he built a sixteen-room wooden house in the Federal style, with verandas running around three sides. Among the famous guests entertained in Gracie Mansion were John Quincy Adams, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, John Jacob Astor, Alexander Hamilton, and Louis Philippe, who later became king of France.

In 1891 the city acquired the property, and in 1927 the white frame house was restored by the park department and opened as a museum. Remodeled in 1942, it then became the official residence of New York's mayors. LaGuardia was secretly glad to move away from his apartment on upper Fifth Avenue. The champion of minority groups, he nonetheless worried about the safety of his children as Negroes and Puerto Ricans began infiltrating the neighborhood.

New York played a major role in the national war effort, its industrial firms and cultural institutions converting to defense production and military techniques. In the New York Public Library, for example, a Japanese naval code was broken. American intelligence officers had learned that this code was based on a certain Mexico City directory of a certain year. However, not a single copy of this book was left in Mexico. In all the Allied world, as a matter of fact, the only extant copy was in the New York Public Library, whose collection of city directories and telephone books was unequaled.

Individual New Yorkers did their part. George Hyde, to name one, worked secretly in the basement of his home at 552 Third Avenue, in Brooklyn. Born in Germany, Hyde had designed machine guns for the Kaiser's army during World War I. By the time he came to the United States in 1926, he was one of the world's great gunsmiths. When army officers planned to land American troops in Europe during World War II, they realized that the Ml (Garand) rifle was too heavy for beach landings and too light in firepower. They asked Hyde to invent a lightweight, rugged, fully automatic weapon that would function well under the harsh conditions expected on the Normandy beaches.

Hyde went to work. Remembering a toy gun he had seen as a boy in Germany, he designed and hand-tooled a prototype of the M3 submachine gun. It was ready for testing only 4 weeks after he got the
assignment. It weighed just 8 pounds, was completely automatic, shot .45 ball cartridges 1,760 yards, and was spectacularly successful. The invasion of France was delayed several weeks while Hyde's new “grease-gun” went into production. More than 8,000,000 of these weapons proved effective in the D-day landings and in action on Pacific islands.

One of New York's most important contributions to the war was made by Columbia University scientists. They learned that German physicists in Berlin apparently had split an atom by bombarding uranium with slow neutrons made of radioactive materials. The news aroused Dr. John R. Dunning, an associate professor of physics at Columbia, and Italian-born Dr. Enrico Fermi, who had recently been made a physics professor at the university. They deduced that when the Germans split the atom, a vast amount of energy was released. They also theorized that the two fragments of the atom had been pushed apart at great speed by the mutually repulsive force of their positive charges. Both were eager to test the theory, but Fermi had to leave for Washington.

Deciding to go ahead with the experiment, Dunning enlisted the help of two assistants. At seven o'clock on the cold and windy evening of January 25, 1939, the three scientists met secretly in Columbia's cyclotron laboratory in the basement of the Pupin Physics Laboratories. This twelve-story red-brick building, topped by a green bronze astronomical dome, stood on the southeastern corner of Broadway and West 120th Street. Working in muted excitement, the physicists set up their equipment and began the test.

At the critical moment they watched a round oscilloscope. Green lines suddenly shot toward the top of the screen, leaped high and ever higher, and finally skyrocketed out of their field of vision. The test was a success. They had split a uranium atom into two parts, each part consisting of 100,000,000 electron volts, the greatest amount of atomic energy ever liberated on earth. Dunning quickly calculated that 1 pound of uranium 235 could yield as much energy as 5,000,000 pounds of coal.

Thus, on a New York City campus, for the first time in the New World, an atom was split. Bending over his laboratory notebook, Dunning scribbled eleven prophetic words: “Believe we have observed a new phenomenon of far reaching consequences.” Years later he mused, “That night I was pretty well convinced this was the beginning of a new age.”

Columbia physicists now asked themselves this question, Was it possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction? A couple of two-man teams began independent experiments on the campus to try to find the answer. Fermi headed one team. Hungarian-born Dr. Leo Szilard was in charge of the other. Working separately, but simultaneously, they proved that the enormous energy released by the fission of uranium could be used to make a bomb. And what a bomb! It would contain a million times more energy
per pound
than any known explosive.

Dr. George B. Pegram, physics professor and dean of graduate faculties at Columbia, had closely watched these experiments. Although he wasn't quite sure that an atomic bomb could be made, he felt it was his duty to report to the federal government. He wrote a historic letter to Admiral S. C. Hooper in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington. This was the very first contact between the scientific world and the United States government about atomic energy. For the next few months, however, federal officials did nothing.

Albert Einstein agreed to alert President Roosevelt to this great potential by writing him a personal letter, that began: “Sir: Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. . . .” This letter was handed to the President by Alexander Sachs of New York, vice-president of the Lehman Corporation in Wall Street and a friend of Szilard's. After brief hesitation Roosevelt said, “This requires action.”

Columbia physicists were already building the world's first atomic furnace, or pile, on the seventh floor of the Pupin Building. On January 20, 1940, the first federal
grant
for atomic energy research was awarded to Columbia. It was a mere $6,000. The following November the first federal
contract
for such work went to the university. This time the Columbia scientists got $40,000. Such was the genesis of the supersecret program first named the Manhattan Engineering District and later called merely the Manhattan Project. Its purpose was to make an atomic bomb before the Nazis did.

By the summer of 1941 the scientists needed more space, so they moved their equipment out of the Pupin Building and into the basement of the nearby Schermerhorn Building. Tons of uranium oxide and graphite were used. Both substances are black, and soon the
physicists looked like coal miners. Their backs ached from lugging around 50- and 100-pound cans of uranium and handling graphite bricks. Dean Pegram suggested that they use Columbia football players for this manual labor. The scientists were delighted. They hired a dozen husky youths who hadn't the faintest idea that they were taking part in one of the greatest scientific experiments in the annals of mankind.

The atomic furnace began to outgrow its new quarters in the Schermerhorn basement. Federal officials conducted a quiet search for more space and found it at the University of Chicago. Transported from New York to Chicago, early in 1942, was every piece of portable atomic research equipment. In a transformed squash court at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942, Fermi produced the world's first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He was still employed by Columbia University.

In those days the most important source of uranium ore was the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo. The mine was owned by the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga. Its managing director was Edgar Edouard Sengier. In 1938 Sengier had visited London. While in the office of Lord Stonehaven, a director of the Union Minière board, he was asked to meet secretiy with Sir Henry Tizard, the famous British physicist. Sir Henry told Sengier that German scientists might be able to make an atomic bomb from uranium. He cautioned Sengier not to let any of his ore fall into German hands. A few days later several French scientists asked for Sengier's help in constructing an atomic bomb in the Sahara Desert. He agreed, but the outbreak of World War II in September, 1939, ended this project before it began.

A month later Sengier left his Brussels home and came to New York. He took command of his company's office on Broad Street and stayed in New York throughout the war. Alerted to the value of the uranium ore in the Congo mine, Sengier made a big decision. On his own initiative, he ordered 1,250 tons of this ore shipped from the Belgian Congo to New York. Stored in 2,000 steel drums, the precious cargo arrived here in September and October, 1940. It was stashed away in a secret warehouse on Staten Island.

Sengier then told American officials what he had done. The State Department wanted to rush his deadly ore to Fort Knox. But, as John Gunther has said, “because of various confusions” nearly two years passed before the United States government “acted to take advantage of Sengier's foresight and perspicacity.”