World War II Rhode Island

McBurney.

Preface

By Christian McBurney and Brian L. Wallin

During World War II, Rhode Island was an armed camp. The U.S. Navy had some of its most important facilities in the country there. At Newport, the Naval Torpedo Station produced most of the torpedoes used by navy submarines, PT boats, destroyers and torpedo bomber aircraft. The Naval Training Station at Newport trained more than 500,000 officers and enlisted men during the war. The PT boat training center at Melville trained some 14,000 officers and enlisted men.

At Quonset Point, the U.S. Navy established the largest Naval Air Station in the Northeast. At its peak, more than 350 navy aircraft were at the station. Pilots were trained to fly on airplanes off aircraft carriers bound for the Pacific. Patrol flights were flown from Quonset to search for and destroy German submarines prowling the New England coast. At the nearby Naval Auxiliary Air Facilities at Charlestown and Westerly, pilots underwent risky radar-equipped night-fighter training.

Next to Quonset, at Davisville, more than 100,000 sailors known as Seabees were trained at the Naval Construction Training Center. Each year during the war, the Advance Base Depot next door shipped hundreds of thousands of tons of equipment to naval bases around the world. At the Advance Base Proving Ground, cutting-edge research was done on pontoons. The ubiquitous Quonset hut was designed and first manufactured at Davisville.

After suffering terribly during the Great Depression, Rhode Island contributed more than its fair share in making the United States the arsenal of democracy. In Providence, Woonsocket and other northern towns, the state’s textile, precision tool, jewelry and rubber industries converted their factories to wartime products. More than twenty-six thousand Oerlikon-Gazda antiaircraft guns were manufactured in the state and assembled at Pawtucket. The state’s largest employer during the war, the Walsh-Kaiser Shipyard at Field’s Point in Providence, at its peak employed more than twenty-one thousand workers to build massive Liberty ships and combat transports as well as midsized warships. At Bristol, the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company constructed one hundred patrol boats, and smaller shipyards at Warren, East Greenwich and Wickford also built submarine chasers and other small boats.

This map shows the U.S. Navy facilities and U.S Army defenses of Narragansett Bay during World War II. Not shown are thirty-one mooring buoys in the East Passage for berthing warships; the naval auxiliary air fields at Charlestown and Westerly; and concrete lookouts and fire control buildings from Little Compton to Point Judith and Watch Hill and on Block Island. Map by Tracy Dungan.

Civilian workers in Rhode Island felt proud to contribute to the war effort. They included thousands of women employed in traditionally male jobs. Increasingly, these women wanted to use daycare nurseries to watch their children during work hours.

Jamestown and Narragansett were also the locations for three top-secret prisoner-of-war camps. The War Department used these camps for an extraordinary project to reeducate some 380,000 German POWs held around the country, preparing them to promote democracy and a respect for human rights in postwar Germany.

All of these valuable military facilities needed to be protected. This was done by the U.S. Army’s coastal defense force, whose soldiers manned Fort Adams in Newport and other artillery emplacements on Narragansett Bay and along the state’s southern coastline, from Watch Hill to Little Compton. A U.S. Army Air Force base was also located at Warwick.

While Rhode Island’s formidable defenses around Narragansett Bay were never tested, the state has two notable claims when it comes to military incidents during the war. Just a few miles south of Point Judith, the last sinking of a U.S.-flagged merchant vessel by a German submarine (U-boat) happened on May 5, 1945, and a day later the U-boat that sank the vessel itself was destroyed by U.S. Navy warships, the last sinking of a U-boat in World War II.

During the war years, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vice President Harry S. Truman visited Rhode Island, while future presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon and George H.W. Bush received navy training in the state.

All told, Rhode Island’s contribution to the Allied war effort was all out of proportion to its small size. Small state, big history, indeed!

1

Pearl Harbor Attack Panics

Rhode Islanders

By Christian McBurney

Rhode Island already had a sizeable military and defense industry presence before the country’s entry into World War II. Knowing that the nation could become embroiled in either or both of the wars in Europe and Asia that started in the late 1930s, the country and the state began to ramp up their military production and preparations. These activities made Rhode Island’s residents worried that their state could be targeted for attack by enemy forces.

Still, Rhode Islanders were thrilled when on August 12, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived in Narragansett Bay on board the presidential yacht USS Potomac to see the navy’s expanding military facilities. The president quickly inspected the Naval Torpedo Station facilities on Goat Island, peering through torpedo factory windows and viewing a completed torpedo. Thousands cheered him on Long Wharf. After reviewing 2,100 new naval recruits at the Naval Training Station on Coasters Harbor Island, the president then took his yacht under the recently opened Jamestown Bridge, with workboats following and sounding their whistles, in order to observe in the distance construction efforts at the new Naval Air Station at Quonset Point. Less than three hours after arriving at Newport, Roosevelt began his trip out of Narragansett Bay.

With tensions rising between Japan and the United States, it was not a complete surprise when news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor swept over the radio airwaves on December 7, 1941. Still, it was a shock. Helen Clarke Grimes, listening to her wooden radio in Providence, wrote in her diary, I guess this is it! Japanese dive bombers have attacked Honolulu! The Pearl Harbor attack undertstandably created a climate of fear about the security of the country and state. This concern quickly morphed into fears of spies and saboteurs and recent immigrants who could be secret enemies.

President Roosevelt, in the front passenger seat, reviewing navy cadets on the grounds of the Naval Training Station at Newport on August 12, 1940, with Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Senator Theodore F. Green and Admiral Edward C. Kalbfus. FDR Library.

The December 8, 1941 Providence Journal reported that the secretary of war’s call for increased precautions against sabotage in defense plants met [with] almost instantaneous compliance in the state. Rhode Island intensified its precautions against sabotage with swift action last night, the newspaper trumpeted, to protect its sprawling defense workshops, key utility and transportation facilities serving them, and the waterfront where the materials of war are setting out on world-wide journeys.

The December 8 newspaper further reported on a five-hour meeting called by the state’s governor, J. Howard McGrath, a Democrat from Woonsocket in his first of three wartime terms as governor. McGrath and the executive committee of the State Council of Defense took steps to mobilize the State Guard to protect public property. After this meeting, according to the newspaper, Guards took up posts at the State Airport and extra patrols were assigned to waterfront points and reservoirs, and state police set up an all-night anti-sabotage guard.

McGrath and the State Council of Defense further mandated the immediate registration of all alien Japanese in Rhode Island. Those who failed to register would be subject to detention. The governor also called on employers and citizens who know of Japanese residents to inform the police. In its December 9 edition, the Providence Journal reported that the round-up of German and Italian aliens in the state believed to be dangerous to the safety of the nation would be carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), even though Hitler would not declare war on the United States until December 11. The next day, Providence’s FBI office reported rounding up four Germans as enemy aliens.

The Providence Journal further reported that during the evening of December 7, several extra buses rolled up to the [bus] station at Fountain Street, to carry sailors and marines back to Newport naval establishments and soldiers to Fort Adams. These extra buses to Newport were kept in service until after midnight, and other special buses were placed in service to take men to Quonset and the Jamestown forts. The New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad—running trains out of Grand Central Station in New York City—added special trains bringing hundreds of sailors on leave from Newport back from New York to Providence. The sailors would then have to make their way by bus to Newport.

With the surprise attack at Hawaii, concern arose about the possibility of Germany and Italy attempting their own surprise attack against the United States on the Eastern Seaboard. Military leaders remembered German saboteurs during World War I blowing up a massive munitions depot in New York Harbor on Black Tom Island. The explosion had the force equivalent to an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale.

Thus, the stage was set for December 9, when at 12:45 p.m. an air raid alert was issued to military bases warning that enemy planes were reported one hour from New York. Panic spread in the state. In Newport, the information was that German bombers were only a short distance away. How this was possible, when Germany had no aircraft carriers to launch bombers, was not explained. In any event, Newport’s schoolchildren were sent home, off-duty policemen and firemen were called in and an emergency plan was put into effect. Off Newport, moored at buoy 7, the flagship of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, prepared for an attack.

Planes and other equipment at the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point are dispersed in case of a surprise enemy attack, December 9, 1941. Naval History and Heritage Command.

An unnamed newspaper reporter’s telephone call to the Naval Air Station at Quonset Point about the alarm prompted an air raid alert to be sounded, leading to the evacuation of the 784 civilians employed at the Quonset Point facility, as well as 1,500 workers from nearby Davisville. The station’s 3,740 officers and enlisted men readied themselves for an air raid.

Governor McGrath ordered the highways cleared and called out the state National Guard. Schools were dismissed in most towns and stayed closed for several days.

Within two hours, military authorities realized the alarm was a false one and issued the all secure signal at 2:46 p.m. The next day, the Providence Journal reported that an erroneous alarm from Mitchell Field on Long Island of the sighting of enemy planes off the East Coast had set off a series of air raid alerts in a wide area. In fact, the planes turned out to be U.S. Navy PBY Catalinas flying from Newfoundland, Canada, bound for Quonset Point.

Germany and Italy finally declared war on the United States on December 11. That day, Rear Admiral Edward C. Kalbfus, the chief of all U.S. Navy operations in Rhode Island, and General Ralph E. Haines, commander of the U.S. Army’s Harbor Defenses of Narragansett Bay, met to discuss how to guard against a surprise attack by Germany and sabotage by enemy sympathizers. According to the Newport Mercury, Heavy guards were posted at all vital spots in the bay area and gun and searchlight crews have taken up their positions. Soldiers were swarming in from leave and furloughs, the newspaper added, noting that many had to cut short their holiday leaves.

Block Island, a small island thirteen miles south of the coast of the Rhode Island mainland, was particularly exposed—as was the case with all U.S. wars with European powers starting with the American Revolutionary War. It was also a useful place for U.S. military forces to maintain lookouts for the enemy. As early as December 8, 1941, William Doggett, the owner of a stone house perched on top of Beacon Hill—the highest point of Block Island—was informed by an army officer that his property had been seized for use by the army for the duration of the war. It was one of the first of many Rhode Island coastal homes that would be commandeered by the army or navy during the war years.

Block Islanders were not intimidated, despite residing on one of the most exposed islands on the country’s Eastern Seaboard. On January 28, 1942, members of the State Council of Defense took a boat to the island to meet with local island leaders at the National Hotel. Warning of a possible German invasion and attempt to use the island as a bridgehead for an attack on the mainland, the state officials offered to evacuate all 671 islanders to the mainland. None of the locals showed any interest in the proposal. "There ain’t a thing here any enemy would wantta [sic] get a hold of, so fur [sic] as I can see, said George Sheffield, the head of the island’s civilian defense efforts. When alerted to the possibility of food shortages on a stranded island, Joseph Pennington retorted, You can’t dig clams in Westminster Street and you can’t get lobsters in Scituate. The state’s press admired the islanders’ spunk, and the Rhode Island House of Representatives passed a resolution congratulating Block Islanders for their patriotic fortitude. Representative Erich A. O’D. Taylor of Newport commented, At last some people have been found in Rhode Island who are not afraid—a spirit I would like to see more generally distributed through the state." Meanwhile, Coast Guard personnel patrolled the seventeen miles of beaches, and army soldiers manned tall cement lookout towers on Block Island, as well as at key points on the state’s southern coast, searching for enemy planes, ships and submarines.

Rhode Island was declared a vital war zone, which meant strict security against spies and precautions against sabotage of military bases and war industries. Posters at defense workplaces warned, Loose Lips Sink Ships. When seventeen-year-old Elisabeth Sheldon of Saunderstown obtained a permit to sail her fifteen-foot sailboat in parts of Narragansett Bay, her permit included this ominous condition: ENEMY ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED ON BOARD.

In fact, there were only a very few supporters of Germany in Rhode Island. One was Nicholas Hansen, who was born in Newport of German parents and worked at the highly sensitive Torpedo Station in Newport. He admitted to the FBI that he was an admirer of Hitler, that he would much rather fight for Hitler than the United States and that he would be willing to participate in a plot to blow up the Torpedo Station. He conceded, however, at his court hearing in Providence in July 1942, that he was not intelligent enough to carry out such a