What Happened to the Factories?

In the early days of World War II, real fear existed that the Japanese would bomb the West Coast. Several war industries were located there, and they needed to be hidden. Enter Hollywood.

Canvases were stretched over the rooftops of aircraft factories and painted with streets and lawns. Movie set designers created fake houses out of canvas and plywood. Trees were made of wire with glued-on chicken feathers painted in shades of green and brown. Air ducts were disguised as fire hydrants. Steep, sloped roofs became hills.

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a possible Japanese air attack.

The goal was to look like a peaceful suburb from the air. Employees took scheduled walks in the fake town, hanging out laundry and moving rubber cars.

Employees stroll through a fake neighborhood.

Long runways beside the aircraft plants would seem to be a giveaway, but when a visiting general was flown over a disguised factory, he couldn’t find it. Japanese aircrews surely wouldn’t.

Dummy runways were created by burning grass to look like tarmac. Far from the real planes and hangars covered to look like farmland, dummy aircraft of wood and metal dotted the bogus fields.

Underneath the camouflage, business as usual.

Thirty-four airfields and factories were hidden. Enemy submarines would have been a likelier threat than airplanes. Ships were sunk within sight of West Coast ports. A Japanese submarine shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara in February of 1942, doing little damage.

In June of 1942, the US Navy sank four enemy aircraft carriers in the Battle of Midway. The chance of Japan bombing the West Coast greatly diminished. The Hollywood-designed sets never had a chance to prove their worth.

The factories remained under cover for the rest of the war.

Captain Gable

What does the army do with a 41-year-old movie star who wants to serve his country during World War II?

Clark Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard, sold war bonds for the Treasury Department. On the night of January 15, 1942, she phoned Gable from Indianapolis after a record-breaking sales drive. “You’d better get yourself into this man’s army,” were her last words to him. The next day, she died in a plane crash.

General “Hap” Arnold of the US Army Air Forces proposed Gable make a recruiting film for gunners for the heavy bombers, the B-17 Flying Fortresses and the B-24 Liberators, if he completed Officer Candidate School. First, however, he would have to pass the rigorous physical training and academic exams.

Gable was old enough to be most of the recruits’ father. He suffered from hemorrhoids and minor skin disorders, wore dentures, and was a high school dropout. He had to shave off his moustache (which he allowed to press to film) and get a buzz cut (which displayed his ears, which were taped to the back of his head for movie filming because they stuck out prominently).

He took his training in steaming hot Miami in August. He passed by using his acting skills. Though not a good student, he memorized mimeographed pages covering the salient points of lectures, as he would a script, and copied it verbatim on exams. Though fatigued by the physical training, he acted fresh and raring to go.

To create a film for gunners, he needed to be familiar with their tasks. He attended specialized gunnery school and earned an aerial gunner’s silver wings. He joined the 351^st Heavy Bombardment Group and brought along his own creative group for his film project. The Group went to England in April, 1943.

Whether at bases in the U.S. or in England, Gable was mobbed by women. Civilian women working on base slipped him scraps of paper with their phone numbers. Even men in the army had ulterior motives. A sergeant from Eisenhower’s administrative staff asked Gable to sign a stack of forms, saying they required a captain’s signature. He then cut off the signatures and sold them to British girls.

Gable wanted his service to be no different than anyone else’s. He flew several combat missions as a gunner. One time a German shell tore the heel of one of his flight boots. He often took over the guns of wounded gunners. He taught gunnery.

The brass didn’t appreciate the unnecessary chances he took. If shot down, the Germans would have had a huge propaganda coup. Hitler offered a reward to any pilot who managed to shoot his plane down. Lord Haw Haw, the Nazi radio propagandist, responded to newsreels touting “Watch out, Mr. Hitler, [then] Lieutenant Clark Gable is headed your way!” by proclaiming, “Welcome to England. … We’ll be seeing you soon in Germany, Clark. You will be welcome here, too.”

Hollywood director Frank Capra, working on a war film project of his own in England, asked a general how Gable was doing. The general said, “He’s scaring the [] out of us. The fool insists on going on bombing missions and he wants to be a gunner, yet. No officer mans a gun; the guy’s crazy. You know what it would do to us if he gets himself shot? I’m pulling every string there is to get him out of here. He gives me the willies. He’s trying to get himself killed, that’s how he’s doing.”

Gable and his Hollywood crew were recalled to the States in October, 1943. He was shocked when Hap Arnold told him his film was now obsolete. A recruitment film was no longer needed. Gable could use the footage however he wanted. He created several short documentaries rarely seen.

In June of 1944, he requested discharge from the army, citing his age. His application was signed by another movie actor-turned-army-captain, Ronald Reagan.

Stars in  WWII

The Duke of Windsor and the Nazis

As the Prince of Wales, Edward Windsor had a sobering experience in World War I. He believed politicians created the conflict between ordinary Germans and British who had much in common. The sights he saw influenced him in the future.

His father, King George V, changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg und Gotha to Windsor in July, 1917. Also that year, the Titles Deprivation Act stripped Britain’s enemies of any rank and honor in Britain. Many German royals were related to the Windsors. Emperor Wilhelm II was the grandson of Queen Victoria.

In 1933, Adolf Hitler was keen to promote marriage between Edward and Princess Friederike, the daughter of Duke Ernst August II of Brunswick and his wife, Duchess Viktoria Luise, the only daughter of Emperor Wilhelm II. Hitler wanted marriages between German aristocracy and other European royals to improve Germany’s international position. The German aristocrats offered respectability to the radical Nazi regime. They showed the traditional ruling class had faith in the new order.

As relations with Germany deteriorated, Edward abhorred the idea of another war. He had little faith in the French and he despised the Soviets for murdering his godfather, Czar Nicholas II. He admired Hitler’s efforts to improve Germany, especially in providing employment and housing for the working class.

After he  married divorcee Wallis Simpson and they lived in exile in France, they visited Germany. Edward wanted Wallis to experience a royal tour. Their tour was a propaganda coup for the Nazis. They looked upon him as a friend of Germany, fluent in their language and with deep affection for the country where so much of his family lived. Edward made no secret of his sympathy and understanding for the Nazi regime, bringing order out of chaos.

When war came, Edward wanted a negotiated peace. He believed if he had remained king, there would have been no war. He envisioned himself as the leader of a world peace movement. He wanted to return to England, but was unwelcome. The Windsors had homes in Paris and southern France. With France falling to Germany, they went to Spain before continuing on to Portugal. He was offered the governorship of the Bahamas, which he saw as being shoved out of the way.

The Germans wanted to detain them in Spain, and after Edward arrived in Portugal, they tried to lure him back to Spain, using the Spaniards as middlemen. Edward was offered a palace in Ronda where they could sit out the war.

The Germans envisioned using him as a peace broker, appealing to the British to lay down their arms. The only obstacle to peace, according to them, was the Churchill clique. Once they had Britain in their pocket, they could put Edward back on the throne as their puppet king.

The Nazis were willing to detain him by force, if necessary. Rocks were thrown at their windows to frighten the Windsors. He was warned of danger in the Bahamas; the British wanted to assassinate him.

In the end, the British got the Windsors to the Bahamas.

Roland Freisler, the Hanging Judge

Roland Freisler was known as the hanging judge. Acting as judge, jury and prosecution of the First Senate of the People’s Court, he sent thousands of people to their deaths. He also served as court recorder, so he could compose of the written grounds for his sentences with his own notions of a National Socialist criminal court. His style of presiding in his court was to scream and shout at the defendants, humiliating them, and making them appear as common criminals.

His most famous cases were the people accused of complicity in the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Hitler. The accused were unshaven and dressed in ill-fitting clothes from concentration camp victims. Belts and suspenders were taken away. One victim had to keep grabbing the trousers so they wouldn’t fall down. Freisler screamed, “You dirty old man! Why do you keep fiddling with your trousers?”

How did such a man arrive at this place?

Born in 1893, Freisler served in World War I as an officer cadet in 1914, and by 1915, a lieutenant. He won the Iron Cross of both classes. In October 1915, he was captured by the Russians. As a prisoner in Russia, Freisler learned Russian, and is said to have developed an interest in Marxism after the Russian Revolution. He was appointed as a commissar for the camp’s food supplies.

After the prisoner camps were dissolved in 1918, Freisler was said to have been a convinced Communist, although this is unsupported. Freisler denied the accusations, but he never escaped the stigma of being a Bolshevik.

He became a Doctor of Law in 1922, and joined the Nazi Party in July 1925, where he served as defense counsel for Party members who got into trouble with the law. One person opined that he was “unsuitable for any leadership post, since he is an unreliable and moody person.” He represented the Reich Ministry of Justice at the Wannsee Conference in January, 1942, when the plans of the Final Solution, the murder of all European Jews, were made.

He was never appointed to cabinet, because he had no influential patron, and his younger brother, Oswald, appeared as the defense counsel in trials which the Nazis wanted to use for propaganda purposes. When Goebbels proposed Freisler to replace the Reich Justice Minister, who had died, Hitler allegedly retorted, “That old Bolshevik? No!”

In August, 1942, Hitler promoted named Freisler to serve as president of the People’s Court. This court, set up outside the frame of law, allowed Freisler to run roughshod over legal niceties. He had jurisdiction over a broad array of political offences, like black marketeering, work slowdowns, and defeatism. The People’s Court almost always agreed with the prosecution. The number of death sentences rose sharply under Freisler’s tenure. Being brought before it was equivalent to a death sentence.

One of his victims was a Catholic priest, Joseph Müller, who told a joke. The joke itself did not bring about Müller’s conviction. His work with youth raised Nazi ire. His beliefs contradicted Nazi dogma.

Throughout the trial, Freisler ranted and raved blasphemously, even helping witnesses find appropriate words of scorn. He screamed accusations of collusion, hostility, and intentional undermining the German people’s will to carry on the war. The only expiation for Müller’s sin: death. Müller was guillotined on September 11, 1944, and his family received a bill for the cost of the execution.

Joseph Müller, 1884-1944

On February 3, 1945, during a Saturday session of the People’s Court, American bombers attacked Berlin. Government and Nazi Party buildings were hit, including the People’s Court.

According to one report, Freisler adjourned court and ordered that day’s prisoners to be taken to a shelter. He paused to gather that day’s files. Freisler was killed when a hit on the building caused him to be struck down by a beam in his courtroom. His body was found crushed beneath a fallen masonry column, clutching the files.

One foreign correspondent reported, “Apparently nobody regretted his death.” Luise Jodl, the widow of General Alfred Jodl, recounted years later that when Freisler’s body was brought in, a worker commented, “It is God’s verdict.”

Freisler is buried in his wife’s family’s plot in a Berlin cemetery, but his name is not shown on the gravestone.