By Dr. Jerry Sanson, Louisiana Maneuvers & Military Museum Staff
People in Louisiana realized during World War II that the state’s location on the Gulf Coast as well as its being the location of the Mississippi River’s mouth made it a potential target for the country’s enemies. Therefore, many of them volunteered for Civilian Defense positions to help protect their homes, their friends, and their families.
Col. (later General) L. Kemper Williams of New Orleans chaired the National Defense Council of Louisiana and had no shortage of people willing to help defend the state. He assumed leadership of civilian defense in July 1940 and more than 100,000 Louisianians volunteered for duty by 1942. Urban areas and surrounding parishes generally organized more thoroughly for civilian defense than did rural areas, but all regions of the state participated in the effort. Air Raid Warden was the most popular job in the state with Aircraft Spotter in second place.
Citizen volunteers “of known probity” who followed U.S. Office of Civilian Defense guidelines scanned the skies for approaching enemy airplanes twenty-four hours a day as they helped protect Louisiana’s underpopulated coastline, war production facilities, and concentration of military installations. Because of the scarcity of people along the coastline Office of Civilian Defense staff recruited intracoastal bargemen, fishermen, trappers, shrimpers, and oystermen to report suspicious activity.
Louisianians were not simply being paranoid. Three torpedoes struck and sank a U.S. cargo ship just as it entered the mouth of the Mississippi River on May 12, 1942, thus bringing warfare to the lower Mississippi for the first time since 1862. The chilling realization that war was that close to home and the rapidity with which German forces overran other European countries convinced many Louisianians to engage in the Civilian Defense program.
Louisiana did not experience any direct attacks or major espionage episodes during the war, but four events reinforced people’s recognition of potential danger. Discovery of Nazi flags flying at Martin Behrman High School in New Orleans and at a playground in Algiers on May 24, 1940, led local citizens to form an “American Vigilance Committee” to investigate all un-American activity in the area. No pro-Nazi culprits were found, but the presence of the flags caused deep concern.
Discovery of four men digging under a wire fence at the DuPont Ethyl plant in Baton Rouge caused a wave of concern throughout the city in July 1940. The men escaped but left behind four sticks of dynamite. Were they saboteurs? No one knew, but many people realized the importance of the facility the men were trying to infiltrate. Only one other plant in the nation, DuPont’s facility in Wilmington, Delaware, produced the same tetra-ethyl high-octane leaded fuel refined in Baton Rouge.
An unannounced flight of four airplanes alarmed Baton Rouge residents on the night of September 9-10, 1940, until sheriff’s deputies learned that they were part of a training mission flown out of Barksdale Field in Bossier City.
Finally, Central Louisiana residents woke up on the morning of March 21, 1942, to find a fine yellow powder covering the ground. Some speculated that it might be a poison or the residue of a poison gas sprayed over the area by enemy planes during the night until chemists from Camp Beauregard and Louisiana College investigated and announced that the powder was simply spring pollen blown from trees by an unusually strong March wind.
The Air Raid Warden’s helmet and adult and child’s civilian gas masks on display in the Home Front Exhibit at the Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum are reminders of the concern that people in Louisiana harbored for the safety of their neighborhoods and the willingness with which they volunteered to help protect their friends and families during the war.