The federal Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) was created on May 20, 1941, and was initially headed by Fiorello La Guardia, the charismatic mayor of New York City. It had a twofold purpose: to protect civilians from enemy attack, and to maintain high morale on the World War II home front. By early 1942, more than 5.5 million Americans had enrolled for such activities as coast watching, air raid defense and aircraft spotting, and enforcing blackouts.
At the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the OCD comprised 1 million civil defense volunteers organized into 6,000 local councils. But the OCD fell far short of La Guardia’s claims of effective organization. Local OCD councils bungled their assignments, and the air raid sirens that were supposed to warn city residents of air attacks often could be barely heard over the traffic. Soon, “wildcat” civilian defense organizations were begun by individual communities to compensate for the inefficient and ineffective local councils. The need for a comprehensive and effective civil defense organization became clearer after Pearl Harbor. False air raid alarms rippled across the country, particularly in San Francisco and Los Angeles as panicked citizens saw “Japanese” planes heading in all directions. As municipal and federal officials sought to bring some kind of order from the chaos, La Guardia maintained that the primary responsibility for the OCD was air raid defense and nothing more.
The OCD was not, however, completely inept. It added thousands of private pilots who had not joined the army air corps to its operations of the Civil Air Patrol, which supplemented and assisted army and navy antisubmarine patrols along the coasts. The air patrols, along with the coastal dim-outs, which eliminated light directed toward the sea, helped to diminish the U-boat threat along the East Coast.
Still, the OCD obviously needed improvement. President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to strengthen the agency by naming John Landis to the position of executive director. La Guardia would remain involved with larger policy decisions, but Landis would run the day-to-day operations. La Guardia soon resigned and escaped the mounting criticism of his leadership coming from Congress. Landis reorganized the OCD and eliminated some of the
Posters, such as the one above, were used by the Office of Civilian Defense to help Americans prepare for wartime. (Library of Congress)
More superfluous programs such as the Arts Council of the Voluntary Participation Branch and the Children’s Activities Section of the Physical Fitness Division of the OCD that had been suggested by Eleanor Roosevelt. By the summer of 1942, although he was still facing a shortage of equipment and a poorly trained volunteer force, Landis had begun to enhance the operations and stature of the Ocd.
By 1943, the OCD was better organized and fairly well equipped. By then, however, it was of little real use, for the tide of the war had shifted to the Allies and there was no real threat of an enemy attack on the United States. From 1943 to 1945 the OCD nonetheless continued to carry out air raid drills and blackouts and maintained its disaster preparedness programs.
Further reading: Richard Lingeman, Don’-t You Know There’s a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York: Putnam, 1970).
—Nicholas Fry
World History
