USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > The history of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1916-1955 > Part 18
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With the declaration of war, the entire country was put on short rations in certain items-not enough to cause hardship or even any real inconvenience. But the rationing was sufficient to arouse a selfish few to loud complaints, and to give racketeers an opportunity to profit in a "black" market on restricted articles.
Gasoline, automobile tires, fuel oil, shoes, meats, fats, oils, butter, sugar, coffee, and certain processed foods were rationed by the Office of Price Administration (OPA), established in Washington to accomplish two purposes. First, it was to assure fair shares for all under the rationing program. Second, it estab- lished price ceilings on most articles so that the country would not suffer the runaway inflation-"profiteering"-that had ac- companied World War I. Though it was much criticized by some and illegally abused by an unscrupulous few, OPA accom- plished its mission reasonably well.
Purchases of sugar were limited to a half pound a week per person. Automobiles were not to be used for pleasure driving. Those who had "necessary driving" to do were entitled to suf- ficient ration coupons for gasoline and tires to keep them going. Everything was done to discourage "non-essential" travel by train, bus, or plane. This and the restrictions on automobile travel seriously affected the tourist and resort business in Pitts- field and the Berkshires throughout the war.
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With the school children doing much of the work, the city carried on systematic campaigns for the salvage of useful scrap -iron, steel, copper, aluminum, tin cans, rubber, rags, old newspapers and magazines, cardboard cartons, and the like. Special bins were built in the schools, on Park Square, and at other places for the deposit of "junk." Housewives contribu- ted old pots, pans, and other utensils. Automobile owners and garage operators threw in old rubber tires. In a week's time the city salvaged 175 tons of paper, enough to fill ten freight cars. In less than a year the General Electric plant saved $1,300,000 of scrap-everything from steel filings to rags.
As the war effort expanded, more and more of the city's young men and women left for service in the armed forces. By 1943, there were more than 3,000 of them in uniform. All of the men were conscriptees after November 1942, when volun- tary enlistments were suspended for the duration of the war.
The women in uniform were volunteers. Depending upon their choice, they enlisted for non-combat duties in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAACS), Women Ap- pointed for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES-Navy), Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS-Air Force), and Semper Paratus Always Ready Service (SPARS Marine Corps).
The names of some of these organizations were strange, even outlandish, dreamed up by publicity men seeking a certain com- bination of initial letters for use as a tag. Our stylish "lady" soldiers and sailors seemed more than a little strange to the more conservative, but they quickly silenced all doubters, efficiently performing important duties in posts all around the world. The first of Pittsfield servicewomen to die in uniform was Pfc. Regina T. Barscz, a WAAC, in 1945.
The war news, which had long been depressing, took a turn for the better late in 1942 when American air, naval, and land forces began well-coordinated offensives against Japanese out- posts in the South Pacific.
At the same time, a new phase of the European war opened with the launching of Operation Torch. A large American and
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British force, commanded by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, landed in North Africa and soon ended the war there, captur- ing 250,000 Axis prisoners. The Russians were smashing back the German armies which had penetrated deep into their coun- try. Mussolini's government fell and Italy accepted uncondi- tional surrender in September 1943.
Nine months later, on June 6, 1944, began Operation Over- lord, the largest amphibious military action of all time, launched from Britain against the German-held northern coast of France. With General Eisenhower in supreme command, the operation involved 176,000 troops, 4,000 invasion craft, 600 warships, and 11,000 planes.
Before landing, American and British paratroopers had been flown over to "jump" from the sky behind the German lines and organize resistance centers there. One of the initial para- troopers to land on this dangerous mission was a Pittsfield sol- dier, Private Francis A. Rocca, formerly a member of Com- pany I.
The conflict was severe along the Normandy beach as the Allied troops waded ashore from all kinds of craft. Brigadier General Nelson M. Walker, Pittsfield's senior officer in the war, was killed in the fighting.
Born in the city and a graduate of Pittsfield High School, Walker had enlisted during World War I. Commissioned at the Plattsburg Officers' Training Camp, he immediately went overseas, being gassed in the Argonne. After the war, Walker chose to make the Army his career and held important posts as he steadily rose in rank. The General was killed near St. Lo when he went into the open to help bring in two of his men who had been wounded. Many honors were posthumously bestowed on General Walker, and the Army later named a transport for him.
Overcoming fierce resistance, the Allied armies soon broke out of the narrow Normandy beachhead and swept across France. Paris was liberated less than three months after the landing. German troops were driven out of Belgium, Luxem-
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bourg, and parts of Holland. Leading the advance, American troops entered German territory on September 12, 1944.
While much fighting remained to be done, final victory was in sight. It was in this atmosphere of hope and of a fervent desire for peace that the 1944 presidential campaign was waged. Both parties agreed that the enemy would be offered no other terms than unconditional surrender and that the country should support and forward in every way the proposed United Nations organization to maintain world peace and security. As their candidate, the Democrats again nominated President Roosevelt, who was opposed by Thomas E. Dewey, Republican governor of New York.
A few days before the election, Dewey's campaign train stopped in the Pittsfield station and a large crowd cheered the candidate as he spoke from the rear platform. On January 20 next, said Dewey, anticipating his occupancy of the White House, he would "start the largest housecleaning in the history of Washington," sweeping out the New Dealers and most of their works.
"It's time for a change," he declared. But the majority of voters in Pittsfield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, and thirty- five other states did not agree, reelecting President Roosevelt to his fourth term by a comfortable margin.
On April 12, 1945, having served less than three months of his new term, the President died, suddenly stricken with a cere- bral hemorrhage, and was succeeded by Vice President Harry S. Truman, formerly a U. S. Senator from Missouri. Pittsfield flew its flags at half-mast to mourn the passing of the much abused and even more widely loved "F. D. R." Always a con- troversial figure, he had affected the country, its institutions, and its whole manner of life as profoundly as any man in our history. Hailed as "the architect of victory" by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he did not live to see our final triumph.
Events on the battlefronts had been moving swiftly to a climax. Powerful American and British forces struck into Ger- many from the west. Massive Russian armies moved in from
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the east. The "1,000-year" Nazi Reich was being crushed in a steel vise. Large German armies, apparently irresistible just a few years before, surrendered one by one. Then came V-E (Vic- tory in Europe) Day on May 8, 1945, when Germany capitu- lated.
Pittsfield's response to this was enthusiastic, but marked by "more confusion than hilarity." There had been reports of an armistice for several days, so that the final official announce- ment came as something of an anti-climax.
Indeed, the city had held its celebration the day before when, about ten in the morning, the central station air raid siren sud- denly sounded. The church bells began to toll. Many people rushed into the streets. Some stores closed; most of them did not. The children were kept in the schools.
After the sirens had been screaming for half an hour, Mayor Fallon had them silenced, complaining that the noise interfered with his work. "The war is only half over," he remarked in ordering business as usual at City Hall. On the following day there was a small but lively parade down North Street.
Though some feared that it might be several years off, the next armistice day was not long in coming. Japan was reeling under thunderous blows now raining from all sides. Early in 1945, Americans recaptured the Philippines and went on to take the strategic islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Russia declared war on Japan and its armies invaded Manchuria.
On August 6, an historic day in the annals of warfare, a frightening portent for all mankind, our planes dropped an atomic bomb on the city and military base of Hiroshima. The bomb destroyed four square miles of the city and killed or in- jured more than 160,000 people. On August 9, another A-bomb was dropped, on the city and naval base of Nagasaki. Five days later came V-J Day when Japan gave up the hopeless struggle.
On the evening preceding V-J Day, with the official an- nouncement of an armistice expected almost any minute, there had been an informal parade down North Street. As described, it consisted largely of "just milling about." Thousands observed the occasion more quietly by attending the churches or staying
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at home, offering prayerful thanks that the awful bloodshed would soon be over at last.
The next evening, at seven o'clock, the radio announced that the armistice had been signed, and Pittsfield celebrated the end of World War II by "really blowing its top." It seemed that almost everybody in the city, old and young, came streaming into North Street as sirens, church bells, and factory whistles signalled the good news. Pittsfield went "wild" with joy and relief.
All formalities were forgotten. Strangers embraced strangers and went dancing and skipping along the street, with a sur- prising number of bright-eyed small urchins darting through the crowds and getting dangerously underfoot. In New York City style, showers of paper from office buildings descended upon the crowds as they surged up and down North Street and around Park Square, with some hurriedly assembled small bands -most of the members not in uniform-supplying a bit of music. Heavily overloaded automobiles, carrying people on the fenders and even on the front and rear bumpers, joined the procession. The incessant din of their horns was deafening, but in the spirit of the occasion.
Some of the more conventional and officious made several attempts to turn this spontaneous demonstration into something more orderly-into a formal parade-with themselves at the head of it.
But they were impatiently brushed aside. The plain people of Pittsfield, in a high spirit of elation, were on their own this night. They had no need of "marshals of the day" to order them into line and tell them what to do.
Yet the celebration was very orderly, with no serious inci- dents and very few arrests, due in part no doubt to the fact that all bars and package liquor stores had closed immediately after the siren sounded, as previously ordered by the Licensing Com- mission at the suggestion of Police Chief Sullivan.
When victory came, so the Chief declared, the bars should be shut tight, principally because so many women frequented them. It was not as it was in the days of the old almost exclu-
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sively masculine saloon, and "I don't need to tell you," he said, "that a drunken woman in a parade is dynamite."
The day after the V-J celebration was declared a holiday at City Hall by Mayor Fallon. Almost all stores and offices gave their employees the day off. Whether they did or not, most of their employees took the day off. The General Electric and other larger factories granted their workers a two-day holiday. This was a welcome rest for many who, to speed up war production, had been working seven days a week for some time, taking no vacations.
Almost 6,000 men and women from the city served in the armed forces during the war. On the World War II Honor Roll placed in the Berkshire Athenaeum and dedicated on Memorial Day, 1947, are recorded 5,761 names .* This was a large number for a community of Pittsfield's size, representing more than a tenth of the population.
The names of the city's sons and daughters who died in service-197, in all-are preserved in the Book of Memory, also in the Athenaeum. In addition to those who served in the armed forces, thousands worked for the Red Cross and the many other organizations which did so much to aid our military effort and ease the sufferings and burdens of war.
Pittsfield made other notable contributions to victory. In every war loan campaign, it oversubscribed its quota. The tubes for the first bazookas used by American troops during the war were developed and manufactured at the General Electric plant. The latter also built parts for radar systems and at its big Naval Ordnance building made gun directors and much other war equipment.
In April 1944, more in line with its normal production, the Morningside works made what was up to that time its largest single shipment of transformers, sixteen impressive giants, which were sent overseas to a then undisclosed destination, now
*Eligibility requirements for the inclusion of names and service records on the Honor Roll were these: (1) service in the United States armed forces between December 7, 1941 and September 2, 1945-those who served in the Merchant Marine, the Red Cross, or in Allied forces were not included; (2) service had to be credited to Pittsfield and not to another city; (3) legal residence on entering service had to be Pittsfield.
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known to be the Soviet Union. It required 70,000 feet of lumber to box this equipment.
Though only a few top officials knew it at the time, the plant had a hand in making the A-bomb possible, building valuable parts of the equipment needed for the manufacture of the bomb. This and other war orders caused a great expansion in the operations and working force at the plant. Employment, which was a mere 2,400 at the end of 1932, rose to a peak of 13,645 in October 1943, a mark that has never since been reached.
Other concerns in Pittsfield were involved in the complicated process of building the A-bomb. The Pittsfield Iron Works and Coal Supply, the May Engineering works, and the E. D. Jones & Sons Company supplied the hush-hush Manhattan Project with certain parts it needed. The workers of these companies labored long hours for many months on a job which they knew was "hot." But they did not suspect its real purpose, thinking that they were fashioning parts for a robot bomb. Local textile mills did their part by furnishing the armed forces with a great quantity of woolens, nylon thread, and nylon parachute cords.
Industrially and in all respects, Pittsfield could be proud of its record in World War II. It had met this national crisis, as every other, with courage, energy, an uncommon degree of cooperation, and an uncomplaining willingness to accept every necessary sacrifice.
In the midst of the war, Pittsfield had been for a time the center of nation-wide attention as the scene of a rather sensa- tional murder trial, perhaps the most widely reported of any in the Berkshires. John F. Noxon, a native son and a prominent and prosperous lawyer, a Harvard graduate whose father had been district attorney in Pittsfield for some time, was indicted and brought to trial on the charge that he was responsible for the death of his infant son, six months old, a disordered and almost helpless mongoloid child. The infant had been electro- cuted by contact with an electric light cord under circumstances that seemed curious and more than a little suspicious.
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It was widely assumed that this was a "mercy killing." But Noxon made no such plea, protesting his innocence, claiming that the baby's death was accidental, that the infant had some- how got himself entangled with the wire.
The trial opened in February 1944. Noxon's chief counsel was Joseph B. Ely, formerly governor of the state, earlier dis- trict attorney at neighboring Westfield, long a friend of Noxon's father. The presiding judge soon declared a mistrial in the case for several reasons. For one, two deputy sheriffs were later found guilty of trying to influence the jury.
Brought to trial again, Noxon was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair after the longest criminal trial in the Berkshire County Superior Court. Judge Abraham E. Pinanski ordered a stay of execution.
Taken to the state prison at Charlestown, Noxon remained in "Death Row" until 1946 when his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Meantime, his family had left Pittsfield. Late in 1948, Noxon's prison sentence was reduced to six years. He was soon paroled and allowed to rejoin his family, which had stood by him through his trial and imprisonment.
During the war years, Pittsfield had continued to grow. Its population increased from 49,684 in 1940 to 53,560 in 1945. The huge demands of the war effort had stimulated and en- larged its industries. The city generally was prosperous and hopeful, feeling well prepared to meet whatever challenge was in store for it.
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Post-War Years: 1946-1949
W ITH HOSTILITIES ENDED and the arms of the United Nations triumphant, people everywhere yearned for peace-a long and enduring peace. A period of relative quiet followed, though there was unrest and revolution in many coun- tries, especially in Asia.
The American people had their problems, too. Pittsfield and other industrial communities feared that they would be the first to suffer if the sudden end of war production brought on a sharp business depression. Washington experts were predicting that the number of unemployed in the nation might reach 8,000,000 by Christmas, 1945-an unduly pessimistic prophecy, as it turned out.
Rationing of all foods but sugar ceased. Price controls, though retained for a time on many articles, were somewhat relaxed. As a result, living costs began to rise at a time when total wages were falling.
In the 1945 municipal election, Mayor Fallon was re-elected to serve his fifth term. For the first time a woman won a city- wide elective post, Mrs. Leonora Goerlach. Now librarian at The Berkshire Eagle, she received the highest vote among the candidates seeking election as councilman-at-large, repeating her triumph in 1947.
Late in 1945 and early in 1946, with many war veterans re- turning to their former jobs, labor-management conflicts in
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Pittsfield increased. Threatened with strikes, local textile com- panies granted wage increases of 10 per cent or more. A strike stopped the buses of the local transit company. After a work stoppage, E. D. Jones & Sons signed a pay raise agreement with Local 212 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America,* an affiliate of the CIO.
But these were minor skirmishes compared to the great strike at the GE plant, where production had remained high from orders for transformers and other products. The UE locals in the plant asked a pay raise of $2 a day. Local and national union officials addressed large mass meetings of workers at the GE gates.
A strike vote was called. In balloting conducted by National Labor Relations Board examiners, the workers voted by an overwhelming majority to walk out in support of their demand for a pay increase. On January 15, 1946, the strike began, with the whole Morningside works picketed.
All trade unions in the city, including Local 127 of the Journeymen Barbers International Union, came to the support of the strikers and contributed funds. The American Legion post soon asked Mayor Fallon to help bring about a speedy and amicable settlement of the conflict, which was adversely affecting the whole city.
Three weeks after the walkout, the City Council, by a vote of 10 to 1, urged the GE management "to enter immediately into negotiations with the Union ... and alter its present policy in favor of a just and equitable attitude toward the wage needs of Pittsfield's GE employees." As three out of four employees in the city worked for GE, the whole community was vitally concerned.
Weeks dragged on until finally, in the middle of March, the strike ended after fifty-eight days. Under the settlement, work- ers were granted a 10 per cent pay increase, with a slightly higher percentage for those earning less than $1 an hour.
Though the plant had been tightly picketed, there had been no violence. But the two-months strike had been costly in
*Hereafter, in accord with local usage, the union will be referred to as UE.
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terms of production and wages lost. Two months after the settlement, GE laid off about 500 employees as business de- clined.
With travel restrictions lifted, the first special snow trains since 1942 came into the city early in 1946. The New Haven railroad put on two specials-the Snow Express and the Snow Clipper, which ran non-stop from New York to Pittsfield. When weather favored, the snow trains operated on Saturdays and Sundays, bringing in thousands of skiers and those interest- ed in other winter sports.
As warmer weather came on, "summer people" again ap- peared in Pittsfield and the Berkshires, and they have since been coming each year in ever larger numbers, providing a major source of revenue for the city and the county.
In September 1946, the city got its first scheduled commercial air passenger service, offered by the New England Central Air- ways. On the first flight, a two-engined five-passenger Cessna, with all seats occupied by free-riding "honoraries," took off about noon for Boston, arriving there less than fifty minutes later. The members of the party watched a baseball game at the Boston Red Sox park and were back in Pittsfield for dinner, being greeted at the airport by Mayor Fallon and a small crowd to celebrate the occasion. The company promised three flights a day from Pittsfield-a schedule not kept for want of local traffic, and the company soon abandoned the enterprise.
Three years later, on September 20, 1949, the first scheduled airmail flight left the airport. For philatelists-alias stamp col- lectors-there was a special cachet for letters on this flight. The city had sent off flights of mail before, but not on a regularly scheduled airmail plane.
Meantime, in 1947, Pittsfield had acquired its second radio broadcasting station, Station WBEC. Established and operated by the owners of The Berkshire Eagle, the city's daily news- paper, the station was part of the American Broadcasting Com- pany's national network.
Steadily rising since the end of the war, prices suddenly shot skyward in the summer of 1946 when the Congress suspended
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the remaining controls of the national Office of Price Adminis- tration. Millions groaned as the price of a cup of coffee went up from a nickel to a dime. "Buyers' strikes" were organized in many communities.
Meeting in Park Square to protest "rank profiteering," a large crowd cheered Mayor Fallon as he urged a boycott of "those who are stealing from us the money we have earned." With elections nearing, the Congress decided to quiet the general outcry by restoring OPA and some of its controls for a year. This helped to check runaway prices.
Rising living costs set in motion another round of demands for higher wages. After stiff bargaining, but without any strikes, most local industries agreed to substantial pay increases.
High prices complicated Pittsfield's main post-war problem -housing. Every year the city was facing a more acute housing shortage. This took a double form. There were not enough resi- dential quarters; there were not enough schools.
No elementary school building had been added in twenty years. Many of the older buildings were used not only for elementary grades but as junior high schools. They were so overcrowded that junior high school students had to attend in two shifts.
Very little residential building had occurred during the De- pression. There had been none during the war years, except for the temporary housing development of war workers at Victory Hill-a "temporary" development still in use. In 1944, only two new houses were built; in 1945, only thirty-one. New con- struction, though obviously and urgently needed, was handi- capped by the high cost of labor and materials. Real estate de- velopers hesitated to build houses that would be priced too high for ready sale.
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