Read article : Duck and cover: New York's first citywide drill for the A-bomb
So far as could be officially determined, only about 100 people died when the atomic bomb fell on New York City on the morning of Thursday the 29th of November 1951. These luckless souls perished on the steps of the New York Public Library when, after they had dutifully bolted from their cabs and buses in midstreet, they found the library doors already locked up tight. "Let me in; let me in," screamed one man who appeared to be taking this exercise very seriously. But the guard inside shook his head. "This is a hell of a situation," grunted Patrolman Matthew Cerick, shepherding the flock across Fifth Ave. to the sanctuary of the Public National Bank. There they were taken in, but of course by that time they had already been vaporized.
Otherwise, New York's first air-raid drill since World War II efficiently hummed along like the finest of sewing machines. After 17 months of planning, there was now near-total order amid near-zero confusion; three minutes after 1,079 sirens began wailing at 10:33 a.m., the city was silent from Chinatown to Harlem and to the Nassau and Westchester borders. A million citizens disappeared into the subways, 35,000 into Rockefeller Center, 90,000 into the Empire State Building, 340,000 into 804 miscellaneous designated shelters, 1,500 into St. Patrick's Cathedral. Fifth Ave. was empty. Penn Station was empty. Times Square was empty. Pushcarts sat abandoned in the Garment District. You could hear the traffic lights click. You could hear the pigeons fly.
All over town, school children climbed under their desks and covered themselves with their coats. On Cortelyou Road in Brooklyn, Mrs. Harold MacKenzie stopped pouring tea for her two guests and the three of them earnestly sat down behind the living room sofa. On Central Ave. in Brooklyn, Mrs. Ernest Garitano locked her dog in the bathroom before taking cover herself.
Former Police Commissioner Arthur Wallander had gone to work on the city's Civil Defense machinery the minute U.S. ground troops landed in Korea in July 1950. Joe Stalin was going to bomb America any minute, this was simply a fact, and New York was plainly first on the list of target cities; CD Chief Wallander's enormous job included building a control center to which all commands would report, drafting and training 200,000 volunteers, organizing food depots and blood banks, drawing up evacuation routes into Ulster and Sullivan counties. In early August he asked the Board of Estimate for $20 million for medical supplies, $533,000 for air-raid sirens and $50,000 for Geiger counters. Nonessential construction stopped as the board freed up funds for Wallander, and the city did without a new police station and modern traffic lights. At the same time, Wallander banned sirens except for air-raid purposes, and police cars and ambulances all made do with their horns.
New York comes alive in Todd Webb's post-war photos
New York was going to be bombed. Nuclear hellfires were going to boil the rivers and melt the streets. Fourteen huge underground shelters were proposed, three in Manhattan, seven in Brooklyn, three in Queens, one in the Bronx, each to hold a quarter-million people. After the atomic holocaust, suggested Planning Commissioner Jerry Finkelstein, they could be used as peacetime parking garages. Unfortunately, they would take several years to build. Fortunately, there were already many miles of subway tunnels into which the people could flee, as well as many skyscrapers with thick concrete walls. Ninety havens were designated the Equitable Building, Met Life, various courthouses and PUBLIC SHELTER signs were affixed to them.
Eight thousand Welfare Department employees were meanwhile directed to staff 47 smaller shelters in the five boroughs; Welfare Commissioner Raymond Hilliard proudly announced in early September that his people were nearly ready to deal with things in the event, say, two A-bombs fell on Queens. "We are practically out of the planning stage now," he said. The Red Cross organized hundreds of first-aid classes. Thirty-five thousand cabbies were tapped to be ambulance drivers. The Ballantine brewery in Newark offered 1,000 trucks.
Late in September, the state Civil Defense Commission, headed by Gen. Lucius Clay, the man who had directed the Berlin Airlift, began distributing millions of free copies of a 36-page booklet called "You and the Atomic Bomb." Nuclear war was quite survivable, citizens learned, if only they took simple precautions. If indoors: "Draw curtains and blinds. . . . Get under a table and throw a cloth over your head." If outdoors: "Crouch behind a tree." After the blast: "Scrub walls to erase radioactivity." Survivors were advised to drink lots of salt water. The dangers from so-called fallout, Wallander assured the public, were "greatly exaggerated."
And so New York City waited for World War III.
According to the master plan, a three-minute cry from Wallander's commandeered sirens would mean that an atomic bomb was expected to fall in about eight minutes. A subsequent series of shorter chirps would signal the all-clear, assuming that the nuclear firestorms had not destroyed the sirens.
By June 1951, when Russia had not yet invaded the United States, Congress slashed President Harry Truman's $403 million Civil Defense budget to $31 million. Still, surveys found that one out of two Americans expected war within two years, and in New York, Arthur Wallander remained vigilant. Civilian observers were manning plane-spotting stations across the city, breathlessly calling in sightings of commercial airliners, and Wallander's volunteer units drilled regularly. In October, Russia exploded two test A-bombs. It was time, Wallander decided, for a public demonstration of preparedness.
From Daily News Jan. 1951.On Wednesday the 14th of November as armistice talks collapsed in Panmunjom and reports came in that 6,270 U.S. prisoners of war had been slaughtered by their barbaric Red captors tens of thousands of emergency workers made a trial run. Sirens screamed and flares burned bright as enemy bombers struck at Third Ave. and 149th St. in the Bronx and at Myrtle and Bushwick in Brooklyn. Ambulances careened about in heavy rains. Twenty-nine ferries, barges, tugs and police boats convoyed down the East River, rescuing patients from five hospitals. Myrtle and Bushwick looked like a war zone anyway, as it happened, since the whole area was being leveled to make way for the new Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
The big show, 15 days later, made a hero out of Wallander, a man who had planned well. It seemed there was only one thing he hadn't thought of, this being horses; deliverymen fleeing their wagons had no idea what to do with their nags except just leave them standing, puzzled, in the street. The city could be proud of itself, editorialized the Daily News: "You got the impression that if New York ever should be bombed, the survivors would claw the cinders out of their hair, bury the fallen with due respect, make some wisecracks in the New York manner and set forth with cold determination to get their revenge." Old Joe Stalin, the paper mused, should only just watch out.
Another citywide nuclear drill, in December 1952, was somewhat less successful; authorities figured that about a quarter-million New Yorkers died.
As late as 1958, local and federal officials were talking about building an enormous $2.5 billion public bomb shelter 800 feet beneath Manhattan, large enough to hold 4.5 million people.
First published on September 9, 1998 as part of the "Big Town" series on old New York. Find more stories about the city's epic history here.
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