December 1, 1941. Birth of the Civil Air Patrol.

On this day in 1941, the Air Force auxiliary the United States Civil Air Defense Services, whose named was soon changed to the Civil Air Patrol, came into existence.

The organization came into being through Executive Order No. 9 issued by F. H. La, which provided:

December 1, 1941

Administrative Order No.9

Establishing Civil Air Patrol

By virtue of the authority vested in me through my appointment as United States Director of the Office of Civilian Defense, through the Executive Order of the President creating said Office, dated May 20, 1941. I have caused to be created and organized a branch of this Office of volunteers for the purpose of enlisting and training personnel to aid in the national defense of the United States, designated as the Civil Air Patrol.

In conformity with said organization, Major General John F. Curry, U.S.A. Air Corps has been assigned to this office by the U.S. Army and designated by me as its National Commander. Said organization shall be formed as outlined in the attached chart, which is made a part of this Order as if written herein in full. The Civil Air Patrol shall carry out such Orders and directives as are issued to it by the Director of Civilian Defense. It shall be the duty and responsibility of the National Commander to see that the objectives and purposes and orders issued in conformity with the policy of this office are carried out and that all activities are reported regularly to the Director through the Aviation Aide.

All enlistments and appointments in the Civil Air Patrol may be disapproved by the Director of the Office of Civilian Defense.

F. H. LaGuardia

U.S. Director of

Civilian Defense

The wartime status of the CAP is frankly a little murky.  Often noted that it was a "civilian" organization using private aircraft, it rapidly came to deploy light aircraft owned by the government. Moreover, as the war progressed, the aircraft became armed and the CAP conducted over 80 bombing and depth charge runs on German U-boats during the war, suppressing their activities but sinking none of them.  The members of the organization were commanded by an Army general during the war, and wore Army Air Corps uniforms.  Given all of that, the better argument is that they were in fact a combat organization.  It's role in the Second World War, in that sense, may be imperfectly analogous to the Coast Guard, somewhat, or the United States Health Service, both of which became wartime auxillaries of the U.S. Navy.

Lt. Willa Beatrice Brown. She later unsuccessfully ran for Congress.

As such, they're further notable in that they fielded some women pilots during the war, one of whom, Willa Beatrice Brown, was African American.  This would mean that the Civil Air Patrol, not any of the other branches of the military, was the first to deploy women officially to a combat service and the first branch of the Army to integrate, albeit to a very small extent.

The subsequent view of the CAP is, at least to some extent, confused by the later creation of the cadet branch, which came into being some during World War Two (October 1942) and which somewhat replicated, at that time, JrROTC, which was limited to the Army.  Like the "adult" branch, the cadet program also included females in its ranks.

We've posted on the CAP a fair amount here before, with the longest World War Two themed one being the following two.

Mid Week At Work: The Civil Air Patrol. Bar Harbor, Maine, 1944.

The Civil Air Patrol is the official auxiliary of the United States Air Force.  Created during World War Two, it's original purpose was to harness the nations large fleet of small private aircraft for use in near shore anti submarine patrols.  The light aircraft, repainted in bright colors to allow for them to be easily spotted by other American aircraft, basically flew the Atlantic in patterns to look for surfaced submarines.  As submarines of that era operated on the surface routinely, this proved to be fairly effective and was greatly disruptive to the German naval effort off of the American coast.

The CAP also flew some patrols along the Mexican border during the same period, although I've forgotten what the exact purpose of them was. Early in the war, there was quite a bit of concern about Mexico, given its problematic history during World War One, and given that the Mexican government was both radical and occasionally hostile to the United States. These fears abated fairly rapidly.

The CAP still exists, with its post war mission having changed to search and rescue.  It also has a cadet branch that somewhat mirrors JrROTC.  Like JrROTC it has become considerably less martial over time, reflecting the views of boomer parents, who have generally wished, over time, to convert youthful organizations that were organized on military or quasi military lines into ones focusing on "citizenship" and "leadership"..

Mid Week at Work: The Civil Air Patrol.

Photographs of the Civil Air Patrol during World War Two. The CAP was made up of civilian volunteers organized into an axillary of the Army Air Corps for the purposes of patrolling the coasts.  They detected over 100 submarines during the war.  The organization exists today as an axillary of the USAF and performs search and rescue operations.

As those threads explain the CAP pretty well, we'll leave it at that.

Franklin Roosevelt cut short a vacation at Warm Springs, Georgia to deal with the mounting crisis of almost certain war with Japan.

Also on this day, the Japanese Navy suddenly changed its communications code, a significant event in that the US had cracked the prior one. This meant that the US was suddenly unable to eavesdrop on radio communications of the Japanese navy, although the Japanese had gone radio silent on their dispatched missions leading towards the events of December 7.

Yugoslavian partisans attacked Italian forces in Montenegro at Pljevilja.  They were predicatably put down, after which the local movement began to severely split, with sizable numbers joining pro Axis militias.

Field Marshall Gerd von Rundstedt, feuding with Hitler after ordering a retreat against Hitler's orders following the German setbacks at Rostov, resigned.  In North Africa, the Afrika Corps fought with New Zealand and British troops at Belhamed Libya with inconclusive results.

Karl Jäger issued a report detailing with precision the murderous activites of Einsatzkommando in the Baltics.

Map from report.

Related Threads:

The Aerodrome: Civil Air Patrol Cessna 182T, Natrona County International Airport

Youth organizations. Their Rise and (near) Fall, or is that a myth? And, did you join?

Thursday December 1, 1941. Lighter than air.

The US airship C-7 flew from Hampton Roads, Virginia to Washington D.C. filled with helium, rather than explosive hydrogen, making it the first airship to use that gas.

This was a large event given that helium, of which the United States has a large supply, is so much safer in this use than hydrogen.

The Federal Government was dealing with other modes of transportation on this day as well.  The task was to find a safer way of delivering the mail, in light of robberies which had been occuring.

Postmaster General Will Hayes and other Post Office officials and a Marine inspecting new armored trucks proposed as a means of protection for the mails.

On the same day, the Federal government imposed regulations on the right to radio broadcast commercially. The regulations required a license and set aside two specific AM frequencies for their operations.

The United Kingdom announced that it intended to offer dominion status to Ireland, but that it intended to retain Ulster.  Talks between Irish Republicans and the British had become dangerously stalled, with there being predictions of a resumption of fighting between the two forces.

The US was looking to introduce a new silver dollar design for 1922.

Director of the Mint, Raymond T. Baker, and Anthony de Francisci examining model of new silver dollar to be issued by Jan. 1st.

A statute to Date was unveiled in Washington D.C. on the 600th anniversary of his birth.

All things Italian remained in vogue at the time.

Page (and Blog) Updates for 2021

 

We've been really bad about updating the pages and features of this blog for one reason or another, but there have been a few recently, so we'll start off this thread by noting those.

One rather obvious thing is we reformatted the layout.  Now items appear on the left margin as well as the right.  The reason is that the items linked in have grown so large that they trail out beyond the posts, no matter what we do.  They still do, but not as severely.

We also culled a bunch of the linked in blogs on the right.  Some are just gone, mostly due to the links being dysfunctional, but many others now are down in the inactive blog list.  Some blogs just stop, and that's where the links to those are.

We also fixed some links that weren't working.  Turned out a few blogs linked in at the right actually update regularly, but their links were incorrect, so their content was being missed.

October 4, 2021

Hmmm. .  I really need to update the pages around here.  Indeed, I know that I've put up piles of posters on the main site, for one thing, I know that I need to add to the collections.

Well, anyhow, there is a new page added to the site:

The Killetarian Cookbook:  Cooking Wild Game.

This was just put up, and it doesn't have any recipes yet. As they're added, as with other pages, I'll update here.

Promise.

October 4, 2021, cont.

The Killetarian Cookbook:  Cooking Wild Game.

Added to.

October 7, 2021

Added to:  The Killetarian Cookbook:  Cooking Wild Game.

Antelope recipes.

December 1, 2021

Added to: They Were Lawyers.

Banastre Tarleton.

Women smoking. How did it come back?

I wish it hadn't.

I'm amazed by how many young women smoke, and comparatively how few men do.   This is very much the reverse of the way things were when I was young.  I.e., a lot of men smoked, but comparatively fewer women did.

Which isn't to say that women didn't smoke.

Historically, women smoking was frowned upon.  It didn't really get rolling until the teens.  Prior to that, it was not only looked down upon, but suggestive in a variety of ways, none of which were really good to have suggested about you.  

Following World War One, however, it rapidly expanded. Cigarettes alone got a big boost by the Great War, taking over from cigars as the favored nicotine delivery method, and the Roaring Twenties brought in flapperism and all that entailed, including suggestive clothing, illegal booze, and of course smoking cigarettes.  Flapperism went away but the illegal booze and smoking didin't, something that kept on keeping on during the Great Depression.  Drinking became legal again and smoking became nearly universal.

Women had their own brand of cigarettes during the Feminist revolution of the 1970s, Virginia Slims, a name that not only referred to the cigarettes themselves but what smoking can do, at first, to a person's figure.

Ultimately it'll ruin that figure, of course.  And for women it not only increases the risk of lung cancer, but breast cancer.  We know this for sure, and nobody really denies that.

Given that, smoking really declined following the 70s. Even by the late 1970s, when I was in high school, girls smoking did so to suggest they were "bad" girls, although most weren't really bad. Rather, they were like Jessica Rabbit, just drawn that way, and in their case, attempting to draw themselves that way.  Rebels without a clue, so to speak.

In college I can't recall very many women smoking.  I can recall some university men smoking, but by and large it had really fallen out of favor.  And when I was first practicing law, it was really on the outs. A smoking woman could be guaranteed to be at least middle aged  and therefore, not young.

Well, it's really back.

Why?

Sunday, November 30, 1941. War Warnings

On this day in 1941 Sunday newspaper readers in Hawaii woke up to read that war with Japan was imminent.  Indeed, headlines in the Hilo Tribune and Honolulu Advertiser read that Japan might strike that next weekend, the weekend of December 6/7.  In fact, the Emperor had issued permission to Tojo to proceed to war.

The Germans retreated near the Mius after the Soviets successfully took back Rostov.  Gerd von Rundstedt issued the order and then continued the retreat in spite of having received direct orders from Hitler to stop it.  On the same day, the commander of the German Army Group Center, Fedor von Bock, directly quested German intelligence estimates of the forces opposing him, which he correctly guessed to be inaccurate.

Also, on the same day they commenced mass murder in Rumbula, Latvia, of the area's Jewish population.  Ultimately, 25,000 people would die.

Two Faced Woman was released. The movie would be Greta Garbo's last appearance.  The film was a bomb, featuring Garbo as a woman posing as her own, fictitious, twin engaged in an effort to recapture the affections of her ex-husband.  The movie met with poor reviews and with the condemnation of the Legion of Decency.  Given the latter, the film was withdrawn and recut, but still bombed.

Uniforms

If you put on a uniform there are certain inhibitions you accept.

Dwight Eisenhower.