Older readers of the Benton News will remember waking up in the middle of the night and heading out Everett Street to the Benton Airport where a stark concrete-block building equipped with two chairs, a table, a chart on the wall for the purpose of determining direction, a pair of field glasses, some writing material and a telephone saw unusual levels of nighttime activity. The happenings at night took place in virtual darkness.The building became a beehive of activity when high-altitude airplanes flew overhead. It happened during World War II as part of a program of visual-aircraft recognition, a program we referred to as we were growing up simply as "aircraft spotting" or "plane spotting." The "dusk-to-dawn" program was "manned" by housewives, farmers in the few hours they were not occupied on the farm and others who willingly volunteered their time. As I remember, two hours a week was asked of the volunteers.During the times I helped spot planes, the lighting in the concrete-block building was kept off--probably so the enemy wouldn't notice the building from 20,000 feet and blow things to smithereenes. Lights off reminded us that there was a war ongoing, although I suspect that there was no enemy plane flying at that time which had the capacity to fly over the sleeping village of Benton. Many houses had "blackout" shades on the windows to keep the light inside.Father and Mother often talked about the "home front" as we sat around the kitchen table, a term which meant what the civilians did to win the war, which had a significant impact on the outcome of the conflict. From shortly after the time that World War II began in Europe on September 1, 1939, the Berwick American Car & Foundry (ACF) plant built as many as 15,000 tanks for the United States government. The plant was the largest producer of armor plate in the world. Father worked at the Berwick ACF for a time, in addition to being a farmer and a rural mail carrier, and any discussion of the ACF was done proudly. For music, we sometimes listened to "Der Fuehrer's Face," a humorous attack on Adolf Hitler, which you can hear by going here.Spotting aircraft was not unique to Benton. There was a building on the Doyle Hess farm, Asbury, about eight feet by eight feet in size, used for the same purpose.
Lee Remley has vivid memories of his nights spotting aircraft in a building on the Karl Fritz farm in Divide. It was an 8 x 8 building, located between the house and barn at the corner of the open lawn. There was a pot-belly coal stove and telephone in the building. A sixty-watt light bulb hung from the ceiling which was turned out until they heard an aircraft. When they heard the plane, they went outside and determined the direction, then they reentered the building and using a pull chain turned on the light so they could identify the aircraft from the chart Then they called the phone number listed on the wall. Lee also remembers a table and two chairs in the building. There was the chart on the wall with the various aircraft pictured. A compass helped determine the direction of the planes. Lee and his brother, Ed, worked together in spotting planes. They walked over the hill from their farm to the observation station for their two-hour shifts. They carried a kerosene lantern to make their way through the darkness. Brothers Herb and Carl also worked as a team.
Loraine Prutzman remembers from her days when she lived near Idetown, Lehman Township, that she spotted aircraft from a cemetery near Harvey's Lake. She and her father proudly wore their arm bands, inscribed U.S. Army AirForce, AWS, Observer. (AWS stood for "Aircraft Warning Service.") Loraine still has her father's arm band, which her mother embedded in a quilt. Millville didn't have a place where spotting took place, or at least Harry Watts and Arla Mae Miller don't remember one. Arla Mae does remember "during WWII when we heard airplanes overhead after dark and had to pull the window shades down. As a 10 year old, that was pretty scary!"
Dean Good remembers that in the fall and winter of 1943 and spring of 1944 he had the 4 AM to 6 AM shift one day each week. Dean recalls that it was "boring but we did have some air traffic that we had to phone in (with) details of wing configuration, number of engines, direction, etc. Darwin Hatch was about 4 or 5 and remembers that it was "really a big deal to go with his father, Vernon M. Hatch, to help spot planes at the Eldersville election house.
It has been a long time since I stared at the sky in an attempt to determine the relative speed and direction of high-flying planes. During the later years of World War II, aircraft didn't have the sophisticated electronics available today. Visual sightings and aircraft recognitions were necessary. If it flew across the sky, diligent and dedicated volunteers would log the course and direction in a book in the observation building, then would call a county telephone in Bloomsburg. Observation was not as complicated as logging registration numbers. Course and direction was all that was provided.It is true that after several nights of scanning the skies, the ground observers began noticing key attributes of aircraft, such as the noise, size, position of engines and number of engines. A deviation from the flight patterns into New York city was immediately recognizable. We soon learned that engines were placed differently on each airplane; i.e., some wings were swept back, some engines were at midpoint, and all these factors were diligently jotted down, recorded, and kept in the memory bank of the observer. I remember long conversations about things in the sky, events that today I wouldn't even notice. All the factors observed by what we felt were "experienced" eyes helped identify the aircraft.The observers had a manual which compiled markings, insignias and logos. Ruth Peterson Cavanaugh, 74, Staten Island, New York, remembers that "school children were shown silhouettes of the various American planes and some of the German- and Japanese planes." When spotters saw them, they knew what they were. Ruth's cousin "had the flash cards with the plane silhouettes." Ruth was referring to flash or playing cards used as an aid in identification.
If you would like to know more about spotting airplanes from the vantage point of where you live, you might visit www.scramble.nl/civbase.htm to learn the characteristics of civilian airplanes which fly over your area. The reference is to Scramble magazine, http://www.scramble.nl/index.html, which provides this information for military and civilian aircraft.
While those who spotted airplanes locally took their job seriously, the "roach spotters," as airplane spotters in England were called, had a far more important job. In January 1941, a call went out to the United States to supply England with 5,000 stopwatches for aerial spotters of England. The watches were shipped to the Civilian Committee for Defense of Homes at Birmingham, England. The watches were used to time the approach of a spotted plane and avoid disrupting industrial activity until the raider came within bombing distance.
The volunteers were a dedicated lot. Ruth Cavanaugh's husband told about a small German plane which crashed on Rockaway Beach (southern Queens) in 1943. The newspapers played it down so people wouldn't be alarmed. The skeptics of the program would have been relieved to know that a Russian bomber successfully landed years later at an American air base on Christmas Day, 1953. Three Russian fliers escaped from their country, flew low to avoid radar detection, made it safely past Arctic, Canadian and United States radar posts and landed at a New York airport. Dale Ruckle remembers the day Dick Reese came home from Europe and World War II. Dick flew so low over Millville in a B-29 that the "shadow covered the entire town."
Aircraft spotters were very successful during World War II in Germany, Italy, China and Great Britain. In several countries, aircraft spotting was organized in the 1930s. Many London alerts were issued when low-flying planes came across the English channel. Gen. Claire Chennault had the Chinese relay warnings to the Flying Tigers from hilltop to hilltop--using hand signals--when Japanese planes approached.
A sign on the wall of the block building at the Benton airport summed up the mission: "Civil defense is everyone's job." World War II patriotic posters were everywhere asking civilians to do their part in the war effort, although I don't remember any in the airport building. You can view many of the World War II posters by heading here.
One of the requirements to be a volunteer was to not have color blindness. Plane spotters had a possibility of seeing different colored lights, necessitating the need for workers to have good color perception.
Ruth Cavanaugh recalls the "Air Raid" drills in school, where children would crawl under their desks as the air-raid sirens blew their warning. Later they "used those same drills" when the country "became concerned about Russian planes dropping atomic bombs on us, until they realized that the desk was no protection." Students were then made to go into the hallways and sit next to the walls on each side of the corridor. Eventually, someone decided that wouldn't protect students either, so they stopped doing that, too.
The volunteer civilian portion of the nation's aircraft warning net was virtually eliminated in early October 1943, except as a reserve for emergency use. The War Department ordered most of it placed in an "alert status" as a conservation-of-manpower measure. Instead of operating twenty-four hours a day, the 7,500 observations posts of the aircraft spotters and the forty-three filter centers and the east, west and gulf coasts and the Canadian border were manned only a few hours one day a week in order to keep the organization intact and remain prepared to start the program up full-time if needed. According to the Dallas Morning News in its edition of October 5, 1943, there were approximately 600,000 in the "ground observer corps" and the "aircraft warning corps" affected by the decision. President Roosevelt warned the public not to interpret the decision as a "demobilization of civilian defense."
Both Joe "Brooks" Sutliff and Ann Sutliff Ganshaw remember aircraft spotting from the Benton airport in the early 1950s while they helped their mother, Ruth Sutliff.
If you would like to be an airplane observer today, there is no better place than at the end of the runway on the banks of the Potomac River (known as Gravelly Point) at Reagan National Airport, Arlington, VA. On your next trip to our nation's capital, forget the touristy spots and ask anyone how to get to the "end of the runway," adjacent to the George Washington Parkway. There is a good chance when you visit that you'll run into someone who learned the art of watching airplanes in a remote, blackened room during World War II.
