Pearl Harbor: How Dayton stood ‘united in the defense of our country’

“We should declare war. There is no other choice,” said Warren Hammaker of 1004 West Fairview.

“My answer to what I believe should be done is in that mailbox back on the corner,” said Irving Webber, a resident of the downtown Gibbons Hotel.

“I just dropped in the papers for immediate enlistment with the civilian corps of skilled men to be sent to Hawaii. I decided it was time for me to do my part.”

“Let’s lick the hell out of ‘em,” Harry Minton at the Moraine Hotel was quoted as saying.

The next day the United States entered World War II.

“U.S. DECLARES WAR ON JAPAN,” read the banner headline in a Dec. 8, 1941 edition of the Dayton Daily News.

The citizens of Dayton buckled down to secure the city and contribute to the war effort.

Young men rushed downtown to enlist for duty forming lines at the Army, Navy and Marine recruiting offices. The Red Cross sought volunteer knitters to find yarn “for the knitting of socks, watch caps and sweaters for the men of the North Atlantic patrol.”

Within days, 500 sweaters were shipped to the first division, U.S. Marines stationed in New River, N.C.

“War emergency duties” were assigned to local architects to help the community identify hazards, safeguard buildings and form programs for evacuation camps, camouflage and protective construction.

Housewives were urged to bring their own baskets when they grocery shopped in an attempt to conserve paper bags. Plans were considered to convert the Masonic Temple into an emergency hospital with 300 to 400 beds. Air and ground defense was increased at Wright and Patterson Fields.

Floodlights that had been used to illuminate night football games at the University of Dayton as well as Oakwood, Northridge and Kiser high schools were removed and installed to guard the boundaries of the air fields.

The newspapers published lists of names of the area sailors, soldiers and civilians considered to be in the “war zone.”

“Paul Hixson, son of Mrs. Elizabeth Hixon, 1509 Wyoming St. is a civilian employee at Hickman Field.

"Moritz Nicholas, brother of Earl Nicholas, 3016 Edison Ave., is a shipbuilder at Pearl Harbor.

"Sailors in Pearl Harbor are Arvin Eugene Hautz, on the battleship Tennessee; William Shroyer, on the destroyer Selfridge and Ralph H. Badders on the destroyer Flusser.”

Anxiously waiting for news of a loved one along with the rest of the community was Anna Zenni, who lived at 708 Keowee St. in Dayton.

Zenni, who was photographed keeping vigil beside a small radio, was waiting for word of her son, First Lt. Richard Zenni, who was stationed with the Army Air Corps at Wheeler Field.

She told a reporter through tears she had tried to send a radiogram and to make a transpacific phone call to her son but to no avail.

“I am so worried about my boy. I can’t get any word from him at all,” she said “I just have to keep sitting here by my radio, listening, hoping that one little word about my boy will eventually be said.”

Charles J. Brennan, the mayor of Dayton, urged the city to unite in a written statement published in the newspaper.

“As mayor of the city of Dayton, I call upon the personnel of our city department to be vigilant, active and firm in the performance of their services for the public welfare,” read part of his proclamation.

“To the people of Dayton, I call for faith and courage, for vigilance and sacrifice in the service they will render in the cause of preserving and maintaining the tradition, the purposes and the institutions of our own United States of America.”

“Let all of Dayton, without regard to race, or class or creed, stand united in the defense of our country.”