‘New Canaan There & Then’ is sponsored by Brown Harris Stevens Realtors Bettina Hegel, Joanne Santulli and Dawn Sterner. In Steven Spielberg’s madcap (sometimes) comedy “1941” starring John Belushi, a ragtag group of California civilians work furiously to make their city defensible from a misperceived attack by the Japanese, in the wake of a real attack on Pearl Harbor days earlier.
The genesis of the movie’s plot was the so-called “Battle of Los Angeles,” where a similar false rumor in the late and early hours of Feb. 24-25,1942 triggered the largest antiaircraft barrage on U.S. soil in history, causing significant property damage, injuries and several indirect deaths. Luckily for New Canaan, the good women and men constituting its local “plane spotters” were far more circumspect in their identification of aircraft than their contemporaries on the west coast.
The period between 1940 and 1960 saw the United States on an almost perpetual war footing, between its involvement in World War II (1941-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953), and the Cold War (1945-1991). Apart from actively fighting “hot” wars abroad, either directly or by proxy, The United States also built up an unprecedented defensive capability at home, most notably through its possession of thousands of intercontinental nuclear ballistic missiles, as well as the legendary B-52 Stratofortress bombers and other assets of the U.S. Strategic Air Command.
A vastly simpler but often overlooked component of America’s comprehensive defense system was its “plane spotters.” During World War II, the U.S. established a massive volunteer network, the Army’s Ground Observer Corps (GOC) (later called “Skywatch”), involving over 1.5 million civilians to identify enemy (i.e., Japanese, German or Italian) aircraft.
