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Whenever I hear an announcement in an airport that the
threat security level has been heightened to orange or red or some other
alarming color, I wonder what the heck I’m supposed to do about that.
I mean, I’m already looking suspiciously at everyone around me, just
because I’m a country boy surrounded by strangers. But what are we
supposed to do about an announced threat?
It sort of makes you nostalgic for the Cold War, when there was a role
available for anyone who wanted to do something about the announced threat
of Soviet bombers sneaking in low from the arctic. You could join the
Ground Observer Corps.
The Ground Observer Corps was a volunteer organization that started during
the Second World War and was revived during the Cold War of the 1950s.
Volunteer observers all over the country, but especially here on the front
lines of the northern plains, were supposed to scan the skies for aircraft
that might be evading radar detection. When they spotted suspicious aircraft,
they called reports into their headquarters offices, known as “filter
centers.”
More than a million volunteer observers took part in this defense effort
from 1952 to 1959. Some 65% of ground observers nationwide were women.
One of my PhD students, Dave Mills, has been telling me about the program.
He’s writing a dissertation called, “The Cold, Cold War: Fighting
Communism on the Northern Plains,” with a chapter devoted to the
Ground Observer Corps. He’d love to hear from people who served in
the volunteer corps, so if you did, and you get in touch with me at North
Dakota State University, I’ll put you in touch with him.
“It was a matter of pride for many communities,” Dave writes,
“to build an observation post out of donated funds, labor, and materials,
and to operate the observation post with volunteers. The air force paid
for the telephones and the cost of the calls, but the volunteers had to
pay for the observation towers, their furnishings, and all utilities.”
Which they did, in a spirit of patriotic service. New Hradek, North Dakota,
only had thirty-five population, but it built an observation post and
signed up 125 volunteer observers.
In Haynes, another tiny town, the Ely Wright family kept watch from their
home and averaged some 1200 hours of watch per month. On a farm down by
Lennox, South Dakota, the Marvin Skie family mounted a 24-hour watch from
atop their silo.
The students at Sentinel Butte High School were not unhappy, I suspect,
to volunteer their time for sky-watching during the school day. During
the night their principal and superintendent and their families sat up
vigilant. Meanwhile, field workers of Nodak Rural Electric Co-op called
in sightings from the road, as did workers on the Milwaukee Railroad.
In August 1954 the U.S. air force recognized the town of Drake, population
650, as the Ground Observer Corps Post of the Month, largely for the town’s
initiative in building a new observation post. The first post, atop the
movie theater, required volunteers to climb seventy steps, too many for
the more elderly sky-watchers. So the town acquired land and built a dedicated
platform for its observers.
Improved radar capacity, particularly the Distant Early Warning Line in
the arctic, made the Ground Observer Corps obsolete, but in its time,
it allowed many patriotic Americans the opportunity to serve in a concrete
way. There must be many among us who can recall their service, and like
I said, we’d love to hear from you.
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