Artists’ Pens Mightier Than Torpedoes in WWII

SAN DIEGO — They were artists and writers, not warriors. And yet, ensconced in the servants’ quarters of a former private residence in Point Loma during World War II, they threw their energy and talents into the war effort.

They were driven by a sense of urgency and a commitment to do what they could to subdue the enemy that lurked beneath the seas. And they proved that the pen was mightier than the torpedo.

During the early part of World War II, the U.S. submarine forces were foundering badly. Equipment was primitive. Submarines plunged blindly through the seas. Torpedoes misfired.

To meet the problem head-on, the National Defense Research Committee set up a project on the West Coast that joined the facilities of the Navy Radio and Sound Laboratory on Point Loma with many faculty members of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, including its director, Harald Sverdrup.

This cooperative effort was named the University of California Division of War Research. Within the next few years, UCDWR grew to a staff of 600.

UCDWR was a large collection of widely disparate experts--Hollywood types, sound engineers and lab technicians. There were physicians and radio station personalities, academics and theoreticians, all bound together by the single-minded goal of triumphing over the enemy below.

The work of the research group focused on the dual problems of finding enemy submarines and hiding our own submarines so they could travel undetected. There were two simple problems, according to Sam Hinton, the renowned folk music singer and historian who was an editor-illustrator at UCDWR: “how to sink and not get sunk.”

Once the research group and other similar operations on the East Coast were operating, work on the scientific fronts progressed steadily. Researchers established quickly that sound waves were the only effective means of “seeing” underwater. This knowledge cleared the course for the scientists to study all of the variables that would affect how sound traveled through the sea.

UCDWR scientist Eugene La Fond conducted studies with the bathythermograph, an instrument that measures ocean temperature in relation to depth. These studies and many others enabled the research group to predict and map the noises, echoes and rugged terrain of the deep that could serve to camouflage underwater vessels.

As the scientists learned more, they realized it was crucial to communicate this complex, scientific information to the sailors in an interesting and useful way. So, from 1944 until 1946, UCDWR employed a cadre of artists and writers who compiled operating manuals for the sailors who might have been shoe salesmen, farmers, or students right out of high school, and who were now on board warships searching for the enemy.

Who were they and where did they come from, these artists and writers who made this complicated information readable, fun and understandable?

Austin Faricy, an elegant, white-haired gentleman, sits in his library retreat with its cathedral ceilings and its walls lined with books and records. Several keyboard instruments attest to a life filled with music. The ocean is visible over an old shed covered with cascading pink bougainvillea. Dark remnants of a sudden downpour complete the scene.

Faricy speaks with precision, almost caressing each well-chosen word as he describes this “joyful, improbable period” during the War.

Faricy, a Rhodes scholar of Latin and Greek, was recruited from his teaching post at Stephens College in Missouri by John Olsen, the head of the artists group at UCDWR. Though Faricy had never heard of underwater sound in his life, he threw himself into the task of interpreting the highly technical scientific data.

“There was always the danger of oversimplifying,” he explained, “and our duties put the men of science on the defensive somewhat, since they felt they had already made this information as clear as the mind of man could make it.”

Faricy tells of his disappointment after being granted security clearance and catching his first glimpse of state secrets.

“I thought, ‘Oh boy, I’m going to find out the mystery of the cosmos,’ ” he said, chuckling. But when Faricy looked at the document, he found mostly indecipherable mathematical formulas. “That document was safe with me!” he said, laughing.

Faricy recalls the group’s offices in Building “X,” a name that drips with mystery but was so called “only for lack of a better name,” he claims. Their group occupied the servants’ quarters on the top floor of this elegant mansion, the Bridges Estate, which had been drafted into service as part of the UCDWR headquarters during the war.

“There was an abrupt demarcation,” he said, “between the estate with its inlaid woodwork and parquet floors, and our offices upstairs with their bare floors, skimpy materials, and cramped circumstances.”

Though the offices were cramped, the windows of the top floor framed panoramic views of the bay. In the spirit of democracy, the writers and artists established a system of rotating desk occupation. Once a month everyone would gather up materials and move one desk over, giving each a turn at a window with a view.

Faricy reflected on the wry humor with which the group regarded its task of inventing cartoon characters to represent deadly weapons. Some of the odd byproducts of this intellectual tension were the outlets to relieve the intense pressure.

“During our coffee break, we would swarm down onto the courtyard and square dance furiously for 10 minutes before retreating back to our servants’ quarters,” Faricy recalled.

Square dancing was only one of the activities this group enjoyed during the morning or lunchtime breaks. Hinton and Jimmy Leighton, another artist, were folk music devotees and kept an old guitar, tin whistles and a harmonica at the office for lunchtime swapping of ballads and tunes.

Sam Hinton was a young curator at the Desert Museum in Palm Springs when the war broke out. An expert in desert zoology, Hinton was consulted by Dr. Martin Johnson, a marine biologist from Scripps who was studying shrimp crackle, the constant noise produced underwater by thousands of snapping shrimp. Hinton helped Johnson stalk the shrimp, which also crackled in the landlocked Salton Sea, not far from Hinton’s Palm Springs base.

The discovery of shrimp crackle was one of Johnson’s great contributions, Hinton explained, since the noisy crustaceans provided safe havens for American submarines by masking their sounds and making them difficult to detect with underwater listening devices--a sort of audio camouflage. By examining the depth of the water, the topography of the ocean bottom, and the latitude, the shrimp crackle could be predicted anywhere in the warm Pacific.

Hinton was recruited to UCDWR on Johnson’s recommendation and one of his first duties was to draw maps of the areas where the snapping shrimp were most dense.

Hinton became renowned among the group for his ability to draw cartoons, a talent he later honed with his weekly column on sea life for the San Diego Union. At UCDWR he created cartoons to illustrate characters invented by George Stewart, a novelist who also spent a brief stint as a writer for UCDWR. Though Stewart’s novels, “Storm,” and “Ordeal by Hunger” (the story of the Donner party), had met with critical success, the two characters he created to cavort about the “Submarine Supplement to Sailing Directions” were not well-received by the Bureau of Ships, the federal agency that had final approval of all publications.

These two characters, for which Hinton drew cartoons, were the Submarine Skipper, Captain Stephen Decatur Farragut who liked to be called by his old Annapolis nickname, Hi-Yi-Q, and Zeke, the Executive Officer.

Hi-Yi-Q was cerebral and enjoyed figuring out the theoretical aspects of running a submarine. Zeke, by contrast, liked to fire torpedoes. Together they made a real good team, Hinton says, and provided a way to explain many of the principles of basic physics to the sailors.

The Bureau of Ships, however, objected to the separation of interests between the cerebral captain and the bloodthirsty officer. Stewart went to Washington to fight for the survival of Hi-Yi-Q and Zeke, but lost the battle and left UCDWR to continue his tenure as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Hinton also laughs about the submarine character that was not deemed sufficiently masculine by the Bureau of Ships. “We had a good time with that one,” Hinton said with glee.

Hinton obviously relishes these tales of intellectual battles that raged within the group and smiles fondly as he relates his stories.

Often, each writer would be assigned a chapter or section of a manual and when they would gather in big conferences to critique the work in progress, the writers felt compelled to defend their contributions to the death, Hinton explained. At the same time, everyone was painfully aware that lives could depend on their clarity. Overriding the arguments over fine points of language and grammar was a huge amount of respect for each other’s skills and talents.

Jimmy Leighton’s house, like those of his former colleagues, is filled with treasures gathered from a lifetime packed with adventures and passions. “A Guide to Western Birds” lays open on a table so he can grab it quickly to identify the many winged creatures that alight in his dense garden.

Leighton came to the research group from the UCLA Theatre Department. It was his first--and last--job, because he remained with the Navy Electronics Lab when UCDWR was disbanded after the War and many of its functions were assumed by the Navy.

Now retired, Leighton lives near the old Bridges Estate in Point Loma when he isn’t bicycle touring, backpacking, or traveling in more conventional style around the world. A thin, wiry man with a salt and pepper mustache, Leighton reminisces about the “very special time and very special people” who occupied the upper floor of Building “X” during the War.

“It was exciting and glamorous for a 22-year-old away from home for the first time,” he said. “I had more fun there than I’ve had since.”

He too recalls the music fests and song exchanges, but also tells of frequent gatherings for after-work parties and producing plays in a cabaret-style theater, in a converted La Jolla warehouse.

“This was a tight group in more ways than one,” he said, chuckling.

There were many other artists in the program--Ethel Greene, for example, whose paintings have been exhibited extensively in San Diego and around the country and hang in many collections. She and her friend, Tanci Sion, were recruited to UCDWR from jobs in the art department of Convair (now General Dynamics) to draw pictures of underwater listening devices.

John Olsen was working as an artist-illustrator with the Air Service Command in San Bernardino when he was recruited to UCDWR to head the artists’ group. Like everyone else, he deemphasizes his own role, asking eagerly whether the others have been contacted; Ev Jones, who went on to teach writing at UCLA, Gil Fera, Jane Loken, Joe Starbuck, Lindsay Field, Jack Zane . . . each individual brings a smile and a story.

“It was absolutely amazing how much talent the group possessed and how well they worked together,” Olsen exclaimed.

Olsen’s tenure at UCDWR continued after the war when he stayed on at the Navy Electronics Lab before returning to New York to complete his doctorate in art education at Columbia University. He returned to California to found the art departments at three California State University campuses: Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Fullerton.

Now more than 40 years later, the Bridges mansion still stands, though it was divided in half years ago into two separate residences. The artists and writers who roamed its top story and swarmed onto its courtyard to dance have gone their separate ways too, “bursting into a thousand fragments after the war,” as Faricy predicted. But their memories, and the mansion’s stone, preserve the knowledge that for this brief period, these unique and gifted individuals were bound together with energy, intensity and strength.