Visual Cultures of Air Defense in World War II Washington, DC

Anne Dobberteen

Advisor: Vanessa Meikle Schulman, PhD, Department of History and Art History

Committee Members: Zachary Schrag and Christopher Hamner

Horizon Hall, #3223
July 11, 2025, 01:00 PM to 03:00 PM

Abstract:

In the United States during World War II, the potential threat of air attacks on the coasts precipitated a visual culture of air defense that was highly participatory in nature. This bi-directional mode of viewing required civilians and military personnel alike to look from new, different vantage points as part of a national defense effort. Participants had to learn to look up to spot and recognize aircraft overhead, or to imagine looking from above, seeing potential targets from an aerial perspective, as though through an enemy’s bombsight. Volunteers and soldiers on the US home front participated in this visual culture of air defense in various capacities as viewers, viewmakers, and objects to be viewed. They might have served as air raid wardens through the Office of Civilian Defense, as volunteer airplane spotters and plotters for the Army Air Forces, as scale recognition airplane model builders for the Navy, or as Coast Artillery gunners and searchlight operators. For civilians, getting involved signified good citizenship and support for the war effort; for soldiers, participating in home defense often provided training before deployment overseas and exposed them to viewing technologies that were part of an international “cinematic” viewing machine that defined modern warfare. Moreover, both groups were contributing to a more extensive morale-building security theater apparatus intended to maintain home front feelings of calm, preparedness, and engagement with the overseas war effort. It hinted at a bigger national security state that was to come during the Cold War.
 
This dissertation focuses on Washington, DC, as a case study to examine how these activities were carried out at a local level from the late 1930s, when these initiatives were just beginning, through their peak in 1942-1943, with a denouement in 1944. It reinserts the lived experiences of Washingtonians into the broader urban home front story and sheds light on a blurry “grey area” between civilian and military defense structures during a period of total war. This project centers visual and material culture methodologies to explore aerial imagery, plane recognition tools, analogue flight tracking devices, photographs, ephemera, antiaircraft equipment, and other objects that helped establish the visual culture of air defense in Washington and beyond.