Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
The solid line of cars snaked up Route 2, with both lanes of traffic reserved for vehicles heading northeast from Bangor to Orono. Buses, trucks and personal vehicles were all packed with people evacuating Bangor on a warm late spring day in the 1950s.
Nobody was in any sort of danger. It was all part of Operation Alert, a massive Cold War-era national training exercise to simulate how 52 different cities across the country would handle a bombing attack by the Soviet Union. In Bangor, the simulation was called Operation Scram, and on June 15, 1955, it saw thousands of people evacuate Bangor’s east side for points north.
The Maine office of the Federal Civil Defense Administration coordinated the effort, in cooperation with local police, Dow Air Force Base, hospitals, schools and other organizations. The scale of the simulation was unprecedented, involving thousands of civilians volunteering in order to see how smoothly — or not smoothly — the whole thing might go.
The Maine Emergency Management Agency, the agency that in the 1980s succeeded Maine Civil Defense, shared a video earlier this month combining footage from the simulation held by the Maine State Library, its own research and quotes from the Bangor Daily News coverage at the time. It’s a fascinating peek into a very specific time in Maine and U.S. history.
The day started with a KB-29 Superfortress — a huge military plane regularly seen at Dow Air Force Base — simulating a “bombing” across Bangor, with informational leaflets dropped instead of actual munitions.
At 11 a.m., the evacuations began, with a total of 3,000 schoolchildren in Bangor schools bussed to the University of Maine in Orono. Bangor High School JROTC students staged an evacuation of volunteers at the Bangor Osteopathic Hospital, today the site of Acadia Hospital. At Dow, family members and non-essential staffers were evacuated, with each car loaded with enough food and supplies to last five days. Service members stayed on site for training exercises related to the simulation.
Then, at 12:30 p.m., it was time for the adults. As the BDN wrote in its coverage, “the first blast of the three-minute long wail of the siren cut the air.” People in east side neighborhoods were instructed to head to pre-established rally points and get into vehicles waiting there. The people remaining in the downtown business district headed out of their shops and offices and into their cars, or boarded buses. Within an hour, downtown was deserted, with the BDN writing that “flags flapped over empty buildings, pigeons waddled undisturbed across the sidewalks.” It must have been an eerie sight.
read more hard telling not knowing
More than half of the city had been asked to evacuate during Operation Scram — around 22,000 people in total. Altogether, only an estimated 5,000 civilians actually participated, with many losing interest or not wanting to deal with the traffic. A number of people left up to 90 minutes ahead of what their scheduled departure was supposed to be, creating an early traffic crush. It was also a beautiful day out, which likely lessened the resolve of people to pretend they were being attacked by the Soviets. Why have fake bombs rained on you, when you could head up to camp?
In its coverage, the BDN noted that for some of those that did participate, it was a traumatic experience. World War II had ended a decade prior, and for the many veterans of that war that lived in Bangor, it brought back painful memories — with the added stress of it all taking place in their hometown. It also cost local businesses around $200,000 in lost sales, due to having to close for most of the day — worth around $2.2 million today, adjusted for inflation.
As the paranoia and fear of the Cold War era began to abate somewhat in the 1960s, the “duck and cover” training exercises in elementary schools and massive coordinated simulations like Operation Alert began to seem a bit excessive. Protesters throughout the country argued that it was foolish to pretend that a nuclear war was survivable, and that simulations like the one that happened in Bangor were mostly for show — a kind of Cold War theater.
