Lee McCardell
reporter, the Baltimore Sun
Baltimore Sun writer whose feature on the wartime Eastern Shore, published at the end of June 1942, reported that the resort's beach was not covered in oil and that Ocean City's hotels had not been taken over by the Army — a piece the Worcester Democrat's front-page column answered on 3 July, complaining that he had understated how much of the war the Shore could see.
In the record (1)
1942 · 1942-07-03
A Baltimore Sun reporter came to the Shore in the summer of 1942 and reported that Ocean City's beach was not covered in oil and its hotels had not been taken over by the Army — and the county paper printed the rebuttal while insisting dead bodies had come ashore there.
The campaign has carried an open question since 1941: did the Army or the Coast Guard requisition an Ocean City hotel? Here is the nearest thing to a contemporary answer, and it is a denial. On 3 July 1942 the Worcester Democrat's front-page column 'Chirps from the Democrat's Pen' took a swing at a Baltimore Sun feature about the Eastern Shore by Lee McCardell. The columnist's complaint is that McCardell had understated things: 'He didn't take the trouble to say that they were filled either with soldiers or army supplies; that the towns were having dim-outs and black-outs; that Federal restriction were putting the clamp on gasoline for the old jalopy. Likewise the Japs had camped on our rubber supply out in Malaya. And that dead bodies had floated ashore at Ocean City. Outside of these insignificant evidences, the Eastern Shore didn't know much about war conditions.' Then he summarises what McCardell had actually written: 'He says reports are very misleading; that we don't know whether we've heard depth bombs or not; Ocean City beach is not covered with oil; the hotels are not taken over by the Army.' So as of early July 1942 a Baltimore daily had gone to the Shore, and the local paper accepted, that the hotels of Ocean City had NOT been requisitioned — while both agreed the dead had come ashore. That is the shape of what the town knew: rumours large enough that a metropolitan paper travelled down to knock them down, and one of them true. — 1943 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [confirmed]: The substantive claim — that the Army did not take over Ocean City's hotels — is now independently corroborated for 1943 by three separate primary-press items in which the hotels are plainly operating as commercial hotels: the Chamber of Commerce and Hotel Owners Association announcing a season opening 29 May with reservations ahead of 1942 (Salisbury Times, 30 April 1943, p5); twelve hotels jointly leasing a Georgetown, Delaware laundry and buying its trucks because their Salisbury laundry had gone over to army contracts (12 July 1943, p5); and the chief of police reporting about 12,000 vacationists virtually filling the beach front hotels (19 July 1943, p1). No requisition, lease to the Government or military occupation of any Ocean City hotel appears anywhere in 2,979 pages of the 1943 Salisbury Times or in the thirteen 1943 council minutes. The traffic ran the other way: the hotel operators believed Atlantic City's displaced visitors were transferring to Ocean City, and in February 1943 a citizen was at the council asking the town to LOBBY the Government to make Ocean City a WAC training centre — which is not what a requisitioned resort does.
Source · checked 2026-08-11