Living through the Great Depression, the greatest generation developed a tremendous resilience in surviving hardship and solving problems.
Living through the Great depression dropped our parents and grandparents to their knees. How could things possibly get worse? World War Two.
Two of my former students Evan Adrian and Jessica Cowan did a lot of research for a project and found some fascinating information about Missouri during the war years and I’d like to share some of it with you today.
When thinking of the victory and sacrifice of those that fought in the Second World War, there are no words that can be expressed to describe what so few accomplished for so many.
Our service members were the finest our country had to offer and they never can be thanked enough.
But a little known fact is that there was another group of heroes who made a major contribution to the war.
Throughout this nation, there were many people who went to work supplying the men fighting the “good fight”.
The great depression created some of the worst times in our history only to be immediately followed by WWII. Most people would simply give up, but not this generation. Instead, they used these experiences to set an example for all of us to follow.
During last week’s show I talked about war production in St. Louis. Kansas City also played an important part in Missouri’s war production. One out of every one hundred American war dollars were spent in Jackson, Clay, and Wyandotte counties.
In total there were almost four hundred war plants in the Kansas City area. Although most of the war plants were small operations, two were massive and vital to victory (Flynn 62-63). The Lake City Ordnance Plant was the backbone of government ammunition, becoming the first of its kind.
American Aviation produced huge numbers of bombers for the war and became a significant asset to American war production.
Foodstuffs were also a great industry in Kansas City. The close relation with farming and ranching proved to be important to Kansas City industry during the war because of the many food processing plants (Flynn 62-63).
Lake City Ordnance Plant played a major role in arming the troops with the ammunition they needed for the war.
To start, the Ordnance Department began by building three plants that would be able to meet their production goals of one million .30 caliber ammunition and six hundred thousand rounds of .50 caliber ammunition per day (Remington 3-4).
Lake City was to be the first in operation followed by Denver and St. Louis. Remington Arms was given operational command over Lake City and Denver. It took just ten months transforming a Missouri farm into a plant that was supplying ammunition to the forces.
The initial plan of one million rounds of caliber .30 was increased in the first contract with Lake City to two million rounds per day. The expected need for .50 caliber remained the same (Remington 6). This meant the plant had the challenge of producing nearly twenty-four .30 caliber rounds per second and seven .50 caliber rounds per second!
One of the most amazing aspects of the Lake City plant was the massive amount of employees that it had during the peak production time.
The plant required at least sixty-five hundred employees to operate at full production. During peak production the number of workers at the plant was over three times that number.
In 1943 Lake City had an astounding twenty thousand people working at the plant. The sheer size of the employee base was amazing. It became a city in itself, with the only difference in that the employees lived outside of the plant. Having such a large workforce presented the plant with the problems of a city.
Lake City had to provide and maintain its own water and sanitation facilities to provide potable water and take care of its sewage. The plant also had twenty-five miles of roads and had its own bus system to transport the workers.
The twenty thousand workers all needed to be fed, so the plant had six cafeterias that were open night and day. There was also a hospital staffed with ten doctors and nearly fifty nurses. The hospital had sections for men and women, a surgical unit, x-ray, laboratory, and an ambulance service. There were also seven first aid stations scattered throughout the plant that were operated 24 hours a day.
Along with personal care, the plant had to provide its own security and protection. This was very important because of the type of production that was occurring at Lake City. At the time, Lake City’s police department was larger than Kansas City’s police department. The compound had twenty-four miles of fences, with police guarding the posts.
American Aviation, Inc. also played a very important role in Kansas City’s war production efforts. American Aviation produced B-25 bombers that would put fear into the Axis forces.
The company started out building small, two-seater, training planes and a three seat observation plane for the United States Military.
Ground breaking for the new plant was held on March 8, 1941 and the plant was turning out bombers three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
American Aviation’s plant was built to be used as a war plant and had features to protect itself from possible enemy attacks. It was one of the first “black out” plants that were built in the United States. This meant that the plant could operate twenty-four hours a day, without the risk of a possible enemy plane seeing the glow from the lighting at night.
The entire plant was air-conditioned so the doors could be left closed and not let out light from the fourteen miles of fluorescent bulbs that were required to light the plant (KCS 1/4/1941).
Much like other war plants, the American Aviation plant became its own city.
The number of planes that came out of American Aviation was staggering. In 1943 more bombers were made in Kansas City than any other plant in the world.
On April 3, 1945 the six thousandth bomber was delivered by American Aviation (KCS 6/24/1945). By the end of the war the plant had delivered nearly seven thousand bombers to the government.
Two-thirds of all B-25’s were made at the Kansas City plant and at peak production the plant was turning out an average of thirteen bombers per day. In August of 1945, American Aviation produced three hundred bombers in twenty-three days.
American Aviation was always in need of workers during the peak production phase of the war through early 1945. Many of the workers were women in the plant because a large number of men were overseas fighting the war and women took over their places on the factory floors.
Women would apply for the job that they wished to do and if they were over eighteen, in good health, and seemed mentally alert, they would be hired .
However, it was a very selective program being hired to work at American Aviation. The women were required to tell about their family history, be finger-printed, and take a physical examination before being employed at the plant. After they were hired, they were sent to a two month long school to learn the job skills that they would be performing at the plant (Gray 8/16/1942).
Speaking of women, let’s talk about their contribution.
Women across the United States gave up their lifestyles and made tremendous sacrifices to contribute to the war effort during World War II.
The need for women in the workforce became necessary if not desperate. Women had never worked outside the home in greater numbers or with greater impact prior to World War II.
The majority of women in the workforce prior to the war were from lower working classes and many were minorities. With men off to fight in the Atlantic and the Pacific, women were called upon to take their place on the production line and fill the vacancies in other professions (National Archives).
The opinions regarding women in the workforce varied. Some felt that women should not occupy jobs that otherwise unemployed men could hold. Others felt that working in a factory at an assembly line was beneath women of a certain economic status (National Archives).
According to the pamphlet titled, “Womanpower”, distributed by Labor Mobilization and Utilization:
“Womanpower is a headache because…it involves a complete dislocation of normal routine. Consequently, most women neither understand it nor like it…men even less. Therefore, it is essential to establish the fact that not only is it necessaryfor women to work, but it is an entirely normalprocedure under a wartime economy, and to convince men as well as women that…the more women at work the sooner we’ll win.”
According to the December poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion regarding women’s opinions on womanpower: 40 percent were willing, 40 percent were unwilling, 17 percent said, “Yes, if…” and 3 percent had no opinion.
When the husbands were polled, they were asked the question, “Would you be willing to have your wife take a full-time job running a machine in a war plant?” Their response was: 30 percent said yes, 11 percent said, “Yes, if…” 54 percent said no, and 5 percent said ‘don’t know’. The summary of the opinion study was this:
“The information campaigns must convince 20 percent of the men that women are needed in war jobs. It must convince 54 percent of the husbands that their wives (if they have no young children) should take war jobs. It must convince 40 percent of the younger women, and 64 percent of the older women, that it is their duty to take a war job.”
Regardless of public opinion, the reality of the times was that our country needed help in the workforce. We needed help winning the war. The War Manpower Commission, a Federal Agency established to increase the production of war materials, recruited women into employment vital to the war effort.
The women of the Greatest Generation stepped up and met the challenge and then some.
Now one final key element to wartime production in Missouri. Farming.
Farming played a major part in Missouri’s contribution to the war effort. Where the plants in St. Louis and Kansas City provided the bullets that the troops needed, farmers fed the nation‘s workers and the troops overseas.
Right out of the gate, Missouri farms started producing for the war effort .
By the end of 1941, farm production numbers were twenty-five percent higher than the previous year despite labor shortages. The wheat crop in the heartland hit an all-time high of 326,267,000 bushels and the number of head of cattle surpassed nineteen million (Hawkins 24).
The USDA War Board recognized that it was paramount for the farmers to produce as much food as possible for the American and Allied troops and the citizens of the country.
Despite the farmers increased goals in production and shortage of labor and machinery, farm production met wartime needs almost religiously. Corn, oats, soybeans, milk cows, and chickens were produced well over their goals in 1943 (8).
Missouri farmers had their share of struggles in their mission to feed the masses. The two biggest problems they faced were shortages of labor and machinery.
Many of the young men that worked on farms as either farm hands or managers were not exempt from Selective Service in the early part of the war.
This took many experienced and knowledgeable workers off of the farm and not producing the goods that the country needed. Congress recognized this error in 1943 and enacted deferment policies for men that were essential and needed on their farms (62nd H/S.J.A. Vol. II 5).
In the first year of the war, Missouri farms lost nearly one-quarter of the labor force due to Selective Service or men wanting to fight in the war.
The farmer’s only choices to attract labor were to offer higher salaries, implement better equipment that reduced necessary labor, or to use family members and neighbors.
By the end of 1942 full time help’s wages had gone up thirty percent from Missouri’s average of thirty-five dollars a month to forty-five dollars, and seasonal help’s wages had seen a thirty-eight percent increase or from forty-seven to sixty-five dollars per month.
Even though the pay for labor was rising significantly, Missouri farmers still had a decline in farm-hands and seasonal laborers. Many of the rural Missourians moved to the cities to take high paying war jobs, leaving fewer workers in the rural communities.
This meant longer hours for most farmers, employing the use of women, children, and the elderly, or an increase in labor saving equipment and farming practices.
More often than not, farmers would carry the burden on their shoulders when it was possible. Many farmers reported that they would do nineteen months of labor in a year to pick up the slack that was left by labor shortages. Women in the rural areas contributed around five months of labor on top of their other duties and there were many young men that left school early in order to work on the farms.
The equipment shortage that faced the farmers was another area that caused problems. New machinery was something that was for the most part unavailable to farmers during the war.
The rationing of building materials made the purchase of new equipment unlikely, so the farmers had to make do with what they already had in the community. Many farmers had to revert back to old methods such as using mules because the mules didn’t break down, they were easy to find, and they didn’t use any of the rationed gas.
Missouri played a very important part in the war. The war goods that it produced in the major cities and the food that was grown in her soil all helped to win the war. WWII was not only won on the battlefield, but was also won in Missouri’s factories, plants, and fields. All manned by Missouri’s Greatest Generation.
So, as I stated at the end of last week’s show, as we sit here today thinking about how bad things are, let’s stop for a minute and ask ourselves.
Are current times worse than those of the Great Depression or World War II?
Better yet, ask yourself, can I, as a part of my generation, even come close to the achievements of my parents and grandparents? If so. How?
The answer is right there in front of you. Study your history.