Ever since we honored our local Rosie the Riveters and the Guys in 2005, when I immersed myself in capturing their stories, I’ve been intrigued by the women who worked in defense industries on the home front during World War II.
So when I learned that former journalist, historian and author Sig Unander, of Portland, would be speaking on that topic a week ago, I joined Edna Fund and my sister at McMenamins Olympic Theater for dinner and an informative evening presentation. He spoke about seven years ago in Centralia about the Columbus Day storm.
While many stories seemed familiar, I sat back in awe when I heard a few facts he shared. For example, I had no idea that Boeing’s B-17 Flying Fortress, a heavy bomber introduced in the mid-1930s, was intended as an interceptor plane to attacks on the U.S.’s East Coast by enemies in Europe, Unander said.
“It was supposed to go out and fly over the Atlantic and intercept German warships and sink them, and it was never used for that,” Unander said. “Instead, it became a high-altitude long-range strategic bomber responsible for putting the kibosh to Hitler’s war effort by flying over Germany and knocking out most of the oil plants, the refineries, the war production, the ball-bearing factories, the marshaling yards, the industrial manufacturing plants — so crippling Nazi war industries, they could not continue the fight.”
The 12,731 B-17 planes, the workhorses of the war, dropped more bombs than any other aircraft during World War II, primarily in the European theater. But when fighting shifted to Japan, the United States needed a plane that could fly longer distances, so Boeing switched to constructing the B-29 bombers.
Unander began his presentation by speaking about Centralia native Dexter James Kerstetter, who dropped out of Centralia High School after two years and worked as an equipment mechanic at the Hub City Creamery until World War II broke out. At 34, he joined the U.S. Army, where he earned the nickname Pop and served as a cook before appealing to a commanding officer to join the infantry. He fought on Luzon Island in the Philippines, where he knocked out several machine gun nests and killed 16 Imperial Japanese soldiers. For his distinguished valor he received the Medal of Honor. He drowned on July 9, 1972, when his boat capsized while he was fishing with his son and stepson. The Chronicle featured his story on May 20 last year.
Unander credited millions of women who joined the workforce during the war and helped America become an industrial superpower. He recounted the Great Depression, with 30 percent unemployment in Puget Sound, when a strike halted West Coast shipping.
“The economy just went down, down, down until there was no money economy anymore,” Unander said. “People bartered. Somebody paid a pig for a hotel room.”
He recapped the start of World War II, when Germany invaded Poland, British attempts at appeasement, and Winston Churchill’s insistence that war would result rather than Neville Chamberlain’s promise of “peace in our time.”
A key player and unsung hero who led conversion of industrial plants that built cars, refrigerators, fishing boats, and radios into defense factories churning out PT boats, airplanes, and ships was production genius William “Bill” Knudsen, a Danish-born American automobile executive promoted to general during the war. He described Knudsen, who stood six-foot-two, as “a gentle giant” who started working in a bicycle factory as a teenager. He partnered with Henry Ford, who later fired him, and then worked for General Motors. President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to lead the effort to build planes, ships, tanks, guns, uniforms, and other goods necessary to fight a war.
Unemployment disappeared with the onset of war, and men enlisted to fight for their country, leaving few on the home front to fill jobs in defense plants. That’s when they tapped the women, initially young, single women already in the workforce and later married and older women who wanted to do their part to help the war effort. Propaganda in the form of war posters showed glamorous women working in factories, doing their part to win the war.
“Although it was hard, dirty, gritty work, it paid extremely well,” Unander said. Rather than 75 cents an hour, they could earn $1.25 to $1.75. Women accounted for 40 percent of the workforce during the war, and much higher percentages in some places such as the Boeing branch plant in Chehalis.
“Behind every riveter there’s a good bucker … with a steel bucking bar pushing against the rivet gun,” Unander said.
One photo showed teenager Norma Jean Mortenson aka Marilyn Monroe assembling Radioplanes similar to drones used by soldiers to practice shooting moving targets.
Knudson, the only American civilian ever promoted to three-star lieutenant general, encouraged assembly line production in defense industry plants.
“You have to Henry Ford it,” Unander said. “You have to train workers to do one small task of everything that needs to be accomplished.”
By mid-1944, he said, “one B-17, ready to fly, came off the factory floor every hour around the clock, 24 hours a day.”
Boeing had many workers sign parts inside the 5,000th B-17 built in Seattle in 1943. The plane, called the 5 Grand, flew 78 bombing missions with the 96th Bomb Group before it was scrapped in 1946. An attempt to preserve the plane as a museum in Seattle failed.
Unander also spoke about American industrialist Henry J. Kaiser who established West Coast shipyards that built Liberty ships during World War II, including at Richmond, Calif., Vancouver, Wash., and Portland, Ore. In 1942, Kaiser built homes to house all the workers flooding to the West Coast to work in the shipyards. Vanport, a city near Jantzen Beach and Delta Park north of Portland, once housed 40,000 people. Recruitment efforts boosted Portland’s Black population from 2,000 in 1940 to 22,000 in 1944, and the city’s overall population grew from 305,000 in 1940 to 374,000 a decade later.
Hiring mothers with young children led to creation of onsite childcare, which enabled mothers to work while knowing their children were cared for. During the war, Kaiser also implemented an employee healthcare program, Kaiser Permanente, which remains active today.
When a railroad berm collapsed during a flood on May 30, 1948, the Columbia River wiped out the city of Vanport near Jantzen Beach, killing 15 people and destroying all the houses, shops, and other building erected for workers at the shipyards.
Unander credited the hiring of older women during World War II with introduction of the coffee break. The older women worked hard but tired easily, so factory owners offered them 10-minute rest breaks twice a day so they could drink tea or coffee and energize, thereby increasing productivity.
All in all, the presentation proved informative and entertaining.
Tulips and the Titanic
I do miss the beautiful tulip fields planted for decades by the DeGoede family on their farm at Mossyrock. Nowadays, to enjoy the flourishing blooms, we need to drive to Woodburn, Ore., for the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival or north to the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, which Edna Fund and I did on Friday.
We left early to avoid the worst of Seattle’s rush-hour traffic and found ourselves touring RoozenGaarde’s seven-acre garden with breathtaking tulip blooms in vibrant reds, pinks, purples, orange, yellow, and lavender. Rivers of daffodils, crocus, and Oregon grape flow among more than 200 varieties of tulips. We heard many languages from visitors to the fields.
On the return trip, we stopped at the Maritime Building in Seattle to take in “Titanic: The Exhibition.” We wrapped headphones around our necks and listened to a narrator tell the poignant stories of those who perished and others who survived when the luxury British ocean liner RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the early hours of April 15, 1912. Two hours and 40 minutes later, the 882-foot-long ship broke in two and plunged to the floor of the north Atlantic Ocean.
I’ve always been interested in the Titanic, especially after learning about the fate of Herman Klaber, owner of hopyards in the Boistfort Valley southwest of Chehalis who was returning from England as a first-class passenger aboard the ill-fated ship’s maiden voyage. He left behind a wife and daughter.
Most of the approximately 1,500 who perished died of hypothermia, not drowning. Temperatures were 32 degrees. Visitors can place a hand on a replica of an iceberg to experience how frigid the water was when the ocean liner sunk.
In addition to large photos of passengers and the ship, the exhibit featured dishes, furniture, rings, necklaces, letters, diaries, and other artifacts recovered from the passengers and the ship itself, which was first discovered on the seabed in September 1985.
In addition to the passengers, we learned about the crew, the mail carriers, the musicians who died.
The 90-minute tour was well worth the $34 ticket for admission. The traveling exhibition, which opened last summer in Seattle, closes April 27 and returns to its permanent location at the Luxor Las Vegas hotel and casino.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
