Evansville: The World War II Years

By Darrel E. Bigham

World War II changed the face of Evansville, Indiana. In December 1941, the city was still recovering from the Great Depression, yet within three months, a series of blockbuster
announcements transformed the region. Several corporations received major defense contracts to manufacture parts and ammunitions, while two new installations were launched: a shipyard to construct Landing Ship Tanks and a factory to manufacture P 47 airplanes. Industrial employment rose dramatically, producing social, economic, and racial tensions as thousands of newcomers poured into a city that lacked adequate housing and public
facilities. The citizens of Evansville persevered, and most workers stayed following the end of the war. One federal official commented that the city not just its many defense plants deserved the coveted Army-Navy E (for excellence) award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Aug 24, 2005
• ISBN: 9781439615485

Darrel E. Bigham

Darrel E. Bigham is director of Historic Southern Indiana and professor of history at the University of Southern Indiana. He has authored several other books on Evansville and its region for Arcadia. His most recent monograph is On Jordan�s Banks: Emancipation and Its Aftermath in the Ohio River Valley.

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Georgia.

INTRODUCTION

The May 1945 issue of the newsletter of the Evansville Shipyard featured Evansville’s many contributions to the war effort. Its editor cited Gilmour H. Haynie, district manager of the War Production Board, who declared that if any city deserved an E award, it was Evansville. Expansion of war production was more acute here than in most places because a series of civic groups had in 1941 made uncoordinated efforts to land defense contracts in the depression-plagued city. Evansville managed to secure a number of them, any one of which would have placed great stress on the city’s infrastructure. When the LST and Republic contracts were announced, the city’s war work had already expanded the work force to 35,000, nearly twice that of 1941. The number nearly doubled again by 1945. Four of five were employed in war-related work.

After Pearl Harbor, the city would never be the same. While hundreds went off to war, about a tenth of whom would die, those who remained on the home front contributed mightily to the war effort. The economic impact of defense contracts was the chief reason, and most of these were announced between January 4 and March 22, 1942. The society and culture of the city would also be altered by these developments.

Although most war-related work was awarded to companies that already existed, a significant amount went to two new ones, Republic Aviation and the Evansville Shipyard. Both were consequences of the city’s safe interior location. In the case of the shipyard, the year-round pool on the Ohio that was created by the locks and dams also mattered. At their peak, they employed about 25,000 men and women. About thirty miles away, in Union County, Kentucky, the Army constructed Camp Breckinridge, where five divisions were trained and sometimes 45,000 men were housed. For them, Evansville was an ideal place for leaves, and that meant that much of their pay would be spent in the city. Their visits also had significant social consequences. Racial conflict between local African Americans and visiting white servicemen became such a serious problem by the fall of 1943 that blacks and whites organized the city’s first interracial conference in early 1944 to resolve race-related issues. Because servicemen also frequented the city’s red-light district, the camp commander forced the mayor to shut the area down or face the prospect of the city’s being off limits. Little, though, could be done about the growth of prostitution among the city’s teenaged girls.

The Chrysler factory exemplified the impact of the war on existing industries. With the cooperation of Sunbeam Electric Manufacturing, it became Evansville Ordnance. Most of the .45-caliber ammunition manufactured for the Allies—more than 3 billion bullets—came from Evansville. Evansville Ordnance also repacked another one and a half billion bullets. So successful was that effort that in the fall of 1943, Chrysler shifted to such projects as repacking ammunition for the Pacific and rebuilding Sherman tanks and Army trucks. At its peak, Chrysler employed 12,500 men and women, a fifth of whom commuted at least fifty miles round trip each day. Chrysler and ten other firms in the city received Army-Navy E awards that recognized the quality of their contributions to the war effort.

Other effects came in the wake of additional jobs—for instance, the quadrupling of the dollar value of building permits in 1942, as compared with 1941, and a 32 percent increase in checking account debits in 1942. In 1943, the latter increased another 50 percent. The county’s population grew by 20,000 between 1940 and 1943, and that did not count the thousands who commuted daily. Many of those stayed, despite the critical shortage of housing during the war. Evansville’s population was 43 percent higher in the 1950 census than it had been ten years before. The war encouraged, moreover, an unprecedented amount of volunteerism, collaborative efforts to gather scrap, to subscribe for war bonds, and to raise money for the local community chest and the Red Cross.

The two most prominent symbols of the war effort, Republic Aviation and the Evansville Shipyard, were forever altered at war’s end. The Republic factory was sold, at a fraction of