Rosie the Riveter in Long Beach

By Gerrie Schipske

During World War II, an unprecedented number of women
took jobs at aircraft plants, shipyards, munitions factories, and other concerns across the nation to produce material essential to winning the war. Affectionately and collectively called Rosie the Riveter after a popular 1943 song, thousands of these women came to the U.S. Army financed Douglas Aircraft Plant in Long Beach, the largest wartime plane manufacturer, to help produce an astonishing number of the aircraft used in the war. They riveted,
welded, assembled, and installed, doing man-sized jobs, making attack bombers, other war birds, and cargo transports. They trained at Long Beach City Schools and worked 8- and 10-hour shifts in a windowless, bomb-proof plant. Their children attended Long Beach Day Nursery, and their households ran on rations and victory gardens. When the men came home after the war ended, most of these resilient women lost their jobs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: May 5, 2008
• ISBN: 9781439636336

Gerrie Schipske

Long Beach city councilwoman and author Gerrie Schipske has taught in the Women�s Studies Department of California State University, Long Beach. Many rare images in this evocative look at an extraordinary group of American women came from her research to establish Rosie the Riveter Park in 2006 on an acre beside the former Douglas Aircraft Plant in Long Beach.

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Schipske

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of the women who worked in the Long Beach, California, aircraft plant that produced the mighty bombers, fierce attack planes, and gigantic troop/cargo tankers that helped the United States win World War II. It is also part of the story of how these women came to Long Beach and became known as Rosie the Riveter.

It begins with the development of the Long Beach Municipal Airport. Strategically located on the West Coast adjacent to railroads and ports, the airport became one of the most successful municipal airports in the United States in the late 1930s. The U.S. Army Air Corps and the U.S. Navy located some of their operations at the Long Beach airfield prior to World War II.

Following the rise to power of Adolph Hitler and the invasion of Poland by Germany, Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his December 29, 1940, fireside chat, called for the rearmament of the United States by demanding that guns, planes, ships and many other things have to be built in the factories and the arsenals of America. They have to be produced by workers and managers and engineers with the aid of machines which in turn have to be built by hundreds of thousands of workers throughout the land.

Days before his radio address, President Roosevelt established the Office of Production Management to oversee the gigantic production of wartime munitions and supplies. We must be the great arsenal of democracy, Roosevelt declared.

Aircraft manufacturer Donald W. Douglas responded to Roosevelt’s call. Douglas, whose aircraft plants were located in Santa Monica and El Segundo, California, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, had successfully built the DB-7, a plane converted into the A-20 Havoc or the Boston, a popular attack plane used by the French and British before the United States entered the war.

The U.S. Army Air Corps saw great value in the DB-7 as a medium attack bomber and decided to build an aircraft plant in Southern California to mass produce it, along with longer-range bombers (B-17) and cargo planes (C-47).

The army selected a 242-acre tract located 22 miles south of Los Angeles adjacent to its Long Beach Army Air Base on the Long Beach Municipal Airport. The Douglas Aircraft Company was chosen to manage the plant.

When the ground was broken for the Douglas Aircraft Plant, Long Beach was a sleepy coastal resort town at the end of the Pacific Electric Red Car line, which connected it with Los Angeles. Long Beach was growing due to oil and its port facilities. Having rebuilt its downtown area following the magnitude-6.3 earthquake in 1933, Long Beach soon became a focal point of military activity. The U.S. Navy began construction of a 393-acre harbor-front base within months of the Douglas Aircraft Plant opening on October 17, 1941.

The Long Beach Douglas Aircraft Plant facility cost $12 million to build and was a massive 1,422,350 square feet of covered workspace comprised of several buildings constructed of concrete and steel. The Long Beach plant was larger than the combined Douglas plants at Santa Monica and El Segundo.

The roofs of the buildings were elaborately camouflaged with fake canvas houses, wire trees, and painted streets that gave the appearance of a suburban neighborhood in order to make certain that the plant did not become the target of enemy bombers. Thick netting covered spaces between the buildings. Sandbags were piled high near the many bomb shelters built for employees.

Windowless yet air-conditioned, the buildings used thousands of glare-less, fluorescent, and mercury vapor lights to create daytime 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

To meet the production quotas set by the U.S. Army, Douglas Aircraft (as well as the other wartime manufacturers) needed to employ tens of thousands of workers. With the creation of the nation’s first peacetime draft in 1940 and the declaration of war in 1941, all eligible males were conscripted into military service, seriously depleting the traditional labor pool.

The U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) launched an intensive propaganda effort to convince women to take jobs in aircraft plants, shipyards, munitions factories, and anywhere else to supply the military with material to win the war.

The image of women working in the defense industry, clad in overalls and hardhats, was popularized in song in 1943 by the Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb tune Rosie the Riveter, recorded by the Vagabonds. Shortly after the song was released, the Memorial Day issue of the Saturday Evening Post magazine featured a cover illustrated by Norman Rockwell showing a muscular, red-headed woman wearing overalls, loafers, and a welder’s mask, surrounded by the American flag and the name Rosie written across her lunch pail. Thereafter, women working in the war industry were referred to as Rosie the Riveter.

The 1944 OWI Women in the War campaign included posters, flyers, news reels, radio broadcasts, music, magazine articles, and movies that sent the message to women of all ages and races that it was their patriotic duty to leave their homes and take jobs normally held by men.

Douglas’s Long Beach plant launched its own successful recruitment campaign by sending Victory Scouts (Boy Scouts) door-to-door to recruit women workers and through advertisements in newspapers and the Teachers Journal, the publication of the Long Beach City Teachers Club.

A Long Beach Douglas female worker was depicted in a popular poster circulated across the nation to encourage women to take defense industry jobs. The campaign led to an increase in the number of women employed in the war