THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508130342
SECTION: PORTSMOUTH CURRENTS PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Olde Towne Journal
SOURCE: Alan Flanders
LENGTH: Medium: 81 lines
When war broke out in Europe in 1939, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard employed 7,625 workers. Four years later, 42,893 workers went through the shipyard gate.
According to shipyard historian Marshall Butt, the shipyard payroll had grown by ``562 per cent in three years and five months, while the yard area had expanded from 352 acres to 746 acres.''
But by the time Japan surrendered in 1945, the number of workers had already dropped by 11,000.
Now that the war machines of both Hitler in Germany and Tojo in Japan lay in ruins, the country was left with huge war industries and the nagging question of whether it could survive peace.
The Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth was at the center of this struggle for survival on the homefront.
During the war years, the yard built 101 new warships and landing craft and repaired, altered or converted a staggering 6,850 naval vessels and boats, totaling more than 27 million tons. On an average day during the war years, there were 50 to 60 ships under repair or alteration along the waterfront.
In dollars and cents, the yard production effort topped $1 billion with a lion's share spilling over into the local economy through payrolls and supply purchases. The yard's physical plant grew tremendously as well with the addition of drydock 8 - l,100 feet in length - and construction of 689 new permanent and temporary buildings.
There were significant changes outside the yard gate as well. Butt wrote:
``Portsmouth was hard-pressed to care for the thousands who poured in from every state in the Union. Every public utility in the city was overloaded beyond its capacity. Housing was hopelessly inadequate . . . no fewer than 45 public and private housing projects, totaling 16,487 family units, were built on the Portsmouth side of the river. . . By 1940, the city had reached the saturation point with a population of 50,745.''
New ferry lines and bus routes were created to service the needs of hundreds of commuting workers from Suffolk, Franklin, Surry, Elizabeth City, Norfolk and Princess Anne County. New communities, like Simonsdale, sprang up to meet the housing shortage. Like it or not, Portsmouth and most of Hampton Roads had become wedded, if not welded, to the military industrial complex required to win World War II.
One of the first shipyard ``peace casualties'' was the immediate halt to the construction of the 45,000-ton battleship USS Kentucky. Even though her keel was laid in June of 1942, Kentucky's completion was delayed because of an emergent order of Landing Ship Tanks during the war.
On V-J Day, she was 35 percent complete and headed for the scrap heap. A similar fate befell the battleship USS Louisiana and repairs on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Sangamon.
Criticism about the yard's work pool size and its utilization of the wartime work force also became public when a series of charges of ``wasted manpower,'' ``loafing'' and general ``overstaffing'' were launched just before the war's end.
On Jan. 17, 1945, a subcommittee of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program looked into the allegations. According to public record, the Meade Committee, as it was called, ``found excess manpower, wasted labor, hoarded labor and enforced labor . . . ''
After an official shipyard management rebuttal, neither Congress nor the Navy were able to find any hard evidence to prove the allegations. However the negative publicity over the issue carried some warning about the future.
The months that followed V-J Day saw even sharper employment declines. And in Portsmouth, what has happened inside the shipyard gate, has had a direct and immediate effect on the outside.
In the five years that followed V-J Day, shipyard employment fell toward its pre-war total, stopping in 1950 at 9,025, but never returning to its wartime high.
All in all, Portsmouth was not as hard hit as other defense-dependent communities after the war, but it's safe to say there will never be another yard work force the size of the one before V-J Day 1945. ILLUSTRATION: File photo
Rear Adm. Felix Gygax, Naval Yard commandant, wishes good luck to a
recruiter bound for West Virginia in the '40s.
by CNB