New York City During World War Two

As Nazi Germany began its domination of Europe, America was woefully unprepared for fighting. Our military was small, poorly supplied and without the prospect of a robust manufacturing sector that might have provided the arms, planes, ships, tanks and other equipment it would have needed.

And then, on December 7, 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

In an almost miraculous feat of leadership and persuasion, Franklin D. Roosevelt cajoled industry heads to retool their factories, saw to it that they had unhindered access to needed raw materials, and inspired the American populace to sacrifice many of its customary comforts.

Within a short time, New York City, with its seven million residents, varied industries, bustling harbor and towering intellectual heft, was thoroughly immersed in the war effort.

Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army

The famous Katz Delicatessen (established in 1888) slogan “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army” must have spurred the shipment of thousands upon thousands of salamis. Between 1942 and 1945, the recruiting office at 39 Whitehall Street inducted over a million metropolitan area residents into the armed services.

Naturally these recruits and others from around the country had to shape up and the New York area became a premier training ground. Military bases in and around the city grew to include such familiar names as Floyd Bennett Field and Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island, Fort Tilden in Rockaway Beach, Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook and Fort Dix in New Jersey.

Over the course of the war, the U.S. Naval Reserve Midshipman’s School at Columbia University boasted some 24,000 graduates, handily outstripping the number of officers from the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

WAVES trained at the country’s most important Navy women’s training facility at Hunter College in the Bronx (now Lehman College). The U.S. Coast Guard had its largest school at Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. And two-thirds of the merchant seamen who ferried supplies to the front lines also got their training in New York City.

In addition to all that, New York, the world’s busiest port, was the main embarkation point for sending troops overseas. The streets of the city were a sea of military uniforms.

Factories Start Slow, Finish Strong

Despite its 27,000 factories, relatively few wartime contracts were awarded New York at the start of the conflict. Many of the factories were quite small and, predictably, about three-quarters of the funds for materiel and supplies went to the nation’s largest 100 companies in Detroit, Newark, San Francisco, Cleveland and Los Angeles.

This left New York’s manufacturing hobbling along and its Depression-era unemployed still without jobs, until a special delegation to the federal government in the summer of 1942 turned the situation around.

Eventually city workers, many of them women filling in for the men who had gone to war, were putting in long hours and expanded work-weeks to meet contractual demands.

They turned out a profusion of “airplane parts, metal products, spun glass fibers, optical lenses and prisms, dehydrated foods, bombs, canvas goods, tents, tarpaulins, haversacks, leggings, mattress covers, powder bags, life preservers” and electrical goods.

• The Steinway Piano Company in Queens made glider wings used to drop troops behind enemy lines in France.
• Pfizer in Brooklyn built the very first penicillin plant in the world and by D-Day in 1944 was producing 50 billion units per month of this life-saving antibiotic.
• The Norden Company, headquartered in lower Manhattan, invented and manufactured the highly classified Norden bombsight that provided unmatched bombing accuracy.
• The Aluminum Corporation of America’s (ALCOA) 10,000 employees, working in a brand new one million square foot plant on Newtown Creek, churned out millions of tons of aluminum.
• The garment industry’s various shops cut and sewed a couple of hundred thousand Army and Navy uniforms and over a million overcoats.
• In the halls of the New-York Historical Society, volunteers rolled 4 million bandages.

Ships, Ships and More Ships

There were 40 ship-building and ship-repair yards in the city. None matched the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which was the leading builder of battleships in the world. Here 75,000 employees, literally working 24/7, constructed the battleships Iowa and North Carolina; five aircraft carriers; and eight huge ships designed to carry tanks onto the D-Day beaches.

A Navy Yard specialty was fitting ships built elsewhere with guns, as well as ship repair. Over 5,000 warships were rehabilitated at the yard during the war, including a British Royal Navy battleship.

Other major contributors were Bethlehem Steel’s Staten Island yard and Todd Shipyards in Brooklyn’s Erie Basin. They turned out huge numbers of destroyers, landing craft, cargo ships and tugs.

The Todd yard was particularly known for its lightning repair turn-around-time. It was said they could return a ship with extensive torpedo damage to service in just days.

In no small measure, New York City’s shipyard output under-girded the nation’s output as a whole. And this was so enormous that, by the end of the fighting, the U.S. Navy was larger than the combined navies of all the rest of the countries in the entire world.

Everyday Life

It’s no exaggeration to say that life in the city changed dramatically once we entered the war. A major change was the institution of security measures. As a coastal city, the most populous one in the country and the nation’s financial center, New York, it was feared, could be a target for air or submarine attacks. (In the first four months of 1942, German U-boats did sink 87 supply ships in the Atlantic Ocean.)

Almost immediately squads of volunteer aircraft spotters and air raid wardens were organized. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia (1935-1945) mandated practice blackouts and drills. And nightly dim-outs became a routine requirement in order to hinder identification of the New York skyline.

An even more pervasive change was rationing. Because most consumer goods were needed for the troops and war effort in general, home front families were only allowed very limited supplies. Monthly ration cards stipulated just how much people could buy of such products as butter, sugar, meat, canned milk, gasoline, fuel oil, firewood, clothing and footwear.

It took considerable planning and pacing; otherwise, toward the end of the month, people were forced to do without. And certain durable goods were simply unavailable. For example, production of new housing, cars, vacuum cleaners and kitchen appliances was banned completely until the end of the war.

Perhaps the most fundamental and lasting change was society’s attitude toward women working. Though there were women in the work force before the conflict, particularly young, single women, the practice was somewhat frowned upon.

Now women, including married women with families, were encouraged to take jobs. And they did. Whether out of patriotism or financial need, they flocked to offices and factories.

Like Rosie the Riveter in the government’s propaganda posters, they often took on men’s work. Said a factory manager:

“Why should men, who from childhood on never so much as sewed on buttons be expected to handle delicate instruments better than women who have plied embroidery needles, knitting needles, and darning needles all their lives?”

In an ironic turn, women who didn’t work were at risk of being considered unpatriotic slackers.

With the city working at full tilt, there was a lot less time for leisure pursuits. But when New Yorkers did look for entertainment, movies were it. In addition to Hollywood’s usual fare, it made hundreds of war movies reinforcing the villainy of the Axis powers and the heroism of the Allies.

It is estimated that some two-thirds of the entire population flocked to movie theaters every week to see such eventual classics as Casablanca (1942), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Corregidor (1943).

Intellect and Intrigue

Even before World War Two, New York was known for its creativity. Art, advertising and media were its hallmark; so it is hardly surprising that these skills were deployed in the service of the war machine. On the radio, in magazines, newspapers and posters, large-scale campaigns promoted the era’s central theme: patriotism.

Citizens were stirred to boost production at work and home, buy war bonds, and collect “scraps,” that is, recycle such commodities as rubber, tin, waste kitchen fats (raw material for explosives), newspaper, lumber and steel, all of which were critical to the fighting front.

Military training films were another important New York product. In coordination with the Army Pictorial Service, the Paramount Studio lot in Queens turned out instruction and morale-building films for the troops. It also taught combat cameramen and photographers this new aspect of their craft.

And then there was the scientific brain trust whose secret experiments would ultimately provide a surprise ending to the war. Development of the atomic bomb began with the investigation of nuclear fission by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi and his team at Columbia University’s Pupin Physics Lab.

Although other physicists and other locations were involved in the final iteration of the bomb, what came to be known as the Manhattan Project was, arguably, the city’s most important contribution to the war.

It accelerated Japan’s surrender and after years of combat, put a halt to the bloody strife and dislocations that were the Second World War.

A version of this article was first published in the Blackwell’s Almanac, a publication of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. The Roosevelt Island Historical Society, founded in 1977 to recover, maintain and disseminate the record of Roosevelt Island’s heritage from colonial times to the present. Visit their website at www.rihs.us.

Illustrations, from above: Women factory workers during World War Two (National Park Service); “Send a salami to your boy in the army” sign in Katz’s Deli, ca. 1942; the launch of the USS North Carolina, June 13, 1940; A ration book warning stipulates a $10,000 fine or imprisonment for anyone who uses the book fraudulently (National WWII Museum); a 1940s War Bonds poster;  and the famous “sailor nurse kiss” photo depicting the joy of V-J day and the end of the war in Times Square.