Claire Kitchin Dahl, dressed as Rosie the Riveter, gave a whale of a presentation yesterday at the downtown Ann Arbor District Library this Wednesday. Her topic was the Rosies, all of them, the real women who went to work to support the war effort during World War II, making airplanes, munitions, and other supplies, and figuring out how to keep track of it all. Dahl also got specific about what converting from the pre-War, consumer economy to a wartime economy entailed. Every person was expected to do her part; that’s what gave rise to the Rosies.
Every company was also expected to do its part, regardless of its normal line of endeavor. The Steinway Company, for instance, was told it was no longer in the piano-making business; now it was to make coffins. So Steinway made coffins. The company also invented a new kind of piano, compact and sturdy enough to be crated and dropped by parachute to all the theaters of war. It was called the Victory Vertical. Measuring forty inches tall and including all eight-eight keys, it came in olive drab, blue, and grey. Steinway’s wartime piano reportedly served its purpose well, giving US troops fighting “over there” a taste of home.
In the scramble to ramp up production of everything war required, most things did not come with instructions. The B-24 bomber, the Flying Fortress, had been made in California at the rate of one a month. The war needed fifty thousand, as fast as they could be put together. Think-tank effort said the way to get the job done was to move production to Michigan and use assembly-line methods. So the enormous Willow Run Assembly Plant, with two production lines, each a half-mile long, went up on land Henry Ford owned, west of Detroit.
As that was happening, people went to California to collect all the parts that went into making a B-24. So they’d have samples of what needed to be produced. And could figure out how to put the parts together, in a hurry. And build everything they’d need to do that. And recruit a workforce at a time when women largely stayed home and able-bodied men were going off to war. It all got done in about three months.
Some of the Rosies quit lower-paying jobs to work at Willow Run. Some were returning to work after having lost their jobs in the Great Depression. And lots of the women had never worked outside the home. Young, old, and in between, they came in droves. Dahl said Willow Run had forty-six thousand people show up there every day.
That was forty-six thousand folks, by and large, without a place to live. No housing had gone up to accommodate the women were arriving from all over the country. Some set up tents in the fields around the plant while waiting for new housing to get built. The pressure for places to sleep was so great, Dahl said, that it became legal for a family that had an extra twin bed to rent that bed to one worker on the day shift and another on the night shift.
Some of the jobs the Rosies did at Willow Run came with classroom training. Others scarcely had training on the fly. Women with questions on electrical assembly, former Rosies shared with Dahl, were told, “It’s color-coded. Get it done, and don’t electrocute yourself!” One former Rosie, when told she was going to work on an island and keep track of all the country’s wartime materiel, asked, “How?” The answer was, “We don’t care! Figure it out! Just get ’er done!”
Part of what made Dahl’s talk so absorbing was sheer tradecraft. This Rosie used to teach history at one of the local high schools and, boy howdy, the woman can teach. To illustrate the shotgun-wedding approach to converting the nation to a wartime economy, she strode over to a man in the front row, grabbed him by the throat, and said, “Get ’er done! Now!” He and the rest of us thought it was funny; his wife thought it was hilarious. Dahl also brought one of the riveting guns the Rosies used at Willow Run and passed it around. It was heavy. Riveter Rosies worked nine-hour days. At the peak of production, the Rosies at the Willow Run Assembly Plant completed a Flying Fortress every fifty-seven minutes.
Dahl is working on oral histories with the remaining Willow Run Rosies, as fast as she can. They range from ninety-eight to a hundred and three years old. Four descendants of Rosies came for Dahl’s talk. “Ah,” she told them, “you’re all Rosebuds.”
11 November 2022