Mobilization for the Duration: The Bay Area in the Good War

Fort Mason. Photo by SuperJumbo, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4549474

Essay by Roger Lotchin, Professor of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC

World War II touched all of California very heavily, but nowhere more than San Francisco Bay. The war turned the Bay into a citadel, and in turn the cities made the fortress work.

Cities played several roles in World War II. They were targets of destruction and strategic advantage; they were distribution points for men and material; and they were centers of production. San Francisco Bay was prepared for the first role, but in the war, only played the second and third. Still, the preparations were massive, swiftly arming San Francisco. Forts Baker, Barry, and Cronkhite ringed the tip of Marin County; Fort Funston stood at the ocean base of San Francisco, with gun emplacements in between. Fort Point mounted guard on the Golden Gate Straits. Inside the bay, bases abounded. Fort Mason, the principal Pacific Port of Embarkation, rested aside Aquatic Park; Moffett Field stood at Sunnyvale; Alameda Naval Air Station and the Army supply depot in Oakland faced San Francisco across the Bay; Hamilton Army Airfield stood to the north in Marin County. Camp Stoneman accommodated servicemen waiting to be sent abroad. The Bay had nearly every kind of base, up to and including one of the chief Pacific code-breaking stations, United States Intercept Station Number Two, at Petaluma.

Some 240,000 people built and repaired ships at Sausalito, Vallejo, Richmond, Oakland, San Francisco and South San Francisco. The converted Richmond Ford Motor Company Assembly Plant prepared tanks for shipment overseas to the Pacific War, and the Benicia Arsenal manufactured the munitions for these and other weapons. Servicemen and defense workers thronged the streets at shift change. Damaged navy ships plied the bay toward the naval shipyard at Vallejo. Thousands came to paint the towns, and thousands more jammed the hospitals for succor. The war was inescapable. It came over the radio, on billboards, in newspapers, from the military presence and in unique events like the exodus through the Gate on April 1, 1942, of the Doolittle Raiders, in Captain Marc Mitscher's timeless words, "bound for Tokyo."

The war imposed its own rhythms on the cities and its own ethos on their inhabitants. People worked the swing shift and then partied through the graveyard shift until dawn. Everyone faced the novel every day: other cultures, other workers, other work routines, other comrades at arms or work, other lovers. Then just as surely, these were replaced again as the workers left, the soldiers sailed and the lovers departed.

Loss was omnipresent and so was death. It came in the newspapers, letters, radio broadcasts and Western Union telegrams. The uncertainty meant that people lived for the moment, dancing at the Stage Door Canteen in San Francisco or unwinding to the black man's blues at the joints of Oakland and the white man's blues at the barn dances in Richmond. People walked into each other's lives, bonded over work, drink, or love and walked out again.

Yet if individual lives were fragmented, irregular and fleeting, the war effort was not. It rolled on unrelentingly. Somehow the mass of locals and strangers, blacks and whites, men and women, young and old, whole and handicapped came together in an extraordinary united war effort. The military and the managers of corporations created an impressive production achievement that kept men and products flowing out of the great San Francisco Bay. So did the cities. Cities had numerous superbly important latent resources for war, not immediately obvious to the untrained eye. World War II uprooted 15 million Americans to work in defense, and the Federal Lanham Act failed utterly to house them. So cities had to. San Francisco and Oakland became vast dormitories, as housewives rented spare rooms, basements, back porches, garages and garrets. People doubled up in apartments and single rooms; hotels took in some; converted warehouses, others; and aunts and uncles shoehorned relatives into their homes.

Somehow cities sheltered these employees. The resident women, retirees, high school dropouts, the blind and other handicapped, and African Americans who joined the labor force already had housing, places at school, transportation (many walked to work) and daycare. Even criminals received early parole for defense work, and the inmates of San Quentin and Alcatraz pitched in while still incarcerated. In special labor emergencies women, girls and retirees delivered the mail at Christmas or picked crops at harvest.

Cities could also mobilize these neophytes. Many drove their cars, but millions more than usual rode mass transit. War workers could get to work by bus, streetcar, cable car, ferry and interurban, in addition to cars. The infrastructure was not the least of the cities' contributions. The new Golden Gate Bridge, Bay Bridge and older bridges held the dispersed metropolis together and allowed it to function as a physically unified military unit from Camp Stoneman to Moffett Field. The military greatly benefited from huge, well developed urban harbors. The State of California had invested $86 million in the San Francisco port alone, and the Embarcadero contained 1,912 acres of facilities. Bay Area harbors were partly laid out on artificial land created as early as the Gold Rush. Airfields supplemented these and often served military functions as did Oakland Airport, where planes were stored and prepared for dispatch overseas.

City police helped train military ones, staffed the civil defense organizations and convoyed army trucks through the streets. Throughout America, urban and town water departments supplied military bases, and the San Francisco and East Bay Municipal Utilities District did the same in the Bay Area.

Camp Stoneman in the North Bay was literally an instant city of 10,000, which badly needed water. So did many industrial processes. These urban services had taken years to develop and the military would have been badly hampered if they had been forced to develop them in 1941. Because of the fall of the water from higher elevations, the urban water projects often came with a hydroelectric power component. City boosters prized this asset to keep power and therefore production costs low, and the military and defense plants inherited this cheap power too.

Open space in the parks and playgrounds served as a tenting space for the housing-strapped military before barracks could be built. Schools and colleges trained people in everything from welding to exotic languages. Even San Quentin became an educational institution, training parolees as welders or as chefs for the merchant marine. Cities are world-class junk piles and this scrap, like high-grade steel from abandoned trolley tracks, came in handy too.

Today, Californians take city advantages for granted, so it is instructive to think of the opposite case. During World War II the government had to site many installations in the rural South and West, where it had to build many of the services that urban areas already contained. The military tried to locate these institutions close to some kind of town, even a small one. In short, Bay Area cities supplied many of the most pressing military needs. In martial terms, they were a force multiplier.

But San Francisco Bay was more than just an arsenal and a production cornucopia. It was also the most important Pacific Theater symbol of freedom, home and America. For 1,650,000 men, it was the last part of the States that they glimpsed before they saw combat, and it was the first thing that they saw when they returned. It was also the voice of freedom until they returned, as was the British Broadcasting Company in Europe. Even American prisoners of war, at considerable risk to themselves, cobbled together clandestine radios in their lethal prison camps to tune in to a twice-weekly newscast from Treasure Island. The risk of a severe physical beating was less important than hearing the voice of San Francisco and home.

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