Richmond, California

California

At Richmond's wartime shipyards, workers once built an entire Liberty ship in five days.

historicalmilitaryengineering

Four shipyards went up along the Richmond waterfront at the start of the Second World War. Kaiser's yards there turned out seven hundred forty-seven Victory and Liberty ships, more than any other site in the country. The normal pace was a finished ship every thirty days. Once, they broke the record and built a Liberty ship in five. The workers came from all over the country after being recruited, many of them Black Americans from the South, many of them women taking industrial jobs for the first time as working-age men were drafted. They lived in housing thrown up specifically for the boom, in Richmond, Berkeley and Albany. A rail line built just for them, the Shipyard Railway, carried them to the yards. In 1940 the city held twenty-three thousand people. Two years later it held nearly one hundred fifteen thousand.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The shipyards broke many records, including the completion of a Liberty ship in just five days.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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