The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 7, Issue 1, Winter 2018 | Page 24

Leandro in the south included the shipyard boomtowns of Richmond, Oakland, and
Alameda. Richmond had been a refinery and storage facility for the Standard Oil
Company but was largely marsh and pastureland. Dating to the Sierra Gold Rush of
1849, Oakland had been the dominant metropolitan area before the completion of
the San Francisco to Oakland Bay Bridge in 1936. 14 By war’s end, Oakland would
become, for all practical purposes, a Kaiser company town. 15 Oakland was also
home to the Moore Shipbuilding Company, second only to Kaiser, which moved
from San Francisco to Oakland in 1906. 16 Midway down the Pacific Coast and the
terminus of three transcontinental railroads, Oakland was the logical supply and
distribution point for the Pacific war basin. In 1938, the federal government
selected Alameda for the site of the Naval Supply Base and Naval Air Station
Alameda, the latter remaining active until 1997. 17
On a broader scale, war migration to the East Bay was a microcosm of the
national shift from rural counties to urban centers. From 1940 to 1947, United
States farm communities lost nearly three million inhabitants or one in every eight
individuals who had been living on a farm in 1940. 18 The 1944 Census showed the
largest number of these out-of-state migrants came from the west-south-central
states of Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. 19 The second largest regional
contributor was the western-north-central states of Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri,
Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas. 20
The influx of agricultural workers and Kaiser’s prefabrication techniques
shifted the demand from skilled to unskilled workers and caused a fundamental
reorganization of local labor unions. The ship construction process was
revolutionary because workers assembled huge hull sections manufactured
elsewhere in the Bay Area, in California, or outside the state entirely. The railroad
transported the nearly finished hulls to San Francisco’s Bay Area for final welding
and launching. In all, Kaiser-Todd’s facilities built 821 Liberty-class, 219 Victory-
class (a larger version of the Liberty ship), 50 Kaiser-class escort aircraft carriers,
and other assorted ships. The output of Kaiser-Todd made them the model of
shipbuilding efficiency. 21
Almost miraculously, workers built the SS Robert E. Peary, a small, fast,
10,000-ton freighter of the Liberty-class at Kaiser’s No. 2 Yard in four days, 15
hours and 26 minutes. 22 Fourteen days from the laying of the keel, the Peary sailed
under the Golden Gate Bridge with a full load of war supplies bound for the
Pacific. 23 In total, Kaiser constructed 747 ships at his four Richmond shipyards. 24
By 1945, Kaiser-Todd had built 30 percent of America’s wartime shipping at its
combined yards.
Nevertheless, there existed a long tradition of shipbuilding in the Bay
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