Honoring the Planes That Helped Build San Diego

For a city so firmly linked to the Navy, it may come as a surprise that it was a plane built for the Army that forever changed San Diego.

This was the city that designed and built the B-24 Liberator: less famous perhaps than other World War II warplanes but more widely used and devastatingly effective, even under murderous antiaircraft fire.

At the war’s peak, 41,937 workers, one-quarter of the city’s adult population, were building the B-24 and a Navy plane called the Catalina at the Consolidated Aircraft Corp. plant along Pacific Highway.

Of those workers, 43% were females, or as a pamphlet given to the firm’s male supervisors described them, “women in men’s clothing.”

Now it is 60 years since the Liberator prototype made its first test flight above Lindbergh Field, and several hundred of the men and women who built, flew and maintained Liberators gathered over the weekend for what may be their last major reunion.

“We used to say that the B-24 flew faster than the B-17 because every B-17 had an extra man aboard: a public relations man,” said Dick Baynes, 76, of Irvine, who was 20 when he flew the first of 35 combat missions over Europe. “The B-17 got the glory, but the B-24 got the job done. It was a great, great airplane.”

For three days, Baynes and others discussed the silvery bomber. It required 30,000 parts and 250,000 rivets, and could put four tons of bombs on targets that the enemy thought were beyond reach, such as the oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania.

In all, 6,726 Liberators were built in San Diego between 1940 and 1945, more than one-third of the production nationwide. No city built more B-24s than San Diego, and no city may have embraced them more tightly.

“The work was extremely hard but we all felt very patriotic,” said Anne Ivey, 72, who was a student at La Jolla High when she worked at Consolidated shooting rivets, filing down metal burrs and putting tracks on bomb bay doors. “We were all afraid to make a mistake because the bosses would bawl us out, just like they did the men.”

Male and female, the Consolidated workers set records for productivity and quality assurance that matched or exceeded those at plants in Fort Worth, Tulsa, Dallas and Willow Run, Mich., where B-24s were also built.

As workers poured into San Diego--many from the Dust Bowl or other Depression-beset regions--the historically slow-moving city was forced to rise to the occasion. The school system expanded, cow pastures were turned into neighborhoods, and a shotgun marriage was arranged with water barons in Los Angeles.

The seeds of modern San Diego were sown during World War II, particularly along the mile-long assembly line at Consolidated. By mid-1944, the plant was turning out Liberators at the phenomenal rate of 270 per month.

“The Liberator changed everything in San Diego,” said Ray Wagner, archivist at the San Diego Aerospace Museum.

The Liberator was born when the U.S. Army needed a bomber with greater range, speed and bombing capacity than the B-17 Flying Fortress.

More Liberators were built than any other World War II bomber of any nation. Although it was primarily used by the Army Air Corps, the Navy had a variant for long-range patrols and anti-submarine warfare.

Liberators were also flown by the Royal Air Force, as well as Polish, Australian, Canadian and South African forces. The German Luftwaffe, envious of the Liberator’s stamina and punch, repaired downed Liberators and put them back into the air to battle the Allies.

Jimmy Stewart, George McGovern and Walter Matthau flew B-24s. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. died when his Liberator exploded on a mission to knock out Germany’s V-2 rocket launching sites.

Esteemed poet-novelist James Dickey wrote a poem about the chance downing (“One shot, a great one/By accident takes place where the plane is”) of a B-24: “The Liberator Explodes.”

Churchill, Stalin and Mao used B-24s as their personal transport planes.

Two former Consolidated workers in attendance at the convention wrote a book about their experiences that was a local favorite during the final year of the war. The book, “Slacks and Callouses,” was republished last month by the Smithsonian Institution Press to memorialize the wartime efforts of the women known collectively as Rosie the Riveters.

The authors, Constance Bowman and Clara Marie Allen, were high school teachers who worked the swing shift at Consolidated during their summer vacation in 1943. Bowman was an English teacher, Allen an art teacher.

“In wartime San Diego there are just two kinds of women: The ones who go to work in skirts and the ones who go to work in slacks,” they wrote.

The women in slacks were Consolidated workers in the blue pants and jackets that were the company uniform: “. . . Dust Bowl mothers buying butter and eggs for the first time, former dime store clerks making more money than Army majors, [and] war wives who feel they must keep them flying because their husbands are flying them. . . .”

While the book talks of the camaraderie and humor of the assembly line and the shared pride of contributing to the war effort, there are also incidents of sexual harassment:

”. . . Men lounging on corners looked us over in a way we didn’t like, from head to toe. . . . Men grabbed us and followed us and whistled at us. They called us ‘sister” in a most unbrotherly way. . . .”

Ivey, too, remembers swinish behavior by male co-workers, including “a hillbilly with green teeth and a dirty mind” who kept saying salacious things until Ivey complained to a boss, who put an immediate end to the harassment.

As her personal good luck wish to the troops, Ivey scratched her name and address into the fire extinguisher door in hundreds of Liberators. She received dozens of letters from homesick aviators and kept up a correspondence with many.

“We were all just grandmothers or moms or schoolkids doing what we could to win the war,” Ivey said. “It wasn’t for the money; it was just the right thing to do.”

Within months of the end of World War II, employment in the aircraft and aircraft parts industries in San Diego had declined by 80% and military payrolls were down by 66% as troops returned to civilian life.

The women of Consolidated left the work force for marriage and motherhood--Ivey married an engineer, Bowman a lawyer and Allen a doctor--and a baby boom was launched. But San Diego would never again be as parochial or comfy.

“The San Diego of 1946 was a far different community from the one of 1940 which had been by-passed by the industrial revolution that had reached the West Coast,” local historian Richard Pourade has written. “The winters were still warm and the summers cool, but the tempo of life had changed perceptibly.”