Set to debut on September 23, and running through October 2, Ken Burns’ series “The War” (The War and the Richmond Home Front, September 1, 2007) serendipitously coincides with Richmond’s own Home Front Festival that takes place September 28, 29 and 30. A copy of the SF Chronicle article follows.

Richmond, California, is the location chosen by the National Park Service to tell the nationwide story of the WWII Home Front, and after seven years in the making, the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park is rolling out the welcome mat to provide hands on and personal experiences of those who lived the Home Front.

·         You will not want to miss Friday evening, September 29, at the Gala Dinner and Fundraiser for Rosie the Riveter Trust and hear author Emily Yellin talk about her new book “Our Mothers’ War” (Author Emily Yellin of "Our Mothers' War" Tapped for Home Front Festival Keynote Speaker, August 17, 2007). Your business or your employer’s business will not want to miss the opportunity to become a sponsor of this first event ever to be held in the 40,000 square foot restored craneway of the former Ford Assembly Building. For full information, see http://www.rosietheriveter.org/gala.htm.

·         Tell your friends from around the Bay Area to turn out on Saturday for a full day of events on the Richmond Waterfront, including Launch the Park at Richmond’s historic Shipyard No. 3 and the Red Oak Victory.

·         Come back Sunday, September 30, for a Home Front Reunion of those who experienced the Home Front and an opportunity to hear them talk about their personal recollections.

World War II created industrial, cultural revolution in Bay Area

Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, September 16, 2007

World War II changed lives forever all over the world - but hit the Bay Area like a hurricane. The War, as everyone then living called it, affected every single life, even those who had no connection with the military. Nothing was ever the same again.

Almost overnight, the Bay Area became the center of a huge military and industrial complex. The war brought new industries, new people and new ideas to the region. For the first time, African Americans in large numbers moved to San Francisco, Oakland, Richmond, Vallejo and other cities around the bay.

More than a million soldiers, sailors and Marines passed through San Francisco Bay on the way to the Pacific theater - and thousands came back to put down roots after the war, setting off a population and economic boom that is with us still.

"The war completely transformed the Bay Area," said National Park Service historian Stephen Haller.

"The war changed the family dynamics of the region, and it changed the racial dynamics," said Anthea Hartig, western regional director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. "It was huge, and we are still feeling the effect of it."

Ken Burns' new series, "The War," documents the war's effect on four cities, including Sacramento. The first episode airs next Sunday on PBS.

The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war on the famous "date that will live in infamy," a bright winter's Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941.

The first reaction on the West Coast was pure panic. All military personnel were called back to their bases. At the Presidio of San Francisco, soldiers were handed obsolete rifles and told to start digging ditches on the cliffs above the Pacific to stop a Japanese invasion.

Citizens were told to keep their eyes out for spies and saboteurs. Boy Scouts were sent to guard the Bay Bridge. On Dec. 8, air raid sirens wailed along the West Coast.

Everybody, including Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, the senior military officer on the coast, was convinced that enemy planes had flown over San Francisco. Worse, the city had not blacked out. Neon lights blazed all over the city, illuminating targets for bombers.

DeWitt was furious. He chewed out San Francisco's city fathers the next day. San Francisco didn't understand, he said. This was war.

It would have been better, the general said, if bombs had fallen on San Francisco. "I never saw such apathy," he said. "It was shameful. It was criminal."

By January, DeWitt and other military men began to think that enemy aliens, persons of Japanese descent, but also Italians who were not citizens, were a danger to the war effort.

DeWitt and other top brass believed the Japanese had an espionage network. He expected "an outburst of coordinated and controlled sabotage."

He was not alone. By February, the entire California congressional delegation recommended that Japanese be evacuated from "all strategic areas." On Feb. 19, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an order allowing military commanders to remove people of Japanese ancestry, citizens and noncitizens, from the Pacific Coast. By May 20, only six seriously ill Japanese remained in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the pace of the war effort stepped up.

Even before the United States got in the war, industrialist Henry J. Kaiser offered to build cargo ships for the British. He found a mudflat on the east shore of the bay, near the little town of Richmond.

Kaiser had never built ships before, but he was a captain of industry, a tycoon, a man of action. "A ship," he supposedly said, "is just a building that floats."

By April 1941, he laid the keel of his first ship. It was the beginning of something huge.

In March 1942, the headquarters of the Bechtel Corp. in San Francisco got a telegram from the government asking if Bechtel was interested in building a new West Coast shipyard.

President Kenneth Bechtel picked a site the next day - the shoreline and tidal marsh just north of Sausalito. Within a week, Bechtel had a plan, and 10 days later, he had a contract to build a shipyard and produce 34 ships.

The yard - called Marinship - was only an idea in March. It started to take shape in April, and in June, work started on the first ship. The ship, named for William Richardson, the founder of Sausalito, was launched in September.

Meanwhile, in Richmond, Kaiser expanded his ship building complex. Soon, he had four yards, and the Kaiser Richmond complex was the largest shipyard ever built.

Once, to show how fast ships could be built, the Kaiser Richmond complex built a complete ship in four days and 15 hours, a world record.

Altogether there were 30 shipyards in the Bay Area; they employed 244,000 people. Kaiser alone had 93,000 in his Richmond operation.

During World War II, the yards on San Francisco Bay produced 1,867 new ships in four years, using many new techniques, such as prefabrication. It was more ships than had been built in a single place in the world.

"It was a complete and utter mobilization," Hartig said.

Before the war, the Bay Area's population was mostly white. The 1940 census showed that San Francisco was 95 percent white; the largest minority was Asian, about 3.6 percent of the population of 640,000. There were only 4,846 African Americans living in San Francisco in 1940, according to the census.

Most of the region's black population lived along the railroads, particularly in West Oakland, where Seventh Street was the community's main street.

The promise of jobs brought thousands of black people West during the war. By 1950, San Francisco's black population had jumped to 43,000, and the African American population in Richmond, Oakland and Vallejo had increased tenfold.

Charles Wollenberg, in his book on Marinship, said the war made the West "a black frontier." By 1945, he said, "blacks had replaced Asians as the Bay Area's largest nonwhite minority and chief target of prejudice and discrimination."

The influx had two results - a severe housing shortage (the vacancy rate in Oakland fell to 0.06 percent at one point) and the construction of wartime housing projects.

Places like Richmond simply exploded. Richmond grew from 20,000 to 100,000 virtually overnight.

All around the Bay Area, what historian Lucy Lawliss called "established communities" resisted this sudden influx. "They didn't want all those people," she said.

In the South there was segregation by law, but in the West, the war brought de facto segregation.

"It was the classic boom and bust," said Haller. And when the boom busted at the end of the war, whole neighborhoods of poor black people emerged - the so called Iron Triangle in Richmond, West Oakland, and the Bayview and Hunters Point, built around the Navy shipyard in San Francisco.

It also brought black writers, entertainers, sports stars and a vibrant culture to the Bay Area.

The war brought women into the industrial workforce for the first time. Before the war, industrial work was a man's job. But in some shipyards, 40 percent of the workers were women. The war produced a new generation of workers - Rosie the Riveter and Wendy the Welder. The posters of women with their sleeves rolled up and the slogan "We Can Do It!" are with us still.

"It was a paradigm shift," said Martha Lee, superintendent of the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park.

The war also brought social changes to the area. The Kaiser shipyards set up a health plan for employees, the nation's first health maintenance organization. The company also provided child care for working mothers. The shipyards are gone, but the Kaiser Permanente medical complex is its legacy.

Despite the problems, despite the wartime boom and postwar bust, the Bay Area seemed very attractive to soldiers and sailors who had seen it for the first time in wartime.

When the war ended in August 1945, the shipyards closed, ship building faded, and the industrial plants shut down. But the Bay Area prospered.

"It was a funny thing," said Lee, "all those people didn't want to go back to Arkansas, Oklahoma or Texas after the war.

"They saw California as a great place to live and stayed."

World War II accelerated trends that were already in motion. Since the days of the Gold Rush and the wagon trains headed west, Americans have followed the setting sun.

The wartime and postwar migration west, says Haller, the park service historian, "was only exceeded by the Gold Rush. People who came here liked what they saw."

The series on PBS

The first of seven episodes of "The War," Ken Burns' sprawling documentary series examining World War II, will be broadcast by KQED on Sunday, Sept. 23, at 8 and 11 p.m. Readers can find the schedule for first-run and repeat broadcasts and broadcasts on KTEH at www.kqed.org

Upcoming coverage

Other stories planned by The Chronicle on the documentary:

-- Profile of filmmaker Ken Burns

-- Review by Tim Goodman

-- Where you can find WWII historical sites in the Bay Area

-- Bay Area women remember their roles during WWII

-- Arts and Culture Critic Steven Winn looks at our notion of patriotism, then and now

-- Bay Area veterans share memories of the war with Carl Nolte

See this story on SFGate.com/WWII for additional online-only features

E-mail Carl Nolte at cnolte@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/16/MNLSS6I1J.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle