DOUGLAS AIRCRAFT

The aircraft industry was trying to gear up for mass production in 1941. The country had a few planes that could fly as far as Hawaii but those were passenger planes and we had only about a dozen or so. Douglas was building twenty light bombers for the French, ten DC3 passenger planes for Hawaii Airlines, one heavy bomber known as the B19 and was just beginning to assemble the first DC4 cargo planes for the U. S. Air Force.

I went to work in Production Control and was assigned to Department 12, a large sub-assembly operation that was responsible for producing small assemblies that served as flight and motor controls on all the aircraft being built at the Santa Monica plant. There were also landing gear components and other vital assemblies. We furnished some 90,000 parts per week to the assembly lines.

Now the pace at Douglas in the summer and fall of 1941 was not very brisk. There were many arguments among employees about the merits of the Russians vs the Germans. Most people seemed to feel that we were not going to be involved in the conflict. I felt much different. I was convinced that we would become active participants very soon and it was apparent that we were not ready. There was a steady turnover in personnel at Douglas as young men were called into military service and older men came in to replace them.

The Japanese resolved all doubt about what we had to do when they bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th 1941. We immediately went to work in earnest. We blacked out all the factory windows. We camouflaged the buildings and the airfield. We ripped the fancy "tourist" decorations out of the DC3s on the assembly line and installed extra gasoline tanks in the baggage compartments so the planes could fly to Hawaii with full loads. We then opened factory jobs to women and they flooded the place. I had the job of training some of the first women working in the shop departments and they were enormously productive. Most of them were mature middle-aged women who had a husband or a son in military service and were determined to do everything they could to help the war effort.

I had been promoted to Lead Man in my department and we needed help on the loading dock where a lot of heavy materials had to be handled. As an example of the man power shortage, when I put in a request for thirty additional employees, I received two. One of them was sixty eight years old and the other was a man with only one arm. I always resented those young soldiers who were sitting on top of the factory "protecting" us. I did not like the "guards" at all the bridges on Highway One either. We were very short of workers and we wasted a lot of man power that could have cured the shortages.

I often considered quitting my job and enlisting in the military. I was never drafted because I was "frozen" in my production position. When I saw unproductive assignments occupied by the "guards", I simply could not justify leaving the factory and possibly going up on the roof as a worthless guard.

I previously mentioned the DC4 planes as being on the assembly line. When the first one took its first test flight, a flood of two