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Mobile, Alabama
Residents of Mobile Interviewed in The War
Back to top Mobile, Alabama, before the war, was a sleepy southern town of 112,000, whose only real industry was shipbuilding, as it had been since the Great War a generation earlier. Discovered by Spanish explorers in the 16th century, colonized by the French, taken over by the British, then by the Spanish and finally incorporated into the United States in 1812, the city boasted a diverse, cosmopolitan population. The city’s elite, “Old Mobile,” consisted of the hundreds of families who traced their roots back to the city’s prosperous antebellum era when it was both the cotton and slave trading capital of Alabama. Mobile was a city deeply divided by race. Jim Crow segregation rules severely curtailed the rights of African Americans to partake of Mobile’s bounty. In 1939, only 224 blacks qualified to vote. A local branch of the NAACP struggled to respond to a litany of problems: lynchings, the denial of due process, employment discrimination, wage disparities, and separate and unequal pubic facilities. Mobile’s black community centered on Davis Avenue, where black-owned businesses, theaters and a public library served the needs of an African-American population that was often excluded from other parts of town. All Mobilians suffered terribly from the dislocations and privations of the Great Depression. Businesses failed, shipyards closed, industrial plants laid off workers and city services were slashed. For years, as Katharine Phillips Singer recalled, “Mobile made its living by taking in each other’s wash.” World War II utterly transformed the city and its economy. The explosion actually began in the late l930s, when local companies such as Alcoa began producing war materiel for Japan and European countries. Local shipyards won contracts to build Liberty ships and destroyers in l940, and by the time America entered the war in late 1941, Mobile was already booming. The Alcoa plant processed millions of pounds of alumina used to build many of the 304,000 airplanes America produced during the war; the Waterman Steamship Company boasted one of the nation’s largest merchant fleets, and Mobile became one of the busiest shipping and shipbuilding ports in the nation. In 1940, Gulf Shipbuilding had had 240 employees; by 1943, it had 11,600. Alabama Dry Dock went from 1,000 workers to almost 30,000. Brookley Field, a major Army Air Force supply depot and bomber modification center, provided 17,000 civilian jobs. During the war, Mobile became the second largest city in Alabama, as tens of thousands of people streamed into the area from small towns and farms all over the south. By March 1944, Mobile County’s population had grown to 233,000, up 64 percent from 1940. The population explosion caused severe overcrowding, housing shortages and overburdened schools that were pronounced the worst in the nation by the U.S. Office of Education. The federal government made a documentary film, “Wartown,” about what was happening in Mobile and the steps begin taken to help the city cope with the challenges it faced. Thousands of African Americans streamed into Mobile in search of defense work and a fresh start. They found both, but they also found the same kind of discrimination they had known at home. In the spring of 1943, in response to a presidential order requiring defense contractors to engage in non-discriminatory hiring practices, as well as years of pressure from local black leaders and the NAACP, the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company reluctantly agreed to promote 12 black workers to become welders. Shortly after the new welders had finished their first shift, white shipyard employees attacked any black workers they could find. In the aftermath of the riot, the company created four separate shipways where blacks were free to hold every kind of position — except foreman. African Americans working in the rest of the shipyard remained largely confined to the kind of unskilled tasks they had always performed. More violent confrontations between whites and blacks would take place in Mobile throughout the war years. Public pronouncements encouraged women to work in war industries, and a series of articles in the Mobile Register featured both women war workers and those who joined the auxiliary military forces. Two-thousand-five-hundred women worked at Alabama Dry Dock, 1,200 at Gulf Shipbuilding and 750 at Brookley Field. Women would hold nearly a quarter of defense-related jobs in Alabama during the war years. More than 15,000 people from Mobile served in the armed forces; 300 died in action. Like all Americans, Mobilians who remained at home supported the war effort through bond drives, clothing drives, fundraising campaigns for the Red Cross and a host of other charitable activities. In 1942, with Germany’s “Operation Drumbeat” underway, Mobile residents responded to the threat of U-boat attacks on merchant and military ships by dimming their lights and holding blackout drills. By the time the war ended, Mobile had been transformed from a regional port town serving the cotton trade to a major industrial and commercial center. The changes that occurred in Mobile during the war years would continue to reverberate during the post-war civil rights era, the rise of the “New South” and the emergence of the Sunbelt in the decades after the war. Residents of Mobile, Alabama, interviewed in THE WAR include: Maurice Bell — A carpenter from Golden, Mississippi, Bell spent the early part of the war building army camps all around the country. He then went to Mobile to work at the Chickasaw shipyard in early 1943 and was drafted when he turned 18 that spring. He chose the Navy, trained at the Great Lakes Naval Station and served on the USS Indianapolis in the Pacific. He witnessed the battles of Tarawa, Saipan, the Philippine Sea and many others. Glenn Frazier — Frazier grew up in Fort Deposit, Alabama, and in the summer of 1941 ran away from home, lied about his age and joined the Army at 16. He volunteered to serve in the Philippines, hoping to be safely far away from the war then raging across Europe. The Japanese attacked in December 1941, and Frazier fought for four months in the jungles of Bataan, became a prisoner of war and endured the Bataan Death March and three and a half years in slave labor camps in Japan. Tom Galloway — A native of Mobile, he was a senior at Auburn University when he left college for Officer Candidate School. He became a 2nd Lieutenant in the 28th Infantry Division, 109th Field Artillery, and in November 1944 was sent into the battle of the Hurtgen Forest, one of the most disastrous Allied campaigns in Europe. It was a nightmarish place to fight: with 100-foot fir trees that in some places grew just four feet apart, the forest was so dense, dark and shrouded in dank fog that soldiers could not see one another, let alone the enemy. Within two weeks, the officers of every single rifle company in Galloway’s division were either killed or wounded. John Gray — Gray grew up in Mobile, attended segregated schools and got a job in the Mobile shipyards as a carpenter’s helper. He was drafted in May 1943 and joined the Marines, which had only recently allowed African Americans into its ranks. He was assigned to the 51st Defense Battalion, one of only two black units to be trained for combat. They became so skilled as expert gunners on 90 and 150 mm guns that they could “shoot the sting off a bee.” But once they reached the South Pacific, their white commanders never saw fit to send them into battle. The men took to calling themselves “the Lost Battalion.” Dwain Luce — Luce was out of college, married and working at his family’s thriving cannery business at the start of the war. He had been in the reserves and immediately went on active duty in late December l941. He became a captain in the 82nd Airborne Division’s 320th Glider Field Artillery Battalion. Leaving behind his wife and infant child, Luce fought in Sicily and Italy and landed in a glider in Normandy on D-Day and again in Holland as part of Operation Market Garden. Clyde Odum — A foreman at the Alabama Dry Dock and Ship Building Company in Mobile, Odum remembers working “seven days a week — 12-hour days five days a week, 10 hours on Saturday, eight hours on Sunday, you felt like you had a week off.” Emma Belle Petcher — Originally from the small town of Millry, Alabama, Petcher moved to Mobile after graduating from high school in 1942 and got a job at Brookley Field. She learned to assemble bomber parts with such skill that she became one of only two women to be put in charge of quality control as an inspector. Katharine Phillips — Phillips was a sophomore at Auburn at the start of the war. After graduation she returned to Mobile and worked at a nursery school for the children of shipyard workers. She also volunteered at the Red Cross Canteen, escorted visiting officers around town and scanned the newspapers every day, hoping not to read bad news about someone she knew. Sidney Phillips — The son of the principal of Mobile’s Murphy High School and the younger brother of Katharine Phillips (see above), he was 17 on December 8, 1941, when he enlisted in the Marines. He became a mortarman in the 1st Marine Division and fought at Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester. Ray Pittman — Pittman was working with his father as a carpenter in Mobile when the war began. In November l942, afraid the fighting would end before he could get into it, he enlisted in the Marines. He became a sergeant in charge of a demolition team in the 4th Marine Division, 20th Marine Engineers, and fought in some of the most brutal campaigns in the Pacific, including Saipain, Tinian and Iwo Jima. Willie Rushton — Born in northern Alabama, Rushton graduated from high school in 1941 and moved to Mobile, where he found work at the Coca-Cola Bottling Plant. He was drafted in March 1943 and joined the Marines. He was assigned to a service company and sent to the South Pacific in July 1943. Along with a number of other black Marines, he petitioned to be sent into combat and was eventually “attached” to the 1st Division, where he brought ammunition to front-line troops and evacuated the wounded. He was himself wounded on Peleliu in September l944. |
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