For the month of March, Women’s History Month, the blog series, Worker Wednesday, devoted to war production employee publications, in particular those of Higgins Industries, the Eureka and Higgins Worker, will focus on women workers. Higgins Industries employed over 20,000 in plants across the New Orleans area. Among these employees were thousands of women. Higgins notably hired women and minority workers for skilled and supervisory positions and built vocational programs to instruct these workers in skilled tasks.
In the March 30, 1945 issue of the Higgins Worker, winners of the “Miss Carbon” contest were featured. Higgins crowned a “Miss Carbon, Day” and “Miss Carbon, Night”, one from each shift. The winners of this personality contest were selected via monetary vote. Fellow workers contributed $1 per vote to the Red Cross, raising a total of $1045.15. Frances Moreau was “Miss Carbon, Night” and Hannah Slayton was “Miss Carbon, Day.” Their “King Carbon” was WWII veteran D. Dahmes.
Join us at the Museum on March 28th for a special Women’s History Month event “Beyond Rosie: Women’s Roles on the American Home Front.” See here for more details.
For the month of March, Women’s History Month, the blog series, Worker Wednesday, devoted to war production employee and their publications, in particular those of Higgins Industries, the Eureka and Higgins Worker, will focus on women workers.
This week’s Worker Wednesday deviates from Higgins Industries to spotlight a worker from Delta Shipyards, another New Orleans production facility which employed thousands of women workers.
Rose Rita Samona completed 204 hours of training at the National Defense School on Frenchmen St. in New Orleans. She was trained in straight-line free hand burning, free hand circles, angles and machine burning. Samona, 22, was welcomed into the International Brotherhood of Boiler Makers, Iron Ship Builders and Helpers of America. From May 1943 to January 1946 she worked as a burner for Delta Shipyards, cutting and burning holes in sheets of steel for the production of Liberty ships at the rate of $1.20 per day. Burners often qualified for extra money because of the dangers involved in the job. And indeed in November 1945 Samona had a minor injury when steel fell while she was working, burning her leg. She received the E-award and Ships for Victory medal for excellence in war production, given for outstanding job performance.
Join us at the Museum on March 28th for a special Women’s History Month event “Beyond Rosie: Women’s Roles on the American Home Front.” See here for more details.
For the month of March, Women’s History Month, the blog series, Worker Wednesday, devoted to war production employee publications, in particular those of Higgins Industries, the Eureka and Higgins Worker, will focus on women workers. Higgins Industries employed over 20,000 in plants across the New Orleans area. Among these employees were thousands of women. Higgins notably hired women and minority workers for skilled and supervisory positions and built vocational programs to instruct these workers in skilled tasks.
The issue March 3, 1945 issue of the Higgins Worker featured women in several columns. One piece focused on women workers who were actually leaving Higgins to enter the service. Oris Huet and Catherine Manfee who had both worked in the Payroll Department were departing Higgins in March 1945 (Oris after nearly five years!) to join the WAVES. (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), the women’s division of the US Navy.
Gift in Memory of Arnold Schaefer, 2012.359.003
Join us at the Museum on March 28th for a special Women’s History Month event “Beyond Rosie: Women’s Roles on the American Home Front.” See here for more details.
In late February 1946, Colonel Jesse Thomas Traywick, Sr. visited his niece Jean’s class at the Goode Street School, an elementary school in Montgomery, Alabama. Hardly half a year had passed since Traywick had been released from over three years of imprisonment by the Japanese. Some of the children wrote Traywick thank-you letters, including his niece Jean, whose letter (pictured in the center below) stated “I appreciate you coming here very much. One little girl said I was lucky to have an uncle like you.”
Traywick had served in the Philippines as Gen. Jonathan Wainwright’s G-3, or Assistant Chief of Staff and was entrusted to deliver a handwritten letter of surrender to Maj. Gen. William Sharp. Although Wainwright had agreed to surrender, General Homma wanted assurance that the forces under Maj. Gen. William Sharp would also put down their arms. Traywick was held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese from the fall of Corregidor on 6 May 1942, until the end of hostilities in August 1945.
Those of us who work with archival collections come into contact with unique handwriting nearly every day. Although we can normally decipher the script (predominantly English in our collection), from WWII, there are times when we have to poll colleagues and guess at what is written. Does it say —? There were times when handwriting played a more central role in communication. In writing to prisoners of war, especially in the Pacific, where letters would be read by both American and Japanese censors, writers received special instruction. Most importantly, the letters were to be short (no more than 25 words) and were to be typed or block printed. Letters that did not comply with these rules, were returned.
We have examples of these failed attempts at communication from a collection of material related to the imprisonment by the Japanese of USMC Sgt. Edward A. Padbury. POWs in Japan were allowed very little, if any, correspondence with their loved ones. Mail was regularly delayed by nearly a year. General Jonathan Wainwright’s wife, Adele, reportedly sent him 300 letters over the three-plus years of his imprisonment. He received a total of six.
Catherine Faye, Edward Padbury’s sister, had some unsuccessful efforts to write to her brother. The first letter was returned on two accounts. It was longer than 25 words and written in cursive. The second letter was block printed, but also too long. We do not have any correspondence from Sgt. Padbury, but we do know that he survived the war and was liberated from Shinjoku POW Camp in the Tokyo Bay area.
Victims of the Malmedy Massacre taken on 14 January 1945. National Archives Image from the Collection of The National WWII Museum.
Seventy years ago, in the days of January 13th and 14th American troops began to uncover this gruesome scene in the snow in Belgium. The murder had occurred weeks earlier; murder, because the American victims had already surrendered to the Germans and were thus afforded the rights of POWs under the Geneva Conventions. Instead of being held captive and transported to a POW camp, on December 17th, 1944, outside of Malmedy, Belgium, 84 American POWs were murdered by their German captors, part of the 1st SS Panzer Division. The war crime now known as the “Malmedy Massacre” was part of a series of such killings in which 362 American POWs (and over 100 Belgian civilians) perished.
73 men were tried for these crimes in the War Crimes Trials held at Dachau in 1946, in which 1,672 German war criminals were charged. Of these 73, 42 received death sentences, 21 life imprisonment and the rest, long sentences. All of these sentences were eventually commuted and by 1956, all had been released from prison.
See an interview with Ted Paluch, survivor of the massacre on our Digital Collections site, recorded in October 2009 by the Museum’s Manager of Research Services Seth Paridon. And read more about Paluch in this Oral History Spotlight, previously featured on our blog. See also the entry on this tragedy in our digital exhibit on POWs in Europe, Guests of the Third Reich.
The Higgins Industries newsletter, The Higgins Worker, profiled in the Worker Wednesday series, begs for a Tuesday post in honor of this newsletter item about the religious holiday referred to as, among others, “Little Christmas,” “Epiphany,” “King’s Day,” and “Twelfth Night.” In New Orleans, January 6th signals the start of the Carnival season, culminating on Mardi Gras Day or “Fat Tuesday.” King’s Day is marked by the eating of King Cake, a tradition that was honored on January 6, 1945, in the Higgins Little Red School House in Ourtown, the settlement established for workers at Higgins Industries. To read more about Ourtown, see the previous post.
Louis Zamperini at The National WWII Museum in 2011
This week marks the release of Angelina Jolie’s film about Louis Zamperini based on Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 bestseller, Unbroken. Mr. Zamperini shared his emotional story with the Museum in the form of an oral history in 2011. It can be viewed in our Digital Collection.
Zamperini, an Olympic track runner, served as a bombardier in the 307th Bombardment Group, 7th Air Force, flying B-24 Liberators in the Pacific. Zamperini’s aircraft went down in the Pacific and he and the two other survivors from his crew were adrift for 47 days. Captured and tortured by the Japanese, he survived the war, regaining freedom on August 20, 1945. Zamperini was one of the 34,648 Americans held prisoner by the Japanese during WWII. Nearly 40% of those men died in captivity, a staggering 12,935 lives lost.
Read more about the Museum’s collection Pacific Theater POW artifacts and the story of the Ofuna Roster. Visit the Museum on Wednesday, January 21, 2015 for a Lunchbox Lecture on the Ofuna Roster and the ties to Unbroken and Zamperini’s story.
Seventy years ago this holiday season, some American servicemen were celebrating in POW camps across the world. They did not know it, but it was the last holiday season that they would spend in captivity.
Clair Cline, B-24 pilot from Minnesota, spent Christmas 1944 in Stalag Luft I. Cline had been shot down in February 1944. As a way to pass time and keep busy, Cline carved wood, beginning with B-24 models. In the fall of 1944, Cline took on a different project, a violin. Cline finished the project just before Christmas 1944. He later recalled the holiday (excerpted from Guideposts Magazine):
My most memorable moment was Christmas Eve. As my buddies brooded about home and families, I began playing “Silent Night.” AS the notes drifted through the barracks a voice chimed in, then others. Amid the harmony I heard a different language. “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht, alles schläft, Einsam wacht…” An eldery white-haired guard stood in the shadows , his eyes wet with tears.
Seventy years ago, on 30 November 1944, the “Kriegies”– short for Kriegsgefangener, German for POW– in Stalag Luft IV celebrated Thanksgiving. They used the traditional date of the 30th of November (for more on this see the previous post on “Franksgiving”). Naturally, this issue of Kriegie Kronikle spotlighted the work of the “Chow Chuckers,” the men who “perform the tasks which are inevitable & necessary in unpacking, sorting, repacking & loading of the chow we all idolize (the word is a masterpiece of understatement!).”
Gift of the Family of Willard Charles Miller, 2012.388
For more on the Kriegie Kronikle from Stalag Luft IV, see this previous post.
