NEWSREEL: An army of 150,000 men, women and children
invaded an American city -
whites, Negroes, Indians, Creoles, Cajuns.
They came from every corner of the land.
Their roots in every curve of the globe -
Moscow, Indiana, Warsaw, North Dakota,
Hamburg, California, Milan, Missouri,
Baghdad, Kentucky.
Some came out of patriotism, some out of grim necessity,
some for a richer life.
All came to do a war job.
These are the people - a few of them.
Thousands more storm through these gates
on the graveyard shift and the swing shift.
These are the jobs they came to fill. Just a few of them.
40,000 workers in two great shipyards,
repairing and refitting the torpedoed vessels of the Allied nations
in giant dry vessels for the Battle of the Atlantic.
The shipyards are the main war job.
But while these men and women weld and rivet and file and plate,
tens of thousands more are working round the clock
in the steel mills, the paper mills, the gypsum plant,
the aluminum plant, the Army Air Corps repair field,
and countless machine shops, foundries, lumber and textile mills.
This could be any one of a hundred great American war centres.
It happens to be Mobile, Alabama.
But the story is the same in every war town in America.
150,000 people, 10 full military divisions,
the civilian equivalent of Rommel's entire African army,
bivouacked without warning
in the narrow confines of one peaceful southern city.
Less than three years ago,
you might have walked blocks in Mobile without encountering a person.
Today, you stop to scratch your head and a line forms behind you.
No wonder there's such a chaos and congestion of traffic.
And one has to butt one's way into buses at the plants
and elbow through thick crowds again in town.
Crowds everywhere.
Crowds at the pay windows.
Block-long lines of white-collar workers outside restaurants.
Thirsty shipyard workers on payday
waiting their turn outside the state-controlled liquor stores.
Overcrowded schools staffed with weary teachers
working in double shifts.
And still 3,000 in-migrant workers' children
had to stay at home this year
until accommodations to care for them are rushed to completion.
Dingy cafes crowded to the doors.
And makeshift tent dance halls in crammed amusement parks.
Old Mobile - sedate, grand old lady in crinoline and iron lace -
thrust aside 240 years of history and tradition,
rolled up her leg-of-mutton sleeves and pitched in
to solve the complex problems created by 150,000 strangers
dropped without warning, and for the duration,
into the lap of a little city of only 78,000.
Every available room was canvassed, utilised.
Many an old magnolia-shaded mansion is now the roost of
an orchestra leader-turned-expediter,
a bond salesman-turned-leaderman.
Old warehouses were reopened
and peopled with shipyard workers and airplane mechanics.
This was an upholstering establishment
converted into a dormitory for women war workers.
This was a neighbourhood grocery store.
These girls - welders, checkers and machinists.
This was a garage, now a barracks -
emergency housing for war workers.
This man is one - a pipe fitter just checking in from San Francisco.
Here, there, everywhere -
on vacant lots and fields and creek banks,
trailer camps, tent colonies and shantytowns -
all facilities were overloaded.
In outlying sections of the city,
housewives, to make sure of water for their daily needs,
set their alarms for two in the morning
to fill buckets and pans
for tomorrow's drinking and washing and cooking.
Mobile's understaffed Health Department
worked day and night
on what was really a national rather than a local civic problem
to provide basic sanitation, water supply and waste disposal.
But still they poured into Mobile from every corner of the nation -
farmers, clerks and little businessmen,
Indians, Okies, cowboys and cotton pickers,
hillbillies, Tennessee horse traders and South American gypsies -
answering the government's call for more and more war workers.
Many of them accustomed to better things.
Others just in from the brush where they use possums for yard dogs.
In Mobile, as in every other war town,
the same acute problem arose -
homes for workers,
housing for the in-migrant armies of industry.
Mobile, as every American city of any size,
had its slums before the war,
but when a nation is at war,
it becomes clear that the health and welfare of each
affects the health and welfare of all.
Lack of comfort, lack of rest,
illness breeding in conditions like these
mean time lost from production.
Each citizen living poorly
weakens the fabric of the society in which all of us live.
These people and these conditions too
suddenly become a problem to be faced
in solving the health and housing complexities of a congested war town.
The government stepped in.
Vast housing projects were initiated
and opened at low rentals to war workers
certified by the personnel and housing officers
operated by the plants in which they worked.
By January 1 of this year,
Congress had appropriated over $2 billion for emergency housing
in America's war boom towns.
Here's how some of it was spent in Mobile.
These are the slums we have seen.
Slum clearance projects had been the local private enterprise
of a few high-minded, far-sighted individuals.
But in Mobile, such projects as these
have become one of the obligations of good government.
They're being written off as part of the cost of building
ships and planes and tanks and guns.
They are rented only to certified coloured war workers,
and are equipped with auditoriums, playgrounds and day nurseries
to take care of the children
while their parents are working in the war plants.
Dormitory units for men and women,
accommodating from 400 to 1,200 single workers.
Equipped with recreational facilities, barber shops, gymnasiums,
hospitals, community centres and low-cost cafeterias -
whole towns in themselves.
Government-owned trailers moved in to meet the emergency
for rent as low as $15 a month per family.
1,700 units to accommodate 7,000 war workers and their families.
Modern, sanitary and scientific -
built by the Maritime Commission
and adjoining the shipyards in which their occupants are employed.
These 2- and 4-family dwellings
are typical of many of the smaller projects
that are being rushed to completion on the outskirts of Mobile.
Day nurseries to care for the children of women war workers
are another problem the government is undertaking to solve.
Five small nurseries to 150,000 people is inadequate.
But more are planned to counteract an important contributing cause
of absenteeism and loss of valuable production time.
For those that can afford them,
there are modern, permanent homes like these,
built with the help of FHA loans
and put on the market
at rentals compatible with government ceilings.
Decent housing, medical care, adequate transportation -
as each of these problems is met, the ratio of production increases.
In the shipyards alone, this is already evident.
At the beginning, one ship was launched every six weeks.
Today, cargo and combat vessels slide down the ways one every week.
And the story of Mobile is the story of every American war town.