Limy Sam:
I recall seeing many pictures in magazines & books of the WWII era showing women working the fields in England. The tractors shown are almost always US manufacturers' products. If I am not mistaken, there was something called the "Land Army", a program in England and maybe Scotland to get people not in the military or in defense work to work the land for food production. If there was a government program to train people and put them to working the land for food production, getting tractors during wartime would make sense. I recall seeing photos in old issues of "National Geographic" about Britain's "Land Army", and the photos showed women using a John Deere tractor. Other photos showed women maintaining and repairing the tractors and implements. All were made by US firms, and I remember wondering whether those firms had plants in Britain at the time, or whether the tractors & implements were exported from the USA.
I am not sure, but somewhere I had heard that in the USA, tractors were available to farmers during WWII. What I also heard was that with rubber and particularly tires being rationed to the civilian population, the tractors came through with steel wheels. I forget the source, and it may be just hearsay, but it does make sense.
There is an age-old saying: "An Army travels on its stomach". Without food, the best equipped military forces will not get anywhere. It would make sense that tractor and ag implement makers were told to keep in production for the war effort, just as machine tool builders and construction machinery builders were kept in production. A big firm like International Harvester had a lot of divisions manufacturing everything from tractors and implements to refrigerators. While the tractor and ag implement division might have been kept in production for the war effort, other divisions were re-tooled for defense work. To illustrate how thorough the re-tooling of US industry was for the war effort, an old friend had a ship's magnetic compass he had "liberated" in the 50's when his US Navy destroyer was decommissioned. He pointed out that the compass was made by Lionel- best known as a maker of toy electric trains.
My LeBlond roundhead Regal lathe was shipped on 26 July, 1943. LeBlond supplied me with the ship date and first owner. The first owner was a firm (still in business) called Ertel Engineering. During WWII, Ertel was building specialized filters for the production of penicillin. The lathe came with a shop made steady rest, built to handle large diameter work- probably tubing or similar for filter bodies. Not all firms engaged in work for the war effort were producing the obvious munitions or armaments or military vehicles or uniforms. Firms producing medication and the means to produce the medication, as well as various foodstuffs were going full blast.
At Canjoharie, NY there was the old "Beechnut" baby food factory. Canjoharie is in the Mohawk Valley, a rich agricultural region with dairy and vegetable farming as well as being on the New York Central RR and NYS barge canal. A man named Bernie, who worked in my old crew at the powerplant, had been born in 1929. Bernie told me that his father was disabled (fell off a silo) when Bernie was 12. His schooling ended and he was boarded out to another farmer as his family could not keep him at home. At age 12, Bernie was a husky kid. The farm where he was working was not far from the Beechnut plant. Bernie said it was obvious we'd be in the war before too long, or maybe Beechnut already had contracts to supply foodstuffs for export to our allies. Either way, he said Beechnut was building a huge expansion to their original plant to produce rations rather than baby food. After December of 1941, most young men were being drafted unless deferred for defense work. The result was the contractors building the Beechnut plant needed laborers and would hire nearly anyone. Bernie had been milking cows and doing farm work, and was ready to make some real money. He said he showed up at the Beechnut jobsite and asked the contractor for a laborer's job. The foreman told him he was a kid and too young. Bernie said they had a test: wheel a wheelbarrow heaped with sand up a plank ramp and back down again. Other men were not able to do this. Bernie said he took the wheelbarrow up and down the ramp, and promptly was hired as a laborer. He said all through WWII, there was no shortage of good jobs for anyone left at home and able to do them. Remington Arms was a bit west in the Mohawk Valley at Ilion, NY and they were flat-out on defense work. Further west, at Utica, Smith Corona typewriter and Stevens Arms and a host of smaller factories were flat-out on defense work. At Rome, NY, there were copper mills, and further west, in Syracuse, there were a larger number of factories all on defense work. The result was anyone who was not in the military and could walk in the door and function reasonably well was able to find work. Bernie said the farmers were hurting for farm labor as a result.
My first boss at the powerplant was Dick Davis. Dick was a real character from Maine. Dick had been in high school when WWII broke out. He lived in Maine, near Portland. Dick said he worked a split shift in a shipyard in Portland. Dick went to HS for part of the day, then went to the shipyard to work his shift. He was put to work welding on Liberty ships. As he told it, he was the only male in his gang, working with older women. He rode an old Indian motorcycle to and from the shipyard. In his junior year, Dick was just 17. He asked his parents to sign his enlistment papers and entered the US Marine Corps. Dick, having entered the Corps late in the war, never left the USA. He was put to guarding German POW's for the most part. Dick wound up a Gunnery Sergeant when he was discharged in about 1946. At that point, he returned to finish high school. He told me it was quite an experience to return to his high school as a veteran, let alone a USMC gunny. He had little or no patience for the kids around him and the stuff they were thinking about or doing. He said it was hard to adjust to high school after being in the Marines. He did graduate, and attended University of Maine and got his degree as a mechanical engineer. Dick was a great guy to work for and really a fine man. He died this past year, age 90. Young for his people, who all seemed to die after passing the century mark. Bernie died a good number of years prior. Those guys, along with my parents, were the kind of people who would have related well to the poster in this thread.
On the other hand, Dick Davis and I had a little debate about slugging welds on work in the powerplant. Slugging being throwing nails, wire, and small scraps of steel into a weld joint with a wide gap or a lot of passes needed- a means of making a large weld happen quicker, or dealing with a wide root gap. It was later found to be a contributing cause to some of the welded-hull WWII merchant ships breaking apart in heavy seas or even at the pier. I had found powerplant mechanic slugging welds and stopped them, and this wound up in Dick Davis' office. Dick whistled through his teeth and said he and the ladies on his shift did it routinely when welding on Liberty ship hulls. I like to think Dick, being just a kid when he was a hull welder, no formal education about the work, just being trained to be a production welder. He did not know of the failure potential caused by slugging the welds and would have been otherwise like the man in the poster.
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