The War Machine
Written by Eric Avila
The economic growth that ensued in California during the war years revolved primarily around the rapid production of massive quantities of ships, planes, missiles and bombs. Washington D.C. channeled billions of dollars into California’s economy, all towards the production of war-related materials and the research necessary for such production. Consequently, a vast array of manufacturing centers coalesced throughout California’s urban centers during the early 1940s, Southern California and the Bay Area in particular. Here, what became known as the “military industrial complex” was born.
In many ways, the emergence of Los Angeles and Southern California as a vibrant urban region began with World War II. Although a rudimentary industrial infrastructure had sprouted in the region prior to World War II, due largely to the discovery of massive oil deposits in southern Los Angeles County, the war transformed Los Angeles and its environs into a manufacturing center of global consequence. The abundance of oil, an expansive port facility, and the outbreak of war on Pacific front created ideal conditions for the development of a vast military industrial complex in Southern California, generating hundreds of thousands of well-paying, unionized jobs, which in turn created demands for new housing, automobiles, highways and secondary commercial services. Essentially, Los Angeles became what one historian has termed the “martial metropolis,” as the city’s very livelihood depended upon the production of war-related materials. New aircraft manufacturing centers sprouted through the region. Lockheed, Consolidated Vultee, North American, Northrop and Hughes Aircraft established massive production facilities in Southern California, spurring the construction of new suburban communities and highways to house and transport its armies of workers. The United States military planted new bases throughout Southern California, including El Toro, March, Norton, Edwards and Camp Pendleton. Billions of federal dollars funneled into the regional economy, making Los Angeles and Southern California a favored locale for federal investment.
A similar dynamic surfaced in the San Francisco Bay Area. In particular, the East Bay cities of Oakland and Richmond emerged as the world’s largest shipbuilding complex. The most prominent wartime manufacturer in the East Bay was the Kaiser Shipyard, founded by the industrial titan, Henry J. Kaiser, who established four major shipbuilding plants in the ports of Oakland and Richmond. Through an innovative set of techniques for the mass production of commercial and military ships, Kaiser Shipyards produced 1490 ships during the war years, almost one ship a day. At the Richmond shipyards, Kaiser also pioneered Kaiser Permanente, the first health maintenance organization, or HMO, of its kind, providing health care to some 20,000 workers. Kaiser’s experiments in providing employee health care lay the basis for the modern health care system in the United States, a byproduct of California’s wartime infrastructure.
California’s war machine extended beyond the production of ships and planes. It also included a set of scientific innovations that opened the age of nuclear and long-range missile warfare. In 1929, U.C. Berkeley’s Ernest Lawrence, a professor of physics, invented the particle accelerator, or cyclotron, and a decade later, his Berkeley colleague, Robert J. Oppenheimer, working under the auspices of the federally-sponsored Manhattan Project, applied the lessons of nuclear fission at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to create the world’s first atomic bomb, used twice against Japan in 1945. In Southern California meanwhile, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed by the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and sustained by an outpouring of federal grants, innovated a series of techniques in the building of rocket engines. JPL played an important role during World War II in analyzing the V2 rockets that were deployed by Nazi Germany. That research led to the creation of the Corporal missile, the first guided missile authorized by the U.S. government carry a nuclear warhead. California’s military infrastructure thus included the state’s public and private universities, which provided the hard science necessary for the building of a formidable war machine that would sustain American military supremacy throughout the war years and beyond.
