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A normal workweek was 48 hours long, and many worked overtime. There were three shifts each weekday and shifts on the weekends. Many commuted from farms and rural towns up to 60 miles away.
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At its peak, the plant employed 4,229 people. Merchants in Grand Island had been paying their workers around 30-cents an hour. The plant paid 70- to 80-cents an hour, about the same as factory workers around the nation but well above what laborers on the farm and in small towns made. Construction just west of Grand Island began in March 1942 and was completed in six months.īuilding bombs and artillery shells known as "ordnance" was a good job. The Cornhusker plant was one of the last one built by the Army during World War II. The other branches of the service had theirs, as well. During the war the Army alone built over 60 ammunition plants. Grand Island's Cornhusker Ordnance Plant. These are three of the major plants in Nebraska: "I'll tell you brother," he wrote, "Well, it sure don't make no sense / When a Negro can't work / In the national defense." Blues musician and activist Josh White wrote songs protesting segregation in the defense industry. However, at least in the beginning, not everyone was put to work. how jumped in there and built airplanes and tanks and everything." "The equipment we had on standby to fight a war was little, if anything," he says. The Martin Bomber plant built 1,500 B-26 Marauder medium bombers and more that 500 huge B-29 Superfortresses including the "Enola Gay," the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima.ĭon Geery, for one, was amazed at how the nation's industry answered the call. Also, a huge aircraft assembly facility was built just south of Omaha at Fort Crook. In Nebraska, there were ordnance plants building bombs near Mead, Sidney, Hastings and Grand Island. Throughout rural America during World War II, factories sprang up.