The Navy, the aircraft plant and the housing crisis that turned San Diego into a war city from 1941 to 1945. All records sourced and cited.
In the last days of 1941, the man about to take command of what was left of the Pacific Fleet was driven down to San Diego in a borrowed car with the license plates swapped.
Admiral Chester Nimitz had crossed the country by train. He was driven to San Diego in the official sedan of the city's mayor, Percy Benbough, and, as historian Richard Pourade tells it, "private license plates" were "substituted for official ones" so nobody would notice who was riding in the back. At North Island he got on a plane for Pearl Harbor.
He was leaving a city that had tried to black itself out on the night of December 7 and failed, because the biggest employer in town would not turn its lights off. On the bay, Consolidated Aircraft was building Navy patrol bombers around the clock. A company official told the authorities they were "building airplanes" and had not "got time to play games." It took a threat to send in a squad of Marines to pull the power switches before the plant went dark.
Two weeks after that, a Japanese submarine was sitting off the coast with orders to shell the city on Christmas Eve.
This is the story of what the war did to San Diego, a Navy town that tripled in size, ran out of houses, turned its great park into a hospital and hid an entire aircraft factory under chicken wire and feathers.
San Diego was already a Navy town when the war started. It was about to become something bigger.
Pourade counted it up as of Pearl Harbor. San Diego Bay was home to "the Navy's mightiest naval air base," with more than six hundred government buildings worth over $50 million around the bay. Thirty two thousand Navy men called the city home. North Island alone based four hundred planes, and it was the repair and operating base for six carriers: the Lexington, Saratoga, Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise and Wasp.
Within a year, three of those six would be at the bottom of the Pacific.
The city around the bases was not large. The 1940 census counted 203,341 people in San Diego. It ranked forty third among American cities. Almost everything that happened over the next four years happened because the Navy and the companies that built for the Navy needed more people than San Diego had.
The first blackout was a failure.
It was ordered the night of Pearl Harbor, and, in Pourade's words, "results were feeble. The lights at Consair continued to glow." Consolidated's position was simple. They were building airplanes. They did not have time to play games. "Under a threat of having a squad of Marines pull its power switches," Pourade writes, "Consair finally went dark."
Across the border it went faster. In Tijuana the military "merely pulled the power company switches."
The first effective blackout came at midnight on December 8. The San Diego Union described the city as wrapped in "soft enveloping darkness, broken only here and there by the dimmed lights of an automobile or a slowly moving street car." Two nights later a blackout covered everything from Bakersfield to the border and inland to Las Vegas, and thousands of workers were evacuated from the Consolidated plant.
Blackouts, and later the softer dimouts, went on until February 1943.
The fear was not paranoid. The submarines were real.
Pourade writes that the Japanese sent nine submarines to sit off West Coast cities by Christmas evening, 1941, with orders to shell them. "Twice during those early days," he writes, "Japanese submarines lay within deck gun range of San Diego."
The one assigned to San Diego was the I-10. According to a 2004 San Diego Union-Tribune account by Roger Showley, its commander wanted to shell the city on December 24 and broadcast an "unhappy Christmas" message to President Roosevelt. Tokyo called it off. The submarines were recalled before any of them fired on a West Coast city that Christmas.
The city did not know any of that. What it knew was that an Army plane had spotted a large submarine on the surface eight miles south of San Clemente Island and could not bomb it. Regulations required bombs to be released from five thousand feet. The cloud ceiling was two thousand.
Two months later, Pourade writes, a lone Japanese submarine made a landfall off San Diego, then went north and shelled the oil field at Goleta, near Santa Barbara, on February 23, 1942. It was the first enemy shelling of the American mainland of the war.
San Diego's defenses in those weeks were thin and improvised. A steel net was strung across the mouth of the harbor. Within two hours of Pearl Harbor, twelve hundred volunteer aircraft spotters were on watch. By the end of February 1942, fifty tuna clippers were at sea on Navy patrol, and more than six hundred fishermen had volunteered. Barrage balloons floated over the bay on cables. Antiaircraft guns were dug into Point Loma and La Jolla Shores. Pourade says the entire West Coast had forty five modern Army fighters and six radar stations.
At the San Diego Zoo, guards were issued rifles and told to shoot if necessary, so that no animals would escape into the city if bombs fell.
At the Natural History Museum, the annual December bird count went ahead, the Union reported, once "soldiers and police" were "convinced that census takers were not spies."
Three days after Pearl Harbor, the Navy took Balboa Park.
Richard Amero, the park's historian, records the date: December 10, 1941. The park was renamed Camp Kidd, after Admiral Isaac Kidd, who had died on the Arizona. Pourade writes that the Navy took over the park's buildings "with one exception."
The Naval Hospital was already in the park, on the hill at Inspiration Point, and voters had agreed in April 1941 to give it more land, by a vote of 24,278 to 5,854. Now it took the rest.
The buildings from the 1915 and 1935 expositions became wards and barracks. The California Building, the Fine Arts Gallery and the Natural History Museum filled with hospital beds. The House of Hospitality became a dormitory for nurses. The Japanese tea garden became a Red Cross center. The lily pond in front of the Botanical Building became a swimming pool. The cottages of the House of Pacific Relations housed officers.
The scale is hard to picture now. Amero counts the hospital at 56 buildings and 1,424 beds in 1941. By 1945 it had 241 buildings on 247 acres and 10,499 beds. The Natural History Museum alone held 960 beds, which the Union pointed out in 1944 was three times as many as Mercy Hospital. About 172,000 patients were treated there during the war. By the summer of 1945, Pourade writes, the hospital averaged eight thousand patients a day.
The men coming back from Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo Jima came here. On September 25, 1942, President Roosevelt toured it. In July 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt walked its wards.
On the other side of the bay, at the foot of Point Loma, the Naval Training Station was turning civilians into sailors.
It had been established by Congress in 1919 and commissioned in 1923, and it already had a nickname, "The Cradle of the Navy." During the war, historian Molly McClain writes in the Journal of San Diego History, it "trained a population of as many as 25,000 recruits and 8,000 students in forty-one schools." Its barracks camps were named for naval heroes: Lawrence, Jones, Decatur, Luce, Mahan and Farragut. In 1944 it became the Naval Training Center.
A navy dispatch from February 23, 1943 that Amero found counts 17,807 men on board at the receiving station alone, with bunks for 19,170, and another 3,630 at Camp Kidd in the park.
Today that ground is Liberty Station.
The rest of the bay filled up with the Navy too.
The Destroyer Base on the San Diego waterfront became the Repair Base on October 7, 1943. According to Bruce Linder's history San Diego's Navy, it handled more than 5,117 ships between 1943 and 1945. A graving dock big enough for 10,000 ton cruisers cost almost $3 million. On the Silver Strand south of Coronado, the Navy built an amphibious training base, authorized in June 1943 and commissioned in January 1944. Pourade: "The crews to land invading Marines were trained at a great new base on the Coronado Strand."
There were blimps at Del Mar hunting submarines, fields at Brown Field on Otay Mesa and Ream Field in Imperial Beach, and Fort Emory on the Strand. The Navy commissioned an auxiliary air station on Kearny Mesa in February 1943 to train crews for the Navy version of the B-24, the PB4Y Liberator.
The biggest war effort in San Diego was not on a base. It was a factory on the bay that built planes for the Navy and the Army Air Forces.
Consolidated Aircraft had come to San Diego from Buffalo in 1935, lured by a sweetheart deal. The Chamber of Commerce was run by T. C. Macaulay, who had taught the company's founder, Reuben Fleet, to fly. Macaulay got the city to lease Fleet a site on Lindbergh Field for a dollar a year. Natalie Nakamura, writing in the Journal of San Diego History, records the plant's dedication on October 20, 1935, and the 311 employees who rode west on the train to staff it.
Fleet was not impressed with the local labor pool. "There aren't any mechanics out here," he said. "Only just a bunch of berry pickers."
By the war, the berry pickers were building the PBY Catalina, the Navy's long range patrol flying boat, and the B-24 Liberator, the most produced American bomber of the war. By July 1941 the company had a backlog of more than $685 million. In 1941 it employed 17,000 men, a third of the male wage earners in San Diego, and four out of five of them were from somewhere else.
In 1943, Consolidated merged with Vultee. The San Diego plant hit a peak of about 45,000 workers that year. Nakamura counts January 1944 alone at 253 B-24s and 74 PBYs, and a peak rate of eight B-24s a day. The San Diego plant built 6,724 Liberators. Every one of them took about 340,000 rivets. A Catalina took 270,000.
The first forty women were hired in September 1941. By May 1944 women were 42 percent of the workforce. Two days after Pearl Harbor the city's vocational school, which had refused women welding students for two years, started a women's welding class. "Rosie the Riveter had arrived," Pourade writes.
And the plant disappeared.
A high concrete wall went up facing it along Pacific Highway. Then, in Pourade's words, "a long camouflage netting across the highway and the plant. From the air, Consair disappeared from the scene." Historian Kimberly Hall writes that the nets were "chicken wire and feathers," that "dummy trees and rooftops were placed above the netting," and that they stayed up until 1944. A Navy photographer, Fenno Jacobs, shot workmen on scaffolding hanging the nets in August 1943.
Driving under it was another matter. Isabel Tinkham, interviewed for the San Diego History Center in 1979, remembered the netting over Pacific Highway as "the creepiest thing." "You couldn't see daylight," she said. "You couldn't see the sun."
When the British writer Alistair Cooke came through, he saw "the low, vast plant of Consolidated Aircraft, the ominous flat roofs stretching a mile or more down to the sea, with only a dull glow coming from the blackened windows."
All of this needed people, and the people needed somewhere to live.
Mary Taschner, writing in the Journal of San Diego History, called it the "Boomerang Boom." San Diego was gaining 1,500 people a week, a hundred families a day, for more than a year. The city went from 203,341 to over 300,000, a number planners had not expected to see until 1960. The Census Bureau estimated that three quarters of San Diego's 165,000 wartime newcomers came from outside the region, mostly from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa and Kansas.
In September 1941 there were 217 vacant houses in the entire city.
Taschner describes what that meant. Families slept in their cars and in all night movie theaters. Landlords refused families with children, eighty five to ninety percent of them by one count. Shift workers rented beds in turns, so that "some beds were never cold." One Consolidated worker from Pawnee, Oklahoma, earning sixty four cents an hour, lived with his wife and six children in a single room of an auto court at eighteen dollars a week.
The federal government put up 650 trailers, many of them in Mission Valley.
In the year before March 1942, the city's Homes Registration Bureau took applications from 32,000 families and 6,000 single men. Christine Killory, in a Journal of San Diego History study called "Temporary Suburbs," found that rent control made it worse in one way: "Many war workers found that the only way to secure a bed was to buy the house that came with it."
The rent control committee did catch some of the worst landlords. It ordered rents rolled back to January 1, 1941 levels, and landlords refunded $75,000 to tenants.
The government's answer was Linda Vista.
Construction on the Kearny Mesa Defense Housing Project started on March 5, 1941, on empty mesa north of Mission Valley. The contractors, McNeil and Zoss, worked on a three hundred day contract under the slogan "3000 houses in 300 days." Taschner describes the job as an assembly line: forty five operations per house, a peak of forty houses finished in a single day, forty five miles of water and sewer pipe, twenty four million board feet of lumber and two million pounds of nails.
The first tenants moved in in May 1941.
Killory, working from the 1943 Congressional hearings on congested war areas, counts 3,001 permanent units and 1,845 demountable ones, 4,846 in all. By April 1943, more than four thousand families, about sixteen thousand people, lived there. The trade journal Pencil Points called it "America's largest defense housing project." Killory calls it the largest single defense housing project, and the largest low income housing development, in the world at the time.
Living there at first was hard. There was one road in, a single ten inch water main and a fire station with nobody in it. There was no store until a Safeway opened in February 1943, and the checkout line ran an hour. A hundred and twenty houses were used as classrooms. Some aircraft workers spent three to four hours a day commuting.
In 1943 a shopping center opened in the middle of it, designed by the Pasadena architects Whitney Smith and Karl Giberson. It is often called one of the first planned neighborhood shopping centers in the country.
Linda Vista was not the last. In the first nine months of 1944 the government built 3,500 more temporary units on about five hundred acres in the Midway district north of Rosecrans, mostly for Consolidated workers. It was called Frontier Housing. A 1944 Tribune Sun article projected fifteen thousand residents.
Paul Fordham, later mayor of La Mesa, lived there. He told the San Diego Reader in 1992 that he got three bedrooms, one bath and an icebox for $37.50 a month.
By 1944, Pourade writes, San Diego had twenty three federal housing projects with more than 14,000 family units, plus a thousand private trailer spaces, holding 65,000 people. Between 1940 and 1943 the city's housing stock grew by more than thirty percent.
The Lanham Act, which paid for the war housing, said it was to be sold or torn down as soon as the war ended. In 1945 Congress allowed the units to be used by veterans instead. Killory writes that more than five thousand units were reclassified from temporary to permanent so they could be sold, many moved out to the unincorporated county, and some sold to Mexico.
At Linda Vista, Pourade writes, "a high proportion of the families living in the permanent units" chose "to buy their homes and remain." The war housing became a neighborhood.
Frontier went the other way. Federal control ended in 1954 and 1955, the two story buildings were razed in 1955, and by the early 1960s the last units were being sold for twenty dollars each. San Diego State used some of them as student housing it called the Aztec Houses. The site became the Loma Palisades apartments, which opened in 1959.
Killory found something else in the 1970 census. Outside Southeast San Diego, the only concentrations of Black and Hispanic residents in the city were on former defense housing sites at Linda Vista and Midway. Before the Civil Rights Act, she writes, the war housing was the "only opportunity to escape" the de facto segregation of Southeast San Diego.
And the federal government never really left. By July 1941, Taschner found, 26 percent of the land inside the city limits was under federal control, and 31,000 acres had come off the tax rolls.
When the war ended, the jobs went first.
Nakamura writes that Consolidated's San Diego employment fell from its 1943 peak of 45,000 to 3,760 in 1945. Pourade's count is higher, under 14,000, but either way the plant emptied. Ryan Aeronautical went from 8,500 workers to 1,200 and, for a while, made metal caskets. Rohr fell from 9,500 to under 2,900. By May 1946 there were 30,000 unemployed in the county.
People did not leave. The 1950 census counted 334,387 in the city of San Diego, up from 203,341 in 1940. The county went from about 289,000 to more than 556,000. The war had pulled them here, and they stayed, and the houses that came next were built for them. Clairemont started going up around 1950 on the mesa next to Linda Vista. It was, the San Diego History Center says, the city's largest and most innovative postwar subdivision.
The Journal of San Diego History, published by the San Diego History Center, carries most of this story: Mary Taschner's "Boomerang Boom: San Diego 1941 to 1942" (1982); Christine Killory's "Temporary Suburbs" (1993), built on the 1943 Congressional hearings on congested war areas; Natalie Nakamura's "San Diego and the Pacific Theater" (2012) on Consolidated; Kimberly Hall's "Women in Wartime" (1993); and Molly McClain on the Naval Training Center (2008). Richard Pourade's City of the Dream, chapters one through three, is hosted by the History Center in full.
Balboa Park's war comes from Richard Amero's park history, a year by year digest of the San Diego Union and Navy correspondence held at the National Archives. The I-10 story comes from Roger Showley in the San Diego Union-Tribune (2004). Frontier comes from the San Diego Reader (1992). Census figures are from the US Census Bureau. The photographs of the camouflage nets, Camp Kidd and the bay are US Navy photographs in the National Archives.
Where sources disagree, as they do on Linda Vista's unit count and Consolidated's postwar payroll, we have said so.
Reuben Fleet built the plant that built the bombers. He wired the President on the day of Pearl Harbor that "we are on the job and at your command, sir." He sold his company for almost eleven million dollars after a White House meeting with Roosevelt.
And in the middle of the war, Pourade writes, Fleet "lost his right to have gasoline for sixty days for exceeding the daytime speed limit of thirty-five miles an hour."
Late in life, with his old plant still running under the flight path, Fleet was asked about airplane noise. "Some people complain about the airplane noises in San Diego," he said, "but I sort of like it. The only time I look up is when I hear an engine missing."
One more. Kay Hill moved her family into Linda Vista in 1941, when it was a muddy mesa with one road and no store. Taschner interviewed her in 1980. Before Linda Vista, Hill's family had been living in San Diego in an apartment with a history. It was, she said, the same apartment Charles Lindbergh had rented when he lived in San Diego, building the Spirit of St. Louis.
The man who put San Diego on the aviation map left an apartment behind, and the aircraft boom he helped start sent the family living in it out to the war's newest neighborhood.
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