Memorial Day is an occasion to remember the men and women who went off to war and never returned. But it is also fitting on this day to recall the soldiers, sailors and Marines who served in World War II and came back.
Those men and women and their families set off a huge postwar boom that completely changed the Bay Area - and produced the region that today's residents have inherited.
World War II had a huge impact on the Bay Area. It resulted in major changes in the area's racial makeup, its economy, even its physical appearance.
The conversion of the orchard-rich Santa Clara County from "The Valley of Heart's Delight" into Silicon Valley can be directly traced to wartime electronic research.
Author Marilynn Johnson studied the impact of the war on the East Bay, where Oakland and Richmond were turned into boom towns. She called it "The Second Gold Rush." The war, she said, "marked the coming of age of West Coast cities."
"The city still looks the same. It is still beautiful, but it's a totally different place than the one where we grew up," said Wallace Levin, who was born and raised in San Francisco and lived in the city during World War II. Levin is coordinator of Monday's Memorial Day ceremonies at the Presidio.
Shipbuilding boom
After Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Bay Area became a centerpiece of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "the arsenal of democracy."
Shipyards went up with lightning speed to construct the ships that would take the war to the Japanese in the Pacific. In San Francisco, the executives of the Bechtel Corp. got a telegram from the government on March 2, 1942, asking if the company would be interested in building and operating a shipyard on San Francisco Bay.
The answer was "yes," and within 10 days, Bechtel began clearing marshland in Sausalito for a shipyard called Marinship. Just over three months from the call from Washington, the keel of a freighter was laid, and in September, the ship, named for William Richardson, the founder of Sausalito, was launched.
In the East Bay, Henry J. Kaiser built three shipyards, which during the war built 747 large ships - one in only four days, a world record.
During the height of the wartime shipbuilding boom, 244,000 people worked in Bay Area shipyards - a workforce equal to more than 13 Army divisions.
Fort Mason, on San Francisco's northern waterfront, became the main port of embarkation for the Pacific war.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/27/MNMV1ONR0I.DTL#ixzz1wBmVyAT8
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