By Linda Harris Sittig
I unabashedly stole this month’s title idea. It comes from an excellent article published by the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, written by Sandy White and Kim Campbell.
Historians estimate that approximately 100,000 women worked in WWII maritime shipyards. And they helped to launch Liberty Ships that carried critical supplies to the Allies overseas.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had little choice but to have Congress declare war on Japan. A few days later, Germany and Italy, joined Japan’s Axis Powers, and declared war on the United States. Roughly 13.4 million men were either quickly drafted or signed up to enter WWII.
That left a gigantic hole in the American labor force. During 1941, six million American women entered the workforce. By 1944, those numbers had risen significantly, with estimates of up to eighteen million.
Many people recall the image of Rosie the Riveter. That icon represented the women who riveted aircraft parts on America’s aircraft assembly lines during World War II. However, thousands of women worked on Liberty Ships in East Coast shipyards. These women welded the ship parts together rather than riveting them. This process, called modular assembly, involved fabricating large steel components elsewhere and transporting them to shipyards for welding. What made the Liberty Ships so distinctive was their purely functional design; nothing about them was pretty. In fact, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nicknamed them ugly ducklings. Ugly they may have been, but they helped the Allies win the war.
Each Liberty Ship was eighty-one feet longer than a football field and designed to carry military cargo across the Atlantic to Europe. That cargo might include tanks, jeeps, weapons, food, supplies, and/or military personnel. All told, 2,710 ships were built during the four years of World War II at eighteen shipyards across America.
Once launched, each ship had a crew of twenty-one to forty civilian merchant sailors and naval personnel. Due to their slow speed of eleven knots, it would take them fifteen days to cross the Atlantic while German submarines (U-boats) sought to destroy them. After the war, 2,400 Liberty Ships survived. Greek and Italian shipping magnates, such as Aristotle Onassis, purchased many of those ships to establish their commercial fleets. Today, only two Liberty Ships have survived the ravages of time: the S.S. John W. Brown and the S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien, both used as museum ships in San Francisco, California.
The eighteen million civilian women who contributed to the war effort on the Home Front in World War II were not recognized during their lifetimes for the invaluable role they played in helping the Allies win the war. However, on April 10, 2024, a ceremony took place in Washington, D.C., and President Joe Biden presented the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of all the ‘Rosies’, the nickname for the women who participated in the Home Front efforts of the 1940s.
Today, the World War II Memorial Foundation is spearheading efforts to erect a memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., so those women can finally receive the recognition they deserve.
I was so impressed when I read about the women who helped to launch the Liberty Ships that I began to wonder what life must have been like for them during the war. The more I researched, the more fascinated I became, and I eventually decided to pull it all together into a novel that would honor their story.
So I began with a 20-year-old Irish immigrant named Rory Sullivan, living in Brooklyn, New York, who travels to Savannah, Georgia, to work first at the Southeastern Shipyard, and then the J.A. Jones Shipyard in Brunswick, Georgia. Rory trains to become a welder, stays longer than she had anticipated, and falls in love. However, an Irish hit man is stalking her, bent on revenge for a family grudge.
Then I wanted to show how decisions made decades ago can have life-altering consequences for future generations. Twenty-five-year-old Emmie Johnson, living on St. Simons Island in 2023, inadvertently discovers an old Irish medallion buried in the front lawn of the beach cottage she has inherited.
The story moves swiftly along, alternating between life during WWII and the challenges of modern living. Although 80 years apart, the reverberations of courage, perseverance, and setbacks echo through both eras, creating a shared legacy of needed sanctuary.
I invite you to read the full story, CHASING THE TIDES, out in print now, in bookstores and online. Available for Kindle as well. Here is the Kindle link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HJYZ5HT2.
~ Linda