Women's signature effort
A recovered aircraft part points to the overlooked story of US women in WWII
Last in a series
The first thing Gregory Berg saw after stepping from his helicopter in the Papua New Guinea jungle was a group of barefoot men with axes in their hands. They pressed in at once, and one of them - eager to lead Berg, a forensic anthropologist with the US military, to a crash site nearby - thrust forward a rust-flecked piece of metal. Still damp from a jungle stream, it bore a set of scratchy pencil marks that had survived 60 years amid wetness and vegetation. It said:
MARY SASSO
FLORENCE VALINE
BESS FLEMMING
JEAN DIEMER
CONSOLIDATED VULTEE
TUCSON, ARIZ.
Berg knew immediately what it was: the signatures of workers who built the plane, 7,500 miles and six decades away. He had gone to the jungle looking for the remains of airmen who had perished when their B-24 Liberator crashed into the side of a remote mountain range. He was greeted instead by the names of women from the aircraft factory.
The signatures, on what appeared to be a wing strut, were evidence of the hidden veterans of America's vast World War II war effort - the millions of "Rosie the Riveters" who wielded the blowtorches and power tools that built the planes and tanks that carried men into battle.
While trying to help the Pentagon bring closure to the families of 78,000 missing soldiers from World War II, Berg had inadvertently opened a window into the contributions of the women who at war's end immediately receded into the shadows, with no ceremonies, no flags, no remembrances, no thanks.
"I tried to find these women," said Berg, who searched for the four names on the Internet and got only far enough to determine that the company that made the aircraft, Consolidated Vultee, which had been the leading heavy-bomber producer of World War II, had ceased to exist. Personnel records had long since been dumped.
At the Hawaii headquarters of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, where Berg works, scientists painstakingly pieced together the identities of the lost air crew, working from shards of bone. The remains were buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery in 2006.
But the story of the women who made the plane remained a mystery lost to time.
That was the way it had so often been. The women were among many thousands on the homefront who spoke little about their work at the time - posters on the walls warned them not to talk about their work - and even less afterward.
For some, the notion of factory work was vaguely embarrassing, just a few years removed from Great Depression notions that a woman in the workplace was stealing a job from a man who needed to feed his family. In some parts of the country, women were legally barred from certain types of jobs. But even those who were proud of their work tended to view it as insubstantial, the least they could do when men were dying.
So in later decades, even as academics began rediscovering women's contributions to the war effort, and as feminist daughters embraced the famous image of Rosie flexing her muscles for the war, the women of Consolidated Vultee in Tucson - indeed, of every plant - were dispersed, largely silent, and disappearing by the day.
"I think she would have been surprised," said Elsie Corazzini, the 81-year-old sister of Florence Valine, who died in 2004 at the age of 88.
But Corazzini couldn't say for sure what her sister would have thought about her name turning up in the jungle after all these years. She knew only that Flo had worked in an aircraft plant during the war, but no more.
The four women worked in a massive trio of hangars that rose swiftly after Pearl Harbor, a sudden, humming monument to American production and Allied might.
The complex, which once stood alone under the Arizona sun, rests today on an obscure patch near the gleaming Tucson International Airport and the blinking lights of the Desert Diamond Casino. It is peeling and anonymous, with pigeon droppings covering its threshold.
Few, if any, of the thousands of workers at the airport and casino have any idea that bombers were made here, or that the plant was part of a milestone in the history of women in the workplace.
Joe Novallo, an 87-year-old who still spends most days in his machine shop, is one of the few plant workers remaining in Tucson. He was not quite 22 when Consolidated Vultee brought him in from Detroit at the start of 1943 to supervise 200 newly trained women. "They were my girls," he said.
But that was just a flash in a long life, and it's been years since Novallo ran into anyone he knew from the hangars. The women had come from all over the country. Consolidated closed the plant immediately after the war, and "they just spread like a covey of quail," Novallo recalled. "Bang, they were gone."
Florence Valine was like so many of the women, taking an unfamiliar job in a new city, and leaving again after the war.
Valine was in her mid-20s when war broke out, living in San Jose, Calif., with her cannery-worker father and homemaker mother, first-generation Portuguese-Americans who raised a large family in tight times. Florence was the fifth of their 10 children.
She had a younger brother, Gil, who got drafted and sent to Tucson, where the Army Air Forces were training flight crews, but he was soon released for health reasons. He stayed in Arizona, hooking on as a bar boy at a downtown hotel.
"My mother didn't want him living there alone, so she told Flo to go there," Corazzini recalled. That led to the job at Consolidated.
In her lifetime, Valine worked a variety of jobs: nurse's aide, child care, even shipyard worker. She married later, in a brief union that made her Florence Nolan but yielded no children. She was a kind woman, and she liked to follow the news, her sister said. Just "a very nice person, very loving," Corazzini said.
Valine and the other three women signed a Liberator that, according to government contracts, originated at Consolidated Vultee's main plant in San Diego in December 1943. At that factory alone, the company was cranking out 250 of the huge, four-engine Liberators a month and flying them immediately to Tucson.
The planes left California in bare-bones fashion to speed production there and get them away from the coast, where they might be vulnerable to a possible attack. The Tucson employees added armaments, oxygen lines, radio equipment, and other components.
Tucson during the war was growing up quickly from the dusty college town and cowboy outpost it had been, but the population was still small enough for the city directory to be a modest volume.
Few of the new female plant workers made that year's edition, but two of the four women who signed the plane were in there - Sasso and Diemer, who was listed as a "Mrs.," though no spouse was noted.
Diemer at the time lived in a squat duplex in an old neighborhood that grew up around the introduction of the railroad, and it still stands. Sasso lived west of town, at an address that is now the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. She also made a brief appearance in the directory after the war, as the employee of a local photographer. Then she vanished from the records.
Sasso could have come from anywhere, but it's likely she was a local. The 1930 US Census, the most recent one open for genealogical research, showed one Sasso family in the state of Arizona. They lived in Cochise County, the sparsely populated mining area southeast of Tucson, and had an 8-year-old daughter named Maria. Other records show that the girl was calling herself Mary by 1948, when she married a Pete Salcido. They stayed on in Tucson, and she died in 2005, at 83.
She was a homemaker who outlived her husband and had no children, and her death notice in the local paper was scant. A younger sister paid for her burial, but the women were not close. Contacted through the funeral home, the sister said she had no idea what Mary Sasso had done during the war.
At its peak, Consolidated Vultee ran three shifts a day, six days a week. But other than newspaper clippings at the local archives, there are few reminders in Tucson of daily life at a plant that over its three-year lifespan employed 10,000 people - more than one-10th of the region's population.
Jesus V. Maldonado, who is now 83 and retired from careers in the aircraft industry and forest service, is among the few who remember the thrill of the plant's opening, at a time when the Depression had held Tucson in its grip for more than a decade.
"We were all excited because it was something entirely new here, and we were earning a wage," said Maldonado, who had worked in a grocery store before he was hired at Consolidated in September 1942, as soon as he turned 18.
Maldonado would be drafted by the spring, and in a matter of weeks would go from installing hydraulic lines on B-24s to flying in them as a machine gunner over Europe. That was not unusual, and women soon filled many of the jobs on the plant floor.
Valine, Sasso, Flemming, and Diemer worked in a set of vast, air-conditioned hangars that spanned nearly eight acres under a single roof. The plant worked almost entirely on Liberators, Consolidated's flagship, the aircraft moving by tractor-powered cables past a series of fixed workstations and platforms.
The job could feel repetitive, and the work was by all accounts strenuous and deafening, especially for those on the bucking, or receiving, end of a rivet, a task that sometimes required women to crawl inside the stuffy wings.
"To get a mild idea of what the guns sound like to the girls 'bucking' rivets, park yourself under a washtub and have little sister pound on it with the family hammer," is how The Consolidated News, a company newspaper, put it.
The work was grueling enough, and the conditions poor enough, that some of the women quit in a matter of weeks.
"Don't these people know there's a war on?" an editorial in The Consolidated News barked during the war's first year. "Can it be that they really are putting their personal comfort above country? What would happen to our beloved country if the men in the Army said: 'I'm tired of fighting. I want to go home,' and were permitted to go?"
But by the time Sasso, Flemming, Valine, and Diemer applied their pencil to a Liberator, women were well integrated into the assembly line. Morale was high. The Tucson plant led the company several times in war-bond participation, and earned an Army-Navy "E" award for outstanding production.
Then it all ended. With the Japanese surrender, Consolidated Vultee quickly closed its plant, laying off everyone by mid-September 1945. And the three humming hangars, rented out by a variety of subsequent tenants, began their decades-long descent into decay.
Only in the last 10 years have there been official efforts to reach out to the women who once worked at the plant, including the creation of an organization called the American Rosie the Riveter Association in 1998, aimed at preserving their history and giving them a presence at the dedication of the national World War II Memorial, and passage of legislation in 2000 to create a national park honoring women and the homefront.
But the vast majority of the women workers remain unrecognized, their service accorded little of the respect given to actual veterans.
"When I think of this plane fragment surviving in New Guinea, in one of the remotest parts of the world, it kind of shows that no matter what, there are chances to give credit where credit is due," said Emily Yellin, author of a 2004 book called "Our Mothers' War."
When they left their jobs, the women of the Tucson plant expressed joy that the war was over, and that they could return to their normal lives.
The Arizona Daily Star, a Tucson newspaper, interviewed two workers about the closing of the Consolidated Vultee plant. One of them, a Chicago native who had previously worked in a department store, declared that she would never again wear slacks. The other, a local homemaker named Margaret Kohlhoff, said she would finally tend to her curtains and darn the worn-out socks piled at home.
Kohlhoff did indeed do that, and rarely mentioned the plant later. She died in 1984. But her daughter, Karen Newman, who was 8 when the war ended, said her mother's feelings were more complicated.
Newman described how her mother had been the first girl at her Minnesota high school to lobby successfully to take shop. At Consolidated Vultee, she was a model employee, earning $40 a week, nearly all of which she put into war bonds for her children's education. She even won a cash prize for developing a new method to quickly find a particular antenna part, which her bosses estimated would save the plant 183 hours a year. She loved the job and wore her "E" pin with pride.
"I am at home! V-E and V-J Days have come!" Kohlhoff wrote, setting her thoughts down in a letter to friends and family later that month. "Yes, I miss the daily thrill of seeing those miracles of metal taking flight to far places as the Army and Navy required. And my rivet gun no longer chatters. But it's over, and I'm glad.
"Undeserved honors came my way and made me know that a housewife could make a useful contribution. It was little to give when lives have been given."
Frances Millbrandt, another worker at the Tucson plant, never mentioned her time there to her own daughter, who was born after the war and knew her mother as a school cafeteria worker. Her daughter, also named Karen, occasionally saw the industrial tool kit in the shed with her mother's name stenciled on the outside, but she never asked about it.
It wasn't until adulthood that Karen Smith sat down with her mother and learned about her work at Consolidated Vultee.
Millbrandt was a hairdresser who left Chicago for Tucson in 1943, seeking a better climate for her husband, who had asthma. She got a job at Consolidated, putting the final touches on bombers after inspectors found flaws.
With the encouragement of her children, Millbrandt, a 93-year-old great-grandmother, agreed to a recent interview. She smiled when shown the picture of the fragment found in the jungle with the four women's names, and she spoke wistfully.
"After all these years," she said.
Millbrandt worked at the same time as those four, but she didn't know them, and she never had an urge to write her name on a plane. "That's kid stuff," she said. "We were there to work and try our best and get the war over with."
Millbrandt was proud of what she did and liked the job, having also been handy around the house.
"Oh, hammers and nails and screwdrivers and saws, that's me," she said.
But when the war ended and the job was over, she didn't dwell on it. She worked other jobs and raised a family.
Still, not talking about her wartime job for years - for Millbrandt, for Margaret Kohlhoff, for Florence Valine and countless others - did not mean the experience lacked an enduring power.
On Mother's Day, Millbrandt went to the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, where a Consolidated-built B-24 has been restored, and laid eyes on a Liberator for the first time in decades. She rolled her wheelchair under the 67-foot-long fuselage and craned her neck to peer through the bomb-bay doors.
"Look at all that," she said, taking it in slowly, the fitted sections of aluminum, the oxygen lines, the rivets, 340,000 of them in all. "How did we do that?"
She saw, too, the machine-gun turrets, and she considered the bombs. Consolidated B-24s dropped more than 1.2 billion pounds of them. Millbrandt wheeled away quickly, biting her lip, her voice shaky.
"I hope we never have to build planes like that again," she said, suddenly thinking of Iraq. "This war is terrible. I hate to think about the boys over there. I feel terrible. . . . It makes me real mad."
Her daughter tried to reassure her, telling her the cause had been just, encouraging her to stay. Millbrandt tried to be cheerful, answering a few more questions, but she did not wish to linger.
"I'm through," she said, and was ready to go.
Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com 