While African Americans were not officially excluded from Charlestown’s prewar workforce, few had been employed. When the war created opportunities for them, some whites openly resisted their presence in skilled positions. But this was not a universal attitude. Allan Crite, a black illustrator in the Design Department, said he experienced no racial problems. Inevitably, though, tensions arose in some areas. Gloria Brandenberg recalled an evening at a social club with her coworkers from the Paint Shop, one of whom was African American. She was asked to leave. The group talked it over; they all left. But the records show no major racial conflict at the yard. At war’s end more than 2,300 African Americans were in the force of 32,000 workers.
By late 1942, the yard had settled into a wartime routine—to the extent that routine is possible during war. Normal peacetime constraints didn’t apply. “During the war there wasn’t much emphasis on estimates,” recalled plumber Lyman Carlow. “For one thing, there wasn’t time. Here’s the job; we need the ship right away; get it done and whatever it costs it costs ... it was just a real frantic pace ... the material just flowed in ... plenty of people, so we could really get the work done.”
More than the higher level of general activity and the large numbers of workers (around 36,000 at this point), it was the volume of new construction that characterized the wartime yard. A walk around the yard on November 23 would have revealed ships being built in every facility but Dry Dock 2, used only for repairs.
Workers generally laid down and launched large vessels in pairs. But while floating two at a time out of a dry dock was standard practice, it was never approached casually. John Langan, a shipfitter during the war, recalled: “It was quite a feat, two destroyers right alongside each other, flooding the dock, and not having them crash.”
A new shipways built in early 1941 helped quicken the pace of production. In that year 10 destroyers were laid down, the most in any one year. By late 1941 the yard’s workers had pushed the time for building a destroyer down to a little over a year and would cut it to three or four months from keel to launching by the end of the war.