page_title: History of Seattle
section_title: World War II
hierarchical_section_title: History of Seattle / World War II
caption_attribution_description: Scope and content: The US Army Corps of Engineers extensively photographed many of the Civil Works project and river and harbor improvement that they were involved with. The Lake Washington Ship Canal and the Hiram Chittenden Locks were built to allow passage between fresh water Lake Union and salt water Puget Sound.
context_page_description: This is the main article of a series that covers the history of Seattle, Washington, a city in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States of America.
  Seattle is a major port city that has a history of boom and bust. Seattle has on several occasions been sent into severe decline, but has typically used those periods to successfully rebuild infrastructure. There have been at least five such cycles:
  The lumber-industry boom, followed by the construction of an Olmsted-designed park system.
  The Klondike gold rush started in 1896, but reached Seattle in July 1897. This constituted the largest boom for Seattle proportional to the city's size at the time, and ended the economic woes Seattle had been suffering since the Panic of 1893.
  The shipbuilding boom, which peaked during World War I and crashed immediately thereafter, followed by the unused city development plan of Virgil Bogue.
  The Boeing boom, followed by general infrastructure building.
  Most recently, the boom based on Microsoft and other software, web, and telecommunications companies, such as Amazon.com, AT&T Wireless, and RealNetworks.
context_section_description: Following Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. entered World War II and the whole Puget Sound region was full on rolling in the nation's war effort. Among the chief priority was the federal government's sudden desire for tens of thousands of planes a year, and Boeing was positioned to provide them. Working under fixed-fee contracts, Boeing churned out aircraft and became by far the largest employer in Seattle. During the war, Seattle ranked as one of the top three cities in the nation in contracts per capita, and Washington state ranked as one of the top two in the nation for war contracts per capita. Seattle and Renton produced 8,200 planes, including 6,981 B-17s and more than 1,000 B-29 bombers. Civilian use of Boeing Field was greatly curtailed to accommodate the production of thousands of Boeing bombers. To accommodate the war effort, the U.S. military also annexed McChord Field in Tacoma, prompting that city to plead with the Port of Seattle to develop Seattle-Tacoma International Airport at Bow Lake -- midway between the Sound's two major cities.
  Puget Sound-area shipyards constructed an unbelievable number of war vessels. At the combined Todd Shipyards/Seattle-Tacoma Shipbuilding operation, 33,000 men and women worked in Tacoma to build five freighters, two transports, 37 escort carriers, five gasoline tankers, and three destroyer tenders. At the Seattle yards, 22,000 employees built 46 destroyers and three tenders for the United States Navy, plus other vessels. The Lake Washington Shipyard at Houghton, now annexed to Kirkland, employed 6,000 workers to repair dozens of merchant vessels and ferries during the war and to turn out ships for the Navy. The shipyard site is now the location of Carillon Point, a residential-commercial development. 15 smaller shipyards in Seattle and other cities in the Puget Sound area also produced vessels for the war effort.
  The war also attracted tens of thousands of workers from across the country, as the greatly expanded wartime production quickly exhausted local labor pools. Of the five million rural southern African-Americans migrating to the industrial North and West during the second wave of the Great Migration, an estimated 45,000 went to the Pacific Northwest, of which 10,000 moved to Seattle. Most black workers came to Seattle as shipyard employees, and by summer 1942, the National Youth Administration brought to the city the first group of blacks to work for Boeing. By war's end, 4,078 (7 percent) of the 60,328 shipyard workers in Seattle were African Americans. Blacks also found work as non-military government employees. Of 18,862 federal employees in Seattle in 1945, 1,019 (5 percent) were black. Moreover, the 4,000 black soldiers and sailors stationed at Fort Lawton in Seattle and other military installations nearby contributed to the new employment diversity of the African American population. As a result, between 1940 and 1950, Seattle's black population grew 413 percent, from 3,789 to 15,666.   The newcomers became permanent residence, building up black political influence, Strengthening civil rights organizations Such as the NAACP, calling for antidiscrimination legislation. On the negative side, racial tensions increased, both black and white residential areas deteriorated from overcrowding, and inside the black community there were angry words between "old settlers" and recent arrivals for leadership in the black communities.
caption: A newly built Boeing B-29 Superfortress traveling by barge in the Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1944.
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