Building Bombers and Trainers in Wartime Wichita: Boeing, Beech and the Women on the Line

This article draws on a National Park Service lesson series on the World War II home front in Wichita, Kansas, one of the designated American World War II Heritage Cities. Wartime newspaper accounts follow a milestone in B-29 Superfortress production and the part women played in the city's aircraft plants.

By the numbers

Wichita's population growth, April 1940 – July 1941 (Wichita Eagle, July 6, 1941):

The same paper noted that its list of newcomers had averaged 22 new families a week since January 1 — not counting single men.

Wartime aircraft production, as tallied by the Wichita Eagle in 2011:

Boeing's Plant 2 cafeteria served 15,000 hot meals a day, at 28 cents a meal.

The 1,000th Superfortress, February 1945

Wichita's three biggest aircraft makers were Cessna, Beechcraft and Boeing, each building different planes for the United States and its Allies — Cessna, for example, also built for the Royal Canadian Air Force. This reading is about Boeing. An apron is the area where aircraft are parked, serviced, loaded, refueled or boarded.

Summary of a Wichita Evening Eagle front-page article of February 14, 1945.

• On the Boeing flight apron, before thousands of workers from both shifts, Boeing's Wichita division handed the 1,000th Wichita-built B-29 Superfortress to the Army Air Forces — a milestone toward victory over Japan.
• Its sides were covered in more than $10,000 in bills and coins, given spontaneously by employees to the infantile paralysis foundation — on top of the $5,350 they had given in a two-day campaign in the plants a little over two weeks earlier. It was the first plane to wear a $10,000 coat of money.
• The Army also accepted the 10,346th Kaydet primary trainer built at Boeing-Wichita (counting completed planes and their equivalent in spare parts) — the last of the Kaydets under the current contract.
• Vice president and Wichita general manager J. E. Schaefer handed both planes to Brigadier General Ray G. Harris of the Air Technical Service Command's midwestern district. He recalled that the first production B-29 had flown from Wichita's municipal airport on June 29, 1943, while experimental models were still being tested in Seattle, and that within a year Wichita-built B-29s flew the opening raids on the Japanese homeland. Wichita, he said, had built the first combat Superfortress and would keep them coming as long as the Army needed them.
• A few weeks earlier, War Production Board chairman J. A. Krug had announced that Boeing-Wichita was producing 100 B-29s a month. For that and for the Kaydet, its workers had won five consecutive Army-Navy "E" awards — the fifth when only 4 of every 100 war plants in the country had won their first.
• Boeing-Wichita had been the main source of the B-29s flown in combat so far. Others came from Boeing's plants in Seattle and Renton, Washington, Bell in Marietta, Georgia, and Glenn L. Martin in Omaha, with Briggs, Cessna, Chrysler, General Motors, Goodyear, Hudson, Murray and A. O. Smith making subassemblies.
• Plant I, long the Kaydet's home and now converted to the B-29, had delivered 44% of the Army's and Navy's primary trainers since Pearl Harbor, while 14 other manufacturers together built the other 56%. The Kaydet was the first primary trainer fully standardized for both services.

Women at Beech, 1942

Summary of a Wichita Eagle article of August 23, 1942.

• Beech personnel director Warren E. Blazier said the company found little difference between men and women in how well they grasped the importance of war production; both were doing a great job.
• Since Pearl Harbor, Beech had hired more and more women, until they made up about 20% of its workforce.
• Careful selection, and training and testing before starting work — on the job's duties, company rules and dress standards — had headed off most problems in advance. Workers had some choice of color and style in their work clothes, to avoid regimentation.
• Blazier praised the women of Kansas and nearby states, from Wichita, small towns and farm districts alike, as loyal, energetic and intelligent — just like the men from the same places.
• Women ran machines and did hand work side by side with men, with very few limits on the jobs they could be given.
• Part of their success, the company said, came from having a woman among its top executives: secretary-treasurer Olive Ann Beech. Her example showed women workers that ability and hard work would be recognized, and her view that a woman could do practically any job a man could was reflected in the company's policy of equal pay for women doing men's work and equal treatment for both.

Counselors for Boeing's women, 1943

Summary of a Wichita Eagle article of March 28, 1943.

Boeing's counselor service gave every woman in its Wichita plants a chance to talk over problems confidentially, with advice based on what was best for her and her co-workers. Counselors saw their job as keeping women on the line: a satisfied worker produced more, better and faster, and one who left had to be replaced.

The women's counselor was Elizabeth Downs, herself a graduate of the war training school. Laura Shannon, a longtime volunteer adviser, counseled part-time alongside her job in the personnel division's employment department. The women supervisors of plant protection helped them.

A Boeing employee, Betty Barker, summed up the attitude in March 1942: a woman on the line was there to be efficient and intelligent and to add her part to as many planes as she could — and the only "man" she was out to get was the enemy.

Postscripts

• A B-29 today. "Doc," a B-29 Superfortress restored by local volunteers, is at the Kansas Aviation Museum — one of only two left of those Boeing built during the war. A local news clip (4:22) shows it on a test flight and explains its local ties.
• War workers at play. In May 1944 the Wichita Evening Eagle profiled Ruth Needels, a second-shift Beech worker from Nash, Oklahoma, who had come from an ammunition plant in Des Moines. Nicknamed "Sarie," she worked as a skinner on plane noses in the sheet-metal department and played on the Beech women's softball team; she was waiting for the men to come home before making postwar plans. In March 1941 the paper reported that the Coleman Lamp women's bowling team, with a 70-pin handicap, beat the Picar men's team in three games, 2,442 pins to 2,347.

More lessons: Wichita series introduction · next lesson: defense manufacturing in Wichita.

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Aviation Production in Wichita, KS, WWII Heritage City," National Park Service, part of the series "Wichita, KS, WWII Heritage City Lessons," written by Sarah Nestor Lane for the Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education under the National Council on Public History's cooperative agreement with the National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson's worksheet questions are left out. It reprints excerpts from the Wichita Eagle and Wichita Evening Eagle of 1941–1945, which are summarized here; a postcard held by the Wichita Public Library and a 1942 photograph held by Wichita State University Libraries are not reproduced; rewritten in hubnx's own words.