Savannah's World War II Home Front: The Quartermaster Depot, Spy Watch and Scrap Drives

Two African American women at work at the Savannah Quartermaster Depot, 1943. National Archives

Savannah and Chatham County, Georgia — an American World War II Heritage City — show three ways civilians supported the war from home: paid work in war industry, volunteering in civilian defense, and scrap drives.

The Savannah Quartermaster Depot

The depot — also called the Army Service Forces Depot — grew from Army supply units activated on June 1, 1941, and became the Savannah Quartermaster Depot in 1942. It stood on the old Rae's Hall plantation, about five and a half miles north of the city on the Savannah River. The U.S. government bought the site's big riverside warehouse complex on June 24, 1942.

According to a 1943 newspaper report, the depot:

• shipped supplies to U.S. troops wherever they served, from tent pegs to 10-ton laundry trucks, and medical supplies — even complete hospital units — to Army posts across the Fourth Service Command
• handled about a billion pounds of equipment and supplies a year
• began stacking stock on wooden pallets moved by forklift, to fill its 41 warehouses to the ceiling
• added eight trained guard dogs from Dogs for Defense against sabotage
• trained new Quartermaster Corps officers and ran a monthly paper for civilian workers, The Colonel's Journal

By war's end it covered 400 acres with 709 buildings. In 1948 it was sold to the state of Georgia for a Georgia Ports Authority shipping terminal.

Five-gallon gasoline cans leaving the depot for overseas — square cans, to save shipping space. U.S. Army Signal Corps

The depot hired African American men and women, and women took on many jobs once reserved for men.

The cemetery beneath the road

To build a road from the depot to U.S. Highway 17, Army engineers moved a forgotten burial ground of enslaved people from the plantation. The remains of 38 people, with their aging marble, concrete and wood markers, were reburied on the riverbank in a new Rae's Hall Cemetery, enclosed by a rustic fence. The oldest marked grave belonged to a young enslaved woman, Emily, who died in 1844; her marble stone had been put up by her enslaver.

A 1943 study by the Georgia Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration noted how war industry was erasing the land's past — its rice and cotton fields, and even the Irene Mound, left by American Indians long before, now nearly level with the riverbank. The case raises hard questions about what wartime development erased and who bore the cost.

Watching for spies

In August 1942, after German agents landed from submarines on the Florida coast near the Georgia line, the director of the Georgia Citizens' Defense Committee, Col. Charles H. Patterson, warned the state's civilian defense workers — and the public — that saboteurs could just as easily land in Georgia. With many strangers passing through, he urged people to be watchful rather than trusting. Georgia had a State Guard, a coast warning system, an aircraft warning system, and more than 290,000 civilian defense volunteers; fishermen, hunters, guides and other sportsmen on the coast were asked to report submarines and signs of refueling, as submarines were sinking many ships off the coast.

The great scrap drive

In the fall of 1942, during the nationwide newspaper scrap drive, Savannah and Chatham County collected 18,217,874 pounds of old metal, rubber and rags in about two weeks — some 150 pounds per person, placing Savannah among the top 30 cities per capita, and far ahead of the Atlanta area.

Donations included old safes, antique shotguns, World War I helmets — German and American — statues and obsolete X-ray machines.

A World War II scrap-drive poster from the U.S. Department of Agriculture War Boards. National Archives

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Home Front Civilian Contributions in Savannah and Chatham County, World War II Heritage City," National Park Service, and the 1942–1948 newspaper reports and 1943 Georgia Historical Quarterly study it presents; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson puts the depot's monthly rail traffic at both about 1,600 and about 16,000 cars, so no figure is given here.