(H)our History Lesson: Defense Manufacturing in Wichita, Kansas, in World War II

Making pup tents at the Langdon Tent and Awning Company, Wichita, June 1941. Library of Congress.

A lesson in the NPS series on Wichita, Kansas, an American World War II Heritage City. More: Teaching with Historic Places.

Essential question

How did defense manufacturing on the home front in Wichita contribute to the war effort?

Objectives

• Identify examples of defense manufacturing in Wichita.
• Describe how the companies' products helped the war effort.
• Evaluate the importance of home front workers, men and women alike.

Materials: the photographs, three readings (below), and ideally a map of Wichita.

Reading 1: Coleman wins the Army-Navy "E"

The Wichita Eagle, June 24, 1944:

• The award: Lieutenant Colonel Wendell S. Holmes presented the Army-Navy "E" award for excellent performance to the Coleman Lamp and Stove Company. He told employees that a military intelligence report ranked Coleman's one-burner stove (the G.I. Pocket Stove) the third most important item of a soldier's individual equipment — and that war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who marched with troops in North Africa and Italy, put it first.
• The record: Coleman had doubled its peacetime production by the beginning of 1943 and was on track to triple it in 1944. "You have produced the supplies we wanted and when we wanted them," Holmes said.
• The ceremony: the flag went to vice president Sheldon Coleman and Owen Gahman, an employee of more than 35 years; president W.C. Coleman presided.

A Coleman recruiting ad in the Eagle (November 7, 1943) urged Wichitans to join the "Battle of Production," telling them that factory workers served the war as truly as a Kansas soldier fighting across the Pacific islands. A 1944 Coleman booklet, How Soldiers Cook at the Fighting Fronts, showed its products serving on both the war front and the home front.

Reading 2: Langdon's tents and leggings

• The Wichita Eagle, September 26, 1940: the Langdon Tent & Awning Company won a War Department contract for 75,000 pup tents, to be delivered within 135 days — believed to be the first such order for a local firm. It installed special equipment and hired 50 more workers. Each soldier carried a shelter-half; two buttoned together made a tent for two.
• The Wichita Eagle, April 9, 1945: nearly done with two pup tent contracts, Langdon won a third — $100,000 for 130,000 pairs of lace-on canvas leggings within 210 days — and planned to expand its plant at 1500 East Douglas. Its tents had gone as far as Hawaii. The company, the paper reported, had War Department orders nearly as large as any U.S. maker of such goods.

Reinforcing guy ropes for pup tents at Langdon, which was turning out 1500 tents a day to Army Quartermaster Corps specifications, June 1941. Library of Congress.

Reading 3: Coleman's decals

Wichita Evening Eagle, September 14, 1943:

• Decalcomania — transferring designs from prepared paper to other surfaces — began at Coleman more than seven years earlier under H.W. Morton, first for Coleman's own product labels, then for oil companies' trucks.
• Speed: a design went on in three to four minutes, equal to eight coats of paint that would take a painter three to four hours.
• War work: Coleman made ninety-five percent of the decals used in Wichita — aircraft insignia, serial numbers and markings — plus luminous instrument-panel markings, and supplied factories nationwide and the Royal Canadian Air Force. It was among the first to deliver decals of the new U.S. star-and-bar insignia.

Discussion questions

1. Why would Coleman show its products on both the war front and the home front?
2. Why did Colonel Holmes single out the one-burner stove?
3. How did Coleman's workers contribute, and how were they recognized? What did the "E" award symbolize?
4. What contracts did Langdon win, and who is shown doing the work? What are pup tents, and why did the Army need Wichita's production?
5. By the numbers: how many pup tents a day did the 1940 contract require? What was the Army paying per pair of leggings in 1945, and how many pairs a day?
6. How did decalcomania improve efficiency, and whom did Coleman supply?
7. Closing: why did the U.S. and its Allies need such diverse products — and how did Wichita's manufacturing help win the war?

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: Defense Manufacturing in Wichita, Kansas, World War II Heritage City," by Sarah Nestor Lane for the NPS Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education, with the National Council on Public History, National Park Service, drawing on The Wichita Eagle (1940–1945); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The newspaper articles are summarized; a Coleman factory photograph from Wichita State University Libraries is left out. Series: previous · next.