On the Swing Shift: Building Liberty Ships in Savannah

Book in excellent condition. I will use it to improve my knowledge on the topic

bonjourvous cffrez aux francais la possibilité de découvrir ce qu'était la vie des marins pendant les batailles sur mer pendant la seconde guerre mondialebon librairie et bon uvrage

My aunt was Master Arc Welder at the Southeastern Shipyard in Savannah during the war years when I was under age 10 so I learned much I did not already know from her few on hand records. Very inspiring. There is a national effort underway to honor these ladies who worked in multiple shipyards around the nation. They became instantly unemployed when the males came home for the war to fill the residual war related jobs that remained.

My Father was 4F because he was born with club feet and the surgery performed by the Masonic Hospital in Atlanta in the '20s only sorta', kinda' fixed him up. You don't really want to think about what life in rural Georgia in the '20s and '30s was like for a skinny little kid wearing big iron braces on his legs.He was 4F but was pretty smart and had a couple of years of college, so he wound up working at Southeastern Shipyards doing something with laying the gun mounts on the Liberties because he could do the math. He told a few stories but like most of the men of the WWII era, you had to get him in the mood for it. Like Cope said, most of the men who built the Savannah Liberties had never seen a ship before; my Father may have but it would have been from a distance.He was a 22 year old kid off the farm in rural Georgia from a family that still bore deep scars from both the Civil War and WWI and was simply habituated to the subsistence agriculture lifestyle of The South because they really couldn't envision anything else. Three years building Libery ships, having money in his pocket, and seeing at least a bit of how others lived gave him a very different perspective on life from his parents and forebears. Unlike so many of the "country boys" he didn't spend much of his money on Savannah's booze and whores. He came back home after the War and built himself a house with his savings and timber off the family place. I wish I could say that it "launched" him but he fell back into the cycle of rural Southern defeatism and predestinarian abdication of responsibility for your fate. But listening to his stories and hearing just the little bit of what he could share of the dreams he once had as a young man with a pocket full of Southeastern Shipyard's money gave me the desire and the will to let slip the surly bonds of The South.Swing Shift ain't great literature but it brings to life an important period in Southern history. WWII and the Southern war industries didn't just give the Blacks the notion that they deserved better, it showed a lot of Whites that not everybody lived on the north end of a southbound mule.

Great book. Bought for my Dad, who worked along with my Grandfather at the Southeastern Shipyard during WW2. He has enjoyed the book. Thanks.