Complete Issue Online - San Diego History Center

San Diego and the Pacific Theater
two months later, instituted a three-shift, 48-hour week that maintained peak
production. 27 The hours were long and the days repetitive. For many, the end
of their shifts inconveniently fell around midnight. “The truth of the matter,”
Bowman and Allen wrote,
was that most people on the Swing Shift ate all the time .... Another
vicious cycle was trying to get the grease out of our clothes, the
metal dust out of our hair, and the dirt out of our nails so that we
could go to work and get more grease on our clothes, more metal
dust in our hair, and more dirt under our nails .... That was the Swing
Shift for you! Sleep. Eat. Work. Wash. Sleep. Eat. Work. Wash. 28
While soldiers fought on the battlefronts with conventional weapons, war
workers faced the rigors of home-front industrialization at their posts on the
assembly lines.
Women in the Work Force
Women working on B-24 fuselage assembly, World War II. ©SDHC 1997:42-5.
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