Arsenal for Democracy
 7 of 10

Building Bombs on the Plains:
Hastings Grows ... and Feels Stress

Hastings, 1944
View Looking West on First Street at Hastings, Nebraska, 1944(?).
The construction of a $45 million ammunition depot (the largest in the nation) brought both growth and stress to Hastings Nebraska. The development helped the Hastings community emerge from the Depression, but it also brought a great influx of immigrants and created new social pressures. At its peak, the depot employed approximately 2,000 military personnel and 6,692 civilian production workers. There were also 2,000 civilians still involved in construction of the plant. All together, over 10,000 workers.

You can see signs of the growing strains by reading newspapers over the years. In 1939 before the war, Hastings celebrated their heritage during "Jubileeum Days." By all accounts, the celebration was harmonious and the people seemed united. Three years later in 1942, two newcomers sent a letter to the Hastings Daily Tribune complaining of "hostile citizens" and "town morals squads" who were herding newcomers into "concentration camps."

Concentration camps in Nebraska? What happened in three years? The Naval Ammunition Depot (NAD) happened.

The newcomers were people brought in by the U.S. Government to work at the ammunition depot. The concentration camps they referred to were the government trailer camps that housed the workers. The Naval Ammunition Depot (NAD) forced the relatively insular community of Hastings to accommodate an influx of people who bought with them diverse social and ethnic backgrounds that were quite different from the norm in Hastings.

Economic self-interest, unfamiliarity with people of different races and backgrounds, and concern about the rapid changes occurring in their community, made the people of Hastings very suspicious of the newcomers. Before the boom, the black population in Hastings was less than 1% and the other races statistically insignificant.

CartoonComplicating the process of dealing with the stresses was the need for wartime security. Secrecy was stressed because the Navy assumed that there might be enemy spies in Hastings — even though they were so far from either coast — trying to find out how many bombs were being produced, when they might be shipped out and where they were going to. The plant's employee newspaper, the Nebraska Ordinance Plant News used its pages to stress the importance of safety and secrecy.

Click here to see a comic strip entitled "Axis Accidents"
that provided a humorous way to get across a serious message.