Prairie Women Unsung Heroes of World War Two

Women on the assembly line at Gulf Ordinance Plant

In all the history books about World War Two, there is one story that seldom is told. It’s about a small Mississippi farming community that transformed a into a munitions plant to help win the war. As MPB’s Ron Brown reports, they did it with a workforce of mostly young women.

Out in the middle of rich Mississippi farmland - Three dozen abandoned empty brick buildings seem strangely out of place. They’re all that’s left of an historic time and there’s nothing to mark their significance. But 60 years ago they were vital to American security. Brent Coleman is an amateur historian who has researched the story behind the Gulf Ordinance Plant in Prairie Mississippi.

“There was no factories in those days. Nobody knew what a factory was, you know. And Prairie was just a small… just a small town, two or three stores, maybe a hamburger, café, a post office, a filling station or two. And that was about it. “

But being out of the way was one of the reasons the U.S. government chose Prairie for a 30-million dollar munitions plant. Construction began in May of 1942, and it took 10-thousand people to build it on 67-hundred acres of land.

“Well, if you’re talking about the plant, itself, that was probably over 200-something buildings that was built. There was 28 miles of railroad. There was 27 miles of blacktop road. Gulf Ordinance was built to accommodate 35,000 people. Now, we’re talking about a sewer system, electrical system, a water system. Ah, it was huge.”

By the second week of November of that same year they were on line making 40-millimeter shells. Before long the munitions included 20 millimeter shells, 40’s, 57 and 67’s, rocket launchers, 100-pound bombs and tracer ammunition for the navy.

The plant once was busy 24 hours a day and churning out ammunition around the clock. When Coleman tours the Gulf Ordinance plant today, the hallways are silent.

“This hallway runs down to the warehouse where all raw material came in. This is line six where they made 100 pound bombs. Again, this hallway is about two thousand feet long.”

The Gulf Ordinance Plant made Prairie Mississippi, for a time, a major American military munitions supplier. The contribution was significant.

“They’ve probably done about 25% of all ammunition that was made during World War II at the Gulf Ordinance.”

It took six-thousand employees to keep the plant running. With the able bodied men needed for military service, the job of manning the defense plants fell to people that had never been in the labor force before or who had been employed in low-paying work. For the first time many of those factory workers were women.

“I had never been in a plant. [laugh] And, ah, I had no idea what it was like. “

Ann Chance traded in a waitress apron to work for the government by building bombs and bullets at the Gulf Ordinance Plant. She helped make 57 millimeter shells, for anti-tank guns used by artillery platoons.

“Well, it was exciting I was going to get to work, and, it was paying more… paying more money than where I was working, and that was interesting.”

Before the war, working in a factory was widely considered to be a man’s job. But Ann Chance and many others like her worked right along with the men in Prairie. Their contribution was enormous. They weren’t just working for a paycheck, they were helping to win the war.

“We was just proud that they wanted me to work, and, and it was a small thing just to help, because, I had a brother overseas. But you felt like you was doing your part when you have to make them shells to help them.”

Brent Coleman: “Those country girls, we might call them, because we were a farming community, they got the job done. But what was more important, they understood. Yeah, they had boyfriends overseas. They had daddies overseas. Mom had a husband overseas. But they were dedicated enough to realize they had to get this job done by making ammunition, because them boys could come home someday. And that one shell that they, they hung over another shift to make might have saved that GI’s life or that sailor on that aircraft somewhere in the South Pacific when those suicide planes were coming at them at a high rate of speed. So, ah, I’m proud of them. “

Coleman says he believes the rest of Mississippi will be proud too, once they discover the story of the Gulf Ordinance Plant in Prairie. For MPB News, I’m Ron Brown

Find out more about Mississippi’s war effort when Mississippi Public Broadcasting airs “Home Front to Battlefront: Mississippi During WWII” on December 7 at 7:00 p.m.