Cradle of Aviation exhibit features WWII-era Long Island factory workers

They were the heroes of the home front, factory workers across Long Island who built the aircrafts — and aircraft parts — that enabled America and the allies to win World War II. Eighty years later, their images remain, ingrained in old black-and-white photographs.

But their identities? For most, they’ve been lost to time.

A new exhibit at the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Uniondale aims to attach names to a cast of currently anonymous faces.

Called “Long Island at War: Working on the Homefront, 1942-45,” the exhibit features about 50 photographs of workers at four major Long Island-based wartime manufacturers: Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. in Bethpage, Republic Aviation Corp. in Farmingdale, the Sperry Gyroscope Corp. plant in Lake Success and Liberty Aircraft Corp. in Farmingdale.

It is a cast as diverse as Long Island itself: women in the workforce and faces of minority and disabled workers.

Each is pitching in to help win the war against the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. All are part of what the Cradle describes as “the extraordinary effort of Long Island’s wartime workforce and their critical role in one of the greatest industrial mobilizations in American history.”

Displayed in a second-floor gallery at the museum, the photo array is remarkable for the quality of what are official factory photographs taken inside workplaces where cameras were otherwise banned by the government due to the wartime need for secrecy.

They are also notable because they are linked to an interactive feature that will enable viewers — at the museum and at home — to scan through not just the photos on display, but also thousands of images in online archives, categorized by manufacturer. Viewers are asked to contact the museum with potential identifying information on anyone who might be recognized.

That in an effort to answer the simple question posed by the exhibit: “Do You Know Me?”

DIVERSIFIED WORKFORCE

Cradle of Aviation curator and historian Joshua Stoff estimates that about 75,000 of Long Island’s approximately 600,000 residents, most with no prior experience in factory work or aviation manufacturing, went to work at wartime companies. They built almost 40,000 planes — many of which saw combat in Europe and in the Pacific Theater. The prewar workforce for all aviation companies nationwide was about 48,000, most of whom were white men.

But following the German invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and official U.S. entry into the war sparked by the galvanizing surprise attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, factories were suddenly in dire need of workers who could “man” assembly lines day and night. As young men enlisted or were drafted and went off to war, overnight the nationwide workforce became diversified as Americans built weapons of war.

“I would say probably 40% of the workforce [on Long Island] became women,” Stoff said. “And you have large numbers of minorities in the Long Island workforce too: African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans. It’s really the first time you’ve ever seen that [those numbers] in American history — that you have men, women and minorities all working together on the assembly line — and, it’s just amazing to see.”

On Long Island, those workers filled round-the-clock shifts at airplane manufacturers. They also worked at Queens wartime manufacturers like the Brewster Aeronautical Corp. in Long Island City and the EDO Aircraft Corp. in College Point.

Workers at Grumman built the famous “Cat” series of U.S. Navy carrier-based fighters — the F4F Wildcat (2,605 built), F6F Hellcat (12,275) and twin-engine F7F Tigercat (364) — as well as the carrier-based TBF Avenger (2,290), an early variant of the torpedo bomber flown in combat by former President George H.W. Bush. Workers at Republic built the rugged P-47 Thunderbolt (15,636), known as “The Jug” — a fighter flown by World War II U.S. Air Force ace and future Long Island Rail Road president Francis “Gabby” Gabreski.

Gunsights, gyroscopes and the twin-.50-caliber machine gun ball-turrets for two mainstay U.S. heavy bombers — the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and Consolidated B-24 Liberator — were built by workers at Sperry.

Liberty was one of the prime producers of aircraft parts for Grumman, Republic, Brewster, Vought, Martin, Curtiss, Fairchild and Sikorsky, specializing in metal finishing for military contractors.

In Queens, Brewster produced the F2A Buffalo fighter (509 built) and SB2A Buccaneer scout bomber (771) and, as a subcontractor, assemblage of a variant of the heralded Vought F4U Corsair. Workers at EDO Aircraft built, among other things, pontoons for a wide range of U.S. military floatplanes.

One wartime Newsday story quoted Sperry president Reginald E. Gillmor estimating 50% of his factory workers were women.

“At the beginning, we accepted women only as a ‘necessary evil,’ ” Gillmor told Newsday in 1944, adding: “But we have since dropped the word ‘evil’ — and consider them ‘necessary.’ ”

Gillmor also told Newsday that 1,200 members of the wartime Sperry workforce were Black, filling 28 job categories. Out of 300 shop stewards, Gillmor said, 22 were Black. Workers received equal pay for equal work, regardless of race or gender, Gillmor said at the time.

During a nationwide 1944 tour of war plants, Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, daughter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and first lady Eleanor, told Newsday after her visit to Sperry: “This is the most interesting plant I have ever seen” — noting the diversity and percentage of female employees.

As Stoff said: “The wartime contribution on Long Island is just amazing — for aircraft, especially . . . Long Island really was a focal point of American production during World War II. What happened here affected the front lines everywhere.”

PROFESSIONALLY SHOT

The photographs are dramatic.

“I think probably the first thing that hit me was they weren’t these big, expansive photos of an assembly line during World War II. They were very intimate,” Stoff said. “These were taken by professional photographers, so the quality is really amazing. And what they’re doing, showing how many jobs went into building an airplane? It’s not just the assembly line, putting the wings on, and an engine, but the workers building tiny parts. There are pictures of people counting rivets, weighing them out. Very small, intimate things like that that, all together, built an airplane.”

There’s a photo of a Black woman, another of a Black man, riveting aircraft assemblies at Grumman. One photo shows an Asian American man working on a wiring harness, another a man in his three-wheeled wooden wheelchair running a hand-operated hydraulic press. In one image, a woman tests a bomber ball-turret assembly at Sperry. Two women perform metal finishing at Liberty, while another, wearing a protective ventilator face mask, spray paints assembled parts.

A woman at Republic uses her wrench to tighten bolts. In another photo, a group of women assembles the fuselage of a Thunderbolt.

These are mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers; grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles and neighbors. But other than a handful of the photos accompanied by company letters that detail their names, they are by and large anonymous.

Museum president Andrew Parton hopes not for long.

‘6 DEGREES OF SEPARATION’

“I think it’s six degrees of separation,” Parton said recently, as he stood before the exhibition photos. “Everyone had a relative or a neighbor who worked at any of these companies. Whether it was Grumman, Sperry, Republic, Liberty, you knew somebody.”

Because of that, Parton said, the interactive element of the exhibit creates the chance for anyone going through the galleries to recognize someone they know and contact the museum to identify them.

Walking through the new exhibit, Steve and Debbie Kempler, formerly of Westbury and now living in Melbourne, Florida, said they loved the idea of being able to search the photos and archives for familiar faces.

Steve Kempler spent decades at Grumman, working first on the Gulf War-era E2-C Hawkeye and later in procurement.

He said he started at Grumman in 1987 because of his stepfather, who had joined the company post-World War II.

“Grumman was multigenerational . . . even then, still a ‘family company,’ ” Kempler said. “I’d bet there’s plenty of people in these pictures someone would recognize. And that’d be very cool, to put names to the faces.”

“Even more,” Debbie Kempler said, “because these are not the frontline people, but the people at home who made everything work.