Seventeen Submarines: Mare Island at War

When the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war on December seventh, nineteen forty-one, Mare Island's position as the West Coast's premier submarine facility was already established. The yard had been receiving, repairing, and overhauling submarines since nineteen oh-three, when two of the Navy's first six submarines arrived here directly from their San Francisco builders.

What followed the attack was a production surge that ran for four years without stopping. By the end of the war, Mare Island had built seventeen submarines, four submarine tenders, thirty-one destroyer escorts, thirty-three small craft, and more than three hundred landing craft. The USS Wahoo, a Gato-class attack submarine whose keel was laid at Mare Island in June of nineteen forty-one, was launched here on February fourteenth, nineteen forty-two. She would go on to become one of the most decorated submarines of the Pacific war, and one of the most aggressive, under the command of Dudley Morton.

The workforce that built these ships was not the workforce of peacetime. Women were hired in roles previously closed to them. African American workers entered the yard in significant numbers, though they confronted systematic discrimination from supervisors and administration workers throughout the war. In August of nineteen forty-two, reports in African American newspapers noted that at least ten Black women were working at the yard, including the first African American female welder hired for the war effort.

The connections to the Port Chicago disaster of nineteen forty-four run through this yard as well. The three hundred twenty sailors and civilians killed in the Port Chicago ammunition explosion had been based in a system that Mare Island administered.

The yard would not close until nineteen ninety-six, but it was the four years of the war that defined its place in naval history.