Frankford Arsenal: The Street That Beat Hitler
Pennsylvania
In nineteen forty-two, a sprawling complex of brick buildings in northeast Philadelphia was producing nine million cartridges a day. The workers who showed up here every morning called it the Street That Beat Hitler, and they were not wrong.
The Frankford Arsenal was established in eighteen sixteen when President James Madison authorized the purchase of twenty acres along Bridesburg Creek as a military supply depot. In the early decades it was primarily a storage and repair facility, but by eighteen thirty-five the Secretary of War had designated it the Ordnance Department's sole proving ground for gunpowder, and it began transforming into something more consequential. By the Civil War, the arsenal ran around the clock, producing percussion caps, fuses, and small arms ammunition for the Union Army. More than a thousand workers labored here by the end of that conflict.
But the Second World War was the arsenal's defining hour. In nineteen forty-two, before private manufacturers had retooled their facilities for wartime production, Frankford Arsenal was the single source of virtually all the small arms ammunition the United States military could call upon. At its peak, twenty-two thousand workers were employed on the grounds. Over the course of the war, the arsenal produced one billion three hundred eighty-six million rounds of small arms ammunition, calibers ranging from point thirty to point fifty, including ball, armor-piercing, incendiary, and tracer rounds. The facility also developed the recoilless rifle and numerous other advances in ordnance technology.
The arsenal closed in nineteen seventy-seven, one hundred sixty-one years after it opened, the victim of shifting military logistics and base closures. Today the former grounds are being redeveloped as office and creative space, but the brick buildings remain, and the scale of what was accomplished here is hard to overstate. The war was won by many hands, and a significant share of those hands worked right here in northeast Philadelphia.
