Munitions factory official lifts veil of plant's secrecy

Tag: Contact Block

Herbert Wentworth was chief financial officer of the Carrboro-based munitions factory during World War II. The information in this article is drawn from an oral history given by Mr. Wentworth at the home of his daughter and son-in-law, Lynne Wentworth and Jim Ward of Chapel Hill.

During World War II, there was a secret in Carrboro, hidden in plain sight. Many people living in the area now are still not aware of what an important part this secret in this small Southern village played in the war effort.

From February 1942 until August 1945, what had been a hosiery mill in the center of Carrboro became a munitions factory helping to defend American ships as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean and were subject to attack by German planes. The man chosen to run the plant -- designed to build 20 mm shells for the Navy -- was a 32-year-old native of New Jersey, Herb Wentworth, who had come to North Carolina to attend Duke University.

The country was still in the Great Depression, and after two years at Duke, Wentworth took a job as a bookkeeper for Durham Notions Company. In 1942, he was offered the job as manager of a proposed munitions plant in Carrboro, for a salary of $125 a month.

In 1942, the mill buildings, of which the existing Carr Mill Mall is one part, were not in use. Wentworth explained how the mill, owned then by Durham Hosiery Mills, was chosen for the plant.

"The cotton mill closed down in 1938, and the buildings were left vacant. The men interested in locating a munitions plant here had offices in Cleveland and New York, and they had other plants around the country. There was a Tetryl Nitrate plant in Tennessee, an aircraft repair place in Florida, another 20 mm munitions plant in Eldred, N.Y., and a ship building plant in New York.

"How they got in touch with Mr. Carr in Durham, I don't know. I presume that the mill property was advertised as being available, and they followed up on it.

"The officials in the university were very cooperative in the war efforts. We had a number of people, including wives of professors, who came to work at the plant. Of course they felt like it was the thing to do to support the war effort. There were plenty of jobs available eventually.

"The main building that housed the munitions plant was where the Health Department was later located in Carrboro, near the railroad tracks. There were other buildings across the main street, where Carr Mill Mall is now located.

"We leased other properties out on the road to Pittsboro ... not owned by us, but we did have several buildings; I don't believe they are there now, but they could be.

"When we bought the buildings, they had to be entirely modified to suit our needs for an ammunitions plant. It took about two months to get it ready to hire people. Then we started hiring my office force to make arrangements to hire the rest of the plant workers.

"When I was taken on, the expectation was that there would be about 154 people needed, but inside of about two months we had passed that by a long way. At our peak production in the four years we were in business, we employed 1,750 people. There had been no wages paid to hosiery workers in this area since 1938, almost four years. So it was a very depressed area and we hired mostly ordinary people -- farmers, housewives, anybody that could do an honest day's work.

"There were more women than men. I would say the ratio was about four to one. I don't know of anyone that boarded here. They were mostly from Orange County and some from down below Pittsboro and over toward Mebane, within about a 35 mile area.

"Workers ranged in age from about 20 to 50. They were mostly white, although there were some black workers as well.

"The main jobs were in the assembly line, and those were almost 100 percent white workers. There were black workers in the warehouse that handled the shipping and unloading and heavy chores like that. I would say altogether there were perhaps 50 to 100 black employees out of the 1,700 people.

"We had three shifts in operation in the plant in the very beginning until almost the end of the war. They worked around the clock and they changed every week. Wages were about 30 cents an hour. We were in the process of talking to raise that to 40 cents an hour when we were told there couldn't be any raises."

Wentworth said he was finally able to get wages raised to 40 cents per hour after he made a trip to Atlanta to talk with a government official who, coincidentally, had been a professor at Duke.

Secrecy surrounding the activity at the plant was strictly enforced, Wentworth said. There were very few newspaper reports because information was so tightly restricted.

"When you came to work you had to sign that you would not discuss anything about the plant whatsoever -- what they were making. It just drove the newspaper people wild, trying to find out what was going on. There was a fine and imprisonment if an employee gave out information about the plant. It scared everybody and of course no one wanted to lose their job."

Wentworth explained that there were guards at the plant at all times.

"We had guards with high-powered rifles all around, hired by the plant. Doctor BB Lloyd, a country doctor known all over Orange County, worked at the plant. He used to claim he had delivered most every employee of the plant, or their children. He came right to start with and was there till we closed."

Ralph Lloyd, who had worked in the Hosiery Mill, was the oldest employee in the munitions plant. Richmond Sloan, who with Wentworth owned Wentworth and Sloan Jewelry after the war, was the paymaster for the plant, and also Wentworth's assistant.

Wentworth described how the buildings were prepared for the dangerous work that was carried out in the factory.

"We had to construct some cinderblock buildings to compress the pellets that went into the 20 mm shell. That's a shell that would fire up to about 3,000 yards with good accuracy and explosive power and speed. It was a Swiss process called 20 mm Oerlikon ammunition. It contained a shell casing about 3© to 4 inches that was loaded with black powder, that simply ignited when it was detonated with a little cap in the bottom of the shell. That pushed the projectile, the top part of the shell, out at the incoming planes.

"The top part of the shell contained a high explosive called Tetryl, a very toxic chemical substance. It was not made anywhere in North Carolina that I know of. It was shipped in to us. That explosive, Tetryl, was compressed into a pellet that fit into the main part of the projectile. The very top part of the projectile was a fuse that, on contact, would explode the rest of the shell, and that's what did the damage. A super machine gun would fire several hundred shells a minute.

"We made over 100 million shells in the time we were in business from about May of 1942 until the war was over, when the Japanese surrendered in August of 1945. There was one other plant that I know of in the United States that made, loaded and assembled 20 mm shells. That was in Eldred, N.Y. Ours was the largest plant that I know of."

Components for the shells were shipped to the plant by train, assembled and shipped out, again by train, then sent to sites as directed by Navy officials.

"The brass casings would come in and they'd be entirely unassembled. Little caps in the bottom, and the projectiles were not on them. Workers loaded the brass shell casing with powder in an assembly line with machines, probably 50 or 75 in a row, with a woman on each machine. Then the projectiles -- the top part of the shell, the explosive part--were loaded with the Tetryl compressed in there, in another building. That was considered a very dangerous part, so it was separated from the main building."

The process of assembling the shells was so hazardous that there were very strict rules about the handling of the materials, and the Navy periodically inspected the plant to make sure all steps in the process were followed carefully.

"When we loaded the high explosive in these projectiles, it was done in what was called a pellet house. The pellets were made and compressed by machines in the pellet house, compacted and put in the shell; then they were sent to another process of assembly, the crimping process, where the projectile was crimped to the brass shell case. That in turn had the fuse, which was also an explosive on its own. All three of those operations were done in separate buildings.

"We had only one explosion, a severe explosion one morning in the pellet house during the compression process. A shift was changing and so the men had to clean their machines. One man was in cleaning his machine, getting ready to go off. The pellet house was built with cinderblocks with a wall between the operator and the machine. There was an explosive-proof glass window so that they could watch the machine in operation. They were forbidden to go behind there without taking certain precautions, including turning the machine off.

"In this instance, though, this employee had found out from working there for some time that he could go in that little cubicle and work the machinery from inside and save some steps. He reached up and turned the machine on and the plunger ordinarily would come down and compress the Tetryl. As we learned afterwards, the plunger that came down to compress the Tetryl had angled off, compressing it and hitting a glass block that had nothing to do with the process at all. That caused a spark that set the whole thing off."

The explosion was heard as far away as Durham, where Wentworth and his wife were living at the time.

"When we had that explosion in the plant it was about 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, as I recall. I heard the thing. The people who were here at the plant ran out for the gate. They thought the whole place was going to blow up. Some people went over the fence. There was turmoil for an hour or two, but only the one person was killed."

After that fatal accident, some of the components were stored off-site. For the sum of $150 a year, property was leased several miles from the plant site, in what was then a rural area near the Orange-Chatham line. Reinforced storage facilities were built there to hold the Tetryl, which was brought into the plant as it was needed.

There were other concerns about the safety of the materials within the plant. Workers who handled the Tetryl all wore white uniforms to protect them from the effects of the powder, which was so toxic it could cause a rash and sores, or Tetryl poisoning, when it came in contact with the skin.

"We had lockers for everybody and in jobs where they came in contact with the Tetryl we had shower facilities. We had a service that cleaned the uniforms every day, anywhere from 300 up to 1,700 uniforms."