World War II reshaped the Bay Area and its people

Memorial Day is an occasion to remember the men and women who went off to war and never returned. But it is also fitting on this day to recall the soldiers, sailors and Marines who served in World War II and came back.

Those men and women and their families set off a huge postwar boom that completely changed the Bay Area - and produced the region that today's residents have inherited.

World War II had a huge impact on the Bay Area. It resulted in major changes in the area's racial makeup, its economy, even its physical appearance.

The conversion of the orchard-rich Santa Clara County from "The Valley of Heart's Delight" into Silicon Valley can be directly traced to wartime electronic research.

Author Marilynn Johnson studied the impact of the war on the East Bay, where Oakland and Richmond were turned into boom towns. She called it "The Second Gold Rush." The war, she said, "marked the coming of age of West Coast cities."

"The city still looks the same. It is still beautiful, but it's a totally different place than the one where we grew up," said Wallace Levin, who was born and raised in San Francisco and lived in the city during World War II. Levin is coordinator of Monday's Memorial Day ceremonies at the Presidio.

Shipbuilding boom

After Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Bay Area became a centerpiece of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called "the arsenal of democracy."

Shipyards went up with lightning speed to construct the ships that would take the war to the Japanese in the Pacific. In San Francisco, the executives of the Bechtel Corp. got a telegram from the government on March 2, 1942, asking if the company would be interested in building and operating a shipyard on San Francisco Bay.

The answer was "yes," and within 10 days, Bechtel began clearing marshland in Sausalito for a shipyard called Marinship. Just over three months from the call from Washington, the keel of a freighter was laid, and in September, the ship, named for William Richardson, the founder of Sausalito, was launched.

In the East Bay, Henry J. Kaiser built three shipyards, which during the war built 747 large ships - one in only four days, a world record.

During the height of the wartime shipbuilding boom, 244,000 people worked in Bay Area shipyards - a workforce equal to more than 13 Army divisions.

Fort Mason, on San Francisco's northern waterfront, became the main port of embarkation for the Pacific war.

Off to war

Government records show that 1,647,174 passengers - soldiers, sailors, Marines and civilians like Red Cross personnel - boarded ships at Fort Mason bound for the Pacific. Two-thirds of all the troops sent to the Pacific in World War II passed through San Francisco.

"They saw the city for the first time, and it made a strong impression on them," wrote Wayne Bonnett, who produced a book on Bay Area shipyards.

Strong impression is right. Those service members who got shore leave in San Francisco never forgot it.

"It couldn't be better," said Johnny Johnson, who was aboard the cruiser San Francisco on leave in the city. "A sailor couldn't buy a drink in a bar. Couldn't buy a hot dog. It was all free."

Historian Kevin Starr noted that streetcars going up Market Street were so jammed with sailors "they looked like ships at sea."

These were service members from the Midwest, the South and the East Coast, and many of them promised themselves that if they survived the war, they'd be back.

San Francisco grew from a city of 634,000 residents in 1940 to 774,821 by 1950. In Contra Costa County beyond the hills, the little towns of Walnut Creek, Orinda and Concord saw their populations double, then double again. Walnut Creek was a little farm town of 1,578 in 1940; Orinda had 1,373 people before the war; Calistoga, at the head of the Napa Valley in what is now the Wine Country, had just over 1,100 residents. The biggest industries in prewar Marin were railroading and dairy ranching.

After the war, California boomed. In places like Daly City, the population quadrupled; in Santa Clara, it quintupled.

Huge migration

It was one of the great movements of individuals and families.

"They had decided that when the war was over, they were going to come back to California and live the good life," Starr said.

The complexion of the state was different as well. San Francisco had only 4,846 black residents in 1940, less than 1 percent of the total population. By 1950, there were 43,821 African Americans living in the city. The numbers were higher in Oakland, but the vast majority of Bay Area residents were whites of European descent and Asian.

Some Asians suffered: Japanese and Japanese Americans were interned, but Chinese Americans did well. Because China was a wartime ally, the hateful Exclusion Acts were repealed in 1943 - the beginning of a new day after a century of legal racism.

The economy boomed as well. The federal government poured $6 billion into war contracts in the Bay Area. Shipbuilding turned out to be a dead-end industry, and the Bay Area soon had a new focus.

Fred Terman, a Stanford professor, had been director of a top-secret radio research project at Harvard during the war. He came back to Stanford with a long list of connections and a determination to make Stanford one of the country's top engineering schools.

A couple of his old students, David Packard and William Hewlett, helped start an electronic revolution, and when Terman retired in 1965, he was hailed as the father of Silicon Valley.

In Bay Area: What's open and what's closed for the holiday. C2

Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: cnolte@sfchronicle.com