IT WAS A TOUCH JOB, working at the New York Navy Yard—better known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard—during World War II. Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Workers hardly got a break. Solomon Brodskv, a packer in the yard's vast supply depot, remembered those years. "There were days I felt like a zombie," he recalled. "You work; there was a war. I had my kid brother in the war. So you feel like you're working for him." It was much easier to see what the yard did than to see what was done to the yard to make it all happen. But a tremendous effort had been required to transform the aging facility into the nation's greatest warship manufacturer. Its dramatic facelift symbolized the stunning prewar expansion of American shipbuilding facilities, the necessary first step in the creation of the nation's mighty two-ocean navy. The United States Navy had entered World War II unprepared for a global fight and then was severely weakened by Japan's December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. But it did have a system of shipyards scattered from the Central Pacific to the East Coast. Led by the Brooklyn yard, these facilities raced to produce massive battleships and aircraft carriers capable of ruling a new age of naval warfare. The story of the Brooklyn Navy Yard begins in 1801, when President John Adams established five naval shipyards on the young nation's East Coast. The Brooklyn yard was one of them. Six decades later, early in the Civil War, it made its name when it turned out the Union ironclad Monitor in time to halt a rampage by the Confederacy's Virginia through the otherwise wooden Union navy.
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