Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment in the West Hills Gazette’s nine-part series that looks at life in Robinson Township during World War II. This series, written by Janet Gonter of the Robinson Township Historical Society, originally ran in the Suburban Gazette in 2017 but is timely now, as the 80th anniversary of the end of the war will be observed later this summer. Check back each Sunday for a new installment.
Part 1 of 10 | Part 2 of 10 | Part 3 of 10 | Part 4 of 10 | Part 5 of 10
Part 6 of 10 | Part 7 of 10 | Part 8 of 10 | Part 9 of 10 | Part 10 of 10
Early in 1942, as the nation ramped up for war, Dravo Corp. on nearby Neville Island was tapped by the U.S. Navy for shipbuilding and soon employed a large percentage of Robinson Township residents. Moon Run native Gwen Gaspare Brouker remembers, “There were so many in our Moon Run area who worked at Dravo — actually, in the entire Robinson area.”
By August of 1942, the East Yard at Dravo had quickly become a major U.S. shipbuilding yard, and by 1945 it had produced 150 LSTs (Landing Ship Transports), 27 destroyer escorts, 20 subchasers and minesweepers, and 65 LSMs (Landing Ship Mediums).
Responding to the Navy’s urgent need of a great many ships, Dravo employed some 16,000 men and women at the Neville Island facility. Like a small city, the shipyard had its own company hospital, as well as police and fire departments.
The plant was in production 24/7, and the cafeterias alone employed more than 400 workers. Today it is hard to imagine such a huge enterprise and number of people on that relatively small island.
Production was astounding. Early in the war, Dravo Neville Island produced one LST every 6.1 days. As D-Day approached, that number grew to one every 3.5 days. Each time an LST or other warship was launched into the Ohio River, huge crowds from the surrounding areas watched and cheered.
The late Bob Glass, a Robinson native, remembered attending a launch as a boy. “It was a very big deal. So many people! I will never forget seeing that big ship slide down the rails and splash into the river.”
Little did that small boy realize that the ship he saw go into the river would find its way down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and eventually across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe.
Even national radio newscaster Lowell Thomas was awed when he visited Dravo.
“I, along with some ten thousand other people, attended a ship launching today. . . It was an ocean-going ship, built for Uncle Sam’s Navy, built here at Pittsburgh and launched here at Pittsburgh. A ship [subchaser] of steel, more than a hundred and seventy-three feet long, to be manned by a Navy crew of sixty, and to do the job of a destroyer.”
The LSTs were even bigger and more important; no ship was more crucial to the war effort. These huge ships — 328 feet long and 50 feet wide — carried 160 men plus more than 20 tanks and trucks, and could land them right on the beach. Some of these Neville Island LSTs landed our troops and tanks on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944 and hastened the end of the war in Europe.
Early in 1945, as the war wound down, activity at Neville Island decreased almost as rapidly as it had grown. In 1946, the East Yard closed and Dravo reverted to building barges and bridges until it finally closed in 1982.
Today, all that remains of the wonder that was once the Dravo Shipyard is a nondescript historical marker.
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