On June 5, 1942, an explosion rocked the old Joliet Army Ammunition Plant and was so powerful windows were rattled as far away as Indiana and the North Shore.
With the four-day Battle of Midway Island raging in the Pacific and the tide of World War II about to turn, a report that 48 workers were killed at the then-Elwood Ordnance Plant was yet another piece of bad news that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor six months earlier.
Despite being overshadowed by the national events, the 1942 plant explosion was not forgotten by old-timers who came from Elwood, Wilmington, Coal City, Kankakee, Morris and Joliet to work at the plant.
But neither was the event memorialized.
Pending additional fundraising this summer, a $30,000 monument commemorating the 48 workers, as well as the thousands of munitions workers who toiled at the arsenal over parts of four decades, is expected to be dedicated at the landmark work site next year.
A golf outing to raise money to cover what is now less than a 5 percent shortfall in the project budget is set for Aug. 31 in Morris, where contributions can be made to a special account at the Grundy County Bank.
State Rep. Mary Kay O’Brien (D-Coal City) got the state to contribute $20,000 from a 1998 budget appropriation. The contribution accounts for the bulk of the funds raised.
Formal recognition of the victims and the workers who survived, many of whom still live in the area, is seen by local residents as long overdue, according to Sandy Vasko, president of the Wilmington Historical Society.
“The people of Wilmington and Elwood have always thought of those who died in the blast as war heroes. It’s something that is brought up every Memorial Day,” said Vasko.
The blast, which occurred in a building where anti-tank mine fuses were being assembled, also injured 46 workers, and 16 of the dead were declared missing by the War Department.
World War II arsenal worker Elmo Ray Younger of Morris, who lost friends in the blast, said, “It’s as important to recognize those who died in the explosion as those who died on the front line” because their sacrifice was no less significant.
Younger, 76, is a member of the Joliet Army Ammunition Plant Restoration Advisory Board, or RAB, the civilian committee assigned to monitor the Army’s project to clean up the complex. He and other committee members initiated the monument plan about two years ago in concert with efforts to convert the arsenal into a recreation area.
A memorial committee, of which Younger is a member, is negotiating with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for permission to place the workers memorial on land deeded to the agency for the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, now under construction.
Though he did not report to work until later on June 5, 1942, Howard Cox, 76, of Wilmington, who started work in the arsenal’s engineering department in 1940, said he has vivid recollections of the blast’s aftermath.
“I can remember . . . huge pieces of concrete blowing hundreds of yards from the source of the explosion,” said Cox, who was born and raised on one of the many farms commandeered by the War Department to build the arsenal.
Cox recalled having daily access to “what they called the missile map” that identified in grim detail “where all the objects, including body parts of specific workers, landed after the explosion.
“There were a lot of good people who were lost there.”
So powerful was the 2:45 a.m. explosion that it rattled houses and was heard and felt nearly 100 miles away, according to a June 6, 1942 Tribune account.
“From Hammond to Park Ridge came reports that pictures had been shaken from walls. Many Chicagoans who felt the explosion thought an earthquake had occurred,” the Tribune wrote. “Though windows were smashed and buildings shook in Joliet, the roar of the explosion was mistaken for thunder by most persons who heard it.”
In what the Tribune also described as being “in some ways . . . freakish,” in nearby Elwood “virtually no damage was caused,” according to the report.
The shipping building destroyed in the blast was part of a series known as Group II, on the east side of the massive complex.
Building 10, as it was called, was where “anti-tank mine fuses were being assembled into shipping boxes and loaded into cars for transfer to storage,” according to one War Department account.
“Damage was estimated as under $500,000, and no evidence of sabotage was found,” the report noted.
According to Younger, “The Army was not sure what caused it.”
But, “I’d say that within a 30-day period they had almost completely recovered . . . had rebuilt and went ahead as if nothing had ever happened,” Younger said.
