
Pilots that flew food planes during the 1937
strike. L to R: B.T. Dyc, Safety Director Republic Steel;
Ben I. Swineford, pilot; Frank Groat, pilot;
L. Croft, pilot; P. Mood, pilot; J. W. Hunt,
pilot Lic. No. 761045. PO1.1044

Planes waiting to be loaded for the food drop
at the Niles Republic Steel plant during the 1937 strike. PO1.1037

Food plane and pilot Frank Groat. PO1.1042

Food storage tent and loading station in Ashland
Airport. PO1.1038

Loading 30# food bags to be dropped at Republic
Steel in Niles in 1937. PO1.1035
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Little
Steel Strike in Niles, Ohio — 1937.
On the eve of Memorial Day, 1937, in the small Ohio town of Niles,
strikebreaking was lifted to new heights. In the skies over Republic
Steel’s plant, there began an airlift to rescue company
employees locked inside during “the Little Steel Strike,”
one of the most turbulent and bloody in labor’s long struggle
to unionize workers.
Republic Steel president Tom M. Girdler
had created a Maginot Line with other “little” steel
companies—Bethlehem, Inland, National, Youngstown Sheet
and Tube—to stave off trade union formation by the newly
formed Steel Workers Organizing Committee, a branch of the Congress
of Industrial Organizations. Big Steel, as the industrial Goliath,
United States Steel, was known, recently had agreed to recognize
the union. To Girdler, this was nothing less than betrayal and
capitulation. He was ready for war. On May 20, he shut down Republic’s
Massillon mill. Six days later, the SWOC ordered a strike against
Republic and Sheet and Tube operations. Strikers formed a heavily
armed picket line around the plants, blocking people and supplies
from entering and loyal employees from exiting.
After hearing that 2,600 employees were holed
up with almost no food or supplies in the Niles and nearby Warren
plants, Girdler hatched a scheme to send them sustenance. “We
were going to fly it!” he wrote in his autobiography, Boot
Straps. “Airplanes were the only answer.”
The first aircraft to be made available, a Waco
biplane, belonged to a company employee. Bread, ham, beans, and
canned salmon were packed into padded sacks. On the first attempt,
two sacks landed outside the Niles plant fence and fell into the
hands of union pickets. But a second drop successfully landed
10 sacks, and Girdler’s employees were soon eating.
That afternoon, Girdler arranged to buy four used Wacos, the nucleus
of a fleet that eventually consisted of seven cabin Wacos and
two open-cockpit models. Four of the eight pilots were Republic
employees. Flights originated from a secret base, Great Lakes
Airport, 50 miles north of the mills. It took 200 workers to unload
supplies off a convoy of trucks and reload them onto aircraft.
Company representatives tried to get Ashland County sheriff Frank
Wallett to deputize workers, but he refused, saying, “That
would drag me into it.”
Republic was able to keep the whereabouts of its base of operations
concealed for a time. Two weeks into the strike, however, the
company was denied landing rights by Cleveland Mayor H.H. Burton
and forced to seek another airport. A 50-acre private field in
Ashland became Republic’s new base.
Management ordered a pine board landing strip to be built next
to the rail yard at the Warren plant. From dawn to dusk for 28
days, Republic’s fleet of Wacos shuttled tons of food and
supplies into the factories.
Witnessing a new brand of strikebreaking, the Steel Workers Organizing
Committee responded with countermeasures. It sent its own airplanes
skyward on “scouting missions” to thwart the airlift—in
effect, to attempt an air blockade. Records don’t identify
the union aircraft, but the Youngstown Vindicator reported: “The
union planes did a few stunts in the clouds in their ‘maneuvers’
calculated to frustrate ‘enemy’ attempts to bring
new supplies to the workers.”
On the ground, strikers resorted to violence. Men hid in trees
and ditches and opened fire with rifles as the Wacos wobbled toward
their destinations. Every landing was a feat. Pilot Frank
Groat, an electrician and part-time pilot hired by Republic,
remembered volleys of gunfire as he eased his Waco toward the
airstrip. “Every now and then you could hear the bullets
whizzing by you as you flew into the mill,” he recalled
from his home in Florida. “We never shut off the engines
when we came in. We landed, men came out to unload the planes,
and we took off. In Niles they used a big net to catch the supplies
when we flew over. On those flights we took a second man along,
a ‘bomber,’ we called him. He threw the supplies out
through the door.”
On June 2, an open-cockpit Waco slammed into a lumber pile alongside
the Warren landing strip, bounced into the air, struck a boxcar,
and crashed. One wing was broken off and the landing gear badly
damaged. The pilot, who was not identified in the Vindicator,
walked away with slight bruises.
By June’s end, the Little Steel Strike collapsed. The Steel
Workers Organizing Committee failed to organize workers and ordered
its men back to work without a contract. Ten people had been killed
and a hundred wounded in the “Memorial Day Massacre”
clash between strikers and police at Republic’s South Chicago
plant.
Republic pilots had delivered 200,000 pounds of supplies. “In
buying these airplanes, in flying food and supplies to the beleaguered
plants,” Girdler said in Boot Straps, “Republic Steel
Corporation was simply taking care of its own.”
Source:https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/oldies-amp-oddities-the-little-steel-strike-airlift-41977502/
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