Elkton’s Triumph Defense Plant (Part 2)

Elkton’s Triumph Defense Plant (Part 2)

Three Who Remember

My dad, my mom, and my sister worked at the Triumph Plant in Elkton. Dad was a powder mixer, and Mom and my sister worked in the building where they put the explosive inside the shell casing. They had some bad explosions at that place. That one place, where my dad worked, blew up, and killed three men. Dad and another guy survived it.   Chet Borger, Florida

During the war, I worked at the Triumph plant in Elkton. I rode the bus for a while, until my friend moved to Chesapeake. Then she took me to work in her car. When we worked the 4-12 shift, we'd come home and ride across on the ferry to cool off. It was a lot of fun. We would just relax at the top railing where we had a nice view. My husband, Ralph, was in the service at the time.

My job at the Triumph was to make primer heads for those tracers. I put small pellets into the tip of the shells. I remember the terrible explosion that happened when I was there. People were killed; it was awful, and it happened on my 21st birthday so I'll never forget that. I was just a few buildings from it. One of those big florescent lights fell right down in front of me. The explosion was caused by a woman carrying a container of powder, which must have scraped something to cause a spark, because it just blew up. Many people were killed, and they asked people to come in off the street to identify the bodies. So you can imagine what was going on overseas in the war. The sound was so awful that I just froze, sitting there at that table with that smashed light right in front of me.

Eleanor Benson Northrup, Chesapeake City

Working at the Triumph plant was hard. I worked in the department that made twenty-caliber anti-aircraft shells. A lot of people worked there because it was wartime. There was a terrible explosion when I worked there. Some workers were badly injured. Some of the people there were hard to work with. They'd leave for some reason and not come back, which would hold up the line. It was not an easy job. I rode a bus to work. It stopped to pick up powder plant workers along the way to Elkton. I remember how it rolled up into the ferry.        Suzi Lum Taylor, Cecilton

Elkton’s Triumph Defense Plant

Elkton’s Triumph Defense Plant during WW II (Part 1)

  

Three Who Remember

          I remember the Triumph Defense Plant. People who worked there had yellow faces and hands from the powder. They had that big explosion, and I don’t know if they ever found out how many people were killed that day. The basement of the Catholic Church, which at that time was right on the street, served as the morgue. They had the bodies lying down there, trying to put them together to see who was who. A lot of the survivors went home and never even went back for their paychecks.

I was working at Bainbridge when the building blew up. I was checking trucks coming from near the Arundel Quarry to Bainbridge, and I was sitting in a ‘37 convertible when the plant blew up. The car was parked near a pier that ran out a little bit into the water, and I was sitting there, halfway dozing between trucks, and I can still feel the explosion shaking that pier; that jar came right down the river. It happened because somebody was careless. The workers were so careless that somebody said they had powder on the floor an inch deep. I don’t know how many buildings blew up. I knew guys who worked there, and they told me that they were moving cases of loaded shells and, instead of using the slow-moving conveyor, they were just tossing the cases to each other.   Bill Baker—Elkton

I was in Elkton the day that Triumph Explosives blew up. It was awful; one woman died, Mrs. Poore from Hack's Point. I was working in a different building when it happened. We made signals for the Korean War. The signals were part of a warning system for our airplane pilots. It was dangerous work, but I never got hurt.

Edna Benson Gorman, Chesapeake City

       I remember the bus that used to cross on the ferry. It was called the Red Star, and it would stop across from the old bank to pick up people who wanted to go to Elkton. It stopped right at Bramble's store and would let people off on Main Street in Elkton. My mother used to tell stories about working at Triumph Explosives during the war. They were working with live grenades and shells. And my grandmother was a nurse at Elkton's Union Hospital when the Triumph plant blew up. A lot of people were killed and they brought a lot of the badly injured into the hospital; it was gruesome.  Steve Warwick—Chesapeake City

Vincent Taylor helped build Chesapeake City’s over-head bridge

I was in the Pacific Theater in World War II, and when I got home I took a job as a surveyor for the contractor who was working on the bridge project. I did the survey work for the bridge piers. I shot all of the grades, did all of the transit work, and ran all of the levels. Then, about nine months later, I was invited to work with the steel contractor who constructed the bridge. My job was a rivet inspector, and when I wasn't checking rivets I worked with their surveying engineer, doing a lot of taping and measuring. We had to check grades to put on the piers and put marks on there for the steel men to set their steel. That had to be nearly perfect.

Now, when we did the measuring for those steel beams, we used piano wire. For instance, when we measured the area that spanned the water—between the two double piers—we used the wire and calibrated it for stretch and heat and all that. The distance between those piers was 550 feet, I believe. Temperature expansion for steel piano wire is .50645 per foot. Yes, we were up there 130 feet doing the measuring—two men on each side. When you do that kind of work you have to have a spring balance; for whatever the tensor is you have to pull a certain amount of pounds' pressure. That accounts for the sag in the wire. It's very precise work.

There was a close call on that bridge. It happened after the span was closed. One day a skid crane operator started jerking on one of the temporary piers, trying to pull it out of there. The bridge shook each time he jerked, and finally he crumbled a flange he was sitting on with that skid rig, and that let him down so that his boom hit the top arch of the bridge. That shook the bridge like the devil. It was so bad that one gang of riveters quit the job the next day. There were several riveting gangs, and at that time my job was to go behind them and inspect the rivets. The bad rivets were called "cutouts" because they had to be cut out and re-riveted. I didn't find as many bad ones as my co-worker did for some reason. But when an engineer checked my work, it was fine.

To my knowledge, not a man was seriously injured on that job. But the worst scare I ever had was when we were checking rivets up near the main span. It was early in the winter, one of those days when we had a freezing rain, and rain will freeze on steel up high like that when it won't on the ground. Well, that day the steel beams became glazed with ice, and we had to crawl along real easy or we could slip off. It was a terrible sensation because your hands could slip, so you just had to slide along very carefully. There's a term for that; we had to "coon-a-beam." You know, it’s the way a coon clings and moves along a frozen branch. Anyway, it happened only that one time all the rest of the winter. But it was a scary time; I'll tell you.

Chesapeake City’s over-head bridge in 1948

Pete Swyka tells of an incident while working on Chesapeake City’s over-head bridge in 1948

After I left the ferry I worked on the bridge for a while. It was still under construction and I had the job of tearing the paper off of those piers that hold the bridge up. They used forms when they poured the concrete, and they used paper to keep the cement from sticking to the forms. When they took the forms off the paper had to be scraped off. I worked on the scaffolding that they attached to the bolts all the way at the top. They dropped me down and I’d scrape the paper off the piers. I worked on Pier #1, above the water on the South Side.

Well, I worked with a man who was known to have seizures, and he had one while I was up there working with him. I remember that he could play any musical instrument that you handed him. He could also dive into the water and stay under for a long, long time. Well, one day he had a seizure when we were both on an open scaffold at the top of that bridge. All I could do was hold him down till he came out of it. He was twisting his arms, salivating, and foaming at the mouth. It was frightening because there were no side rails on those things. All you had was a twelve foot bed on the bottom, four sets of poles, and one rail across there with nothing between the top and the bottom.

And he was lying there, flailing around with one leg hanging off, so I pulled the leg up next to the other one and swung him around next to the center pipe and held his hands down as best I could until he came out of it. I didn’t want him to fall off and I didn’t want him to knock me off either. I had to slap him on the cheeks to help him come out of it and get him squared away and make sure that he was all right. When I got down from there . . . that was it. I quit then and there. After I got down from there I didn't want any more of that, so I went to work on a tugboat.

Three Luzetsky Brothers who Served our Country

Three Luzetsky Brothers who Served our Country

Nick (deceased) joined the navy just out of school and had basic training at Bainbridge. He was then sent to Virginia where he was assigned to the signal tower. He explained: “My job was to identify all of the ships sailing through there off the bay on their way to Norfolk, Little Creek, and so on. Using lights with coded signals, we had to document where the vessels came from, where they were going, how long they were going to stay, as well as other information. Not long after that the war was over and I was discharged. I caught the Cape Charles ferry, boarded a train to Wilmington, and thumbed it home. The first car that came by picked me up.”

Brother Bill (81) was sent to Korea from San Francisco after basic army training in Camp Chaffee, Arkansas. “It wasn’t too good in Korea, living in bunkers,” Bill pointed out. “I was in artillery, the 29^th Division, I believe, and operated mostly behind the line. When we first landed we got artillery fire right on us. We were relocated right away but could hear the shells whistling in on us. When the war ended we were shipped home across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal. We disembarked in Baltimore where I hitch-hiked home. Sure, I thought about all of us brothers in the service at once . . . but I didn’t dwell on it; it was just something we had to do.”

Alex (deceased), the youngest of the brothers, served in the army during the Korean War but did not leave the States. After basic training at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, he was sent to Fort Carson, Colorado, where he was assigned to the Heavy Mortar Company of the 155^th Infantry. His wife, Betty, said that the army was ready to ship his company into combat when the Korean War ended.

All of our service men and women—people like the Luzetsky brothers—and our current fighting men and women deserve our heartfelt support. We would not be the free nation we are today without their bravery and devotion.

Luzetsky Brothers, Veterans of WW II

Steve and Pete Luzetsky, Veterans of WW II

  

Steve (90) joined the navy and spent his time on merchant ships that supplied the Allies during World War II. His family members described him as a gentle, quiet, and respectful man. Steve told me about his navy adventures. “I was sent to New York to board my first ship and during my tour of duty I saw a lot the world: Africa, Greece, Italy, the Mediterranean Sea, the pyramids, the Sphinx, the Panama Canal, and the Suez Canal to name just a few.

“While aboard the ships we had to always be concerned about German submarines. I remember when a ship in our convoy was destroyed when it hit a mine. It was off to the side of my ship but none of our ships were allowed to stop to help them; no sir, we kept right on going. Our ships had destroyer escorts with us when I served, but some ships still didn’t make it. At the time, the Germans had submarines everywhere. I know that our mother prayed often for us boys. That meant an awful lot to us; maybe that’s why we all came home with no serious injuries.”

        Brother Pete (deceased) was drafted into the army right out of high school and was stationed in Dakar, Africa, for almost three years. His brother, Nick, remembers: “Capt. Pete was in Africa when all of those tank battles took place with Rommel. Remember? He was also stationed in Italy.” Dorothy, Pete’s widow, pointed out: “My husband was an M.P. in the Army Air Force. When discharged he got a job in dredging and in thirty-eight years worked his way up from deckhand to captain. He was sent all over the world on the dredging boats, even as far away as the African coast.”

Mike and Paul, two of eight Lutzetsky brothers who served our country in war time.

Mike Luzetsky and his wife, Jean, served in World War II, Mike in the army and Jean in the WACS. Brother, Nick, explained that while in the army Mike guarded German prisoners of war who were detained in a stockade in Germany: “Actually, none of us brothers like to talk about the war, but one time, while we were hunting, Mike told me that once, when he looked in at the prisoners, he recognized a guy he had known from Chesapeake City. I guess he had gone A.W.O.L and was thrown into the stockade with the Germans. The guy was from our same small town—amazing!”

Mike’s brother, Paul, joined the navy and did his basic training at Bainbridge before he served in the Pacific on a destroyer escort, the U.S.S. Decker. Brother Nick pointed out: “Paul wrote me letters when I was in the navy and told me: ‘Yeah, as gunners we shot down Japanese airplanes.’ That’s all he ever told me, but, you know, he must have seen plenty of action in the Pacific.”

Nick Swyka Receives Long-Awaited Purple Heart

Nick Swyka accepts his medal.

Nick Swyka Receives Long-Awaited Purple Heart

On July 10^th, 2008, Nickolas Swyka, former Chesapeake City resident, was awarded the Purple Heart for wounds he suffered while serving our country during World War II. Major General Frank Vavala spoke of Nick’s valor before pinning on the medal.

Guy Gravino, a service disabled veteran, explained how Nick was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge: “Fearsome fighting continued until the battle’s end on January 25^th,1945, the time frame when PFC Swyka was wounded. On Christmas Day, 1944, while standing in a chow line with fellow troops waiting for their hot Christmas meal, German artillery opened up, sending their own deadly gifts to the Americans they had tangled with for the last 10 days.

“According to Frank Meyer, a medic for the 1^st Bn, 395^th IR, while in that chow line, PFC Swyka was hit by shrapnel in the arm and back. Meyer bandaged PFC Swyka, stopped the bleeding, and gave him a shot of morphine and sulpha drugs to fight infection. PFC Swyka refused to go to the aid station because the 395^th was short of fighting men. Their unit was surrounded, with fighting on all sides. Doc Meyer further explained that they were cold, hungry and scared, but they were family and wanted to stay together. Although late, we assembled here today to thank Nick for his service & sacrifice.”

During an interview Nick said: “I was the last one in the chow line when the Germans started shelling us. Somehow they had spotted us and I ran for cover but couldn’t escape from that shrapnel. I was hit in the cheek, the wrist, and the back. The medic wanted me to go off to the aid station but I told him ‘No! You take care of me right here.’ I couldn’t leave the outfit because we were short-handed. I wouldn’t leave till we could all go together.”

Thus Nick’s wounds were not reported to the proper authorities at the time, therefore the Purple Heart was not awarded. However, over recent years LTG Steven Blum had been working on Nick’s behalf to have his medal presented, and now, after 64 years, Nick’s courage under fire has been recognized.

The impressive ceremony was held at the Middletown Nelson Armory and was attended by Nick’s wife, Mildred, and many family members and friends. Several high-ranking army officers and enlisted men were present to honor Nick’s bravery. Nick acknowledged his award by talking briefly to the appreciative audience, expressing how honored he was to receive his country’s purple heart.