Virginia Rutland relaxes in her back yard Wednesday with a picture of her parents, Ira and Melba Hess, her sister, Ethel, and herself a few years before World War II when her parents began building Liberty ships for the war effort. (Meredith Spencer The Vicksburg Post)

[12/23/04]It was about this time of year exactly 60 years ago that Ira and Melba Hess sat their two daughters down and explained they would be working for free on Christmas Day.

The memory of that day in 1944 is vivid for Virginia Rutland, one of the daughters who is now retired from the City of Vicksburg after a 21-year career.

She was living in Brunswick, Ga., with her mother and father and sister, now Ethel Tew. Ira and Melba Hess were both working at J.A. Jones Construction Co. shipyard building Liberty ships. Also working at the shipyard was one of Rutland’s uncles, R.C. Belk.

The Jones shipyard was one of many in the United States that built the special ships during World War II. Of the 2,710 crafted between 1941 and the end of the war in 1945, Jones built 99.

The Liberty Ships were conceived early in World War II as a simple design for a large, rugged cargo ship. They were built in pieces and then the pieces were welded together using production-line techniques. As a result, complete ships could be built in a month instead of the normal 18 months. The idea was to build them faster than German U-boats could sink them.

Liberties were the workhorses of the Allies’ cargo fleets and carried all the bullets, beans and other supplies the soldiers and sailors fighting the Axis powers needed.

“He worked in the inner bottom,” Rutland said of her father.

She explained that his specific job was to tack pre-welded parts of the ships way down inside the hull. Later, another welder would come in and complete the seal.

Her mother, Rutland said, worked in the fabrication shop, where she would mark steel plates using templates to show welders where to cut pieces for assembly.

Rutland said her father and mother both grew up in Mississippi and when the war broke out, her father got a job with J.A. Jones Construction Co. building military camps. Following that work, she said, her father worked on camps at what became Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, and in Fort Smith, Ark., and others.

“He worked on one at Raleigh, N.C., and J.A. Jones asked the men there if they would go to Brunswick to the shipyard,” she said, explaining how they moved to the southeast coast of Georgia. “We were up there for 28 months.”

Rutland was about 12 and Ethel was three years younger when they arrived in Brunswick in 1943. They left after the war ended.

In December 1944, many of the Allied leaders believed the Germans were all but defeated. They were taken by surprise when the Germans attacked a lightly defended area in the Allied line in the Ardennes Forest on the German-Belgian border. This made the Liberty ships even more important.

The workers at the Jones shipyard had completed their sixth ship of the year and launched it on Dec. 23, meeting their quota. But they decided to do more. They decided they would build one more ship by the end of the year. Such an effort would require working around the clock, even Christmas.

“They told us they would be working Christmas Day,” Rutland said, explaining the shipyard workers decided they would take no pay for that day’s work. They would be Santa Claus with a gift for the war effort that day.

The company paid the workers separate checks for that day’s overtime. The workers endorsed those checks and returned them to the company, a total of $16,080.

Despite their parents’ working, Rutland said the family had a Christmas celebration.

“We had a little Christmas tree,” she said, holding her hands a couple of feet apart. “And we had Christmas presents.”

After their parents left, Rutland and her sister probably completed their housekeeping chores before heading to the bus stop for a trip to downtown Brunswick.

“They had two movies, the Bijou and the Ritz,” she said recalling the typical program consisted of a episode of a serial, the main movie and the news reels of the day.

And the girls still remember the Christmas their parents worked both for free and to help keep them and their nation free.