From the archives of The Palletizer, the U.S. Navy’s wartime materials handling magazine, a story that industry has largely forgotten.
It took thirty seconds for the young man to get into a jam. He was at a U.S. wartime naval ammunition depot, tasked with something straightforward: drive a loaded fork truck across a loading platform, enter a box car, and deposit the pallet cleanly inside. Within half a minute, he had steered too sharply on the bridgeplate, wedged the machine against the car bulkhead, and was hopelessly stuck. The load had jammed; the truck was immovable. A maintenance crew came to sort out the mess.
Then, so the story was recounted, a woman climbed onto the same truck. She loaded thirty-two pallets into that box car before the hour was up. In doing so, she saved dozens of man-hours that would otherwise have been spent throwing boxes in by hand. She did not do it with special training, unusual physical strength, or years of experience. She did it because she had been taught properly, and the man had not.
That contrast between two operators, one machine, one hour, thirty-two pallets appeared in a 1944 issue of The Palletizer, the U.S. Navy’s now-obscure wartime materials handling magazine. The story is told in an article called “Training Tells.” It was not presented as a novelty or a curiosity. It was presented as evidence that fork truck operation was a learned skill, not a natural gift, and that the assumptions about who could learn it were badly wrong. In a nutshell, it helped underscore the enduring proposition that operator training matters.
A Machine Nobody Knew How to Use
By 1944, the fork truck had been a commercial reality for roughly twenty years. It’s deployment was slowly gaining acceptance across American industry in the 1920s and 1930s, used in factories, warehouses, and rail yards. But operators remained, in an important sense, undertrained. Most drivers learned by watching someone else, by trial and error, by figuring out through minor accidents and near-misses where the limits of the machine actually were.
The war changed the stakes of that approach. When the Bureau of Ordnance set up its Materials Handling Laboratory at Hingham, Massachusetts, and began palletizing the Navy’s ammunition supply, fork trucks went from useful industrial equipment to critical military infrastructure. A truck out of service was ammunition not moving. A damaged load was a safety incident, a delay, and a cost. An undertrained operator was a liability the program could not afford.
“Training Tells,” published in The Palletizer in May 1944, made the argument directly. A seven-thousand-pound forklift moving at six miles per hour through a warehouse full of live ammunition was not a machine to be handed to someone with a few casual instructions and a wave goodbye. “Awkward, unskilled operation destroys usefulness,” the article warned, “and often transforms the relative complexity of a mechanical device into a handicap and a danger.”
The Women Nobody Expected
The manpower problem arrived fast. As Alvin Stauffer documented in his 1948 Quartermaster Corps monograph on wartime supply operations, the winter of 1942 to 1943 brought a civilian manpower shortage so severe that some depots were forced to hire women, older men, and high school pupils to keep operations running. The men who had been running forklifts were going to war. More forklifts were being produced and sent to production facilities. Someone else had to run them. But who would that be?
At a war plant whose name The Palletizer did not publish, a training program was developed specifically for a workforce of women. The magazine described these candidates in the language of its time: women in their mid-thirties with families, chosen, it said, for steadiness and careful habits rather than physical strength or prior experience. That framing tells us something about the assumptions of 1944 as much as it tells us about the operators themselves. The qualities being praised, such as patience, precision, attention to detail, were being attributed to domestic role rather than individual competence. What the program actually demonstrated, however, was something simpler and more important: that when the right people were given proper instruction, the fork truck did not care about their gender, age, or domestic situation.
An article in the magazine called “Made, Not Born” described what the program found. These operators, once properly trained, were not merely adequate substitutes for the men they had replaced. In many respects they outperformed them. Their accident rates were lower. Their damage rates were lower. Their turnover was lower.
Physical attributes were also evaluated. “Good vision is important in fork truck operation,” the article noted. “Training is wasted on an employee with poor eyes.” The screening process, which tested vision, mechanical aptitude, and mental alertness, was designed to find candidates who could learn the skill. It found them, in large numbers, among women who had never previously operated industrial machinery.
Emil Holzwart, the industrial engineer who wrote about his decades in industry, noted the same pattern across multiple installations. Women, newly entering industrial workplaces during the war, took over machine operations once held by men. At pallet manufacturing plants, they filled the drill jig and carriage bolt stations. In warehouses and loading docks, they climbed onto fork trucks and learned to tier, to stow, to load boxcars to capacity.
What Training Actually Did
The productivity numbers tell the larger story. Stauffer calculated that between the third quarter of 1943 and the second quarter of 1945, the average tonnage handled per worker per month across Quartermaster depots more than doubled, rising from 101 tons to 212 tons per person per month. This happened during the precise period when the workforce was shifting toward women, older men, and less experienced workers. The gains were not despite that workforce. They were partly because of how that workforce was trained. And to be fair, it was also partially due to more forklifts in use as wartime production scaled. That does not diminish, however, the accomplishments of those who were trained to maintain production and shipments.
The estimated saving was $80 million in wartime wages, work that would have required far more manual labor under the old methods, now accomplished by smaller and less experienced workforces operating machines they had been taught to understand. Stauffer acknowledged the irony: productivity surged even as depots “suffered the loss of thousands of young men as a result of the Selective Service Act and were forced to surmount the serious difficulties involved in the employment of workers of lower caliber.” That phrase, “lower caliber,” was his. It reflected the prejudices of the era. The productivity figures told a different story.
The training programs documented in The Palletizer were remarkably sophisticated for their time. At Naval Supply Depot Bayonne, New Jersey, candidates underwent hearing tests, Keystone Telebinocular visual assessments, physical coordination tests adapted from the American Automobile Association driver screening, foot-reaction timing, and written examinations covering mechanical aptitude and mental alertness. Those who passed received four three-hour instruction periods covering mechanical construction, operating controls, palletized stowing, carloading, and shiploading, followed by a formal practical examination on a 200-by-70-foot paved testing area marked with painted lines to simulate warehouse aisles, box car doors, and freight car positions. Only those who passed with 86 percent or better received a badge and permit card authorizing them to operate.
At the Naval Ammunition Depot on Mare Island, California, the one-week training course worked through five scored practical problems: obstacle courses, narrow-aisle maneuvering, perpendicular pallet placement, freight car loading, and high stacking with loose cases. Trainees were not considered ready until they passed an examination requiring a grade of at least 72. Seventy-five percent achieved it on the first attempt. These were not casual afternoon orientations. It was structured training around the recognition that forklift operation was a learned skill with physical, perceptual, and cognitive components, and that the machine did not care about the background of the person behind the controls. It cared about whether that person had been taught correctly.
The Lesson the Industry Took Decades to Rediscover
The programs documented in The Palletizer in 1944 and 1945 anticipated requirements that would take decades to become industry standard. ANSI B56.1 began formalizing powered industrial truck safety rules in the late 1960s, and NIOSH published a detailed forklift operator training outline in 1978 that codified many of the same elements the Navy had been practicing thirty years earlier: defined instruction, supervised practice, testing, and documentation. OSHA’s revised powered industrial truck standard in 1998 finally made formal operator evaluation and certification legally mandatory across American industry.
What the women of 1944 demonstrated, and what the Navy’s training programs proved statistically, was that fork truck competence was teachable, measurable, and not inherently connected to prior industrial experience, physical strength, or the domestic circumstances of the person being trained. The fork truck did not know the difference. It was the training program that made the difference.
A Story Worth Recovering
The Palletizer ran from 1944 through February 1946, published monthly by the Naval Ordnance Materials Handling Laboratory at Hingham, Massachusetts. Later in 1946, the magazine was privatized by Norman Cahners, the naval officer who produced it. The Navy version was never widely distributed outside military and industrial circles, and it has been largely forgotten since. The only known complete set I know about is archived in the basement of Baker Library at Harvard Business School.
The women it described, the ones who loaded thirty-two pallets in an hour, who passed the Bayonne certification exam, who managed their own trucks and reported their own defects and kept America’s ammunition moving while the men who had done those jobs were overseas, are largely overlooked in the historical accounts. Most of them probably never thought of themselves as pioneers. They were doing a job that needed doing, on a machine they had been taught to use. That, as it turns out, was the whole point.
This article draws on The Palletizer (1944–1946), published by the Naval Ordnance Materials Handling Laboratory, U.S. Naval Ammunition Depot, Hingham, Massachusetts; and Alvin P. Stauffer, Quartermaster Depot Storage and Distribution Operations, Historical Section, Office of the Quartermaster General, 1948. A selected collection from The Palletizer is currently being prepared and will be published later in 2026 as Pallets and Progress, Volume II.
Further Reading
Pallets and Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922-1945
