Elizabeth L. Reilly

Elizabeth L. Reilly was born in December 1926 in Bayonne, New Jersey. On December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor, she was a junior at Port Richmond High school on Staten Island. Reilly remembered hearing news of the attack on the radio and witnessing panic among her friends. During her senior year, most of the boys in her high school joined the military; Reilly recalled that there were no boys to go to the prom with. She and her friends ended up going as a group with three young sailors. Reilly had twenty-two cousins who served in the war, and she remembered writing to them frequently, as well as to other men in the service.

Reilly graduated from high school and found a job, along with her aunt, at Elco boat company in Bayonne, New Jersey. She worked on building PT (Patrol Torpedo) boats, using electric buttons that would turn the boat upright to be finished, and typed the specifications. During World War II, New Jersey women faced opportunities and challenges as they were absorbed into the massive workforce the industrial state needed to fuel America’s war machine.

Women joined the ranks of employees on assembly lines and in manufacturing and even management jobs, filling the void left by departing husbands, brothers, sons and boyfriends. By the end of 1942, seventy-six percent of Bell Telephone employees were women. “Rosie the Riveter” Jersey girls filled factories, and by 1943, most of the production workers on the Avenger torpedo bomber assembly line at the General Motors Eastern Aircraft Division in Ewing Township were women. Reilly would be classified as a “Rosie the Riveter” for her wartime employment. The Elco job was initially supposed to be summer employment prior to her enrollment in Pace University, but she ended up staying there until the end of the war.

During her interview, Reilly recalled the story of John F. Kennedy’s PT 109 being struck by a Japanese ship, stranding him and his crew on an island in the Pacific. JFK carved an SOS into a coconut and sent it out via local natives to a nearby base, where an Australian read the coconut and dispatched a PT commander to the rescue. Reilly met that officer, Bud Riley, at a huge PT reunion in 2002. She also mentioned that a PT boat rescued General MacArthur and his family from the Philippines.

When the war ended, Reilly’s job abruptly ended as well. She said she never even had a chance to say goodbye to the women she worked with. Reilly later had a job where she worked for Walter Folger Brown, who had been U.S. Postmaster General during the Hoover administration. The building she worked in was later torn down to build the World Trade Center. Reilly has given speeches at reunions, local schools, including Colts Neck High School in New Jersey, and several public libraries. She believed that the youth would respond the same way they did back then, if there was another war now. Reilly was happy to see that the war is being shown in the media and taught in schools.

On August 2, 1943, as PT 109 was running silent to avoid detection, it was struck by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Traveling at 40 knots, the destroyer cut PT 109 in two. The entire crew was thrown into the dark waters. Kennedy towed injured crew member McMahon 4 miles to a small island to the southeast. All eleven survivors made it to the island after having spent a total of fifteen hours in the water. After four days on the island, with the help of a message on a coconut carried by local islanders to an Australian spying on the Japanese, they were finally rescued on August 8th.

Elizabeth L. Reilly lived to the age of 91. She died on February 22, 2018.

Additional Resources:

• PT Boats of World War II: From Home Front to Battle
• John F. Kennedy and PT 109