Kilroy…

Posted on by April 30, 2013

KILROY WAS HERE

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He is engraved in stone in the National War Memorial in Washington, DC- back in a small alcove where very few people have seen it. For the WWII generation, this will bring back memories. For you younger folks, it’s a bit of trivia that is a part of our American history.

Anyone born in 1913 to about 1950, is familiar with Kilroy. No one knew why he was so well known- but everybody got into it, I even remember seeing him around public places in the late 60s…

So who the heck was Kilroy?
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In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, “Speak to America”, sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy, offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article. Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had evidence of his identity.

‘Kilroy’ was a 46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework and got paid by the rivet. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn’t be counted twice. When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would erase the mark.

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Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters.

One day Kilroy’s boss called him into his office. The foreman was upset about all the wages being paid to riveters, and asked him to investigate. It was then he realized what had been going on. The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn’t lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk. He continued to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added ‘KILROY WAS HERE’ in king-sized letters next to the check, and eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message.

Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks. Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. With the war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn’t time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy’s inspection “trademark” was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the yard produced.

His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South Pacific.

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Before war’s end, “Kilroy” had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo. To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that someone named Kilroy had “been there first.” As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.

Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always “already been” wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arc de Triomphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon.

As the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI’s there). On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!

In 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam conference. Its’ first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide
(in Russian), “Who is Kilroy?”

To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up as a playhouse in the Kilroy yard in Halifax, Massachusetts.

And the tradition continues…
image005I do know that ‘we’ continued that tradition while I was in service, and I do remember seeing “Kilroys” all over the world, some of them obviously dating to WWII.
h/t JP

Comments

Kilroy… — 24 Comments

  1. I remember Kilroy, but I never had a clue as to it’s origins. Very cool.

  3. It’s a little known fact that “Bubba” is Kilroy’s much younger brother. The fact that Kilroy went everywhere and that they very closely resemble each other explains why “everyone knows Bubba”.

  4. I don’t believe I was ever at a duty station over my whole career that I did not run into Kilroy on some piece of gear or in some hidden corner. It’s good to know he’s still on duty watching over our troops!

  6. That’s awesome! I’ve never heard the origin either but I do remember noticing that Kilroy had been to the Mogadishu airport in Somalia before we landed there Dec. 9, 1992 😉

  7. I was born in ’52. Didn’t see much Kilroy. “Who is John Galt?” was emblazoned on the RR overpass by my high school, though.

    gfa

  8. Kilroy had been in the bowels of the ’44 tin can on which I served, long before I got there. I’d heard some of what you reported here, but thank you for the added info.

  9. I always wondered what the origins of that was..now I know! thanks for the history lesson…

  10. Great story, and yes, I’ve seen a few over my years in the service.

  12. Love your blog and check almost daily. Here’s a website with more information on Kilroy, WWII and the heros that served in that struggle. Great stuff!

    http://www.kilroywashere.org/index.html

    This gent (Pat Tillery) has been trying for about a decade to get the USPS to issue a postage stamp to honor WWII vets without much success I’m afraid.
    Dano

  13. I’ve seen Kilroy in WWII vintage barracks on Camp Pickett … despite 30 years years of repainting. Someone maintains the image. Sense of humor? Tradition? Who knows.
    Also found Kilroy in the fore-stocks of an M-16 and under the butt plate of a Lend Lease M-1917 my Uncle was restoring.

  14. Re Kilroy at the WWII memorial, when I first found it I remember marveling that it seemed to be the only engraving that is backfilled with black coloring, making it look even more like heavy pencil, charcoal, or crayon. I don’t remember seeing any other engraving at the entire monument with that characteristic.

  17. I have read this before and am very familiar with Kilroy. But the one I remember most from my generation is Jodie. “Ain’t no need in going home…Jodie’s got your gal and gone. Sound off, one, two…”

  20. This is the type of thing that should be in a sidebar in history textbooks. Sadly most of the sidebars seem to be saved for, “Sure, the Nazi were murdering Jews by the trainload but Americans were just as bad.”