In Scranton, The War In Ukraine Breathes New Life Into A 116-Year-Old Arms Factory

SCRANTON, Pa. ― Father Myron Myronyuk, the pastor of St. Vladimir Ukrainian Catholic Church, remembers the generosity of his neighbors when Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine began.

Myronyuk, a native of Western Ukraine who moved to the United States in 2008, said he spent part of the first day of the invasion lighting the altar’s 60 candles, crying and praying. As with other Ukrainian churches, his congregation sprang into action and collected donations of aid to send, filling up three shipping containers’ worth.

“From the first week, we were trying to give support as much as we can, and people were so, so great. [They] brought food, clothes, medical,” he said, his voice maintaining a meaty eastern European accent.

“I experienced how generous American people are, how compassionate they are, how they feel sorry” [for what happened], he said. “And not just saying the words, they say, ‘How can I help?’”

The war in Ukraine has meant more than sympathy in Scranton, and in surrounding Lackawanna County in Northeastern Pennsylvania. As the home of Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, it’s also meant jobs assembling the 80-lb. forged steel casings are crucial to the Ukrainian war effort.

In the presidential race, the war in Ukraine has been the focus of cataclysmic rhetoric, with former President Donald Trump insisting it risks the start of World War III, and Vice President Kamala Harris joining President Joe Biden, Scranton’s best known native son outside of the fictional characters on ‘The Office,’ in portraying it as a crucial front line in battling 21st-century authoritarianism.

But even in a place with ethnic and economic ties to the war, the war in Ukraine appears to remain a mostly back burner political issue locally. In that sense, blue-collar, traditionally Democratic and multiethnic Scranton reflects a larger consensus that this year, politics doesn’t just end at the water’s edge, it barely even gets wet.

A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found just 18% of voters nationally said the Russia-Ukraine war was “extremely important” to their vote, the lowest of 11 issues polled.

Dan Naylor, the Lackawanna County GOP chairman, said there was clear support for the war when it began, but the issue had fallen into the background as the war continued.

“If you drove around and see the [Ukrainian] flags that are out, they’re well-worn because they’ve been out,” he said. “But there haven’t been [any] new flags put out.”

The first thing to know about the ammo plant located a few blocks away from Joe Biden Street in downtown Scranton, population 76,119, is that it doesn’t make complete shells. It just makes steel casings before sending them off to a facility in Iowa, where they are packed with explosives.

“They do the dangerous stuff. We just start the process off,” Richard Hansen, the commander’s representative and head of the ammo plant, told reporters before a recent walk-through of the plant. Hansen has worked for General Dynamics, the plant’s contractor, since 2006.

Hansen is being modest. The work done at the plant is dangerous, as it takes in raw steel bars, slices them into smaller chunks, heats those up to 2,000 degrees so they can be shaped into shells, and then, eventually, machines the casings to tolerances within “thousandths of an inch,” according to Hansen.

The testing and double checking mean that while the shells could in theory be produced in a much shorter time frame, practically it takes several days to get them through the entire process. But the need for caution is great because the consequences of failure are great.

A mistake in the process that is not caught, Hansen said, could result in the death of an entire company of troops in the field.

“That’s what keeps me up at night,” he said.

Hansen himself is a veteran. At 59, he left the U.S. Navy after 24 years in aviation maintenance and after rising to the rank of lieutenant. A gruff, no-nonsense type with closely cropped hair, he refused to be drawn into the speculation over how many shells Scranton and two other sister plants in the area could produce monthly as they try to meet rising demand.

Asked what his production goals will look like next year, Hansen replied simply: “Whatever the government wants.”

What the government wants is more, now, basically. Among Ukraine’s other problems, like its smaller population and resources compared to Russia, is its reliance on the U.S. and NATO allies for the 155mm shells it uses. When U.S. aid slowed to a trickle after being held as a political hostage by congressional Republicans earlier this year, Ukrainian troops reported an incoming vs. outgoing shell mismatch as high as 10 to 1.

Hansen said that as of six months ago, area plants including Scranton were only producing 24,000 shells a month. Now, it’s 36,000. And that’s even before three new machining lines are set to come online at Scranton.

To date, though, the boost in jobs so far from modernization has been “nothing significant,” according to a General Dynamics rep. The factory, which opened in 1908 as a locomotive factory and repair shop, is running three shifts of workers, though, 24 hours a day, except for weekends.

Built in 1938, St. Vladimir is located less than a mile away from the ammo plant. Myronyuk said when he talks with troops from back home, they still say they face shortages.

“That’s why, before they shoot, they want to be sure they have something for tomorrow. That’s why it’s still bad,” he told HuffPost.

Myronyuk has lived with the war intimately since it started in earnest Feb. 24, 2022. As with the other ethnic groups that settled in the rugged valleys of northeastern Pennsylvania, the Ukrainians have left their own imprint, and the church, like Scranton, has seen better days. Myronyuk said his flock numbers about 100 now from a high point of several thousand in its heyday.

“Like other nationalities, Slovak, German, you know, they came for a better life, and they did a great job,” he said.

In the back of the auditorium where the services are being held during the summer, there is a collection of signed battle flags, gifts from members of various Ukrainian military units that have made fundraising appearances at the church. At the end of September, there will be another fundraising dinner at the church, an event that’s drawn around 150 people previously, Myronyuk said.

Despite the support, though, Myronyuk said he felt the war had receded into the background of many people’s lives.

“Everybody’s tired,” he said. But it doesn’t compare with how fatigued the Ukrainians are.

His nephew often had to go to a basement shelter at night because of air raid warnings, he said, and had to stay there for several hours.

“And next day you have to learn something. You’re just exhausted. You didn’t sleep well last night. That’s why this is kind of hitting our people so deep.”

Irish, Italian, German, Polish. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 75% of Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania’s residents traced their ancestry back to one of those four ethnic groups.

Naylor tells the tale of Ernie Preate, a former county district attorney who went on to become the state’s attorney general in the late 1980s.

“When he won, his brother said it wasn’t because he was Italian. It was because his mother was Slavic, and they went to every polka party up and down the valley,” Naylor said.

“Because the Slavic vote, they’re actually a stauncher vote than even the Irish. And that’s saying something.”

The immigrant communities of Scranton remained loyal Democrats for decades, though the Trump era has tested their loyalty. President Barack Obama won 62% and 63% of the vote in both 2008 and 2012 in Lackawanna County, before the Democratic vote share fell to just 50% and 54% in 2016 and 2020.

Now, Naylor said, there probably is more sympathy for the Ukrainians and their plight in the Scranton area than elsewhere, in part because so many residents can trace their ancestry back to Europe.

Some, he said, have migrated from Russia in the last 34 years, with the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. “I’ve heard that, you know. ‘We fought the communists. You guys, you don’t want to know what you’re playing with here,’” Naylor said.

Concerns over costs and the possibility the U.S. will get dragged into a Vietnam-like quagmire are rising, Naylor said. But the main thing is people in Lackawanna County are worried about the same things he said worry most Americans: inflation and unchecked immigration.

“The issues still are the open border and the economy,” he said.

Scranton Mayor Paige G. Cognetti, a Democrat, disagreed.

She said Ukraine remains “very much a live issue” in Scranton and nationally.

“I do think there will be people that will vote in November based on Donald Trump refusing to continue to support Ukraine. I think there are a lot of people for whom that would be catastrophic,” she said, either because their roots are in Ukraine or they just don’t want to see a “World War II scenario.”

“I have not had one conversation here in our community where someone has said we should stop funding Ukraine. It doesn’t matter what party.”

Republican gains in the Trump era have local GOP leaders feeling bullish on their chances to finally unseat Rep. Matt Cartwright, a sixth-term Democrat who has held onto a seat Trump won in 2020. Cook Political Report lists Cartwright’s seat as a toss-up.

Neither Cartwright nor his GOP challenger, Rob Bresnahan, are putting support for Ukraine front and center. Bresnahan’s web site does not mention the war, and Cartwright only mentions he believes the U.S. must stand by its commitments to its allies, “including NATO and Israel.” Cartwright is a member of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus on Capitol Hill and voted in favor of aid to Ukraine in April.

Neither campaign responded when asked by HuffPost if their candidate supported further military aid.

Naylor noted Bresnahan has something previous challengers to Cartwright haven’t: deep ties to the local community.

He became the chief financial officer of his grandfather’s electrical contractor company at the age 19. And while Bresnahan’s name is very Irish, his grandfather’s was not: Kuharchik.

“So he has a Slavic tie, you know?” Naylor said.

“They’re hardworking, rugged people. And good people. But, they go back to the mines, and at that point, the Democrat Party was the party that protected them,” Naylor said.

As an outsider from Oregon who married a Scrantonian, Cognetti said the ties do indeed run deep.

“There’s absolutely a culture here of whether you’re from here or whether you are a transplant,” she said. “It’s something that’s quite endearing in a lot of ways, in that there’s still such a cultural tie to people’s ancestral roots.”

That’s reflected in the voting, she said. While Scranton is blue, the Democrats there tend to be more centrist and will “pop over to the other side” on occasion, she said.

And while there’s long been an “undercurrent” of the wider culture wars, Cognetti said, it may not matter this year.

“They might dip into the anger factory that is Donald Trump,” she said. “But I think people are tired of that.”

The steel that will leave the Scranton plant as ammo arrives in 2,000-lb, 20-foot bars is transported by truck or rail. Once moved inside, they are then cut up into shorter, 15-inch tubes called billets.

Those are then heated to 2,000 degrees for an hour and 15 minutes before being taken out of a large circular furnace by an automated robot. Wearing a flame-retardant jacket cooled by water and moving like the xenomorph from the “Alien” movies, the giant robotic arm lifts each glowing hot billet in its mechanical hand and sends it on its way to the next station. There, the billets are pressed violently into a series of below-floor molds, giving it a bullet-like shape and lengthening it to 30 inches.

After the presses, the part moves on a conveyor belt beneath the plant floor to an inspector. While the billets are still glowing at about 1,800 degrees, the inspector stops the line about every five minutes to grab one with a small hand crane. Once secured, the inspector uses gauges to check the part is the right length and the walls have the right thickness.

After another inspection and an initial machining process, there’s more heating. The billets are reheated to 1,500 degrees for 15 seconds, in a process called “nosing.” Once heated, a press shapes the top end of the casing into a nose cone and the billet begins to look like the artillery shells seen on TV.

“This process is akin to, I don’t know if you remember as a kid, you take a Coke can, cut the top off, and then try to squeeze the Coke can into a nose. Do that without putting any wrinkles in the material,” Hansen said.

Wrinkles or other imperfections would mean the part would fail the next stage, being reheated again to 1,500 degrees before being doused into an oil bath to cool it back down, to harden the steel.

The most visible evidence of the ammo plant’s $418 million modernization efforts, which began even before the war in Ukraine started, are a series of approximately 20-foot long by 10-foot wide booths that would speed up the machining processes before shells are painted and shipped.

The booths, when up and running, will be able to do several processes, saving space by reducing the number of workstations now needed. “Instead of going from one process to another, it’s all done inside one machine,” Hansen said.

Like Scranton itself, like St. Vladimir, the ammo plant has seen better days. Much of the equipment being replaced dates from the 1970s or even earlier. It now employs about 300 people, well down from the 1,500 during its Vietnam era. That’s only enough to rank 38th out of the county’s largest employers.

But Hansen said the plant provides good paying jobs to workers who are proud to work there. Near one of the storage areas, an American flag was painted on a wall at some point during the Korean or Vietnam war, and it has remained untouched.

“Over the decades, the employees who have come since have taken it upon themselves to preserve that art. It’s not a mandate from the government,” he said.

“These are jobs in this area that are good paying jobs, union jobs. The benefits are good. These folks are happy to have these jobs. And they’re proud to do the work and they’re glad to come to work every day. That’s what Scranton’s all about.”