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Without a doubt, World War II is the single most important event that changed history in Sunnyvale, the San Francisco Bay Area and all of California. Some people date the beginning of the defense era in Sunnyvale with the arrival of Lockheed Missiles & Space Company in 1956. But defense industry roots were planted much earlier because Sunnyvale has a long history of actively recruiting industry by offering land and labor.

Walter Crossman was a turn-of-the century real estate developer who laid out the town of Sunnyvale (he want to call it "Murphy" for the pioneer rancher Martin Murphy, Jr.). Crossman achieved a certain amount of success with his plan, and what he called the "city of destiny" was born. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he offered free land to San Francisco companies that would establish a business in Sunnyvale. One of the companies that took him up on his offer was the Joshua Hendy Ironworks. It was a foundry that manufactured placer mining equipment and later put out street lamps and other public works fixtures.

Crossman and local businessmen were keenly aware of the impending opening of the Panama Canal. Like several other towns around San Francisco Bay, they envisioned their own deep-water gateway to international trade through the new canal. They wanted to build a deep water port in Sunnyvale.

So when Sunnyvale was incorporated in 1912, its boundaries included a narrow strip of land, extending from the center of town, roughly today’s Murphy Avenue where the train depot is, out to the edge of the bay. For the next fifteen years, different developers tried to create a deep-water seaport there. All those efforts failed, but the strip of land remained part of Sunnyvale.

In the meantime the ironworks prospered for a time and during World War I built steam engines called "up and downers" for cargo ships. But throughout the 1920s and the Depression, Hendy could not even keep a full-time work force, and operated only on demand. When a new order would come in, the whistle at the plant would blast, calling its workers from the surrounding orchards.

When World War II began, some big government suppliers fronted by men like Henry Kaiser and W.A. "Dad" Bechtel discovered the idle ironworks, they purchased it, and during their ownership, Hendy put out a record 754 gigantic Liberty ship engines for the war effort. Its workforce jumped to 7,500 men and women. When the war was over, thousands of workers were let go. Then Westinghouse Corporation purchased Hendy, giving the defense industry a firm foothold in Sunnyvale.

Besides these factors, Sunnyvale sat there with the U.S. Navy and NASA-Ames at its back door. Moffett Field had been commissioned Naval Air Station Sunnyvale in 1933 as home base to a West Coast air fleet of dirigibles. Within two years, both dirigibles assigned to Moffett had crashed and the Navy relinquished the base to the Army Air Corp. NASA was established to carry out aeronautical research at the same time that the Army had jurisdiction over Moffett.

With the start of World War II, the Navy reclaimed the base and NASA continued aeronautical research. The natural by-product of the military operations at Moffett and research at NASA were the defense-related businesses that grew up around the base.

So available land, the U.S. military and the space agency, along with Westinghouse all combined to make Sunnyvale attractive to the emerging defense industry or what President Dwight Eisenhower called the "military industrial complex." So when the Southern California defense contractor Lockheed was looking for a location in the early 1950s, it chose Sunnyvale. It built permanent quarters in 1956 near Moffett Field just outside the boundaries of Sunnyvale.

In the 1950s, California state law required that land could be annexed to a city or town only if it was contiguous, or touching the town boundaries. Crossman’s narrow strip of land, Sunnyvale’s irregular borders, allowed it to quickly and legally annex thousands of acres. Sunnyvale successfully annexed the Lockheed property, gaining all the tax dollars generated by the company. Neighboring Mountain View sued Sunnyvale, attempting to annex the Lockheed land for itself, since the area had been served by the Mountain View School District. The judge ruled in favor of Sunnyvale because of its boundaries set early in the century, and rejected Mountain View’s position.

In 1960 in addition to Moffett Field, NASA and its suppliers and support industries, Sunnyvale Air Force Station (later renamed Onizuka Air Force Base) was established adjacent to Moffett Field as a top-secret facility and remains there today, more commonly known as the "Blue Cube."

Considering the amount of military and defense work going on in Sunnyvale during in the Cold War and Vietnam War eras (Lockheed manufactured the Polaris and Poseidon missiles and a variety of rockets. Westinghouse supplied the launch tubes for Trident submarines), there was almost no vocal war protests. Part of the reason might be the secrecy under which these businesses operated.

The "Blue Cube" had no windows. Co-workers at most of the defense and aerospace companies did not know what the person in the next office or next cubical was even working on. The companies did extensive background checks on employees and their family members and instilled a sense of paranoia. To this day many former employees of the defense contractors hesitate to talk about the projects they worked on thirty or forty years ago.

Military spending was drastically cut by the Federal Government in the middle 1980s. When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the Cold War was officially over, massive job lay-offs plagued defense workers. The Navy withdrew from Moffett Field in the 1990s and although it is occupied by NASA, the precise fate of the base remains in question. Many defense workers chose to look for jobs at the nearby high tech companies of Silicon Valley.