U.S. At War: 10,000 X 10,000

The Maritime Commission met the gigantic need for ships by multiplying an already fabulous assignment. Last week the Commission let contracts for 258 more merchant ships. Week before, the Commission upped its schedule to 20,000,000 vital tons, 1,800 cargo vessels, almost as big a tonnage as that of the entire pre-war British Fleet—to be built in two years.

Out of one of the Maritime Commission’s offices in Washington, presided over by Rear Admiral Emory Land, poured plans, surveys, orders, contracts. The history of World War I shipping was the effort to revive the ghost of a dead industry. The job this time was on a vaster scale. Six years ago, the U.S. cargo-shipbuilding industry was mackerel-dead; now, on paper anyway, U.S. ships were thick as herrings.

The job involved hundreds of more ways, labor running into the hundreds of thousands (850,000 by the end of the year), an estimated 6,000,000 tons of steel a year (14% of the nation’s annual steel capacity), buildings, machine tools, engines, multitudinous fittings, parts, precision instruments by the freight-carful. The job involved not only freighters but ore carriers, tugs, tankers. It involved priorities and allocation problems, as naval building also exploded into new, titanic activity. It meant a twentyfold increase of the 1939 rate of building by the end of 1942. It meant the mobilization of the country’s shipbuilding brains.

One such brain was that of William Francis Gibbs. His firm of Gibbs & Cox, naval architects, had designed yachts, the luxurious “Santa” liners of the Grace Line, slick, sleek destroyers for the Navy. For the Maritime Commission’s merchant fleet tall, bony, bespectacled Mr. Gibbs had adapted the design of a British freighter, a little ugly duckling of 10,000 dead-weight tons. Parts were standardized for mass production. The plan, which the Maritime Commission adopted, called for simple reciprocating engines, fittings, gears, pumps (all interchangeable) to be made from coast to coast, shipped, fitted into place at the yards.

“E” for Excellent. This was one answer. The next had to come from builders. On a frozen marshland in South Portland, Me., Todd-Bath had laid out a yard in mid-winter of 1941. Six months later the Maine builders laid the first keels of a British contract for 30 of the British prototypes, launched the first two by Dec. 20. Todd-Richmond in California, with 30 more to build for England, had one launched, delivered and bustling off to Britain ten months after signing the contract.

The British jobs were curtain raisers. The Commission’s Liberty shipbuilding soon got under way. First to be delivered: the Patrick Henry from the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard in Baltimore. An endless brood of Liberty ships, unbeautiful but worthy, began to plop into the waters. The fabulous Henry J. Kaiser (dams, concrete, magnesium) spat on his hands, went to work at Portland, Ore. Under Kaiser’s son, Edgar, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the Oregon Shipbuilding Corp. yards were launching two ships a week by February 1942. By the middle of March the yard had launched 20, delivered nine, sent a tenth ship on her trial run. Award: a Navy pennant emblazoned with the famed “E” for Excellence.

By summer the Kaisers will have added twelve more ways on the other side of the Columbia River in Vancouver, Wash., ten more on Swan Island, will have a total of 33 ways in three gigantic Northwest yards working night & day to float some 290 ships by the end of 1943. In California, the Kaisers now operate three more yards.

In New Orleans, brash, thundering Andrew Jackson Higgins, who has built speed runners, tugboats, barges, Navy PTs, last week took an order for 200 more ducklings. These were more answers.

“C” for Complaints. But it was not all excellent, and there were still more questions than answers. The Maritime Commission was belabored for not charting its all-out program sooner, for not utilizing all available shipways. Companies were accused of grabbing orders just to keep a comfortable backlog. Labor was lambasted for demanding double time for holiday work, for refusing to work ten-hour shifts. (Last week 1,000 workers at Richmond [Calif.] shipyards perversely staged a one-day walkout because they wanted ten-hour shifts instead of eight-hour.)

“B” for Bottlenecks. As the program expanded, bottlenecks developed. One was in supervisory labor (foremen). One reason for slowdown rumors was the time lost because green men had to stand around waiting instruction. Many skilled workers had to be used as teachers. In actual operations one supervisor had to handle as many as 10 to 15 green hands.

Most serious bottleneck was among subcontractors. Many hulls slid down the ways, then waited months for subcontractors to deliver propulsion machinery, ventilating & electrical equipment, pumps, the dozen-and-one other vital innards of a modern cargo vessel. The supply of steel had West Coast builders worried, too. Said a spokesman for the Kaiser yard: “They don’t realize back East how much we need that steel. They don’t realize how fast we can turn out ships in Portland.”

But men were finding answers to those problems. Time lags caused by shortages were being cut. For wide sheared-steel plate, now running short, a narrower plate produced in strip mills was substituted. Subcontracting was tackled hard by men like bull-shouldered, 300-lb. Charles E. Moore. A year ago, seizing on the bankrupt Joshua Hendy Iron Works, a dilapidated foundry in the middle of a pear orchard near Sunnyvale, Calif., Moore cleared off 34 acres of trees, put up 300,000 square feet of buildings, began to turn out mighty, two-story high, 271,000-lb., triple-expansion engines for the Liberty ships. Enough Hendy engines will have been produced by the end of 1942 to drive 1,000,000 tons of cargo shipping.

In some respects the whole vast program rated an E. Speed record of World War I Hog Island ships: 234 days from keel laying to commissioning. For Liberty ships: 105 days.

Speed was the terrible necessity. Perhaps the worst mistake to date has been in underestimating the urgency and the size of the requirements, which Mr. Roosevelt and the Maritime Commission have been forced to revise again & again, always upward.

Six months ago military experts estimated that 10,000,000 tons of shipping would be needed to supply 5,000,000 troops for a war in Europe. To supply troops fighting simultaneously in Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania, the Wall Street Journal figured, “may require more than 30,000,000 tons of American Shipping.” Up to March 1, the rate of actual production was not enough to fill even last summer’s comparatively modest schedule. And Hitler’s sharks in the Atlantic ripped open vessels almost at the rate they were launched.

The ships were there—in men’s minds, on drafting boards, in molten pig rolling out of blast furnaces, in mold lofts, in shops where steel was twisted and wrenched into shape, on ways, alongside docks getting fitted out and smeared with the last daub of grey war paint. Some were on the high seas. Into Alexandria, Egypt, last week steamed the Patrick Henry, after a maiden voyage that took her around South Africa, through the Red Sea and the Suez into the Mediterranean, with 10,000 tons of war supplies.

Before the war is over there must be ten thousand times ten thousand.