Freedom's Forge (28 page)

The powers that be brought in Admiral Howard Vickery, the Maritime Commission’s head of construction. “Can you do it?” they asked.

Vickery was a large, intense man who was most comfortable with a pipe in his mouth. He looked over the figures. “If I can get to eight million tons in ’42,” he said, “ten will be no problem for ’43.”

It was an astonishing prediction. But like Bill Knudsen, Vickery understood that the real issue was not the numbers but the momentum. Once the yards got up to a certain pace of production, increasing it would be easy. As with a marathon runner, it was the pace that mattered.

Still, existing Liberty shipyards were slammed. New ones would have to be built, and Vickery knew whom to turn to for that. On March 3 he sent seven identical telegrams to Kaiser and the other heads of the Six Companies. He asked each of them to draw up a proposal for construction of a new yard that could start producing ships in 1942. It may have seemed an impossible task, but Vickery concluded, “The emergency demands all within your power to give your country ships.”
⁴

The first telegram he got back was at 11
P.M
. that night, from Steve Bechtel. “We are studying the problem tonight,” it read, “and will give you our sincere best judgment tomorrow.” Steve put his younger brother Kenneth in charge of the task force and gave him twenty-four hours to plan out the yard and find a place to build it. On March 4, Ken showed his brother the results and Steve wired back to Washington. Nine days later the Bechtels had their contract.

The place they had found was in Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, near Sausalito. It was a stretch of deserted land along the shore of Richardson Bay belonging to the Northwest Pacific Railroad. The railroad leased the land to the Bechtels, the Marin County Board agreed to the terms, and on March 28—little more than three weeks after Vickery’s telegram—bulldozers broke ground.

“I’m betting on you fellows,” Vickery told them. “I expect you to produce.” They did. Even with the fierce competition for local labor from Richmond and their own Calship, the Bechtels managed to scrape up enough live bodies to put them to work in the new yard, dubbed Marinship. The marine architect described his supervisor staff as “an orchestra leader, a nightclub proprietor, and a cabinetmaker.” Some of his draftsmen had never drawn a ship before. Many of the workers were disabled.
⁵
Still, with skilled hands on loan from Calship along with booms and equipment, and a crash seventy-hour training program for the rest, the Bechtel brothers were able to lay their first keel before the summer was out. Before 1942 was finished, Marinship would launch five ships just as promised—an astonishing feat even by Richmond standards.

All the same, if the United States was going to meet the desperate new goals, Henry Kaiser’s yards were going to be at the center of the effort.

That suited Kaiser. The month before Pearl Harbor, he and his Todd partners had bought back the Richmond yards from the British. They would be producing for the American cause now. The arrival of war only sharpened his own appetite for work, and his two key lieutenants, his son Edgar and Clay Bedford, were working flat-out, seven-day-a-week schedules to hit the numbers.
⁶

So were their workers. The historian Carlo D’Este’s father worked the graveyard shift in the Richmond yards. He still remembers driving down at night to meet his father, with strings and strings of arc lights brightening up the sky like daylight while hundreds of workers milled around the unfinished hulks.
⁷
A British visitor, the radio commentator
Alistair Cooke, compared them to characters in a Disney cartoon, who “rush forth with welding guns and weld the parts into a ship as innocently as a child fits A into B on a nursery floor.”

Cooke had seen normal shipyards in places like Philadelphia and the Mersey in his own country. He was a bit bemused at how clean and neat Kaiser’s yard was. Everything was laid out with meticulous attention. “Sheets of steel are marked VK2 and MQ3, to indicate to a moron where they fit on a ship,” since these were workers who had never built ships before. Cranes would swing overhead to gather a sheet, lay it down where drillers and fillers would break it up into the parts traced in outline in yellow chalk, then move it on into the lofts where the real work of assembling the ship was done.
⁸

Inside the hull, the noise could be catastrophic to a newcomer. A woman who worked as a welder at Yard No. 1 remembered when the chippers would get under way and two shipfitters would start swinging sledgehammers at opposite sides of a steel bulkhead, “and you wonder if your ears can stand it.” The sound “will seem to swell and engulf you like a treacherous wave in surf-bathing and you feel as if you are going under.” Yet after a few days she became used to it and never gave it another thought—nor thought it was strange that she could sing popular songs at work at the top of her lungs without anyone hearing a sound.
⁹

She grew to deal with it. So did the other welders, chippers, grinders, reamers, flangers, shipfitters, loftsmen, air-compressor operators, bolters, flanger-shrinkers, plate hangers, pneumatic drill and punch and shear operators, and riggers of cranes, machines, and planes—along with forty or so other trade workers who labored to get the plates assembled, the boilers erected and installed, and the ships ready for launching.
¹⁰
It was incredibly dangerous work. The same woman welder remembered having to jump three-foot gaps with a forty-foot drop below, welding torch in hand. She did it, but “my knees were a little shaky under the welding leathers.”

Then there were the swinging scaffolds. Our lady welder never quite had the nerve to try, but others learned to ride up on one scaffold as it rose, then jump to another as it swung past on its way down, without a thought—even though a slight slip meant a neck-breaking plunge to the bottom of the hull. Working out on the far end of what would be
the main deck was like standing atop a six-story building, with no restraints or guardrails. There were electrical wires to trip on or to be electrocuted by; red-hot rivets to drop on a foot or 250-pound-per-square-inch metal presses in which to flatten an unwary hand or finger; plus the hazards every welder faces, of searing burns that leave arms and legs covered with scars.

All this for an average of sixty dollars a week.
¹¹

But the workers came. In 1942 the growth of the Richmond yards was explosive. In the summer of 1941, there were still only 4,000 employees working there, most living in ramshackle shacks thrown up on the barren flats surrounding the yards. Pearl Harbor brought floods of new faces, many from as far away as New York and Boston. By the end of 1942, some 80,000 men and women were employed in the yards; a year later there were 100,000. The Portland yards trailed only slightly behind in numbers. At least 60,000 simply climbed into their cars and drove across the country. Many of them were destitute laborers from the Dust Bowl states, like characters from
The Grapes of Wrath
. When they arrived, they found an entire city being built by Kaiser and his Permanente Shipbuilding Company, complete with restaurants, movie theaters, schools, and hospitals. Eventually Henry Kaiser even began chartering a special train service to bring prospective workers to the Richmond site.
¹²

It was a willing workforce, unionized by prior agreement with the Maritime Commission and the AFL, and backed by a production staff who blinked at nothing. All the same, when Admiral Vickery broke the news to Kaiser and his men that they now were expected to hit 105 days for completing a ship (60 on the ways, 45 for outfitting), their minds boggled. Work on Edgar Kaiser’s first ship,
Star of Oregon
, was begun on May 19, 1941, and delivered on New Year’s Eve: a total of 253 days. How would they ever reach the new totals? But forty-eight hours later, they were signed on.
¹³

Kaiser’s approach was to concentrate on pure production. It was a classic front-end philosophy. He set Clay Bedford on the case, whose teams were already building the new Richmond No. 2, while Edgar was building the brand-new yards on Vancouver Island.

Meanwhile, Edgar’s team was learning rapidly, just as Land had predicted
when he said American industry could cut the production time to just four and a half to six months. They were also learning that the faster they worked, the cheaper the cost. The
Meriwether Lewis
and the
William Clark
came down the slips in January and February 1942, and by the tenth ship,
Robert Fulton
in March, they were down to 154 days. Howard Vickery’s goal was almost in sight.

Kaiser’s men were also learning the importance of reorganizing the supply yard so that the seven hundred tons of shapes and materials, including 50,000 castings, were always on hand when crews were ready to install them, with no pause in the production. They were also discovering the importance of getting the subcontractors to deliver their goods on time, from the propeller shaft, two water-tube boilers, and two anchors, to winches, fans, lockers, compasses, chairs, antiaircraft guns, and the six onboard electric generators. And then there was the mammoth three-cylinder, reciprocating engine, standing two stories high and weighing 135 tons of dark gray, well-oiled steel.
¹⁴

Next to procuring steel plate, the engine became Bedford and Kaiser’s chief headache. Although it weighed 135 tons, the Liberty ship’s engine had an output of only 2500 horsepower. It had long since been outperformed by modern diesel and turbine engines, the ones companies like GM were making for the Navy’s subs and destroyers. It was a relic of a vanished maritime age. But the EC-2 reciprocating engine had one insuperable advantage that made it appealing to Land and Vickery. It could be built fast by a variety of companies and in a variety of conditions. Joshua Hendy Iron Works, of which Henry Kaiser was part owner and whose manager, Charlie Moore, reflected his flat-out, full-speed-ahead business attitude, became the main source for the Kaiser yards, and did it in record time and numbers.
¹⁵
Before 1942 was out, the Hendy plant was building thirty-five EC-2 engines a month, or one every twenty-one hours.

But the centerpiece of the Kaiser effort was Richmond’s Yard No. 2.

In March 1941 it had been a long mudflat running along the Richmond channel, with a large marsh pond standing in the middle. The ink on Kaiser’s contract with Admiral Vickery was barely dry, however, before a tiny clapboard building appeared on the edge of the pond. The building was the field engineer’s office, thrown together in the driving
rain even as Kaiser’s crew were completing their survey of the land. Bedford had put McCoon in charge of construction again, and on April 22, McCoon’s men dug a long drainage ditch to empty the pond. By mid-June they had sunk more than 40,000 piles, 12,000 for the twelve shipways to come and the rest for the massive outfitting docks and buildings where workers and subcontractors would complete the work on getting the hulls seaworthy.

McCoon brought in massive dredges to scour away 2.5 million cubic yards of mudflats in order to create a launching basin, where the completed hulls of Yard No. 2 would be shot out into the channel like bullets from a gun. Each shipway had a set of steel tracks on either side for the cranes that would do the heavy lifting, while huge steel plates were laid out between the shipways on top of a corduroy quilt of timbers laid end to end in the mud. These would provide solid, stable platforms on which the workers and technicians and welders and their supervisors could do their work around the ships—while a system of sliding roofs equipped with arc lights ensured they could work round the clock, in any weather.
¹⁶

Meanwhile, McCoon dumped the silt on the marshy ground east of the basin, to create a base for sheds and materials storage. North of the shipways, the plate shop took shape, a huge gray steel-trussed building with a concrete floor for the four-ton steel plates that would become the hull subsections of No. 2’s first Liberty ships.

When it was done, Richmond Yard No. 2 covered 185 acres with a dozen shipways, each 87 feet wide and 450 feet long—the same width as the shipways Bedford had built for Yard No. 1 but a good 25 feet longer. On September 17, the crews gathered to watch the laying of the first keels in shipways 3, 4, and 5. Henry Kaiser liked to have a little ceremony for events like this, even by remote control from Washington, so more than two thousand workers and managers had gathered for the laying. Richmond’s mayor was there, as was the city’s Chamber of Commerce president, P. N. Stanford. Todd Shipyard flew in Francis Gilbrick all the way from New York—although the dealings between Todd and Kaiser Permanente were about to undergo a radical shift.
¹⁷

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, on December 31, the first No. 2 Yard Liberty ship shot down the slips, the
James Otis
. On board was a Joshua Hendy reciprocal engine, the very first on a Liberty ship.

Richmond’s efficient methods and frantic pace had slashed the assembly time of a Liberty ship down to 80 days. At Oregon, however, Edgar Kaiser cut the time to 71, inspiring Washington columnist Drew Pearson to dub him the nation’s shipbuilding ace. But as German torpedoes sank more and more ships, that was still not fast enough.

On February 19, 1942, there was a tense conversation in the White House bedroom, between the president and Vickery’s boss, Admiral Land. For once, FDR did not beat around the bush, and gave Land the bad news. The truth was the Allies would now need 9 million tons of new ships for 1942, not 8; and a staggering 15 million for 1943.
¹⁸

Land was floored. Until now his entire reputation was based on achieving amazing results with little or no preparation, thanks to men like Kaiser, Bedford, and Moore. But now, precisely because they had succeeded, the bar was being raised to what seemed an impossible level.