Freedom's Forge (29 page)

“I realize this is a terrible directive on my part,” FDR wrote to Land afterward, “but the great emergency left no options.”

Land called Vickery, who was in the South looking for new shipbuilding sites. Vickery listened and said, “You know that’s impossible.”

“Yes,” Land answered, “all I said was we would try.”
¹⁹

Meanwhile, the search for new sites had taken Vickery to Wilmington, to Panama City, to Savannah and New Orleans. But even if they opened a half dozen new yards, both men knew another problem was looming. Even with Joshua Hendy swinging into production, a growing bottleneck in engines and steel was threatening to shut the entire program down. Looking at the numbers, a discouraged Stacy May broke the news to Donald Nelson at the War Production Board. The Liberty ship program would never hit its goals for March.
²⁰

At the same time, public pressure was growing. Criticism in the newspapers and at the Capitol was flying thick and fast. Rumors circulated that even though the numbers had been reduced, the program was in such chaos that they couldn’t be met.

Land and Vickery were learning what Knudsen had discovered at OPM. The ability to get amazingly quick results simply bred demands for more results, and disappointment when the new ones weren’t achieved. And like Knudsen, Land and Vickery knew that labor problems, plus the shortage of steel, were at the heart of it.

As early as February 1942, Admiral Land had told Congress that strikes in 1941 had cost the Maritime Commission between seven and twelve ships—nearly 150,000 tons of shipping lost as surely as if it had been sunk by U-boats.
²¹
And things were getting worse. In 1942 the CIO and AFL would extend their perpetual battle for supremacy to the shipyards, where clashes over membership turf would divide the workforce and cause major headaches for management, Kaiser included.
^22
*

Then there were the stories of unproductive workers, and absentee ones. Land said bluntly there was “too damn much loafing going on in the shipyards.” Stories were told of managers finding marathon craps games in out-of-the-way corners of the unfinished hulls, and of people having full-time jobs in town and only showing up at the Richmond yard to collect a paycheck. Some said Kaiser’s yards in particular were overstaffed, and that his “soft touch” with labor made him an easy mark with workers and organizers alike. A later Maritime Commission study found that Richmond No. 1 ranked number 33 of 41 shipyards in employee attendance.
²³

Kaiser hit back hard. “The talk about absenteeism has been grossly overdone,” he bellowed to critics. “Let’s talk about
presentism
. My hat is off to the 93 percent
faithful
in the Kaiser-operated shipyards…. With hands and hearts they are fashioning complete victory as surely as if they were on the fighting front.”
²⁴

Eventually Kaiser’s record would silence his critics, because at Richmond Yard No. 2, Clay Bedford was changing how ships were made.

Under the traditional methods of shipbuilding, when a ship’s hull was nearing completion and the deckhouses were being added, swarms of welders, electricians, cutters, pipe fitters, burners, and joiners moved in, out, and around the action to do their job—but also getting in each other’s way. This meant the process of building a ship actually slowed down the closer it got to completion, as Kaiser’s men were finding out.

Edgar and Clay tried various ways to speed up the process. But they couldn’t avoid the fact that the shipbuilding process required doing large numbers of tasks at once, rather than in sequence like Knudsen’s auto assembly line.

Bedford decided there had to be a better way—and the place to start was the Liberty ship’s mid and after deckhouses.

He talked his idea over with Norman Gindrat. Each deckhouse was made up of separate slabs of steel averaging twenty feet long each—the heaviest weighing 72 tons and the lightest 45 tons. Clay told him to create a prefabricating shop where workmen could weld these sections together and build the deckhouses off-site. Then he and Clay would find a way to move those assembled deckhouses and install them complete, onto the hull—like snapping the lid onto a box.
²⁵

What Gindrat came up with was a mammoth 480-foot-long steel-frame shed, with two 90-foot bays with three bridge cranes in each bay, and a 150-foot run out beyond the building where the slabs of steel would be set out—and a vertical clearance below the cranes of 40 feet. Work spaces for the various crafts for outfitting the deckhouses, from joining and pipe fitting to electrical and sheet metal shops, ran along the long sides of each bay.
²⁶

Once it was built, Bedford put Elmer Hann, a veteran shipbuilder Kaiser had recruited from Consolidated Steel in San Francisco, in charge and stood by to watch.

Plates and structural shapes went from the various suppliers direct to the warehouse, and then to the prefab center by flatcar or trailer. There three conveyor belts in each bay were set up to handle three deckhouses at a time. The belt was not a belt at all, but a three-foot-high concrete platform, on which were mounted trolley wheels at two-foot intervals—and on the wheels were the enormous mounted jigs carrying the deckhouse and pulled by a two-drum 10-horsepower hoist at the opposite end.

First the decks were laid out, made of thirty-six steel plates, and double-torched and match-marked to fit. Then the plates were set on an “upside down” jig on the conveyor belt, where they were welded together by two welding machines and a pack of Lincoln 300-amp welders.
²⁷

Then came the beams, stiffeners, and other shapes that were welded in
place, each cut and bent to shape in large numbers ahead of time and stored in the “angle orchard.” Then bridge cranes lifted each deckhouse and turned it right side up and onto a series of jigs, so that the bulkheads, boat decks, bridge decks, house tops—all cut, shaped, and machined ahead of time and stored in racks—as well as piping, plumbing, heating, and electrical wiring, could be installed, station by station, on the belt.
²⁸

By the time the deckhouse reached the end of the conveyor belt, it was complete in every detail, including temporary stiffeners and rigging for hoisting each deckhouse into place in the shipway. Then a retractor conveyor picked it up and jacked it up for a trailer. Each trailer was a Trailermobile weighing eighty-five tons, with thirty-two 10×15 tires. Then a Caterpillar DW10 tractor moved it to the ways, where four high gantry cranes lifted the finished deckhouse and slid it into place. Easier said than done, since coordinating all four cranes to lift at the same time took some planning and skill. But like everything else in the Kaiser yards, practice made perfect.

Bedford soon expanded this technique to include the engine room. All the one hundred sections of piping were prefab, which the pipe fitters worked together in a mock-up of the Liberty engine room, complete with a wooden dummy engine. Welders fastened down the flange at one end of each pipe with a complete weld, but the other ends were only spot-welded so that they could be disassembled, then refitted and welded into place in the actual ship.
²⁹

Assembly-line production had come to America’s shipyards. By August the prefab yard had 2,500 workers, with 42 women welders and burners—and ships were ready that were 95 percent preassembled.
³⁰
The time it took to launch a Liberty ship plummeted, while the man-hours required fell by almost half. The Kaiser yards had already found ways to reduce the time to build a ship from 220 days to 105. Now Clay Bedford was pointing the way to 50 days or less.

At Portland, applying those same preassemblies was transformational. Edgar Kaiser’s tenth ship,
Robert Fulton
, had taken 154 days. In April the
Henry W. Longfellow
finished in 86 days, and in May the
James Whitcomb Riley
in 73. Edgar pushed his team still harder. In July, Hull No. 230, the
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
, got finished in just 43 days.
³¹

Bedford was unwilling to let that record stand. In August 1942, Yard
No. 2 brought out a ship in just twenty-four days. Harold Vickery sent an ecstatic congratulatory telegram, but just as the battle of Guadalcanal was heating up on one side of the Pacific, the battle of the Kaiser shipyards was under way on the other side.

In September, Edgar one-upped Bedford. His assistant general manager, Albert Bauer, found ways to push through the preassembly envelope by increasing production per worker in every department: “More men and equipment are swung into the job,” he explained. “We simply program the erection on a faster schedule.”
³²
On the twenty-third the
Joseph Teal
was finished in just ten days. The day before launching, Edgar called Clay Bedford down in Richmond, barely disguising his glee.

“Why don’t you come up for the christening?” Edgar asked.

“Sorry,” Clay replied. “I’m just too busy down here. Can’t spare the time.”

Edgar said, “Do you want me to call my father and have him order you to be here?”
³³

Clay blanched. He got the message and took the first train up to Portland. He knew there was another, even more important reason he had to be there.

The president of the United States was going to watch the christening.

Roosevelt arrived there after visiting the Seattle Boeing plant and the Bremerton Navy Yard, where five thousand ship workers heard him speak with a hand microphone from his open car. After Bremerton, Roosevelt was excited to see what wonders the Kaisers were performing at Portland. He was not disappointed.

He was greeted by Henry Kaiser himself—“a dynamo,” FDR confessed later to his cousin Daisy Suckley.
³⁴
He shook hands with the man of the hour, Edgar Kaiser, who smiled his father’s smile of confidence. Clay Bedford was there, too, and got a handshake and a brief comment from the president. “I remember you from Grand Coulee Dam, when you were one of the men who showed me around there.”
³⁵

Then the president toured the great yards. His car rolled past the plate storage area, the plate shop and assembly building, and then down to the pre-erection skids onto the ways, where the
Joseph Teal
was waiting.

Roosevelt’s car was parked on a high ramp overlooking the christening
ceremony. The president was mesmerized. As a former assistant secretary of the Navy, he could remember the long, tedious process involved in building the average ship, which Kaiser and his engineers had now cut by almost 90 percent. Out of desolate marshland, they had built, in little more than a year and a half, one of the country’s most dynamic and innovative industrial centers.

Fourteen thousand workers and six thousand onlookers watched as Anna Boettiger tried three times to crack the champagne bottle on the
Teal
’s prow. Finally, on the third try, she succeeded, managing to shower herself and the other dignitaries until “they were soaked to the skin,” said onlooker Daisy Suckley—as the crowd cheered and cheered.

The president spoke. “I am very much inspired by what I have seen,” he said, “and I wish that every man, woman, and child in these United States could have been here to see the launching and realize its importance in winning the war.”

Then it was Henry Kaiser’s turn. “Here beside us is this great craft,” he said, “only ten days from keel laying to launching; and in a few days she will be on the ocean bearing cargo to our allies and our soldiers. It is a miracle, no less—a miracle of God and of the genius of free American workmen.”

Later, when the president’s train pulled away and the goodbyes were done, someone asked Kaiser how long the ten-day record would stand.

“I expect that record to go by the boards in the very near future,” he said.
³⁶

He was right. As Clay Bedford rode back to San Francisco, he was already planning his next move.

Later that week the workers at Richmond No. 2 were getting off the bus and picking up their copies of the shipyard newsletter,
Fore N Aft
, when they found a flyer inside. “What’s Oregon Got,” it read, “That We Haven’t Got?”
³⁷

In the flyer Clay Bedford asked his crews to think of ways to regain the record they had lost to the yards up in Portland. The flyer set the Richmond crews of Yard No. 2, all three shifts, on fire. Bedford got back more than 250 letters, each suggesting ways to speed up construction.

Bedford couldn’t try them all. But he already had the dynamic key, which was prefabrication. All he had to do was speed up the process—
not
of putting together the ship itself, as Edgar was doing, but of pre-assembling the separate sections, so that they could be snapped together almost in sequence, like Lincoln Logs.

By now Bedford had the building of decks down to twenty-three separate preassemblies, which would then be lifted by crane into place and welded together. His engineers were now thinking they could manage to reduce that down to just seven.
³⁸

The superintendent of Yard No. 2 was J. M. McFarland. Bedford asked him point-blank: Did he think they could build a ship in just five days? McFarland charted out the process on paper and passed his calculations on to the production managers, who all agreed five days was achievable. Bedford was elated. There was only one worry. What would President Roosevelt think if the Richmond yards broke the record set by the
Joseph Teal
, the ship whose christening the president himself had supervised? Clay put the problem to Henry Kaiser, who put it to the president’s assistant James Byrnes. Roosevelt was delighted. “Build it,” was his response, “and if it can be built in
one
day, so much the better.”
³⁹

On Saturday, November 7, 1942, the preassembled parts of the “five-day ship,” Hull No. 440, were spread all over the yard. Masts, anchor chains, and deckhouses were stacked up in a confusing pile, ready to be taken down to Ship way No. 1, with more than half the ship’s components already finished. The hull was laid out in five huge double-bottom chunks, the heaviest weighing 110 tons, while the deck units came in 250-ton chunks, with piping, hatches, portholes, radiators, and even washbasins and mirrors all preinstalled. On one side stood the trusty Joshua Hendy engine, all three stories of her. The whole thing looked like an abandoned machinery junkyard.