Freedom's Forge (43 page)

“No one will deny that speed is needed in the construction and delivery of ships,” the
Journal of Commerce
solemnly opined. “However, no matter how speedily a ship is delivered its worth is practically nil if its plates crack.”
²²

The Maritime Commission also weighed in, with Admiral Vickery flying out to Portland in the middle of a snowstorm the day after the accident. Realizing the seriousness of the problem, he asked the civilian American Bureau of Shipping to appoint an independent subcommittee to investigate. What they found caused a sigh of relief—at least at first. The bureau’s experts found that the accident was the result of “an accumulation of an abnormal amount of internal stress locked into the structure by the processes used in construction,” including defective welding. They concluded “closer control of welding procedure … will prevent a recurrence of such major failures.”
²³

Vickery made the changes. He canceled the use of automatic welding machines on main strength points, ordered crack arresters to be installed at key junctures in the ship’s joints, and mandated design changes including separating the bulwarks from the top of the hull and
bridging the gap with riveted stiffeners. The
Schenectady
was hauled out of the silt, repaired and refloated, and went on to a long, distinguished career as a tanker.
²⁴

Meanwhile, the Liberty ships kept cracking.

The public and Congress began to demand answers. Was it really poor welding, as the Bureau of Shipping claimed? Was it defects in the steel? the Truman Committee wanted to know. Or was it something else Kaiser was doing in his haste to build ships that was making them unsafe? And the headlines blared,
ANOTHER SHIP FALLS APART
.

Some suspected a whitewash of the politically popular Kaiser. John Green of the CIO’s Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers angrily asked, “Has the Maritime Commission revealed all of the instances of Kaiser-built ships cracking up?”
²⁵
Kaiser fired back that ships owned by the steel companies themselves had suffered the major cracks, and “we likewise have had some others, which have been minor ones.” It was also pointed out that cracks were appearing on riveted ships, but the suspicions still fell on the welding—and on Kaiser.
²⁶

That July a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries weighed in, chaired by a freshman congressman from Washington State named Henry M. Jackson—“Scoop” to his friends. Jackson pointed out that only two out of more than a thousand Liberty ships had actually been lost, with no loss of life. Neither of the two,
Thomas Hooker
and
J.L.M. Curry
, had been built in Kaiser yards. The Truman Committee cleared Kaiser of any malfeasance and pronounced the Liberty ship “the truck horse of the fleet.”
²⁷
No one suggested stopping the building program, let alone halting Kaiser’s own operations.

But rumors continued right to the end of the war, and afterward. With wartime censorship, who knew how many ships were lost the government
wasn’t
telling us about?

In the winter of 1943–44, there were still more cracks, including several from Kaiser’s Portland and Vancouver yards. One mariner said, “You could hear them crack like gunshots. And the cracks, once started, run like a woman’s stocking.”
²⁸

The fact was, no one knew exactly what was wrong, until many years later. The Bureau of Shipping’s final word on the subject was
published in 1947, when it became clear the problem wasn’t Kaiser’s welds but the steel they held together. The Bureau found that notches in certain welded ships tended to crack in the icy cold waters of the North Pacific and Arctic, due to rapid temperature change. The steel of the day suffered from a phenomenon known as “embrittlement,” and was vulnerable to cracking under low-temperature, high-load conditions, and with constant rolling stress—like a rolling ship. And since so many of Kaiser’s ships had served duty in the frigid North Atlantic and Pacific, they had been particularly vulnerable. One such ship, the Portland yard’s
John P. Gaines
, had sunk in the North Atlantic with a loss of eleven hands in December 1942 before anyone knew anything about cracking.
²⁹
Another fifteen sailors died when the
John W. Straub
broke apart in Arctic waters and went down in 1944.

Twenty-six deaths out of the tens of thousands of sailors who sailed in Liberty ships and out of the thousands who died in ships sunk by enemy submarines and aircraft and surface ships, 8 ships lost out of 2,744 made. Meanwhile, hundreds of other Libertys continued to sail, day in and day out, for two decades after the war.

Not a bad record for a ship that had been designed to be expendable from the start, and which had set off such a storm of controversy for two years.

Yet for Henry Kaiser himself, the cracking controversy was sobering. There was a price to be paid for being the most prominent businessman of the war. It made you the first to take the blame. He soon found this out when he ventured into the other boom industry of the war effort, aviation.

By 1942 annual American airplane production reached 47,873, fast approaching the 50,000 Roosevelt had laid down as a fantastic dream two years earlier. With Ford putting out B-24s at Willow Run and General Motors Grumman Wildcats and TBMs in Baltimore and Trenton, it was no surprise that Henry Kaiser would conclude that making airplanes was his inevitable destiny.

After all, it had been his dream when he first landed in Washington in the summer of 1940.
³⁰
Then came the Liberty ship contract, and
Kaiser got distracted. But in 1941 he was thinking in that direction again, this time about cargo planes—airborne versions of the Liberty ship. All he needed was a partner who knew something about planes, and by September 1942—the same month the Maritime Commission announced the Liberty ship program had built 488 vessels in a single year—he thought he’d found him: Howard Hughes.

Hollywood tycoon and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes would later become an American icon, a symbol of wealth gone wrong. But in 1942 he was a well-known private aviator and head of Hughes Tool Company, a California-based concern that had racked up a number of important defense contracts. The Navy Aeronautics Board’s George Spangenberg, who met Hughes in early 1944, found him “a very competent engineer” with a wide-ranging knowledge of aeronautics as well as practical flying.
³¹
Like Kaiser, Hughes was a maverick, and like Kaiser, he was a man who dreamed big. And if Kaiser saw in Hughes an expert aviation industry insider whose brain he could pick while finding a project begging for joint investment, Hughes saw in Kaiser the man who could bankroll his most cherished project: building the biggest airplane in the world.

Boeing had shown the way with its four-engined bombers, first the B-17 and then the biggest and most complex of all, the B-29. Together with Consolidated’s B-24, they ruled the skies of Asia and Europe as offensive weapons. Donald Douglas had made the big cargo plane a reality, first with his twin-engined C-47, the most ubiquitous airplane of the Second World War, and then his four-engined C-54 Skymaster, of which twelve hundred were made for the Army Air Forces and the Navy.
³²

Glenn Martin had carried the concept a step further with the JRM-3 Mars, a gigantic flying boat that could carry almost 100,000 pounds of cargo across the Atlantic Ocean—far above the reach of German U-boats. The Mars had its maiden flight on November 5, 1941, and seemed to be the last word on cargo-carrying megaplanes.
^†

Hughes, however, intended to outdo them all. He envisioned a plane with not four or even six but
eight
Pratt and Whitney R-4360 4000-horsepower engines and a wingspan of 320 feet—an entire football
field. Taking off from water like a seaplane, the Hercules (as he dubbed it) would carry one hundred tons of cargo, or 750 men or a Sherman tank, over a transoceanic distance at 20,000 feet—nothing less than a flying Liberty ship, in effect.

To Kaiser, the image was irresistible. There had been some talk at the War Production Board of giving him a contract to build the Martin plane, but he jumped instead at Hughes’s plane. “These ships could land 500,000 fully equipped men in England in a single day,” he enthused to
Time
. “The next day they could fly over again with 70,000 tons of fresh milk, beefsteaks, sugar and bombs.”
³³
He learned that General Hap Arnold had turned Hughes’s superplane down flat—but then, Arnold had turned down Kaiser once as well. He heard aviation executives like Donald Douglas and Jack Northrop tell him the idea was insane—but then, traditional shipbuilders had said the same thing when he set out to build Liberty ships.
^‡

He declared that he and Hughes could have five thousand megaplanes in the air inside of two years, even though Consolidated’s master of mass production, Harry Woodhead, warned him it couldn’t be done in less than four.
³⁴
And so, despite the misgivings of the aviation industry and the Air Force brass, the Defense Plant Corporation gave Kaiser and Hughes an $18 million contract to build three of their cargo planes under Hughes’s direct supervision. There would be no fees; Kaiser and Hughes would be doing the entire thing for free. Kaiser was less than pleased. “Every builder knows,” he protested, “that a non-profit contract is a loss.”
³⁵
But such was Kaiser’s enthusiasm that he leaped at the chance to realize his dream of revolutionizing the aviation industry, just as he had almost everything else.
³⁶

Kaiser and his wife, Bess, met his new partner for dinner at the Shoreham Hotel in DC. The thin, taciturn Hughes walked in wearing sneakers and no necktie. He had a slinky blonde on his arm with long hair pulled down over one eye like Veronica Lake.

“I think Mother Kaiser almost died,” Kaiser’s longtime secretary Edna Knuth remembered. “But that didn’t bother Mr. Kaiser. He was talking business with Hughes and it was a big night for him. He didn’t care about the blonde.”
³⁷

Then reality began to intrude. Because aluminum and magnesium were in critical supply in 1942, the government had deemed that all new airplane prototypes be made from plywood. Hughes’s first problem was finding enough wood for his massive project, and for the massive building in which to house it. In the end he settled on birch laminates, but the press preferred to think it was spruce so it could brand his plane the “Spruce Goose” (a name Hughes hated). But as Kaiser followed the plane’s progress by phone calls and telegrams, he became more and more alarmed.
³⁸

Kaiser was obsessed with meeting deadlines. Hughes, on the other hand, was a perfectionist who considered deadlines imposed by others an intrusion into his own private vision. He was also prone to be inaccessible at critical times—a foretaste of the mysterious recluse of later years. Kaiser would show up at the plant in Culver City and learn that Hughes was missing. Then he would pace and fume while Hughes’s aides hunted for their boss.
³⁹

By summer he was not only running out of patience but running out of time. He had to account to the War Production Board for the Spruce Goose delays, but Hughes was giving him almost no information. On August 27, 1943, the project’s general manager called Donald Nelson out of his office. “We have a terribly chaotic situation out here,” he warned. “It’s going to blow right up in your face.”
⁴⁰

Kaiser and Nelson were never mutual fans. Many felt Nelson had set the megaplane project up to fail: As journalist Eliot Janeway put it, he had told “Kaiser that, so to speak, he can have a ham sandwich if he can bake the bread, borrow the butter, and somehow steal the ham.”
⁴¹
But for once they had a common foe, Hughes’s unaccountable delays, and a common objective: to find out what the hell was going on.

In September the Navy’s top aeronautics expert, George Spangenberg, was sent out to California with the head of the Civilian Aviation Board, Dr. Ed Warner, who had been Jimmy Doolittle’s teacher at MIT. On the flight out, Spangenberg and Warner did hours of calculations of
the plane’s planned weight, fuel, and payload range—which became more sobering the longer they checked the figures.

Spangenberg had to admit he was “tremendously impressed” with the setup at Culver City. Hughes had figured out how to build everything from wood, including his factory—with the cap strips for the Spruce Goose’s wing beams requiring no fewer than sixty-four laminations.
⁴²
But he was furious that Hughes’s engineers hadn’t told their boss the aeronautical truth: while the plane’s lift went up as the square of its linear dimensions, its weight went up as a
cube
of those dimensions. The “square-cube” law had doomed the project from the start, plywood or no plywood. The Spruce Goose might get off the ground but it would never fly—let alone across the Atlantic.

Spangenberg and Warner returned to Washington to write out their sixty-page grim report, and on February 11, 1944, Nelson canceled the Kaiser-Hughes contract.
⁴³
After the war Kaiser put the blame squarely on his old nemesis Jesse Jones. Jones had said, he told a Senate committee investigating the Spruce Goose’s cost overruns in 1947, that “there was no more able and reliable man” than Hughes and “if you go along with Hughes I want it understood that Hughes has the responsibility and you do not interfere with him.”
⁴⁴
Now Kaiser saw that had been a mistake. Jones’s own view on being saddled with the Hughes debacle was never recorded.

On the Spruce Goose, Kaiser had learned his lesson and moved on. Hughes, however, refused to give up. He sank more than $11 million of his money into the plane’s completion. It would fly a single maiden flight after the war, in November 1947, with Hughes himself at the wheel. Then it returned to its climate-controlled hangar, where it would remain until Hughes’s death in 1976. Right to the end, Hughes kept on payroll a fifty-man team to fix and maintain his wonder plane in case the federal government, or Henry Kaiser, changed their minds.