|
THE LAST LIBERTY By Captain Walter W. Jaffee1
Read the Book Review by Ged Gasperas, Ph.D. Chapter 1The Lessons of War
And so, the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 was passed.
Considered by many as the Magna Carta of the United States
Merchant Marine, the Act took as its three critical principles:
To accomplish its intent, the Act created operating and
construction differential subsidies. These allowed American
ships to compete in a world market where ship construction
costs were half, and ship operating expenses two-thirds,
that of the United States.
In 1939, before war was declared in Europe, recognizing
the importance of controlling our own commerce, the production
schedule of the ten-year program was doubled to 100
ships a year. In August 1940 it was doubled again, with
construction orders for 200 ships a year being distributed
between 19 shipyards.
As country after country fell under Hitler's iron hand,
England fought the enemy alone while the United States
remained neutral. During the first nine months of war
English losses totaled 150 ships, more than 1 million tons.
In April 1941 alone, 800,000 deadweight tons of shipping was
lost. German U-boats sank ships faster than England could
build them.
In desperation, England turned for help to America,
with her vast supply of natural resources and unequalled
ability to accomplish large-scale projects. In September
1940 the British Merchant Shipbuilding Mission approached
the United States about the possibility of building ships
for Great Britain. Bringing with them their own plans for a
ship design, they proposed a vessel similar to the Dorington
Court, built in 1939. It had evolved from an old tramp ship
design first conceived in England in 1879 and later modified
by Joseph L. Thompson & Sons at Sunderland, England.
Initially dubbed the "Ocean" class, the ship was rated at
10,000 deadweight tons with a 2,500 horsepower engine that
produced a speed of 10 knots. The design was slow, but the
construction simple. Driven by an obsolete reciprocating
engine with coal burning fire-tube boilers, the vessel had
been built, year after year, on the River Tyne and had
proven its reliability in trades where speed was secondary
to reliability. England wanted sixty of them.
Even without England's sixty ship order, however, the
accelerating construction of new hulls outstripped the
industry's ability to provide engines for them. There were
not enough turbines to propel the new "C" types, let alone
modify an additional sixty ships for Great Britain, and the
demand for more tonnage was growing daily. It soon became
apparent that the sophisticated, well-made ships envisioned
by the Maritime Commission in 1936 would have to wait.
Quantity rather than quality became the overriding goal.
To produce in quantity meant that existing ship designs
had to be modified for immediate construction. The time
necessary to design and develop a new ship was a luxury no
one could afford. With the Battle of the Atlantic already
raging, construction timetables were also critical. To
reduce production time and costs, it was decided to weld the
new ships rather than use the traditional, and time-consuming,
riveted method.
The best design available was that brought over by the
British for their "Ocean" class. It had adequate horsepower
and carrying capacity for its intended purpose. In addition,
the Dorington Court hull and engine were simplicity
incarnate. First, the simple hull lines conformed easily to
the new concept of welding, keeping construction costs
relatively low and construction time minimal. Second, the
reciprocating engine used in the British design was an
uncomplicated piece of equipment that could be built in any
machine shop. Unlike the high-speed turbines designed for
the "C" ships, no special techniques were needed for manufacture
and the capacity to produce them was available. The
same was true of the engine's steam boilers, especially
considering the relatively moderate pressures associated
with reciprocating engines. Third, the ship was easy to
operate. Operation of the steam reciprocating engine
required a minimum of training.
The President announced construction of the new emergency
class of ship in February 1941. Describing them as
"dreadful looking objects," he set the first construction
goal at 200 emergency cargo vessels. This would soon be
increased to 2300 vessels totalling 23 million deadweight
tons for 1942 and 1943.
Trying to change the public's image of the new
emergency ship, which was soon to be the mainstay of American ship
construction, Admiral Land referred to the 200-ship order as
the Liberty Fleet and declared September 27, 1941 as "Liberty
Fleet Day." On that day fourteen "emergency" ships were
launched across the nation. The first of these, the Patrick
Henry, provided the inspiration for the event. It was the
ship's namesake who said "Give me liberty or give me death."
A month later, on October 15, 1941, the first of Britain's
"Ocean" ships came off the ways. Named the Ocean Vanguard,
it was launched by Mrs. Emory Land.
The strategy of building ships faster than they can be
sunk would prove to be an effective concept. An equally
valid counter-objective is to sink them faster than they can
be built, and that was precisely the strategy of the German
Navy. In May 1942 German Admiral Dönitz said, "The total
tonnage the enemy can build will be about 8.2 million tons
in 1942, and about 10.4 million tons in 1943. This would
mean that we would have to sink approximately 700,000 tons
per month in order to offset new construction; only what is
in excess of this amount would constitute a decrease in
enemy tonnage. However, we are already sinking these
700,000 tons per month now." His mistake was in underestimating
the shipbuilding capacity of American yards.
In the process of gearing up for Liberty ship production
the art of shipbuilding was revolutionized. Old-line
shipbuilders contributed their knowledge and experience.
New organizations developed new techniques, their very lack
of preconceived ideas about shipbuilding creating new
methods and innovations in an old profession.
The art of welding had only recently been developed to
the point where it could be used in shipbuilding and the
first all-welded ship came off the ways in November 1940.
With welding came prefabrication. Sun Shipbuilding of
Chester, Pennsylvania developed the process of building a
ship's bow section on the ground, then adding it to the ship
under construction on the ways. Soon bulkheads and sections
of inner bottoms were being built in shops of various shipyards
and set on the ways, rather than the old plate-by-plate,
frame-by-frame methods. The Bethlehem-Fairfield yard
at Baltimore was in the vanguard of this type of construction.
In their fabricating shops they assembled materials
for eight ships at a time: double bottoms with fuel and
drainage pipes already installed, sections of deck structure
complete with framing and bulkheads intact. From the shop
the complete section was transported to the ways where it
was set in place and welded to other sections. Meanwhile,
construction began on the next section.
Slowly the new ship caught on. Originally designed to
have a life of five years, it was often said during the war
that if a Liberty delivered its cargo once, it had paid for
itself. Few people would have guessed that the ship would
outlast these pessimistic predictions and become the mainstay
of the world's merchant fleets for the next twenty-five
years. They hadn't counted on American workmanship and
know-how -- the ability to do the job, do it quickly, and do
it well when the chips were down. This unique American
quality, harnessed with a national policy and detailed
planning, was to be an insurmountable force.
Author of the recently published book, recipes from a coal-fired
stove, he has also written:
Capt. Jaffee's articles and stories have appeared in more than
100 magazines. He has served as technical consultant to the Atlas
Warships series and is a contributor to the soon-to-be-published
Virginia Military Institute 3 volume Encyclopedia of Naval History. |
THE LAST LIBERTY, The Biography of the SS JEREMIAH O’BRIEN, by Capt. Walter W. Jaffee (
The average remaining useful life of ships in the
American Merchant Marine at the time was considered to be
five years. Beginning in 1937, the Act called for a
ten-year program in which fifty new ships a year would be built.
The new fleet would be made up of fast tankers and three
types of freighters (C-1, C-2 and C-3) each powered by
economical geared turbines, producing a relatively high sea
speed. At the time there were only ten shipyards capable of
building ships more than 400 feet long. Containing
forty-six slipways, half of these were already occupied with navy
production.
According to Admiral Emory Scott Land, Chairman of the
United States Maritime Commission, the quickest way to produce
the ships was for Britain to buy them outright, rather
than go through the U.S. government. But no construction
berths were available. New yards would have to be created
in which to build the new ships. To accommodate the
sixty-ship order for "Ocean" class vessels, a conglomerate of West
Coast construction and engineering firms was called in.
Known as the Six Services or Six Companies it included the
general contracting firms that built the Hoover and Grand
Coulee Dams and was headed by Henry Kaiser. Within months
it would include Todd Shipyards Inc. in New York and the
Bath Iron Works in Maine, among the oldest and most venerable
shipbuilders in the United States.
In early 1941 Admiral Land showed President Roosevelt
the plans for the British design with the intent of modifying
it to produce a quickly-built, efficient American ship
to meet the needs of the war effort. Roosevelt's comment
was, "Admiral, I think this ship will do us very well.
She'll carry a good load. She isn't much to look at,
though, is she? A real ugly duckling." As soon as the
press heard the comment, the name stuck. The ships were
affectionately known ever after as "ugly ducklings."
In Oregon, the entire Portland plant was revised to the
new prefabricated, assembly-line method of ship construction.
Here the sections were prefabricated as completely as
possible reaching the point where the entire superstructure,
with living quarters and navigation equipment, was built in
the shop, lifted by gigantic cranes, and lowered into place
as the hull of the already-launched ship floated under the
crane. In North Carolina, the Newport News Shipbuilding
Company went so far in its newly-constructed Wilmington yard
as to preassemble almost the entire sides of their ships.
Once assembled, they were cut into manageable sections and
the sections were then rejoined by welders on the launching
ways. Delivery time, originally expected to be 110 days,
averaged about 40 days for the new vessel.