THE BRIDGE OF BOATS
The primary need of this country when it entered the war was that of
ships. The necessity was urgent and it was evident that they would have
to be provided in constantly increasing number by dozens and scores
and hundreds, for a great army would have to be ferried across the
Atlantic, with munitions in enormous amount and mountains of supplies,
equipments and food. Unless a bridge of boats could be thrust across
the ocean, and it could be renewed as fast as destroyed by submarine
warfare, nothing that this nation could do in the prosecution of the
war would be of the least value, for all her effort would be paralyzed.
The enemy was depending upon submarine operations to paralyze that
effort and was confident it could be done.
The U-boats were sinking ships in 1917 at the rate of 6,000,000 tons
a year, and destruction had so much exceeded construction that the
world’s supply of shipping had been greatly depleted. What remained was
not sufficient to meet the already existing needs and the submarine
inroads upon it were steadily lessening its tonnage. Therefore the
United States would have to build ships, and more ships. If the
submarines sunk them, more would have to be produced to take their
places. And so the production of ships became for America the primary
and most pressing problem of her war effort.
But for many decades America had not been a ship building nation.
When she entered the war her ships were carrying a little less than
nine and seven-tenths per cent of her own imports and exports. In the
whole country there were only sixty-one ship-yards, both steel and
wood, totaling 235 ways. About three-quarters of the capacity of the
steel ship-yards, of which there were thirty-seven, had been already
preëmpted for the essential expansion of the navy, and many of the
wooden yards were unfit for modern ship-building. Less than 50,000 men
were working in these yards, their number representing, probably, the
sum total of the workers in this country whose industrial training had
prepared them for ship-building tasks. And among the men accustomed to
the organizing and carrying through of great construction enterprises
only a scant few had had experience in the building of ships. They
had built railroads and engines and cities and bridges and dams and
machinery, but not ships. In short, the country was so scantily
supplied with the facilities, the experience and the skill needed for
the production of ships as to be next door to destitute of them. And
ships were its primary and most urgent need.
The nation sprang to meet that need with energy and determination.
There were at first delays and faulty organization and disagreements
that interfered with the early progress of the work and at the time
greatly irritated the country. But at the signing of the armistice the
sixty-one shipyards had been increased to more than two hundred, all
at work upon steel, wood, or composite ships, the 235 ways had grown
to over 1,000, and nearly 400,000 workers were building ships, with
300,000 more in the essential allied trades.
At that time some of the largest shipyards in the world were in the
United States, their sites having been transformed in one year from
waste land to huge industrial plants already producing ships. By the
end of 1918 there had been built, delivered to the Shipping Board
and put into service 592 vessels of a total dead-weight tonnage of
3,423,465 and there were under construction steel ships amounting to
3,600,000 tonnage and wood vessels aggregating 1,200,000 tons. Within
the jurisdiction of the United States Shipping Board there were, at
the beginning of September, 1918, including chartered foreign vessels,
2,600 sea-going steam and sailing vessels of a total of 10,334,000
dead-weight tonnage. A part of this total had been gained by the
requisition of ships under construction or contract by American
ship yards and speeding up work upon them. In every yard effort was
intensified, resulting in one case in three times the deliveries of
the previous year. To October 1st, 1918, 255 of these requisitioned
ships, of which the keels of only about twenty per cent had been laid
when the Fleet Corporation took over the contracts, had been delivered,
their tonnage amounting to 1,500,000. A few ships were built in other
countries for the United States. Enemy vessels in American ports at
our declaration of war were seized and put into American service after
the damage inflicted upon them had been repaired. These totaled about
600,000 dead weight tons. Other enemy vessels interned by neutral
governments were purchased. More than 300 vessels of about 1,000,000
tonnage were chartered during the year for varying periods from
associated and neutral governments.
Thus did the United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation,
the organization through which the Government functioned in the
management of the shipping situation, reach out in every direction and
secure every possible ship to aid in building that vitally necessary
bridge of boats across the Atlantic. With the help of the Allies the
bridge was built and, guarded by the British and American navies, it
was able to carry with triumphant success all the men and materials of
every sort, in all their vast amounts, that were needed.
But the special achievements in ship construction of the U. S. Shipping
Board Emergency Fleet Corporation deserve more extended mention, for
it had built over sixteen per cent of this entire fleet. It devised a
new scheme for the rapid production of ships, that of the so-called
“fabricating” shipyard. So enormous and so urgent was the need for a
large tonnage output that beside it existing facilities were negligible
and too much time would be needed for the construction of enough
shipyards of the ordinary type. So, while every effort was put forth to
renovate and enlarge existing yards and build new ones, several huge
yards were constructed for the assembling of the parts of steel ships
after they had been made in steel structural works. A ship was designed
with simple lines, flat decks and few curves, the design standardized
and production of the parts begun in many plants while the building of
the big yards was rushed. One of these, having twelve ways for 9,000
ton ships, laid its first keel five months after the signing of the
contract for the building of the yard; another, having fifty ways for
7,500 and 8,000 ton ships, laid its first keel, when the yard was half
completed, in five months; and another, with twenty-eight ways for
5,000 ton ships, laid its first keel in three months.
These three yards, each of which was built and operated by a
contracting company, represented an investment of almost $100,000,000.
They were equipped to turn out, together, 270,000 tonnage per month,
which is more than the tonnage of all the steel ship yards in the
country had produced in any entire year for the last previous nine
years. These large yards had begun to come into production only a
little while before the signing of the armistice. One of the plants
included 139 acres, all of which was waste land, overgrown with weeds
and brush, when the company signed its contract in September, 1917.
A year later its twenty-eight ways were completed, a ship was under
construction on each one, fourteen ships had been launched and one had
been completed. Docks, railway sidings, shops, offices, had been built
and huge stacks of ship-building material covered the ground. A big,
four-sided bulletin board, on which was posted each day the progress of
every ship on its twenty-eight ways, voiced the spirit of the workers
and the management in a slogan across its top that proclaimed the
purpose, in letters that fairly shouted, “Three ships a week or bust!”
Another of these fabricating yards, whose site was chosen because of
its nearness to industrial centers and easy accessibility, was located
on an island that was an uninhabitable malarial marsh in September,
1917. It was first taken in hand by sanitary engineers, drained,
cleared of mosquitoes and flies and put into sanitary condition. Then
the plant, covering 846 acres, was built, its fifty ways extending for
a mile and a quarter along the water front and its piers having space
for twenty-eight vessels, so that seventy-eight ships could be in
course of construction and outfitting at the same time. It had eighty
miles of railroad track and 250 buildings of various kinds, including
a hospital, a hotel, a Y. M. C. A. building, a cafeteria and a trade
school. The yard laid its first keel in five months and launched its
first ship in less than eleven months from the date of the first stroke
of work on the island marsh.
Existing shipyards enlarged their facilities and speeded their work
and new ones rushed their ways to completion and began laying keels
and driving rivets at the earliest possible moment. In the summer of
1918, 280,000 laborers were engaged on shipyard construction. In a
little more than a year 400,000,000 feet of yellow pine lumber for
the construction of wood vessels was cut in American forests and
transported to shipyards in the Atlantic and Mexican Gulf coastal
regions--enough to lay the floor of a bridge twenty-five feet wide from
the United States to France. As much more pine and fir lumber was cut
for the construction of vessels in Pacific Coast yards. In one month,
September, 1918, 15,000,000 feet of yellow pine lumber was used in the
building of houses for shipyard workers.
On the Great Lakes, when we entered the war, there were fourteen
shipyards with seventy-five ways. The signing of the armistice saw
twenty-one yards in that region, with 110 ways, and fifteen more ways
under construction. These Great Lakes yards, when the Shipping Board
took charge of the shipping program in August, 1917, sent at once a
fleet of twenty-one steel vessels which had been used in lake commerce
down the St. Lawrence for the government’s use on the ocean. Some of
them had to be cut in two to enable them to pass the canal locks, and
were then welded together again and soon steamed out of the river’s
mouth loaded with cargoes.
A world record of rapid work was made by one of these Great Lakes
shipyards which launched a 3,500 ton steel freighter seventeen days
after the keel was laid and at the end of seventeen more days delivered
the ship to the Shipping Board complete and ready for service. During
the fourteen months from the time when the Shipping Board took charge
of the shipping program until the end of hostilities the Great Lakes
shipyards sent to the ocean a fleet of 181 steel vessels aggregating
over 600,000 deadweight tons, which was twice the record prewar output
of sea-going ships of 1,500 deadweight tons and over. On the Pacific
Coast one shipyard made another world’s record with a wooden ship of
4,000 tons which was launched seventeen and one half days after the
laying of the keel and was ready for the sea in eight days more. The
Pacific Coast yards built, to the end of September, 1918, 137 vessels
totaling over a million deadweight tons.
Delivery of completed ships was often delayed by lack of boilers and
other fittings, the manufacture of which had sometimes to wait for
steel upon other war necessities. Nevertheless, as yard after yard
began to show the results of the speeding of construction, the monthly
tale of ships grew by mighty leaps. In August, 1918, at the end of a
year, it passed the record monthly production of British ship-yards,
which previously had built a larger tonnage than all the rest of the
world combined. It kept the lead and broke its own record the next
month, and that one also in October when seventy-eight ships of 410,865
deadweight tonnage were delivered to the Shipping Board ready for
service--a tonnage in one month exceeding by more than 100,000 tons our
greatest annual pre-war output of sea-going vessels.
During the twelve months ending September, 1918, the sea-going tonnage
built in the United States aggregated a tonnage equal to 70 per
cent of that built in the whole world in 1913, the year before the
outbreak of the world war, which until 1918 was the highest total
of ship production in any year in the history of ship-building. The
total number of merchant vessels under construction throughout the
world, excluding the Central Powers, at the end of 1918 was 2,189
ships of 6,921,989 gross tons, a little more than double the largest
corresponding tonnage under construction by the world before the
war. Of that total the United States was constructing 997 vessels of
3,645,919 gross tons, or almost half the number of vessels and more
than half the tonnage.
The official records of the Bureau of Navigation of the Department
of Commerce show that there were constructed in the United States
during 1918 821 sea-going vessels of 100 gross tons and over totaling
2,597,026 gross tons, an unprecedented total for any country in the
history of ship-building. Lloyd’s Register accords the highest previous
total of ship production for any one year to the United Kingdom, whose
shipyards launched in 1913 1,932,153 gross tons of vessels of 100 gross
tons and over. The ship production of the whole world during that year
was 3,332,882 gross tons of vessels of 100 gross tons and over. The
construction of sea-going vessels in the United States during the last
six months of 1918 was at the rate of 3,600,000 gross tons a year.
On a single day, July 4th, 1918, there were launched in American
ship-yards for the United States Shipping Board 95 steel, wood and
composite vessels of 3,000 deadweight--approximately 2,000 gross--tons
and over, totaling 474,464 deadweight, or approximately 316,310 gross,
tons. And in the month of October there were completed and delivered to
the Shipping Board vessels of 2,000 gross tons or over totaling 283,652
gross tonnage, which exceeded by nearly 100,000 gross tons the highest
output of vessels of 100 gross tons and over for any month in the
ship-building history of any other country.
From being almost a non-ship-building country the United States had
sprung in a year and a half to the position of world leadership in ship
construction.
[Illustration: A SHIPYARD IN THE MAKING]
[Illustration:
_Copyright by Brown Bros._
THE FIFTY SHIPWAYS, EACH WITH A SHIP IN CONSTRUCTION, OF THE SAME YARD
ONE YEAR AFTER WORK BEGAN UPON IT]
The whole nation hung with eager interest upon the progress of the
shipping program and during the first summer of our participation in
the war, when it was being hampered by disagreements and delays, there
was much anxious protest. The unprecedented winter of 1917-1918, with
its bitter weather, shortage of coal and railroad congestion, also
interfered with the forward movement of shipping affairs. But when at
last it began to be manifest that the urgent need for ships would be
met the country threw itself with enthusiasm into a helping attitude.
Business and professional men took their vacations in shipyards and
in overalls with sleeves rolled up they offered whatever aid, whether
muscular or mental, was in their power. Hundreds of college students
joined the army of shipyard workers. Business firms offered prizes to
stimulate the speed of riveters, among whom were made some world’s
records.
In line with the government’s purpose to carry on its entire war effort
in harmony with democratic aims and methods, a systematic program of
education was instituted by the U. S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet
Corporation, whose chief purpose was to increase the efficiency of the
workers by enlarging their vision and appealing to their intelligence.
In every shipyard stirring talks gave the men information, which many
of them at first lacked, about the meaning of the war, why America had
entered it, what would be the significance of victory and of defeat to
them and to the nation, why the ships were needed and what the labor of
each of them meant to the battle lines across the ocean. These talks
made the ship-workers see that, under the emergency, to build good
ships as rapidly as possible was to give a great service to humanity.
The program was well organized and hundreds of speakers--soldiers,
ministers, professors, business men--addressed shipyard meetings,
explaining, urging and inspiring. Effective posters in every yard
gave pictorial point to their message and kept it constantly before
the eyes of the men. Pamphlets and circulars were distributed among
them that told them in direct and vigorous language the significance
and importance of their work. The plan met with signal success and
from week to week could be seen a steady growth of enthusiasm and
determination, while improved morale and new ideals of citizenship were
also evident.
Skilled shipyard laborers were few in number compared with the need for
the army of them that sprang out of our entrance into the war. Some
new method of training had to be devised that would quickly prepare
green men for capable and efficient service. The same idea of intensive
training that proved successful in the preparation of officers for the
army and of instructors and workers in many branches of war effort
was applied to the shipyard problem. Training centers, which finally
averaged two for each of the eleven ship-building districts, were
established, each with a staff of instructors composed of men who
had had both technical and practical experience and also training
in effective teaching methods. To these centers were sent bright
mechanics, selected for their ability and promise. After a stiff six
weeks’ course, each in some special ship-building trade, they were
returned to their respective plants, where they joined the yard’s own
training staff and aided in the turning of green men into skilled
laborers. Training schools to develop efficiency in the instructors of
the training centers were also established, in order to make sure that
the right kind of training would be given to the mechanics from the
shipyards. Special courses were instituted at these training centers
for men who wished to advance and broaden their capacity by gaining
a knowledge of allied branches of work. Most of the yards organized
training departments of their own which utilized all the assistance
they could get from the training centers and also made use of skilled
and capable mechanics in their own employ by having men trained in
teaching methods instruct them in the art of showing others how to do
things and then putting unskilled men into their charge. These methods
of intensive training proved to both managers and workers that by them
skilled labor in large quantities can be quickly provided.
Safety engineering work aiming to secure and maintain better and safer
conditions of working and to enlist the interest and coöperation of the
employees had such good results as to reduce materially the percentage
of accidents. This went down from the average for ship-building of
twenty-two per cent before the war to as low as six per cent in one
large plant.
Shipyard publications had much to do with creating a fine community
spirit, instilling patriotism, broadening outlook and inspiring the
workers with zeal for the job in hand. The Health and Sanitation
section of the U. S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation carried
on a vigilant campaign to protect the health of the shipyard workers by
making sure of a pure water supply, endeavoring to protect them from
epidemics of disease, doing away with unsanitary restaurants and lunch
rooms in the vicinity of the plants and combating by education and
medical clinics the scourge of social disease.
The assembling of such large numbers of men as were needed by each
and every one of the American shipyards for the country’s program of
ship-building produced, for most of them, a housing problem that was
almost as difficult and imperative as was the building of the sorely
needed ships. It was an acute emergency and to meet it the United
States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation was authorized to
expend $75,000,000. When the cessation of hostilities came it had
built or was building dwelling houses, apartment houses, dormitories,
mess halls, boarding houses and other such structures to the value
of $64,000,000 and had enlisted the coöperation of municipalities and
public utilities companies. In some cases the increase in workers was
absorbed by adjacent cities and in others it was sufficient to erect
dormitories and cottages in nearby towns. But in several it became
necessary to create new towns, upon newly selected sites, and to build
at high speed homes and streets and all the many structures necessary
for a community of ten thousand or more people. The aim in the building
of these towns was to create permanent and attractive homes provided
with the necessities and comforts of modern civilization,--well built
and lighted streets, provisions for fire and police departments,
churches, libraries, schools and theaters,--such as ordered, contented
and intelligent communities desire. Some of the best architects and
housing experts in the country contributed their services in the making
of the plans for these towns, in which building went on at the rate of
twenty or more houses per day.
It was no small part of this huge shipping program to provide officers
and crews for the ships that were sliding from their ways with
increasing rapidity. For, along with the decrease in ship-building,
Americans had lost interest in sea service. It was necessary to begin
at once the recruiting and training that would man and officer the new
ships. Within two months after we entered the war free navigation and
engineering schools had been started, and when hostilities ended more
than 6,000 men had been graduated, of whom over 3,000 had received
officers’ licenses while many others had entered the navy. And in the
dozen or more mammoth Naval Reserve Training Stations established and
conducted by the Navy Department many thousands of young men were
trained for service in all capacities in the merchant marine.
In so enormous an undertaking, entered upon with such scanty facilities
and carried on under the stress of such urgent need, it was inevitable
that the outcome should not always have equaled the hopes and desires
of the country and that the zealous efforts and patriotic purposes of
those engaged in it should not always have won complete success. But
it was an achievement, within a year and a half, of plants enlarged
and constructed for the building of ships, of labor trained for that
building, of ships built and put into service, and of men trained to
officer and man the ships that was a potent factor in the winning
of the war. It was an immense and rapid industrial development made
possible only by the ardent coöperation of all the factors of the
entire national life necessary, under the emergency, to bring it to
success.