Timber dock
Swing gates (backed up caisson)
Caisson (“floating gate”)
Ironclad Technology
The clash of ships at sea embodies the ongoing technological battle
between arms and armor: between deploying ever more destructive weapons
and contriving ways to withstand them. As long as solid shot was the
only way to attack a ship’s hull, heavy timbers were usually armor
enough. Big wooden warships were rarely sunk by even the heaviest shot.
(_Constitution_ is a particularly good example.) But the rules of the
game changed with the coming of more powerful and more accurate guns,
and especially with the development of the practical explosive shell in
the 19th century. A shell could open a gaping hole in a heretofore
impervious wooden hull. By 1860 France and then Britain had begun
building ironclads. In Britain, especially, the rising cost of
diminishing timber supplies was another incentive to experiment with
iron, both as armor and for structural elements of the hull. But in the
United States, wood was still cheaper than iron. Also, though the
country had earlier experimented with ironcladding, the Navy resisted
the new technology, putting emphasis on speed rather than armor. But it
quickly made up for lost time after the beginning of the Civil War. The
Confederacy took the lead, for the same reason that the United States
had built “super-frigates” at the end of the 18th century. A country
that could afford only a small navy had to build state-of-the-art
warships. The blockade-breaker C.S.S. _Virginia_ showed the lethal
effectiveness of its ironcladding on its first outing (_see page 28_).
The next day U.S.S. _Monitor_ fought _Virginia_ to a draw in the first
battle between ironclads (_right_). The encounter spurred European
navies to accelerate their ironclad programs, but new breech-loading
rifled guns were demonstrating greater armor-piercing ability. In
response iron, and then steel, armor was made thicker and harder,
leading to still more powerful guns. The gun designers generally stayed
a step ahead, with the biggest guns able to penetrate the thickest
armor.
[Illustration: Monitor and Virginia]
[Illustration: Inside a Turret]
Pilot house (did not rotate)
Turret (23-foot diameter inside) rotated on central spindle
Ammunition gantry
Two 15-inch Dahlgren guns
Ammunition
[Illustration: _The monitor_ Monadnock _(all turreted ironclads were
designated monitors) was built at the Charlestown yard in 1862-63.
The only monitor built there, it was quite successful, described by
Admiral David Dixon Porter as “the best monitor afloat.”_]
Ventilation shaft
Auxiliary steering position
Shot locker
Ericsson engine
Stokers’ quarters
Coal bunk
Funnel (5-inch armor)
Officer’s quarters
Boilers
Crew’s quarters
Turret rotation gearing
Stores
Chain locker
Specifications:
Length overall: 259.5 ft.
Beam (width): 52.5 ft.
Displacement: 3295 tons
Draft: 12 ft., 8 in.
Armor: turrets, 10 in.; pilothouses, 8 in.; over wooden hull, 3-5
in.; deck, 1.5 in.
Engines: Two Ericsson 1426 HP steam engines, 32-in. cylinders; four
boilers
Screws: Two 4-bladed screws, 10-ft. diameter
Speed: 9 knots
Crew: 167
Armament: Four 15-in. Dahlgren smoothbore muzzle-loading guns; fired
shot or shell
[Illustration: Layers of Protection]
1 Typical ironcladding had wooden backing up to three feet thick.
2 A layer of India rubber or felt might be added to help absorb shock
and retard corrosion.
3 The cladding was often made up of laminated one-inch iron plates.
4 Tallow was sometimes applied to the outer surface on the theory that
it helped deflect shot.
[Illustration: _Light battleship U.S.S._ Maine _on its first cruise
in 1895_. Maine, _part of the new steel navy, blew up in Havana
Harbor in 1898 under circumstances still unclear. The resulting
Spanish-American War ended Spain’s days as a colonial power and made
a popular hero of Theodore Roosevelt, who resigned as Assistant
Secretary of the Navy to serve in Cuba._]
The New Navy
On first looking into the cavernous interior of Shiphouse I, a visitor
during the winter of 1884 would have gotten the impression that
Charlestown was a busy shipyard. Workers crawled over the almost
completed ship-of-the-line _Virginia_, swinging hammers, sawing, pumping
hydraulic jacks—apparently applying the finishing touches. But behind
the house, growing piles of four-foot lengths of wood told a different
story. The workers were breaking up the old 74. _Virginia_ had occupied
the shiphouse for more than 60 years, through all but the first two of
the yard’s launchings. Back in 1824, _Virginia_ had been within two
months of making its own trip down the ways. Now its day had passed, and
its great timbers were being reduced to firewood and sold at auction.
Outside the shiphouse, very few workers could have been found among the
silent buildings. Charlestown was a moribund yard, barely functioning
since its repair and construction duties had been suspended the year
before. Only the manufacturing divisions still showed signs of life. In
1886 the yard would be officially converted to a facility that
manufactured equipment—especially rope—for vessels built and repaired
elsewhere.
The yard was also stripped of much of its equipment and ordered to sell
the vessels in ordinary. Repair work fell to an all-time low: between
the 1883 docking of the Charlestown-built double-ender _Talapoosa_ and
1890, the dry dock was used exactly five times to do repair work for the
U.S. Navy—once on the yard tug and four times on the floating gate for
the dry dock.
[Illustration: _Joiner Shop foreman George W. Burroughs, about
1901._]
New construction was out of the question. The yard had known for years
that the vessels already in the shiphouses and on the building ways
(labeled “Rotten Row” by a local newspaper in 1882) would never be
launched. So it came as no surprise that the order closing the yard also
condemned _Virginia_, two wooden steamers, and a monitor—the latter
three laid down during the Civil War. Still, it was disheartening that
in the early 1880s a yard that had built and repaired ships was reduced
to taking them apart.
At least the dismantling of vessels provided employment for the workers,
who at this point felt quite vulnerable. Throughout the 1880s,
“suspension” (being laid off) was always hanging over their heads. More
than 500 men were employed at the yard when work was halted in mid-1883.
There were around 300 by the end of the year and their ranks continued
to thin, averaging less than 200 until 1888—most of them ropemakers,
machinists, laborers, and watchmen.
Until World War I, jobs connected with supply would remain more stable
than those related to construction and repair. In the late 1880s and
’90s, managers found ways to transfer men in the latter trades to other
divisions within the yard in order to keep their services on call. But
in the early ’80s the yard could find virtually no work for men skilled
in the craft of wooden shipbuilding—formerly the elite of the workforce.
After _Virginia_ and the other vessels had been turned into stacks of
wood, those who had done the work were sent home.
Now let us look ahead some three decades to 1917, by which time we find
a yard dramatically transformed. Eleven wharves described a great arc at
the confluence of the Charles and Mystic Rivers. The familiar old
shiphouses had been replaced by a large shipbuilding ways and steel
plate storage yards. The timber basin that had long dominated the center
of the yard was gone, replaced by a new dry dock twice as long as the
first one. The other timber basin at the east end of the yard had been
filled in and was now the site of gas and oil tanks, a locomotive shed,
and a gas plant for acetylene torches.
It was a vital place, showing an intensity not seen since the Civil War.
In fact it was again a wartime yard: after almost three years of
neutrality the United States had entered the global conflict that was
later called World War I. Some 4,500 workers worked two ten-hour shifts
or around the clock in three eight-hour shifts, answering to a steam
whistle instead of the bell that had summoned 19th-century yard workers.
The wharves and docks were crowded with three- and four-stacker steel
ships, some carrying the towering cage masts that were a short-lived
experiment of the period. On the building ways, workers had laid the
keel of the fuel ship _Brazos_.
Electric lights illuminated the thousands of men working on ships
through the night. Vessels under repair were alive with the flare of
welding torches and the tattoo of pneumatic rivet guns. Over them moved
the arms of great cranes, including a 150-ton floating derrick and a
colossus that traveled on tracks between dry docks. Materials and
equipment were transported by yard locomotives that had replaced the
oxen (although horses still did service). A mechanized coaling plant
near the old dry dock helped ease the dirty and arduous task of fueling
ships. But it was apparently undependable, and at times ships were
coaled the old way.
Charlestown’s main responsibility was repairing the warships of a
greatly enlarged fleet: steel destroyers, armored cruisers and
battleships, submarines, and wooden sub chasers. The yard also outfitted
and commissioned new vessels, converted civilian vessels to wartime use,
armed merchantmen, and altered seized German passenger liners to
transport U.S. troops to France.
More work came to the yard in 1917-18 than in any other comparable
period in its history before World War II. Some 450 vessels were
serviced during those two years. In addition Charlestown was a supply
depot and embarkation point. In all, an average of 50 ships a day
arrived at or departed from the yard during the war.
By 1918 some 10,000 skilled workers, laborers, and clericals worked at
Charlestown. Reflecting the growth of the labor movement over the last
three decades, many of them belonged to trade unions (although they
could neither strike nor be represented by the unions in wage
negotiations). Women working at the yard were mostly naval yeomen, but a
few worked as radio and telephone operators, radio electricians, and
ropewalk machine tenders.
Yard employees worked in 17 trade shops, the names of which
characterized the needs of modern steel shipbuilding: Shipfitters
(including riveters, drillers, welders, sheet metal workers);
Electrical; Pattern (for cast metals); Chain; Copper/Pipefitting; and
other skills employed in raising a steel ship.
Some of the old familiar shops survived in reduced or altered roles. The
sail loft now produced mostly canvas bags, pea jackets, and hammocks.
The riggers loft had become a versatile shop responsible for an array of
shipyard tasks. They still worked aloft on stacks and steel masts;
directed dry docking and crane operations; prepared shipways for
launchings; dove beneath ships in hardhat diving suits; and continued to
do the traditional rigger’s handiwork, such as the braided rope fenders
that protected ships’ hulls and the fancy leatherwork and ropework still
common on naval vessels. The workers in the joiner shop worked on the
small wooden boats built at the yard, but spent much of their time
making shipboard furniture. The ropewalk continued to turn out the large
quantities of rope still needed on steel ships.
[Illustration: _These young women were working as civilian clerks
for the Navy when the U.S. entered World War I. Overnight they
became Yeomen-F (female) naval personnel. (Yeomen is the naval term
for clerical workers.)_]
[Illustration: _Joiners were skilled workers in wood and
traditionally the elite of the yard workforce. Even in the early
days of steel ships, they remained among the highest paid of the
workers. Here joiners are photographed in their shop, about 1897._]
[Illustration: _Yard’s floating crane, shown here in 1913, could
lift 150 tons. Dry Dock 1 is visible in left background._]
The traditional shipyard hierarchy was virtually unchanged: the crews of
mechanics, apprentices, and laborers were headed by leadingmen; several
leadingmen were supervised by quartermen; and the quartermen were under
a chief quarterman or they answered directly to the master who headed
the shop.
Unlike the hard times of the 1880s, the employees at Charlestown had
reason to feel secure. Civil Service reforms of the ’90s had already
gone a long way toward making merit, not political advantage, the
criterion for hiring and firing. And now, in the hour of war, the Navy
wanted to keep its shipyard workers. In the months before the United
States entered the conflict, officials had worried that employees swept
up in the popular sentiment for preparedness would enlist. Secretary of
the Navy Josephus Daniels declared it the “patriotic duty” of the
workers to remain at the yard, asserting that “their services to their
country ... [are] as important as if they were actually in the field.”
When the draft was initiated in 1917, the Navy responded by gaining
exemptions for crucial classes of yard workers such as supervisors,
draftsmen, and skilled mechanics and their helpers. The military draft
gave new meaning to the yard’s “six-muster” rule, by which any worker
missing six successive roll calls for any reason could be fired. One
week after any worker was dismissed, the yard informed his draft board.
The demand for workers and the boosted war economy drove up wages. No
doubt prompted by this incentive and by the exemption policy, some
240,000 men applied for work at the yard in 1917-18. But while
Charlestown didn’t lack for applicants, filling the most skilled
positions was a continuing problem. To remedy this (and to help workers
gain exemptions), the yard cut a year from the term of apprenticeship
and established a trade school to train unskilled workers as mechanics.
While World War I sped up Charlestown’s evolution from naval backwater
to modern shipyard, other factors had set the process in motion. Time
and expected technological advances accounted for some of it. But the
transition was accelerated at the yard by a larger transformation of the
Navy, prompted by the country’s position in a changing world and
completed on the stage of the Spanish-American War.
Historians have tagged this transformation the “New Navy.” If we simply
compare the numbers of the 1880 Navy, when its aging fleet of wooden
vessels ranked 12th in the world, to that of the 1900 Navy, when there
were in commission or on the stocks 17 steel battleships and a number of
armored cruisers, the label “new” is certainly accurate. But there was
more to this than simply building new steel ships to catch up to Europe.
The Navy’s mission underwent a strategic shift in this 20-year period.
The early phase involved a strengthening of the Navy’s capacity to carry
out its mission. For a century its job had been to defend the shores and
to ensure that other navies allowed American merchant vessels free trade
anywhere in the world. Its tactical traditions were one-on-one
engagements and hit-and-run commerce raiding. But it was clear by the
early 1880s that the U.S. Navy was inadequate for even these limited
operations. Reformers could point to obvious deficiencies as European
navies converted to armored steel hulls in the 1870s and ’80s. The old
wooden navy had become a disgrace.
Powerful voices were raised in the House Naval Affairs Committee, and in
1883 Congress appropriated money for the steel cruisers _Atlanta_,
_Boston_, and _Chicago_, and the dispatch vessel _Dolphin_. These
vessels could still spread a large area of sail, and by European
standards were not formidable, but the so-called “ABCD” ships were the
core of the New Navy, the first small step towards making the United
States a true sea power.
For Charlestown, they were a mixed blessing. The New Navy’s need for
maintenance and repair bode well for the future, but the immediate
effect was devastating. For the same legislation that authorized new
ships also established a new criterion for repairing existing vessels.
Only repairs that cost less than 30% (later reduced to 20%) of the cost
of a new ship of the same size could be performed. This freed up funds
to build the new ships, but it also meant so little work for shipyards
that both repair and construction work at Charlestown and three other
yards was suspended.
In its new role as manufacturing center, the yard kept the ropewalk,
rigging loft, and sail loft open. The forge began producing chain and
anchors for the new steel ships. But even these activities were sporadic
until later in the decade. A survey done one March day in 1884 showed
that the ropewalk was spinning rope for _Dolphin_—literally the only
thing done that day to help put warships to sea.
During the worst years of the 1880s the ropewalk almost singlehandedly
kept the yard alive. It made itself an indispensable facility by
supplying virtually all of the Navy’s rope. Other shops followed its
lead, and by 1890 the Charlestown yard had become an important general
manufacturing center, the only naval shipyard producing rope, sail,
anchors, and chain. It was still unable to service ships, however. In
August 1890 _Chicago_ was directed to the yard for repairs, only to turn
back because the old dry dock wasn’t in good enough condition to accept
the steel cruiser. “Repairs to engine bolts” for _Boston_ typified the
kind of task the yard could perform.
But 1890 also marked the beginning of the yard’s rebirth. Congress
appropriated $152,000 for new machine tools and modernization of
Charlestown’s crumbling facilities. It wasn’t enough to remake the yard,
but it was a start. It was also the year that Commander Alfred Thayer
Mahan, president of the Naval War College and one-time aide to the
Charlestown Navy Yard commandant, published _The Influence of Sea Power
Upon History, 1660-1783_. This important book helped to stimulate the
world-wide buildup of naval forces prior to World War I. His thesis
(greatly simplified) was as follows: A combination of geography,
population size, and “national character” makes a great seafaring
nation. Essential to the continued well-being of such a nation is a
government that actively promotes a vigorous maritime commerce. “Sea
power”—command of the sea lanes—protects this commerce. Only large
concentrated fleets of capital ships able to engage and destroy the
enemy’s navy can create and maintain sea power.
Mahan’s influence, both as author and adviser to the Secretary of the
Navy, was pivotal. His writings strengthened the hand of imperialists
and reformers who had called for new strategic thinking. The United
States, they reasoned, was a growing industrial power with increasing
overseas interests, and some—among them Mahan disciple and future
Assistant Secretary of the Navy and President Theodore
Roosevelt—believed the nation should have a navy befitting its role, one
able to open markets, protect those economic interests, and project U.S.
power.
In a burst of enthusiasm recalling that for the ship-of-the-line at the
end of the War of 1812, Congress in 1890 authorized the country’s first
full-sized battleships. They represented enormous commitments of
resources, time, and money. Called “coastline” battleships to placate
still powerful coast defense advocates, they were nevertheless another
step in the United States’ emergence by the turn of the century as a
world power with a widening sphere of influence. The Navy kept its faith
in battleships until their vulnerability to air power and the
superiority of aircraft carriers as attack weapons were demonstrated in
World War II.
Although a succession of battleships, cruisers, submarines, and other
vessels were now being laid down, Charlestown didn’t immediately reap
the benefits. The majority of the warships launched between 1883 and
1905 were built by contract in private yards, and Charlestown built none
of them. For most of the 1890s, the yard continued to be primarily a
manufacturing facility. The New Navy’s hulls did account for much of the
yard’s repair work. Steel hulls didn’t rot, but they more easily fouled
with barnacles and seaweed than a coppered wooden hull and were less
resistant to corrosion than iron. Maintaining them became the
Charlestown yard’s bread and butter.
The Spanish-American War broke this pattern, making Charlestown once
again a repair yard. Besides the new warships the United States was
trying out against the Spanish navy, there was also the “mosquito fleet”
(old monitors, converted yachts, and other small craft used for coastal
defense during the war) to be maintained and repaired. In all some 50
vessels were serviced by 1,200-1,400 workers.
To beef up its workforce for war, the yard began hiring more foreign
workers, especially from Scandinavian countries with shipbuilding
traditions. Charlestown thereafter maintained a workforce averaging over
2,000 during the two decades before World War I—compared to the fewer
than 400 workers there through most of the 1890s. The Spanish-American
War was pivotal, marking a permanent expansion in the size and diversity
of the Charlestown workforce.
At war’s end the United States was recognized as a world power with
attendant responsibilities. This new status was symbolized by the
establishment of a coaling station in the recently acquired Philippines.
The capital ship building program continued apace—given renewed vigor by
President Theodore Roosevelt, staunch advocate of big ships and a strong
navy.
The yard continued to be mainly a repair facility with a steadily
increasing workload. The new 750-foot Dry Dock 2, authorized three
months after the sinking of _Maine_, was built to receive the Navy’s
biggest ships. But soon after the massive structure’s 1905 completion,
Britain launched H.M.S. _Dreadnought_, ushering in an even larger class
of battleship the dock could not accommodate.
In this period the yard specialized in the smaller battleships and the
newest type of warship: destroyers. These fast, versatile ships had
evolved from British “torpedo boat destroyers” built in the 1880s to
counter the new torpedo boats. The mobile torpedo, also developed in
Britain, was a self-propelled explosive device launched from a warship’s
deck, traveling underwater to open the hull of its target.
Developments in naval technology from the 1880s to the eve of World War
II included nothing quite so dramatic as the epochal shifts from sail to
steam and wood to iron, but the period saw advances in strategic weapons
such as submarines and aircraft carriers, and major innovations that
resulted in ships and shipbuilding essentially like what we see today.
In the period before the age of flight, sophisticated warships were
highly visible embodiments of the state of a nation’s technology, and
the rapidly expanding U.S. fleet was an unmistakable sign of its growing
industrial and technological prominence.
[Illustration: _Charlestown’s machine shop in 1913. Overhead belts
transferred power from a central steam engine to the machines. The
potentially hazardous belts were later replaced with electric motors
on each machine._]
[Illustration: _Lathe operator shapes steam turbine rotor for
destroyer tender Whitney in 1923._]
The major innovations were again in hull material and propulsion. The
transition from iron to steel hulls further liberated naval engineers.
Lighter, stronger, and less brittle, steel allowed them more play in
hull size and proportions. Despite extensive use of ironclads by the
United States during the Civil War, its navy essentially skipped the
iron stage in seagoing warships, moving from _Hartford_-type wooden
steamers to the steel ABCD ships of 1883. While the Charlestown yard
launched no steel warships until the 1930s, it did construct the tug
_Pentucket_ (1903) and training bark _Cumberland_ (1904), both
steel-hulled.
As steam engines grew more efficient in the 1880s and ’90s, sailing rigs
were made smaller and vestigial masts served mainly as radio antennae
and platforms for directing big guns. But a revolution in steam
technology sent reciprocating engines the way of masts on most large
naval vessels. Steam turbines, which were much more efficient at
sustained high speeds, were developed in the 1880s in Europe and used in
1905 on _Dreadnought_. In America they became truly practical during the
World War I period.
Along with the introduction of turbines came an innovation in the fuel
that powered them. During the 1890s oil was introduced, used in
combination with coal. By 1910 the United States had built its first all
oil-burning warship. Besides providing greater power more quickly, oil
needed less storage space and fewer engine room hands than coal.
These advances and refinements completed the evolution of the U.S. Navy
warship from wooden-hulled sailing vessel to powered steel ship. But
perfecting the new technology was not the only challenge associated with
the transition. The demands of modern naval design provoked growing
controversy over how work should be performed at naval shipyards and how
those yards should be organized. Charlestown Navy Yard played a central
role in the debate.
Since 1868 the nation’s naval shipyards had each been organized into
departments corresponding to those at the Navy Department level. Each
department head, though nominally under the yard commandant, really
worked for his boss in Washington. So each department became in effect a
separate plant protecting its own interests and budget. When a yard
built relatively simple wooden-hulled ships powered by steam engines,
the tasks of the Construction and Steam Engineering departments differed
enough that there was little overlap. The old organization was not then
a problem. But as warships became complex, integrated machines the
system broke down, providing little coordination between departments and
a great deal of duplication. By 1910 it was grossly wasteful and
inefficient, a public scandal.
At about the same time as reformers were calling for a shakeup of naval
shipyards, the phrase “scientific management” was being bandied about.
Everyone recognized that the 19th-century industrial system, while
highly successful, had to be managed differently to best incorporate
20th-century technology. The most famous of the new management systems
was that of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s system called for the
strict application of scientific methods to industrial management and
organization in order to produce the maximum output. Specifically,
efficiency experts would study workers’ tasks and break them down into
their smallest components; perform time-and-motion studies to eliminate
wasteful motions and determine the optimum time in which a task should
be completed; and offer wage incentives and penalties for meeting or
falling short of the new standards. There would be no reason for
bargaining or for unions since non-debatable scientific principles,
rather than human foibles and emotions, would govern management
decisions.
The workers’ response to Taylorism was speedy and unequivocal. They
fiercely resisted any system that would analyze their movements as if
they were machines to be fine-tuned (not an exaggeration of Taylor’s
stated beliefs). Such a system, they said, would demean them and their
skills—robbing them of their autonomy and individuality; eliminating
craft from the job; turning workers into mere cogs performing sped-up,
repetitious tasks “to the physical breaking point”—not to mention the
threat to collective bargaining. So visceral was their reaction to
Taylorism that any kind of management system became suspect.
Thus when the Navy attempted in 1912 to introduce a British management
system—less doctrinaire than Taylorism, though with the same ends of
efficiency and increased production—workers at Charlestown were
immediately on their guard. The system’s reorganization of the yard’s
divisions also upset established power relationships between traditional
sea (line) officers and newer and often younger engineering (staff)
types, tilting the balance in favor of the latter. Not surprisingly,
line and staff were polarized over the merits of the new order, accusing
each other respectively of obstructing progress and overmanaging.
In this charged atmosphere, when two overzealous junior officers
attempted to introduce minute Taylor-like task breakdowns at
Charlestown, the metal workers at the yard took action. They asked their
congressman to hand-deliver a protest to Assistant Secretary of the Navy
Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Roosevelt agreed in principle with
scientific management, he was generally sympathetic to labor and refused
to implement a system that the yard workers opposed.
[Illustration: _Machine shop workers pose for a group picture in Dry
Dock 1, about 1905. At this time a little more than 2,000 employees
worked at the Charlestown yard._]
[Illustration: _U.S.S._ Whitney _rises amid a forest of scaffolding.
The keel of the 484-foot destroyer tender—the largest vessel ever
built at Charlestown—was laid down in 1921. It took two and a half
years to build. After surviving the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor_, Whitney _served in the Pacific during World War II_.]
Roosevelt’s visit to the yard in 1913, during which he let it be known
that certain junior officers were being reassigned, focused national
attention on the controversy and encouraged other yard workers around
the nation. A delegation representing them lobbied against Taylorism,
eventually persuading Congress to outlaw such management systems in navy
yards. Yet when it was all over, the Charlestown yard was organized
quite differently than in the 19th century, making it a more efficient
builder and repairer of modern naval vessels and helping it to perform
as it did during World War I.
U.S.S. _Bridge_, commissioned as the first American troops were enroute
to France, exemplified the yard’s progress since the dark 1880s.
Following a long campaign by a job-desperate Boston to have the ship
built at Charlestown, _Bridge_ was laid down in 1914 and launched two
years later. It was the Navy’s first refrigerated supply ship, with a
steel hull and a boiler that could burn oil or coal. Its 423-foot length
made _Bridge_ the largest vessel yet built at Charlestown and its first
major ship since the 1870s.
After demonstrating its competence with _Bridge_, Charlestown was
assigned _Brazos_, two other fuel ships, and a destroyer tender. The
war-spurred building program helped Charlestown stay busy when peace
came, as the last three vessels weren’t laid down until after the
armistice. In fact the number of employees actually rose, to almost
13,000 in 1919. Besides the shipbuilding, there was work converting
ships to troop transports to bring the soldiers home and stripping
military gear from ships returning to civilian service. Charlestown
repaired a large number of destroyers, subs, and battleships small
enough for Dry Dock 2. To increase its docking capacity, the yard
purchased in 1920 a new state-built dry dock in South Boston. At the
time it was the country’s largest dry dock, becoming the nucleus of the
yard’s South Boston Annex.
Events conspired in the 1920s to dampen the yard’s postwar prosperity.
The 1922 Five-Power Treaty limited new ship construction and the overall
number of vessels, meaning less repair and outfitting work for naval
shipyards. In any case the political mood was to spend money on other
things. After the destroyer tender _Whitney_ was launched in 1923, there
was no more construction at Charlestown, other than a couple of tugs,
for the rest of the decade. And as the Japanese grew increasingly
expansionist, much of the fleet was moved to the West Coast, further
reducing work at the yard.
Nevertheless, Charlestown kept up its steady repair work, especially on
destroyers, albeit at a more modest level and with a workforce reduced
to below 3,000 by 1922. The addition of a marine railway in 1919 allowed
the yard to more easily service smaller ships of up to 2,000 tons.
By the end of the decade further developments seriously threatened the
Charlestown yard. The London Naval Treaty of 1930 extended the
moratorium on new capital ship construction for another six years. The
treaty further required the U.S. to scrap three battleships and 94
destroyers—the latter a mainstay of Charlestown. The deepening
Depression also hurt the yard, as the government’s austerity program in
the early years of the crisis reduced work at naval shipyards. The
Hoover administration threatened to close most federal yards, including
Charlestown. Yet in the Depression itself we can trace the roots of the
coming boom.
Building a Steel Ship
Beginning in the 1880s, steel rapidly supplanted wood as the primary
material in U.S. naval vessels. Charlestown began building large steel
vessels in 1915-20, the period depicted below. Stronger per pound than
wood or iron, steel enabled naval architects to design bigger ships that
could carry more armament. Steel was also better suited to bearing the
massive weight of steam engines and boilers. The structural members of
early steel vessels were riveted together, with limited gas welding in
use by World War I. Shipyard artisans traded auger, saw, and mallet for
pneumatic drill, gas cutting torch, and pneumatic rivet gun. Massive
steam-powered cranes replaced the old hoisting shears. Yet, while a
riveted steel ship demanded vastly more complicated plans and a higher
level of coordination between shops, it was assembled in much the same
way as a wooden vessel. From the keel rose the stem, sternpost, and
frames. Transverse beams, longitudinals, vertical stanchions, watertight
bulkheads, decking, and plating completed the hull, all held together by
rivets. Electric welding (_below_), developed in the 1930s, allowed
still lighter construction and the prefabrication of sections.
Designers, however, still called for rivets for some parts of the hull
throughout World War II.
[Illustration: _When the Charlestown yard began constructing steel
ships in 1915, a new building ways was erected on the site of the
shiphouse in which the wooden screw frigate_ Merrimack _had been
built 60 years earlier_ (see pages 32-33). _The yard built three
475-foot fuel ships (“oilers”) on this shipways between 1917 and
1921, reducing the time between keel laying and launch from two
years for the first ship to less than a year for the last._]
[Illustration: Electric welding]
Chain for the Navy
Until World War I, forged iron chain was used on naval vessels, and the
forge shop at the Charlestown yard was a leader in the industry. But it
was a laborious process, and the demands of war spurred the development
of cast steel chain, which could be produced more quickly. Charlestown
was soon experimenting with detachable links to connect standard chain
lengths. This led to the development in 1926 of a new chainmaking
process, in which each link was made from half-links joined in a die
under a drop-forge hammer—“die-lock” chain. It was clearly superior:
more uniform, stronger, cheaper to make. By the early 1930s Charlestown
was producing die-lock chain in several sizes, and by 1936 die-lock had
superseded cast steel chain for all sizes. The shop made the chain used
in most U.S. naval vessels built during World War II and was the only
forge to make chain for the largest postwar aircraft carriers.
[Illustration: Finished chain is loaded for shipping.]
[Illustration: Decorative background]
[Illustration: The Die-lock Chainmaking Process]
1 Rolled nickel-steel rods (from ¾-inch to 4¾-inch in diameter) are cut
into shorter bars.
2 The cut bars are heated in a gas furnace to 2100°F. The now-malleable
bars are bent by machine into U-shapes.
3 The U-bars are stamped to form stems, with tapered and ridged ends, or
they have holes punched in the ends to form sockets.
4 Stem is hooked onto last completed link and placed in die; socket is
heated, and the two are joined under a 10,000-pound hammer (_next page_
).
5 Largest 4½-inch chain for supercarriers could withstand up to 2.5
million pounds. Each two-foot-long link weighed 360 pounds. Red
undercoat and grey paint helped retard rusting.
[Illustration: 10,000-pound hammer]
[Illustration: _At a shift change in 1943, departing workers hurry
past destroyer escorts being outfitted for war. At its peak during
the war, the Charlestown yard and its annexes employed more than
50,000 men and women._]
The Yard Transformed
It was not a dramatic launch—no gathering speed down the shipways and
plunging into Boston Harbor. Instead, the water flowing into Dry Dock 1
rose slowly around U.S.S. _MacDonough_ until the destroyer lifted off
the keel blocks and was towed out of the dock. The 1934 “floating” was
low-keyed but significant. _MacDonough_ was the first warship built by
Charlestown since the wooden screw sloop _Vandalia_ slid down the ways
in 1874.
The technological leap between the two vessels—partially bridged by the
steel supply and fuel ships Charlestown built in the World War I
period—was considerable. Except for its coal-fired auxiliary steam
propulsion, the 216-foot _Vandalia_ did not differ significantly from
the old _Constitution_. _MacDonough_ was a modern destroyer—the
sloop-of-war’s 20th-century counterpart—incorporating the advances of
the past 60 years. It was powered by geared turbines driven by steam
generated in oil-burning boilers, and relied on sophisticated
electrical, hydraulic, and communications systems. At 341 feet, its
steel hull took up most of Dry Dock 1.
As soon as _MacDonough_ was moved out of the dock, the destroyer
_Monaghan_, just floated from Dry Dock 2, was moved into #1 for
completion and outfitting. Two more keels were immediately laid in #2.
It is noteworthy that neither dry dock was being used to repair ships.
In fact, the whole yard’s traditional role as repair facility had given
way in the past year to a new one as shipbuilder, a status it maintained
through World War II. Charlestown built 12 destroyers in the 1930s and
24 more by the end of the war. Of course the yard built and serviced
other types of vessels—especially destroyer escorts and LSTs (Landing
Ship Tank)—but Charlestown acquired a reputation as a “destroyer yard”
and thereafter specialized in this workhorse of the Navy.
[Illustration: Navy Yard Complex During World War II
_This map of Boston Harbor in 1942 shows the five units of Charlestown
Navy Yard during World War II. By war’s end the South Boston Annex was
the largest, with dry docks big enough to repair battleships and heavy
cruisers. The Chelsea and East Boston Annexes repaired small vessels,
and the Fuel Depot Annex served the great number of naval vessels
entering the harbor during the war._]
CHELSEA
Chelsea Naval Hospital
Chelsea Naval Annex
Fuel Depot Annex
CHARLESTOWN
Navy Yard
EAST BOSTON
East Boston Annex
Pipeline
DOWNTOWN BOSTON
_BOSTON HARBOR_
Deep Water Pier
SOUTH BOSTON
South Boston Annex
Ironically, the change had been brought about by the same economic
crisis that almost put an end to the yard. After considering closing all
yards but Norfolk and Philadelphia to save money, the Hoover
administration in 1931 proposed closing only the Charlestown yard.
Reaction was swift: committees were formed in Boston; petitions
protesting the closing were signed. But it was probably the fact that
_MacDonough_ had been ordered a month earlier that tilted the scales in
the yard’s favor. The keel was not laid for two years, however, and 1932
was the yard’s bleakest year since before the Spanish-American War, with
only 1,500 people employed.
The Roosevelt administration’s program to stimulate the economy, provide
jobs, and pull the nation out of the Depression was the first step in
Charlestown’s transformation into a true ship construction yard. Under
FDR’s 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act, 32 new warships were
authorized, 20 of them destroyers, of which two were assigned to
Charlestown. The following year, growing worries about Japanese
aggression moved Congress to further expand the Navy.
The yard kept a rapid pace in the 1930s, laying two keels simultaneously
in Dry Dock 2 in 1934 and again in 1935. (As the shipways was inadequate
for destroyers, all keels were laid in this dock until 1939.) After
floating, the hulls were moved into Dry Dock 1 for completion, the whole
process taking about two years.
Repair work was much reduced in the 1930s by federal economy measures
specifying lengthened maintenance intervals. As both dry docks were in
any case usually tied up in construction work, and because most of the
ships in for repair were relatively small, many of these vessels were
floated into a large cradle and hauled from the water up the tracks of
the yard’s marine railway. Others were taken across the harbor to the
South Boston dry dock.
Technological change transformed many of the yard’s oldest trades by the
1930s, while the growing size and complexity of ships required more and
more workers. Such large government employers as shipyards were seen by
policy makers as places to both promote economic stability and save
money. Early in the Depression these two goals were addressed,
respectively, with lower and upper limits for each yard’s workforce—at
Charlestown, 1,500 and 1,800. The workforce stayed generally within
these limits until 1935, when it began growing, reaching some 5,000
workers by late 1939. (During hard times the yard kept its eye on the
future, exempting apprentices from layoffs.)
By the time war had begun in Europe in 1939, with “readiness” again
America’s watchword, the yard was operating at an even faster rate of
production than in the mid-thirties. With the shipways enlarged to
handle destroyers, six ships were in some stage of construction that
summer. In October four destroyers were floated out of Dry Dock 2 on the
same day. The yard also prepared 18 of the old World War I four-stacker
destroyers for transfer to Britain under the 1940 destroyers-for-bases
agreement.
Then came the war. If the thirties had been a period of gearing up,
wartime pushed the yard into overdrive. It took a great war effort for
the yard to realize its true shipbuilding and manufacturing potential,
confirming a statement by Secretary of the Navy George von Meyer in
1910: “Navy yards are primarily for war and only incidentally for
peace.” One historian’s conservative estimate: under the goad of war the
yard built, repaired, overhauled, converted, or outfitted some 6,000
vessels between 1939 and 1945.
The raid on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 made every naval installation
fearful of enemy attacks. Charlestown installed anti-aircraft batteries
on roofs and camouflaged waterfront buildings. Some security measures
were disruptive of yard routine. Blackouts and dim-outs were in force,
especially in the early years of the war, to reduce the chances of ships
being silhouetted against lights. When the air raid whistle blew,
workers had to stop what they were doing and go to shelters. Throughout
the war, yard officials juggled the conflicting demands of security and
production.
Other security measures had more personal consequences. Some yard
workers were banned from certain areas, and everyone was forbidden to
speak foreign languages while at work. A number of workers were
suspended in 1941 as security risks. “Remarks ... inimical to the
government” were enough to earn an employee a place on the suspension
list.
The huge number of people working at Charlestown was another sign that
the yard had been remade by war. The U.S. Navy became the world’s
largest single employer of industrial labor during the conflict, and the
Charlestown yard held the same status in the Boston area. The yard’s
force rapidly swelled from 5,000 workers in 1939 to a high of about
50,000 at Charlestown and its annexes in mid-1943, working around the
clock in three eight-hour shifts.
As in World War I, the yard again had to protect its essential employees
from the draft board. But voluntary enlistment proved to be the real
drain on the workforce. Although yard foremen tried to dissuade crucial
employees from going, some 13,000 workers left the yard to join the
fight. Throughout the conflict, even when more than 50,000 people worked
there, the yard was shorthanded.
Mainstays of the Yard: Warship Overhaul and Repair
After the construction boom created by World War II, Charlestown resumed
its traditional role of “serving the fleet” (the yard’s motto). In the
early 1950s it was the home yard for 121 vessels, including U.S.S.
_Cassin Young_, the destroyer now on exhibit at the yard. All types of
ships, but especially destroyers, came for everything from minor repairs
to overhauls on established cycles. The latter, which often involved
some degree of modernization, could require 800 to 900 workers a day.
After the war the yard preserved decommissioned vessels of the Atlantic
Reserve Fleet berthed at the South Boston Annex. Charlestown also
prepared ships for transfer to allies, outfitted vessels built
elsewhere, and repaired equipment, especially sonar.
[Illustration: U.S.S. Wasp plaque]
[Illustration: _Charlestown was busy in 1960 with overhauls and
modernizations. In the foreground: aircraft carrier_ Wasp _(whose
crew presented the yard with the plaque shown above); floating dry
dock (in a yard dry dock); heavy cruiser_ Macon (_CA-132_).]
To make up for the shortages, the yard began for the first time hiring
significant numbers of women and African Americans. Their door of
opportunity, unlocked by the needs of a war economy, was kept open by
pressure from civil rights groups on the Roosevelt administration (often
relayed by a sympathetic Eleanor Roosevelt). Women at the yard had
traditionally worked in clerical positions and as phone operators, and
this remained true at war’s outset. But more and more women found work
in the industrial shops, notably as welders and at the ropewalk (the
latter having employed them during World War I). At least in some shops,
however, there were restrictions. Gloria Brandenberg, who worked in the
Paint Shop, recalled that all painter’s helpers were female, supervised
by a woman (the “leading lady”), while all painters were male.
Brandenberg said there was no chance for advancement.
By 1943 female blue-collar workers outnumbered women in clerical
positions. Some 7,700 women were on the rolls in late 1944—far above
their prewar level and about 19 percent of the workforce. Many worked as
welders on ships under construction, but yard officials wary of contact
between female workers and male crews barred women from all vessels in
for repair. Painter’s helper Brandenberg recalled that the women were
not allowed even to talk to sailors.
While African Americans were not officially excluded from Charlestown’s
prewar workforce, few had been employed. When the war created
opportunities for them, some whites openly resisted their presence in
skilled positions. But this was not a universal attitude. Allan Crite, a
black illustrator in the Design Department, said he experienced no
racial problems. Inevitably, though, tensions arose in some areas.
Gloria Brandenberg recalled an evening at a social club with her
coworkers from the Paint Shop, one of whom was African American. She was
asked to leave. The group talked it over; they all left. But the records
show no major racial conflict at the yard. At war’s end more than 2,300
African Americans were in the force of 32,000 workers.
By late 1942, the yard had settled into a wartime routine—to the extent
that routine is possible during war. Normal peacetime constraints didn’t
apply. “During the war there wasn’t much emphasis on estimates,”
recalled plumber Lyman Carlow. “For one thing, there wasn’t time. Here’s
the job; we need the ship right away; get it done and whatever it costs
it costs ... it was just a real frantic pace ... the material just
flowed in ... plenty of people, so we could really get the work done.”
More than the higher level of general activity and the large numbers of
workers (around 36,000 at this point), it was the volume of new
construction that characterized the wartime yard. A walk around the yard
on November 23 would have revealed ships being built in every facility
but Dry Dock 2, used only for repairs.
Workers generally laid down and launched large vessels in pairs. But
while floating two at a time out of a dry dock was standard practice, it
was never approached casually. John Langan, a shipfitter during the war,
recalled: “It was quite a feat, two destroyers right alongside each
other, flooding the dock, and not having them crash.”
A new shipways built in early 1941 helped quicken the pace of
production. In that year 10 destroyers were laid down, the most in any
one year. By late 1941 the yard’s workers had pushed the time for
building a destroyer down to a little over a year and would cut it to
three or four months from keel to launching by the end of the war.
Women in the Workforce
“_We all felt that we were doing our job, and the harder we worked,
the faster we would get the ships out and the faster it would get
over. Deep down, everyone was very serious about it, because
ninety-nine out of a hundred people had a husband or a brother or
somebody close to them that was overseas.”_
—_Gloria Brandenberg, WW II Charlestown yard worker_
[Illustration: _Welders at Charlestown during World War II._]
As enlistments and competition from private industry depleted the pool
of male workers during World War II, the Navy looked to the large
numbers of women who wanted to do their part for the war effort. Women
had long worked at the Charlestown yard, although almost exclusively
(except during World War I) in clerical positions. But beginning in 1942
the easing of state workweek restrictions for women hastened their
recruitment into the yard’s manufacturing and traditional shipyard
shops. The intention was to have them replace men in relatively
unskilled positions requiring little training. And in fact most women
did work as helpers in their shops, often with little chance of
advancement. But some moved into the trades as machinists, riveters,
painters, riggers, pipefitters, and especially as welders and ropewalk
workers. At the same time women still occupied more than half of the
yard’s clerical positions. Altogether, they made up about one-fifth of
the yard workforce by 1945. Those in the trades knew their jobs would
likely end when the war did, but the point had been made. In 1945, a
yard historian wrote: “Experience over the past two years has proven
that female employees are able to work efficiently on an equal basis
with men on many jobs that were formerly considered to be men’s jobs.”
[Illustration: _Welders at Charlestown during World War II._]
[Illustration: _The yard’s clerical workers enlisted as Yeomen-F
(female) at the outbreak of World War I. Women also worked as radio
operators and at the ropewalk._]
[Illustration: _Many responded to posters urging women to fill an
industrial job and “free a man to fight.”_]
The new shipways was also used to build destroyer escorts (DEs)—smaller,
slower, and less expensive versions of destroyers designed for escort
duty and antisubmarine warfare. Escorted convoys had proven to be the
only effective way to thwart U-boat “wolf packs” preying on allied
shipping. In 1942, after the Navy ordered the first of more than a
thousand DEs, Charlestown built a new dry dock in which it could turn
out four at a time. The next year 50 DEs were laid down at the yard,
half of which were destined for Britain in accordance with the
Lend-Lease Act of 1941. Charlestown got the production of DEs down to an
art: of the 62 it built, workers launched an impressive 46 in the first
eleven months of 1943.
If 1941 was the year of the destroyer at the yard and 1943 belonged to
the DE, 1944 was the year of the LST (Landing Ship, Tank). These
seagoing assault vessels carried tanks and other vehicles during
amphibious landings. The yard laid down 30 in 1944, taking only a month
to complete one of the 328-foot vessels.
In all, Charlestown built 174 large vessels during the war, including 12
barracks ships and four submarines. There were also hundreds of smaller
craft, such as wooden motor launches and diver boats. The South Boston
Annex played a part in the yard’s strong wartime performance, doing much
of the repair and conversion work and fabricating hull sections that
were towed to Charlestown for incorporation into ships under
construction.
Not all vessels were built outside: in the summer of 1942, shipfitters
fabricated in their shop 150 fifty-foot LCMs (Landing Craft,
Mechanized)—also called “tank lighters”—for the British-American
invasion of North Africa. Shipfitter John Langan remembered it as a
“crash program.... We just stopped everything else and concentrated on
them and delivered them for the invasion.”
While this kind of rapid, assembly-line construction was Charlestown’s
specialty during the war, there were other claims on the yard’s time. By
late 1942 war’s reality was being brought home to Charlestown in the
shape of battle-scarred ships needing quick repair. When a damaged ship
arrived, it was given priority until it was ready to return to combat.
There was another reason for the air of urgency around war repairs: ship
repair generally called for more skill than did shipbuilding. Because
workers often had to work blind on battle damage until its nature and
extent could be determined, such work called on all the workers’
resourcefulness. John Langan remembered “everybody fighting to get them
[war-damaged vessels], because it is good work.” Langan recalled one
vessel towed into the yard: it had been “torpedoed and cut right in
halves ... and the fireroom was open to the seas ... [They had] tied her
down with big I-beams ... tied them the full length, all the way
around”—to keep the ship afloat until it reached the yard.
Even without the shell-torn hulls and shredded superstructures, war is
hard on ships. Pushed faster, farther, and longer under less than ideal
conditions, they needed more than routine maintenance. And on top of the
already demanding schedule of ship construction, repair, and
maintenance, other tasks competed for time and resources. Yard workers
outfitted naval vessels built at other yards. They converted private
vessels and old naval ships to wartime uses. They manufactured turbines
and thousands of tons of die-lock chain (_see pages 60-61_). They
“degaussed” hulls—neutralized their magnetic fields so they would not
trip mines. Together these activities suggest the scope and grueling
pace of the yard’s war effort.
In such an atmosphere, mishaps caused by fallible humans dealing with
complex machinery were inevitable. One particularly embarrassing, and
nearly tragic, incident was related by electrical shop foreman Mel
Hooper. His men were completing electrical work on the new submarine
_Lancefish_ (built at another yard) in 1945. “Some machinist went down,”
he recalled, “and opened up the front gate on the torpedo tube and
forgot to close it; then he went back in the ship and opened up the
inside one and then it started to flood. And they had a hell of a job
trying to close it, and they couldn’t close it, and everybody ran aboard
the dock to get the hell out of there before they got drowned. And then
the ship sank.”
The stepped-up safety program was almost certainly an improvement on the
pre-war conditions, when, as remembered by plumber Lyman Carlow, “It
seemed to me that everyone was supposed to look after himself.” But
while the program called for more protections for workers from open
machinery, hazardous fumes, and other dangerous conditions, a survey in
1944 noted that workers were rarely disciplined for safety violations,
machines lacked guards, and most workers did not wear their hard hats,
goggles, or ear protection. “You [went] down to the tanks with the
chipping hammers and riveting guns going all around,” recalled Carlow,
“and you wouldn’t be able to hear for a couple of hours afterward. But
nobody did anything about it, or thought anything of it. You just got
deaf, and that was it.”
A shipyard was a dangerous place to work even in peacetime; war
multiplied the hazards. Charles Snell, an apprentice rigger at the yard,
recalled 40 years later, “We had a lot of close escapes, because safety
wasn’t really stressed then as much as it is today ... we lost a lot of
riggers, strangely enough, and I can never account for this, being run
over by the cranes ... the operator of the crane, when it was traveling,
had very limited visibility close ahead. And we lost an inordinate
number of riggers because they’d stumble and the crane would run over
them.... We had quite a few falls into the dry dock, not riggers, but
all trades.”
Snell left the yard in 1943 and served in Europe for the duration of the
war. He recalled his impressions upon returning in 1946, comparing the
yard to “a runner, which was running for an objective, and all of a
sudden, the objective wasn’t there. The need for everything had suddenly
evaporated. And it was a question of what do you finish and what don’t
you finish, and what’s important.”
With peace came the end of Charlestown’s brief period as a major
shipbuilding center. But the war-seasoned yard did not simply revert to
what it had been before. Charlestown found a new postwar role as a place
where old vessels were remade from the inside out, transformed into
modern warships. Old did not necessarily mean long in years. In the
1950s, ships that had performed admirably in the late war were being
left behind in a world of accelerating technological change. Charlestown
extended their careers, installing state-of-the-art electronics. When
advances in missile technology opened a new era in naval weapons and
strategy, Charlestown played a leading role in the changeover. The life
of the crowded and aging yard itself was extended by such activities,
enabling Charlestown to render another three decades of service to the
country.
In the months after war’s end, the level of activity naturally fell off,
but the yard remained busy converting transports to bring home the
troops, inactivating ships, and completing the last few LSTs, barracks
ships, and subs laid down in 1945. Charlestown also carved a niche for
itself in sonar, a technology dating to the World War I period and
considered standard equipment since the 1930s. Beginning in 1948 the
yard became a center for the repair of sonar equipment, establishing a
sonar laboratory and developing techniques adopted by other electronics
repair centers throughout the Navy.
Radar, developed in the 1930s, had come into widespread use during the
war. The yard undertook a major conversion program in 1950 when it began
upgrading radar and sonar systems on a number of destroyers and
destroyer escorts, converting them to radar picket and antisubmarine
warfare (ASW) roles. Charlestown also planned and designed all
alterations, wherever they were performed, to cruisers, destroyers,
escort carriers, LSTs, and several auxiliary vessel types.
While the yard accepted a variety of vessels, including aircraft
carriers, it continued its traditional specialization in destroyers and
destroyer escorts. In 1955 the yard converted the 10-year-old _Gyatt_
into the world’s first guided missile destroyer.
That year the yard laid down the keel of its only postwar vessel and the
last one it built: the LST _Suffolk County_, first of a larger and
faster class of LSTs. Charlestown also served as the design yard for the
other six LSTs, built in private yards.
In the 1960s the yard stayed busy with outfittings, missile and ASW
conversions, and Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization (FRAM) overhauls
that added five to seven years of service to aging warships.
Charlestown’s FRAM program specialized in World War II-era destroyers.
Ranging from brief dockings to major operations of a year or more
costing millions, these projects involved such sophisticated work as
installing or upgrading sonar (_see pages 76-77_), radar,
communications, and computer equipment; major alterations such as
replacing engines and entire superstructures; and the more prosaic tasks
the yard had been performing for over a century: cleaning and painting
hulls, renovating propellers and rudders, and rebricking or replacing
boilers.
Nevertheless, by 1972 work was falling off at Charlestown, and signs did
not bode well for the yard’s future. For years the Navy had invested
little there for maintenance or modernization, making it harder to stay
efficient. The marine railway and ropewalk had been shut down in 1971.
Elsewhere, superfluous or inefficient military bases were being closed
to save money. (The New York Navy Yard was closed in 1966.) A massive
infusion of funds was needed to upgrade the old Charlestown yard—too
small in any case for proper expansion of its facilities.
The Navy in general was retrenching for economic reasons. The destroyer
fleet, especially—the lifeblood of the yard in the 20th century—had
steadily dwindled since 1960. The fewer destroyers there were to
service, the harder it was to justify the Charlestown yard’s existence.
The failure of the Navy to carry through modernization plans, including
one whereby the majority of the yard’s industrial activity would be
transferred to an enhanced South Boston facility, helped to hasten the
inevitable. Many associated with the yard also suspected that
Massachusetts, as the only state going Democratic in the 1972
presidential election, would pay a penalty for failing to back the
winner.
On April 16, 1973, the yard commander, Captain R. L. Arthur, announced
that the Charlestown yard, along with the yard at Hunter’s Point in San
Francisco, was to close. Over the next year it ceased all fleet
servicing and manufacturing operations, and on July 1, 1974, nearly 175
years of service to the nation ended with a formal disestablishment
ceremony. Only one naval activity remained at Charlestown: the
protection and maintenance of the old warship long associated with the
yard, U.S.S. _Constitution_.
[Illustration: _The launching of a ship celebrates the time, energy,
and skill spent in its making. Here U.S.S._ Guest, _one of 24
destroyers built at Charlestown during World War II, slips into
Boston Harbor in 1942. The big_ Fletcher-_class destroyer took only
five months to build_.]
[Illustration: _A destroyer is traditionally named for a
distinguished naval figure, and if possible the closest female
relative sponsors the namesake ship. In a centuries-old ritual,
DD-461’s sponsor Eileen Fairfax Thomson breaks a bottle of champagne
against the ship’s bow in 1941, sending it down the ways with the
words, “I christen thee_ Forrest, _and may God bless all who sail in
her.” Captain French Forrest commanded the Charlestown-built_
Cumberland _in the Mexican War. Siding with the Confederates during
the Civil War, he oversaw conversion of the burned U.S.S._ Merrimack
_into the ironclad C.S.S._ Virginia—_destroyer of_ Cumberland (see
pages 28-29).]
Ships for World War II
From 1933 to the end of World War II, the Charlestown yard moved outside
its traditional role as repair yard and became a shipbuilding facility.
It began with destroyers—ships it had long specialized in
repairing—averaging two a year in the 1930s. This period of steady
production was preamble to the World War II crash building program.
Charlestown launched almost 200 vessels, including 24 destroyers,
between 1939 and 1945. In 1942 it began building destroyer
escorts—smaller, less expensive versions of destroyers designed to
counter German submarines. The final big program was the production of
LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) for amphibious assaults in Europe and Asia.
LSDs (Landing Ship, Dock) for carrying other vessels; submarines; and
various auxiliary vessels also came down the ways during the war. These
programs spurred major changes at the yard. Greater specialization, for
instance, broke up traditional shops. The biggest change was in
construction methods, most notably prefabrication. Several bow and stern
sections, each with its own keel, were built separately—many in the
Shipfitters Shop, but also “in playgrounds and schoolyards and parts of
the yard, and all around greater Boston,” remembered Rigger Charles
Snell. These were then joined to the midship hull section rising on the
shipways. “Economy was not the name of the game,” recalled Snell. “The
name of the game was time.”
[Illustration: _Hulls were launched from shipways or dry docks, then
moored alongside piers for completion. Here, yard workers, who
labored round the clock during the war, outfit a_ Fletcher-_class
destroyer as night falls. At top, a five-inch gun is lowered by a
mobile crane._]
[Illustration: Destroyer (36 built)
A fast, versatile, relatively small ship, it was equipped for
anti-submarine warfare, escort duty, scouting, antiaircraft warfare,
torpedo or gun surface engagement, and shore bombardment.]
[Illustration: LST (Landing Ship, Tank; 44 built)
This craft carried tanks and other vehicles for amphibious landings. The
water ballast system allowed it to vary its draft: deep for stable ocean
travel and shallow for moving in close to shore.]
[Illustration: Destroyer Escort (62 built)
This smaller, more quickly built version of the destroyer was designed
to protect allied shipping convoys from German U-boats, freeing
destroyers for other duties.]
New Careers for Old Ships
During the long era of wooden sailing ships, when naval technology
changed only gradually over the decades, a warship’s service lasted as
long as the materials from which it was built. But as the pace of change
quickened in the mid-19th century with the advent of steam propulsion
and iron hulls, a vessel quickly grew obsolete without continual
incorporation of the latest technology. This state of affairs, which
intensified in the 20th century, provided Charlestown Navy Yard with a
new role after World War II: lengthening or transforming the careers of
old ships, otherwise destined for mothballs, through modernization and
conversion. Modernization meant updating old electrical, propulsion, or
weapons systems or performing structural surgery without altering the
vessel’s function. This ranged from installing a sonar dome on the
bottom of the hull to dismantling the entire superstructure and building
a new one. The process normally took several months. Conversion, which
could take years, involved major alteration of a vessel to prepare it
for a different tactical mission. A typical example would be the
conversion of a conventional scouting, escorting, and submarine-fighting
destroyer to a radar picket destroyer, whose role was to provide
mid-ocean radar warning. A notable postwar task undertaken by the yard
was the 1956 conversion of the destroyer _Gyatt_ into the world’s first
guided missile destroyer. Basically, the vessel’s aft five-inch guns
were replaced with a twin missile launcher. But the ship had to be
significantly altered to perform its new function. The yard designed
automated systems that first affixed a booster charge to the missile and
then moved it from the air-conditioned belowdecks magazine to the
launcher. The decks and superstructure had to be reinforced to withstand
the tremendous pressure and temperature of a launch. A system of ducts
and blowout plates was installed to minimize damage and injury in the
event of a premature explosion. Innovative retractable fins at midships
helped stabilize the vessel for firing. With these and other changes,
the yard remade _Gyatt_ into a sophisticated missile-firing machine.
[Illustration: _In the late 1950s the Navy began installing sonar
equipment in bow domes. Bow domes reduced hull resistance and were
less susceptible to bubble noise. The Charlestown yard, already a
leader in sonar technology, performed a prototype dome installation
in 1958. To install a dome, workers first cut away part of the old
bow, then fitted the prefabricated dome_ (next page, on U.S.S.
_Willis A. Lee_ in 1961).]
[Illustration: _Sonar works actively and passively. In active sonar,
the transducer in the dome transmits sound pulses through the water.
When the pulses reach an object (or the bottom), they are reflected
and received by the transducer as echoes. Distance is determined by
time elapsed between transmission and echo. In passive sonar,
hydrophones pick up noises generated by underwater sources._]
[Illustration: Installing a sonar dome]