Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  Six months later the number had grown to twelve hundred. By now they were joined by five hundred Marines under Major James Devereux. The work was already half-finished except for the submarine base. When Harry Morrison and his wife flew out in November, they found the place almost ready for operations. The only major job left for the airstrip was the construction of protective bunkers for the Marine planes. The Morrisons shook hands with Teeters and his wife, and greeted the workers, many of whom they knew from previous jobs. One of them was Joseph Crowe, son of Hoover Dam’s designer, Frank Crowe. They talked about Crowe’s prospects when he got back to Boise, and then had a sobering meeting with Major Devereux.36

  War was almost certainly coming, he told Morrison, and Wake would be in the middle of it. The tiny island’s prospects were slim if the Japanese attacked. The Navy was ordering the women to leave, but there would not be time to evacuate all the civilian workers. As Harry and Ann took off to return to Hawaii, he must have wondered if he would ever see Teeters and his men again.

  Teeters, meanwhile, wasted no time. Since not a single Marine could be spared from his duties, every available construction worker had to help with the defense. Teeters’s construction workers filled sandbags, redistributed and camouflaged Wake’s supplies, and built bomb shelters and revetments. Teeters, a veteran of World War I, pulled together 185 volunteers to serve alongside the Marines. Devereux was in no position to refuse, and soon MK hard hats were taking their place around the five-inch guns and machine gun nests, waiting for the Japanese.37

  They didn’t have long to wait. On December 8, just hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers seemed to appear from nowhere, the sound of their engines drowned by the pounding surf until they were virtually on top of the island. The island’s squadron of Marine fighters took off but lost the bombers in the clouds as death showered down on the tiny atoll. Eight of the Marine’s twelve Grumman Wildcats were blown up, and two out of three pilots were killed or wounded. Dozens of MK’s workers were also killed in the raid. Some of the survivors panicked and fled into the jungle. But most remained at their post, and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Marines through a second raid two days later, and when the first Japanese warships appeared on the horizon on December 11.38

  It was a formidable force of three light cruisers and six destroyers, plus a contingent of transport with 450 soldiers loaded for an amphibious landing. Wake’s chances for survival went from slim to none. Only two things stood between defeat and captivity. One was the Marines’ four surviving Wildcat fighters. The other was the two batteries of five-inch guns, which Teeters’s workers had reinforced with Henry Kaiser’s cement.

  As the Japanese troops tried to disembark, those twin batteries ripped into their escorting ships. Four shells hit the light cruiser Yubari; Platoon Sergeant Harry Bedell’s Battery L blew the destroyer Hayate in half with three salvos. Battery B pounded away at three Japanese destroyers, scoring direct hits on two of them.

  Meanwhile, the Marine Wildcats had zeroed in on the Japanese light cruiser Kisaragi. None of the young pilots had ever dropped a bomb before, even in a practice run. With sheer courage and determination, however, they scored the Kisaragi with perfect bull’s-eyes. She was already aflame from a previous hit near her ammunition storage when Lieutenant John Kinney pulled his bomb release lever and the one-hundred-pounder hurtled down. It caught the Kisaragi amidships. “A huge explosion engulfed the ship,” Kinney later wrote, “and she rapidly began to sink.”39 A cheer went up around Wake Island. They had held out, against almost impossible odds. But could they hold out the next time?

  Miraculously, they did. The island was attacked every day after the eleventh except one, while the MK workers dodged bombs and lived on starvation rations. The four surviving Wildcats shrank to two, which the Marine mechanics kept going by cannibalizing parts and trying out bits from truck and bulldozer engines when the aviation equipment ran out. All America followed the epic struggle on Wake on their radios; President Roosevelt himself got daily bulletins. But on December 22, the last Wildcat was gone.

  The next day, Teeters, Kinney, and the others watched a new Japanese flotilla appear, much more powerful than the first. This time there were four heavy cruisers and nearly two thousand Japanese soldiers—plus two carriers, Soryu and Hiryu, flinging in their carrier planes before the final assault. Remarkably, the Marines managed to beat off the Japanese who hit the beach on Wilkes. Captain Wesley Platt ordered his ninety or so Marines to fix bayonets and charge an enemy who outnumbered them five to one. Caught by complete surprise, the Japanese panicked and fled into the surf. Platt’s men killed almost all of them.40

  On Wake itself, however, the Marines didn’t have a chance. Pounded by bombs and strafing planes, hammered by the cruisers’ guns, they were helpless to halt the Japanese advance. One of Teeters’s workmen, “Pop,” had served in World War I as a lieutenant and had been a corporate executive until alcohol had cost him his marriage and position and reduced him to menial jobs. Now he grabbed a bag of grenades and waded into the surf. He tossed them into one Japanese landing craft and then another, until he ran out of bombs, and hightailed it back to safety. Workmen and Marines cheered, but Major Devereux knew they were doomed. He fired off an urgent radio message: “Enemy is on the Island. The issue is in doubt.” A few hours later, he was told that the task force on its way to relieve Wake had been ordered back to Pearl. He tied a white rag to a mop handle and marched out to surrender what was left of his command. The battle for Wake was over.41

  More construction workers than Marines had died in the fighting—forty-eight, versus forty-seven of Devereux’s hard-pressed men. Two hundred and eight others would die in the brutal conditions of Japan’s POW camps. Twenty or so were kept on Wake Island to work as slave labor for their captors. When it was clear the war was lost and Wake would have to be evacuated, the Japanese shot them all.

  Dan Teeters would survive the war, despite leading a desperate escape attempt that led to his recapture and a savage beating. Florence Teeters mounted an unrelenting campaign in Washington to provide money and relief to the workers’ families. Harry Morrison, Kaiser, and their fellow contractors pitched in $300,000.42 The harrowing experience of the Wake Island workers would help to force one of the biggest changes in the Navy’s way of conducting war—the creation of the Construction Battalions, or CBs, known to everyone else as the Seabees. From now on, the men who risked their lives building on the firing line would be in uniform, trained to fight and if necessary die facing the enemy.

  The fall of Wake sealed the fate of the Philippines. The Japanese were now undisputed masters of the central Pacific. Yet the sacrifice at Wake had not been in vain. Even though they never sent the radio signal “Send Us More Japs” that rumor said they did, the Marines and Morrison’s men had shown that Americans were ready to fight and die, even against steep odds.

  They inspired a nation. They also sent Washington an urgent message.

  Give the armed forces the right tools, and in the right numbers, and America just might win. That’s what the Army’s new head of logistics, General Brehon Somervell, was thinking about, too.

  Under his boss, Undersecretary Robert Patterson, the Army had grown like a field of mushrooms. From 260,000 men in May 1940, it had expanded to more than a million, thanks to the Selective Service Act. The new U.S. Army had two armored divisions, whereas in 1939 it had none. In 1939 it had 1,500 planes. Thanks to Knudsen and his friends, it now had 16,000, and 22,000 pilots. Already, British and American war production was equaling that of the Axis powers combined.

  With the coming of war, Somervell was now looking at an army that was going to expand from a projected one million in 1942 to seven million by the end of 1943. He also figured that the Army’s supply of tanks, trucks, and planes would rise to 50 percent of its Victory Plan goals by the end of 1942. That meant America would be ready to go on the offensive. Until then, he told the War Production Board in one of its first meetings, t
he U.S. armed forces’ job would be to keep the lines of communication open to our allies Britain and Russia.43

  That made Kaiser’s Liberty ship program more vital than ever.

  * * *

  * Meigs, however, was more than just a booster. It was Meigs who proposed forming a Joint Aircraft Committee to standardize the parts and designs of airplanes being ordered by both the British and the Americans, including the Navy. The committee worked out how to supply the fifty-five different types of airplanes in American production with the same screws, parts for landing gears, tires, bombs and bomb releases, and hundreds of other parts—in addition to identifying which were more likely to suffer battle damage and need larger numbers of replacements and which were not. The Joint Committee’s work proved a major step forward in keeping both the RAF and the U.S. air force in the air, and a huge step toward bringing mass production to the world of aviation.

  † Passed in 1934, it had legitimated collective bargaining for America’s labor unions and also immunized them from court injunctions.

  ‡ There were so many migrant workers from the border states that a joke began to circulate around wartime Detroit. “How many states in the Union? Forty-six, because Tennessee and Kentucky are now in Michigan.”

  § The gigantic and ultramodern Volkswagen plant at Wolfsburg, for example, started the war with enough machine tools to produce 200,000 vehicles a year. Barely one-fifth of its capacity was ever used; one worker there recalled “there seemed to be no plans at all” what to do with the rest. Later, bombing by American Flying Fortresses and B-24s made the issue moot.

  Moving a prefab deckhouse section, Richmond Shipyard No. 2, 1942. Copyright 2012, Penton Media, 84595: 112SH

  We see a greater America out here.

  —Henry Kaiser

  “THE FOUNDATION OF all our hopes and schemes was the immense shipbuilding program of the United States.”

  Those were Winston Churchill’s words, describing the situation at the start of 1942.1 Merchant ships were no longer just the lifeline for Britain in its struggle against the Axis. They were now essential to America’s ability to project its power across two oceans, the Atlantic and Pacific.

  The coming of war meant big changes for the Liberty ship program, as well. How many ships were being made suddenly became a decisive factor in their chances of victory. It was American as well as British ships that were being taken out by German U-boats—more than 6.4 million tons’ worth in the first half of 1942. The Germans’ Operation Drumbeat set up patrols of U-boats to catch merchant ships as they came out of every harbor on the East Coast, their victims framed against the coastal lights like silhouettes in a shooting gallery.2

  With losses like this, Knudsen’s and Admiral Land’s estimate before Pearl Harbor of needing five million tons of shipping in 1942 and seven million for 1943 looked out of touch with reality.

  Something had to be done to expand the program once again—even though every shipyard in America was going flat-out building war vessels. The pressure of events, however, was inexorable. During Churchill’s visit to DC shortly after Pearl Harbor and just before Christmas 1941, the goalposts were moved yet again. The politicians agreed there would now have to be eight million tons built in 1942, and ten million in 1943.3

  The powers that be brought in Admiral Howard Vickery, the Maritime Commission’s head of construction. “Can you do it?” they asked.

  Vickery was a large, intense man who was most comfortable with a pipe in his mouth. He looked over the figures. “If I can get to eight million tons in ’42,” he said, “ten will be no problem for ’43.”

  It was an astonishing prediction. But like Bill Knudsen, Vickery understood that the real issue was not the numbers but the momentum. Once the yards got up to a certain pace of production, increasing it would be easy. As with a marathon runner, it was the pace that mattered.

  Still, existing Liberty shipyards were slammed. New ones would have to be built, and Vickery knew whom to turn to for that. On March 3 he sent seven identical telegrams to Kaiser and the other heads of the Six Companies. He asked each of them to draw up a proposal for construction of a new yard that could start producing ships in 1942. It may have seemed an impossible task, but Vickery concluded, “The emergency demands all within your power to give your country ships.”4

  The first telegram he got back was at 11 P.M. that night, from Steve Bechtel. “We are studying the problem tonight,” it read, “and will give you our sincere best judgment tomorrow.” Steve put his younger brother Kenneth in charge of the task force and gave him twenty-four hours to plan out the yard and find a place to build it. On March 4, Ken showed his brother the results and Steve wired back to Washington. Nine days later the Bechtels had their contract.

  The place they had found was in Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, near Sausalito. It was a stretch of deserted land along the shore of Richardson Bay belonging to the Northwest Pacific Railroad. The railroad leased the land to the Bechtels, the Marin County Board agreed to the terms, and on March 28—little more than three weeks after Vickery’s telegram—bulldozers broke ground.

  “I’m betting on you fellows,” Vickery told them. “I expect you to produce.” They did. Even with the fierce competition for local labor from Richmond and their own Calship, the Bechtels managed to scrape up enough live bodies to put them to work in the new yard, dubbed Marinship. The marine architect described his supervisor staff as “an orchestra leader, a nightclub proprietor, and a cabinetmaker.” Some of his draftsmen had never drawn a ship before. Many of the workers were disabled.5 Still, with skilled hands on loan from Calship along with booms and equipment, and a crash seventy-hour training program for the rest, the Bechtel brothers were able to lay their first keel before the summer was out. Before 1942 was finished, Marinship would launch five ships just as promised—an astonishing feat even by Richmond standards.

  All the same, if the United States was going to meet the desperate new goals, Henry Kaiser’s yards were going to be at the center of the effort.

  That suited Kaiser. The month before Pearl Harbor, he and his Todd partners had bought back the Richmond yards from the British. They would be producing for the American cause now. The arrival of war only sharpened his own appetite for work, and his two key lieutenants, his son Edgar and Clay Bedford, were working flat-out, seven-day-a-week schedules to hit the numbers.6

  So were their workers. The historian Carlo D’Este’s father worked the graveyard shift in the Richmond yards. He still remembers driving down at night to meet his father, with strings and strings of arc lights brightening up the sky like daylight while hundreds of workers milled around the unfinished hulks.7 A British visitor, the radio commentator Alistair Cooke, compared them to characters in a Disney cartoon, who “rush forth with welding guns and weld the parts into a ship as innocently as a child fits A into B on a nursery floor.”

  Cooke had seen normal shipyards in places like Philadelphia and the Mersey in his own country. He was a bit bemused at how clean and neat Kaiser’s yard was. Everything was laid out with meticulous attention. “Sheets of steel are marked VK2 and MQ3, to indicate to a moron where they fit on a ship,” since these were workers who had never built ships before. Cranes would swing overhead to gather a sheet, lay it down where drillers and fillers would break it up into the parts traced in outline in yellow chalk, then move it on into the lofts where the real work of assembling the ship was done.8

  Inside the hull, the noise could be catastrophic to a newcomer. A woman who worked as a welder at Yard No. 1 remembered when the chippers would get under way and two shipfitters would start swinging sledgehammers at opposite sides of a steel bulkhead, “and you wonder if your ears can stand it.” The sound “will seem to swell and engulf you like a treacherous wave in surf-bathing and you feel as if you are going under.” Yet after a few days she became used to it and never gave it another thought—nor thought it was strange that she could sing popular songs at
work at the top of her lungs without anyone hearing a sound.9

  She grew to deal with it. So did the other welders, chippers, grinders, reamers, flangers, shipfitters, loftsmen, air-compressor operators, bolters, flanger-shrinkers, plate hangers, pneumatic drill and punch and shear operators, and riggers of cranes, machines, and planes—along with forty or so other trade workers who labored to get the plates assembled, the boilers erected and installed, and the ships ready for launching.10 It was incredibly dangerous work. The same woman welder remembered having to jump three-foot gaps with a forty-foot drop below, welding torch in hand. She did it, but “my knees were a little shaky under the welding leathers.”

  Then there were the swinging scaffolds. Our lady welder never quite had the nerve to try, but others learned to ride up on one scaffold as it rose, then jump to another as it swung past on its way down, without a thought—even though a slight slip meant a neck-breaking plunge to the bottom of the hull. Working out on the far end of what would be the main deck was like standing atop a six-story building, with no restraints or guardrails. There were electrical wires to trip on or to be electrocuted by; red-hot rivets to drop on a foot or 250-pound-per-square-inch metal presses in which to flatten an unwary hand or finger; plus the hazards every welder faces, of searing burns that leave arms and legs covered with scars.

  All this for an average of sixty dollars a week.11

  But the workers came. In 1942 the growth of the Richmond yards was explosive. In the summer of 1941, there were still only 4,000 employees working there, most living in ramshackle shacks thrown up on the barren flats surrounding the yards. Pearl Harbor brought floods of new faces, many from as far away as New York and Boston. By the end of 1942, some 80,000 men and women were employed in the yards; a year later there were 100,000. The Portland yards trailed only slightly behind in numbers. At least 60,000 simply climbed into their cars and drove across the country. Many of them were destitute laborers from the Dust Bowl states, like characters from The Grapes of Wrath. When they arrived, they found an entire city being built by Kaiser and his Permanente Shipbuilding Company, complete with restaurants, movie theaters, schools, and hospitals. Eventually Henry Kaiser even began chartering a special train service to bring prospective workers to the Richmond site.12