Freedom's Forge

by Arthur Herman

  In May 1942 the Navy posed their problem to the Maritime Commission’s Admiral Land, who came up with what he thought was the perfect solution. Let Henry Kaiser do it.

  It made sense. Kaiser was the reigning king of Liberty shipbuilding. By the start of 1943, he would cut the labor hours required for building a ship nearly in half, from 640,000 in March 1941 to 352,000. He had proven his engineers’ ability to work from a completely new design. So why not turn him loose on escort carriers?5

  Henry himself loved the idea. When Land wired him with the Navy’s suggestion, he enthusiastically assented. Here was the company’s chance to make ships that would not only supply the war, but fight it. It was also just the kind of production challenge his son Edgar would shine at. By March 1943, he said, Vancouver could switch all twelve ways over to aircraft carriers.6

  Kaiser turned to a design agent, George Sharp, to come up with the preliminary drawings. After consultations with both the Navy and the Maritime Commission, the proposed design met the construction specifications of both. Four hundred and ninety feet long and displacing 6,890 tons, it actually had a longer flight deck than the Independence carriers, although Seattle’s conversion jobs were much bigger ships. There wasn’t a single turbine or diesel engine available anywhere: They were all going to other warships. So Kaiser’s designer opted for a five-cylinder reciprocating steam engine, which could deliver 5400 horsepower on each of its two propeller shafts.7

  Simple, compact, easy to build—those were the hallmarks of the Kaiser shipbuilding philosophy and of his proposed new carrier. On June 2, 1942, he headed out to Washington to do the presentation to the Navy personally. All he needed was eighteen minutes, his lawyer Chad Calhoun had told Admiral Ernest King and the other Navy brass.

  Kaiser delivered the proposal with his characteristic gusto, complete with full-color drawings of the proposed ships and sheaves of engineering data. He summed things up by asking for a cost-plus contract for one hundred CVEs, or escort carriers. He told King that six months after the start of production, he’d have thirty ships ready to go to sea.8

  Henry Kaiser stepped out of the room to await their decision. When they called him back in, however, he was in for a shock. The Navy had decided to turn him down. The vote was unanimous, sixteen to zero.

  He and Calhoun left the Navy Building in stunned disbelief. The Navy had explained that it felt the design was too flimsy to stand up to enemy bombs and torpedoes. They also felt there were enough Independence and Sagamon class CVEs already on order. But there was also another reason they didn’t mention.

  The Navy wanted escort carriers, but they did not want Henry Kaiser.9 His reputation as a showboat and prima donna had preceded him and sunk his chances. The Navy wanted the focus to be on the ships, not the shipbuilder. For once, Kaiser’s ability to dominate the limelight had proved a liability, not an asset.

  A dejected Kaiser and Calhoun walked down the street in the heavy Washington heat. Then Calhoun caught sight of a mutual friend, Mordecai Ezekiel. Ezekiel was also a Washington lawyer, and a friend of President Roosevelt. As they exchanged greetings and shook hands, Kaiser had an idea.

  “Look here,” he said, “the Navy has just turned down my proposal to build them a series of small aircraft carriers.”

  Ezekiel expressed his condolences. “Mind if I have a look?” he asked.10

  They were standing on the sidewalk across from the Mall. Kaiser suggested they stretch out the plans and data on the grass. Soon three men in business suits were sitting on the lawn, surrounded by graphs and drawings. Kaiser explained the strengths of the design. How the flight deck was suited to quick operations; how the ship’s turn radius was amazingly tight (“practically a square corner” was Kaiser’s phrase), allowing it to outmaneuver those enemy bombs and torpedoes; and how it could be built quickly without interfering with other shipyards.

  Ezekiel was impressed. The president ought to see this, he told them. “Can you keep yourselves available for a call later?” he asked. Kaiser and Calhoun enthusiastically said yes. They returned to the Shoreham and waited. That evening, sure enough, the phone rang. It was Ezekiel. The three of them were to meet President Roosevelt at the White House in the morning.11

  There Kaiser found not just the president but Admiral King and his aides, and Admiral Land. Roosevelt didn’t just like the idea, he was now convinced Kaiser could do anything. With the president’s intervention, the Navy relented and the contracts were signed. The one condition was that Land and the Maritime Commission, not the Navy, would supervise construction and the final design. That way the Navy had an out if the first of Kaiser’s “baby flattops,” as they would be called, came out of the slip and sank to the bottom of the ocean.

  Their fears were misplaced. By March 1943, Edgar Kaiser had assembled a team ready for the most complex shipbuilding project Oregon Shipbuilding had ever undertaken.12 As for Portland itself across the river, it was no longer the staid sawmill town Edgar first visited two years earlier. The Kaiser yards had brought in more than 100,000 workers and counting. Chartered trains brought people in from Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, including thousands of African Americans. Every third person in town was a newcomer.13

  Almost the rest of Oregon was emptied of workers, both men and women, who came looking for jobs in the Portland facility or Vancouver or Swan Island. One local employee was teenaged Patricia Cain Koehler, who signed up with a girlfriend to be electrician’s helpers. After a couple of weeks’ training, they graduated as journeymen electricians at $1.20 per hour.

  “We celebrated by applying for jobs on the hookup crews, which worked aboard ships at the outfitting dock.” Her first ship was one of the new baby flattops. “I was assigned to fire control. That meant guns! My leadman had never had a female working for him, and he was skeptical. [But] like a shadow, I followed his every move, anticipating what tool he needed next and handing it to him before he could ask. After a few days of this he relaxed and began teaching me the ropes … or rather the wires.”

  Working forty-five feet above the water, she had constant reminders of how dangerous the job could be. “Occasionally I looked down into the swift current of the Columbia River and noticed small boats dragging for a worker who had fallen in.” Cain’s own work wasn’t without mishap. Once she stumbled on a ladder clogged with rubber-hosed welding leads and broke a toe. Another, more serious fall smashed an elbow, and she “learned to work left-handed.”14

  The work progressed, but not at the pace Kaiser had confidently predicted. He had hoped to deliver the first four by February 1943 and have the rest done by the end of the year. The first delivery wasn’t until July. But Kaiser didn’t care. On March 12, 1943, he had a special meeting at the White House and presented FDR with a glass-encased model of the new aircraft carrier. Deeply pleased, Roosevelt agreed to have Eleanor christen the very first baby flattop.15

  On April 5 the First Lady smashed a bottle of champagne across the bow of the USS Alazon Bay. Henry Kaiser’s first aircraft carrier, with its characteristic flat bow and stern, slid into the Columbia River. Microphones carried Mrs. Roosevelt’s remarks to the assembled throng. “The president is greatly interested in this type of ship,” she told them. “He has sent Mr. Kaiser his very best wishes and hellos to the workmen.” The Oregonian reported she also said the Vancouver Kaiser yard was the “neatest and tidiest I have ever seen, and everyone seemed busy at his or her particular job.”16 She praised the dormitories of Hudson House,* which the Kaiser people had erected for their workers, and the planned community of Vanport City taking shape across the river. By May there would be almost 19,000 people living in Vanport along with a 750-seat theater, gyms and playgrounds, five new schools, a combined fire and police station, and a 250-bed hospital—where the workers’ bills were paid, as with Richmond workers, by the health care package that took its name from Kaiser’s mining company: Kaiser Permanente. It was also desegregated by law.17

  Meanwhile, the Liberty ships were still comin
g down the Portland slips as rapidly as before. The B. F. Shaw, the Simon Bolivar, Louis Agassiz, Gilbert Stuart, De Witt Clinton (completed as the Sevastapol in tribute to America’s Soviet ally), and the Richard Harding Davis: seventeen in April alone, or more than four a week (the last, Hull No. 671, would still be sailing in 1967). There was a story about a woman who had been asked to christen a Portland yard ship but arrived too late; it had already been launched. “Just keep standing there, ma’am,” she was told, “there’ll be another along in a minute.”18

  By now Kaiser’s reputation was so big Hollywood got into the act. “Ahead of Him Success! Back of Him … A Woman!” That was the tagline for a movie Republic Pictures put together loosely based on Kaiser’s career, called The Man from Frisco. Starring Michael O’Shea and Anne Shirley, it concerned a hard-charging engineer with some revolutionary ideas about shipbuilding. To call it a fictionalized portrayal would be criminal understatement.

  NOTHING’S IMPOSSIBLE for this red-headed tornado! He launched ships by the thousands … and had a love affair to go with each!

  The growing legend of Henry Kaiser, however, left less and less space for the rest of the Six Companies. Kaiser had pulled away from his old partners. They hadn’t joined him in his Fontana steel venture, and they played no part in his future plans. When Steve Bechtel wrote a note hoping they could meet and talk “just as we have in the good old days,” Kaiser didn’t answer.19

  Kaiser was on his own, and on his way to the top. Franklin Roosevelt even began to wonder if the man from Frisco might be the perfect running mate in the presidential election in 1944.20

  Yet just as the adulation reached its height, Henry Kaiser learned how easy it was for the bubble of media reputation to burst.

  On the night of January 16, 1943, a Saturday, a new oil tanker, the Schenectady, was sitting peacefully at the outfitting dock at Kaiser’s newest Portland yard, Swan Island. She was the first vessel built in that yard, and had just completed her seat trials when the entire crew was awakened by a terrible metallic bang. When they investigated, they found a massive crack had split across the deck and down both sides all the way to bottom shell plating. No one had a clue about what had happened.21

  Then on February 12, the Liberty ship Henry Wynkoop split apart as she was being loaded in New York Harbor. At about the same time, two other Liberty ships cracked at sea. Then on March 29, another oil tanker, the Esso Manhattan, was leaving New York Harbor when it too suddenly broke in two. Her crew, thinking she had hit a mine, abandoned ship. It was only later that it was discovered that she was part of the same mysterious series of catastrophic failures.

  Kaiser had been the nation’s master shipbuilder. Overnight some wondered if he was also a careless one. The Esso Manhattan had been built by Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock, one of the country’s biggest and most experienced yards; the Wynkoop by Delta. But the story the papers carried was about the Kaiser yard’s Schenectady. Calls for investigation began. How much of our new 24 million tons of merchant shipping, critics were asking, was actually going to fall apart at sea thanks to Kaiser’s slipshod methods?

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

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

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

  Meanwhile, the Liberty ships kept cracking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  After all, it had been his dream when he first landed in Washington in the summer of 1940.30 Then came the Liberty ship contract, and Kaiser got distracted. But in 1941 he was thinking in that direction again, this time about cargo planes—airborne versions of the Liberty ship. All he needed was a partner who knew something about planes, and by September 1942—the same month the Maritime Commission announced the Liberty ship program had built 488 vessels in a single year—he thought he’d found him: Howard Hughes.

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

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