Freedom's Forge (21 page)

Three hundred and thirty-seven thousand cubic yards of silt had to be dredged out of the Santa Fe Canal, and another 300,000 from what was to become the launch basin and canal where completed ships would get their final outfitting. On February 22 the first makeshift office was finished, and Clay Bedford moved in with his team from Corpus Christi: secretary Howard Welch and cost accountant Joe Friedman. And still it rained. The fiberboard ceiling in the building became so waterlogged that it sagged. Bedford had to duck his head every time he went into his office.
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Even in fair weather, the construction equipment of the time did not make the job easier. In 1941 there were no hydraulic rigs, only cable scrapers, bulldozers, and cranes on trawlers or trucks. The biggest bulldozers for clearing earth had only 132 horsepower, with the operator constantly hopping off his machine to check the grade against the marked slope numbers. Concrete had to be poured from a crane-hoisted bucket, while water and gas mains required installing time-consuming cast iron or welded steel pipe—at a time when steel was becoming a rare commodity.
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Still, the deadline would not wait. “That first keel has to be laid by March 7,” Kaiser had told Bedford and, to make his life more complicated, all the work was to be done using union labor. Laborers from sixteen different craft unions applied for work; even union barbers from around the country turned up, expecting that the new yards were going to mean lots of paying customers.
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When finished, the yard had seven shipways, each 87½ feet wide and 425 feet long. North of the shipways was a massive steel-framed building housing the plate shop and assembly bay, as well as a large open area where preassembled parts could be moved and stored until hoisted into place. To do the hoisting, each shipway was serviced by cranes that moved along steel tracks set on either side of each slipway, so that the crane could swing from one slipway back to another. Gantry cranes of that size were in short supply in Depression-era America, so Bedford arranged for cranes he had used building Grand Coulee Dam to be dismantled and shipped west.
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Until now the model for American
shipbuilding had been the steel industry. Kaiser and his team would introduce a new model: big-time construction. In so doing, they would revolutionize shipbuilding not just in America but around the world.

All the same, an operation of this size required an experienced superintendent. It was a typical early morning Kaiser phone call that got Edwin W. Hannay, a famed West Coast shipyard manager and troubleshooter for several shipmakers during the First World War, out of bed and out of retirement. Henry’s son Edgar was on the line. “Can you come back to work for us?” he asked. Hannay agreed and made some calls of his own. He pulled together sixteen friends and former colleagues, who then brought in
their
friends. In no time a skeleton force was ready to get to work.
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This was fleshed out with the men who had worked with Kaiser before on every project from Boulder Dam and Grand Coulee to the Oakland–San Francisco Bridge, and who were used to doing the impossible for the boss.

They knew a lot about construction and cement but, as Hannay found out, not a lot about iron or shipbuilding. When Hannay got started on Hull No. 1, he heard someone ask impatiently, “When do we pour the keel?”
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Edgar, meanwhile, was on his way up to Portland.

In 1940 Oregon was still the Northwest his father had known and left behind: a world of towering forests, lumber camps, and sawmills, surrounded by thousands of acres of fruit orchards. Oregon was settled, it was said, by Missourians who didn’t want to work, and the slow, easy ways of the past still suited the pioneers’ grandsons and granddaughters who made up the bulk of the state’s population.
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When Edgar arrived, he managed with his father’s help to pick out eighty acres of barren land outside Portland that were to be the site of the Todd–Six Companies shipyards, otherwise to be known as the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation. City fathers were unperturbed by the Kaiser hustle and bustle. Shipbuilding activities during the last war had made the town.
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They also had known Henry Kaiser the road builder for some twenty-five years. They figured (wrongly, as it turned out) that this would be nothing too big or complicated, and that they could keep a handle on the new development.

Edgar had begun work for his father at age twelve, writing out dispatch
tickets for truckers supplying equipment for road construction sites. One day a trucker drove off after forgetting his ticket, and Edgar chased after him. The boy slipped, fell under the rumbling vehicle, and had his foot crushed. Ord Ordway and another worker gathered him up and drove him to a hospital. Doctors wanted to amputate, but Ordway warned them they had better wait for the boss to show up. Henry Kaiser arrived, looked at his son’s foot, and ordered the doctors to do what they could to save it. They did as they were told, and although Edgar Kaiser walked the rest of his life with a limp, he did it on two feet.
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Henry’s relationship with Edgar was typical of all his dealings with subordinates, sons or not. “You find your key men by piling work on them,” he used to say. “They say, ‘I can’t do any more,’ and you say, ‘Sure you can.’ So you pile it on and they’re doing more and more. Pretty soon you have men you can rely on absolutely.”
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Far from driving a wedge between father and son, Kaiser’s demands made them an inseparable team. Henry was devoted to his other son, but Henry Jr. suffered from bad health and would eventually die of multiple sclerosis in 1961. The bond between Henry and his namesake would never be as close, or as vital to the making of the Kaiser corporate empire, as the one between Henry and the bespectacled, hard-driving Edgar.

Edgar had made his bones, as it were, supervising the construction at Grand Coulee—although he had been only thirty-four—and then the Bonneville Dam. Now getting started at Portland, he had learned all he could about shipbuilding from repeated visits to various Todd yards: about the laying of the keel, the fitting of steel plates and support ribbing for decks and holds, and then the installing of engines. He could envision it all in his mind, including finally the electrical and ventilation assemblies, before the main deck was completed and the ship was ready to slide down the slip.
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And he knew this particular ship design and the demands it would make on his engineers, foremen, and workers. It required steel plates, each weighing several tons, to be molded and cut into 435 different shapes and an even more bewildering variety of sizes. His Portland operation would be ordering 7,500 components from 600 different suppliers, from condensers and switches to wires, pumps, and the engines themselves.
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Even more daunting was the fact that he would have to do all this with men who had never built a ship in their lives, workers from construction jobs, sawmills, and lumber camps, under the supervision of foremen and quartermen who barely knew more.

But like Clay Bedford, Edgar had his own team of trusted engineers and site managers, men he had driven and hounded like his father had hounded him—and who knew how to make anything in a hurry. There was also another goad to action: the desire to beat his rival, the man who was almost Kaiser’s other son, Clay Bedford. Over the next thirty-six months, Henry would encourage a less-than-covert competition between the two yards, and the two men in charge. It was another typical Kaiser strategy, and it worked. It never turned ugly, and never became divisive. But Edgar Kaiser and Clay Bedford would work eighteen-hour days for the next three years, each trying to see who could build ships faster and better.

Bedford had a month’s head start. In typical Kaiser style, Edgar got to work even before the blueprints were finished. It took him less than two months to get the first set of shipways built.
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At the end of March, his first buildings and cranes appeared on the Portland horizon, as nine hundred miles away in Richmond, Bedford and Hannay were ready to lay the first keel of the vessels both he and Edgar would be building: the Liberty ships.

Initially the maritime commissioner had rejected Knudsen’s idea of making Kaiser’s ships the standard for a new generation of American merchant freighters. But as the events of December 1940 grew darker, Land changed his mind. He made secret plans to take over the Kaiser ship contract in case Britain fell—and the growing need to get ships down the slips faster pushed his earlier reservations away. If they didn’t take this opportunity, he told Bill Knudsen, it wouldn’t just be Britain, but America that wouldn’t see a completed ship before 1942.
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Knudsen signed on. It would mean that a whole new series of shipyards would have to be acquired or built, in addition to the one Kaiser was building at Richmond and the one Todd and the Six Companies were using in Portland, Maine—and Edgar Kaiser’s yards in Oregon.
Baltimore’s Sparrow Point, New Orleans, Houston, Jacksonsville, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama, were among the places they found.
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But getting the right sites for shipyards was just one problem. The other was what kind of ship. Land went to New York City to see the man who knew the answer, visiting him at his office on 21 West Twenty-first Street. His name was William Francis Gibbs and the building was the headquarters of Gibbs and Cox, the biggest naval architecture firm in America.

Gibbs was the reigning king of American ship design. When Land contacted him that bleak January of 1941, Gibbs had seen the war clouds gathering for years. He had prepared his firm to be ready for floods of new orders from the United States Navy. Before 1940 was out, his employees had grown from an even dozen to more than a thousand people.
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In the end, Gibbs and his business partner, William Cox, would design almost three-quarters of U.S. naval vessels during the war. But his most renowned and enduring design would be the one Henry Kaiser and his team would make famous.

When Land approached him about a new merchant vessel, Gibbs already knew about the problem. Kaiser had hired him when he had to adapt the existing British plans to his yards at Richmond. Through Kaiser, Gibbs knew these ships had to be built fast; he knew that meant they had to have a standard plan, especially for a labor and management force like Kaiser’s—men who had never been aboard a ship, let alone built one.

He also knew there had to be a standard design, not just for the yards and its engineers, but for the six hundred or so subcontractors, so they would know what parts to make and how many—even while the yards themselves were still being built.

Gibbs showed Land what he had done for the Kaiser-Todd people. Land was impressed and quickly agreed. The Kaiser yard design would be the standard for all.
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Working overtime, with Maritime Commission technicians helping out and offering advice, Gibbs turned out acres of blueprints for every part of the ship. When he was done, he had created a vessel that looked rather different from its British predecessor. It had one central deckhouse, instead of the usual two fore and aft. It was oil fired, not coal
burning (which made it possible to fuel at sea, if necessary), and on its main deck it had solid steel bulwarks instead of the standard chain rails, so that cargo could be crammed onto every square inch of the ship, including planes and tanks and trucks strapped on deck.

Gibbs’s Liberty ship was made with as many straight lines as possible, because it would be made from welding rather than rivets.
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Also to speed the construction, standard wooden interior decks were replaced with steel, although with wooden hatch covers in between. When someone asked why, they got a bleak answer: That way the hatch covers could be used as life rafts if the ship took a U-boat torpedo and sank.

Because from the beginning, Gibbs and Land assumed the Liberty ship would be an expendable ship. Many would be sunk; many sailors would be lost. Although manned and conned by civilians, they would be directly in the line of fire. No one expected them to have many return voyages.

Partly for that reason, and because speed of construction was key, Gibbs’s design made as few concessions as possible to comfort. There was no electricity or running water for the crew; their rooms and bunks were smaller than standard size. There was cement, not tile, in the toilet spaces, and no mechanical ventilation for the engine and boiler rooms and crew’s quarters. The galley was lit with oil lamps, and there was no fire detection system.
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These would not be comfortable trips, even by merchant seaman standards. Gibbs’s ship was a seagoing boxcar, able to stow eight thousand tons of material in her hull. She would carry everything from tanks and bombers to copper wire and sugarcane. And she had to be built not only in record time, but in record numbers, in order to keep Britain alive.

The first keel of a Liberty ship was laid at the Bethlehem yard in Baltimore in March, and the first Richmond keel on April 14, 1941. The
Ocean Vanguard
would be the first of 747 that would be built in Richmond yard in the next four years. Even as workmen scrambled that week of the fourteenth, Kaiser found himself under contract for many more.
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Land gave him the go-ahead to expand the number of slips both at Richmond and Portland, even before the first ship was launched. Under the new regime, some 300 new ships would have to
be built, including 72 tankers, and the Six Companies were going to be at the center of it.

That included Kaiser’s partner Stephen Bechtel. He had tried to get the British interested in a second West Coast contract for their “Ocean” ships, but they had opted for a more experienced East Coast yard, Todd-Bath of Maine, instead. Now he and his two partners—Ralph Parsons, an engineer specializing in oil refinery designs, and a former Consolidated Steel engineer Steve had known since college days at Berkeley named John McCone—had thrown themselves into a bid for the Liberty ship program in January. Their prospective company, called California Shipbuilding, or Calship, got the contract, and would open with fourteen slipways instead of eight. Richmond would be adding a whole new yard, called Yard No. 2; and Edgar’s Portland basin was to add three more shipways even before the first eight were built.
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