At the conclusion of the First World War, the United States was left with a surplus of merchant ships no longer needed to support the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. This surplus led to a severe slump in the U.S. shipbuilding industry that was further exacerbated by the Great Depression. As a consequence, it was projected that, by 1942, 91.8% of the 1422 oceangoing U.S. merchant ships would be at least 20 years old. The vast majority of these ships were not capable of cruising at more than 11 knots. The U.S. passenger liner fleet was almost nonexistent. The only sector of the civilian fleet that was in good shape was the tanker fleet, which had been kept up-to-date by the U.S. oil companies.
In response to growing fears of another war in Europe,
and as a stimulatory measure to create jobs as part of the New Deal,
the Maritime Commission was created by the Roosevelt
administration under the Merchant Marine Act of 1936. This act created
a five-member commission whose charter was to encourage the
modernization of the U.S. merchant fleet through appropriate subsidies.
Ships operating on routes in direct competition with foreign shipping
could apply for a subsidy to make up the differences in operating
costs, provided the route was of strategic value and the owners had
credible plans for replacing older ships with new construction. Ships
constructed in American yards were subsidized to the difference in
construction costs with foreign yards, assuming the ship plans were
approved by the Maritime Commission. Construction remained slow,
however, with just 29 merchant ships constructed in U.S. yards in 1939
and 53 in 1940, at a time when imports of strategic materials were
already ramping up.
The first chair of the Maritime
Commission was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future President, who
was thought to have the political savvy to set up the new organization,
and who accepted the appointment with the understanding that he would
move on once things were rolling. He
was replaced by retired Admiral
Emory Scott Land in February 1938 when Kennedy was named as ambassador
to England. Land proved an
aggressive and inspiring leader. Land was
also an old friend of President Roosevelt and an experienced and
capable Navy construction officer.
Title VII of the the Merchant Marine Act allowed the
Maritime Commission to place its own contracts for ship construction
"as a last resort" and with the approval of the President. This
provided the authority necessary for the Commission to order ships as
fast as shipyards could construct them following the emergency of 1940,
and to expansion construction yet again after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even before the
country was formally at war, the "Big Five" shipbuilders (Newport News,
Federal, New York, Sun, and Bethlehem) were working to full capacity on
Navy construction, and almost all the remaining capacity in the country
was taken up by Maritime Commission orders, there being practically no
private construction on the ways by that time. Contstruction of new
merchant ships in 1941 reached about 100, of which 53 were standard
freighters and just 7 were Liberty
Ships.
By early 1941 the Maritime Commission had been
transformed
from a New Deal agency to modernize the merchant fleet to a wartime
agency whose goal was to build
merchant ships faster than the U-boats
could sink them. This goal was
met
mainly because effective countermeasures greatly reduced the
effectiveness of
the U-boats. Nonetheless, the accomplishments of the U.S. shipbuilding
industry
under the Maritime Commission were considerable. About 50 million
deadweight tons of dry cargo and tanker shipping were constructed
between 1939 and 1945, compared with a total deadweight capacity of 12
million tons in the U.S. merchant fleet and 81 million tons in the
world merchant fleet in 1939. In addition, about 23% of Maritime
Commission expenditures went to military type ships. A point was
reached at which shipyard capacity
outstripped steel
production and some of the shipyards had to be shut down.
Maritime Commission ship types were broken down into
standard types, emergency types, military types, and other types.
Standard Types. There
were numerous Maritime Commission
standard ship types,
each with a letter prefix for function class (e.g., C for dry cargo, P
for passenger, and T for tanker) and a number for size class (e.g., C1, C2, and C3 for increasing size of dry
cargo ships.) These designs were standardized when the Maritime
Commission was still focused on modernizing the merchant fleet, and
they were constructed for a long lifetime of economical operation.
The standard types differed from older merchant ships
in their use of high-speed turbine engines with double reduction gear,
which allowed the ships to cruise at 15 knots no less efficiently than
the existing 11 knot merchant ships, which mostly used reciprocating
engines. The standard ships also had improved fireproofing, based on
the experience of the Morro Castle
disaster in September 1934, and they had improved crew accomodations
meant to attract men into the Merchant Marine. Crew quarters were moved
from the forecastle to the amidships deck house and were supplied with
hot and cold running water, mess rooms, improved ventilation,
refrigerated food and improved rodent control.
The standard cargo ships were usually equipped with 14
or 15 five-ton booms and one thirty-ton boom worked by electrical
winches. These were rigged to a set of 10 king posts, which gave the
standard cargo ships a distinctive profile.
Most were built with at least some welding in place of
riveting. The Maritime Commission continued to encourage increased use
of welding on all ship types through the remainder of the war.
Emergency Types.
The standard types were excellent ships, but their quality worked
against rapid construction. There were also not enough suitable machine
tools in the country
to produce geared turbine machinery for all the ships ordered by the
Navy and the Maritime Commission. By 12 November 1940, when the
Maritime Commission agreed to build 60 new
ships for the British, it was clear that these would have to be 11-knot
10,000-ton freighters using obsolescent reciprocating engines and built
in new shipyards opened for emergency wartime construction. The
emergency type ships,
prefixed with an E (e.g. EC2 for Liberty dry cargo ships), were
just "good enough" for the duration of the war.
The most famous
emergency type was the Liberty
Ship, designed for mass
production and a lifetime of just five years. As shipbuilding
caught up with
needs and the war began to wind down, Liberty Ships were replaced with Victory Ships,
which were much faster, much better built, and were expected to remain
a major component of the merchant fleet long after the war was over.
Military Types.
These were mostly auxiliaries, though a large number of escort carriers were built
under Maritime Commission contract.
Other Types.
These included specialized types such as tank carriers or ore carriers.
In addition, the Maritime Commission briefly considered
building P4-P passenger liners that could be rapidly converted to light carriers. These would
have closely resembled the Japanese Junyo
class, but none were laid down before war broke out and rendered
the project moot.
By 3 January 1941, when President Roosevelt declared
that the
Maritime Commission would construct 200 new emergency type ships for
Britain, the nation's shipyards were already working at full capacity
on Navy warships and Maritime Commission standard type ships. A
compromise was worked out early in 1942, assigning
Sun to work exclusively on Maritime Commission contracts while Newport
News, New York, and Bethlehem would work exclusively on Navy contracts.
The Navy constructed twelve government-owned ways to be managed by Sun
in addition to its own eight ways.
It became
clear that new shipyards would have to be opened to meet the demand. A
few of these were managed by the Big Five, but most were run by
relative newcomers to the shipbuilding business. Of these, the most
important was Todd Shipyard Corporation, whose corporate leaders
included industrialist Henry Kaiser. Kaiser's firms had built the Grand Coulee, Bonneville, and Boulder Dams and it was expected
that Kaiser would supply the drive and expertise necessary to construct
new shipyards as quickly as possible. What was not anticipated was that
Kaiser, who had no experience of shipbuilding, would bring new methods
of mass production to the field that would reduce ship construction
times to previously unimagined values.
The British had supplied plans for 28-way shipyards capable of
building 100 ships a year. This was though too large, and the first
nine Maritime Commission shipyards had between four and thirteen ways.
These yards were scattered around the nation's coastline, except the
Northeast where the existing shipyards were concentrated, in order to
take advantage of regional labor pools. Ultimately the Maritime
Commission opened some 39 shipyards around the country.
The rapid expansion of the merchant fleet also meant rapid expansion
of the merchant sailor corps. Most performed their duties well, but
there were exceptions. One destroyer flotilla commander bitterly
complained about the poor service received from an auxiliary munitions ship at Leyte Gulf, whose master berated
the Navy officers while his merchant crew taunted the bluejackets with
"Suckers! Suckers! I get twenty bucks a day, whadda youse guys get?"
(Morison 1958). On the other hand, merchant sailors in the Atlantic
faced considerable danger from the German U-boats with remarkable
courage.
References
American Merchant
Marine at War (accessed 2009-6-22)
Lane
(1951)
Leighton and
Coakley (1955)
Morison
(1958)
Wildenberg (1996)
The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2006, 2009 by Kent G. Budge. Index