Freedom's Forge (42 page)

In the spring of 1943, that larger-than-life reputation was about to be turned loose on the U.S. Navy.

Under Navy undersecretary and Dillon, Read, investment banker James Forrestal, the Navy was already embarked on the biggest shipbuilding program in history. From a force in 1939 still trapped in a hemispheric defense mentality, it was now in effect a seven-ocean navy, engaged in operations from Alaska and the Aleutians to Greenland, the North and South Atlantic, and across the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. The five biggest shipbuilding firms in the country were filled with orders for battleships, cruisers, carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts, while companies like Electric Boat in Groton were building submarines in record numbers.

Events in the Pacific in 1942, however, had forced a major change in thinking. The battles of Coral Sea and Midway had proved the value of the aircraft carrier as the fleet’s primary capital ship—even as battle losses shrank that force from six to four. At the same time, both the British and American fleets in the Atlantic saw the value of carriers for convoy protection. From Atlantic to Pacific, the push was on for carriers—not just the 34,800-ton monsters of the
Essex
class like
Yorktown
and
Intrepid
, but smaller carriers that could be built faster to fill the gap.
³

The result was the so-called
Independence
class of less than 15,000 tons, which could carry nine TBM Avenger torpedo planes and twenty-four new Hellcat fighters, compared to the nearly one hundred aircraft on a
Yorktown
or
Bunker Hill
. Likewise, Sun Shipbuilding and
Dry Dock in Chester, Pennsylvania, was converting old oil tankers into the 23,350-ton
Sagamon
class.
⁴

Even this, however, was not enough. The Navy decided they would need something still smaller that could be built in one-quarter of the time of the
Independence
class—and since the yards were running out of hulls to convert, it would have to be designed from scratch.

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 coming 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.

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?