Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman Read Free Book Online

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 waspublished 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 Roosevelt 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