The New Navy
On first looking into the cavernous interior of Shiphouse I, a visitor during the winter of 1884 would have gotten the impression that Charlestown was a busy shipyard. Workers crawled over the almost completed ship-of-the-line Virginia, swinging hammers, sawing, pumping hydraulic jacks—apparently applying the finishing touches. But behind the house, growing piles of four-foot lengths of wood told a different story. The workers were breaking up the old 74. Virginia had occupied the shiphouse for more than 60 years, through all but the first two of the yard’s launchings. Back in 1824, Virginia had been within two months of making its own trip down the ways. Now its day had passed, and its great timbers were being reduced to firewood and sold at auction.
Outside the shiphouse, very few workers could have been found among the silent buildings. Charlestown was a moribund yard, barely functioning since its repair and construction duties had been suspended the year before. Only the manufacturing divisions still showed signs of life. In 1886 the yard would be officially converted to a facility that manufactured equipment—especially rope—for vessels built and repaired elsewhere.
The yard was also stripped of much of its equipment and ordered to sell the vessels in ordinary. Repair work fell to an all-time low: between the 1883 docking of the Charlestown-built double-ender Talapoosa and 1890, the dry dock was used exactly five times to do repair work for the U.S. Navy—once on the yard tug and four times on the floating gate for the dry dock.
Joiner Shop foreman George W. Burroughs, about 1901.
New construction was out of the question. The yard had known for years that the vessels already in the shiphouses and on the building ways (labeled “Rotten Row” by a local newspaper in 1882) would never be launched. So it came as no surprise that the order closing the yard also condemned Virginia, two wooden steamers, and a monitor—the latter three laid down during the Civil War. Still, it was disheartening that in the early 1880s a yard that had built and repaired ships was reduced to taking them apart.
At least the dismantling of vessels provided employment for the workers, who at this point felt quite vulnerable. Throughout the 1880s, “suspension” (being laid off) was always hanging over their heads. More than 500 men were employed at the yard when work was halted in mid-1883. There were around 300 by the end of the year and their ranks continued to thin, averaging less than 200 until 1888—most of them ropemakers, machinists, laborers, and watchmen.
Until World War I, jobs connected with supply would remain more stable than those related to construction and repair. In the late 1880s and ’90s, managers found ways to transfer men in the latter trades to other divisions within the yard in order to keep their services on call. But in the early ’80s the yard could find virtually no work for men skilled in the craft of wooden shipbuilding—formerly the elite of the workforce. After Virginia and the other vessels had been turned into stacks of wood, those who had done the work were sent home.
Now let us look ahead some three decades to 1917, by which time we find a yard dramatically transformed. Eleven wharves described a great arc at the confluence of the Charles and Mystic Rivers. The familiar old shiphouses had been replaced by a large shipbuilding ways and steel plate storage yards. The timber basin that had long dominated the center of the yard was gone, replaced by a new dry dock twice as long as the first one. The other timber basin at the east end of the yard had been filled in and was now the site of gas and oil tanks, a locomotive shed, and a gas plant for acetylene torches.
It was a vital place, showing an intensity not seen since the Civil War. In fact it was again a wartime yard: after almost three years of neutrality the United States had entered the global conflict that was later called World War I. Some 4,500 workers worked two ten-hour shifts or around the clock in three eight-hour shifts, answering to a steam whistle instead of the bell that had summoned 19th-century yard workers. The wharves and docks were crowded with three- and four-stacker steel ships, some carrying the towering cage masts that were a short-lived experiment of the period. On the building ways, workers had laid the keel of the fuel ship Brazos.
Electric lights illuminated the thousands of men working on ships through the night. Vessels under repair were alive with the flare of welding torches and the tattoo of pneumatic rivet guns. Over them moved the arms of great cranes, including a 150-ton floating derrick and a colossus that traveled on tracks between dry docks. Materials and equipment were transported by yard locomotives that had replaced the oxen (although horses still did service). A mechanized coaling plant near the old dry dock helped ease the dirty and arduous task of fueling ships. But it was apparently undependable, and at times ships were coaled the old way.
Charlestown’s main responsibility was repairing the warships of a greatly enlarged fleet: steel destroyers, armored cruisers and battleships, submarines, and wooden sub chasers. The yard also outfitted and commissioned new vessels, converted civilian vessels to wartime use, armed merchantmen, and altered seized German passenger liners to transport U.S. troops to France.
More work came to the yard in 1917-18 than in any other comparable period in its history before World War II. Some 450 vessels were serviced during those two years. In addition Charlestown was a supply depot and embarkation point. In all, an average of 50 ships a day arrived at or departed from the yard during the war.
By 1918 some 10,000 skilled workers, laborers, and clericals worked at Charlestown. Reflecting the growth of the labor movement over the last three decades, many of them belonged to trade unions (although they could neither strike nor be represented by the unions in wage negotiations). Women working at the yard were mostly naval yeomen, but a few worked as radio and telephone operators, radio electricians, and ropewalk machine tenders.
Yard employees worked in 17 trade shops, the names of which characterized the needs of modern steel shipbuilding: Shipfitters (including riveters, drillers, welders, sheet metal workers); Electrical; Pattern (for cast metals); Chain; Copper/Pipefitting; and other skills employed in raising a steel ship.
Some of the old familiar shops survived in reduced or altered roles. The sail loft now produced mostly canvas bags, pea jackets, and hammocks. The riggers loft had become a versatile shop responsible for an array of shipyard tasks. They still worked aloft on stacks and steel masts; directed dry docking and crane operations; prepared shipways for launchings; dove beneath ships in hardhat diving suits; and continued to do the traditional rigger’s handiwork, such as the braided rope fenders that protected ships’ hulls and the fancy leatherwork and ropework still common on naval vessels. The workers in the joiner shop worked on the small wooden boats built at the yard, but spent much of their time making shipboard furniture. The ropewalk continued to turn out the large quantities of rope still needed on steel ships.
These young women were working as civilian clerks for the Navy when the U.S. entered World War I. Overnight they became Yeomen-F (female) naval personnel. (Yeomen is the naval term for clerical workers.)
Joiners were skilled workers in wood and traditionally the elite of the yard workforce. Even in the early days of steel ships, they remained among the highest paid of the workers. Here joiners are photographed in their shop, about 1897.
Yard’s floating crane, shown here in 1913, could lift 150 tons. Dry Dock 1 is visible in left background.
The traditional shipyard hierarchy was virtually unchanged: the crews of mechanics, apprentices, and laborers were headed by leadingmen; several leadingmen were supervised by quartermen; and the quartermen were under a chief quarterman or they answered directly to the master who headed the shop.
Unlike the hard times of the 1880s, the employees at Charlestown had reason to feel secure. Civil Service reforms of the ’90s had already gone a long way toward making merit, not political advantage, the criterion for hiring and firing. And now, in the hour of war, the Navy wanted to keep its shipyard workers. In the months before the United States entered the conflict, officials had worried that employees swept up in the popular sentiment for preparedness would enlist. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels declared it the “patriotic duty” of the workers to remain at the yard, asserting that “their services to their country ... [are] as important as if they were actually in the field.”
When the draft was initiated in 1917, the Navy responded by gaining exemptions for crucial classes of yard workers such as supervisors, draftsmen, and skilled mechanics and their helpers. The military draft gave new meaning to the yard’s “six-muster” rule, by which any worker missing six successive roll calls for any reason could be fired. One week after any worker was dismissed, the yard informed his draft board.
The demand for workers and the boosted war economy drove up wages. No doubt prompted by this incentive and by the exemption policy, some 240,000 men applied for work at the yard in 1917-18. But while Charlestown didn’t lack for applicants, filling the most skilled positions was a continuing problem. To remedy this (and to help workers gain exemptions), the yard cut a year from the term of apprenticeship and established a trade school to train unskilled workers as mechanics.
While World War I sped up Charlestown’s evolution from naval backwater to modern shipyard, other factors had set the process in motion. Time and expected technological advances accounted for some of it. But the transition was accelerated at the yard by a larger transformation of the Navy, prompted by the country’s position in a changing world and completed on the stage of the Spanish-American War.
Historians have tagged this transformation the “New Navy.” If we simply compare the numbers of the 1880 Navy, when its aging fleet of wooden vessels ranked 12th in the world, to that of the 1900 Navy, when there were in commission or on the stocks 17 steel battleships and a number of armored cruisers, the label “new” is certainly accurate. But there was more to this than simply building new steel ships to catch up to Europe. The Navy’s mission underwent a strategic shift in this 20-year period.
The early phase involved a strengthening of the Navy’s capacity to carry out its mission. For a century its job had been to defend the shores and to ensure that other navies allowed American merchant vessels free trade anywhere in the world. Its tactical traditions were one-on-one engagements and hit-and-run commerce raiding. But it was clear by the early 1880s that the U.S. Navy was inadequate for even these limited operations. Reformers could point to obvious deficiencies as European navies converted to armored steel hulls in the 1870s and ’80s. The old wooden navy had become a disgrace.
Powerful voices were raised in the House Naval Affairs Committee, and in 1883 Congress appropriated money for the steel cruisers Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago, and the dispatch vessel Dolphin. These vessels could still spread a large area of sail, and by European standards were not formidable, but the so-called “ABCD” ships were the core of the New Navy, the first small step towards making the United States a true sea power.
For Charlestown, they were a mixed blessing. The New Navy’s need for maintenance and repair bode well for the future, but the immediate effect was devastating. For the same legislation that authorized new ships also established a new criterion for repairing existing vessels. Only repairs that cost less than 30% (later reduced to 20%) of the cost of a new ship of the same size could be performed. This freed up funds to build the new ships, but it also meant so little work for shipyards that both repair and construction work at Charlestown and three other yards was suspended.
In its new role as manufacturing center, the yard kept the ropewalk, rigging loft, and sail loft open. The forge began producing chain and anchors for the new steel ships. But even these activities were sporadic until later in the decade. A survey done one March day in 1884 showed that the ropewalk was spinning rope for Dolphin—literally the only thing done that day to help put warships to sea.
During the worst years of the 1880s the ropewalk almost singlehandedly kept the yard alive. It made itself an indispensable facility by supplying virtually all of the Navy’s rope. Other shops followed its lead, and by 1890 the Charlestown yard had become an important general manufacturing center, the only naval shipyard producing rope, sail, anchors, and chain. It was still unable to service ships, however. In August 1890 Chicago was directed to the yard for repairs, only to turn back because the old dry dock wasn’t in good enough condition to accept the steel cruiser. “Repairs to engine bolts” for Boston typified the kind of task the yard could perform.
But 1890 also marked the beginning of the yard’s rebirth. Congress appropriated $152,000 for new machine tools and modernization of Charlestown’s crumbling facilities. It wasn’t enough to remake the yard, but it was a start. It was also the year that Commander Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the Naval War College and one-time aide to the Charlestown Navy Yard commandant, published The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783. This important book helped to stimulate the world-wide buildup of naval forces prior to World War I. His thesis (greatly simplified) was as follows: A combination of geography, population size, and “national character” makes a great seafaring nation. Essential to the continued well-being of such a nation is a government that actively promotes a vigorous maritime commerce. “Sea power”—command of the sea lanes—protects this commerce. Only large concentrated fleets of capital ships able to engage and destroy the enemy’s navy can create and maintain sea power.
Mahan’s influence, both as author and adviser to the Secretary of the Navy, was pivotal. His writings strengthened the hand of imperialists and reformers who had called for new strategic thinking. The United States, they reasoned, was a growing industrial power with increasing overseas interests, and some—among them Mahan disciple and future Assistant Secretary of the Navy and President Theodore Roosevelt—believed the nation should have a navy befitting its role, one able to open markets, protect those economic interests, and project U.S. power.
In a burst of enthusiasm recalling that for the ship-of-the-line at the end of the War of 1812, Congress in 1890 authorized the country’s first full-sized battleships. They represented enormous commitments of resources, time, and money. Called “coastline” battleships to placate still powerful coast defense advocates, they were nevertheless another step in the United States’ emergence by the turn of the century as a world power with a widening sphere of influence. The Navy kept its faith in battleships until their vulnerability to air power and the superiority of aircraft carriers as attack weapons were demonstrated in World War II.
Although a succession of battleships, cruisers, submarines, and other vessels were now being laid down, Charlestown didn’t immediately reap the benefits. The majority of the warships launched between 1883 and 1905 were built by contract in private yards, and Charlestown built none of them. For most of the 1890s, the yard continued to be primarily a manufacturing facility. The New Navy’s hulls did account for much of the yard’s repair work. Steel hulls didn’t rot, but they more easily fouled with barnacles and seaweed than a coppered wooden hull and were less resistant to corrosion than iron. Maintaining them became the Charlestown yard’s bread and butter.
The Spanish-American War broke this pattern, making Charlestown once again a repair yard. Besides the new warships the United States was trying out against the Spanish navy, there was also the “mosquito fleet” (old monitors, converted yachts, and other small craft used for coastal defense during the war) to be maintained and repaired. In all some 50 vessels were serviced by 1,200-1,400 workers.
To beef up its workforce for war, the yard began hiring more foreign workers, especially from Scandinavian countries with shipbuilding traditions. Charlestown thereafter maintained a workforce averaging over 2,000 during the two decades before World War I—compared to the fewer than 400 workers there through most of the 1890s. The Spanish-American War was pivotal, marking a permanent expansion in the size and diversity of the Charlestown workforce.
At war’s end the United States was recognized as a world power with attendant responsibilities. This new status was symbolized by the establishment of a coaling station in the recently acquired Philippines. The capital ship building program continued apace—given renewed vigor by President Theodore Roosevelt, staunch advocate of big ships and a strong navy.
The yard continued to be mainly a repair facility with a steadily increasing workload. The new 750-foot Dry Dock 2, authorized three months after the sinking of Maine, was built to receive the Navy’s biggest ships. But soon after the massive structure’s 1905 completion, Britain launched H.M.S. Dreadnought, ushering in an even larger class of battleship the dock could not accommodate.
In this period the yard specialized in the smaller battleships and the newest type of warship: destroyers. These fast, versatile ships had evolved from British “torpedo boat destroyers” built in the 1880s to counter the new torpedo boats. The mobile torpedo, also developed in Britain, was a self-propelled explosive device launched from a warship’s deck, traveling underwater to open the hull of its target.
Developments in naval technology from the 1880s to the eve of World War II included nothing quite so dramatic as the epochal shifts from sail to steam and wood to iron, but the period saw advances in strategic weapons such as submarines and aircraft carriers, and major innovations that resulted in ships and shipbuilding essentially like what we see today. In the period before the age of flight, sophisticated warships were highly visible embodiments of the state of a nation’s technology, and the rapidly expanding U.S. fleet was an unmistakable sign of its growing industrial and technological prominence.
Charlestown’s machine shop in 1913. Overhead belts transferred power from a central steam engine to the machines. The potentially hazardous belts were later replaced with electric motors on each machine.
Lathe operator shapes steam turbine rotor for destroyer tender Whitney in 1923.
The major innovations were again in hull material and propulsion. The transition from iron to steel hulls further liberated naval engineers. Lighter, stronger, and less brittle, steel allowed them more play in hull size and proportions. Despite extensive use of ironclads by the United States during the Civil War, its navy essentially skipped the iron stage in seagoing warships, moving from Hartford-type wooden steamers to the steel ABCD ships of 1883. While the Charlestown yard launched no steel warships until the 1930s, it did construct the tug Pentucket (1903) and training bark Cumberland (1904), both steel-hulled.
As steam engines grew more efficient in the 1880s and ’90s, sailing rigs were made smaller and vestigial masts served mainly as radio antennae and platforms for directing big guns. But a revolution in steam technology sent reciprocating engines the way of masts on most large naval vessels. Steam turbines, which were much more efficient at sustained high speeds, were developed in the 1880s in Europe and used in 1905 on Dreadnought. In America they became truly practical during the World War I period.
Along with the introduction of turbines came an innovation in the fuel that powered them. During the 1890s oil was introduced, used in combination with coal. By 1910 the United States had built its first all oil-burning warship. Besides providing greater power more quickly, oil needed less storage space and fewer engine room hands than coal.
These advances and refinements completed the evolution of the U.S. Navy warship from wooden-hulled sailing vessel to powered steel ship. But perfecting the new technology was not the only challenge associated with the transition. The demands of modern naval design provoked growing controversy over how work should be performed at naval shipyards and how those yards should be organized. Charlestown Navy Yard played a central role in the debate.
Since 1868 the nation’s naval shipyards had each been organized into departments corresponding to those at the Navy Department level. Each department head, though nominally under the yard commandant, really worked for his boss in Washington. So each department became in effect a separate plant protecting its own interests and budget. When a yard built relatively simple wooden-hulled ships powered by steam engines, the tasks of the Construction and Steam Engineering departments differed enough that there was little overlap. The old organization was not then a problem. But as warships became complex, integrated machines the system broke down, providing little coordination between departments and a great deal of duplication. By 1910 it was grossly wasteful and inefficient, a public scandal.
At about the same time as reformers were calling for a shakeup of naval shipyards, the phrase “scientific management” was being bandied about. Everyone recognized that the 19th-century industrial system, while highly successful, had to be managed differently to best incorporate 20th-century technology. The most famous of the new management systems was that of Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s system called for the strict application of scientific methods to industrial management and organization in order to produce the maximum output. Specifically, efficiency experts would study workers’ tasks and break them down into their smallest components; perform time-and-motion studies to eliminate wasteful motions and determine the optimum time in which a task should be completed; and offer wage incentives and penalties for meeting or falling short of the new standards. There would be no reason for bargaining or for unions since non-debatable scientific principles, rather than human foibles and emotions, would govern management decisions.
The workers’ response to Taylorism was speedy and unequivocal. They fiercely resisted any system that would analyze their movements as if they were machines to be fine-tuned (not an exaggeration of Taylor’s stated beliefs). Such a system, they said, would demean them and their skills—robbing them of their autonomy and individuality; eliminating craft from the job; turning workers into mere cogs performing sped-up, repetitious tasks “to the physical breaking point”—not to mention the threat to collective bargaining. So visceral was their reaction to Taylorism that any kind of management system became suspect.
Thus when the Navy attempted in 1912 to introduce a British management system—less doctrinaire than Taylorism, though with the same ends of efficiency and increased production—workers at Charlestown were immediately on their guard. The system’s reorganization of the yard’s divisions also upset established power relationships between traditional sea (line) officers and newer and often younger engineering (staff) types, tilting the balance in favor of the latter. Not surprisingly, line and staff were polarized over the merits of the new order, accusing each other respectively of obstructing progress and overmanaging.
In this charged atmosphere, when two overzealous junior officers attempted to introduce minute Taylor-like task breakdowns at Charlestown, the metal workers at the yard took action. They asked their congressman to hand-deliver a protest to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Roosevelt agreed in principle with scientific management, he was generally sympathetic to labor and refused to implement a system that the yard workers opposed.
Machine shop workers pose for a group picture in Dry Dock 1, about 1905. At this time a little more than 2,000 employees worked at the Charlestown yard.
U.S.S. Whitney rises amid a forest of scaffolding. The keel of the 484-foot destroyer tender—the largest vessel ever built at Charlestown—was laid down in 1921. It took two and a half years to build. After surviving the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Whitney served in the Pacific during World War II.
Roosevelt’s visit to the yard in 1913, during which he let it be known that certain junior officers were being reassigned, focused national attention on the controversy and encouraged other yard workers around the nation. A delegation representing them lobbied against Taylorism, eventually persuading Congress to outlaw such management systems in navy yards. Yet when it was all over, the Charlestown yard was organized quite differently than in the 19th century, making it a more efficient builder and repairer of modern naval vessels and helping it to perform as it did during World War I.
U.S.S. Bridge, commissioned as the first American troops were enroute to France, exemplified the yard’s progress since the dark 1880s. Following a long campaign by a job-desperate Boston to have the ship built at Charlestown, Bridge was laid down in 1914 and launched two years later. It was the Navy’s first refrigerated supply ship, with a steel hull and a boiler that could burn oil or coal. Its 423-foot length made Bridge the largest vessel yet built at Charlestown and its first major ship since the 1870s.
After demonstrating its competence with Bridge, Charlestown was assigned Brazos, two other fuel ships, and a destroyer tender. The war-spurred building program helped Charlestown stay busy when peace came, as the last three vessels weren’t laid down until after the armistice. In fact the number of employees actually rose, to almost 13,000 in 1919. Besides the shipbuilding, there was work converting ships to troop transports to bring the soldiers home and stripping military gear from ships returning to civilian service. Charlestown repaired a large number of destroyers, subs, and battleships small enough for Dry Dock 2. To increase its docking capacity, the yard purchased in 1920 a new state-built dry dock in South Boston. At the time it was the country’s largest dry dock, becoming the nucleus of the yard’s South Boston Annex.
Events conspired in the 1920s to dampen the yard’s postwar prosperity. The 1922 Five-Power Treaty limited new ship construction and the overall number of vessels, meaning less repair and outfitting work for naval shipyards. In any case the political mood was to spend money on other things. After the destroyer tender Whitney was launched in 1923, there was no more construction at Charlestown, other than a couple of tugs, for the rest of the decade. And as the Japanese grew increasingly expansionist, much of the fleet was moved to the West Coast, further reducing work at the yard.
Nevertheless, Charlestown kept up its steady repair work, especially on destroyers, albeit at a more modest level and with a workforce reduced to below 3,000 by 1922. The addition of a marine railway in 1919 allowed the yard to more easily service smaller ships of up to 2,000 tons.
By the end of the decade further developments seriously threatened the Charlestown yard. The London Naval Treaty of 1930 extended the moratorium on new capital ship construction for another six years. The treaty further required the U.S. to scrap three battleships and 94 destroyers—the latter a mainstay of Charlestown. The deepening Depression also hurt the yard, as the government’s austerity program in the early years of the crisis reduced work at naval shipyards. The Hoover administration threatened to close most federal yards, including Charlestown. Yet in the Depression itself we can trace the roots of the coming boom.
Building a Steel Ship
Beginning in the 1880s, steel rapidly supplanted wood as the primary material in U.S. naval vessels. Charlestown began building large steel vessels in 1915-20, the period depicted below. Stronger per pound than wood or iron, steel enabled naval architects to design bigger ships that could carry more armament. Steel was also better suited to bearing the massive weight of steam engines and boilers. The structural members of early steel vessels were riveted together, with limited gas welding in use by World War I. Shipyard artisans traded auger, saw, and mallet for pneumatic drill, gas cutting torch, and pneumatic rivet gun. Massive steam-powered cranes replaced the old hoisting shears. Yet, while a riveted steel ship demanded vastly more complicated plans and a higher level of coordination between shops, it was assembled in much the same way as a wooden vessel. From the keel rose the stem, sternpost, and frames. Transverse beams, longitudinals, vertical stanchions, watertight bulkheads, decking, and plating completed the hull, all held together by rivets. Electric welding (below), developed in the 1930s, allowed still lighter construction and the prefabrication of sections. Designers, however, still called for rivets for some parts of the hull throughout World War II.
When the Charlestown yard began constructing steel ships in 1915, a new building ways was erected on the site of the shiphouse in which the wooden screw frigate Merrimack had been built 60 years earlier (see pages [32]-33). The yard built three 475-foot fuel ships (“oilers”) on this shipways between 1917 and 1921, reducing the time between keel laying and launch from two years for the first ship to less than a year for the last.
Chain for the Navy
Until World War I, forged iron chain was used on naval vessels, and the forge shop at the Charlestown yard was a leader in the industry. But it was a laborious process, and the demands of war spurred the development of cast steel chain, which could be produced more quickly. Charlestown was soon experimenting with detachable links to connect standard chain lengths. This led to the development in 1926 of a new chainmaking process, in which each link was made from half-links joined in a die under a drop-forge hammer—“die-lock” chain. It was clearly superior: more uniform, stronger, cheaper to make. By the early 1930s Charlestown was producing die-lock chain in several sizes, and by 1936 die-lock had superseded cast steel chain for all sizes. The shop made the chain used in most U.S. naval vessels built during World War II and was the only forge to make chain for the largest postwar aircraft carriers.
Finished chain is loaded for shipping.
The Die-lock Chainmaking Process
1 Rolled nickel-steel rods (from ¾-inch to 4¾-inch in diameter) are cut into shorter bars.
2 The cut bars are heated in a gas furnace to 2100°F. The now-malleable bars are bent by machine into U-shapes.
3 The U-bars are stamped to form stems, with tapered and ridged ends, or they have holes punched in the ends to form sockets.
4 Stem is hooked onto last completed link and placed in die; socket is heated, and the two are joined under a 10,000-pound hammer ([next page]).
5 Largest 4½-inch chain for supercarriers could withstand up to 2.5 million pounds. Each two-foot-long link weighed 360 pounds. Red undercoat and grey paint helped retard rusting.
At a shift change in 1943, departing workers hurry past destroyer escorts being outfitted for war. At its peak during the war, the Charlestown yard and its annexes employed more than 50,000 men and women.