At that time some of the largest shipyards in the world were in the United States, their sites having been transformed in one year from waste land to huge industrial plants already producing ships. By the end of 1918 there had been built, delivered to the Shipping Board and put into service 592 vessels of a total dead-weight tonnage of 3,423,465 and there were under construction steel ships amounting to 3,600,000 tonnage and wood vessels aggregating 1,200,000 tons. Within the jurisdiction of the United States Shipping Board there were, at the beginning of September, 1918, including chartered foreign vessels, 2,600 sea-going steam and sailing vessels of a total of 10,334,000 dead-weight tonnage. A part of this total had been gained by the requisition of ships under construction or contract by American ship yards and speeding up work upon them. In every yard effort was intensified, resulting in one case in three times the deliveries of the previous year. To October 1st, 1918, 255 of these requisitioned ships, of which the keels of only about twenty per cent had been laid when the Fleet Corporation took over the contracts, had been delivered, their tonnage amounting to 1,500,000. A few ships were built in other countries for the United States. Enemy vessels in American ports at our declaration of war were seized and put into American service after the damage inflicted upon them had been repaired. These totaled about 600,000 dead weight tons. Other enemy vessels interned by neutral governments were purchased. More than 300 vessels of about 1,000,000 tonnage were chartered during the year for varying periods from associated and neutral governments.
Thus did the United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation, the organization through which the Government functioned in the management of the shipping situation, reach out in every direction and secure every possible ship to aid in building that vitally necessary bridge of boats across the Atlantic. With the help of the Allies the bridge was built and, guarded by the British and American navies, it was able to carry with triumphant success all the men and materials of every sort, in all their vast amounts, that were needed.
But the special achievements in ship construction of the U. S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation deserve more extended mention, for it had built over sixteen per cent of this entire fleet. It devised a new scheme for the rapid production of ships, that of the so-called “fabricating” shipyard. So enormous and so urgent was the need for a large tonnage output that beside it existing facilities were negligible and too much time would be needed for the construction of enough shipyards of the ordinary type. So, while every effort was put forth to renovate and enlarge existing yards and build new ones, several huge yards were constructed for the assembling of the parts of steel ships after they had been made in steel structural works. A ship was designed with simple lines, flat decks and few curves, the design standardized and production of the parts begun in many plants while the building of the big yards was rushed. One of these, having twelve ways for 9,000 ton ships, laid its first keel five months after the signing of the contract for the building of the yard; another, having fifty ways for 7,500 and 8,000 ton ships, laid its first keel, when the yard was half completed, in five months; and another, with twenty-eight ways for 5,000 ton ships, laid its first keel in three months.
These three yards, each of which was built and operated by a contracting company, represented an investment of almost $100,000,000. They were equipped to turn out, together, 270,000 tonnage per month, which is more than the tonnage of all the steel ship yards in the country had produced in any entire year for the last previous nine years. These large yards had begun to come into production only a little while before the signing of the armistice. One of the plants included 139 acres, all of which was waste land, overgrown with weeds and brush, when the company signed its contract in September, 1917. A year later its twenty-eight ways were completed, a ship was under construction on each one, fourteen ships had been launched and one had been completed. Docks, railway sidings, shops, offices, had been built and huge stacks of ship-building material covered the ground. A big, four-sided bulletin board, on which was posted each day the progress of every ship on its twenty-eight ways, voiced the spirit of the workers and the management in a slogan across its top that proclaimed the purpose, in letters that fairly shouted, “Three ships a week or bust!”
Another of these fabricating yards, whose site was chosen because of its nearness to industrial centers and easy accessibility, was located on an island that was an uninhabitable malarial marsh in September, 1917. It was first taken in hand by sanitary engineers, drained, cleared of mosquitoes and flies and put into sanitary condition. Then the plant, covering 846 acres, was built, its fifty ways extending for a mile and a quarter along the water front and its piers having space for twenty-eight vessels, so that seventy-eight ships could be in course of construction and outfitting at the same time. It had eighty miles of railroad track and 250 buildings of various kinds, including a hospital, a hotel, a Y. M. C. A. building, a cafeteria and a trade school. The yard laid its first keel in five months and launched its first ship in less than eleven months from the date of the first stroke of work on the island marsh.
Existing shipyards enlarged their facilities and speeded their work and new ones rushed their ways to completion and began laying keels and driving rivets at the earliest possible moment. In the summer of 1918, 280,000 laborers were engaged on shipyard construction. In a little more than a year 400,000,000 feet of yellow pine lumber for the construction of wood vessels was cut in American forests and transported to shipyards in the Atlantic and Mexican Gulf coastal regions—enough to lay the floor of a bridge twenty-five feet wide from the United States to France. As much more pine and fir lumber was cut for the construction of vessels in Pacific Coast yards. In one month, September, 1918, 15,000,000 feet of yellow pine lumber was used in the building of houses for shipyard workers.
On the Great Lakes, when we entered the war, there were fourteen shipyards with seventy-five ways. The signing of the armistice saw twenty-one yards in that region, with 110 ways, and fifteen more ways under construction. These Great Lakes yards, when the Shipping Board took charge of the shipping program in August, 1917, sent at once a fleet of twenty-one steel vessels which had been used in lake commerce down the St. Lawrence for the government’s use on the ocean. Some of them had to be cut in two to enable them to pass the canal locks, and were then welded together again and soon steamed out of the river’s mouth loaded with cargoes.
A world record of rapid work was made by one of these Great Lakes shipyards which launched a 3,500 ton steel freighter seventeen days after the keel was laid and at the end of seventeen more days delivered the ship to the Shipping Board complete and ready for service. During the fourteen months from the time when the Shipping Board took charge of the shipping program until the end of hostilities the Great Lakes shipyards sent to the ocean a fleet of 181 steel vessels aggregating over 600,000 deadweight tons, which was twice the record prewar output of sea-going ships of 1,500 deadweight tons and over. On the Pacific Coast one shipyard made another world’s record with a wooden ship of 4,000 tons which was launched seventeen and one half days after the laying of the keel and was ready for the sea in eight days more. The Pacific Coast yards built, to the end of September, 1918, 137 vessels totaling over a million deadweight tons.
Delivery of completed ships was often delayed by lack of boilers and other fittings, the manufacture of which had sometimes to wait for steel upon other war necessities. Nevertheless, as yard after yard began to show the results of the speeding of construction, the monthly tale of ships grew by mighty leaps. In August, 1918, at the end of a year, it passed the record monthly production of British ship-yards, which previously had built a larger tonnage than all the rest of the world combined. It kept the lead and broke its own record the next month, and that one also in October when seventy-eight ships of 410,865 deadweight tonnage were delivered to the Shipping Board ready for service—a tonnage in one month exceeding by more than 100,000 tons our greatest annual pre-war output of sea-going vessels.
During the twelve months ending September, 1918, the sea-going tonnage built in the United States aggregated a tonnage equal to 70 per cent of that built in the whole world in 1913, the year before the outbreak of the world war, which until 1918 was the highest total of ship production in any year in the history of ship-building. The total number of merchant vessels under construction throughout the world, excluding the Central Powers, at the end of 1918 was 2,189 ships of 6,921,989 gross tons, a little more than double the largest corresponding tonnage under construction by the world before the war. Of that total the United States was constructing 997 vessels of 3,645,919 gross tons, or almost half the number of vessels and more than half the tonnage.