Even without the shell-torn hulls and shredded superstructures, war is hard on ships. Pushed faster, farther, and longer under less than ideal conditions, they needed more than routine maintenance. And on top of the already demanding schedule of ship construction, repair, and maintenance, other tasks competed for time and resources. Yard workers outfitted naval vessels built at other yards. They converted private vessels and old naval ships to wartime uses. They manufactured turbines and thousands of tons of die-lock chain (see pages [60-61]). They “degaussed” hulls—neutralized their magnetic fields so they would not trip mines. Together these activities suggest the scope and grueling pace of the yard’s war effort.
In such an atmosphere, mishaps caused by fallible humans dealing with complex machinery were inevitable. One particularly embarrassing, and nearly tragic, incident was related by electrical shop foreman Mel Hooper. His men were completing electrical work on the new submarine Lancefish (built at another yard) in 1945. “Some machinist went down,” he recalled, “and opened up the front gate on the torpedo tube and forgot to close it; then he went back in the ship and opened up the inside one and then it started to flood. And they had a hell of a job trying to close it, and they couldn’t close it, and everybody ran aboard the dock to get the hell out of there before they got drowned. And then the ship sank.”
The stepped-up safety program was almost certainly an improvement on the pre-war conditions, when, as remembered by plumber Lyman Carlow, “It seemed to me that everyone was supposed to look after himself.” But while the program called for more protections for workers from open machinery, hazardous fumes, and other dangerous conditions, a survey in 1944 noted that workers were rarely disciplined for safety violations, machines lacked guards, and most workers did not wear their hard hats, goggles, or ear protection. “You [went] down to the tanks with the chipping hammers and riveting guns going all around,” recalled Carlow, “and you wouldn’t be able to hear for a couple of hours afterward. But nobody did anything about it, or thought anything of it. You just got deaf, and that was it.”
A shipyard was a dangerous place to work even in peacetime; war multiplied the hazards. Charles Snell, an apprentice rigger at the yard, recalled 40 years later, “We had a lot of close escapes, because safety wasn’t really stressed then as much as it is today ... we lost a lot of riggers, strangely enough, and I can never account for this, being run over by the cranes ... the operator of the crane, when it was traveling, had very limited visibility close ahead. And we lost an inordinate number of riggers because they’d stumble and the crane would run over them.... We had quite a few falls into the dry dock, not riggers, but all trades.”
Snell left the yard in 1943 and served in Europe for the duration of the war. He recalled his impressions upon returning in 1946, comparing the yard to “a runner, which was running for an objective, and all of a sudden, the objective wasn’t there. The need for everything had suddenly evaporated. And it was a question of what do you finish and what don’t you finish, and what’s important.”
With peace came the end of Charlestown’s brief period as a major shipbuilding center. But the war-seasoned yard did not simply revert to what it had been before. Charlestown found a new postwar role as a place where old vessels were remade from the inside out, transformed into modern warships. Old did not necessarily mean long in years. In the 1950s, ships that had performed admirably in the late war were being left behind in a world of accelerating technological change. Charlestown extended their careers, installing state-of-the-art electronics. When advances in missile technology opened a new era in naval weapons and strategy, Charlestown played a leading role in the changeover. The life of the crowded and aging yard itself was extended by such activities, enabling Charlestown to render another three decades of service to the country.
In the months after war’s end, the level of activity naturally fell off, but the yard remained busy converting transports to bring home the troops, inactivating ships, and completing the last few LSTs, barracks ships, and subs laid down in 1945. Charlestown also carved a niche for itself in sonar, a technology dating to the World War I period and considered standard equipment since the 1930s. Beginning in 1948 the yard became a center for the repair of sonar equipment, establishing a sonar laboratory and developing techniques adopted by other electronics repair centers throughout the Navy.
Radar, developed in the 1930s, had come into widespread use during the war. The yard undertook a major conversion program in 1950 when it began upgrading radar and sonar systems on a number of destroyers and destroyer escorts, converting them to radar picket and antisubmarine warfare (ASW) roles. Charlestown also planned and designed all alterations, wherever they were performed, to cruisers, destroyers, escort carriers, LSTs, and several auxiliary vessel types.
While the yard accepted a variety of vessels, including aircraft carriers, it continued its traditional specialization in destroyers and destroyer escorts. In 1955 the yard converted the 10-year-old Gyatt into the world’s first guided missile destroyer.
That year the yard laid down the keel of its only postwar vessel and the last one it built: the LST Suffolk County, first of a larger and faster class of LSTs. Charlestown also served as the design yard for the other six LSTs, built in private yards.