accent would - before 1939 - have excused an
Englishman from any hope of a commission in the Coldstream Guards. However,
since reality is no respecter of respectability both these gaucheries had to be
accepted as part of the high price of Hitler.
The professional prejudice against Kaiser is easily
understood. A shipyard is a shipyard the world over, but not at Kaiser's
Liberty Shipyard in Richmond. By this time, Mr. Kaiser has undoubtedly heard
of the bow of a ship. But it's almost a point of principle that he should go on
calling it the 'front end'. It stresses
his deliberate scorn of professionalism. He turned to building ships as an
expanding drugstore owner might add fishing rods to his stock of hairnets and
magazines. His key men had never seen a ship launched. Before 1939, Kaiser had
never built a ship, or an airplane, or handled steel. He merely heard that it
took five months to build a freighter. And he decided that if you knew nothing
about shipbuilding, and approached the art as a construction job, you might
easily 'make' a ship in a month. This is what he did. The Kaiser yards look
like something out of Disney. They are absurdly clean and neat. The elements of
a ship are divided into separate piles all the way from the administration
building down to the ways. Innumerable cranes swing through the air and clutch
precisely at the piles, deposit them at the plate shop, heave them down to the
ways, where small armies of Disney characters rush forth with welding guns and
weld the parts into a ship as innocently as a child fits A into B on a nursery
floor and confronts a destroyer made with his very own hands. Mr. Kaiser's
secret is a simple compound of three elements: the pile[1]up, the cranes, the
Assembly Bay. Between the various piles of materials and the finished ships are
fifty unvarying automatic processes. Sheets of steel are marked with shameless
crudity, because it doesn't matter to Mr. Kaiser that the workers have never
built a ship before. The sheets are marked VK2 and MQ3, to indicate to a moron
where they fit on a ship; a crane swings over, picks up a huge sheet of steel.
It is moved down fifty yards, laid on the yard floor. Then a plywood template
descends, and thirty men move into place and trace the template on to the
steel. Another crane moves in, lifts the sheet down to another place where
drills and files break it up into the traced parts.
More cranes whisk the parts off to the plate shop
where the parts are welded together. This is the precision work, and to Mr.
Kaiser it is a niggling but necessary evil. Way off in lofts, the real solid
work begins - whole forepeaks and sterns are prefabricated. Down at the
Assembly Bay, you will see a whole bulkhead go in one piece, and so out on to
the launching skids. Mr. Kaiser had pat answers for the traditional objections.
He uses riveters only for the ribs, where the extra pressure is felt. And as
for the old difficulty of taking the precision parts back to the machine shop,
he disposed of that by putting a machine tool on every ship, the moment the
bottom was laid. It is typical of Kaiser's stubborn originality that he has
introduced comic refinements into the hard labor of bending the heavy metal. Instead
of fitting one iron to one ship, he wants to see thirty irons made ready for
thirty ships. So down at the bending slab, where the channel irons are made for
the base of the ships, you see the glowing metal slide from the furnace on to
the yard, and instantly two strapping heavyweights run forward and start
pounding it with 24-pound sledges. The process is quickened by choosing one
left-handed man, and one right. 'It shouldn't be difficult, with a little practice,
to turn out a ship a day.' The world's newspapers were greatly amused at that
one and generously agreed to think kindly of the crass arrogance typical of the
best American stories. In time, however,
Mr. Kaiser turned out one a day. America, prompted admittedly by some very
capable Kaiser press agents, learned to worship, and the world to admire, this
heavy man with the bald head and the expression of an amiable bullfrog.
When asked what the most important part of shipbuilding was, he answered at
once, 'Keeping the books.' He went on to explain that he meant the purchasing
of materials, the transportation of it, the speedy auditing of accounts. He is
not interested in airplanes or ships for their own sakes. He got interested in
the Liberty Ship only when the U-boats seemed to be imperiling every Allied
freighter. At the same time, he got the idea for air freighters. The moment a
problem is beaten, he looks around for another problem. Even in 1942, he had
only a retrospective pride in Liberty Ships. His theory that everything is a
construction problem had made him recognize that the main hitch to fulfilling
his boast on ship production would be the assembling of the raw materials,
especially steel.
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| Collage by Norman E. Hooben |
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