Mr. Henry Kaiser, there will never be another!

One of the best/interesting books I've read in years. I read it the first time at my local library and enjoyed it so much I went out to buy my own copy...so new, I could smell the ink on its freshly printed pages; yes, I bought it less than a month after it was first published (2006).

The purpose of this post is not so much as to promote Mr. Cooke's book but to shed light on a forgotten character in American history, Henry Kaiser.  He could build a ship in one day!  Just mentioning this fact to others, one gets that stare of wonderment or disbelief.  But let us thumb through the pages of Alistair's book and give you the real story... below the book's intro. - Norm H.

In nearly three thousand BBC broadcasts over fifty-eight years, Alistair Cooke reported on America, illuminating our country for a global audience. He was one of the most widely read and widely heard chroniclers of America—the Twentieth Century’s de Tocqueville. Cooke died in 2004, but shortly before he passed away a long-forgotten manuscript resurfaced in a closet in his New York apartment. It was a travelogue of America during the early days of World War II that had sat there for sixty years. Published to stellar reviews in 2006, though “somewhat past deadline,” Cooke’s The American Home Front is a “valentine to his adopted country by someone who loved it as well as anyone and knew it better than most” (The Plain Dealer [Cleveland]). It is a unique artifact and a historical gem, “an unexpected and welcome discover in a time capsule.” (Washington Post) A portrait frozen in time, the book offers a charming look at the war through small towns, big cities, and the American landscape as they once were. The American Home Front is also a brilliant piece of reportage, a historical gem that “affirms Cooke’s enduring place as a great twentieth-century reporter” (American Heritage).

From pages 161 to 163

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.

Collage by Norman E. Hooben