Richmond shipyards, October 1941. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Together we build.

—Henry Kaiser

THE EXPERTS PREDICTED it would take Bedford, McCoon, and their teams six months to build up enough solid ground before they could begin work on the shipyard. It took Kaiser’s men exactly three weeks.¹ Truck after truck brought up 300,000 cubic yards of rock and gravel around the clock. In more or less continuous rain, gangs of workmen sank 24,000 iron piles for the shipways and piers, even before Kaiser’s architect Morris Wortman had completed the final blueprints. “There was a race,” Clay Bedford later remembered, “between the Kaiser draftsmen and the field people as to whether we could build it first or the engineers and architects could draw it first.”

Three hundred and thirty-seven thousand cubic yards of silt had to be dredged out of the Santa Fe Canal, and another 300,000 from what was to become the launch basin and canal where completed ships would get their final outfitting. On February 22 the first makeshift office was finished, and Clay Bedford moved in with his team from Corpus Christi: secretary Howard Welch and cost accountant Joe Friedman. And still it rained. The fiberboard ceiling in the building became so waterlogged that it sagged. Bedford had to duck his head every time he went into his office.²

Even in fair weather, the construction equipment of the time did not make the job easier. In 1941 there were no hydraulic rigs, only cable scrapers, bulldozers, and cranes on trawlers or trucks. The biggest bulldozers for clearing earth had only 132 horsepower, with the operator constantly hopping off his machine to check the grade against the marked slope numbers. Concrete had to be poured from a crane-hoisted bucket, while water and gas mains required installing time-consuming cast iron or welded steel pipe—at a time when steel was becoming a rare commodity.³

Still, the deadline would not wait. “That first keel has to be laid by March 7,” Kaiser had told Bedford and, to make his life more complicated, all the work was to be done using union labor. Laborers from sixteen different craft unions applied for work; even union barbers from around the country turned up, expecting that the new yards were going to mean lots of paying customers.⁴

When finished, the yard had seven shipways, each 87½ feet wide and 425 feet long. North of the shipways was a massive steel-framed building housing the plate shop and assembly bay, as well as a large open area where preassembled parts could be moved and stored until hoisted into place. To do the hoisting, each shipway was serviced by cranes that moved along steel tracks set on either side of each slipway, so that the crane could swing from one slipway back to another. Gantry cranes of that size were in short supply in Depression-era America, so Bedford arranged for cranes he had used building Grand Coulee Dam to be dismantled and shipped west.⁵ Until now the model for American shipbuilding had been the steel industry. Kaiser and his team would introduce a new model: big-time construction. In so doing, they would revolutionize shipbuilding not just in America but around the world.

All the same, an operation of this size required an experienced superintendent. It was a typical early morning Kaiser phone call that got Edwin W. Hannay, a famed West Coast shipyard manager and troubleshooter for several shipmakers during the First World War, out of bed and out of retirement. Henry’s son Edgar was on the line. “Can you come back to work for us?” he asked. Hannay agreed and made some calls of his own. He pulled together sixteen friends and former colleagues, who then brought in their friends. In no time a skeleton force was ready to get to work.⁶ This was fleshed out with the men who had worked with Kaiser before on every project from Boulder Dam and Grand Coulee to the Oakland–San Francisco Bridge, and who were used to doing the impossible for the boss.

They knew a lot about construction and cement but, as Hannay found out, not a lot about iron or shipbuilding. When Hannay got started on Hull No. 1, he heard someone ask impatiently, “When do we pour the keel?”⁷

Edgar, meanwhile, was on his way up to Portland.

In 1940 Oregon was still the Northwest his father had known and left behind: a world of towering forests, lumber camps, and sawmills, surrounded by thousands of acres of fruit orchards. Oregon was settled, it was said, by Missourians who didn’t want to work, and the slow, easy ways of the past still suited the pioneers’ grandsons and granddaughters who made up the bulk of the state’s population.⁸

When Edgar arrived, he managed with his father’s help to pick out eighty acres of barren land outside Portland that were to be the site of the Todd–Six Companies shipyards, otherwise to be known as the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation. City fathers were unperturbed by the Kaiser hustle and bustle. Shipbuilding activities during the last war had made the town.⁹ They also had known Henry Kaiser the road builder for some twenty-five years. They figured (wrongly, as it turned out) that this would be nothing too big or complicated, and that they could keep a handle on the new development.

Edgar had begun work for his father at age twelve, writing out dispatch tickets for truckers supplying equipment for road construction sites. One day a trucker drove off after forgetting his ticket, and Edgar chased after him. The boy slipped, fell under the rumbling vehicle, and had his foot crushed. Ord Ordway and another worker gathered him up and drove him to a hospital. Doctors wanted to amputate, but Ordway warned them they had better wait for the boss to show up. Henry Kaiser arrived, looked at his son’s foot, and ordered the doctors to do what they could to save it. They did as they were told, and although Edgar Kaiser walked the rest of his life with a limp, he did it on two feet.¹⁰

Henry’s relationship with Edgar was typical of all his dealings with subordinates, sons or not. “You find your key men by piling work on them,” he used to say. “They say, ‘I can’t do any more,’ and you say, ‘Sure you can.’ So you pile it on and they’re doing more and more. Pretty soon you have men you can rely on absolutely.”¹¹ Far from driving a wedge between father and son, Kaiser’s demands made them an inseparable team. Henry was devoted to his other son, but Henry Jr. suffered from bad health and would eventually die of multiple sclerosis in 1961. The bond between Henry and his namesake would never be as close, or as vital to the making of the Kaiser corporate empire, as the one between Henry and the bespectacled, hard-driving Edgar.

Edgar had made his bones, as it were, supervising the construction at Grand Coulee—although he had been only thirty-four—and then the Bonneville Dam. Now getting started at Portland, he had learned all he could about shipbuilding from repeated visits to various Todd yards: about the laying of the keel, the fitting of steel plates and support ribbing for decks and holds, and then the installing of engines. He could envision it all in his mind, including finally the electrical and ventilation assemblies, before the main deck was completed and the ship was ready to slide down the slip.¹²

And he knew this particular ship design and the demands it would make on his engineers, foremen, and workers. It required steel plates, each weighing several tons, to be molded and cut into 435 different shapes and an even more bewildering variety of sizes. His Portland operation would be ordering 7,500 components from 600 different suppliers, from condensers and switches to wires, pumps, and the engines themselves.¹³

Even more daunting was the fact that he would have to do all this with men who had never built a ship in their lives, workers from construction jobs, sawmills, and lumber camps, under the supervision of foremen and quartermen who barely knew more.

But like Clay Bedford, Edgar had his own team of trusted engineers and site managers, men he had driven and hounded like his father had hounded him—and who knew how to make anything in a hurry. There was also another goad to action: the desire to beat his rival, the man who was almost Kaiser’s other son, Clay Bedford. Over the next thirty-six months, Henry would encourage a less-than-covert competition between the two yards, and the two men in charge. It was another typical Kaiser strategy, and it worked. It never turned ugly, and never became divisive. But Edgar Kaiser and Clay Bedford would work eighteen-hour days for the next three years, each trying to see who could build ships faster and better.

Bedford had a month’s head start. In typical Kaiser style, Edgar got to work even before the blueprints were finished. It took him less than two months to get the first set of shipways built.¹⁴ At the end of March, his first buildings and cranes appeared on the Portland horizon, as nine hundred miles away in Richmond, Bedford and Hannay were ready to lay the first keel of the vessels both he and Edgar would be building: the Liberty ships.

Initially the maritime commissioner had rejected Knudsen’s idea of making Kaiser’s ships the standard for a new generation of American merchant freighters. But as the events of December 1940 grew darker, Land changed his mind. He made secret plans to take over the Kaiser ship contract in case Britain fell—and the growing need to get ships down the slips faster pushed his earlier reservations away. If they didn’t take this opportunity, he told Bill Knudsen, it wouldn’t just be Britain, but America that wouldn’t see a completed ship before 1942.¹⁵

Knudsen signed on. It would mean that a whole new series of shipyards would have to be acquired or built, in addition to the one Kaiser was building at Richmond and the one Todd and the Six Companies were using in Portland, Maine—and Edgar Kaiser’s yards in Oregon. Baltimore’s Sparrow Point, New Orleans, Houston, Jacksonsville, Florida, and Mobile, Alabama, were among the places they found.¹⁶ But getting the right sites for shipyards was just one problem. The other was what kind of ship. Land went to New York City to see the man who knew the answer, visiting him at his office on 21 West Twenty-first Street. His name was William Francis Gibbs and the building was the headquarters of Gibbs and Cox, the biggest naval architecture firm in America.

Gibbs was the reigning king of American ship design. When Land contacted him that bleak January of 1941, Gibbs had seen the war clouds gathering for years. He had prepared his firm to be ready for floods of new orders from the United States Navy. Before 1940 was out, his employees had grown from an even dozen to more than a thousand people.¹⁷ In the end, Gibbs and his business partner, William Cox, would design almost three-quarters of U.S. naval vessels during the war. But his most renowned and enduring design would be the one Henry Kaiser and his team would make famous.

When Land approached him about a new merchant vessel, Gibbs already knew about the problem. Kaiser had hired him when he had to adapt the existing British plans to his yards at Richmond. Through Kaiser, Gibbs knew these ships had to be built fast; he knew that meant they had to have a standard plan, especially for a labor and management force like Kaiser’s—men who had never been aboard a ship, let alone built one.

He also knew there had to be a standard design, not just for the yards and its engineers, but for the six hundred or so subcontractors, so they would know what parts to make and how many—even while the yards themselves were still being built.

Gibbs showed Land what he had done for the Kaiser-Todd people. Land was impressed and quickly agreed. The Kaiser yard design would be the standard for all.¹⁸

Working overtime, with Maritime Commission technicians helping out and offering advice, Gibbs turned out acres of blueprints for every part of the ship. When he was done, he had created a vessel that looked rather different from its British predecessor. It had one central deckhouse, instead of the usual two fore and aft. It was oil fired, not coal burning (which made it possible to fuel at sea, if necessary), and on its main deck it had solid steel bulwarks instead of the standard chain rails, so that cargo could be crammed onto every square inch of the ship, including planes and tanks and trucks strapped on deck.

Gibbs’s Liberty ship was made with as many straight lines as possible, because it would be made from welding rather than rivets.¹⁹ Also to speed the construction, standard wooden interior decks were replaced with steel, although with wooden hatch covers in between. When someone asked why, they got a bleak answer: That way the hatch covers could be used as life rafts if the ship took a U-boat torpedo and sank.

Because from the beginning, Gibbs and Land assumed the Liberty ship would be an expendable ship. Many would be sunk; many sailors would be lost. Although manned and conned by civilians, they would be directly in the line of fire. No one expected them to have many return voyages.

Partly for that reason, and because speed of construction was key, Gibbs’s design made as few concessions as possible to comfort. There was no electricity or running water for the crew; their rooms and bunks were smaller than standard size. There was cement, not tile, in the toilet spaces, and no mechanical ventilation for the engine and boiler rooms and crew’s quarters. The galley was lit with oil lamps, and there was no fire detection system.²⁰ These would not be comfortable trips, even by merchant seaman standards. Gibbs’s ship was a seagoing boxcar, able to stow eight thousand tons of material in her hull. She would carry everything from tanks and bombers to copper wire and sugarcane. And she had to be built not only in record time, but in record numbers, in order to keep Britain alive.

The first keel of a Liberty ship was laid at the Bethlehem yard in Baltimore in March, and the first Richmond keel on April 14, 1941. The Ocean Vanguard would be the first of 747 that would be built in Richmond yard in the next four years. Even as workmen scrambled that week of the fourteenth, Kaiser found himself under contract for many more.²¹ Land gave him the go-ahead to expand the number of slips both at Richmond and Portland, even before the first ship was launched. Under the new regime, some 300 new ships would have to be built, including 72 tankers, and the Six Companies were going to be at the center of it.

That included Kaiser’s partner Stephen Bechtel. He had tried to get the British interested in a second West Coast contract for their “Ocean” ships, but they had opted for a more experienced East Coast yard, Todd-Bath of Maine, instead. Now he and his two partners—Ralph Parsons, an engineer specializing in oil refinery designs, and a former Consolidated Steel engineer Steve had known since college days at Berkeley named John McCone—had thrown themselves into a bid for the Liberty ship program in January. Their prospective company, called California Shipbuilding, or Calship, got the contract, and would open with fourteen slipways instead of eight. Richmond would be adding a whole new yard, called Yard No. 2; and Edgar’s Portland basin was to add three more shipways even before the first eight were built.²²

Henry Kaiser, meanwhile, was delighted. This was the kind of massive project he loved, although some in the press, such as Fortune, were wondering aloud if perhaps “he had bitten off more than he could chew.” They were wrong. As Hannay and the others were laying Hull No. 1 on April 17, Henry Kaiser was already poised to become the living symbol of Knudsen’s arsenal of democracy.

April 1941 was important for another reason. On March 11, Roosevelt had signed the first Lend-Lease agreement with Britain. The steady stream of orders for British war materials was about to become a flood. Everything, including the Liberty ship program, was about to get a lot more complicated.

It also meant new headaches for Knudsen and his team. Knudsen estimated it would add 60 percent more to America’s war production burden.²³ As the new Office of Production Management, they were now installed in a series of suites in the Social Security Building. OPM was supposed to create a simple division of labor for clearing Army and Navy orders, with Knudsen and his people (Biggers at Production, Nelson at Purchases, and Stacy May doing statistics for everyone) handling management, Hillman dealing with labor problems, and the secretaries of war and Navy speaking as consumers of defense production.

But there was also a fourth guest at the table, namely, Great Britain. Every week, it seemed, the British expected a fresh cornucopia of weapons and materials. Knudsen knew it couldn’t be done that quickly, especially since the federal government had no way of ordering anyone to do anything about arming the Americans, let alone the British. In February, Winston Churchill had made the stirring statement “Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” But which tools? Thus far it had been pretty much ad hoc guesswork. Knudsen’s people had to get ahead of the problem by figuring out what Britain needed and when, and what America could be expected to produce and when—all without derailing America’s own effort to arm itself.

This was a problem in statistics as much as production, and the man who figured it out was OPM’s numbers man, Stacy May. That summer Knudsen gave him the go-ahead to prepare a comprehensive study of what American industry was making, and could potentially make, by way of war materials. The result was the Big Book, a massive compilation of production figures and forecasts for everything from tanks and gas masks to brass for artillery shells and cotton for uniforms. Knudsen and the others had for the first time a comprehensive picture of what America needed to fight a modern war, what it would take to make it, and how much it would cost—roughly $50 billion.²⁴

May lugged his magnum opus off to London to fill the other half of the book with an estimate of what Britain’s entire material production potential was and what its stockpiles amounted to. For two months he and his British counterparts conferred, filling in the blank sheets and tabs. When they were done, they had one of the most extraordinary documents of the war: a complete record of American, British, and Canadian military requirements, from tanks and planes to food and uniforms; current and potential production; and current and potential raw material stocks, including steel, aluminum, and copper.

It was in effect a complete balance sheet (the British termed it “the consolidated statement”) of the Allied war effort, both present and future—the first ever drawn up. For the Americans, it showed they still had a long way to go. Though the United States had two and a half times the population of Britain and Canada, the country’s munitions output still lagged far behind. But at least the people in Washington now knew where they had to go—while Knudsen and the OPM figured out how to get there.²⁵

May shook hands with his British counterparts and then boarded a plane in Manchester to begin the long journey back to the States, finally touching down outside Baltimore. “I should have been met at the airport and escorted to Washington by an armed guard,” May noted later, “equipped with at least .45’s and submachine guns.” There was no one. So May simply and quietly caught another cab and then, unobserved and unescorted, brought the single most important book in the Allied war effort to the Munitions Building and set it finally down on Stimson’s desk.

A copy also made its way to OPM. The final numbers boggled everyone’s mind. Back in March, May had calculated the buildup the Americans and British were looking for could not be done for less than $50 billion. Now Knudsen and Stimson might have to treble that number.²⁶ As for Congress, its defense authorization for 1942 was stuck at $10.5 billion. That was barely 1 percent of what might be needed.

It didn’t matter. For all its impressive bulk and data, the Big Book was a fantasy. The pages of data were a rough guide to what materials would have to come out of the civilian sector to meet Army and Navy orders, but not much more.²⁷ It gave Washington the illusion of control over war production trends and events when in fact it had none. Even the revised figure of $150 billion wound up being half of what the American economy had to produce to win the war—less than half when the value of Lend-Lease aid to Britain and Russia is thrown in.

No one as yet knew what American business could do once it really got started. This was uncharted territory. The fiercest obstacle the war-production effort faced, however, wasn’t Washington or the military or even the Axis.

It was the labor unions.

Union membership had surged during the New Deal years, from 6 percent in 1933 to 16 percent of the workforce in 1940. Now labor leaders like Sidney Hillman worried that all-out war production would wipe out past gains and allow employers to break open closed shops.²⁸ Others saw reviving factories and plants as an opportunity to get new concessions.

For those associated with the Communist-dominated CIO, there were also political issues involved. The official party line was that the war raging in Europe was still a bourgeois struggle and the working class had nothing to gain by getting involved. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact hadn’t made the Soviet Union Hitler’s ally exactly, but Stalin and his Communist followers had no desire to help Britain or its Dominion allies win. As labor historian Max Kampelman has shown, the Communists’ goal was to halt or at least hamper the American war effort, and strikes were one way to do it.²⁹

The first was at the Vultee aircraft plant in San Diego. It was easy to see why the CIO targeted Vultee. It was run by the Communist-hating, New Deal–defying Tom Girdler of Republic Steel, who had put the plant under the supervision of an assembly-line whiz named Henry Woodhead. Woodhead had perfected his craft under Felix and Albert Kahn’s brother Julius, stamping out factory components for Truscon Steel like steel window sashes and airplane hangar doors, as well as highway guardrails and wire mesh for reinforcing concrete. At Vultee he installed an overhead conveyor line, the first ever in an aviation plant, and used mass-production stamping methods for the airplane parts. In no time he was building trainers for the Army Air Corps and Vengeance dive-bombers for the British.³⁰

Then in November the Vultee workers, led by two CIO organizing brothers, struck against having to continue their fifty-cent-an-hour wage in spite of the new work. Woodhead’s humming assembly line fell ominously silent. White House pressure forced management to give way, but the Vultee run-in left plenty of bad feelings just as January brought strikes in a radiating wave, closing one factory after another.

In February the CIO pulled workers off the lines at the Allis-Chalmers plant in Milwaukee, which was making turbines for Navy vessels, and at the Cluett and Peabody factory making uniforms. There were strikes at International Harvester, at Ford’s major plants, and at the North American plant where B-25s were being built. By March 1941, at a time when airplane production was at a vital premium, there were no fewer than fifteen strikes at aircraft or aircraft-related companies.³¹

Knudsen was furious. “This is criminal,” he told the National Press Club, “almost like men fighting about who should hold the hose when the house is on fire”—because he knew most of the strikes weren’t over wages or conditions but which union should have jurisdiction over new workers or a new plant.³²

On March 7, Knudsen sketched out for Stimson and Knox how bad things really were. He was looking at four million labor hours lost at Allis-Chalmers, where the strike was now in its eighth week. He told hair-raising stories of threats of violence against foremen and executives at the Vanadium Steel plant in Pennsylvania.³³ Sidney Hillman, OPM’s labor head but also a staunch anti-Communist, agreed to go in person to Milwaukee to hammer out a settlement, but failed. “The unions are so undisciplined, young, and restless,” he told Knudsen, “it’s hard to do anything with them.”

Didn’t they understand, Knudsen said, that every week’s loss of work to win a nickel or dime raise meant it would take sixteen weeks for the company to get back where they started? Hillman threw up his hands and said nothing.³⁴ The fact was, Communist-led unions were determined to strike, whatever their wages. Knudsen didn’t know that, however, and took the impasse hard. Stimson noted that “poor Knudsen, who is bearing the brunt of it, is getting a little tired and discouraged with it.” It was particularly tiresome to have the union’s friends in the administration blaming him and big business for moving slowly on war production, when it was the unions who were putting on the brakes—slowing war production before Pearl Harbor, Knudsen later calculated, by as much as 25 percent.³⁵

He and Stimson told the president the only solution they could see was a national defense mediation board, and Hillman agreed. The president duly announced its creation on March 19—but the strikes went on as before.

Then, at the start of April, John L. Lewis, the fiery leader of the United Mine Workers, threatened to pull 400,000 of his men out in a nationwide strike. It was not just defense plants but the entire width and breadth of American industry that was looking at a complete shutdown.

America “has got to get over this strike epidemic,” thundered Bill Knudsen before an audience of Veterans of Foreign Wars at the Waldorf Astoria on April 5. “The hours lost can never be made up and are precious…. I am getting all out of patience with all this talk about money. This is no time to ask for quotations on the defense of the United States.” Knudsen said he didn’t think there was need for legislation to prevent strikes, but he did say something had to be done to get people to take preparedness seriously. Otherwise, as columnist Stewart Alsop noted in the New York Herald Tribune, “every informed person in Washington agrees the result may be tragedy.”

March and April saw British reverses in Greece and the Mediterranean. Rommel’s Afrika Korps pushed British forces in North Africa almost to the Egyptian border. U-boat sinkings in April reached a new high. For German submarine captains, this was “the happy time.” Congress, meanwhile, remained skeptical about spending more on defense, despite passing Lend-Lease.

“This job can’t be handled with money,” Knudsen had said. But critics could point out that Knudsen and OPM had been very concerned about money when it came to protecting business profits as an incentive to wartime conversion, especially for the auto industry. So in a show of good faith, on April 17 Knudsen negotiated a new round of concessions from Detroit. The entire industry, he told the press, agreed to cut its car production by 20 percent by August, in order to save manpower and materials. Starting August 1, carmakers would be making one million fewer automobiles.

Knudsen had offered a 40 percent cut, but his co-chair, Sidney Hillman, vigorously opposed it. Hillman worried that big production cuts would force Detroit workers to look for jobs elsewhere and decimate the unions, so he pushed for the number to be cut in half. All the same, Knudsen figured this would save 1.4 million tons of steel, 113,000 tons of rubber, almost 125,000 tons of copper, zinc, and lead, 6.5 million square feet of leather, and 41 million yards of hardwood.³⁶

But save for what? America’s military buildup looked like it was stalling out. The War Department was pushing one way, demanding more production and more materials; labor and strikes were pushing the other way; OPM found itself jammed in the middle. When Donald Nelson proposed a sweeping reorganization of the Army’s procurement system, Knudsen had given it a thumbs-up. Then John Biggers handed Nelson a letter from the War Department, saying no thanks and curtailing his procurement powers. Nelson decided it was time to give his notice, until the president talked him out of it.³⁷

This was connected with a larger problem that Nelson and his Priorities Board had to address. How would America prepare for war without starving the rest of the economy? The Big Book offered a sobering picture of war production sucking America’s supplies of raw materials dry. The solution Don Nelson had worked out in late 1940 was a system of priorities for purchasing certain critical raw materials, such as wool, cotton, steel, and rubber. This way the military wouldn’t run short but civilians wouldn’t find store shelves empty, while critical products like tractors and railway cars were still being made and repaired.

The initial system worked out based on the priorities lists drawn up in World War I was soon hopelessly inadequate.³⁸ Nelson and his hardworking team had to reinvent it again and again, dividing America’s raw materials into “strategic,” “critical,” and “essential” categories, and ultimately creating an A, B, and C priority system for allocating enough of the most critical materials, such as steel and rubber, to defense needs. It was so confusing even the administrators couldn’t keep up.

Knudsen and everyone else looked to “the boss,” FDR, to break all these impasses, but the president’s earlier boldness deserted him. One day when Hillman was out ill, Knudsen and Knox (who was desperate for those Allis-Chalmers turbine engines) issued a joint statement ordering the workers at the Milwaukee plant back to work, but FDR refused to back them up.³⁹ He also refused to break the logjam over the North American strike, which dragged on into June, even as Communist organizers led 12,000 workers off the job in the sawmills and logging camps around Puget Sound—a major source of construction lumber for shipbuilders in the region.⁴⁰

The president’s penchant for putting off big decisions was kicking in. He turned down Churchill’s request to help with the convoying of supply ships across the Atlantic, although he did allow British naval vessels to refuel and repair in American ports. Roosevelt also proclaimed a security zone around the United States, warning off Axis warships—but it only extended midway between Brazil and Africa. Inside the zone, U.S. warships could track and warn others of the presence of U-boats, but could not take any further action.

To intimates, Roosevelt that spring seemed “cautious to the point of immobilization.”⁴¹ Luckily, Bill Knudsen wasn’t.