Bottoms for Britain

(See Cover)

Last week bright-skied spring bared its first smiles on Britain. Those smiles were sinister. They snatched away winter's ice-laden, cloud cover for convoys plodding across the Atlantic and up the coast of Africa. They spread the horizons and smoothed the swells for Germany's swarm of new submarines. They gave fair weather and good hunting to ocean-ranging bombers.

By week's end came a frightening announcement: over a period of 48 hours the exultant German High Command issued claims of having sunk 224,000 tons of British shipping, left the world to speculate on how long the job had taken. Moreover, Britain's ship losses were already running at a ruinous 350,000 tons a month, and rumor in London had reported that 600 new submarines would take to the sea lanes with spring.

Mahan's Day. There was no denying that against the destructive virtuosity of surface raiders, of Nazi airmen and of seamen lying in the chill, sweating bowels of the U-boats, the British convoy system was far from effective. The great danger was that, with better weather, it would become even less effective. In the tragic, high-hearted history of Britain's first 18 months of war was the admitted record of at least 4,300,000 gross tons of shipping lost at sea. This was a net loss (after replacements) of some 2,650,000 tons (TIME, March 24). Less than 18,000,000 tons were left to haul the war-swollen traffic of an empire.

Against a probable loss of 3,500,000 to 5,500,000 tons in 1941, Britain could expect no more than 2,100,000 in replacements from U. S. and British yards. It could hope for little expansion of its own from then on, might well suffer a shipbuilding decline if German airmen began to play hob with its home yards. Already the U. S. has supplied Great Britain (directly and through neutrals) with 1,500,000 tons which it could spare. Henceforth U. S. shipping aid waits on construction. At present, besides 1,600,000 tons on the ways and under contract, there are approximately 4,900,000 tons of ships to be built under President Roosevelt's emergency program. These are to be built in yards which are themselves still abuilding. The fate of the Empire hung upon the productive capacity of the U. S.--on its shipyards as much as on its aircraft factories, its gun and ammunition plants. The apocalyptic day seen by the U. S.'s late, great Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan had dawned:

"Let each nation [the U. S. and Britain]," wrote Mahan 47 years ago, "be educated to realize the length and breadth of its own interest in the sea; when that is done, the identity of these interests will become apparent. This identity cannot be established firmly in men's minds antecedent to the great teacher, Experience; and experience cannot be had before that further development of the facts which will follow the not far distant day, when the United States people must again betake themselves to the sea and to external action. . . .

"In this same pregnant strife the United States doubtless will be led, by undeniable interests and aroused national sympathies, to play a part, to cast aside the policy of isolation which befitted her infancy, and to recognize that . . . now to take her share of the travail of Europe is but to assume an inevitable task ... in the work of upholding the common interests of civilization."

Bright-faced German boys in tanks, at torpedo tubes, squinting over bombsights, had finally done Experience's job. The British had learned their lesson bloodily, at firsthand, in the broad sunlight of the day Mahan had foretold. The sun rises later in the U. S. But there too at last Mahan's day was dawning.

The great danger was that the U. S. had learned too late. Relying on the weight, the tremendous, latent power of its production machine, the U. S. needed time to make that weight effective. It would still take months, and years, for the U. S. to exert the force that comes from mass plus momentum. Deliveries to Britain of aircraft, guns and powder were a long way from the top. Still further off was the day when the U. S. could provide a transfusion of the most necessary corpuscles in Britain's blood stream: ships.

Home Is the Sailor. For its unpreparedness to make weapons the U. S. could blame its witless conviction, bolstered wishfully after every war, that there would never be another. But for its unreadiness to put ships on the sea it had a sounder reason: for the past 80 years the call of its own domestic empire had increasingly drowned out the call of the sea. The U. S., which had once been a nation of seamen, had become a nation of landlubbers. There had been too much to do at home. And as domestic prosperity heightened, its prices and its wages were scaled too high to make the shipping business as profitable as landbound enterprises.

Before the days of railroads, of high tariffs and high wages, when most of the U. S. population clung to the seacoasts, men took to the sea in merchant ships. Clippers like the Flying Cloud, Sovereign of the Seas, Great Republic, Red Jacket, Lightning showed clean heels to anything afloat. U. S. seamen, U. S. ships were the finest in the world. Before the Civil War the U. S. had the best and second-biggest (2,379,000 tons) fleet of merchantmen on the high seas, and carried over 77% of its foreign commerce in its own bottoms. But steam was replacing sail, and the U. S. never took to steam; it was too busy with other things: gold in California, oil in Pennsylvania, the Civil War, tricks with machinery. By 1880 the U. S. merchant fleet was a pitiful remnant; by 1910 it was touching bottom with 782,000 tons in foreign commerce.

World War I turned the country's eyes seaward again. The U. S. found that it had a Navy, but only 81 ships in foreign trade (less than 500,000 tons). The fleet was dependent for coal and other supplies on foreign merchantmen that were either hostile or busy with other jobs. The U. S. had to pitch in and build itself a merchant fleet. It did. But by the time it got rolling at top speed, the war was over. By late 1918, U. S. merchantmen were being launched at the rate of one every three days; the tonnage of new ships launched that year was 3,033,030. When the shooting was all over, the production machine really got into high: 4,075,385 tons in 1919, 2,476,253 in 1920. Then the U. S. sat down again and remembered it was a landlubber. Hog Islanders and other ugly but effective freighters were tied up by the hundreds to rust, were sold or junked. By 1935 U. S. shipping began to scrape bottom again, a miserable 3,065,000 tons. Over 75% of the merchant fleet had sailed 15 of its 20-year effective life. By 1942 close to 92% of the ocean-going fleet built for World War I will be hope lessly old and obsolete.

Land & Sea. If the U. S. does become a seafaring nation again -- as its commerce and its rank as one of the world's two great naval powers entitle it to do -- the history of its international trade revival in the American Century will date not from the beginning of the war but from 1936. For in that year a seagoing President and a willing Congress set up the Maritime Commission, to replace the ineffectual, graft-ridden Shipping Board, with orders to build up the U. S. Merchant Marine.

Today the Maritime Commission has another, war-born job. It has to build another bridge of ships to carry arms and food from the arsenal of democracy to the battle fronts. The scope of that task no man can foresee. Its length and breadth depend upon how much battering the British can still take, how much shipping the Germans can sink, how fast U. S. shipyards can turn out bottoms to re place them. All the Commission is concerned with is to turn out ships, ships and more ships, and turn them out fast. The U. S. Navy is in the midst of a separate, all-out $4,000,000,000 building program. Neither program must block the other. The Navy needs merchantmen as auxiliaries, and it must get them when it needs them. The Merchant Marine needs ships for the deserted trade routes. They must be supplied. The British need ships to live. They must be supplied. Under the Lend-Lease Act, British ships may be repaired in U. S. ports. (This week a dam aged British cruiser was headed for Nor folk for repairs that will throw an added load on the yard.) They must be repaired.

In the mushrooming aircraft industry, failure to supply airplanes to Britain in time to stave off defeat will fall on many manufacturers, who will also share the praise if the job is done well. In the shipbuilding industry, praise or blame is likely to go to one man: a slight, wiry, retired rear admiral of the Navy named Emory Scott Land. For 61-year-old Jerry Land is chairman of the Maritime Commission as well as co-holder of its tennis championship, casual dispenser of its most lurid and effective seagoing profanity. Except for Joseph Patrick Kennedy, who chairmaned the Commission for its first ten months and got it off to a handsome start, he has been its only boss.

Navymen blinked when Admiral Land retired from the Navy (after 35 years' service) when he was only 58. For this was the same Jerry Land who won the athletic sword at Annapolis in 1900 (for football, baseball, crew, track, minor sports) while he was finishing sixth in his class. It was the same Jerry Land who was head of the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair, who could fly his own airplane, who was a field official at two or three big-league football games each season (as he still is), the little man with the quarterdeck voice whom sailormen called "the busiest guy in the Navy." How could he retire? He hadn't retired. Few days later he was on the new Commission, year later its boss.

Of the 500-ship quota set for the Maritime Commission when it was organized, 71 vessels, from tankers to the 26,454-ton luxury liner America, have been delivered to ship lines operating under Government subsidy. Some of them have already been taken away or turned over to the Navy. Twenty-nine more have been launched and are in fitting-out basins, and contracts have been signed for 98 more. Meantime, the program has been pushed six months ahead of schedule.

But the big job, still ahead, has nothing directly to do with building up the U. S. Merchant Marine. President Roosevelt sprang it on the country in January when he announced that 200 fabricated ships, box-shaped 7,500-tonners with reciprocating engines, would be built for Britain (cost: $350,000,000). This additional job was naturally no surprise to the Maritime Commission or to Land, who had helped lay out the program and knew the British would order 60 more ships of the same brand. This week the Commission announced that it would get busy on 400 more seagoing slugs for Britain, when it gets money ($500,000,000) from the $7,000,000,000 appropriation for aid-to-Britain just passed by Congress.

Just how and where the Maritime Commission would go about finding yards and workmen for this 400-ship job, it was not ready to say. For the 260-ship job, the Commission had things under control: six new shipyards (operated by private contractors) are being built and two other yards expanded. To its own rapid specifications, 51 ways are being built, last week were 45% complete--all within two months. Already some $38,750,000 in shipbuilding contracts have been let, and the first of the ugly ducklings is expected to be ready for service by early 1942.

Meanwhile, the Commission has plenty of other things to do. No. 2 man of the Commission, hulking Captain Howard LeRoy Vickery (on leave from the Navy), Jerry Land's right-hand man, is in charge of ship construction. Captain Edward J. Macauley (who replaces Lawyer Max O'Rell Truitt on April 1) is a specialist on ship design, will be assigned accordingly. Bushy-browed, big-nosed Thomas Mullen Woodward, Philadelphia lawyer, does the Commission's legal jobs, is charged with enforcement of control of foreign commerce. Ruddy, white-haired ex-Congressman John J. Dempsey handles the Commission's business affairs, walks around amid a litter of real-estate deeds, letters from Chambers of Commerce in cities where new yards are building, from Baltimore to Houston to Portland, Ore.

When the war began, the world market for ships boomed. By last week the Maritime Commission had scraped together about all the old ships that could be had. Old Hog Islanders were refitted. Even rusty German ships from World War I graveyards were sent to sea. Meanwhile, the U. S. Navy had been supplied with 25 new ships, from 19-knot tankers to swift cargo carriers for auxiliaries. That pleased Commissioners Land and Vickery as much as anything else, for one of the purposes of their original program was to turn out ships that the fleet could use when it went on a war footing.

If the naval building program and the Maritime Commission's program should collide, Admiral Land could wield a big stick for giving merchant building priority over naval construction if he thought the need was there. Last week he was reported as leaning in that direction.

Whereas Jerry Land once built warships in peacetime, he now builds peacetime ships for war. For he knows that in ships of the Maritime Commission lies a big part of the U. S. hope for world leadership when peace comes. Their speed (except for the ugly ducklings) will put them alongside or ahead of any merchant fleet in the world. Their modern crew quarters carry a big remedy for the labor troubles that grew out of the cramped, lousy forecastles where many a U. S. seaman had to live. Even the new emergency ships (which have good quarters, too) will be worth-while additions to the merchant fleet when war is over. In the job of lugging slow freight, their record for the next 20 years should be better than the mark hung up by the Hog Islanders, some of which are still in service. Pressed by war, sped by the precarious plight of Britain, Land and his Commission are paradoxically building for peace in the long run.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.