Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (27 page)

THE FIRST LSTS WERE PART
of a large construction program authorized early in 1942 for Operation Roundup. In March of that year, Secretary of War Stimson urged Roosevelt to “lean with all your strength on the ruthless rearrangement of shipping allotments” to ensure a sufficiency of landing craft for the invasion, and the next month Roosevelt declared that landing craft should have priority over “any other program.” The Navy dutifully informed its contractors that “landing craft would take precedence over all other programs in the A-1 category,” then still the highest priority rating. In May 1942, contracts were let to build three hundred new LSTs, and on July 1, they were officially elevated to the top of the priority list.
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The moment did not last. The July 22 decision to invade North Africa made Roundup unlikely for 1943, and both Leahy and King argued that landing craft construction should be scaled back in favor of building escorts for the convoys. The British protested mildly, suggesting that the new LSTs could be sent to England anyway in case “an opportunity for operations on the Continent in 1943 might arise.” King thought that was a terrible idea, and said so in his usual emphatic way. He argued that it made no sense to
build LSTs to be warehoused in Britain for an unlikely contingency. German bombers might blow them out of the water before they could be of use to anyone. He proposed that any LSTs that were already under construction should be completed, but they should then “be allocated to that theater where they were most needed,” by which he meant the Pacific. Meanwhile, the contracts for all LSTs not yet laid down should be cancelled to allow for the construction of more destroyers and escort carriers for convoy protection. The CCS agreed, and on September 16, 1942, the War Production Board cancelled the contracts for one hundred of the new LSTs, as well as forty-eight LCI(L)s. Whereas in the spring of 1942, eighteen American shipyards had been engaged in the construction of LSTs, by September 1943, only eight were so employed. Though landing craft in general remained in the AA-1 category, their place in the priority list slid to twelfth, behind minesweepers. By the end of 1942, the United States had produced a total of only twenty-three LSTs.
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The decision made sense at the time. The prospects for Roundup were doubtful at best, and the Allies were desperately short of escorts. The British First Sea Lord reported that the Royal Navy was two hundred escort vessels short of simply being able to maintain current operations, and Frank Knox told Roosevelt that the U.S. Navy was 981 escorts short of a full complement. The new emphasis on building escorts in 1942 did much to ease this shortage and helped turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1943. Indeed, the “crossover point” at which Allied ship construction began to exceed losses to U-boats occurred in November 1942, during the North African campaign. (See Chart,
page 113
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Still, the decision to restrict LST construction in the late summer of 1942 did affect the Allies’ ability to meet the requirements set down by COSSAC for the invasion of France in 1944. The Allies tried to rejuvenate the LST program after the Trident conference in May 1943, and to effect that, four of the shipyards that had been retooled for destroyers were ordered to shift back again to accommodate LSTs. But it was much easier to order it than to do it. Retooling a shipyard was not simply a matter of throwing a switch. Parts already fabricated for one kind of vessel had to be set aside and the whole program restarted from the beginning of the logistical
pipeline. As a result, some yards did not get fully back on line producing LSTs until March 1944.
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Another factor that affected the LST shortage, one that was far more perplexing, was the evident lack of any particular urgency on the part of the principal decision makers—even after the Trident and Quebec conferences. Instead of responding to the May 1 deadline for D-Day with enthusiasm and alacrity, the U.S. military bureaucracy exhibited a curious kind of malaise, at least insofar as LST construction was concerned. The Joint Chiefs did formally recommend a 25 percent increase in landing craft production. That instruction, however, did not specify that LSTs were a particular priority. As a result, though the production of the small Higgins boats (LCVPs) jumped from 567 in June to over 1,000 in July, there was no similar acceleration in LST construction—indeed, during those same months, LST production actually fell from twenty-seven to twenty-four per month. When Morgan expressed concern that the shortfall in landing craft could upset the Allied timetable, Donald Nelson, head of the War Production Board, assured him that all was well. “Don’t you believe a word of it,” Nelson told Morgan. “By early 1944 we shall have so much of the darned stuff that we shall be hard put to find a use for it all.” The reality was much different. New orders for LSTs were not placed until December 9, less than five months from the date scheduled for D-Day. Only then could the various subcontractors begin to retool their shops to manufacture the more than thirty thousand different components that made up an LST.
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A third factor that affected productivity was the competition for raw materials. If shipbuilding was a major bottleneck in Allied strategic planning, steel plate was a major bottleneck in shipbuilding. Between 1940 and 1943, American steel mills increased production from four million tons a year to thirteen million tons, an increase of over 300 percent. In that same period, however, shipyard consumption of steel plate increased from half a million tons to seven and a half million tons, an increase of 1,500 percent. Indeed, by 1943, shipbuilding consumed more than half of all the steel plate rolled in the United States, and the principal consumer of that steel plate was the United States Maritime Commission, which produced the other U.S. ship with a legitimate claim to being called the most important
vessel of the Second World War—the Liberty ship. For much of the war, Liberty ships carried the munitions and supplies that kept Britain and Russia in the war and sustained Allied trade and Allied operations worldwide. Before the war was over, American shipyards would turn out more than twenty-seven hundred of them.
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At 14,500 tons each, Liberty ships were more than three times larger than LSTs, and they were voracious consumers of steel plate. Back in February 1942, Roosevelt had challenged retired Rear Admiral Emory Scott Land, who ran the Maritime Commission, to build eight million tons of shipping that year, and ten million tons more in 1943. These were audacious numbers; in 1941, even with the spur provided by the government’s subsidy program, the American shipbuilding industry had produced a total of only 1.1 million tons of shipping. Now FDR wanted eighteen times that. It is not clear where he got the numbers; he may have simply plucked them out of the air to impress Land with the importance of building as many ships as he could as fast as possible. At the time, both Land and his deputy, Rear Admiral Howard Vickery, believed achieving such a goal was unlikely. Nevertheless, with a Herculean effort, by 1943 Land and Vickery seemed to be on their way to accomplishing it. At that point, Roosevelt raised the bar, setting a new objective of twenty-four million tons. His attitude seemed to be:
If you achieved the goal I set, I must not have set it high enough
. Such astonishing levels of productivity, however, absorbed unprecedented amounts of raw materials, especially steel plate, and that affected the renewed effort to build LSTs. As the 1944 War Production Board report put it, “Competition among various agencies of the Armed Services for available material was keen.” That competition also involved machine tools, electric motors, welding rods, generators, reduction gears, bearings, pumps, and hundreds of other vital components. Despite America’s role as the “Great Arsenal of Democracy” (Roosevelt’s term), it was a zero-sum game after all: one more Liberty ship might well mean one, two, or even three, fewer LSTs. The competition for resources between landing craft and other construction projects demonstrated that American industrial capacity was not infinite.
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Table 2 U.S. Landing Ship and Landing Craft Production, January 1942–May 1944

The LST construction program also had to compete for manpower. With millions of Americans in the Army, the labor pool for shipbuilding consisted mainly of three groups: those who had been rated 4-F by their draft boards, older workers, and women. Just as millions of young men were turned into soldiers in a matter of weeks in Army boot camps, so, too, were inexperienced and unskilled workers turned almost instantly into shipbuilders. Teenager Clendel Williams was rated 4-F by his draft board because he was underweight (six feet one inch and 118 pounds), so he sought a job at the Evansville, Indiana, shipyard. “The interviewer only glanced at my application,” he wrote later. “There was no physical, nor an eye examination. One person took my picture and another one finger-printed me. Within a few minutes I was handed a badge with my picture and number 4214 on it.” After attending welding school “for a few weeks,” he was certified as a “three position welder” and set to work building LSTs. Women also joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers. Though this aspect of what was, in effect, a social revolution was most evident in the aviation industry, women also went to work in the nation’s shipyards as drafters, drivers, and welders. Indeed, the shipbuilding industry had its own version of “Rosie the Riveter” in “Wendy the Welder.” By the end of the war, a full third of the ninety thousand workers at the Richmond, California, shipyard were women.
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In most of the shipyards, the workers employed the task system. Teams specialized in a particular function—cutting sheet metal, fabrication, electrical, piping, or carpentry—and they completed all the work of that type on one ship before moving on to the next ship on the next building way. They labored in three shifts around the clock, earning fifty cents an hour, which, after deducting $1.40 for “old age benefits” (the new Social Security program), yielded $18.60 for a forty-hour week, though sixty-hour weeks were common. Workers who left at the end of the day shift at 4:00 p.m. jostled past hundreds of others coming in for the swing shift. At dusk, giant floodlights on towering stanchions lit up the shipyards, and the work continued without a pause. At midnight, workers from the swing shift gave way to those working the night shift, and so it went around the clock, seven days a week. The welding machines were in use twenty-four hours a day, handed
off from one shift to another. Yet due to the finite number of building ways, the production of LSTs continued to lag behind anticipated need.
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One effort to deal with the labor shortage was Andrew Jackson Higgins’s idea to hire large numbers of underemployed black workers to build Liberty ships. By local tradition, blacks were not admitted to skilled-labor jobs in the South, including shipbuilding, because white workers simply refused to work alongside them. As a result, thousands of able-bodied blacks remained idle even as the demand for labor grew. Higgins’s idea was to build two separate shipways, one employing all white workers and the other relying on only black workers. Segregated they might be, but at least black workers would find lucrative employment that was otherwise unavailable. Higgins planned to challenge the workers on each building way to demonstrate their skill and work ethic by outproducing the other group—an approach that might have led either to healthy competition or a race riot. In any case, it never happened, for in making the switch from Liberty ships and LSTs to escorts in 1942, the contracts Higgins had been promised were among those that were cancelled.
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