War 23+

Vol. II

No. 1

W

HEN this war is over, the United States of America, returning to the ways of peace, will bring with them neither annexation nor indemnity. We have solemnly pledged our word to that. And yet we may come out of the war with a greater material gain, in one respect, than any other nation engaged in it-something of far more value than the left bank of the Rhine, or a million square miles of African hinterland-something which we shall not have taken from anyone else, but wrought out for ourselves from our own resources. We went into this war with an overseas merchant marine of less than 2,000,000 tons; we shall emerge from it with an overseas merchant marine of at least 9,000,000 tons of ships, probably more.

That, viewed in its true proportions, is one of the few really big, outstanding facts of today, and we are all beginning gradually so to view it. But behind that elementary fact there is another of which we have not thought so much. It is this; at least a third, and not improbably a full half, of the enormous total of this new merchant marine of ours is going to consist of ships of a type that has yet to be tried out in actual service at sea, and that, before this war was begun, had not even been heard of.

It would seem, off-hand, a matter of some moment to the people of the United States, this

experiment on a colossal scale; an experiment into which, relying unhesitatingly on the judgment of a few men, we are putting something like two thousand million dollars of our good money; an experiment upon whose success or failure, it is not too much to say, hangs practically the whole future of our merchant marine.

We are not talking now of our new merchant marine merely as an emergency weapon against the submarine. As to that, there is very little question of our success. The plans to which these ships are being built are good plans, drawn by some of the ablest naval architects in America or the world. They are built of good American steel. They will carry cargoes and help to win the war, and by so much they will surely justify their existence.

But after the war? We have hoped for more than a bare victory over the submarines; we are making our plans for much better than that. We expect these 9,000,000 tons or more of American ships, manned by American men and flying the American flag, to form our permanent reliance for overseas trade; to keep on after the war, in open competition with the world, carrying us and our goods overseas, and bringing foreign goods home again for our benefit. If one-third or more of these ships fail to realize expectations, it is going to hit every one of us, and hit us hard.

We have not fully realized this, perhaps, because we are still dazzled by the afterglow of that far more daring—and more unsubstantial-plan to overwhelm the submarine by a vast armada of steam-driven wooden ships. Yet even in our steel shipbuilding program we are gambling with our future; gambling boldly, gambling mightily, for the highest stakes in the world, but still gambling, on the standardized, fabricated steel ship.

Until this war came to upset preconceived notions about shipbuilding, along with preconceived notions about everything else, a merchant steamer, even though only a humble tramp, was a highly individualized affair. Kipling, in "The Ship That Found Herself," gives a picture of the care and pains people used to put into the building of a new ship. They made long and earnest calculations upon the kind of cargo she would most often be called upon to carry; the particular trade she was chiefly expected to engage in; the ports she would most frequently visit; the average length of her voyages. Bringing those calculations to bear, not always without strife, upon the most skilled naval architect they could afford, they evolved with him a set of plans for a ship.

Then they took those plans to a shipyard, just as you would go to a building contractor with a set of plans for a house, and the ship was built to those plans, as literally built to order as a house or a suit of clothes. The plans were laid out full scale, "faired by experienced and skilled artisans", steel was cut and bent and shaped to fit them as cloth is cut to a pattern by your tailor, put together with precision, and presently you had your ship.

Then came the war, and in its train a great outcry for ships, to replace the faithful servants of commerce which the ruthless searavager was scattering upon the ocean floor. And it became increasingly evident that all the ship-tailors in the world were unequal to the task of silencing that outcry.

So-nobody knows, perhaps, who thought of it first, because the same idea seems to

have occurred simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, to scores of keen minds widely separated from each other, some of them in this country and some in England-men with imagination arose and said, "Go to; all houses are not made to order, neither are suits of clothes nor shoes. The sum total of individual ideas in these things, despite their infinite variety, may be reduced to an average, and people may live in comfort in ready-made houses and wear ready-made clothes. Why can they not go to sea, and their goods also, in ready-made ships?"

It is not an experiment that could have been made with profit, probably, on so large a scale at any other time in the history of the world, but when the time was ripe and the emergency arose, the science of engineering and construction proved that it, too, was ready. Therefore, both here and in England, but in England to a far less degree, both absolutely and in proportion to her total merchant marine, than here, ships are already under construction -a few of them already afloat-of which, when completed, one will be as exact a duplicate of another as it is humanly possible for two things to be. Instead of being built of steel cut and bent and fitted on the ways by skilled ship tailors, they are built of steel cut and bent and fitted to pattern in scattered shops miles from the water's edge, and assembled on the ways as matter-of-factly as a Ford car.

Will ships built by this method be a permanent commercial success in after-war competition? Will the leadership of the United States in cheap, accurate, quantity production of steel machinery, which has enabled the American cheap automobile and the American typewriter to triumph over our higher labor and material costs, and overrun the earth, seize upon this new idea and create American ships which will overrun the seas? Or will the standardized, fabricated steel freighter prove only the freak of an emergency; will shipbuilding, after the passing of the emergency, gradually return to the state of high individualization in which we found it;