Symon
Posts: 1928
Joined: 11/24/2012 From: De Eye-lands, Mon Status: offline
|
In response to ny59giants; Bill (wdolson) has a nice take. Digging through hometown newspapers, diaries, books, and websites, the picture of Portland shipbuilding comes a lot clearer. Some explicit and some inferential stuff from Maritime Commission and War Planning Board materials (and some Kaiser recommendations) suggests the new industrial centers were contemplated as magnets for the still extent dust bowl/depression victims in the central regions. Sort of a “turn a broke and desperate dust farmer into a self-reliant and proud ship fitter” sort of thing. Portland (Columbia River) was perfect. Easy, deep water, access to the Pacific; good infrastructure road and rail connections to the steel mills/rolling plants in the lakes region; excellent topography; open land (for storing 50-100,000 tons of plate steel); an educated population base; a small, but established, indigenous shipbuilding capability (Albina E&M Works, Standifer G.M., Northwest Steel, and Columbia River SB Co. for example). Kaiser chose it, on those bases, for his tanker yard on Swan Island. Then, War imperatives required an increase in “emergency” and general construction yards. Since Kaiser was there already, it made sense to expand Portland facilities to two other yards constructing their own specific vessel types. The Casablanca CVEs were all on the same hull, a stretched P1, which was a development of the C2. I know the sources say S4, but MC nomenclature simply means the S4 was a “Special” variant of a standard design (the 4th such variant, in fact). P1 was itself based on such a variant of the C2. What was specifically required was the machine/engine yard infrastructure to support the S4 (P1) powerplants. Once that was in place, it made total sense to build as many as possible, as fast as possible, in that specific yard. Why Portland and not Seattle? Seattle had the same kinda stuff (Ames SB, Duthie & Co, Seattle Pacific, Skinner & Eddy, and Todd in Tacoma). I don’t really know. I have guesses. Seattle got its share of contracts, but for other ship types and didn’t need new yards per se. Also think that the planners (govt and industry) wanted to spread the wealth and spread the migration destinations as well as they were able.
_____________________________
Nous n'avons pas peur! Vive la liberté! Moi aussi je suis Charlie! Yippy Ki Yay.
|