Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo Laton Mccartney (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

Vickery was cautious, though. The scale of operation he envisioned would require quick turnaround, standardized design, production-line techniques-all the innovation necessary to turn out not just a few but dozens, even hundreds of ships. Did Bechtel and McCone think they could handle this kind of assembly-line work? “Admiral,” Steve said 57

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

evenly, “that’s precisely the approach we had in mind.”2

Roach couldn’t believe how quickly everything had progressed. “The next thing I knew,” he said, “they were in the middle of the shipbuilding business. “3

W hen Bechtel and McCone returned to California, however, a rude surprise awaited them. The shipyards on the Pacific, including their own operation in Seattle, were as jammed with work as those on the Atlantic. To build new ships would require constructing an entire new yard. Looking around, Bechtel soon found two: the port of Richmond, and a former Northwestern Railroad terminal outside Sausalito on the shore of Richardson Bay. Here, near his original home base, he could draw on resources from the ongoing Socal work, and bring the talents of W A. Bechtel into play. Others were not so sanguine. Visiting Richmond in the fall of 1940, a BPC representative was shocked to discover that the BechtelMcCone “shipyard” was, as he put it, in a nervous cable to London, “nothing but a vast sea of mud.”

Bechtel and McCone had just begun clearing it when they were summoned to Washington for an emergency meeting with Vickery and his boss, Maritime Commission chairman Admiral Emory S. Land.

There had been, Land and Vickery informed them, a slight change in the agenda. Besides building ships for the British, they would have to build them for the Americans as well. Not merely tankers, but Liberty and Victory cargo ships, troop transports, the whole makings of a merchant navy. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of vessels would be needed, and they would have to build them just as quickly as possible. America was heading into war.

It was apparent now that the Richmond and Sausalito yards alone would not suffice; a third yard would be necessary as well. The War Department found them a site on Terminal Island in Los Angeles harbor, not far from their corporate headquarters. Bechtel and McCone dubbed the operation “Calship” and called on Steve’s old partners at Six Companies for help. On January 11, 1942, slightly more than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Maritime Commission awarded Calship its first shipbuilding contract; three days later, ground was broken at Terminal Island.

They were moving quickly-but as far as Land was concerned, not

Though he’d formed several new companies since his father’s death, Steve still operated the W A. Bechtel Company and used it for earth moving and heavy construction projects.

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THE WAR YEARS

quickly enough. In March, he telegraphed Bechtel and McCone with instructions to complete both shipyards as soon as possible. He added that he expected the first completed ships by the end of the y ear. “wE

ARE NOW RELYING ON YOU INDIVIDUALLY,” wired Land. “THE EMERGENCY DEMANDS ALL IN YOUR POWER TO GIVE YOUR COUNTRY SHIPS. “4

Bechtel and McCone met the deadline with time to spare. W ithin little more than a year Calship was employing 42,000 workers and building as many as three dozen Liberty ships simultaneously on its prefabrication and subassembly lines. At the Sausalito yard-named

“Marinship,” for its proximity to Marin County-the pace was nearly as frantic. Under the direction of Steve’s brother Ken, who, with brother Warren, was helping to run