Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1940-09-06
Time for Building
Ships 10 Expand Navy
kCut Materially
Emergency Leeds to
Speedup Of All
Factors Involved

This is the third OF series OF
articles prepared By the National
Defense Advisory Commission to
giUe the public a background on
the current program OF Building
for Defense"
1t takes time to build a good
ship. There is no reason for get
ting in a sweat about it. No other
nation can build them any faster.
But the United States Navy began
its expansion program back in 1888
and it has been possible to get
pretty well along with our work
by the present time.
The first requirement in build
ing a ship is to have a shipyard and
the first requirement of the ship
yard is to be some place near the
ocean. A shipyard is an extremely
complex organization requiring a
variety of highly specialized skills,
covering practically every mechani-
cal field known to man. Under our
national defense program, we may
have to have a few new ShipyardS.
though shipyards already in the
business are being expanded. Ship
yards that handled only small ships
before are preparing their ways
and shops to handle bigger units
for our present needs.
Begins in Iron Mines.
The actual building of ship
starts a long way from the ship
yard. 1t may begin at the iron
ranges of Minnesota, for a ship is
90 per cent steel. Before the first
rivet can be driven into place, an
adequate and increasing sup
ply of steel must be guaranteed,
and the Industrial Materials Divi-
sion of the National Defense
Advisory Commission, working with
the Army and Navy, already has
surveyed the steel demand of the
naval program, and found there
will be no delay from this end.
But iron ore won't make a ship.
The ore has to be changed into iron
and the iron into steel. And as the
Nations defense program got under
way in the hot summer of 1910
new blast furnaces roared to life
again, and the production Of steel
began to increase.
While this process was going on,
thousands of designers labored over
their plans, producing the acres of
blue prints necessary for building
the ships. In the yards, these plans
were broken down into thousands
of units, each unit number in the
billion pieces that make modern
fighting craft. At the same time,
the Nations great factories were at
work on ordnance and fire control
instruments, those intricate pieces
of machinery that can lay ton of
high explosives into an opposing
admiralS lap 20 miles away.
Experience Cuts Time.
Meanwhile, we have learned a lot
on how to speed up the process of
ship building during the past few
years. In the first place, we learned
quite bit from the 100 new naval
vessels that have been commissioned
since March, 1888, and the sc others
that are rapidly approaching COM
pletfon. These vessels serve as pro-
totypes for the other ships of the
same class which are following. In
other words, experience gained in
current construction will aid ma
terially in eliminating the bugs and
speeding construction of new ships
of the same design.
Great progress also has been made
in expediting contracts for the new
ships. In the first few weeks that
the National Defense Advisory Com
mission was operating, contracts
were cleared for almost 100 new
hulls. The letting of the contracts
alone had sometimes taken months
under procedure prevailing before
this emergency.
Time for Subs Also Cut.
The time it takes to build a ship
has been materially cut Recent
contracts, for instance, call for the
completion of cruisers within much
shorter time than the building period