Chapter III: Part 1: The Making of a Navy (3)

Even without the shell-torn hulls and shredded superstructures, war is hard on ships. Pushed faster, farther, and longer under less than ideal conditions, they needed more than routine maintenance. And on top of the already demanding schedule of ship construction, repair, and maintenance, other tasks competed for time and resources. Yard workers outfitted naval vessels built at other yards. They converted private vessels and old naval ships to wartime uses. They manufactured turbines and thousands of tons of die-lock chain (_see pages 60-61_). They “degaussed” hulls—neutralized their magnetic fields so they would not trip mines. Together these activities suggest the scope and grueling pace of the yard’s war effort.

In such an atmosphere, mishaps caused by fallible humans dealing with complex machinery were inevitable. One particularly embarrassing, and nearly tragic, incident was related by electrical shop foreman Mel Hooper. His men were completing electrical work on the new submarine _Lancefish_ (built at another yard) in 1945. “Some machinist went down,” he recalled, “and opened up the front gate on the torpedo tube and forgot to close it; then he went back in the ship and opened up the inside one and then it started to flood. And they had a hell of a job trying to close it, and they couldn’t close it, and everybody ran aboard the dock to get the hell out of there before they got drowned. And then the ship sank.”

The stepped-up safety program was almost certainly an improvement on the pre-war conditions, when, as remembered by plumber Lyman Carlow, “It seemed to me that everyone was supposed to look after himself.” But while the program called for more protections for workers from open machinery, hazardous fumes, and other dangerous conditions, a survey in 1944 noted that workers were rarely disciplined for safety violations, machines lacked guards, and most workers did not wear their hard hats, goggles, or ear protection. “You [went] down to the tanks with the chipping hammers and riveting guns going all around,” recalled Carlow, “and you wouldn’t be able to hear for a couple of hours afterward. But nobody did anything about it, or thought anything of it. You just got deaf, and that was it.”

A shipyard was a dangerous place to work even in peacetime; war multiplied the hazards. Charles Snell, an apprentice rigger at the yard, recalled 40 years later, “We had a lot of close escapes, because safety wasn’t really stressed then as much as it is today ... we lost a lot of riggers, strangely enough, and I can never account for this, being run over by the cranes ... the operator of the crane, when it was traveling, had very limited visibility close ahead. And we lost an inordinate number of riggers because they’d stumble and the crane would run over them.... We had quite a few falls into the dry dock, not riggers, but all trades.”

Snell left the yard in 1943 and served in Europe for the duration of the war. He recalled his impressions upon returning in 1946, comparing the yard to “a runner, which was running for an objective, and all of a sudden, the objective wasn’t there. The need for everything had suddenly evaporated. And it was a question of what do you finish and what don’t you finish, and what’s important.”

With peace came the end of Charlestown’s brief period as a major shipbuilding center. But the war-seasoned yard did not simply revert to what it had been before. Charlestown found a new postwar role as a place where old vessels were remade from the inside out, transformed into modern warships. Old did not necessarily mean long in years. In the 1950s, ships that had performed admirably in the late war were being left behind in a world of accelerating technological change. Charlestown extended their careers, installing state-of-the-art electronics. When advances in missile technology opened a new era in naval weapons and strategy, Charlestown played a leading role in the changeover. The life of the crowded and aging yard itself was extended by such activities, enabling Charlestown to render another three decades of service to the country.

In the months after war’s end, the level of activity naturally fell off, but the yard remained busy converting transports to bring home the troops, inactivating ships, and completing the last few LSTs, barracks ships, and subs laid down in 1945. Charlestown also carved a niche for itself in sonar, a technology dating to the World War I period and considered standard equipment since the 1930s. Beginning in 1948 the yard became a center for the repair of sonar equipment, establishing a sonar laboratory and developing techniques adopted by other electronics repair centers throughout the Navy.

Radar, developed in the 1930s, had come into widespread use during the war. The yard undertook a major conversion program in 1950 when it began upgrading radar and sonar systems on a number of destroyers and destroyer escorts, converting them to radar picket and antisubmarine warfare (ASW) roles. Charlestown also planned and designed all alterations, wherever they were performed, to cruisers, destroyers, escort carriers, LSTs, and several auxiliary vessel types.

While the yard accepted a variety of vessels, including aircraft carriers, it continued its traditional specialization in destroyers and destroyer escorts. In 1955 the yard converted the 10-year-old _Gyatt_ into the world’s first guided missile destroyer.

That year the yard laid down the keel of its only postwar vessel and the last one it built: the LST _Suffolk County_, first of a larger and faster class of LSTs. Charlestown also served as the design yard for the other six LSTs, built in private yards.

In the 1960s the yard stayed busy with outfittings, missile and ASW conversions, and Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization (FRAM) overhauls that added five to seven years of service to aging warships. Charlestown’s FRAM program specialized in World War II-era destroyers. Ranging from brief dockings to major operations of a year or more costing millions, these projects involved such sophisticated work as installing or upgrading sonar (_see pages 76-77_), radar, communications, and computer equipment; major alterations such as replacing engines and entire superstructures; and the more prosaic tasks the yard had been performing for over a century: cleaning and painting hulls, renovating propellers and rudders, and rebricking or replacing boilers.

Nevertheless, by 1972 work was falling off at Charlestown, and signs did not bode well for the yard’s future. For years the Navy had invested little there for maintenance or modernization, making it harder to stay efficient. The marine railway and ropewalk had been shut down in 1971. Elsewhere, superfluous or inefficient military bases were being closed to save money. (The New York Navy Yard was closed in 1966.) A massive infusion of funds was needed to upgrade the old Charlestown yard—too small in any case for proper expansion of its facilities.

The Navy in general was retrenching for economic reasons. The destroyer fleet, especially—the lifeblood of the yard in the 20th century—had steadily dwindled since 1960. The fewer destroyers there were to service, the harder it was to justify the Charlestown yard’s existence. The failure of the Navy to carry through modernization plans, including one whereby the majority of the yard’s industrial activity would be transferred to an enhanced South Boston facility, helped to hasten the inevitable. Many associated with the yard also suspected that Massachusetts, as the only state going Democratic in the 1972 presidential election, would pay a penalty for failing to back the winner.

On April 16, 1973, the yard commander, Captain R. L. Arthur, announced that the Charlestown yard, along with the yard at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco, was to close. Over the next year it ceased all fleet servicing and manufacturing operations, and on July 1, 1974, nearly 175 years of service to the nation ended with a formal disestablishment ceremony. Only one naval activity remained at Charlestown: the protection and maintenance of the old warship long associated with the yard, U.S.S. _Constitution_.

Ships for World War II

From 1933 to the end of World War II, the Charlestown yard moved outside its traditional role as repair yard and became a shipbuilding facility. It began with destroyers—ships it had long specialized in repairing—averaging two a year in the 1930s. This period of steady production was preamble to the World War II crash building program. Charlestown launched almost 200 vessels, including 24 destroyers, between 1939 and 1945. In 1942 it began building destroyer escorts—smaller, less expensive versions of destroyers designed to counter German submarines. The final big program was the production of LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) for amphibious assaults in Europe and Asia. LSDs (Landing Ship, Dock) for carrying other vessels; submarines; and various auxiliary vessels also came down the ways during the war. These programs spurred major changes at the yard. Greater specialization, for instance, broke up traditional shops. The biggest change was in construction methods, most notably prefabrication. Several bow and stern sections, each with its own keel, were built separately—many in the Shipfitters Shop, but also “in playgrounds and schoolyards and parts of the yard, and all around greater Boston,” remembered Rigger Charles Snell. These were then joined to the midship hull section rising on the shipways. “Economy was not the name of the game,” recalled Snell. “The name of the game was time.”

A fast, versatile, relatively small ship, it was equipped for anti-submarine warfare, escort duty, scouting, antiaircraft warfare, torpedo or gun surface engagement, and shore bombardment.]

This craft carried tanks and other vehicles for amphibious landings. The water ballast system allowed it to vary its draft: deep for stable ocean travel and shallow for moving in close to shore.]

This smaller, more quickly built version of the destroyer was designed to protect allied shipping convoys from German U-boats, freeing destroyers for other duties.]

New Careers for Old Ships

During the long era of wooden sailing ships, when naval technology changed only gradually over the decades, a warship’s service lasted as long as the materials from which it was built. But as the pace of change quickened in the mid-19th century with the advent of steam propulsion and iron hulls, a vessel quickly grew obsolete without continual incorporation of the latest technology. This state of affairs, which intensified in the 20th century, provided Charlestown Navy Yard with a new role after World War II: lengthening or transforming the careers of old ships, otherwise destined for mothballs, through modernization and conversion. Modernization meant updating old electrical, propulsion, or weapons systems or performing structural surgery without altering the vessel’s function. This ranged from installing a sonar dome on the bottom of the hull to dismantling the entire superstructure and building a new one. The process normally took several months. Conversion, which could take years, involved major alteration of a vessel to prepare it for a different tactical mission. A typical example would be the conversion of a conventional scouting, escorting, and submarine-fighting destroyer to a radar picket destroyer, whose role was to provide mid-ocean radar warning. A notable postwar task undertaken by the yard was the 1956 conversion of the destroyer _Gyatt_ into the world’s first guided missile destroyer. Basically, the vessel’s aft five-inch guns were replaced with a twin missile launcher. But the ship had to be significantly altered to perform its new function. The yard designed automated systems that first affixed a booster charge to the missile and then moved it from the air-conditioned belowdecks magazine to the launcher. The decks and superstructure had to be reinforced to withstand the tremendous pressure and temperature of a launch. A system of ducts and blowout plates was installed to minimize damage and injury in the event of a premature explosion. Innovative retractable fins at midships helped stabilize the vessel for firing. With these and other changes, the yard remade _Gyatt_ into a sophisticated missile-firing machine.