Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, CA

all right hi I'm Ryan samanski curator for Battleship New Jersey museum and Memorial today we're on board Red Oak victory in Richmond California and I am joined by Alan burns the chief docent here at Red Oak Victory we're going to be talking about the Kaiser Shipyard here in Richmond California that built 747 vessels during World War II of which only one is left for you to visit today Alan can you tell me a little bit about the yard here it's an amazing story right here in Richmond Henry Keizer built four shipyards and did it within a period of two years the first Shipyard was built right here at the end of the canal he started the shipyard on January 21st 1941 and 85 days later he laid the kill for the very first ship which gives you something to say about how fast this man moved an interesting story was that when Henry Carter came down here he asked some local Engineers how long it would take to develop 80 acres of waterfront property in order to build Shipyard number one and he was told it would take six months he said nuts to that brought his team down from the Columbia River in Washington and got the entire 80 acres ready in three weeks which is just absolutely amazing six months after he started Shipyard number one he built Shipyard number two which is where the marina is today six months after that he started with Shipyard number three which is we are today and another six months later maybe seven he started Shipyard number four the amazing thing is that within a period of two years four shipyards were built with a capacity of building 27 ships at one time interesting along with the building of the shipyards was the explosion in the city of Richmond in 1940 I think the the population was 23 000 people two years later it was over a hundred and thirty thousand people and the payroll went from 4 000 or so in the beginning up to over ninety thousand I think it was 93 000 people within that same two-year period so it's a phenomenal story of growth and you just think about the amount of effort it took to put that together and the coordination and everything else this must have been really a booming place in the in the 40s 24 hours a day six days seven days a week and radio Factory is at the grounds of the former Shipyard that is correct it was actually built in Shipyard number one down here okay currently it's in the dry dock number and shipyard number three at this time and um how many ships did you say were built by the shipyard during the War uh 747 ships were built within a four and a half year period and those are both Liberty ships and victory ships Liberty ships Victory ships Landing ship tanks small Corvettes it's a very very busy place and how many of them did you say are left today is the only one that's left let's talk about how quickly ships were built here very good point the original victim was actually built in 87 days 88 days which is a phenomenal thing considering the fact that there was a big complicated step Liberty ships though a different story in 1940 the average length of time to build a liberty ship uh the old cramp steamer configuration it was almost a year it was 365 days or something six months after or I should say yeah within a year after Henry Kaiser started and he got that down to 160 days I think in 1942 it was down to 90 days and by 1943 he was building a liberty ship on average once every once a month every 30 days there's two examples I can talk about one was that I have a photograph of a liberty ship that's being launched and it showed the date the kill was laid and it indicated that the ship was to be scheduled launched 25 days later and they didn't make it according to the sign it took 27 days to launch the ship yeah I had to wait for the paint to dry another item was as enlarged as a publicity stunt Henry Kaiser built one ship it was a liberty ship after a lot of preparation in four days 27 hours and 15 minutes or something like that it was an absolutely incredible feat to build the ship it was 95 98 ready a lot of people who didn't think it would make it past the Golden Gate Bridge but this ship served for 22 years or something I didn't get scrapped until 1963 and was involved in the Normandy invasion as well I was impressed that the Philadelphia Navy yard got building battles of New Jersey down from about four years down to just three years but four and a half days is a whole nother order of magnitude though and of course it takes a little bit longer to build Red Oak Victory because the victory ships are a little bit bigger and more complicated than the earlier Liberty ships that's true the plant is a lot more complicated he took a uh took a page I think out of Henry Ford's book and one of the secrets to success here was that the entire Shipyard being brand new was organized to take advantage of this new idea he had was to have sub-assembly plants and prefabrication sections in the shipyard itself so the sheet the sheet steel would come in on the rail on the railway offloaded into the template shop here they'd mark it with paint or chalk or whatever in order to outline where the cuts and bends should be made in the sheet steel then that seal went into the prefabrication shop and they put units of the ship together and then bring them down to the pier and by units I mean big sections like the deck house it was built I think in four different slices if you will these slices were brought down and rolled it back together again other units would be as big sections of the double hole or the after Peak or the four Peak it was really there was so much going on around the shipyard and then the pieces that were manufactured or in the case of boilers for example brought in from Westinghouse built not Westinghouse but Babcock Wilcox and then we brought together these pieces and put on trucks taken down to the shipyard and that's where these whirly cranes were involved there were something like 40 whirly cranes here at one point in time I guess there would have to be for that many slipways and another thing I've noticed I haven't seen any riveting on this ship all weld beads there are about 5 000 rivets on here but the only place they exist is on the bulkheads outside for the boycotts around the rim of the ship otherwise it's all welded and that's helped speed climb up that's true yeah did you use the electric arc welding so as far as the body of this ship is concerned the whole there's no let's not go to get their rivets at all so expanding the workforce of this brand new Shipyard was he bringing in experienced machinists from other places no not at all the people were coming they were desperate for people people were just migrating that you know it hadn't been that long since the Great Depression and they were trained specifically to do a particular job if you did know how to weld they put you in the welding school and they teach you how to weld but also when you got out you would be doing a particular type of welding on a particular type of unit so it was repetitive we did the same thing over and over again so you didn't become a master welder but you certainly knew what you were doing and as far as experience if I had one guest come on one board well a woman and her mother who worked in the shipyards and she was a payroll Clerk and she told me a story about handing paychecks to people people would walk up with workers show their ID card and get a check you know some one man got his check and he said what's this she said well it's your paycheck he said I don't want a paycheck all my cash money I'd win what is this piece of paper I had no idea what a what a check was he had never had a checking account yet he was a valuable employee he was able to do a lot on the on the shipment I'm sure so we were talking about bringing in an all-new Workforce and obviously we're putting something like 14 million men in uniform during World War II so they have to draw this Workforce from new groups of people can you tell me about some of that well you could imagine bringing a town from 23 000 23 500 over 130 000 people fantastic but they needed a place to stay they needed to shop so we actually they were involved in exploding the city that's the best term I can come up with they had to come up with schools Healthcare facilities Child Care markets it's like any other town that needed all the various places that were necessary to carry on life and one of the things that was interesting a couple things that are important there's a small building on the ship Road number three here which was the original field Hospital of the field office I guess you call it which really was the beginnings of the Kaiser health system and these pictures that are on the wall right here were actually painted by children or shouldn't printed they were made by trollden back in 1944-45 as part of an art project for the child care center that was also on the on the shipyard and they needed that because there were now women in the workforce they weren't staying at home and taking care of the kids that's correct 27 in the shipyard were women and I've been told and I think there this is probably true because I've looked at the welds you can tell the difference on the Wells on this ship from the ones that were produced by women versus the men because the women's Wells are nice and smooth all the way down and the men's are kind of wobbly like this so when they were better welders and I've been told now to buy about six or seven different people the classic Wendy the welder exactly counterpart the Rosie the Riveter that's right so I just think these are these are amazing these are the original features of the original paintings drawn by kids and ranging from eight to ten years old and and just going back to something else he said I found it amazing that uh this Shipyard here in Richmond California was absolutely pioneering in World War II when it was brand new uh but now Kaiser shipyards is no longer a thing but one portion of Kaiser still exists today in the medical field that's true and that was just there to support all of the workers that were at that time in his main industry that's absolutely incredible to me yeah a little bit self-serving perhaps but they was they stressed um training of people and safety I mean there was no OSHA at that point in time you made the analogy before to Henry Ford and his pioneering assembly line techniques and nowadays we think about oh yeah you're if you can assembly line a car you can assembly on a ship it's it's no small leap of judgment but that's not true this is such an order of magnitude different from a car it is it's amazingly more complex Kaiser was a genius for being able to say okay a car is let's say a hundred pieces that you got to put together a hundred steps you have to do we can do that on a ship that is tens of thousands of times fat larger yeah he had a lot of vision I mean some of the ideas that he came up with too are fascinating one is that he came up with the idea of building the baby Jeep carriers it was his idea and uh there's one yep right up there and he also remember the idea of putting helicopters on these things and sending them out in the middle of the ocean to protect convoys from submarines we didn't do that for quite a long time afterward but now it is the exclusive way that we hunt submarines and he partnered with Howard Hughes a defilter spruce goose another item throughout Town yeah he was quite a man quite a Visionary and while we're talking about cars about how many cars do you think this ship could carry well I don't know exactly but I did for fun this ship hold has 455 000 cubic feet of storage space and just for the fun of it I measured the cubic volume of a World War II Village Jeep if you fold the windshield down and pull the wheels off and I forget the number right now but I remember that if you divide that number into 455 000 it comes out to over 1800. so if you assume that because of the curvature of the hole and the stanchions being in the wrong place and everything else you knock off a few 400 you're still talking about putting a thousand twelve hundred Jeeps maybe on a ship like this and that gives you a concept of the order of magnitude larger one of these things is than a car there's a lot of space [Music] it really is a floating Warehouse well Alan I'd like to thank you for your expertise on this video today thank you Brian it's a pleasure so have you heard of Henry Kaiser's shipyards before let us know in the comments section down below remember you can come and visit the former shipyards here in Richmond California and see the last of the 747 vessels that were built at this yard Red Oak Victory herself who is now open as a museum ship Battleship New Jersey receives operating support from the New Jersey Department of State also from a number of other businesses and private individuals including yourselves we really appreciate your support for this video consider 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Channel: Battleship New Jersey

Views: 19,423

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Id: M5DYhWGzCs8

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023