The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors: The Extraordinary World War II Story of the U.S. Navy's Finest Hour

by James D. Hornfischer

An escort carrier was built on a cargo ship’s hull. Shipbuilding magnate Henry J. Kaiser was the Lee Iacocca of his day, a visionary industrialist whose name was a household word. Among his innovations was the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel that could be mass-produced virtually like an oceangoing Model T. Using a breakthrough welding technique, submerged arc welding, that could stitch steel plate with molten rivets up to twenty times faster than existing methods, Kaiser’s shipbuilders produced a Liberty ship in an average of only forty-two days. Seeing that he was in a position to bolster not only America’s merchant marine but also the Navy’s offensive capability, Kaiser’s next brainstorm was to reconfigure his merchantmen as aircraft carriers. However brilliant their means of construction, Kaiser took shortcuts on components and materials. Escort carriers did not have many watertight compartments, a standard damage-control feature on American combatants. The ships were driven by inexpensive, idiosyncratic Skinner Uniflow steam engines, peculiar in design and nonconforming with Navy specs for cylinder lubrication, filtering, and quality of fittings, and foreign to the young mechanics coming out of America’s wartime technical schools. In combat conditions breakdowns were common. The hull of a CVE was no better than its engines. High in sulfur and phosphorus content, the thin steel was brittle, a deficiency that worsened when all the hatches, vents, and other structural discon...