Too Many Ships Too Late; The Emergency Fleet Corporation and Its Redundant Armada. By John Henshaw. McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, Jefferson North Carolina 2025 (www.mcfarlandpub.com)
Reviewed by Tim Coyle
In Two Many Ships Too Late the Australian author John Henshaw forensically analyses the World War One United States emergency ship construction program under the United States Shipping Board (USSB) through its Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC), and the British Emergency Ships program.
Drawing on specialised published works, official sources and prior data collections, Henshaw posits that the EFC’s emergency program produced too many ships which led to mass redundancies following the November 1918 Armistice. Shipbuilding continued into the 1920s to meet contracts which could not be cancelled. The story Henshaw tells in this book is a fascinating study in industrial mobilisation, the lessons of which can be transposed to today.
When the US entered World War One in April 1917 it faced a major shipping quandary. Despite the exponential industrial development in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, merchant shipping capacity was lacking; less than five percent of world shipping flew the US flag. US military planners assessed the war could last until August 1919, requiring the transporting of the American Expeditionary Force (60, 80 or 100 divisions comprising 2.5, 3.35 or 4.26 million troops respectively) to the European battlefields, logistically supporting them and returning them after hostilities.
Authorities had foreseen such a continency and established the USSB on 19 September 1916: ‘for the purpose of encouraging, developing, and creating a naval auxiliary and naval reserve and a Merchant Marine to meet the requirements of the commerce of the United States with its territories and possessions and with foreign countries; to regulate carriers by water engaged in the foreign and interstate commerce of the United States for other purposes’.
Ten days after the US entry into the war, the USSB founded EFC ‘to acquire, maintain and operate merchant ships to meet national defense and foreign and domestic commerce’. The USSB’s ‘mission statement’ was couched in bureaucratic policy language; however, the EFC was stridently focussed on providing merchant ships for the wartime emergencies.
After introducing the state of US shipping pre-war, and outlining the USSB and EFC establishment and guidelines, Henshaw dives into the various emergency measures to acquire ships. The first, and ostensibly the most direct, was seizing interned German ships. Ninety-five German ships were interned in US ports: the largest being the liner SS Vaterland. However, the interned German crews – idle since 1914 – went to work with relish to destroy ships systems at a cost of 11 million dollars. The next mode of emergency acquisition was requisitioning, which incurred the ire of foreign shipowners
Then came the new shipyards. Here Henshaw describes the vast capability of US industry to produce enormous materiel output from a virtual standing start. There were 37 shipyards with 234 slipways in April 1917; by March 1919 there were 181 shipyards with 891 slipways. The largest was the built-for-purpose Hog Island yard on the Delaware River in Pennsylvania. Built on swampland it had 50 slipways, seven wet docks, a detention basin and 28 outfitting docks. To feed the shipbuilding materiel requirements; prefabricated components were manufactured by a network of providers across multiple states. Henshaw provides details of Hog Island and several of the more prominent yards.
Of note is the preponderance of wooden ships built under the emergency program. Four hundred and thirty wooden ships (up to 4000 deadweight tons), tugs and barges of 16 EFC designs were built in 104 yards. Henshaw explains the technology advances which gave rise to steel ships over the latter half of the 19th century. This demand for steel outpaced the demand, hence the recourse to wooden construction. He gives comparative details of the steel versus wooden ships and clearly delineates the shortfalls of wooden construction. Nevertheless, while steel construction was superior, the EFC pushed for wood to close the shipping gap.
Few wooden ships survived beyond a few years of service – if that. Their inherent deficiencies saw many scrapped after the war. However, not to be outdone, the EFC contracted for 22 ships of ferro-concrete construction from seven yards; only 12 were completed.
The bulk of the book – Chapter 12: ‘The EFC Designs’ – describe in fine details, accompanied by the author’s drawings, the 135 EFC steel, wooden and concrete ship designs. Although caveated as to some of the numbers’ accuracy, Henshaw does an impressive job in documented these designs – using available records and the work of previous analysts. In addition to Henshaw’s drawings, archive photographs accompany the descriptions.
Henshaw then turns to the British Emergency Ships in Chapter 13. There the British faced similar problems but provided different solutions. There were nine British Ship Types designs, all of which are described in detail.
Henshaw concludes his study with descriptions of the US Cruiser and Transport Force and the Naval Overseas Transportation Service, thereby closing a most exhaustive and informative analysis of US and British war emergency shipping. Appendix A lists the EFC Ship Types, Appendix B, the EFC Ships by Design and Builders and Appendix C, Requisitioned Ships by Builder. Henshaw’s relaxed and personable writing style (’correcting’ a couple of American terminologies) facilitates absorption of the highly detailed content. One thousand nine hundred and twenty ships were built to EFC designs. Four hundred and twenty-one ships were requisitioned from US owners, and the British Shipping Controller requisitioned 52 ships.
The book’s title, Too Many Ships Too Late, reflects the historic fact that there were too many ships built. However, this was predicated on America’s ‘late’ entry into the war which, US authorities assessed, would continue into 1919. In the event they ‘over-catered’ but they should not be criticised for that. Henshaw’s final point is that the World War One emergency shipbuilding program proved to be a precursor to the several orders of shipbuilding magnitude demonstrated in World War Two.
To my mind how logistics contributed to the major wars of the last century is at least as interesting as the campaigns themselves. ‘Amateurs study tactics but professionals study logistics’, Is a much-bandied truism as relevant today as at any time in history.
There is much to learn from John Henshaw’s ‘Too Many Ships Too Late’ and its lessons of history extend to how a contemporary emergency might be managed.
