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When the USS Bunker Hill (ex-CV-17) arrived at a Tacoma scrapyard in 1973, she was already in bad shape as the result of a kamikaze hit in World War II and a collision while being towed to her final destination. Most World War II Navy vessels haven’t suffered such indignities; they have been cut up as the Bunker Hill was.
It’s been said that ships of the World War II fleet do not die or even fade away—they come back to us as millions of razor blades. This may not be exactly true, but the fact remains that the scrapyards have indeed been the destination of most of the ships that helped win the war. During World War II, over 1,400 warships were built in U.S. shipyards. Today, perhaps 20 or 30 remain active. The rest of these ships, once the pride and backbone of the fleet, became old, tired, and obsolete; now, more than 30 years after seeing us to victory, most are gone.
The path to the scrapyards begins with an inspection by the Board of Inspection and Survey, which is required by the U. S. Code to examine each ship in the “mothball fleet” for fitness at least once every three years, if practical. For a ship judged by the board as unnecessary to the fleet, the next step is a letter from the board and a series of endorsements beginning with the signature of the commanding officer of the Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility where the ship is berthed and ending with the endorsement of the Secretary of the Navy to the Chief of Naval Operations. The decision to dispose of a ship rests with the Secretary of the Navy, who recommends that a ship be stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on the first day of the following month. Factors considered in making the final decision include the ship’s type and condition and certain provisions of the public law. Instructions for disposal are issued by the Commander, Naval Sea Systems Command.
Currently the Navy has a number of combatant* “in mothballs” at Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facilities, including four World War II battleships- the USS New Jersey (BB-62) and USS Missouri (BB-63) a' Bremerton, Washington, and the USS Iowa (BB-61) and USS Wisconsin (BB-64) at Philadelphia. Other e*' cess Navy ships, such as auxiliary type vessels, afe maintained for the Navy at National Defense Reserve Fleet sites held by the Maritime Administratin'1 (MarAd) of the Commerce Department, which als° keeps inactive ships of merchant configuration.
From the mothball fleets, if no other possibility5 are open, a ship deemed unnecessary will be sold f°c scrap. Those intended for scrapping are referred t0 the Defense Property Disposal Ship Sales Off'ce (DPDSSO) of the Defense Logistics Agency for publk advertising and sale. Auxiliary vessels are sol through MarAd. The DPDSSO and MarAd send on' bid lists. Prospective ship dismantlers place thc'f bids, the highest bidder getting the ship; or, if t^e bids are not considered high enough by the two d>*' posal agencies, all bids are discarded and new hi listings posted.
Of course, not all ships put into mothballs scrapped. Ships may be overhauled and allowed bac into the active fleet. If a friendly foreign navy e*” presses an interest in acquiring an excess U. S. veS sel, the Navy usually considers it desirable to keep i ship in continued active service under a friendly eign flag rather than to scrap her. After letting foreign navy know which vessels are available, l^e. transfer is proposed by the office of the Chief 0 Naval Operations, subject to the approval of the partment of Defense, Department of State, and Co11 gress. A few ships are preserved as memorials so tbat future generations may see them and walk their deck*-
Ships are sold domestically under two categoric Vessels in the first group must be scrapped with*0 ‘ certain time limit set up by the DPDSSO and MarA
but
bid
people who bought the ship with the highest moor the ship to their own pier. There, using Preside cranes, they start at the top of the vessel,
Th •
ne second category of ships is sold under the desig-
nadon of “nontransportation use,” which means that
ship cannot be used to haul cargo or passengers,
Way be sold or lent to become a floating ware-
°Use or office, a crane barge, storage ship, or proving vessel. In any case, a bond is required of the uyer, ensuring that the vessel will not become a nav*gational hazard in case of sinking, and covering T*e possibility of any pollution that might be caused. 116 amount of the bond is determined by the size of ship.
The project of cutting down an entire warship into ^table-sized pieces without causing a sinking, a pol- tlon accident, or cluttered heaps in the scrapyard is ^deed no mean accomplishment. To begin with, the lsWantling must be done in the reverse order from 'vbich a ship is built; in building a ship, the keel is
ai<a first, while in dismantling, the keel is the last to 8°. in
some cases, naval vessels are demilitarized
"■Ten sold for nonmilitary purposes, a process which
eritails cutting up any weapons so as to render them
'^operable. Then the ship breakers, or scrappers— the
,Clng off huge chunks and hauling the severed P‘eces ashore, where they will be hacked away "her, separated, and stacked in piles to be dragged t0 junkyards. When all machinery, ballast, and ^ °pellers have been removed from the vessel and she as been cut down as low as possible, the final cut- lQ8 begins.
The most expensive way of finishing the cutting is
to place the hulk in drydock to be taken apart. Another method uses water as ballast; as one end of the hulk is ballasted, the other end rises out of the water to be chopped off and lifted ashore by crane. The process is then repeated with the other end of the hulk. This seesaw method is used until only the amidships portion is left; when this is carried ashore and torn apart, another group of scrappers finishes up with the remains of the ship, cutting it down as far as possible. Using a tugboat and the extra buoyancy of\high tide, they tear off the propeller, then ram the hulk ashore. At last, during low tide, they dismantle the rest of the hulk and drag the pieces away with a bulldozer.
Those ships that are doomed to undergo the scrappers’ tools create a sad, eerie sight. To a man who has spent his service career in one of these ships and who remembers the bustle of activity on her decks, it can be quite a shock to see an old ship with those same decks as solemn as death, while men swarm over her with blowtorches to reduce her to a pile of scrap metal.
Mr. Fredeen spent four years on active duty as a Navy enlisted man. Following boot camp in San Diego and machinist’s mate school at Great Lakes, he served for three and one-half years in the amphibious assault ship Princeton (LPH-5). For the past 15 years, he has worked as a steam engineer for the Shell Oil Company. In recent years, he has pursued marine photography as a sideline and has a negative file numbering in the thousands. Included are square riggers, Navy ships, Coast Guard cutters, and merchant vessels. Mr. Fredeen’s home is Seattle, Washington.
There is much truth in the adage that they also serve who only stand and wait, and so it has been with mothball fleet ships in their role as cannibalization victims. When the USS Wisconsin collided with the USS Eaton (DDES 10) in May 1956, she came away with a badly damaged bow. Repairs to the Wisconsin were expedited by taking the bow from the hull of the never-finished Kentucky (BB-66). New bow sections were manufactured and put on the Kentucky’! deck. They were still there when she arrived at a Baltimore scrapyard in 1958. Two battleships which never came back from mothballs were the ones pictured on page 59 of this issue, the Washington (BB-56) and South Dakota (BB-57). Citizens of the state for which the latter was named wanted to keep her for a memorial, as her sisters Massachusetts (BB-59) and Alabama (BB-60) wound up. But there was no way to transport so large a ship to the upper Midwest, so she ended up instead being cut apart in Kearny, New Jersey, (bottom), in 1963. The Washington didn’t become a memorial either, probably because she was mothballed on the East Coast rather than at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. Thus, she also was scrapped at Kearny (opposite page at top, behind the large cruiser Alaska [CB-1]).
COURTESY OF BOSTON METALS CO., BALTIMORE, MD.
UNIVERSITY OF UTAH MEDICAL CENTER
'SCO EXAMINER
Another case of cannibalization took place when the USS Indiana (BB-58) was demolished in 1963-1964 at Richmond, California. One of her anchors went on display at Fort Wayne, her mast and two 40-millimeter gun mounts were placed beside the football stadium at Indiana University in Bloomington (opposite page), and 175 tons of her armor plating went underground in Salt Lake City, Utah. An “iron room” has been constructed for metabolic experiments involving radioactive tracers. The battleship steel was used for the room's thick shielding because it was made before the first atomic blasts. Since it contains no radioactivity itself, it can screen out about 99% of the background radiation and thus permit highly accurate measurements to he made inside.
The U. S. Navy built what turned out to he a plethora of 6-inch-gun light cruisers during World War II and shortly before. After the war’s end, though, there was little use for them, and most were soon decommissioned. Some were transferred to South American navies, while the rest just sat around in various mothball fleets until the time came to be scrapped. At right is the Denver (CL-58). Commissioned in late 1942 and decommissioned less than five years later, she is shown in June I960 while being scrapped at Kearny, New Jersey. A different fate was planned for the large cruiser Hawaii (CB-3). She was 84% complete when construction was suspended in 1947. After being put into mothballs, she was slated for conversion to the world’s first guided-missile cruiser. Later, she was intended as a command ship. Neither came about, so in 1959 (below), she was towed away to Baltimore to he cut up. At bottom are the remains of the prewar-built destroyer Sampson (DD-394). Like light cruisers, destroyers were in oversupply, and the ships built during the war were more than enough to fill requirements. That meant getting rid of older ones such as the Sampson.
NEWPORT NEWS SHIPBUILDING AND ORY DOCK
Like the Hawaii, the Thetis Bay (top) had several hull number redesignations, although all such considerations became pretty much academic when the ship was reduced to shards of steel, for the record, the Thetis Bay started as an escort carrier (CVE-90), was given the new hull number CVHA-1 as an auxiliary helicopter carrier, and was finally the prototype amphibious assault ship (LPH-6) for vertical envelopment. She is shown here in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1966. Attack carriers were not immune to that sort of changing. The USS Wasp (shown in the center photo behind the cruiser Oregon City [CA-122]) was CV-18, CVA-18, and CVS-18 before newer, larger carriers and the scrappers’ torches cut her down. At left is the partially dismantled Ticonderoga (CVlCVAlCVS-14), the fate of which closely paralleled that of the Wasp.
Among the many merchant-hull-type Navy ships uhich have been scrapped was the reefer Sirius (AF-60). During the process of being scrapped in Seattle, she caught fire, rolled over onto her port side, and sank. She was raised, again sank, and was finally scrapped on her side in 1972. The Japanese tug Iris prepares to tow the ex-USS Andromeda (AKA-15) to Taiwan for scrapping. The former attack cargo ship did stick around Seattle long enough to have fake guns mounted so she could appear in a movie. Another Japanese tug, the Sakura Maru, tows two World War H-built cargo ships, the Kingston Victory and Waltham Victory, to a Taiwanese scrapyard in June 1972.
TED STONE
The internal hull compartmentation of the old seaplane tender Currituck (AV-7) is dramatically revealed in the pictures at left which were taken while she was being scrapped at Oakland in 1972. Alongside on the pier is a line of railroad cars to carry away chunks of the ship as she dwindled down, piece hy piece. At top, awaiting her demise in a cluttered scrapyard at Richmond, California, in 1971 is the former attack cargo ship Mathews (AKA-96). Above, the how and lower hull are about all that remain of the minesweeper Pigeon (AM-374) during demolition at Wilmington, Delaware in 1970.
Man's existence has been described as going from ashes to ashes and dust to dust. As for ships, the steel plating, turbines, propellers, valves, piping, boilers, and so forth that go into them when they are built will come out of them when they are scrapped years later. Below, for example, is a stack of scrap which contains steam turbine blades and reduction gears, among other things. At right is a conglomeration of valves which were once part of Navy ships. At bottom are miles of twisted tubing, previously used in boilers.
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At top, old diesel engines stand in a neat row. Above are hull plates and girders. At left are propellers, a rudder, and a general profusion of generally unidentifiable bits and pieces. In their day, they were parts of the structures of men of war. In new incarnations, they may have been melted down to form automobiles, bridges, or even, perhaps, ships once again.
r°ceedings / February 1979
73