The old saying is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Anybody can prepare a delicious-sounding recipe but unless a pudding is made and eaten we will never know whether the recipe is good.
The same holds equally true in the design and building of naval ships. Designs of ships can be made which promise great results in speed, gun power, and protection, but unless ships are built from these designs we will never know whether the high promises have been or can be fulfilled. Skill in ship design and shipbuilding is based practically on experience. The longer new building is delayed the more will be the deterioration in both the designer’s skill in making the plans and in the shipbuilder’s skill in executing these plans.
Since the Limitation of Armament Treaty in 1922, we have laid down eight cruisers and three submarines; none of the light cruisers have been completed, i.e., put to the proof. Two battle cruisers have been converted to airplane carriers. Thus there has been practically a stoppage of naval construction. Shipyards have been closed and the work at navy yards has been greatly reduced. With the closing of some shipyards and the slackening of work at others, the skilled men, trained through years of experience to the high standards required of naval construction, have been scattered into other lines of work, and the patiently gained knowledge and skill of these men is now largely lost to shipbuilding and thus to the Navy. To illustrate this scattering of skilled shipbuilders to other lines of work, it was necessary for three different contractors for the last six cruisers ordered to establish a central drafting office at Philadelphia, as there were not enough trained draftsmen available to permit each shipyard to build up its force to the required extent.
The bureau of construction and repair is that branch of the Navy Department charged with the design of naval vessels, and quite aside from the question of the needs of the Navy for new ships of the various types and classes, this bureau is particularly interested that a new building program be approved by Congress, in order that skill in the design and building of naval vessels shall not be lost. Even if skill in designing could be maintained by preparing designs only, the interest of the designers will surely lag, unless they see the product of their skill made to live in completed ships, and with the lagging of interest, skill and ability will most surely suffer and eventually disappear. This skill once lost cannot be re-created in time of sudden emergency, when with a war at hand, we are called upon to build ships and ships and still more ships.
The Secretary of the Navy this past year submitted to Congress a building program of naval ships in carefully determined numbers, to round out the fleet into a well- balanced whole, and to replace ships which have already passed or will shortly pass the age limit of their usefulness. This building program failed of passage in the closing hours of the Congressional session.
The program recommended included four different types of naval vessels: cruisers, airplane carriers, destroyer leaders, and submarines. Each type presents its own problems from th« point of view of the designer. and each type is one which we will be called upon to build in numbers in the event of war.
Since the end of the war, great advances have been made in the materials of engineering and in engineering practices.
Even to the layman these advances are brought home in the development of electric and gas welding, which he now sees used in the construction of the iron work on bridges and buildings instead of the long-established riveting; the coming of the use of aluminum and aluminum products to save weight in the building of large airships; the widespread use of small, light refrigerating machinery; and in many other ways. Every one of these developments has its application in naval shipbuilding, but unless ships are built, determination as to their possible application and value will rest only on theory and not on actual practice.
In addition to these general features of engineering development, the cruiser presents a number of particular problems, especially from the point of view of restrictions existing nowadays which were not experienced in past years.
The Limitation of Naval Armament Treaty placed a limit upon the maximum displacement of cruisers of 10,000 tons, and a limit upon the size of the guns of 8-inch caliber. Smaller cruisers, of course, may be built, but the needs of the United States Navy will best be met by cruisers of the largest size permitted by the treaty. The problem of the designer is therefore to give the best possible ship which can be built on a displacement of 10,000 tons. He must bring into play every element of the modern developments in engineering skill and practice, to reduce to the minimum the weight of all features of the design which do not enter directly into the military characteristics of the ship. This must, moreover, be done without sacrificing structural strength.
Here enter those elements of the engineering developments of the past years. If welding can be used to connect the structural parts of the hull, the weight of straps and rivets will be saved. However, welding has not reached quite the point where full reliance can be placed upon it for the main girders of the ship. It can, however, be used very generally where local strength only is needed, and thereby much weight is saved and made available for guns, armor, and machinery. With the ship built and in service, the welding used may prove itself so reliable that in the next ship to be built, welding throughout can be adopted with further savings made available for the essentials. Only time and the building of ships will tell.
Similarly, there can be used in many places, such as bulkheads for staterooms, and storerooms, the aluminum alloys developed by the airship builders, duralumin and allied materials, and weight thereby saved for the essentials.
In the machinery plant itself, there is opportunity to take advantage of the improvements in steam machinery during these past years, particularly in the use of higher pressure steam with increased power for the same weight. Thereby the speed of the ship will be increased.
In many other fields, new apparatus is available for these new ships; steering gear and windlasses of improved type, automatic steering apparatus which will ensure steady courses in formation and in battle, modern refrigerating apparatus of greater efficiency and less weight. The list might be multiplied indefinitely.
For the second type of ship, the airplane carrier, it is almost unnecessary to enumerate the reasons why the building of such a ship is of great importance from the particular point of view of the designer as well as from that of the Navy in general.
We have three airplane carriers in service, it is true, the Langley, the Lexington, and the Saratoga. However, the Langley is a converted collier, and has, since her conversion, been looked upon purely as an experimental vessel, on board of which the problems of airplanes taking off from and landing upon a flying deck could be thoroughly studied. Her low speed, if no other reason, prevents her use as an active fleet unit. This leaves the Navy with but two carriers, the Lexington and Saratoga. It does not take an expert, in these days of the rapid development of aircraft, to demonstrate that the Navy must have more than two carriers to fill its needs.
Moreover, speaking from the point of view of the designer, the Lexington and Saratoqa were not in any sense designed as aircraft carriers from the ground up. These ships were originally building as battle cruisers, and by the Washington treaty we were permitted to convert them to large airplane carriers instead of scrapping them. Thus, they represent the best design of airplane carrier—based on the limited experience with the experimental ship Langley, that it was possible to produce from a partly completed ship originally designed as a totally different type of warship.
Thus we have no airplane carrier designed and built from the beginning to embody the best thought as to what such a ship should be. That such ships should be built appears self-evident in these days in which aviation has come to take so prominent and important a part in modern navies.
Airplane carriers are limited by the naval armament treaty both as to size of individual ships and as to the total tonnage which may be possessed by any of the nations concerned. For the United States the total tonnage of carriers allowed is 135,000 tons. The first question to be determined is, therefore, the size of the carrier needed. The Navy Department believes that the remainder of our allowance of aircraft tonnage should be utilized in building carriers of about half the size of the Saratoga.
With the size generally determined, all the matters of modern engineering practice referred to in the case of the cruisers come at once into the question, for in order to build the best aircraft carrier on the tonnage allowed, weights, essential and non-essential, must be saved so that the carrier may accommodate the greatest possible number of planes.
In addition, the airplane carrier presents from her very existence many problems not found on other types; the size and arrangement of a flying deck, the arresting gear for securely stopping and retaining planes which land on the deck, huge elevators for carrying planes between the hangars and the flying deck, and the disposal of smoke and gases from the boilers through smoke pipes which will not interfere with flying operations. All these problems require not only study and solution on paper, but actual working out in the building of a ship, in order to ensure that the solution arrived at will meet the needs of the service.
The third type of ship in the building program is the destroyer leader. The name “destroyer leader’’ many times causes a question to arise in the minds of both naval officers and laymen as to just what such a ship is and what she is intended for. A destroyer leader may be said to be simply an up-to-date destroyer with accommodations
increased sufficiently to permit the officer commanding a squadron of destroyers to use the vessel as his flagship in leading the squadron. The principal reason for building destroyer leaders, or destroyers, actually rests in the fact that, in spite of their numbers, all destroyers now in the Navy are old and of obsolescent design.
In the late war the needs of the Navy centered in destroyers, to counter the submarine war, and to convoy transports and merchant vessels, and all effort was bent to the building of this type, of which, at the end of the war we possessed some 300.
That was ten years ago, and the designs of the vessels date from 1916, twelve years ago. Since then we have built no new destroyers, and the two great shipyards which for years specialized particularly in building destroyers, the Bath Iron Works at Bath, Maine, and William Cramp and Son, at Philadelphia, have been forced to go out of the shipbuilding business for lack of work.
Of all types of naval vessels, with the exception of the submarine, the destroyer is the most highly specialized in design and construction. Everything is cut to the limit, and engineering skill in design of hull and machinery must bring into play every trick of the trade. No less important is the skill of the builders, who must be trained by experience to build this class of ship.
In these ten years, with two destroyer building plants out of existence and no destroyers building in any of the others, organizations capable of building destroyers have almost ceased to exist in this country. If another ten-year holiday in destroyer building ensues, it is doubtful if this country will be able to design and build a destroyer which will compare at all favorably with the product of foreign countries which have kept up the practice.
The situation abroad is quite different. During our time of idleness Great Britain has built or is building eleven destroyers and leaders; France, forty-four; Italy, twenty- eight; and Japan, fifty-one.
Although at present we have 274 first- line destroyers, sixty-six of them reach the end of their effective life by 1934, and another 105 of them in 1935. It is an absolute necessity that we should prepare for the replacement of these vessels by building new destroyers from time to time in order to bring design and engineering skill up to date and to retain in this country the ability to construct these vessels, so vital to the Navy.
Finally on the program come submarines. Since the war we have continued to build submarines in small numbers, developing new types at intervals, and this building has permitted the design of submarines to be kept up to date, particularly in special types.
However, the main strength of our fleet in submarines rests in a large number of vessels built during the last war. These vessels are rapidly approaching the end of their effective life of thirteen years. By 1933 seventy-five of our 122 submarines will have passed their effective age. Moreover, since their building, developments in design have advanced enormously. The design and construction of submarines is more highly specialized than that of any other type of naval vessel, and like the destroyers, if skill in these arts be lost, it will be long before it is regained.
Fortunately, as stated above, Congress has appropriated for a small number of submarines since the war, and by the building of these vessels it has been possible to keep alive skill in the design and building, which is so necessary. Had a similar program been followed with destroyers, our outlook for that class of ship would not be so dark.
These submarines which have been built have generally represented special types with which it was considered essential that we have experience. Generally speaking, they do not represent the type which the fleet will need in the greatest number to replace the submarines now nearing the end of their years of active service.
It is therefore of the greatest importance, from the point of view of the designer, that at least some submarines should be built of the type most needed by the fleet. In this
way the latest developments in design and building of these specialized vessels will be embodied in their construction and the organizations necessary to this construction will be maintained.
The preceding gives, from the point of view of the designer, a general survey of the particular features of each of the four classes of ships included in the new shipbuilding program recommended by the Secretary of the Navy to Congress this last year; cruisers, airplane carriers, destroyer leaders and submarines. In the past years, no limit, except that imposed by the money made available in the appropriations for building, has been placed upon the size of naval ships. Now, however, in two of the classes at least, the Limitation of Naval Armament Treaty has placed limits on the size, which calls for the display of skill greater than that demanded before, in order that the most for the money and the displacement may be obtained in the finished ship.
Finally and always, in the product of the designer’s and shipbuilder’s skill the fighting branch of the Navy must place its reliance in time of battle, and this product can never be fully tested until the day of battle comes. With constant practice, skill and knowledge increase, but without this practice ability atrophies.
The program of new shipbuilding recommended by the Secretary of the Navy is one carefully prepared to meet the needs of the Navy to give it a well-rounded fleet and to replace old vessels. From the point of view of those charged with the preparation of the designs of these vessels and their building it is more that that; it is an absolute necessity to ensure that in design and construction, the naval vessels of the United States shall be at least the equals of those of foreign nations.