Building a ship is an art, a science, and a challenge. No two ships are identical in every respect, nor are the conditions under which they are built. Thus each excursion into shipbuilding may be a unique experience—I had such an experience as Officer-in-Charge of Construction of the Saratoga (CVA-60), the second carrier of the Forrestal-class. I hope by this article to convey to the lay reader some idea of modern ship construction and, to the professional reader, a further insight into the unusual technical aspects as well as a greater appreciation of shipyard personnel, their problems, and accomplishments.
To comprehend the magnitude of the task of building a ship the size of the Saratoga involves more than listing her dimensions: 1,039 feet long, 129-foot beam, 97-foot depth, 60,000 tons standard displacement. It may help a little to point out that she was to house, feed, and otherwise minister to the needs of some 4,000 officers and men—the population of a fair-sized town. It may also help to say that she was to accommodate and arm approximately 100 aircraft—more than you are likely to see on an airfield of a large city. The ship has to be able to maintain these aircraft, house them in a hangar over three city blocks in length, launch them by means of four giant steam catapults, recover them by means of massive arresting gear, and transport them between the hangar deck and the flight deck on four elevators, each the size of a house site. These things you can understand quite readily by viewing the pictures of the ship. It would be more difficult to comprehend what we went through in terms of designs, schedules, delays, frustrations, and the innumerable complications of installing 500 miles of electric cable, other miles of ventilating and air conditioning ducts, a machinery plant of over 200,000 horsepower, not to mention construction of a hull whose keel-line varied from a true line by less than three-eights of an inch in over 1,000 feet. A way to sum it up is to say that it took over 2,300,000 man-days of productive labor and some $200,000,000 to build this ship.
My job was to direct and co-ordinate the combined efforts of thousands of craftsmen and to monitor procedures and material-flow into the building dock in order to produce a ship of technical excellence at a reasonable cost. An effort of these proportions is of necessity the product of teamwork. In this case, the team was supplied by the New York Naval Shipyard, formerly and still unofficially known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
From its small beginnings in 1801, the Brooklyn Yard has become an industrial complex of 290 acres, employing 16,000 people, and equipped with six large and small dry- docks, unequalled structural shops, large and adequate machine and electrical shops, and numerous supporting activities. Even more essential than the physical facilities is the century and a half of shipbuilding skill that has been acquired there. These impressive resources made our task possible of accomplishment; there are relatively few sites and facilities in the United States which could undertake such an assignment.
The Structure
A modern shipyard is an assembly plant as well as a workshop. Industrial products from all parts of the United States flow into a shipyard, which must proceed to put them together in proper sequence. Planning is obviously a key to success. Unfortunately even the most careful planning cannot anticipate even a portion of the contingencies that will arise, and no major ship can be built without a hitch. So it was with the Saratoga.
First, let me sketch the general planning for ship construction. The Bureau of Ships initiates early specifications and orders for the long-lead-time items like the main engines, reduction gears, and boilers. Thousands of blueprints are prepared, issued, and phased to permit orderly construction sequences. Tens of thousands of tons of steel must be funneled into the shipyard in a controlled way. Erection sequences must be formulated for the structure and for the machinery installation. Manpower in the proper numbers and skills must be made available at the proper time. Workers’ productivity must be monitored and cost figures presented periodically in intelligible form. Inspection procedures must be decided upon. Procedures must be adopted to identify, store, and make available at the proper time the thousand and one items that go into a ship. From the standpoint of shipyard management, perhaps the most difficult task is balancing manpower assigned to new construction against the requirements of routine repair and overhaul jobs. Against this background let us consider the problems that we encountered with the Saratoga (CVA-60).
Because initially the “60” was to be identical with the “59” (Forrestal) as far as hull and structure were concerned, shipyard officials decided to duplicate the steel purchase orders of the latter for the Saratoga. These orders were released in approximate sequence to the Navy Supply System starting in August, 1952. Plans called for ultimate delivery of over 49,000 tons of structural steel, the bulk of it medium steel, and 21,000 tons of it special treatment steel (similar to armor plate) and high-yield strength steel.
Despite months of conferences and co-ordination between shipyard officials, supply officers, and representatives of the steel companies, progress had been disappointing by the time the keel-laying took place, December 16, 1952. At that time there were less than 3,500 tons of steel on hand and no assemblies had been completed.
Within several months after keel-laying, another phase of the steel picture worsened. Arrivals were picking up but sequences were being lost. Sequence was important because the steel orders were for “tailored plates,” that is, plates cropped or trimmed by the steel mills to specific dimensions to fit specific needs. This type of order followed the CVA-59 orders, but it limited our ability to make substitutions or to operate with flexibility. The rejection of plates for failure to meet dimensional, chemical, strength, or ballistic specifications threw the structural erection sequence into confusion. For example, by the middle of March, 1953, three months after keel-laying, the steel picture for one of the major transverse bulkheads between machinery rooms was five out of seven plates assembled, two not yet received. Specific end-use ordering works for a sharp, timely material outfit, but hardly works with the complex and overlapping supply channels of the Government.
The trickle of special treatment steel (STS) deliveries had an unusual explanation, we discovered. Originally STS was to have been sent to the shipyard, but some months after issuing the orders which specified this delivery point, it was decided to store the STS at a temporary facility in nearby Kearny to prevent undue clutter of the yard. When the change of destination order reached the steel mill, the rumor quickly spread that the Navy was not yet building the ship; instead it was just getting the steel and storing it! It took a trip to the mill and photographs of construction to convince the supplier (and the naval inspector) that the rumor was untrue. As a result, some of the mill’s output began again to come to us rather than to other customers.
The general rule that we followed in construction was that the ship was to be built from the center lower portions, growing fore and aft and upwards. Although I used the term “keel-laying” earlier, it was in a purely conventional sense to indicate the commencement of work on the ship. CVA-60 has no keel. Each of the vertical longitudinals in the inner bottom, for at least a considerable portion from centerline to port and starboard— including the centerline—are of the same thickness high tensile steel. There is not the single backbone concept as with a ship having a keel.
A major problem of the building yard is determination of the optimum sizes of sub- assemblies for shop fabrication. Generally speaking, the limiting factors are the weighthandling and transportation facilities of the shipyard, as well as a nice balance between the economy of large sub-assemblies and the difficulty of fitting them in place. The New York Naval Shipyard has excellent weighthandling facilities in the structural shops, in barge transportation from shop to dock, and around the drydock itself. In side-framing the carrier, sub-assemblies weighing up to 80 or 90 tons worked out very well for us. The largest sub-assembly that went into CVA-60 was 137 tons of structural steel, representing approximately two thirds of the forward gas tank.
Each sub-assembly that came from the shop had surplus at its forward or after end, depending on its intended location in the ship. As it was lowered into position and regulated and welded into place (98 per cent of the ship is welded), its edges would be trimmed to the truest line. The results were very satisfactory. As mentioned earlier, there was less than 7/8 of an inch variation from a true line along the keel, except at the extreme bow. The deflection upward of approximately | of an inch from frame 10 forward was less a matter of welding distortion than an error on our part when fabricating the 75-ton bow sub-assembly.
Our hope was to have machinery units in place before completion of the spaces to which they were assigned. Here rigorous adherence to scheduling was important. If the units arrived in time, or a bit early, there was no problem, but the great majority arrived late and caused many interruptions in orderly structural erection sequence. We had to provide openings for receiving the late-delivered machinery, in some cases measuring 20 by 35 feet in size. This situation created problems not only for the structural people, but also for the outfitting men who came after them and were forced to interrupt ventilation-duct runs, temporarily leave gaps in the piping, and detour cables around the openings. For example, due to failures of the initial contractor fabrications, the last very large accumulator tank for number 4 deck-edge elevator came fifteen months after it was required. This delay affected construction on three decks, as well as considerable vertical structure, and caused innumerable stoppages.
In an enterprise of this magnitude it was important to know what progress we were making toward completion of the ship. This was easier said than done. Structural progress can be estimated by a comparison of the tonnage fitted and welded versus a planned rate, and we had a small team check these figures each month. Cable footage is another useful gauge, but in this instance the design section could not provide a firm indication of total electrical footage until a year before completion. In general, therefore, we followed the customary practice of roughing out complete systems and having a team make an evaluation of the degree of completion once a month. A similar approach was used for the machinery systems and hull equipment. The end-result was a monthly listing of several hundred items, each with the degree of completion and an arbitrary value based on its share of the completed ship.
Another approach to the problem of measuring progress is known as “compartment close-out.” The term covers those tests which establish that a space is in fact finished. The tests include a check-off of all fittings that should be in the space. It is not unusual to have ten or fifteen plans involved in a single space. Multiplied by some 3,000 spaces, the check-off document becomes a most formidable one! Since there was no such document for the “60,” we approached the problem from the standpoint of terminal fittings. It followed that when each space on the ship had all terminal fittings, such as ventilation outlets, pipe ends, and electrical fittings, the ship would be complete. Each system, of course, received individual system tests.
The complications in compartment closeout are infinite. What do you do, for example, when a compartment is turned down for the second time because several cable racks are missing? The electricians can show you records that they put them up after the first inspection. However, it turns out that the ventilation gang in rerouting their last run chipped off the newly-installed racks and did not replace them. Such permutations are endless. Thus a compartment close-out rate of more than seventy compartments per week in a large ship is very difficult to achieve.
In terms of the rate of progress toward completion, there is a conflict between safety requirements and production. Overly cautious steps in the interest of safety can impede production unnecessarily. But all of us, even the most ardent advocates of production, want to achieve the goal without fatalities. Unfortunately we did not achieve this goal on the “60”-—one pipe fitter died as the result of burns suffered in the oxygen-rich atmosphere of a small compartment. Although, as was driven home when several of us attended the services for the pipe fitter, one fatality was too many, statistically it was one less than could have been expected in relation to the number of man-days of productive labor employed on the ship.
Fire is another threat to construction progress, and in a project of this extent and duration, fires were almost inevitable. The worst one that we experienced was due to our own ignorance. It occurred in the last few months of building when the steam accumulators on one of the forward catapults were being tested. Visualize four upright steel tanks, each some twelve feet in diameter and three decks high. The working steam pressure in the tanks is 600 pounds per square inch. When we entered the testing phase, the insulation on the outside of these tanks was not complete. We made the mistake of leaving the wooden staging surrounding the tanks in the compartments while the tanks were tested to over-pressure. The resulting temperature was sufficient to ignite the wooden splinters and we had a fire on our hands. Although it was not a particularly bad fire, it lasted four or five hours because it was a tough one to get to. We could not subject the tanks to the shock of cold water, but by cooling the adjacent structure and by smothering techniques, we were able to prevent really serious or extensive damage.
The problems encountered in structural work lead to the subject of cost control. For a ship the size of the “60,” about one half the cost is in material, about one half in labor. Roughly one-third the labor cost is incurred in the structural phase, which involves the fitters, chippers, welders, and riveters. If structural costs are high, it necessarily follows that the ship will be expensive. If structural costs can be kept low, there is at least the possibility that the total cost of the ship can be kept down. In the structural phase, therefore, the superintendent of construction must exercise some over-all control of cost. On the CVA-60 we watched “Structural Man-Days Per Ton Erected,” which simply indicated the number of man-days for the structural people—including those in the mold loft, the shop, and the drydock—to finish erection of an assembly. Welding manning was considered and regulated as a ratio of structural manning.
Our experience in the use of this cost control technique was satisfactory. Although there was considerable monthly variation in the number of man-days per ton, the trend was reasonably consistent. As the manning curves and the tonnage of the ship showed, the man-days per ton erected came out to approximately 12.5, with the lowest point in the order of 10.0.
Machinery
“Machinery” may sound remote to the lay reader at this stage, but the problems we encountered in this area were fully as much a part of the project as any we met in constructing the hull. I shall try to keep the discussion as straightforward as possible, but I trust that a few technical asides for the benefit of professional readers will be excused.
Each of the four shafts of the CVA-60 is driven, through a reduction gear, by a pair of steam turbines. Each pair of turbines is supplied with high pressure-high temperature steam by two boilers. For each shaft there is one main machinery room, housing the boiler-turbine-reduction gear combination and essential auxiliary equipment.
While the low pressure turbines are conventional, the high pressure ones are unique. Technically they consist of a high pressure-intermediate pressure combination on one rotor. There are the two customary main bearings, one at each end. Steam admission is at the center of the turbine casing, and steam flow is either in series or parallel. For high power operation, steam expands simultaneously through the high pressure end and the intermediate pressure end. For medium or low power operation, the incoming steam first goes through the high pressure end and then is diverted back through the intermediate pressure end. This design, first used to my knowledge in World War II German destroyers, offers good economy at lower speeds and permits the large steam flow required for high power. An additional advantage of this design is that it does not allow highly superheated incoming steam to approach the vicinity of the seals at the ends of the casing.
The boilers are of the integral superheater, single-furnace type, each fired by seven burners and provided with air, through preheaters, from three forced draft blowers. Unfortunately these blowers are located very close to the boilers. Because they are installed between the top of the boilers and the 4th deck, installation and maintenance are very difficult.
The boiler selection is an interesting one, for it was a throwback some thirty years in history. In those days the Navy used integral superheaters; that is, the steam produced by the generating section of the boilers all passed through a superheater cradled in the boiler generating section. Then for years we used divided furnace boilers, with a separate generating side and a separate superheat side, each with its own burners. The advantage of installing the “old” type in the “60” was the saving in size and weight. Nevertheless, the completed boiler weighed over 75 tons. The boilers were assembled in the shipyard boiler shop, including erection, rolling of tubes and downcomers, welding, and hydrostatic testing at very high pressure.
The main feed pumps and turbo-generators receive steam direct from the superheat line, an uncommon system. The particular advantage is the continuous steam flow through the superheaters, a most reassuring feature to the engineering force.
Main steam piping and associated valves and fitting are 2.25% chromium and 1% molybdenum steel; all joints are welded except the final connections to the high pressure turbines. Careful and elaborate procedures were set up to insure that only the proper alloys got into the piping systems.
Our biggest problem in the piping area, however, was one over which the drydock had little control—the late receipt of piping components and especially valves and fittings. This delayed delivery plagued us almost from the start of the CVA-60. For example, one of the earliest piping systems to go into the ship was the main drain system, extending along the fore and aft length of the ship just above the inner bottom. This piping, almost a foot in diameter, went into the “60” early, but the valves had failed to arrive on time. As a result, in making up the piping we had to fit “dutchmen” (spool
pieces) where the valves were to go. The sizeable, remotely-operated valves arrived nearly half a year later. The pipe gangs had to remove the dutchmen and install these units. But this was not the end. The remote control operating gear for the valves did not arrive with them. When it finally came, some four to six months later, the pipe gangs again had to retrace their steps. Poor performance of this kind is expensive in terms of time and money—not to mention temper!
Our difficulty with piping components reflected the complex procurement rules with which Government yards have to live. The Government often requires several agencies to be involved in procurement, and few of them feel the urgency that the builder does nor could they be expected to. Furthermore, the picture is complicated by legislative requirements as to low bidders. While at first glance these requirements would seem to protect the Government against high costs, the reverse may actually be the case. For example, we were forced to ship one batch of large high pressure valves back and forth by air freight, coast to coast, two times before we got acceptable ones. In some cases, low bids go to jobbers who manufacture nothing themselves. If their record is good, repeat contracts make sense. From our experience with pipe fitting on the Saratoga, however, the low-bid requirement worked poorly; yet procurement practice kept putting us in the same untenable predicament time and again. Perhaps if some of these requirements were made optional, their use might be beneficial. But this whole procurement matter is a story in itself.
Shafting
When the problem of shaft installation and alignment arose, two courses of action seemed the most likely choices. On the one hand, we could finish the installation of bearing foundations, bulkhead stuffing boxes, etc. and then insert the shafting through the stern tubes. Or we could lower shafting sections into the ship as early as possible, hanging or propping them in their spaces to accommodate structural erection. Although no clear-cut answer was possible, we chose the latter course, giving control to structural erection. We lowered and stowed our shafting sections before we closed the overheads of the compartments.
Our method of shaft alignment was not too unusual, but it is simple and direct. I shall describe it briefly. Try to visualize first a shaft a city block and a half long—hollow, about twenty inches in diameter, made up of sections some 35 feet long. Sections of shafting inboard of the stern tubes were either slung or propped in their approximate position. Each section was supported by two temporary hangers, each xs of the length in from the ends. In this way we approximated parallelism of the end flanges. Theoretically a uniformly loaded beam will have zero slope at the ends if the supports are 0.201 L in from the ends. We used 0.2L, and disregarded the effect of the flanges. By utilizing this approach we built into the ship an automatic alignment device. When we jockeyed shaft sections with these supports and took clearance measurements between the flanges, we could portray our shaft alignment without the customary intricate mathematical procedures and equipments. This procedure further simplified the final internal shaft alignment after the ship was waterborne and at least partially loaded.
The external shafting was aligned to a true line, with stern tube and strut bearings installed and bored true to the line of sight from the after flange of each reduction gear to a target representing the propeller. The result was shaft runs (up to 390 feet plus in length) consisting of a straight wet-shaft run and an adjusted internal shaft run. Any minor variations that occurred were absorbed by adjusting the shafting between the afterflange of the reduction gear and the inboard flange of the stern tube shafting section. The success of this job and the trouble-free operation to date are a tribute to the skill and cooperation of the machinists of the New York Naval Shipyard.
My satisfaction with this job is tempered only by the fact that the wet shafting had to be replaced. This development stemmed from a decision made some years ago to utilize a new alloy and allow higher stresses in shafting. The day after we had installed the last propeller, we learned of the failure of the tail shaft of a smaller ship equipped with similar shafting. Fortunately the struts and stern tubes of the CVA-59 and 60 had been made to sufficient size to accommodate the larger, old-type shafting when and if the need arose.
Thrust Bearings
In the matter of thrust bearings we had the benefit of Forrestal’s unhappy experience of having three shafts immobilized after operating only a short time on her trial runs. This trouble was the result of insufficient oil or inadequate circulation and cooling within the thrust bearings. The net result was that the thrust shoes seized on three of the main shafts.
These thrust bearings, of identical design to the Saratoga's, were self-lubricating. The main thrust collar dipped into an oil sump in the base of the bearing, the oil being carried by the collar to wiping devices in the upper section of the bearing housing. The oil was then distributed throughout the bearing housing as necessary, a portion passing through the oil cooler which was part of the housing. This system would be a boon to the operating engineering force, for it could eliminate one vital and troublesome link that had to be serviced by the lube oil system in the conventional installation.
The bearing manufacturer, who had an excellent reputation, had met questions about this system from the Bureau of Ships and ourselves with favorable and satisfactory answers. He had even built a sizeable model and had done some testing on it. We were satisfied that the new design was workable and represented an improvement that would be welcomed by operating personnel because of its simplicity. The Forrestal's misfortune caught us aback, but the problem was finally resolved for both ships by installing electric- driven and shaft-driven pumps to insure sufficient circulation of oil within these thrust bearings. It is hoped that the matter of self lubricated thrust bearings will not be ruled out in the future because of our difficulties— its advantages are important.
Electrical Installation
The electrical installation of any large man-of-war is a complex of considerable magnitude, possibly even more so on the large carriers. The “60” has thirteen electrical generators, more than 2,400,000 feet of electric cable, innumerable electrical outlets, very large motors capable of operating the deck- edge elevators, steering gear, and the like, small motors by the gross, and lighting fixtures by the thousands. There are eight ship’s service turbo-generators rated at 1,500 KW each, 440 volts, 60-cycle 3-phase AC. For emergency power there are three large automatically energized diesel generators, each rated at 1,000 KW. In addition, there are two 400-cycle, 1,000 KW turbo-generators for aircraft equipment servicing.
The problem of properly utilizing manpower was especially difficult in connection with the electrical installation. The general manning curves of the electrical shop showed the amount of activity, first in cable pulling, later in hook-up, check-out, and test. By and large, we should have started the electrical cable installation earlier and thus avoided much of the over-manning in the completion stages of the ship. There were several factors, however, which made it difficult to follow a neatly prearranged manning schedule. Partway through construction, for example, the switch from a conventional carrier to the angled-deck type made it necessary to await revised plans for the middle section. Again, the late arrival of components played havoc with the planned approach to cable-pulling and hook-up. Finally, the demand for electricians to handle urgent repair and overhaul jobs elsewhere in the yard severely complicated the task.
The amount of electronics equipment installed is staggering. For security reasons it is not possible to list the many and varied types of radar, radio transmitting and receiving equipment, countermeasure equipment, fire control, and target designation equipment. Suffice it to say that they are so numerous that one can be sure that the days of gunners looking over the peep sights are gone forever, and, perhaps, even those of the seaman taking a casual glance at a magnetic compass.
Rudyard Kipling once wrote, “This new ship here, is fitted according to the reported increase of knowledge among mankind. Namely, she is cumbered, end to end, with bells and trumpets and clocks and wires which, it has been told to me, can call Voices out of the air or the waters to con the ship while her crew sleep. But sleep Thou lightly, O Nakhoda! It has not yet been told to me that the Sea has ceased to be the Sea.”
The facilities for handling combat information, displaying the essential data for control of air patrols, controlled carrier approach, and the many other displays are complicated and sizeable. It may be a point of interest to note that the Combat Information Center, the heart of this electronic complex, floats on rubber. The internal structural steel members are isolated from the main decks, girders, and bulkheads by rubber gaskets and padding, with copious sound-absorbing and insulating material. Thus, the room is to a great extent free of flight deck noises, and also absorbs and attenuates its own noise level to a great degree. This type of construction is typical of the controlled carrier approach room and the various control rooms in the vicinity of the bridge.
Worker Productivity
A large organization tends to generate problems. As larger and larger numbers of people become involved in a job, only the most alert management can prevent confusion, wasteful empire-building, and reduced worker productivity.
My ideas on this subject have been greatly influenced by the work of Dr. Elton Mayo, former Head of Industrial Research at the Harvard Graduate School. Through many years of research, he was able to correlate tendencies and motivations with productivity. Of the several factors influencing this, the significance of the workman to the job is the key element. How and where the worker fits into the community of workers, what he understands as his contribution, determines the output. The works of Mayo provided excellent guidance, for surely in the administration of a large working force policy must be consistent.
In the field office we tried a number of devices to stress the significance of individual contributions to construction and to relate these contributions to one another and to the end-product. None of these devices was new or startling, but collectively they represented an attempt to put Mayo’s findings into practice. We utilized take-apart diagrams to illustrate various aspects of the ship’s structure or construction and put them on a large billboard in the drydock. We held weekly meetings of about three-quarters of the key supervisors and invited them to run the show. Each supervisor brought a different key worker with him each time. Various supervisors gave talks on their phases of the building of Saratoga, emphasizing how each phase was related to the work of the other supervisors. Questions were penetrating and far-reaching, just as we had hoped that they would be. We could see teamwork and a feeling of individual responsibility being developed, not to mention an increased appreciation by individuals of the significance of their assignment. The drive, co-operation, and steadfastness of the supervisors on Saratoga were excellent—I shall always remember them.
Fortunately we enjoyed generally favorable support from the many labor councils, unions, and trade affiliations. To achieve and maintain this good relationship, frequent meetings were scheduled with key union councils in order that mutual problems of worker-supervisor and management could be aired and possibly resolved. The gripes, of course, were numerous and covered almost every conceivable angle. Many of them were justified and we were able to get at least some action and in some cases a resolution of the difficulty.
Commissioning and Trials
Saratoga was commissioned, passed her acceptance trials, and has had a splendid operating record for over two years. However, the method of placing in commission a ship built at a naval shipyard seems to me both unsound and unfair. Although the “60” passed this phase, the process was not at all facilitated by the standard procedure for trials of government-built ships.
When a ship is placed in commission at a naval shipyard, the legal responsibility for her safety passes to the commanding officer as soon as the commission pennant is hoisted. The work that is performed thenceforth is carried on under the most adverse conditions. The commanding officer and the ship’s force have the innumerable responsibilities of crew indoctrination, fire drills, watch, quarter, and station bills to make up and implement. The yard, on the other hand, inevitably has many items of work to be completed. The result is a set of conflicting demands that complicate the situation for both the ship’s company and yard workers. By way of contrast, at a private yard, the ship remains under control of the contractor up to and including the preliminary acceptance trials. Therefore, the emphasis can be placed on completing the ship and getting the most out of her on trials, free of the complications involved in commissioning, breaking in a crew, and squaring away for sea.
In my opinion, the same set of rules and procedures applied to privately-built ships should apply to ships constructed in naval shipyards. The naval shipyard should be responsible for running the dock, builder’s, and preliminary acceptance trials, and rectifying the deficiencies. Only then should the ship be commissioned and turned over to her crew. The matter of key officers and ratings reporting early as a pre-commissioning detail would work just as it does for a privately-built ship. These people are assigned for indoctrination, schooling, and training. After the ship is commissioned and ready to go, it is time to move her to another activity for her dockside training, loading, and preparations for sea.
There are several significant advantages to adopting this procedure. It would, I believe, give us completed ships sooner. It would save at least part of the considerable expense of last-minute changes. As an added feature, it would enable us to make more meaningful comparisons between the work of government yards and private ones. A study made by the Harvard Business School at the request of a Congressional committee has shown that a valid comparison of costs at government and private yards is most complicated. If trials of government-built ships could be conducted on the same basis as those privately built, one area of inequity and confusion would be considerably improved.
Despite all the problems that we encountered in building Saratoga, those of us who lived these problems day in and day out are proud of our ship. She will always be a part of us, and we shall follow her and be a part of her as long as she is afloat. Those of the Navy who man her, fight her, or fly from her decks can be assured that we did everything possible to make her worthy of confidence, a credit to the Navy and the Nation.