Bottom Roundup

Ships for defense and ships for Britain--to get them both, the U.S. last week stripped its merchant marine to the bone:

> The Maritime Commission's Rear Admiral Emory Scott Land announced that in about a week the Commission had commandeered for the Army and Navy 28 U.S. merchant vessels. Totaling 310,000 tons and headed by the flossy S.S. America (TIME, June 9), the new additions brought recruit merchant tonnage for the services since the emergency began to better than 500,000 tons--none too many to carry materials and about 190,000 men to the far-flung bases which the U.S. is building. To man this fleet and do incidental jobs, some 4,500 Coast Guard officers & men were jerked out of their service, plunked down in the Navy (where they always land in wartime).

> That afternoon Jerry Land and other Maritime Commission men told 16 U.S. operators in the coastal trade, that the Commission wanted about 32 ships--half of their seagoing fleets (3,500 deadweight tons and over). Thus, by legal authority given in 1917 (19 years before it was born), the Maritime Commission made one of its biggest hauls in the 1941 roundups of deep-sea bottoms. The requisitioned ships will be a whacking addition for the 2,000,000-ton shipping pool for Britain ordered by Franklin Roosevelt in April.

>While the Commission announced that U.S.-flag ships would take over Britain's shipping services to Australia and New Zealand (thus releasing British ships for combat-zone traffic), Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill authorizing the Maritime Commission to take over and use all foreign vessels now idle in U.S. harbors. Thus, with a pen squiggle, the U.S. became the prospective owner of 84 ships, totaling 459,140 tons. Topped by the $80,000,000 Normandie, now lying idle at her dock in the Hudson River, they also included freighters and six tankers--to help replace the 50 oilers recently turned over to British use.

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