Facts v. "Flapdoodle"

Plowing through icy Arctic waters, the Liberty ship Chief Washakie was 45 miles off Unalaska Island on the blustery night of last Dec. 10. At 10:22 her master was startled out of a sound sleep by a sound "like cannon fire"; the Washakie had split her sides open. Held together by her double bottom, the ship limped into Makushin Bay for temporary repairs, then headed for Dutch Harbor 48 miles away.

She cracked again, made Dutch Harbor, was repaired by Seabees this time and cleared for Seattle. In the Gulf of Alaska she ran into a gusty blow, hove to for eight hours, cracked again, rigged chains to relieve the stress. When she finally made Puget Sound, she was leaking but still under her own steam.

At least six other Liberties are known to have cracked open in Alaska waters during the midwinter months. From shipping centers around the world have come alarming reports of sudden, mysterious failures in the hulls of the No. 1 U.S. merchant ship. In February, after preliminary inquiries, the Truman Committee began formal hearings to investigate the soundness of Liberties.

Last week Committee members were winding up the hearings in the East, preparing to shift to the West Coast. They had taken reams of testimony from ship operators, builders, designers, masters and Maritime Commission officials. They had discovered that serious structural failures have developed in only 62 of the 1,917 Liberties delivered up to Feb. 1. But until the C.I.O. National Maritime Union's President Joseph Curran took the stand last week they had heard only hazy, technical explanations of the cracks.

Tough, blunt, Red-minded Joe Curran stepped out of character as a longtime hard-slugging critic of U.S. ships and shippers. He praised the Liberty as an excellent ship-- for its wartime purpose. He saw nothing extraordinary in the small percentage of Liberty ship failures (3.23 reported by the American Bureau of Shipping), declared that ships built by master craftsmen in peacetime have suffered the same casualties. To keep their positions in convoys, the slow (10 1/2 knots) Liberties often must buck mountainous seas while running at full speed instead of slowing down as they would normally do. Overloading with solid cargoes of jeeps and tanks is common. Too often the voyage home is made without sufficient ballast to keep the ships from straddling heavy seas that leave bow and stern dangling out of water.

When the Truman Committeemen arrive on the West Coast late this month, they may hear the Liberty ship praised even more lyrically if Captain Walter A. Brunnick is in port. Brunnick, 62, has skippered the Liberty Henry Ward Beecher 63,000 miles, carried bombs and gasoline to India by the long cold route south of Australia, ridden out a hurricane off Madagascar, survived a collision during a submarine attack off Brazil. His verdict on attacks made by the Liberties' detractors: "Flapdoodle!"

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