Tattered Ensign

From windows of San Francisco hilltop buildings last week, office workers saw six rust-splotched cargo vessels towed through the bay. They were the first of 16 merchant ships which the Military Sea Transportation Service had ordered yanked from its "mothball" reserve fleet.

The U.S. was raising steam to win the battle of Korean supply; most of the 16 vessels will be reconditioned and possibly loaded and ready to make the 5,000-mile trip to Korea by the end of this week. Before the Senate was a bill to provide $25 million to de-mothball 134 more ships, thus quickly boost the nation's whole active merchant fleet to 1,390 vessels. This would be enough to handle the immediate needs of a localized war and leave 2,074 other mothballed merchant ships in reserve.

Hardtack. But U.S. shipping was far from ready for a graver emergency. The nation's shipyards have not completed a single ocean-going passenger or cargo-passenger vessel in the last 23 months. As a result, the U.S. merchant fleet is slipping into middle age (the average ship is eight years old), and the once-mighty U.S. shipbuilding industry is growing skeleton-thin on hardtack. With just 19 ocean-going ships under construction last week, the U.S. has dropped to ninth place among the nations of the world in tonnage of new ships on order; even conquered Japan has more new ships abuilding.

In Seattle, an order to recondition three mothball Victory ships was the biggest contract Puget Sound shipbuilders had seen in several years. Shipyard employment has dropped from a wartime peak of 90,000 in Seattle alone to a handful of 2,600 workers in the whole state of Washington. Along the Gulf Coast, Pascagoula's Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp. was the only yard with new construction under way last week. And Ingalls is building just one ship: an experimental model of a highspeed (18 1/2 knots) cargo steamer which the Maritime Board hopes to use as a prototype for future cargo vessels.

Battened Hatches. In all the U.S., on May 1, only 43,500 private shipyard workers were employed, compared to 75,000 last year, and 1,397,700 during the busiest days of World War II. Last month the shipbuilding industry received just one new order--a ferry for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway Co.

The biggest U.S. scarcity was in fast ocean passenger tonnage convertible to troop transport service. No U.S. passenger ships were built during World War II, and the pip-squeak postwar construction has not begun to replace the losses from sinkings and scrappings. Even with the completion in 1952 of six liners now in the yards, the U.S. will have only 58 passenger vessels in operation, with berths for 20,000 passengers, less than half the space available before Pearl Harbor. Last week U.S. shipbuilders were hoping that Congress would pass the industry-sponsored long range shipping bill providing special tax benefits as well as a maximum 50% construction subsidy to build ships for the U.S. Merchant Marine.

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