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W. Earl Hall World War II stories, 1944
Letter #28
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slug-A Glasgow Has-4 By W. EARL HALL Globe-Gazette Managing Editor Letter No. 28 Glasgow, Scotland--(By U.S. Army Bomber Transit)--I sat today in the office of a veteran Scotch ship-builder, George Barrie, construction director for Barclay Curle and company, and heard America's Henry Kaiser referred to as the "third miracle of this war." The first, in his order of narration, was Britain's defense against Nazi invasion in 1940, the second was Russia's performance at Stalingrad; the third was this amazing man who tossed ship-building orthodoxy out the window in the interest of giving America a lot of cargo-carrying vessels over-night. This appraisal of Mr. Kaiser by one whose roots are deep in the ship-building tradition of this great maritime construction center along the tiny Clyde was both surprising and gratifying to me. "Not all my colleagues in the industry will agree with me," Mr. Barrie added, "but so far as I'm concerned, I'm willing to give full credit where it's due. If it hadn't been for Mr. Kaiser, I frankly don't know what the allies would have done for bottoms during and after the Nazi sub campaign in the Atlantic." Mr. Barrie, who speaks with a delicious burr so characteristic of his race, is head man at one of Glasgow's 33 ship building yards. A few are larger, more are smaller. It concerns itself wholly with cargo and passenger craft. Here and at the plant of Yarrow and Co., Ltd., we clambered over the decks of craft in all stages of construction, some barely started and some ready to slide down the ways into the river, scarcely as large as the Cedar at Cedar Rapids. The Yarrows concentrate on naval construction. Turbines and boilers, as well as ship hulls, are manufactured there. I stood on the spot where in 1940 a well-aimed Nazi bomb brought death to 60 workers and destruction to one great tooling plant. How long did it hold up construction," I asked the guide. "Not an hour," he replied with obvious pride. "We shifted our men about, borrowed materials and tools from other yards and kept exactly to schedule." A live subject of discussion in both yards visited by us is whether the welding technique introduced by Mr. Kaiser is superior, in effectiveness or economy, to the riveting technique which is accepted practice at Glasgow. The rather commonly expressed conclusion was that while it might be a bit faster, it calls for a greater number of workers. And we simply haven't got them," it would be noted invariably. It's an interesting fact that the two mightiest liners afloat, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, were made and launched here. In both cases, the launching in the narrow Clyde was the most difficult part of the operation. The mouth of a smaller stream emptying into the Clyde was dredged and utilized to give an added stretch of water as the mighty craft splashed down the ways. In the afternoon we visited the mammoth plant of a great British motor car company (it must go unnamed), where motors for all types of airplanes are being turned out in mass production. We saw the process from raw metal in pig form to the finished motors in the testing rooms, a privilege not often granted to those in civilian clothes and without government portfolio. An interview with Glasgow's lord provost (counterpart of an American mayor) and a formal dinner tendered by Sir Alexander B. King for our party of four (augmented by representatives of the Glasgow press) completed a most pleasant and profitable day for us. There were toasts to the king and to the president (and the next president, an idea thrown in by the 3 republicans in our group.) In the table conversation and in the banquet talks, one question was uppermost in the thinking of the Scotsmen: What is America willing to do to insure a lasting peace. We assured them that isolationism was dead in our country, no less in the land-locked middle west than in the seaboard areas. I hope we were right. -- 30 --
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slug-A Glasgow Has-4 By W. EARL HALL Globe-Gazette Managing Editor Letter No. 28 Glasgow, Scotland--(By U.S. Army Bomber Transit)--I sat today in the office of a veteran Scotch ship-builder, George Barrie, construction director for Barclay Curle and company, and heard America's Henry Kaiser referred to as the "third miracle of this war." The first, in his order of narration, was Britain's defense against Nazi invasion in 1940, the second was Russia's performance at Stalingrad; the third was this amazing man who tossed ship-building orthodoxy out the window in the interest of giving America a lot of cargo-carrying vessels over-night. This appraisal of Mr. Kaiser by one whose roots are deep in the ship-building tradition of this great maritime construction center along the tiny Clyde was both surprising and gratifying to me. "Not all my colleagues in the industry will agree with me," Mr. Barrie added, "but so far as I'm concerned, I'm willing to give full credit where it's due. If it hadn't been for Mr. Kaiser, I frankly don't know what the allies would have done for bottoms during and after the Nazi sub campaign in the Atlantic." Mr. Barrie, who speaks with a delicious burr so characteristic of his race, is head man at one of Glasgow's 33 ship building yards. A few are larger, more are smaller. It concerns itself wholly with cargo and passenger craft. Here and at the plant of Yarrow and Co., Ltd., we clambered over the decks of craft in all stages of construction, some barely started and some ready to slide down the ways into the river, scarcely as large as the Cedar at Cedar Rapids. The Yarrows concentrate on naval construction. Turbines and boilers, as well as ship hulls, are manufactured there. I stood on the spot where in 1940 a well-aimed Nazi bomb brought death to 60 workers and destruction to one great tooling plant. How long did it hold up construction," I asked the guide. "Not an hour," he replied with obvious pride. "We shifted our men about, borrowed materials and tools from other yards and kept exactly to schedule." A live subject of discussion in both yards visited by us is whether the welding technique introduced by Mr. Kaiser is superior, in effectiveness or economy, to the riveting technique which is accepted practice at Glasgow. The rather commonly expressed conclusion was that while it might be a bit faster, it calls for a greater number of workers. And we simply haven't got them," it would be noted invariably. It's an interesting fact that the two mightiest liners afloat, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, were made and launched here. In both cases, the launching in the narrow Clyde was the most difficult part of the operation. The mouth of a smaller stream emptying into the Clyde was dredged and utilized to give an added stretch of water as the mighty craft splashed down the ways. In the afternoon we visited the mammoth plant of a great British motor car company (it must go unnamed), where motors for all types of airplanes are being turned out in mass production. We saw the process from raw metal in pig form to the finished motors in the testing rooms, a privilege not often granted to those in civilian clothes and without government portfolio. An interview with Glasgow's lord provost (counterpart of an American mayor) and a formal dinner tendered by Sir Alexander B. King for our party of four (augmented by representatives of the Glasgow press) completed a most pleasant and profitable day for us. There were toasts to the king and to the president (and the next president, an idea thrown in by the 3 republicans in our group.) In the table conversation and in the banquet talks, one question was uppermost in the thinking of the Scotsmen: What is America willing to do to insure a lasting peace. We assured them that isolationism was dead in our country, no less in the land-locked middle west than in the seaboard areas. I hope we were right. -- 30 --
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