Uncle Sam, Mariner?

Series

Series Name

The March of Time 10th Year

Issue

Issue No.

6

Date Released

5 Feb 1945

Length of issue (in feet)

1541

Stories in this Issue:

1. 1Uncle Sam, Mariner?

Story

Story No. within this Issue

1 / 1

Summary

The March of Time synopsis: In 1919, says the film, the United States allowed its big wartime fleet, built at an enormous expense under the pressure of war, to rust and rot. Its vessels became slow and outmoded, and American ship-owners were forced to cut operating costs to a minimum in an effort to run them in competition with foreign lines, with the result that the crews’ quarters were crowded and unsanitary, and conditions aboard ship fell far below American living standards. After a determined fight the Unions eventually won better working conditions and better wages for their men, but these concessions, while fully justified, added to American costs and gave a still greater advantage to foreign shipping. Fast modern European super-liners secured the lucrative trans-Atlantic trade, and within two decades after World War I, the United States had fallen far behind the leading maritime powers.

In 1936, when American merchant tonnage had reached its lowest point, Congress passed an Act designed to put the United States back on the seas. It provided for subsidies; stimulated a shipbuilding programme, and created a Maritime Commission, headed since 1938 by Admiral Emory S. Land, whose job was to supervise construction of the new Merchant Marine. Plunging into a gigantic shipbuilding programme, the nation set to work, under the Maritime Commission, to create a Merchant Marine equal to the demands of war. Huge shipyards had to be built, hundreds of thousands of workers had to be found and trained, and, at a cost of many billions of dollars and months of precious time, the programme succeeded. To provide crews to man the new fleet, maritime training schools already in existence were vastly expanded and many new ones established. Thousands of young men who had never been near the ocean were rushed through an intensive training period of thirteen weeks, as their only preparation for difficult billets at sea. With its pool of available men constantly replenished from training schools, the Merchant Marine was able to meet its manpower requirements, and since the first days of the war a ship has seldom been held up for lack of a full crew.

For the first two years of war the casualties in the Merchant Marine were at a higher rate than in any of the armed services, but month after month, at a time when Allied survival depended upon getting the ships through with their cargoes of war material, there merchant crews kept the convoys sailing. From one end of the world to the other, U.S. merchant ships are carrying to scores of beachheads the huge amounts of supplied needed to support allied battlefronts. The task of landing a liberating army of millions in France alone required five to twelve tons of shipping per man, with an additional two tons a month which is needed to keep each man in combat. Today, the United States - which in 1939 had barely eleven million tons of shipping, carrying only twenty-five percent of her own foreign trade - possesses a merchant fleet nearly equal to the combined pre-war shipping of all other nations. Matching the size and quality of this immense fleet is the Merchant Marine personnel of one hundred and sixty thousand experienced and competent men - four times the number in service before the war. How to keep this vast pool of men and ships on the seas after the war is the chief problem of the Maritime Commission’s Post-War Planning Committee, for it is determined that the merchant marine organisation developed in war must become a national asset in peace.

Researcher Comments

This story was included in Vol.11 No.3 of the US edition.

Keywords

Ships and boats

Written sources

The March of Time Promotional Material   Lobby Card, Used for synopsis

Credits:

Production Co.

Time Inc.