For Want of a Ship

Overnight, war with Japan made the U.S. shipping shortage twice as bad.

When the Japs started shooting, some 200 U.S. merchant vessels were within reach of her submarines and raiders. They were probably all unarmed and certainly unconvoyed.

In the first 36 hours of war, no actual sinkings of U.S. merchant ships were reported; though at least one SOS call was heard (700 miles from San Francisco) and some ships have undoubtedly been sunk. Insurance rates on U.S. vessels zoomed; the war risk rate to the Hawaiian Islands was 5-c- per $100 last week, $4 at this week's beginning.

To arm all U.S. vessels, marshal them into convoys, hold the fast ones down to the pace of the slow, expose them to damage, load and unload them in bombed ports, reroute them may reduce the efficiency of an already inadequate merchant marine by 50%. Most shipping between the U.S. and Malaya, for example, will now go around the Cape of Good Hope. That route is 4,360 miles farther from New York than the route across the Pacific from San Francisco.

The U.S. shipping shortage has long worried Washington. Last week it became known that U.S. deliveries to Russia in October and November were less than half the several hundred thousand tons promised; lack of cargo space was the chief reason. Including those in the North Atlantic, more than half the 600-odd ocean-going U.S. freighters were last week engaged in supplying the Allies. But on no supply route were there enough ships to carry all the goods the U.S. was prepared to send.

In the Pacific U.S. ships form a long thin supply line stretching from Panama to the Straits of Malacca and the Java Sea; to the ports of the Dutch Indies, Singapore, Penang; to the Indian Ocean and along Africa's coast. Homeward bound most of these ships bring the U.S. vital Far Eastern cargoes. Outward bound many of them have been carrying supplies to China, Russia and the British in the Middle East.

The immediate need for new ships--perhaps as transports to Hawaii and the Far East--will probably strip still further the service to Latin America. One fleet still untapped by the Maritime Commission last week was United Fruit Co.'s 52 banana carriers (26 U.S. flag, the rest Panamanian or Honduran). If these are requisitioned, the U.S. may have to subsidize some Central American republics, throw the bananas in the water. But if some more of the good-neighbor fleet is taken over, the South Americans may be roused into putting into service their share of the 85 Axis vessels still immobilized in Western Hemisphere ports.

U.S. shipyards are scheduled to launch 20 ships in December, 75 in the first quarter of 1942, 324 in the rest of the year. For want of labor some shipyards are still on a five-day, one-or-two shift basis. If the labor can be found, they probably will not long remain so. But when the ships are built crews will still be needed to man them--and the U.S. is short of sailors.

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