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The new employees at Kaiser’s new shipyard tried to keep their chins up, but it wasn’t easy. As a morale-booster, having one’s very first ship break in half a propos of nothing while innocuously tied to the pier leaves something to be desired. Thoughts turned immediately to sabotage. Could this have been a deliberate act? It was hard to imagine that any saboteur could have engineered this kind of a break, but if one had, he or she would surely have earned a gold star for this job. The F.B.I. moved with lightning speed to quell that rumor. The very next day, the bureau released a statement denying that sabotage was involved. Then Rear Admiral Howard L. Vickery arrived to lead the investigation.
THE RESULTS WERE rather unsettling. Faulty welding was the first suspicion on everyone’s mind — remember, this was the first ship off a brand-new assembly line, so everyone working on it was new on the job, and many of the welders working on the Schenectady had never welded anything before the war broke out. And, frankly, faulty welding was what most people were hoping the trouble was. After all, that was a problem that could be easily fixed with more training and supervision of the welders. But a careful inspection of the hull didn’t reveal any welds that might have failed. The crack had split right through the plates of steel themselves. The report ended up pointing to an excessively stiff design, pre-existing stresses that had been somehow locked into the hull, and the relatively extreme temperature spread between the icy air and the temperate water. It was also well known, by this time, that welded ships were more susceptible to this sort of thing than were the old-fashioned riveted kind, because once a crack gets started in a welded ship, it can spread all the way around, like a crack in a car windshield; in a riveted ship, the crack goes to the end of the plate and stops. This had happened to several other ships, and would happen to others later; but it took three times as long to rivet a ship together as it did to weld it, so the practice continued throughout the war. Eventually, much later, the true culprit would be identified: The low-grade steel used for ships’ hulls was subject to brittle fractures when it got below a certain temperature, and when it did, invisible flaws in the steel would concentrate forces acting on the steel at certain vulnerable breaking points. So, if a flawed panel just happened to be installed in a high-stress location, the ship was essentially doomed. Those lessons wouldn’t be learned for some time after the war, however. As for the Schenectady, because of where it was the repair was a simple one. Water was pumped into the compartments amidships, so that the entire hull could settle onto the river bottom; then scab steel was welded across the breach to hold her together and she was refloated. Towed to a dry dock, she was put back together with a heavy reinforcing plate across the spot where the crack had opened, and was out moving gasoline across the Atlantic Ocean just a few months later. Still, the breaking of the Schenectady was so strange, and the F.B.I.’s response was so swift and decisive, that one just has to wonder … was it really just the weather? Or could this have actually been a case of sophisticated sabotage, covered up by the wartime government to prevent the public from learning what had really happened? Almost certainly not. But it would make a whale of a plot for a paperback thriller, wouldn’t it?
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