Japan and the Birth of Modern Shipbuilding

Summary

Universe Apollo, first 100,000 DWT supertanker, built by National Bulk Carriers at Kure, Japan.During WWII, the US constructed an unprecedented shipbuilding machine. By assembling ships from welded, prefabricated blocks, the US built a huge number of cargo ships incredibly quickly, overwhelming Germany’s u-boats and helping to win the war. But when the war was over, this shipbuilding machine was dismantled. Industrialists like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel, who operated some of the US’s most efficient wartime shipyards, left the shipbuilding business. Prior to the war, the US had been an uncompetitive commercial shipbuilder producing a small fraction of commercial oceangoing ships, and that’s what it became again. At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world’s ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%.But the lessons from the US’s shipbuilding machine weren’t forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world.One of the shipyards that built cargo ships during the war was Welding Shipyards, owned by Daniel Ludwig. In 1936 Ludwig had founded shipping company National Bulk Carriers (NBC), which bought surplus WWI cargo ships and converted them into oil tankers. From there, Ludwig expanded into shipbuilding, and built his one-berth shipyard at Norfolk in 1940. During the war, Welding Shipyards produced T3 tankers using prefabricated welded construction, which were then operated by National Bulk Carriers. After the war, Ludwig continued to build tankers: between 1948 and 1950 he built 5 Bulkpetrol-class tankers, then the largest tankers in the world.Ludwig wanted to build even larger ships, in part to capitalize on the burgeoning iron ore trade with Venezuela, but was limited by the size of the berth at Welding Shipyards. Unfazed, Ludwig dispatched his lieutenant Elmer Hann to find a shipyard wit...