Old steel, a liberty ship, the Pennsylvania had already cracked once and been put in dry dock.

Old Steel - The Wreck of the SS Pennsylvania
by Lamar Stonecypher

Asail from Long Beach to Yokohama, the Pennsylvania, half-way out, ran into tall seas and the captain was called out in his pajamas. The deck lights revealed the failure - a large crack in the deck cladding running from the pilot house's right aft to the stack.

She heeled to port and returned to Portland all of a piece, and spent half of the winter of 1951 in dry dock. "Fit and trim" they called her, and soon she was again asea.

Seven years old was she, in her youth of an expected twenty years service, when on January 2nd she put her ills behind her and loaded sixty-eight tons of army trailers and two army dump trucks on her decks, 5,863 tons of wheat and barley and 1,982 tons of additional cargo in her holds and departed from Vancouver.

In three days, she was back in Portland, and the pilot went ashore. In his stead came Captain George P. Flower, an experienced and seasoned ship's master, to complete the trip.

Four days later, word came by radio from the Pennsylvania. Old steel had once again failed, and this time the failure might be fatal, for what had cracked was not the deck - it was the hull, from the sheer strake (top of the hull) to the engine room. The steering had failed, and the ship was uncontrollable. If the steering could be repaired, ran the message, the old girl would turn and try to make way for Seattle.

Wallowing in forty-foot-seas and battered by gale-force winds, the structurally weakened ship's deck bindings, which had been made in accepted, conventional naval fashion, failed, and army vehicles went sliding about the decks. She was taking on water in the engine room from the hull crack and the forward cargo holds whose covers had been broken by sliding equipment. Travel on deck was impossible.

The steering, they radioed, had been repaired, but by then the bow was so low in the water that the rudders were exposed by each trailing wave. The gale continued, and the master said that his only hope was that the weather would improve. It did not, and he gave the order to abandon ship at 11:49 PM on January 9, 1952.

A dozen ships from the Navy and Coast Guard reached the search area the next day. Military aircraft flew hundreds of sorties in search for the wreckage and survivors. There were no survivors. Of the Pennsylvania's four lifeboats, a single one was found, and that one was keel up.

Of the crew of the SS Pennsylvania and the ship itself, nothing else remained.

The "liberty ships" were welded rather than riveted, because the needs of war-era America required more ships in less time than the shipyards could produce by normal means. The SS Pennsylvania was not the first welded ship to fail, but when the Marine Sulphur Queen headed for the bottom with all hands in 1963, there had been eighteen structural failures of old steel - the welded liberty ships.

Notes:

1. The report of the official Marine Board investigating the disappearence of SS Pennsylvania with crew can be downloaded in PDF form at this Coast Guard web page.

2. Economists study the Liberty Ship program because it demonstrated an unrivaled productivity gain of 40 percent per year for over a three year period. Research done in the seventies, however, suggests that "a tradeoff was made [in Liberty ship production] of quality for quantity." For more information, please see Peter Thompson's Liberty Ships Overview.

3. For another view contrary to the official Marine Board's finding that the heavy seas and loss of steering control contributed more to the loss of the Pennsylvania than the structural failure of the hull did, see The Wreck of the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer by Bob Frump.

4. Ardent ship spotters will have realized that the image above is NOT the SS Pennsylvania. Indeed, it is the SS Pendleton, a ship of type VC2-S-AP3, similar to the Pennsylvania. Also based on the VC2 "merchant" hull were the "Victory Ships." They were slightly faster and had more modern reinforced hulls than the Liberty models. Currently undergoing restoration in Richmond, California is the "Red Oak Victory" shown on the index page. More pictures of the Red Oak can be found here.

Lamar Stonecypher is the publisher of this ezine and the developer of the writing site called the Kudzu Klub.