Fire at Christmas by Captain Fred Klebingat
The second Christmas after Pearl Harbor was drawing near. Shipyards in the United States were building ships by the hundreds. They were now building ships faster than the enemy U-boats could sink them. It was a blustery day in San Pedro when I shipped as chief mate on the Liberty ship William Mulholland. The wind was from the southeast-our storm quarter-and increasing as I stepped out into the street from the Masters, Mates & Pilots hall. The rain started. Big drops splattered onto the sidewalk , mushrooming into spray. It rained all that night. Many of my friends were working at the outfitting dock, where the William Mulholland was making ready for sea. That evening I picked up the phone, called one of these chums and told him that I was going to join the ship in the morning. "Hell," said he, "I don't know how you can do that. She is not even painted, and it is raining pitchforks." The people who had told me to join the ship must know what they are talking about, I said to myself. She should be ready in the morning, or they would have told me. I reached for the phone again and called another friend of mine, Otto Mathies*, who had a job on the launching ways. "Don't worry about it," he said, "Rain or no rain, that ship will be painted by 8 A.M. and ready to go on a trial trip." The next morning the rain had eased as I joined the "rat race" making for the gates of the California Shipbuilding Company at Terminal Island, Los Angeles Harbor. A flood of shipyard workers-men and women. There was the William Mulholland in a glistening coat of dark grey, immaculately painted. How did they do it? They told me a gang with burning gas torches dried the plates of the wet ship-rain pouring down-and right behind the burning torches, the spray painters applied the paint to the hot plates . That's the way we did things in this country in 1942. I stepped on board and found the captain's quarters and introduced myself to the captain, a downeaster by the name of Smith. He was an old-time shipmaster who had traded to West Africa in the days of sail for mahagony and palm oil when the Barber Line-which was going to operate this ship-was still young. The captain had come out of retirement to again assume command. The chief engineer was of an entirely different stamp, although also a New Englander. At home somewhere in the State of Maine, he had at an early day gone to sea with his dad, who owned a schooner. As he was going to sit for his examination for mate, it was found that he was color blind. So he put away his sextant and became an engineer. His name was Rowndy. He stayed in this ship until the end of the war. • And of course there were my two partners, the second mate and third mate. The second, evidently born in Germany-although he denied this-had adopted an English name. Although a capable navigator, he had the unfortunate knack of making himself cordially disliked by everybody. And then there was Jahren, the third mate, in his forties. He was a reliable man of medium build; although Norwegian born he was swarthy . These were the men who manned the ship-the officers. All those before the mast I have now forgotten. I always have been an admirer of beautiful machinery. But if I was looking for what might be called fine engines, I surely had come to the wrong place . This was a triple expansion engine, but there was no power ram to put the engine in reverse, no separate vacuum pumps, and the whole thing was roughly finished-well, I suppose they just did not have enough machinists who could do first class work.
*Otto came around Cape Horn in the British four-masted bark Howth . He was for many years skipper on John Barrymore 's yacht Mariner.
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The Mulholland had only one anchor ready to use. There was not enough chain for the other hook, so it was welded fast to the deck, a most efficient way of keeping it from shifting-or being used. The missing chain was discovered months later, loaded on flat-cars that were sidetracked on a waystation somewhere in Texas. The lower bridge of the Mulholland was fairly well fitted out, as was the chart room. But the upper bridge had a wheel exposed to all weathers, like the old colliers. But they did improve some of them later on; a neat wheelhouse was built above the bridge to shelter the helmsman, who then regularly steered from up there. The captain's quarters were nothing that worthy would want to write home about. Right up on top, near the ship's stack, built of bare steel plates, his rooms were stifling hot in the tropics and bitterly cold in the winter. Some skippers in Liberties that had a wheelhouse built on top, as I have described, then made their living quarters on the ship's bridge. My own quarters as mate on the Mulholland, one deck below the captain's, may actually have been a little better than his, even though a mass of steam pipes thickened by lagging encumbered the overhead. After I had looked over the Mulholland, I thought to myself, "And now you are condemned to sail in tubs like this one for the rest of your seafaring career. They were built to win the war and there is no doubt, as the expression has it, that 'they did their part.'" And a large part it was. They were simple ships-simple to build. That was the point; it was wartime. Once, I understand, they built one in five days. But as a professional seafaring man, I cannot pretend that I was thrilled when I encountered my first Liberty ship. The ship had five hatches, all covered with wooden hatch boards. And of course she was armed to the teeth. As I remember, there was a five-inch caliber gun in a tub on a house near the stern, and one of three-inch caliber in a guntub forward. At least eight 20-mm anti-aircraft guns were mounted on high pedestals amidships. It was about ten in the morning when the trial trip crew came on board . In charge was Captain Halvarsen, the shipyard's Port Captain, and Captain Cederloft, Trial Trip Captain in command. We steamed to the Outer Harbor. Engines on full ahead and on slow, rudder on the different angles, hard left and hard .. . All seemed to be satisfactory. We dropped the anchor-windlass in good working order. The ship was swung for compass adjustment and later put on the degaussing range. Early in the afternoon we were done with that and we moored the ship at Pier 47, the former Matson Terminal. The William Mulholland was officially delivered to the Barber Line, who would operate her hereafter. The trial crew went ashore. Longshoremen came aboard and raised the cargo booms; winchdrivers secured extensions to the control handles of the winches, so that one winchdriver could operate both of them, a venerable West Coast way of doing things . The ship's crew came on board and by the end of that busy day all hands had reported. Although it was late December, the weather turned fine. Loading was going on in all five hatches. A gasoline-driven crane was mounted on deck on the after part of Number Two hatch on the starboard inshore side to speed the cargo in. For security, some members of the Navy gun crew patrolled the ship at regular intervals, and a gangway watchman was supplied by the Pinkerton Agency. On the morning of December 24th, the day of Christmas Eve, I arrived from home about half past seven in the morning and showed my pass to the watchman at the wharf gate. He was a new SEA HISTORY, WINTER 1982/ 83