How We Saved the Liberty Ship Jeremia_h O'Brien J. Patterson, USMS (ret.) as told to and set down by Karl Kortum by RAdm Thomas
I came out here with MARAD, the Maritime Administration, in 1962. I was one of two captains and two chief engineers given the job of surveying 300 Liberty ships. They were laid up in fleets at Olympia, Washington; Astoria, Oregon; and Suisun Bay in California. Some 500 other Liberty ships were to be surveyed at the same time on the East and Gulf coasts. Our task was to rank them in condition-best to the worst. The government was going to sell them; that meant most of them would go to the scrapyard. The process was about to start. Our orders were to hold the best to the last. The reason for the exercise with these vessels was that in 1962 the Navy had informed the Maritime Administration that Libertys would not be required in their future strategy. At ten knots, they were too slow. . The four of us "walk-over surveyed" fifteen Liberty ships a day. We inspected the whole vessel, from the flying bridge to the engine room. We went down in every hold . Did the ship have wooden booms or steel booms? Had the ship been reinforced? What kind of ballast? Did she have any visible damage? What was the overall condition? I had the strongest legs I ever had in my life. Up and Down. Fifteen a day .... I noticed the Jeremiah O'Brien. She was completely unaltered except that, like the others, her guns had been removed. All the World War II equipment aboard was undisturbed. All the charts were there,
from Normandy to the Pacific. The glass was intact in the license frames on the bulkhead. The wartime instructions were posted alongside the Mark XIV gyro. The station bill, signed by the captain, was in place. The captain's night order book at Normandy beach was in a desk drawer. There were only minor indents in the Jeremiah O'Brien's plating and little hull pitting. The blueprints of the ship were mounted in the passageway abaft the wheelhouse, intact. The oak joiner work throughout her quarters was beautiful to behold. The ship was a time capsule. I didn't know whether some way to save her could be contrived, but something told me to try to hang on to her. We began a little exercise to keep her off the scrap list. The problem was that the Jeremiah O'Brien would have been scrapped in the first group because she was not reinforced . She did not have a "crack arrester"-that is a steel band rivetted right around her hull at the sheer strake. A half dozen Libertys had broken up in heavy weather and finally it was decided to add a reinforcement of this sort as a precaution. The "crack arrester" cost about $50,000 to add to a ship during the war; it would cost a million dollars today. So the O'Brien was vulnerable. Some Libertys were sold for' 'non-transportation use" such as fish canneries, floating drydocks, crane barges. A few were towed out and sunk for fishing reefs . But most were cut up. The price they brought the
government averaged $50,000. We kept moving the Jeremiah O'Brien down the scrap list. .. we kept shoving her back ... kept dropping her name down. There was another reason. A ship on "scrap row" was subject to being "raided" by the Navy. People came up from Treasure Island . The Navy still had eight Libertys on each coast, AGRs , fourhatch Libertys-they were ocean radar picket ships. (I might point out here that I was skipper of the first of the four-hatch Liberty ships, the USS Guardian, AGR-1, ex-James G. Squires.) With some logic, a ship that was going to be broken up was picked over for equipment and furniture that would enhance the still operational AGRs. The Navy had this access. So we kept the Jeremiah O'Brien in another row. The game went on for years. We kept her from being raided. We also protected her from vandalism . Finally, like the dwindling of the ten little Indians, Jeremiah O'Brien was the last one. The Maritime Administration said, "You've got to do something with that ship." They said they had no authorization to hold her for historical purposes. From now on it was up to me. I went out to industry-the companies, the unions, the shipyards. I went to Tom Crowley: ''What is so special about a Liberty?'' he wanted to know. I tried to explain. I went to Bob Blake, King' s Point alumnus, now in ship repair; to Admiral Jim Gracey and Captain Ernest
Karl Kortum, Chief Officer of the US Army Transport Octorara , took this photograph as that vessel entered the Reserve Fleet on Suisun Bay for layup in July 1946. In the foreRround are a couple of Liberty ships, the most numerous type of vessel in this vast flotilla.