California Shipbuilding Corp.
Los Angeles, California
source: Sawyer & Mitchell

©
California

The California Shipbuilding Corporation at Terminal Island, Los Angeles, was another of the nine shipyards approved in early 1941 and from which it was estimated that 260 ships would flow from their 65 ways in two years.

This yard, generally known as 'Calship,' was the third emergency yard on the West Coast and was managed by Henry Kaiser and his associates. Situated on land owned by the local ports authority, it was originally planned with eight ways but this figure was soon raised to fourteen as the yard expanded along the Cerritos Channel, which connects the port of Los Angeles with the port of Long Beach.

Records for speed were achieved after the yard had expanded and was remodeled. The monthly quota of ship deliveries, set at twelve, was exceeded by June 1942 and substantially exceeded during every month of 1943. One of the vagaries of supply and demand was that while the contracts urged builders to deliver as many ships as possible, the Maritime Commission was endeavoring to impose restraint due to a ten percent shortage of steel, this shortage in some measure being brought about by the Commission's own revised figures of ship output that had already been lowered due to the earlier lack of steel.

In an effort to improve welding methods, Calship developed special welding procedures. Although the sequence of welding plates and sections was difficult to plan, it was believed these sequences were connected with the 'locked-in' stresses - the possible cause of some fractures. However, the experts were to hold a very different theory to this a few years later.

This shipyard supplied the nucleus management required to establish the Marinship yard, and early fabrication for Marinship was performed at the Calship plant.

Suggestions from the personnel of all shipyards for improving efficiency gave large savings to the Commission and Calship ranked third in the scale of total savings.

At the end of the war Calship was paid $25 million and given title to all its yard facilities, which in 1941 was estimated to cost $10 million but which in actual fact cost some $27 million. In return they undertook to restore the property to the condition called for in the lease.

Liberty ship output: 306 vessels at an average cost of $1,858,000 each, plus 30 Liberty tankers.

USMC Numbers	Yard Numbers
64-94 277-294	1-49
295-300	50-55
631-739	56-164
1632-1691	165-224
1854-1879	225-250
2225-2230	251-256
1910-1915	257-262
2538-2567 2231-2244	263-306

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World War II Construction Records of California Shipbuilding Corporation

See copies of Calship Log, published by the California Shipbuilding Corporation