Western Pipe and Steel Company
Shortly thereafter, WPS purchased land in the Richmond District of San Francisco, and moved the Francis Smith plant to the new location.
With the purchase of Schaw Batcher, Western Pipe & Steel inherited these contracts, thus gaining its first foothold into the shipbuilding industry.
The first eight of the ships were fitted with General Electric steam turbines with a horsepower of 2500, but the plant proved unreliable and was subject to frequent breakdowns.
The remaining 10 vessels were fitted with triple expansion engines built by Joshua Hendy, a local San Franciscan company.
The 2,800 horsepower (2,100 kW) Joshua Hendy plant proved much more reliable, and many of the vessels powered by this engine went on to have long careers (one of them in fact, the West Camargo, was to enjoy a remarkable service life of almost 60 years, finally being scrapped only in the late 1970s).
The company closed its Richmond operation in 1921 and moved the plant located there to the San Francisco shipyard, which now began building barges and pipes.
Perhaps the biggest peacetime contract awarded to Western Pipe & Steel was for work on the Grand Coulee Dam project in the 1930s.
Fabrication of the pipes required more than nine miles (14 km) of heavy welds,[8] and the experience gained was to help make Western Pipe & Steel a world leader in the field of automated welding technology by the outbreak of World War II[9] - expertise that would be put to good use after commencement of the company's wartime shipbuilding program.
In the late 1930s, the U.S. government set up the Maritime Commission, tasked with developing a scheme for replacing America's ageing merchant fleet with more modern vessels suitable for use as naval auxiliaries in the event of war.
The commission introduced the Long Range Shipbuilding Program in 1937 which set a goal of producing 500 new merchant ships over a ten-year period.
When the commission began to offer public contracts for its shipbuilding program, the Western Pipe & Steel Company found itself in an advantageous position.
[10] The company's first bid - for the production of five C1 type cargo vessels - proved successful, and in October 1939 a $10 million contract was signed.
Instead, the San Francisco shipyard switched in 1940 to manufacture of the larger and faster C3 type, which had been expressly designed by the Maritime Commission with naval auxiliary service in mind.
Many of these hulls were not completed as standard C3 cargo vessels however, but were converted onsite (or at other yards) into naval auxiliaries, particularly escort carriers, attack transports and troopships.
The most notable ships built at the San Pedro yard were the seven Wind class icebreakers, whose specifications were so imposing that Western Pipe & Steel was the only bidder.
With the dropping of the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the war ended abruptly and the amount of work available to shipyards across America rapidly declined.
Instead the Navy proposed the building of several Landing Ships Dock (LSD), but a February 1953 survey concluded that the cost of modernizing the yard would probably be excessive.
In the early 1970s, the yard briefly came to life again when Howard Hughes' Summa Corporation began the construction of the Glomar Explorer and the large submersible barge HMB-1, as part of the top-secret Operation Jennifer whose purpose was the salvage of a Russian nuclear submarine which had sunk in the mid-Pacific.
Fitted with the much more reliable Joshua Hendy triple expansion engine, she was launched in 1920 and enjoyed an active service life as a commercial cargo vessel between the wars.
After the war, Desna remained in service with the Soviet Union as a special cargo vessel for the transport of fish, a role she retained until 1978.
One of the five Type C1 vessels built by Western Pipe & Steel for its initial Maritime Commission contract, American Leader was delivered in July 1941 but only made a handful of voyages before being sunk by the German auxiliary cruiser Michel off the Cape of Good Hope in September 1942.
In April 1944 eighteen survivors of American Leader were being transported on the Japanese hell ship Tamahoko Maru when the vessel was torpedoed and sunk by the submarine USS Tang.
In September of the same year, five of another party of nine former crewmates were killed aboard the Japanese hell ship Junyo Maru when she was torpedoed and sunk by HMS Tradewind.
One of the four escort carriers built by the company for service with the Royal Navy, Fencer was credited with the sinking of four German U-boats during the course of the war - U-666 on 10 February 1944, U-277 on 1 May, and U-674 and U-959 on the same day, 2 May 1944.
Launched in September 1941 under Maritime Commission contract, Steel Artisan had almost been completed as a standard Type C3 cargo ship when word came through that she was to be converted into one of the newly designed Bogue class escort aircraft carriers.
The conversion was subsequently carried out and Steel Artisan briefly became USS Barnes before being transferred under lend lease to the Royal Navy who dubbed her HMS Attacker.
Laid up for some years, she was eventually bought by Russian entrepreneur Alexander Vlasov whose company the Sitmar Line undertook another major conversion of the vessel, this time into an ocean liner.
In 1959, Hawaiian Citizen underwent a major conversion into a container ship, thus becoming the first all-containerized freighter operating on the West Coast of the United States.
In the aftermath, an inquiry chaired by Halsey heard allegations that the captain of one of the destroyers that sank, USS Hull, had been negligent in his command.
[24] American novelist Herman Wouk later used this inquiry as the inspiration for his 1952 Pulitzer Prize winning fictional work The Caine Mutiny.
