Unseen Body Blows

Author William A. Gay

FORWARD

  This book is about a very specialized military vessel, the “Landing Ship, Tank,” or “LST,” designed for one purpose-to deliver tanks and their crews onto remote coastlines under battle conditions.  This particular LST was built in the Kaiser Richmond shipyards, where the weekly newspaper Fore ‘n’ Aft of April 7, 1944, told readers: “LST’s have come to be the mark of conquest.  Wherever they go, the enemy flees or dies.”

  The LST’s 476 and 479, grew into shape on the skids in  Yard Four.  However, this book is really about people, not machines.  It honors the servicemen-like Lin Gay, who crewed them – as well as the home-front workers who built them.  It was a very dangerous time, in battle and in production.  Bill Gay mentions one of the new wave of women shipyard workers, Penny Price, who contracted double pneumonia.  As the war progressed, the standard industrial workforce of healthy white men was depleted as they went off to fight, and production was taken up by everyone else’s.  No one was too disabled, too young, too old, too female, to contribute to fighting fascism.  Penny’s illness was not uncommon, but the care she got in the shipyards was.  The highly efficient Kaiser health care program for the 90,000 Richmond workers was so good that they received the first civilian doses of life-saving penicillin during the war.

  The shipyard workers were also masters of innovation.  An Associated Press article from late 1942 describes how they “got it done” building their first LST while the Richmond shipyards themselves were still under construction.  They could not buil working docks because there was no lumber available, so they dug a hole, lined it with concrete, and built the ship on sleds.  When the ship was completed, they pulled out with cables.  They even had to build the huge cranes from scrap steel to drag the ship out.  It was built in sixty-one days, and Henry J. Kaiser remarked, “This is one of those jobs that can’t be done.”

  But we did it.  Lin Gay did it; Penny Price did it, even my uncle, who was a steam fitter in those yards, did.

  Take some Dramamine and climb aboard the spunky LST 479 for an adventure.

Lincoln Cushing

Kaiser Permanente Heritage Resources