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seemed,
Life
or
Time
or
Fortune
ran a featured story on the Kaiser phenomenon; in January 1943, the
New York Times
called him the Paul Bunyan of the age with his own three giant blue oxen in harness: Imagination, Organization, and Perspiration. A schoolteacher in South Carolina asked her class if they knew which face launched a thousand ships (referring to Helen of Troy in Christopher Marlowe’s
Doctor Faustus
). One boy’s hand shot up. “Henry Kaiser,” he said proudly. 2
    In the spring of 1943, that larger-than-life reputation was about to be turned loose on the U.S. Navy.
    Under Navy undersecretary and Dillon, Read, investment banker James Forrestal, the Navy was already embarked on the biggest shipbuilding program in history. From a force in 1939 still trapped in a hemispheric defense mentality, it was now in effect a seven-ocean navy, engaged in operations from Alaska and the Aleutians to Greenland, the North and South Atlantic, and across the Pacific to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. The five biggest shipbuilding firms in the country were filled with orders for battleships, cruisers, carriers, destroyers, and destroyer escorts, while companies like Electric Boat in Groton were building submarines in record numbers.
    Events in the Pacific in 1942, however, had forced a major change in thinking. The battles of Coral Sea and Midway had proved the value of the aircraft carrier as the fleet’s primary capital ship—even as battle losses shrank that force from six to four. At the same time, both the British and American fleets in the Atlantic saw the value of carriers for convoy protection. From Atlantic to Pacific, the push was on for carriers—not just the 34,800-ton monsters of the
Essex
class like
Yorktown
and
Intrepid
, but smaller carriers that could be built faster to fill the gap. 3
    The result was the so-called
Independence
class of less than 15,000 tons, which could carry nine TBM Avenger torpedo planes and twenty-four new Hellcat fighters, compared to the nearly one hundred aircraft on a
Yorktown
or
Bunker Hill
. Likewise, Sun Shipbuilding andDry Dock in Chester, Pennsylvania, was converting old oil tankers into the 23,350-ton
Sagamon
class. 4
    Even this, however, was not enough. The Navy decided they would need something still smaller that could be built in one-quarter of the time of the
Independence
class—and since the yards were running out of hulls to convert, it would have to be designed from scratch.
    In May 1942 the Navy posed their problem to the Maritime Commission’s Admiral Land, who came up with what he thought was the perfect solution. Let Henry Kaiser do it.
    It made sense. Kaiser was the reigning king of Liberty shipbuilding. By the start of 1943, he would cut the labor hours required for building a ship nearly in half, from 640,000 in March 1941 to 352,000. He had proven his engineers’ ability to work from a completely new design. So why not turn him loose on escort carriers? 5
    Henry himself loved the idea. When Land wired him with the Navy’s suggestion, he enthusiastically assented. Here was the company’s chance to make ships that would not only supply the war, but fight it. It was also just the kind of production challenge his son Edgar would shine at. By March 1943, he said, Vancouver could switch all twelve ways over to aircraft carriers. 6
    Kaiser turned to a design agent, George Sharp, to come up with the preliminary drawings. After consultations with both the Navy and the Maritime Commission, the proposed design met the construction specifications of both. Four hundred and ninety feet long and displacing 6,890 tons, it actually had a longer flight deck than the
Independence
carriers, although Seattle’s conversion jobs were much bigger ships. There wasn’t a single turbine or diesel engine available anywhere: They were all going to other warships. So Kaiser’s designer opted for a five-cylinder reciprocating steam engine, which could deliver 5400 horsepower on each of