• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 935 0

had been in the year just ended. Ships were once again arriving by surprise, tying up ports, while the lack of basic supplies was so severe that the air force had to airlift half a million tons of meat from Okinawa because there was none in-country. Nonmilitary cargoes, including U.S. aid, were taking two weeks or more to unload, and the backlog of military cargo was rising even as the army was grappling with such perplexing supply problems as a surplus of “ecclesiastical items, with greatly limited demand experience,” and evacuating nonessential candelabras and crucifixes. Unloading at Saigon was hampered by resistance from Vietnamese longshoremen, who feared that the U.S. military would take over the docks and eliminate civilian jobs. When McNamara visited Vietnam in October 1966, the secretary of defense spent much of his time on port problems. “McNamara Acts to End Port Tie Up,” the military newspaper headlined.17

In that environment, the MSTS reopened the bidding for containership service to Vietnam on October 14. Three companies were interested, but Sea-Land upstaged the competition by offering to provide not only containers but chassis, trucks, and terminals. To the government’s surprise, Sea-Land proposed a fixed price per ton rather than the customary markup over its costs. After much negotiation, Sea-Land was awarded a $70 million contract in March 1967 to provide seven ships. Three of its largest vessels were to start sailing between Oakland and Seattle and Cam Ranh Bay by August. Sea-Land would install shore-based cranes there to handle the traffic. Three small vessels with shipboard cranes would cover routes between the West Coast and Da Nang starting in June, four months earlier than the First Logistical Command had deemed possible. The seventh ship was to serve as an interport shuttle within Vietnam. Sea-Land agreed to furnish refrigerated containers, to unload its own ships, and to deliver the containers with its own trucks and chassis to any point within thirty miles of its piers.18

Almost overnight, Cam Ranh Bay was turned into a large containerport. One of the DeLong piers was redesigned to support massive container cranes, and South Korean welders worked in intense heat inside the pier to reinforce the wooden deck. Crane rails were installed on the deck, while Sea-Land assembled two cranes in the Philippines from a patchwork of parts. In June, two barges, loaded with the partially built cranes, trucks to haul containers, campers for workers to live in, and even a sewage disposal plant, were floated across the South China Sea from the Philippines to Cam Ranh Bay. Then the realities of construction in the middle of a war zone intervened. The Da Nang operation got under way on August 1, a few weeks late, as the first containership to serve Vietnam, the Bienville, arrived from Oakland and unloaded its 226 containers in fifteen hours. The containerport at Cam Ranh Bay, though, did not see its first ship until November 1967, three months behind schedule. When it finally arrived, the Oakland, 685 feet long, delivered 609 35- foot containers—as much cargo as could be carried on ten average breakbulk ships hauling military freight to Vietnam.19

Another huge containership brought 600 or so containers to Cam Ranh Bay every two weeks. One-fifth of them were typically refrigerated units filled with meat, produce, and even ice cream. The remainder held almost every type of military supply except ammunition, which was not approved for shipment by container. Sea-Land’s trucks carried about half the food to nearby bases, and the rest was transshipped to Saigon or other coastal ports on the rusty vessel Sea-Land used as a feeder ship. Sea-Land’s state-of-the-art computer system at Cam Ranh Bay used punch cards to keep track of every container from loading in the United States to arrival in Vietnam to its return to America. Supplies flowed in, and the cargo backlog dissipated. “The port congestion problem was solved,” the army’s history of 1967 declared triumphantly. The seven Sea-Land containerships, MSTS Commander