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By Root 910 0

found 154,907 shipping containers in use in non-Communist Europe. The number is large, but the containers were not: fully 52 percent of them were smaller than 106 cubic feet, less than the volume of a box 5 feet on a side. Almost all European containers were made of wood, and many had no tops; the user piled the goods inside and covered the load with canvas—hardly an efficient system for moving freight. The containers promoted by the Belgian national railway were meant to be slid up a ramp to fit inside truck bodies, requiring an extra stage of handling. American containers were typically made of steel, providing better protection but at enormous cost; one-quarter or more of the weight of a loaded container was the container itself.27

All over the world, the main methods for handling containers in the years after World War II offered few advantages over loose freight. “Cargo containers have been more of a hindrance than a help,” a leading steamship executive complained in 1955. Many containers had metal eyes on top of each corner, requiring longshoremen to climb atop them to attach hooks before they could be lifted. The lack of weight limits meant that lifting could prove dangerous. Moving them with forklifts instead of winches, though, often damaged the containers. Large, expensive longshore gangs were still required to stow containers alongside loose freight in the holds of ships, where the boxes had to be maneuvered past built-in posts and ladders. “[I]t is certain that the goods would occupy far less space if they were stowed individually instead of in containers,” the head of the French stevedores’ association acknowledged in 1954. “This wasted space is quite considerable—probably over 10%.” Ten percent of the ship’s volume sailing empty amounted to a huge penalty for carrying cargo in containers.

For international shipments, customs authorities often charged duties on the container as well as the contents. And then there was the cost of sending emptied boxes back where they had come from, which “has always been a heavy handicap to container transport,” Jean Levy, director of the French National Railway, admitted in 1948. Shipping food from a depot in Pennsylvania to an air base in Labrador cost 10 percent more using containers than with conventional methods, a 1956 study found—if the container was left in Labrador. When the cost of returning it empty to Pennsylvania was figured in, container shipping was 75 percent more expensive than loose freight.28

TABLE 2

Cargo Aboard the Warrior

By the early 1950s, there was little dispute that freight terminals were a transportation choke point. An unusual government-sponsored study, conducted in 1954, laid bare just how backward cargo handling was. The subject was the Warrior, a fairly typical C-2-type cargo ship, owned by Waterman Steamship Corp. The ship was chartered to the U.S. military, but on its run from Brooklyn to Bremerhaven, Germany, in March 1954, it carried a mix of cargo typical of merchant vessels, and was loaded and unloaded by civilian longshoremen. With government consent, the researchers had access to unusually detailed information about the cargo and the voyage.

The Warrior was loaded with 5,015 long tons of cargo, mainly food, merchandise for sale in post exchanges, household goods, mail, and parts for machines and vehicles. It also carried 53 vehicles. The cargo comprised an astonishing 194,582 individual items of every size and description.

These goods arrived in Brooklyn in 1,156 separate shipments from 151 different U.S. cities, with the first shipment arriving at the dock more than a month before the vessel sailed. Each item was placed on a pallet prior to storage in the transit shed. Longshoremen loaded the ship by lowering the pallets into the hold, where the men physically removed each item from its pallet and stowed it, using $5,031.69 worth of lumber and rope to hold everything in place. The longshoremen worked one eight-hour shift per day, excluding Sunday, and required 6 calendar days (including a day lost to a strike) to load the ship.