"building ships" Topic

Brother Phil does ancestry.com, which just informed him that our grandfather James Orland Todd worked here during WWII. Note that Brown had NO prior shipbuilding experience. Pause again and reflect on the folly of Japan picking a fight with a nation coming out of a depression with hundreds of factories idle and millions of men unemployed.

The Brown Shipbuilding Company was founded in Houston, Texas, in 1942 as a subsidiary of Brown and Root (now KBR) by brothers Herman and George R. Brown to build ships for the U.S. Navy during World War II. Brown Shipbuilding Company ranked 68th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.[1]

In 1941, Navy officials asked the Brown brothers to build four submarine chasers. The brothers had no shipbuilding experience, but had helped build Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.[2] In 1942, the brothers formed Brown Shipbuilding and, with $9 USD million in Navy funding, built the Green's Bayou Fabrication Yard at the juncture of the Houston Ship Channel and Green's Bayou.[3] After delivering the ships, Brown received orders for landing craft and more sub chasers, and eventually won an order for destroyer escorts at $3.3 USD million per ship. [2]

Between May 1943 and August 1944, Brown turned out 61 destroyer escorts, an average of one per week.[3] Perhaps the most famous was USS Samuel B. Roberts, part of the outgunned Taffy 3 unit that turned back a Japanese battleship force during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Brown also built 254 amphibious assault ships, known as LSMs, between May 1944 and March 1946. By the end of the war, it had produced over 350 Navy warships in contracts totaling over $500 USD million

Daddy Todd was a tool and die maker, a skilled machinist. He loved to show his grandkids his hands, which were missing a total of about two fingers, spread over three or four digits. Part of learning the trade, he said.

Great information, Doc, thanks! And we would be hard pressed to find a more "Hero" ship than the Sam Roberts. When I first read about its action in Leyte Gulf decades ago, I could hardly believe it.
I had a second cousin (much, much older) who was lost at LG on the USS Hoel. He apparently made it into the water, and was last seen/heard saying he was going to try to swim to shore "to get help". The survivor who told his parents about it didn't think he was delirious at the time, but he could have just been being nice. Either way, Rest in Peace all you brave sailors!