The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (28 page)

Cam Ranh Bay was the largest natural harbor on the Vietnamese coast, but it was not an easy place to build a logistical complex. It had no infrastructure, and the shifting sands along the shore were hospitable neither to earthmoving equipment nor to standard construction techniques. Aside from the harbor, the location had one important feature: there was no South Vietnamese facility at the site. The dismal performance of the Vietnamese-run Saigon port preoccupied U.S. officials at the highest level, so much so that Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge personally discussed port problems with South Vietnamese premier Nguyen Cao Ky in July 1965. These efforts made little headway: control over the port was too lucrative for top South Vietnamese generals, who resisted U.S. proposals that a new port authority should take over. The port at Cam Ranh Bay would ease those problems by being entirely a U.S.-run operation, free of Vietnamese corruption and inefficiency. Some top U.S. policymakers even envisioned a model community surrounded by industrial parks and residential subdivisions instead of the usual bars and brothels. The fastest way to get the port up and running was to bring in a DeLong pier, a three-hundred-foot barge with holes through which pilings could be driven into the harbor floor; the barge could then be jacked up on the pilings to the desired height above the water. The navy located a DeLong pier in South Carolina, towed it through the Panama Canal and across the sea to Cam Ranh Bay, and anchored navy ships in the harbor to provide temporary electrical power—and the port was in operation. By December, merchant ships were arriving directly from the United States, and more DeLong piers were under construction.
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Yet the supply problems kept growing worse. Every month, 17,000 additional U.S. troops were landing in Vietnam. Each 830- man infantry battalion hit the beach with 451 tons of supplies and equipment, each mechanized battalion 1,119 tons. Feeding, clothing, and arming the troops after arrival was using every ship the MSTS could lay hands on. By Thanksgiving 1965, 45 ships were being worked in Vietnamese ports—and 75 more, loaded with food, weapons, and ammunition, were holding off the coast or in the Philippines, where they were sent to avoid the higher pay to which merchant seamen were entitled while their ships were in Vietnamese waters. “Ten first class ports in CONUS [the continental United States] are shipping material to SVN [South Vietnam] as fast as they can—we have four second-class ports to receive it,” the head of the military’s trucking branch complained. When the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visited Vietnam in November 1965, they got an earful about logistical problems. “Our ports are jammed with ships and cargo,” the head of the First Logistical Command told them.
Life
magazine ran photos of Saigon port congestion in December, and a visiting congressman advised Westmoreland to place more emphasis on the ports. The logistical mess in Vietnam was starting to become a political embarrassment at home.
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Washington demanded solutions. Under heavy pressure, the South Vietnamese government agreed in late 1965 that the United States could build a new deepwater port, appropriately called Newport, in Saigon, so it could move military freight away from the downtown docks. The Pentagon simplified the supply chain by overruling navy objections and making the U.S. Army responsible for supplying all allied forces in Vietnam, including the famously independent Marine Corps. And, on orders directly from the secretary of defense, the MSTS hired a private company, Alaska Barge and Transport Co., to take charge of coastal shipping. Alaska Barge earned its living delivering cargo to remote ports in Alaska, and its boss managed to persuade McNamara that the company could straighten out logistics in Vietnam. Alaska Barge quickly began building docks, and it replaced the erratic service of Vietnamese coastal ships with a barge shuttle service to move supplies up and down the coast. “We couldn’t have gotten along without it,” recalled the commander of the MSTS. Alaska Barge’s success left an impression on military officials used to doing things in war zones the military way: perhaps there were other jobs in Vietnam that private companies could do better than uniformed troops.
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It was not the excess of cargo alone that caused the port logjam in Vietnam. Aside from fuel, every bit of cargo shipped to Vietnam, military or civilian, arrived in the holds of breakbulk ships. Unloading meant lifting individual items out of the hold and placing them on the dock or, even worse, into a shallow-draft vessel that would ferry them to shore, where they would have to be unloaded a second time. Many ships made multiple stops, and if a ship had been stowed poorly in Oakland or Seattle, some cargo would have to be unloaded and then reloaded for delivery to the next port. Often, cargo could not be identified once it was finally on the dock, complicating efforts to get it to the troops who were supposed to receive it. After surveying the situation, a military study team recommended basic changes in shipping procedures in November 1965. Logistics officers in the United States should send full shiploads to individual Vietnamese ports, rather than having a ship make several port calls, so the vessel could return to America as quickly as possible. Vessels should be loaded for ease of discharge. Cargo for different consignees in Vietnam should be kept separate as much as possible, to minimize sorting at the dock. The first recommendation on the committee’s list was most notable of all: all shipments should come in “unitized packaging.”
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To military logistics experts, “unitized packaging” meant above all the ubiquitous five-ton Conex boxes that were carried with other cargo in the holds of breakbulk ships. Palletization, in which individual items were wrapped on a wooden pallet and moved on and off ships as a single piece, had come into commercial use in the early 1950s, and by late 1965 the Sharpe Army Depot, the main supply base in California, was promoting it for military cargo. McNamara, however, knew that the commercial world had moved far beyond small containers and wooden pallets. Leading shipping executives were invited to Washington, where they were shown film clips of sailors lowering cargo nets by rope and asked for advice. When Malcom McLean saw the film, a colleague recalled, “[h]e got obsessed with the idea of putting containerships into Vietnam. He was back and forth to Washington, talking to people, and they told him there isn’t anything you can do in Vietnam.”
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McLean finally got the ear of Frank Besson, the four-star general who headed army supply operations. At Christmas 1965, Besson agreed that McLean could take a look at the situation in Vietnam. McLean phoned his engineering chief, Ron Katims, and consulting engineer Robert Campbell, both just arrived in Europe to plan the start of Sea-Land’s European service, and told them to meet his Pan Am flight in Paris the next morning. A day later, with their wool suits and overcoats, the trio was in steamy Saigon. They visited Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay, got rounds of military briefings, and crossed paths with a delegation from the International Longshoremen’s Association, which had arrived in Saigon on December 16. McLean’s team concluded that containerization would solve much of the logistical confusion in Vietnam. He received the prompt endorsement of ILA president Teddy Gleason—the same Teddy Gleason who had fended off containerization in New York for the better part of a decade. On departing Vietnam in late January, Gleason urged the government to lease as many containerships as it could find.
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The military command was of two minds when it came to such a radical change in procedures. On the one hand, political pressure to bring in private-sector expertise was intense. At a top-level conference in Honolulu in January 1966, the Joint Chiefs announced a new policy “to contract for civilians to perform duties which they could accomplish, such as the operation of port facilities.” On the other hand, no one in the military had experience with containerization. The MSTS had never leased a containership or run a supply exercise involving containers. The Defense Department’s initial request for proposals to run a “containership service” to Vietnam involved only 7-foot Conex boxes carried as breakbulk cargo, not the far larger aluminum containers that could be handled by high-speed cranes and lifted directly onto truck chassis for delivery. The numerous port construction projects under way by early 1966, including the deepwater complex at Cam Ranh Bay, the Newport development in Saigon, and the new piers at Da Nang and other ports, all were proceeding as conventional breakbulk facilities. Container shipping, no matter how important in the commercial world, was not something that the military knew how to do.
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Through the winter of 1966, McLean struggled to convince the Pentagon that containerization could solve its logistical problems in Vietnam. In April, he finally obtained a foothold. Equipment Rental Inc., a new division of McLean Industries, was awarded an army contract to run a trucking operation at the Saigon piers. The contract had nothing to do with containers, but McLean was so eager to show what his company could do that Equipment Rental began moving freight two months ahead of schedule. In May, Besson asked the MSTS to give Sea-Land a contract to run three containerships between Oakland and the Japanese island of Okinawa, a major staging point for Vietnam. Sea-Land was to deliver 476 35-foot containers every 12 days. At the same time, with conventional carriers unable to supply additional vessels, the MSTS solicited bids for containerships to sail directly from the United States to Vietnam. Sea-Land would have to compete for the business—but as the largest containership operator by far, the only one sailing across the Pacific, and the only one with a handy supply of vessels equipped with the shipboard cranes needed to unload in Vietnam, it had the edge. When several competitors sought to submit a joint proposal, the MSTS refused to accept their bid. Things finally seemed to be going McLean’s way.
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But Vietnam was still not ready for container shipping. The First Logistical Command, the agency in charge of the military’s port, warehousing, and trucking operations in Vietnam, was notably unenthusiastic. The port delays facing military ships had eased during the first half of 1966, from an average of 6.9 days in February to 5.3 in July, and port congestion problems had less urgency for the forces on the ground. No cranes or storage areas for containers were available, and none were under construction. With Besson’s Washington-based Army Materiel Command pushing container shipping aggressively, and with Sea-Land showing in Okinawa that container service required only half as many ships and one-sixteenth as much labor as breakbulk service, Westmoreland ordered the First Log to reassess its opposition. In July 1966, that command finally conceded that a containership service was desirable, but no sooner than October 1967. Sea-Land won a contract to open a containership service to Subic Bay, the huge U.S. naval base in the Philippines, but the bidding for service to Vietnam was postponed.
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It took yet another logistical breakdown in Vietnam to put an end to bureaucratic resistance. The improvements of the first half of 1966 were being reversed by August under the mounting flood of supplies and war materiel: shipments from California to Vietnam would be 55 percent higher in the year starting July 1, 1966, than they 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.
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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.
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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.
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