James Clark

U.S. Navy
Los Angeles Harbor, California

… Events that you have no control over are going to have a bearing on your life, and it depends on how you respond to those events, how you see opportunities, and how you take the challenge…

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the American military desperately needed new warships. Shipyards sprung up in California to meet the demands of the Navy. When James Clark was in his late twenties, he served as a firefighter at one of these shipyards in Los Angeles, where large cargo carriers called Liberty Ships were being built. The welding process used in the construction of ships created high fire dangers. Clark extinguished many fires in his years at the shipyard.

The Fremont after her launching.

Originally I was from a little town in northwest Missouri called Mount City. When I was six years old, I moved to a little town called Maryville, Missouri, where my dad operated a moving picture theatre for about seven years. My family—my father, my mother, my sister, and I—left Missouri in 1928. That was the beginning of the Great Depression. We came to California to find a better life. We had an aunt who lived in Visalia, California, who asked us to come and live with her until we found a place for my dad to work. Eventually he became a projectionist in a theatre in Los Angeles in 1929.

I was in my late twenties when the war started. I become a firefighter because World War II was really heating up. It was just a horrible thing happening in Europe. The United States was asked to send equipment, men, and so forth to help fight the war in Europe.

When the Japanese decided to attack the United States, they sent their warplanes over to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. They bombed our warships, provoking an all out war between the United States and Japan. As the activities were not on the United States soil, we needed ships to transport goods; soldiers, tanks, all of the equipment needed to fight a war. President Roosevelt declared military rule. We were building airplanes and sending them to Europe; we built tanks and other war fighting machines and sent them to Europe. But, we had to protect ourselves, and the Pacific area, because of the Japanese. That created a very serious problem. The Japanese would be able to attack the west coast of the United States.

The California Shipbuilding Corporation’s fire trucks aligned at the station.

The need for men to fight in the war was great; every able-bodied person was drafted to fight in the war. When I was drafted they found something wrong with me physically. I was not fit to fight in the war. I was classified as 4F. That meant that I couldn’t become a part of the military, but I had to go into some activity having to do with the war.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we hardly had any merchant marines; we had no ships to take supplies to the Pacific. Ships had to be built that would carry large amounts of supplies and men to the war effort. In the Los Angeles area there were some older shipyards but they were inadequate, so they had to build a new shipyard. They also had a ship yard in northern California and in the state of Washington. I was living in Los Angeles then, and I went to the shipyard, which was called California Ship building.

The shipyard was capable of building what we called the Liberty Ships. The Liberty Ship is a specially designed ship that can carry hundreds of tons of equipment and/or personnel. It is a very simple ship that can load and unload cargo with out having any dock facilities. Those ships were not existent until after Pearl Harbor. They built a shipyard to build these ships in a matter of four years. Operations had to go on day and night twenty-four hours a day to meet the demand.

The welding process created a great deal of heat (The shipyard itself was really hot!). Ships were built on a platform called a shipway. That platform was made out of wood. All of the structure around the ship was wood. Wood is flammable, and it gets catches fire very easily. So here we had a situation where extreme heat with wooden structure all around created an area of high hazard because of the potential for fire. Any fire that would get started could easily destroy the entire operation. So it was vital that we maintain fire safety as well as we could. In order to do that we had to have special fire equipment and crews. I was one of the crews to fight these fires. A fire may have started out relatively small, but if you didn’t stop it soon, it could take the whole facility.

James Clark Fourth from the right. San Pedro, California. 1943-1944.

I didn’t know anything about firefighting when I was drafted but it was a job that I could do; I would be trained on the job. The first part of the job was just going around the shipyard all day long. A whole shift making sure that all these fire extinguishers were filled with extinguishing agent and ready to be used (They were being used constantly by the workers.) It was a very intense activity. The atmosphere the conditions that we were working under were certainly not pleasant. It was very noisy, dirty—it was just not a nice place to work. However, it was very necessary.

To build the ships, they started from the bottom and built it up. It was just amazing. Then when these ships were completed they had to be tested to make sure everything worked. We would run them on what they call a trial run that would be just taking them out on the harbor and making sure that they went forward and backwards and that all the mechanical parts worked. Then they were immediately taken to a warehouse or a dock in the Los Angeles harbor and loaded with tons of materials. Then they went to sea to the Pacific Theater of War.

One problem that we had launching the ships was caused because of how the ships were built on wood platforms called skids. The skids were made of two pieces of wood and held in place by steel welded down. Between the two pieces of wood was grease, because when you got ready to launch the ship it was on an angle and would slide down and go into the water. Imagine having a platform like this and you can put another one on top of it all of this on a incline and, then you build your ship on top of that. The grease was very flammable and here we have all this wood all around it. In order for the ship to be released, you see, it was held in place on this incline all the time it was being manufactured. They had big steel plates that were attached to these skids. I don’t know if you can visualize this or not. Those steel plates would hold that ship in place. After they removed all of the steel plates underneath the only thing it was sitting on were these skids and grease would be squishing out. In order to release these, they had to use welding torches. The fire had to be controlled, and that fire was very hot. It would melt the steel that was holding this together and finally when they melted the steel plates it would let lose and the ship would start going down the shipway and into the water. We were told that ships had to go faster then than it ever did in the water. Of course that was a very bad hazard. Because we had all this grease and we had this very hot process. Well, fortunately, we kept on stand by. The firemen would be on standby with their hoses and everything all hooked up. In case it did catch fire, we would put it out before it could do any damage. However, we were able to control the problem really well. Still, it was one of the real hazards that we had to contend with everyday.

The ships weren’t fast; actually, they were very slow, moving at only twelve knots. So they had to use them in convoys and protect them with destroyers and war ships. That made it possible then for these ships to get their cargo into the Pacific theater of the war. The ship itself was expendable. If it made one trip and delivered one cargo it paid for itself. The theory was that if they made that one trip it justified that effort to make that ship. So we had to keep making ships in order to keep sending enough supplies.

The SS Jeremiah O’Brien makes it’s fifth annual sailing in honor of those who built and served on America’s Liberty Ships.

I had nothing to do specifically with building the ship. My job was keeping the shipyard safe so the ships could continue to be built. I was only one of millions that had to help with the war.

It was over a period of about four years that I worked in the shipyard. When we won the war, the shipyard was totally dismantled. A great deal had been learned in technology—how to build, how to organize, how to engineer, and how to utilize technology for what we needed. That knowledge is a by-product of every war. We improved ships by what we learned during the war. We improved airplanes. We built fighter planes and bombers. A lot of this technology was developed during the war effort because of the excessive need.

Philosophically, war is a horrible thing. Yet the reward that is achieved is having your freedom; having a society that is free and can progress.

Fire is a phenomenon that is essential for all life. A simple way to explain what a fire is that it’s a triangle. You must have fuel, you must have heat, and you must have oxygen. Those three components have to exist to create a fire. We use fire as a very useful phenomenon in the progress of our society. Yet uncontrolled fire is devastating. It’s not only important to use fire but also to be able to control fire. We would control the fire by using water. Water on a fire cools it down. If you cool it below the temperature that the fuel will be able to combust the fire will go out. There are different kinds of fuel that burn in different ways. With some kinds of fuel, water may not cool enough. For instance gasoline, if it catches fire, is ignitable at sixty degrees below freezing. So to cool a gasoline fire, the lowest ignition temperature is practically impossible. We would stop it by removing the oxygen or by isolating the fuel. That way you take away one of the three parts of the triangle and could put out the fire.

One of the things that I was able to do, and that was very exciting and very rewarding, was operating a fire truck. It’s basically a large pump carrying water. It is a very high-powered pump. The pump could give a thousand gallons of water a minute. A gallon of water weighs a little over eight pounds. You are moving eight thousand pounds of liquid a minute. A great deal of energy is it needed to do that. Because of that, the truck had to have a very high-powered engine. It had a twelve-cylinder gasoline engine to run the pump. Special kinds of equipment were used. One gives a fog effect. There were many different techniques that we had to use in order to fight all the different kinds of fires. Over time I learned how to use water and fog as necessary. Sometimes we would use chemicals. One that we used was carbon dioxide, which is a gas that has a smothering effect. It has the effect of reducing oxygen to where it will not be sufficient to feed a fire. The carbon dioxide was limited, however, because it is hard to apply. There is a chemical I refer to as dry chemical, which is basically bi-carbonated soda. It’s just a dry solid material that when properly applied to these fires will extinguish it very fast through a rather interesting, it smothers it, and removes the oxygen at the same time it has a cooking effect. It has a more efficient way of putting out the fire. Foam is a mixture of water and certain chemicals that create a big blanket to put over the fire. In the shipyard most of the fire hazard was wood. There were other fuels there. The shipyard had a lot of grease involved with building, which is basically oil, and then of course the gases used for welding. So all of that different equipment was carried and dispersed by the trucks.

Naturally the knowledge of how to use this is what a fireman has to learn. You not only have to learn how to use and how to apply these chemicals but you have to understand the nature of the material it’s burning. Paint, for instance, is basically flammable liquid. There were hundreds of gallons of paint needed to paint these ships. They had to be painted to keep from rusting or they wouldn’t last in the water very long. We had to deal with all of these hazards and you recognize what it takes and the conditions that create fire. The temperature is critical and the amount of oxygen that is available is critical to get combustion.

There’s one fire I remember vividly. There were about a dozen of these kinds of big buildings with rounded roofs that were made out of wood. They were huge in order to house offices, machine shops, and warehousing certain materials. They were very critical, as far as building the shipyard; it had all this material that had to be put together.

As I mentioned, we were on a twenty-four hour deal and I happened to be on duty one night. It was in the middle of the night and it was in the wintertime. They had an oil heating system in the attic and for some reason it started leaking and caught fire. Now these buildings were huge, over two hundred feet long. In the middle of the night this building caught fire from this oil leaking out of the furnace in the building. It started burning that wooden building; it was a real big fire. I operated my truck, brought it into the fire scene hooked it up to put the water on the fire, but it was too big for just our equipment. We brought in the city firefighters and they came in and the fireboats because we were right on the water. They are in the water and have all the water in the world. They have powerful pumps that can pump water from the ocean up onto the fire. We were able to save that building by pumping all this water into the fire before the building was totally destroyed. That was the biggest problem we had.

****

I was working in the shipyard when I first found out the war was over. It was a great relief to know that the killing and the destruction would stop. When the war was over, the emergency was gone and you had the ability to go back to a normal way of life, pursuing your happiness and raising your family.

The shipyard was dismantled immediately after the war was over. Most of the ships that were left over from the war were scrapped. With one of the few that didn’t undergo scrapping, a group of old guys like me got together that operated the ships during the war and the President of the Untied States said “Okay we’ll give you one ship. Instead of going to the scrap yard you can have the ship and do whatever you want to do with it.” So they restored it slightly, and as far as I know, it’s still being used as sort of a museum piece.

My own experience was interesting because I had learned a whole new concept of fire fighting and I wanted to further that career. I thought, “well, geez, I would like to become a civilian fire fighter I could work for the LA city fire department.” I was too old by that time; I was in my late twenties and couldn’t qualify because of my age. I had to think of something else to do. I saw all of this fire equipment around and I saw how effective it was and how it was needed and everything so I decided I wanted to go into that business. So, I just wrote letters to the different companies that manufactured fire equipment and asked them if they needed a salesman. Maybe I could be a salesman. Eventually, I got a response and I actually went to work with one of the companies as a salesman of firefighting equipment. That led me to thirty years with one company. The knowledge that I had learned at the shipyard I was able to use in my work with selling, working with firefighting equipment and developing new and unusual firefighting equipment.

I went through a tremendous challenge, but I had to face it. I had no idea what the outcome might be. But, I learned from it that as the events occur that we have no control over, like the war, which we had no control over, but I was affected by it as were millions of other people. So, these events that you have no control over are going to have a bearing on your life and it depends on how you respond to those events; how you see opportunities and how you take the challenge. What I saw was an opportunity to learn and was I able to utilize this information and experience in my future.