Japanese Concrete Ships
Jbeck
It did not state anything else other than this. This ship appeared to be
somesort of freighter configuration, and was tied up to a pier.
Did the Japanese build such things as ocean-going vessels, or is this
something intended to be a decoy and nothing else?
Joe Beck
Donald Phillipson
> I saw a photograph yesterday which was titled "Japanese Concrete Ship"
> It did not state anything else other than this. This ship appeared to be
> somesort of freighter configuration, and was tied up to a pier.
Britain built several types of concrete ships during WW2
when short of steel. You still saw concrete river
barges in use on the London River in the 1950s. Once
in a while you hear nowadays of a concrete yacht, but
modern fibreglass resins ended experiments with concrete.
--
| Donald Phillipson, dphil...@trytel.com |
| Carlsbad Springs, Ottawa, Canada |
Andrew Clark
Donald Phillipson <ad...@freenet.carleton.ca> wrote
> Britain built several types of concrete ships during WW2
> when short of steel.
Very true. And, to stretch a point a little, the giant concrete caissons
which formed most of the Mulberry & Gooseberry structures on and off the
D-Day beaches were "concrete ships", being in all respects able to proceed
to sea under tow.
HOST Comp Tanker
>> when short of steel.
This tendency predated World War II, for that matter. The flagship of the Texas
Navy (typical Texian cuteness, if you ask me) is a half sunken tanker from the
World War I days; it too is largely made out of concrete and re-steel. You can
see it from the deck of the Galveston-Bolivar Island Ferry, and it's accessable
from small boats as well.
Although I'm sure that the Japanese may have considered concrete as a steel
substitute, I don't recall any such vessels making the lists during World War
II. One of the problems with concrete ships for Japan would have been that
cement was in as short supply as was steel.
The Japanese did get into wooden shipbuilding in a big way during the war, both
in larger "seagoing" ships (what most would consider to be real ships) and in a
smaller vessel known as the "seatruck". These were in the neighborhood of
eighty to one hundred feet long, way down there in the tonnage range, and were
used as "seaworthy lighters" to shift supplies from places like Rabaul to the
outlying islands. The book "Japanese Merchant Shipping in World War II" covers
this topic in some detail
Terry L. Stibal
HOSTCom...@aol.com
Luca Di Mascio
>Britain built several types of concrete ships during WW2
>when short of steel.
There is the wreck of one of these concrete ships at the foot of the cliffs
just south of Whitby, in England.