USS LST-374 (center) and USS LST-314 (extreme right) are at the ramps in the background. But the town kept the waterworks, sewage disposal system, better streets, fire protection equipment, and a new school building that the Navy built.Ī mobile crane lifts a crate during pre-invasion loading in an English port, circa late May or early June 1944. The article includes the recollections of the native Sandra Timmons on the impact of the population growth on the town.īy May, 1946, the shipyard had been silent for almost a year and structures were being torn down. The Chicago Tribune has a big article on the shipyard by Ted Gregory on page 12 of the Main section of their June 8, 2014, issue. So the population of Seneca was an order of magnitude more than it is today. During the war, about 27,000 people worked at the shipyard. The population at the beginning of the war was 1,200. My road atlas indicates the current population of Seneca is 2,371. LST-77 lands Fifth Army M-4 "Sherman" Tanks on the Anzio Waterfront, 27 April 1944. When they got to New Orleans, the mast was raised again and the radar equipment was installed. The ships were launched with the radar mast laid flat on the deck. Observers on the south bank were frequently drenched by the wave of water traveling from the river across the fields. They hit the water at a speed of 22 to 28 mph. Because they were launching into a river, the ships slid in sideways.
The initial plan was to launch a ship each week, but CBI achieved a launch rate of 7 per month. The last ship was built with 280,000 person hours.ģ9 gallons of champagne were used to launch the 157 ships.
It required 880,000 man hours (actually, probably some women hours) to construct the first ship which was launched Dec. Teams moved from ship to ship doing the same work on each one. Many a town had a water tower which had been constructed by CBI. Chicago Bridge and Iron Company was chosen as the contractor because of their welding experience manufacturing their primary product-pressurized tanks of various types and shapes. Most jobs began with a two-week training period, but welders were trained for four to six weeks. To construct one ship, the hull department welded 23,300 pieces totaling 1,340 tons of steel ( Colby). Sections were fabricated and hoisted into place to avoid the time and cost of erecting scaffolding. There were 3 Caterpillar tractors to move a ship to the launch way. As the ships were completed, they were moved to a central way and then prepared for launch. There were 15 berths parallel to the river for erecting ships. The 200 acre site was wedge shaped with three-fourths of a mile along the river. Landing Ships Tank (LST) land invasion supplies on Omaha Beach, shortly after the 6 June 1944 D-Day assault. Seneca was chosen because only 30 inches of topsoil and creviced limestone had to be removed to get to solid sandstone bedrock that could support the weight of the steel supplies and erected hulls. This freed up the coastal shipyards to build the larger ships such as aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers and destroyers. Thus the 9-foot channel of the Illinois River was adequate for these ships even though they were 327 feet long and weighed 5,500 tons. Landing Ships were designed to have a flat bottom with a shallow draft so that they could get close to land. has pictures of LST-199 being launched at Seneca and unloading at Normandy. 23 of the LSTs participated in the D-Day assault. It built 157 of the 1051 LSTs (Landing Ship, Tank) that were built during WW2. built the "Prairie Shipyard" in Seneca, IL, to build landing ships. (National Archives) via NavyTimesĭuring World War II, Chicago Bridge and Iron Co. LST-325 stranded at low tide on 12 June 1944, while delivering materiel to the Normandy beachhead. (For future reference: USLST contains three photos of the Evansville yard.)
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