Re: PT Boat

Posted by su8overdrive On 2013/6/5 14:32:38

I remember reading one of Ralph Stein's wonderful books about classic cars, published back in the '60s. In one of his Packard chapters, he brushed over the Company's War II production as "military gewgaws."

Maybe that's a bit flip. But let's not forget that Packard's focus from 1941 on was military work, the cars downright incidental in the 1942 annual report. Packard had what some automotive historians cite as the best manufacturing machine shop in the world, a view shared by
even those over at Clark Street, certainly at Rolls-Royce, many of whose buildings still had dirt floors throughout that decade.

Packard refined and improved the Merlin and produced the big V-12s propelling the PT and Army rescue boats, based on existing marine racing engines.

But Dr. Cole raises some good points about their inefficiency. Packard, like the rest of the auto industry,
"did their part," the best they could. Packard was also handsomely p a i d for this work and was one of only two automakers to emerge profitable from the war.

Packard's legal counsel, Henry Bodman, rewrote the Merlin contract so it became the basis of all US military contracts. With 49.2% of each and every one of our federal tax dollars going to an unaudited Pentagon today, who continues to make weapons to fight last century's wars under openended contracts, well, dunno 'bout you, but i'd rather keep a little more of my money to play with my Packard.

When Henry Ford, despite his later dementia, wisely paid his workers five dollars a day, Packard's president, Alvan Macauley, accused him of running "a charitable institution."

The noxious (Frederick Winslow) Taylor time and motion studies and implementation began at Packard in 1909. How happy would you be working like that? They weren't running a hobby shop.

After the war, Packard, addicted to military largesse,
increasingly focused on jet engines, and began phoning the cars in, Ultramatic being the Company's only self-engineered offering, Torsion Level from an outsider, Bill Allison.

The war killed a lot more than 60 million people worldwide. It killed the Packard Motor Car Company, the promise of the sleek Clipper--- Clipper ragtops like the one-off Darrin built for Errol Flynn, Clipper woodies by 1943.

There was color television at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair. To this day, most film buffs and critics agree 1941 was the best ever single year for great movies.
FM radio was underway. The immediate prewar cars from most automakers were increasingly sophisticated, to drive one in original mechanical fettle that hasn't been buggered is a rare treat dear few know.

I know one of the nation's foremost Merlin rebuilders, who flies his own P-51. Years ago, he decided he wouldn't rebuild anymore Packard Merlins for the usual cowboys running them at twice their wartime take off and emergency rating manifold pressure 'til they blow up at the Reno Air Races.

Hearing such an engine fire to life, that distinct crack as it makes a low altitude pass, or seeing a PT boat skip over the waves, stirring. Of course.

But Ralph Stein may've summed it well, for those of us who are autoholics. Most War II combat vets i knew rarely wanted to talk about the war. They were too busy living their lives. Packard never got back to living their life. Not really.

Meanwhile, Dr. Cole makes some good points which have been glossed over,
and the below's interesting:

The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency by Robert Kanigel; New York, NY: Viking , 1997. xi, 675. {Note: There is a new paperback edition published by the MIT Press, 2005]

Robert Kanigel is an author, journalist, and professor of science writing at MIT.

Robert Kanigel's book explores the life of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the original champion of time-and-motion studies. In many modern management and manufacturing circles little is known about Taylor, the father of "scientific management" or "Taylorism," as his principles came to be known, yet his impact is far reaching. In Kanigel's words, "Today it is only a modest overstatement to say that we are all Taylorized, that from the assemblyline tasks limited to a fraction of a second, to lawyers recording their time by factions of an hour, to standardized McDonald's hamburgers, to information operators constrained to grant only so many seconds per call, modern life has become Taylorized." Peter Drucker suggested Taylor, alongside Darwin and Freud, was one of the most prominent figures "in the making of the modern world."