Little Stinker

She looked wrong. In many respects she had proved unpractical. Now the odd-shaped Sea Otter rocked at her mooring in Charleston Harbor, gathering rust. Shipbuilders, sick of hearing about her. sighed: "That stinker." But during her short career she had plowed up a wake which still boiled last week. She had become an "affair."

Last summer, sold on the idea that the 250-ft., 2,240-ton "tin can" might be the answer to the submarine menace, impressed by the performance of an 80-ft. model, Franklin Roosevelt and Navy Secretary Knox decided to have a full-sized Otter built, try her out. Mr. Knox ordered his special assistant, Joseph W. Powell, former president of United Shipyards, to go to work.

Quickly built, the Otter had her first trials. "Very satisfactory," chuffed Secretary Knox. People began to believe that whole shoals of Sea Otters would shortly squirt out of U.S. shipyards, start bobbing across the Atlantic in schools. But nothing happened. Two months ago Mr. Knox finally admitted the idea was dead.

This was the signal for a more than routine uproar. Columnists, Congressmen and Otter-lovers wanted to know why. A Senate investigating committee took a look, trumpeted: the vessel had not had a full and fair trial; Navy and Maritime Commission officials (Powell, Rear Admiral Emory Land) had been hostile to the sponsors and their idea; obstacles had been deliberately put in the way. Mrs. Walter Lippmann and her good friend Eleanor Roosevelt carried on a vigorous backstage campaign. Mrs. Lippmann's husband thundered that the Maritime Commission was waterlogged with ancient prejudices. "What happened to the Sea Otter ... is proof positive, I submit, that no really new invention ... is likely to be welcomed and given a proper test."

"Flaming Coffins." What had happened to the Sea Otter'? Navy and Maritime Commission men, British agents had attended her trials. But their reports were not made public. This was the main reason that the Sea Otter became an "affair." For more than a week, a lengthy press release on the subject had lain unreleased on the desk of glum Mr. Knox. Said Mr. Powell ruefully: "I thought this Sea Otter thing was too small and unimportant to bother about after we had made our decision." The decision: thumbs down. Some of the reasons, from official files:

>In a 30-mile wind and five-foot waves, the little Otter had rolled as much as 38 degrees-enough to convince passengers, clinging desperately to handholds, that only tough, trained "destroyer crews" could ever sail in her, and then only under compulsion. Almost twice as many men would be required to operate her, per ton of cargo carried, as a conventional merchantman.

>Her maneuverability was excellent except going astern. After one trial run it took a Navy tug an hour of backing & filling to get her into dock.

>Her shallow draft (eleven ft.) was a feature. But her four propellers, sticking out under her bottom on vertical shafts, like outboard motors, increased her actual draft to 17 ft.

>Though she made 10.6 knots with a load corresponding to about 1,300 tons of cargo, the conventional Maritime Liberty Ships made 9.75 knots on the same power while carrying seven times as much.

>Use of readily obtainable narrow-strip mill steel in her hull was no longer an exclusive advantage. Ships of conventional design had been adapted to the use of narrow strip too.

>After only some 150 hours' use, there was possible evidence of deterioration in her 16 gasoline engines. Experts figured she might have to carry from six to ten extra engines as spares. Gasoline as fuel was not only extremely hazardous ("flaming coffins," one critic dubbed the Otter), but more expensive and difficult to get than other fuels.

>The cargo capacity of the ship was too small to justify the expense.

Last week, more to quiet the rumpus than anything, President Roosevelt gave the Otter's indignant backers (Weaver Associates, W. Starling Burgess, designer of the America's Cup defenders Enterprise and Ranger, Commander Hamilton Bryan, U.S. Navy, et al.) $20,000 to try again, work over their design. Their point: the Otter was only experimental, was never intended to be a frozen design. To meet some of the objections, Bryan and Burgess proposed to increase the Otter's cargo space, move her engines to the stern, substitute 150-h.p. diesel engines for gasoline-fueled Chryslers. But where Chrysler engines could have been procured in quantity, 150-h.p. diesels were hard to come by. Critics pointed out that, if all objections were met, the Sea Otter would probably end up as just an undersized cargo ship of orthodox design.

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