Samuel Murray Robinson - Chief of BuShips

Chief of BuShips

In 1940, Robinson became the first chief of the Bureau of Ships (BuShips), a new division formed by consolidating the Bureau of Engineering with the Bureau of Construction and Repair. The merger was the brainchild of Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison, who wanted centralized control of shipbuilding but had failed in a previous effort to create a chief of shore operations, which the sea-going admirals had resisted as placing excessive responsibility and power in the hands of a mere technical officer.

In the Bureau of Ships, Robinson generated designs for the ship types ordered by the Chief of Naval Operations. According to Robinson, picking a ship design was like buying a hat: for every new class of ship, the Bureau drafted up to ten different designs, unofficially nicknamed "spring styles". After six or eight months of drafting work, these tentative blueprints were submitted for consideration by the General Board of the Navy, which then informed the Bureau which choice it preferred.

As coordinator of shipbuilding, Robinson laid the groundwork for the dramatic expansion of the fleet under the two-ocean Navy program. Under Robinson, the time between contract plans and working plans was cut from between 15 and 18 months to less than a year, an efficiency achieved in part by Robinson's decision to freeze the designs of combat ships in each category in order to stop the endless engineering delays incurred by frequent design changes. He mustered legislative support by testifying some 50 times before Congressional committees to explain the Navy's materiel requirements, and mobilized industry resources by exhaustively surveying and reserving the nation's shipbuilding facilities. Thanks in large part to Robinson's careful preparation, when Congress appropriated the funds to expand the fleet by 70% in September 1940, the Navy awarded almost every contract within an hour after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the bill.

By March 1942, the completion date for the two-ocean Navy program, originally projected for 1947, had already been pushed forward to 1945-46. Every major shipyard in the United States was either building or repairing some kind of Navy vessel. Many vessels would be completed more than a year ahead of the schedules specified by their original contracts, including aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, and other light warships. By the end of Robinson's tenure, the Bureau of Ships was churning out ships faster than the other bureaus could outfit them with instrumentation and other essentials.