Houston’s deep-water port and its protected location from open waters made it ideal for locating other defense facilities. The U.S. Army established an ordinance depot, and close by was the Hughes Tool Company’s Dickenson Gun Plant. And then there was shipbuilding.
World War II gave birth to two shipbuilding operations on the channel. The first was a subsidiary of New York’s Todd Shipbuilding Corporation—the Houston Shipbuilding Corporation. The other was the Brown Shipbuilding Company. Together, they churned out over 572 vessels for the United States that included Liberty Ships, sub chasers, landing craft, and destroyers. Before the first hull was launched, however, Houston would suffer a blow to her morale.
The USS Houston (CA-30) steamed into the Port of Houston to visit her namesake back in 1930, but she was still close to the hearts of Houstonians. Just two months after Pearl Harbor, early in 1942, the Houston and the Australian cruiser Perth were inadvertently caught in a trap while taking on superior enemy forces. They sank one transport and forced three others to beach before meeting their fate. Perth succumbed to enemy fire first, leaving the Houston to fight alone for another hour until she was sunk. Of the original crew of 1,061 men, 368 survived. On May 30, 1942, 1,000 new Navy recruits, known as the Houston Volunteers, were sworn in at a dedication ceremony in downtown Houston to replace those believed lost on USS Houston. They would serve on the new light cruiser Houston (CL-81), which was formerly to be named Vicksburg.
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| Launch of the Samuel B Roberts from Brown Shipbuilding. |
Two years later, another ship with Houston ties would fight against overwhelming odds with honor and courage. The ship was the product of the Brown shipyard and christened USS Samuel B. Roberts (DE-413) She was part of Taffy 3, an epically heroic group of small convoy escort vessels that confronted a Japanese battleship force during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944. Specifically, Taffy 3 only consisted of six escort carriers, three destroyers, and four destroyer escorts. The escort carriers withdrew from the main battle leaving the destroyers. These were not big or heavily armored vessels. And they stood toe-to-toe with four Japanese battleships, including the largest, meanest battleship ever built, the Yamato, along with six heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, eleven destroyers, and some odd aircraft piloted by Kamikaze. It was akin to a Chihuahua taking on a bull elephant. In the end, Taffy 3 suffered heavy losses, but it inflicted enough damage on the Japanese to necessitate their retreat from the battle.
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| Samuel B. Roberts cruising in the Pacific shortly before engaging the Imperial Japanese Navy In October 1944. |
The Taffy 3 incident took place in late October of 1944. Six months later, Germany surrendered and four months after that, Japan surrendered. Having gained control of the seas in early 1945, U.S. commercial shipping resumed. Ship arrivals to the Port of Houston quickly climbed, and cargo tonnage started increasing, too. In fact, within a year of the end of the war, cargo handling exceeded the pre-war peak set in 1939 and reached almost 32 million tons.
