Warbird Information Exchange

P.J. O'Rourke once said "Water causes rust, salt causes rust, so imagine what salt water can do" (or words to that effect) Even if you put the ships on dry land, most of them are located near the ocean and environments with a lot of salt. Putting them on land will solve a lot of problems, but not all of them.

Ultimately, it all comes down to money. If we were facing this issue 30 or 40 years ago, the general population would be more willing to help out. Pop culture has changed. In the 1970s, most schoolkids (particularly boys) could name the three American carriers at Midway (partially due to the movie, partially due to the propensity of model making). Now, how many could? Likewise, in the 1960s, schoolchildren helped make contributions to save the Alabama from scrapping. I think a public school campaign to save a warship these days wouldn't fly as saving an "implement of destruction" would not be considered politically correct.

If you make history "cool" again, you get more people coming through the doors. More people = more money = more money available for preservation. The best way to make sure these ships are still around is to instill in the next generation the desire to keep them around.

If that's the case, then I find that really disturbing. I can't imagine the meeting when pondering a new museum ship goes anything like this:
Okay, the ship will be delivered on the 14th. The pier is confirmed and the 30 years lease just got signed yesterday
What about 31 years from now?
Say what?
We have the money, space and people lined up now, but what about 31 years from now? Many of us will be dead by then, how do we make sure the ship won't be scrapped or that we're gonna saddle a group in the future to an impossible situation, maintaining a ship that big with a few people and no funding?
Uggh... why do you always start this? Why can't you be pumped that we finally got the ship after all the red tape with the Navy? Why can't you enjoy what we accomplished? People will love having this ship here!
Sure, right NOW they will, but what about years from now? We're all so pumped but we only have a few dozen people now willing to work on the ship, in the Navy they had hundreds working all day, every day on it. That's gonna catch up in a while.
Oh, quit raining on the parade. We got the ship. It'll work itself out!
You know the version of this group 30-40 years from now is going to wonder what we were thinking without a real plan to keep this ship afloat in the longterm.
That never happens...
Are you nuts? Does "USS Texas" or "USS Olympia" ring any bells for you? That's gonna be this ship by the time our grandkids are middle aged!We can't just assume 'it'll work itself out'!
It will, don't worry.
Hmm. Maybe the local RR preservation group could use some people. At least a locomotive will be okay with minimal maintenance on display indoors...

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Life member, 91st BG Memorial Association
Owner, 1944 Willys MB #366014
Former REMF (US Army, O3)

The Yorktown and others like it would have gone straight to the scrappers 30 years ago if cities like Charleston hadn't stepped up to the pate. While it is unfortunate that nobody has the means to keep them in top shape forever, we gain a huge benefit by having a conservation program which allows them to be on public display for decades. Sure, the inevitable eventually comes, but in the Yorktown's case, it can probably be pushed back 20 more years by spending a fraction of the $85 million previously mentioned.

But some day, it will be at a point where a patch or a coat of paint won't do the job. That's just an unfortunate fact.

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I'd suggest that before the Navy donates something that size, knowing darned full well that eventually they're going to be asked for assistance decades down the line, they require a plan of the people they're donating it to that extends for the really longterm care of the vessel in question. There should be some kind of workable plan for drydocking the ship when it needs it. Otherwise, maybe it should be turned into razorblades.
I'd rather there be 20 ships in good preservation with support for the long term than 40 that are one sump pump failure away from becoming a reef right at the pier. And make no mistake, there are more than a couple that are in that bad a shape right now with no real plan that calls for actual needed work to really take place right now!
But hey, your idea of "rescue them all and it'll all work out somehow" attidue has some merit. It has kept ships out of the scrapyard. But at what cost later on? If 5-10 years later we're recalling the Yorktown, Olympia or one of the many museum ships ready to sink in the past tense, were they really saved at all? I'd call your 'plan' (if you could even use the term) to get the ship and hope for the best to be delaying the inevitable, and at the further cost of perhaps preventing other ships from being saved later on because I know for sure the Navy is sick of donating them and having the people whine years later that they can't maintain them!

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Life member, 91st BG Memorial Association
Owner, 1944 Willys MB #366014
Former REMF (US Army, O3)

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Easy girl, it will be ok.

I for one am glad that she was saved, so my family could tour a part of our history. I went 32 yr. ago when they had the only nuclear powered cargo ship Savanna and now it's gone, but I had the pleasure to walk its decks and interior. As we all know as hard as we try nothing lives forever, but we don't quit trying to save what we can. I do have pic. to remember all of them at Patriots Point.

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When you meet a Veteran shake his or her hand and thank them, they earned your freedom.
I plan to fly in as many B-25 as possible be fore I die! B-25 for ever!!!

Come now, someone holding a different point of view is hardly reason to call for a thread to be closed. Discussion of differing viewpoints can be very helpful. I see nothing that warrants the thread to be closed, especially given that some valid questions are raised concerning the long-term preservation and future of items of machinery which have had a part to play in warbird history.

Thread remains open.

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Personally I'm glad not everyone thinks like Lee. We can't save them all, I get that. On the other hand, I'd rather some short-sighted fool try and give it their best to save them, if even for a couple or three more decades. That will just be that many more people who will get to experience and learn about that particular piece of history.

Sure, maybe many of them will fail; in a lot of cases they may eventually, but good on them for trying. History is just a point in time and yes, many of these will probably become rusty reefs at some point in the future but I'm glad that a good number of short-sighted fools were brave enough to dedicate themselves to such huge undertakings so I, and millions of others, could have seen them. Sure, any average Joe can put on a pair of HBTs and drive around a Willys MB and I'm glad those folks do that too, but it takes a big commitment and in many cases a lot of stress and heartache to take on something of this magnitude.

Lee I’m glad you weren’t around to consult Mr. Maloney, or Mr. Soplata and tell them what short-sighted fools they were they were trying to save dozens of old derelict aircraft that nobody wanted. I'm also glad you weren't around to tell my father, Carl Scholl, and Tony Ritzman that they couldln't afford to save derilict abondoned B-25s and restoring them isn't a viable business back when nobody cared. These people didn't know they were going to succeed when they started out, they didn't have a detailed business plan and cost and profit center model for the next 30 years. They said, we are going to succeed until we can't.

My father is one of those fools who saw a WWII airfield rotting into dust back in the early 1980s. He couldn’t bear to see it destroyed so he scrapped up what money he could to buy this place that was clearly outside of his capability to restore and preserve. 25 years later it still stands, not perfectly restored but preserved in much better condition than it was when he found it. Since then, hundreds of the original pilots who trained there have returned and tens of thousands of people have come to visit and have learned about history. He's managed to do this without a dime from the public coffers, and with a ton of personal sacrifice. He doesn't want any thanks or adulation, he just wants the place to exist as a memorial to those who served and never returned. Thanks to him it still does. Someday it might not, and to me that doesn’t mean he is a short-sided failure. To me it makes him a hero who stood up to try and do something that most people would be afraid to do.

I thank God for those who are too foolish to know what they can’t accomplish.

Ryan

Interestingly, Ryan, I think your thanksgiving inadvertantly targeted at least half of everyone who posts at WIX!

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It was a good idea, it just didn't work.

Dan, myself included!

"You can save some but you can't save them all." FACT

"Eventually some that were saved will be lost." FACT

"It's better to have had them for a while than to have never had them at all." DEAN'S SILLY OPINION.

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Dean Hemphill, K5DH
Port Charlotte, Florida

You guys are riding p51 too hard for making some valid and important points. He has bent over backward not to insult the folks putting effort and money into these artifacts and has not called anyone a fool. His key point, which seems to be getting lost here, is that if a ship is preserved for 30 years and then scrapped, that is not a costless thing. The approach of "Well at least it was here to be looked at for 30 years" may not take into account the big picture.

Take a simplified situation. Suppose we have two ships and enough resources to endow one for indefinite preservation, so that in principle it could be preserved for 200+ years, but if those resources are divided between the two, they will both be scrap in 30 years. If the division of resources is chosen, the well-intentioned work going into the ships for 30 years is not exactly wasted -- there is some value to the "at least we had it for 30 years" attitude -- but it is misallocated. In the long run, which is what concerns p51, we are better off with one well-supported ship.

By the way, when I say "we" in the sentence above, I mean society, not we who are hanging around here now. We present buffs might well be happier to see two ships, which might not even look too shabby in our lifetimes, than just one that will last indefinitely. There is sometimes a "let's experience it now" approach that I sense in the warbird community that comes at the expense of posterity, of our grandchildren. Heavy discounting of the future is a big problem in our society, in many more important ways than this.

One problem with p51's long-run, big-picture view, however, is his assumption that if fewer ships were saved, more resources could be allocated to them. I have to question whether that is true. Outside of ships still owned by the navy, we have no central planning agency to decide how many ships can be preserved for the long run, which ones those should be, and direct resources to those ships. It is not necessarily the case that the people in Texas who support their ship would send their money to South Carolina if their ship were not there. Folks have an understandable local bias about where they put their funds and effort. If a local community cannot support a ship, then that might be the ball game. If there is no chance of pooling resources to preserve the optimal, smaller number of ships indefinitely, then we may not be able to do much better than a bunch of local, mostly futile struggles to preserve essentially doomed ships for as long as possible. If so, that is sad.

The analogy with warbird aircraft is poor, by the way. They are fundamentally different from a preservation perspective. An aircraft, or even a whole bunch of them, is fairly easy for one person to provide with basic shelter from the elements and preserve in restorable condition, and they can move physically to where the money is. In relative terms, they are small, simple and well-documented enough to be built from scratch essentially, so there is almost no "point of no return" at which they have deteriorated beyond hope of restoration. Neither p51 nor anyone else is saying that any approach that has been taken with respect to aircraft is foolish or ill-advised; it isn't even relevant to the topic here.

August