# Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable.....CVE's, how safe were they?



## Lucky13 (Jan 5, 2014)

With whatever brilliant means of construction, Kaiser seem to have cut corners on materials and components etc..* An escort carrier had fewer watertight compartments than many, if not most other warships. Their power was provided by those inexpensive and idiosyncratic Skinner Uniflow steam engines rather than turbines, which did not conform to Navy specifications and were pretty much unknown to the young engineering sailors who had graduated from the USN schools.* The thin steel used to build the ships had high sulfur and phosphorus in it and were quite brittle, which meant that if hit, it would burn quickly and break up fast, which had happened to the USS Liscome Bay, torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on November 24, 1943 and sunk within 30 minutes. Also, the ships were built without blower systems to ventilate the lower compartments; the crews suffered whether they were in the freezing North Atlantic or the sweltering South Pacific....


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