is interesting to note how that schedule might progress and what it would do.

The first relief would come from a pipe line across Florida. You can make any assumption you wish as to the size or number of these pipe lines. I have assumed for the purpose of setting up the schedule that we will have three 8-inch pipe lines. There may be three 10inch pipe lines, or one or two, or what not; but that is the basis upon which I have set up this schedule. Those three 8-inch pipe lines will carry 90,000 barrels per day of petroleum.

The number of barges of the standard size which I have mentioned, operating from Port Arthur, Tex., to the end of the pipe line at Port St. Joe, Fla., picking it up again at Jacksonville and carrying it north to Philadelphia, to carry 90,000 barrels a day would be 284. That is the number of barges that would be necessary to do that work. That would mean delivery in Philadelphia of 8.18 barges per day. That could begin during the 5-month period after the program was gotten under way. That would be the maximum capacity of those 3 pipe lines from that time forward. In other words, 284 barges would deliver from Port Arthur, in connection with the pipe line, to Philadelphia 90,000 barrels a day; that much and no

more.

To increase that flow we would have to enlarge or increase both the pipe lines and the number of barges. If we assume a construction period for the canal across Florida of 15 months—you can assume it as 20 months, 24 months, 36 months, whatever you may want to-if we assume it as 15 months, and we have been building barges on this schedule, which is an attainable schedule, of 210 per month, the canal should be open during the sixteenth month, at the end of the fifteenth month, at which time we would have 1,470 barges constructed and onethird that many tugs.

Senator VANDENBURG. That is all contingent on finding the necessary propulsion machinery?

Mr. BUCKMAN. Yes, absolutely. You must find the propulsion machinery, or you cannot do the work.

Senator VANDENBURG. Are you going to discuss the possibility of finding it?

Mr. BUCKMAN. No, sir; I do not propose to do that. I merely show that these materials include not only petroleum, but equally important materials that must be moved.

The director of the Office of Defense Transportation has stated in the public press that the railroads have probably reached their maximum capacity of general transportation, including oil transportation. We are still desperately short of means of transport. If there is any other way to do this it would be well to consider it also. But I say that if you are going to cure that shortage we must find what is necessary to implement this plan of water transportation. If we cannot, the plan will fail, of course. You must have barges; you must have tugs; you must have whatever steel is required; and do not for a moment believe that you have any choice in the matter. If we do not supplement this transportation between these portions of the country to the mills at Bethlehem and Sparrows Point and the other steel mills in New England, you are not going to continue your steel production.

I venture to say that you can repay for all of the steel that is required for this program by additional transportation of scrap, by the absolutely essential transportation of dolomite and refractories, for the lining of furnaces; by the transportation of sulfur, without which you cannot make thin steel sheets. They must be pickled in surfuric acid. The food package for the Army is not coming through unless we can keep our steel mills in operation; and you cannot manufacture those thin steel sheets without sulfur for the sulfuric acid. We have not much choice in this matter.

Senator VANDENBURG. I am inclined to agree with you. I do not think we have any choice. I think the W. P. B. has all the choice.

Mr. BUCKMAN. It is my hope, Senator, that higher authority than the W. B. P. will be able to solve this with proper guidance and direction. That is only a hope. That is all, as a citizen, that I can

say.

Senator VANDENBERG. I share your hope. I want to express my gratitude for one thing. I have heard several times today the strange suggestion that Congress is the higher authority.

Mr. BUCKMAN. Some of us are still of that opinion.

Now, to return to this schedule. The first month the canal is opened on this schedule it would transport to Philadelphia daily 466,000 barrels of petroleum. In addition to that, it would transport 148,000 tons of dry cargo to and from the East and points on the Gulf coast. That schedule runs through to 24 months. That is an arbitrary stopping place. At the end of 24 months, on that schedule, we can deliver 731,000 barrels daily to Philadelphia from Port Arthur and 232,000 tons of dry cargo.

Let me give you an idea of what that means in terms of shipping. During the sixteenth month we would be transporting on that schedule what it would take a fleet of 357 ocean-going ships to transport, 247 cargo ships, and 110 tankers.

At the end of the twenty-fourth month we would be transporting tonnage which would be the equivalent of ocean-carried tonnage of 557 ships in that trade, 383 cargo ships, and 174 tankers.

The total tonnage represented there would be 127,531,000 tons a year; and I call attention to the fact that that is substantially the total tonnage of our Gulf and Alantic ocean-borne trade in 1940.

The point I wish to make is that with this canal we can restore substantially the ocean-borne transportation which we have lost. This is not simply a question of supplying a certain amount of petroleum to the eastern part of the United States.

General Reybold has stated publicly that this canal will carry all of the petroleum to the eastern United States. It is easy to see on an attainable schedule how that is the case. I do not mean a deficit of 400,000 or 500,000 barrels, but the entire quantity, in addition to the dry cargoes.

I should now like to submit some figures for your consideration. Assume that the Government had to pay for every one of those barges and every one of those tugs, which, of course, it should not have to pay for, because many of them can be financed-in fact, the great bulk of them can be financed. The total number of barges required by the end of the twenty-fourth month would be 2,310 multiplied by 2, or 4,620.

Let me interject and say that if that sounds like a great many barges, the officia! reports from our agencies in Germany in 1940 showed that there were in Germany 8,500 barges of 1,000-ton capacity in operation on the German waterways at that time.

Half that many barges-4,620-at the price estimated by the Office of Defense Transportation, $36,000 apiece, would cost $166,320,000. They would require 1,540 tugs at a price, estimated by the same agency, of $171,000. Those would not be miscellaneous scrap tugs; they would be the best tugs you could build, powered with Diesel engines having 600 horsepower, and made of steel. It is not necessary that we have those, but I am taking the higher figures on those. Those tugs would cost $263,000,000.

All the improvements contained in this bill should cost $93,000,000. That would make a total of $522,320,000 even if the Government had to pay for all of it.

The 174 tankers which they would replace, at $1,885,000, which is a pre-war figure, would cost $322,000,000.

The 383 cargo ships which they would replace would cost $604,374,000.

That would make a total of $927,144,000 if we put that money into ocean shipping and if we could use that shipping in the face of enemy attack.

That makes a saving of $404,824,000 to carry the same amount of material, and carry it safely, that the barge movement over this proposed waterway can accomplish.

It can be done. It has been done in other places. Germany and France have done it, England has to a large extent done it, Russia has done it. It can be done here.

I urge that you do not consider this thing pivotally on any of its more or less minor features; if you please, look at it from the overall picture of a relief, a relief which must be had if we are going to prosecute this war successfully.

A few more words, if you please, on the relation of this movement to the military situation on the Pacific coast. You know, of course, that all supplies, troop movements, and so forth, that move to the Pacific coast from the valley and points east must go over six lines of rail. Those six lines of steel are all that connect us with the Pacific coast. That they are totally inadequate to carry the burden has been accepted as an axiom by the War College for years. Testimony to that effect has been before this committee, experience of the last 6 months has rammed it home.

We depend upon ocean movement through the Panama Canal to supply and protect the west coast of the United States.

The Straits of Florida, the Windward passage, the Mona passage, the Anegada passage, and all the other similar passages in the Lesser Antilles, all the way from Key West to Trinidad, are substantially closed. We all know that. The only way to get ships through there is at the price of a dreadful proportion in sinkings and losses or by the use of convoys which we simply do not have. Those are the ordinary approaches to the Panama Canal.

The only other approach is from the ports of the Gulf through the Yucatan Channel. If the enemy can succeed in substantially closing that channel-and he has already made a long stride toward it

there will be no possibility of our supplying the west coast of the United States with the necessary materials and supplies except over these six lines of rail, which are inadequate for the purpose.

A substitute for that-not an adequate substitute but a very important contribution-would be the west-bound movement over this waterway to Houston and then transporting it across by Southern Pacific to southern California. Three years ago that would have appeared to be a fantastic plan.

You may be interested to know that there is now being considered the possibility of a railroad being constructed across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That might take care of part of our situation if the Straits of Yucatan are closed.

So again I ask that you look at this thing from the over-all dimensions, from the over-all picture.

Our railroads are carrying more than double the burden that they carried in ordinary times, due to the shutting off of our ocean-borne commerce. Few people realize that in ton-miles more than half the domestic freight of the United States is transported by water. Most people do not realize the tremendous tonnage coming from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast by ship or from the Gulf to the Atlantic and the Pacific or up and down the Atlantic or up and down the Pacific. Now the Pacific coastal trade, the Atlantic coastal trade, the intercoastal trade, and the Gulf-Atlantic trade are stopped; therefore, automatically more than half our ton-mileage has been thrown upon the shoulders of the railroads-that without beginning to consider the increased transportation developed by the war.

Probably we could not have a better authority behind the over-all railway transportation system than Mr. Eastman. He has stated that the railroads can take no more. Yet we are greviously short in our facilities. This project-this group of projects, if you wish to call it that, as outlined in this bill-this waterway-will supply to a far greater degree this deficiency than any other plan of which I know or which I have heard discussed.

There is one detail on which I will ask permission to spend 2 or 3 minutes, in order to clear up what seems to have been somewhat of a misapprehension on the part of some of those discussing this, and that is that with this pipe line across Florida you would approach some solution of the petroleum situation. As I have attempted to show, unless you have the harges for that, you cannot do so.

One figure may not be amiss. To bring 250,000 barrels daily to Philadelphia over the intracoastal canal to Port St. Joe, Fla., and then to transport that by nine 8-inch lines-that is what it would taketo Jacksonville, and then north by barge to Philadelphia, would require 730 barges. To carry that same amount of oil all the way on the crossFlorida canal between the same points of origin and destinationthat is, Port Arthur, Tex., and Philadelphia, Pa.—would require 806 barges. There is a difference of only 64 barges anyway.

Please do not put your dependence in the fact that if you get the pipe line in you have something. The pipe line, I think, is a wise provision, whether it comes by means of this bill, whether it comes by Executive order, or in some other way. Just as a contractor who builds a bridge provides a temporary detour for traffic during the time of construction, so this pipe line will be of tremendous advantage, and I

74347-42--4

hope to see put in as many pipe lines as we can get to serve until the time when we can get an unlimited flow by water. But you cannot get the capacity of the pipe lines through to the East until you have substantially the same number of barges and tugs constructed that you would need for the other waterway.

Madam Chairman, that concludes my presentation. I know that I have overrun my time, and I thank you for your courtesy. I shall be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Senator ANDREWS. An estimate has been made that it will take so many months or years to construct a barge canal across to the St. Johns River. Are we to assume that that would have a depth of from 10 to 12 feet from the Gulf to the St. Johns River, from which point it is 10 or 12 feet farther north?

Mr. BUCKMAN. It would be 12 feet in depth, according to the plan of the engineers, Senator, from the Gulf to the St. Johns River, where the depth is 13 feet.

Senator ANDREWS. On the assumption that it would take 24 months to build, is the calculation made on the basis of three shifts throughout the day, as is the case in most of the projects now?

Mr. BUCKMAN. I do not think so. I am not privy to the computations in the office of the Chief of Engineers; however, in discussing this matter with officers of the corps, I have been told that if they are not given any particular priorities in materials and equipment, it might easily take 24 months or longer to build that canal across the State; if they are given priorities, they can build it in far shorter time. In other words, they take the entirely proper attitude, I think, for that agency to take, namely, that they must assume conditions as they are, with the authority which they now have, when they prepare an estimate.

As an engineer, I can give you my opinion for what it is worthand I have moved a great deal of dirt. That canal can be constructed in 15 months. I think that any officer of the Corps of Engineers will tell you the same thing if you grant him the authority and the priorities for materials and equipment.

Senator ANDREWS. It would not take any more material to work three shifts than it would to work one?

Mr. BUCKMAN. I think in all previous work on the Florida ship canal, during the time when a certain amount of that excavation was being done in 1935, the plan developed then was for the dredges to work 24 hours, but for the drag lines and the dry excavation material to be worked only on the one shift, the daylight shift. That could, of course, be stepped up. With this shallow canal through there, there will be proportionately a good deal more dry excavation, which could be stepped up to three shifts, than wet excavation, which could be done by dredges.

There is no reason to suppose that, if Congress so desires, it is not physically possible to complete that canal and open it to traffic in 15 months.

Senator ANDREWS. What percentage is already dug, if you know? Mr. BUCKMAN. Well, again I would have to give you my understanding and not accurate information from the Army engineers. However, in discussing this matter heretofore over the past several years, since the cessation of work at that time, they have credited