The Bridge To France

The Bridge to France is a memoir by Edward Nash Hurley, the American businessman and federal administrator who lived from 1864 to 1933 and who served as the chairman of the United States Shipping Board and the Emergency Fleet Corporation during the First World War. The book was published in 1927 and presents Hurley’s account of the enormous American shipbuilding program that supplied the merchant ships needed to transport American troops, supplies, and food to France and to the broader Allied war effort.

Hurley took over the Shipping Board in 1917 at a moment when the American merchant marine was almost non existent as a serious factor in world shipping and when the British had been losing merchant ships to German submarine warfare at a rate that threatened the entire Allied war effort. Under Hurley’s direction the United States built up the largest merchant shipbuilding program in world history to that point, with new shipyards established along both American coasts, standardised ship designs adopted to permit rapid mass production, and substantial federal funding directed to the entire effort.

The bridge of the title refers to the chain of merchant ships that the program produced, the bridge that carried American men and material across the Atlantic to the Western Front. The actual statistics that Hurley presents are striking. The American shipbuilding program produced more merchant tonnage during the war than the rest of the world combined had built in the same period, and the rate of construction at the peak of the program was substantially faster than anything that had been thought possible before the war began.

The memoir is a substantial primary document of the American war effort and of the broader history of American industrial mobilisation. Hurley writes from the inside of the federal administrative effort and presents detailed accounts of the various crises, decisions, personalities, and accomplishments of the shipbuilding program. The book includes substantial documentary material from the period and is a valuable source for historians working on the American war effort and on the broader history of American industrial policy.

The book runs to about four hundred pages and is best read by selecting particular chapters of historical interest. It is essential reading for historians of American First World War mobilisation and of American merchant marine policy.