1942 - Transportation

Transportation

The last new U.S. automobile that will be produced until 1945 rolls off the Ford assembly line February 10 as auto plants turn to producing tanks, Jeeps, aircraft, and other war matériel on cost-plus contracts under the direction of the War Production Board.

New York's East River Drive opens May 26 with ceremonies led by Mayor La Guardia. The roadbed between 23rd and 34th streets is filled with bricks and rubble left from air raids on London and donated by the British, but the new drive that cuts Manhattan off from the East River is poorly drained and will flood in heavy rains.

The Alcan International Highway opens November 21 through wilderness to link Fairbanks, Alaska, with Dawson Creek, British Columbia. Canadian troops and about 2,000 civilian contractors have helped 10,607 U.S. Corps of Engineers soldiers (3,695 of them black) to build the 1,522-mile road in just 8 months.

The Canadian transportation giant Bombardier Inc. has its beginnings in a Montreal company that makes snowgoing equipment. It will produce Ski Doo snowmobiles and expand to make passenger trains, mass-transit railcars, utility vehicles, amphibious planes, large and small aircraft, and boats.

The French Line passenger ship S.S. Normandie that went into service in 1935 has been gutted by fire and capsizes at her New York pier February 9 while being converted for troop transport service. Renamed the U.S.S. Lafayette January 1 after U.S. seizure, she will be righted, towed away, and scrapped.

The 6-year-old Cunard-White Star passenger ship-turned-troop carrier S.S. Queen Mary collides with the British cruiser Curaçao off Norway October 2 and sustains a huge gash in her hull. The cruiser sinks with a loss of 338 men, the Queen Mary's damage is repaired, and news of the incident will be suppressed until 1945.

The Liberty Ship Robert E. Peary launched November 9 by the Kaiser Shipyards is delivered November 12—7½ days after her keel was laid (see 1941). Henry J. Kaiser has built the first steel mill on the Pacific Coast to produce steel for his shipyards, and he builds a magnesium plant as well. He also manufactures aircraft, Jeeps, and other war matériel in plants acquired for the purpose (see aluminum, 1945).

The IL-2 Stormovik dive bomber designed by Soviet engineer Sergei Vlandimirovich Ilyushin, 48, goes into volume production for use against the USSR's German invaders. Soviet factories will produce some 36,000 of the heavily armored planes, and the IL-2 will serve as the Soviet equivalent of the U.S. DC-3 introduced in 1936.