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t h e I n s t a n t b u I l d I n g
SIMPLE TO MANUFACTURE AND EASY TO ASSEMBLE, THE QUONSET HUT OUTLASTED THE WAR FOR WHICH IT WAS BUILT
Although it's never gotten nearly as much glory, the humble Quonset hut was the architectural equivalent of the jeep in World War 11. Like the jeep, it was simple, rugged, versatile, and easy to manufacture; and like the jeep, it was a ubiquitous part of the scenery for American servicemen both during the war and after they got home.
A team of designers developed the utilitarian barrel-backed hut at Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island-hence the name. The leaders of the team were Peter Dejongh, an engineer, and Otto Brandenberger, an architect. Both worried for the George A. Fuller Company, a big New York City construction firm.
With America preparing for the possibility of war, the Navy approached Fuller in late March 1941 and asked the company to design a prefabricated, portable structure that could be shipped in pieces to faraway military outposts and set up easily and quickly by untrained personnel. Fuller was also commissioned to build a factory to manufacture the structures. The kicker was that everything had to be ready within two months. The company threw up a sprawling plant near Davisville, Rhode Island, in thirty days while still working out the design. Quonset huts began rolling out the factory door well before the two-month deadline.
The Quonset hut bore a close resemblance to the Nissen hut, which the British had developed for World War I and still used in the early part of World War II. Conceived by the British mining engineer, Lt. Col. Peter N. Nissen, the Nissen hut served basically the same function as the Quonset, but in much more Spartan fashion. Most Nissen huts had
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The 33rd Construction Battalion erects Navy pilots' quarters in the Russell Islands, November, 1943.
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section steel ribs and corrugated-steel outer skins, which fastened to the ribs with nuts and bolts. Stran-Steel came up with a faster, cheaper way to assemble huts in the field. The innovation involved a rib made of two mirror-image U-shaped steel stampings welded back to back. The mating surfaces of the ribs were shaped in such a way that the welds left a narrow gap between the stampings. The gap, if you looked into it, had the shape of a stretched-out W.
Why exchange the simple T shape for slotted ribs with gaps? So that instead of fiddling with nuts and bolts, GIs could simply drive nails through the galvanized outer wall of the hut and into the ribs. The W-bends held the nails more tightly than wood. Stran-Steel's idea was to make the Quonset hut so simple that anyone who could hammer a nail could set it up. It still used a few nuts and bolts, but they were mostly square-headed types that tightened with pliers and a crescent wrench. A team of ten Seabees could put up the typical twenty-foot Quonset hut in a day.
The earliest Fuller-built Quonset huts had a sixteen-by-thirty-six-foot floor. After Stran-Steel became involved, they were produced in two basic sizes: the 20 and the 40. The 20 measured twenty by forty-eight feet, while the 40, also called the Elephant Hut, stood forty feet wide by a hundred feet long. Often several Quonsets were joined end to end set side by side. The largest wartime assemblage of huts was said to have been a 54,000-square-foot warehouse on Guam called the Multiple Mae West.
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dirt or concrete floors and no insulation. They were essentially an updated version of the Iroquois council lodge, with steel ribs instead of wooden poles and sheet metal in place of animal skins.
While it is unlikely that Lieutenant Colonel Nissen actually had the Iroquois council lodge in mind, it is a matter of record that Delongh and Brandenberger were given plans for the Nissen hut at the start of their assignment. They found its basic shape and structure adequate but made so many changes and improvements that they ended up virtually starting from scratch. Like the Nissen hut, the Quonset had curved sheet-metal outer walls attached to a frame of semicircular steel ribs. The Fuller team's innovations, though, made it a much more pleasant place to live and work in. The Quonset hut came with a one-inch tongue-in-groove plywood floor supported on a raised metal framework, wood-fiber insulation between the outer shell and an inner lining of Masonite (pressed wood), and provisions for doors, windows, and chimneys. Fuller shipped the first Quonset huts to Britain under Lend-Lease in June 1941. The Fuller factory couldn't build them fast enough, so the Navy soon let out a second contract to Stran-Steel, a division of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation of Detroit. Stran-Steel soon took over the bulk of the production
The Fuller-designed huts used arched T-
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