Red Sea Invasion

Poland is scarcely known as a seafaring nation; it is famous for coal, hams, Copernicus and a long history of serving as a parade ground for invading foreign armies. Yet, from its 326 miles of Baltic coastline, Poland is now mounting a seaborne invasion of its own into foreign markets. Ships built in ports bearing such tongue-twisting names as Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin are turning up with increasing frequency in fishing and merchant fleets round the world.

The Polish thrust is not yet a major threat to the better-known shipyards of Bremen, Clydeside and Yokohama. The country still ranks only twelfth in gross registered tonnage among shipbuilding nations. But Poland's annual output has risen 50% just since 1970, to 750,000 deadweight tons, and shipbuilding has become the country's second largest earner of foreign currency, after coal. Polish shipbuilding has become one of the few Communist bloc industries ca pable of competing in the West on straight commercial terms. Capitalist nations last year bought almost $200 million worth of Polish ships, about half the country's exported production and one-third more than in 1971.

Credit for transforming Poland into a shipbuilding power goes largely to Soviet leaders, who began welding the Eastern European countries into a bloc shortly after World War II. The Soviets decided that Poland, with its skilled labor force and largely ice-free ports, should build the bloc's merchant ships; since the late 1940s, the U.S.S.R. has invested millions of rubles in developing Polish yards. The regime of Communist Party Secretary Edward Gierek has decided to intensify that development. Gierek knows all too well that the bloody wage-price riots of 1970 that toppled his predecessor, Wladyslaw Gomulka, began with strikes in the Baltic docks and shipyards and is determined to keep the workers there prosperous. A major investment in the five-year plan that ends in 1975 is 7.5 billion zlotys ($341 million) for shipbuilding.

By now, the heavy investments are giving the Poles some of the best-equipped shipyards in the world. For example, Polish builders are experimenting with a method of constructing giant cargo ships in two halves and then joining them in the water. The two sections are fitted together with the aid of a horseshoe-shaped tunnel that enables welders to work both inside and outside the hull, producing a stronger seam than is attained by conventional methods. In the past, other Communist nations got most of the benefit of Polish expertise: one out of every two Rumanian fishing ships, and every fourth Albanian, fifth Soviet and sixth Chinese merchant ship, is Polish made.

Now that long-term commitments to their Red partners are running out, though, the Poles are finding a growing market in the West. "We can sell all the ships we produce," Wlodzimierz Korchot, economic director of the industry's trade union, told TIME Correspondent Strobe Talbott. "We are already fully contracted to capacity through 1975. The Soviet Union alone could buy all we can make."

This week Olsen & Ugelstad, a Norwegian line, will take delivery of a 55,000-ton cargo vessel. Fleets in France, Britain and Brazil also contain Polish-built vessels. John J. McMullen Associates of New York City has sold the Poles designs for stabilizers; vessels built in Poland may soon be sailing more smoothly because of U.S. technology.

The Poles do not attempt to undercut Western yards on bid prices, but capitalist customers say that they are super-scrupulous on contract terms; if Polish builders suffer cost overruns, they do not stick the buyer with the bill. A British line expects to save some 15% on two large freezer trawlers from Poland because the ships will be delivered a few months ahead of schedule, on favorable credit terms and at the exact price agreed on when the deal was signed three years ago. Says the buyer, who for obvious reasons does not want to be identified: "I don't like helping Iron Curtain countries, but we have all these bloody strikes here, and Polish ships are as good as any in the world."

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