Another installment of our STACKED series.
STACKED is where longer-form writing lives when it doesn’t quite fit the usual formats at Reusable Packaging News.
Some of history’s greatest surprises were not entirely surprising to the people who had been watching closely. The clues were there. Specialists had noticed them, information had accumulated, and in some cases people had even predicted roughly what was coming. What they could not necessarily do was persuade everyone else to see those developments in the same way.
Pearl Harbor is perhaps the most dramatic example. The rise of palletization is obviously a much different and considerably less consequential story, but it has something of the same historical quality. By the time pallets emerged as an indispensable tool of wartime logistics, material handling specialists had already been talking about their potential for years.
The Spy on the Hill
For much of 1941, Japanese naval intelligence officer Takeo Yoshikawa moved around Honolulu posing as a civilian. Using the alias Tadashi Morimura, he booked fishing excursions, visited scenic overlooks and gathered increasingly detailed information about the U.S. Pacific Fleet, including where particular ships were moored within Pearl Harbor.
At the same time, tensions between Japan and the United States were steadily worsening. American intelligence had broken portions of Japan’s diplomatic communications, and military officials certainly understood that war was possible. On the morning of December 7, radar operators even detected the approaching Japanese aircraft, although the flight was mistaken for an expected group of American bombers.
None of this meant that American commanders knew an attack on Pearl Harbor was coming. They did not. But viewed retrospectively, the amount of information in circulation is striking. Hawaii’s distance from Japan and the apparent protection offered by the Pacific helped shape how the available evidence was interpreted. An attack might be possible, but presumably somewhere else.
Looking backward, the clues appear much easier to connect than they did at the time.
Palletization Was Already Happening
Something much less dramatic was taking place in material handling during the same period. Pallets were still far from universal, but engineers, equipment manufacturers and warehouse operators had been experimenting with unit-load handling for years. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, their discussions were increasingly about applications rather than theory.
In 1941, material handling specialist Matthew Potts predicted that palletized shipping would become one of the significant developments of the year. His prediction is interesting because he was not describing some futuristic technology waiting to be invented. Companies were already using pallets and skids successfully. What Potts saw was the possibility that those practices would spread.
General Electric’s C.H. Barker Jr. was writing at about the same time about manufacturers handling steel coils, transformers, cartons and other products as unit loads. Fork trucks were improving. Dock plates and other supporting equipment were making movement between buildings and vehicles easier. Warehouses and factories were finding more places where the approach made sense.
There was still plenty standing in the way. Existing plants had been designed around older handling methods. Railcars, warehouses and loading docks were hardly standardized around pallet movement. Companies had investments in labor and equipment, and changing a handling system could involve considerably more than simply buying some wooden platforms and a forklift.
That helps explain why an idea that looked compelling to material handling specialists could still advance unevenly.
The War Changed the Urgency
The Second World War did not invent the pallet, although pallet history is still sometimes told that way. Pallets, skids, lift trucks and unit-load handling practices were all in use before American entry into the war. What the war supplied was urgency on a scale that industry had never experienced.
Military logistics required enormous quantities of food, ammunition, machinery and other supplies to move through factories, depots, railcars, ports and ships, often with severe labor constraints and intense pressure to increase throughput. Under those conditions, reducing repeated manual handling became considerably more important.
Practices that might have seemed optional in a commercial warehouse could look quite different when millions of tons of military supplies had to be moved quickly. Palletization was particularly attractive because it worked in combination with another technology that had been steadily improving: the forklift.
The material handling specialists who had been writing about unit loads before the war therefore did not suddenly discover pallets after Pearl Harbor. Rather, wartime logistics created circumstances in which ideas already circulating within the profession could be tested and adopted much more aggressively.
By the end of the war, pallets had been used extensively in depots, manufacturing plants, rail operations, ports and overseas supply activities. The surprising part, looking back at the trade literature from just a few years earlier, is how much of what followed had already been anticipated.
References
Rick LeBlanc, EMBA, is the founder and editor of Reusable Packaging News (subscribe to the free newsletter) and editor of Western Pallet Magazine. A supply chain journalist with more than 30 years of experience, he specializes in pallets, reusable packaging, material handling and related operations. Rick is co-author of Pallets: A North American Perspective and Pallets & Progress: A Collected History of Pallets and Palletized Handling 1922–1945. He is also an advisory board member of the Virginia Tech Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design. Read Rick’s full bio.
