Vital to the War Effort as well

B4T Editorial Columnists

This series was launched by the appearance in the May Transport Topics of a feature article about pallets, which abruptly took us back to a boyhood interest, well, really more like a brief boyhood obsession. There was a time when we thought of nothing but pallets. We assembled a band of like-minded brothers with the bold vision of building a palatial fort of pallets. Unfortunately, we were unable to secure grown-up support to our plans. Summer ended; school started and the pile of pallets behind the local grocery store stopped being the mortar of empire and again became a plain stolid stack of wood. 

The Pallet Industry
We confess we had given no thought to pallets since that long-ago summer of ‘59, when our interest was reignited by the TT article. The notion that pallets actually occupy a place of interest in the grown-up world is a revelation. Apparently not only are there adults who are interested in pallets, but many who actually make their joyful living doing things with pallets, such as designing them, manufacturing them, transporting them, disassembling them, making guitars of them (more on that later), and having arguments about their size and weight for purposes of international standardization. 

We are amazed, gratified too. What a dull world this would be without pallets! 

When Was the First Pallet?
How long have there been pallets? To our surprise, not so long. The idea of something that supports goods to be moved by mechanical means (forklifts) is not an old idea, at least not compared to an enduring idea like sharp-edged weapons, which have been around in one form or another almost as long as humans have been humans. (We are speaking here of the idea, not the object itself. For instance, airplanes, though decidedly a modern invention, have existed as a human dream for millennia. But there has never been a universal dream of pallets; there are no preliminary sketches of pallets in the notebooks of Leonardo.) 

No, pallets are a creation of modern cargo handling. There were, to be sure, precursors to pallets. These were called “skids.” The prototypical skid was a raft of boards nailed together and held in place by three somewhat thicker perpendicular boards. Although they were commonly used in factories and warehouses, skids truly came into their own in World War II in—where else?—America. 

The “Skid”
Prior to the war, this country was more rural than urban, more farm than factory. The need for tanks and boots and jeeps and all the accoutrements of warfare marked the industrialization of America. Moreover, not only did these things need to be made, they had to be conveyed from the place of manufacture to the place of use. It was much easier for a crane to hoist skids of ammunition aboard a ship than for gangs of sailors to manhandle the crates up a ramp. Much easier to unload too, which is important if you happen to be unloading on a beach where soldiers are shooting at you. Under those conditions you want to keep your head down, so you push or pull the load of ammo and skid it across the beach. Thus the unlikely name. 

What’s the difference between skids and pallets? Pallets are sturdier, because they have a bottom “raft” of boards. Think of a pallet as a sandwich, with the “stringers” (which are the three boards that hold the top and bottom together) as the sandwich “meat.” We grant you, that’s a fanciful analogy since not even a shipwrecked sailor would ever think of eating a pallet, but you get the idea. 

Pallets Go to War
The new, improved “pallet” was created independently by various cargo managers before the war, but there was no uniformity and although companies used pallets in their own warehouses, they didn’t like to use them for transport elsewhere. Why? Because they didn’t get them back! This was a major issue and caused real disruption in the supply chain until the U.S. Army and Navy instituted standard sizes and standard practices. 

You can see the problem. You run an ammunition depot and you’ve just gotten a huge shipment of artillery shells, all of them crated, but since they don’t come with skids or pallets, your warehouse workers have to pile the crates onto your own pallets for the forklift. Big delay. The armed forces instituted the “swap” system, which mean that all U.S. pallets had to conform to several basic sizes and were part of the cargo shipment. No one “hoarded” pallets. Instead pallets flowed back and forth as part of the supply chain. Companies routinely used pallets from other companies. There was grumbling, to be sure, but the government was such a big purchaser that it was in a position to demand compliance. 

A Rare Document
The burning question that all palletologists ask is, when did “pallet” replace “skid” as standard nomenclature? That can now be satisfactorily answered due to the tireless work of Rick LeBlanc. Mr. LeBlanc is the go-to man for pallet information. His enthusiasm for pallets even exceeds our own. He is the owner of PACTS, which is a consulting firm on supply management and the onetime editor of Pallets Enterprise Magazine (which is now digital, but when it started in 1992 was a real paper magazine). 

LeBlanc has even written a book on pallets and their use and lest you think this is the equivalent of My Big Golden Book About Pallets, it sells for $79.95 and is filled with the kind of detail that keeps warehouse managers reading late into the night. He is also the force behind the lively website PackagingRevolution.com. LeBlanc is a tall, spare man who looks to be in his sixties, with a broad smile and an even broader mustache, the kind of thing you would expect to see on a Canadian lumberjack. 

Recently LeBlanc discovered a U.S. Navy pamphlet dating from WWII, which was written for warehouse managers and is the first known printed use of “pallet” as the term of choice. The pamphlet is provocatively titled, “Why Use Two If One Will Do?” The gripping subtitle explains its object is “Standardization of Pallet Sizes Facilitates the Flow of Unit Loads Through Naval Ammunition Depots.”

When Just-in-Time Is Really Just in Time
This rare document is the pallet equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls and like them, the author’s identity is lost to history, but it apparently had an influential impact on American warehousing and supply chain systems. It speeded things up. We’re not saying that had it not been for the pallet, we might have lost the war, but the pallet made its contribution. If you were a G.I. dug in on an atoll in the Pacific and running out of bullets, you would be mightily grateful that sailors showed up skidding a pallet of ammo crates across the beach a day earlier than expected. 

Overlooked But Essential
Except for people like Rick LeBlanc, nobody—not even truckers—gives much thought to pallets, except when, say, Sixty Minutes wants to run a shocker about how pallets are poisoning our food. (Dubious.) Pallets, however, are as essential to modern cargo handling as the container. In the next part of this engrossing series, we’ll examine the variety of pallets and how they’ve evolved for specific purposes. We also look at the afterlife of pallets. What do you do with a pallet once it’s too broken to repair? Surprisingly, many things. 

Sources for this article include Pacts: Pallet & Container Management Specialist, Packaging Revolution: Why Use Two When One Will Do?, Packaging Revolution: Which Came First, the Pallet or the Forklift?, Wikipedia: Pallet and Pallet Enterprise: Markets in Transition 

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