Four Days, Fifteen Hours

In 1942 German U-boats hit more than 1,300 Allied ships. Every tank, shell and soldier bound for Britain, Russia or the Pacific had to cross an ocean, and the cargo ships to carry them were going to the bottom. The answer was one plain freighter, built by the thousand, by men and women who had never built a ship before.

1. 20 December 1940

   A British order

   Britain is losing merchant ships faster than its own yards can replace them. Its shipping mission signs contracts for 60 freighters of a plain, cheap design from J.L. Thompson & Sons of Sunderland. Thirty will come from a new yard on the tide flats of Richmond, California, run by a group of road and dam builders led by Henry J. Kaiser. None of them has ever built a ship. Work on the yard starts that month.

2. 3 January 1941

   The emergency program

   President Roosevelt announces an emergency program of 200 cargo ships modeled on the British design. Adm. Emory S. Land’s Maritime Commission reworks the plans for speed: oil-fired boilers, and welded seams in place of rivets. The result is the EC2: 441 feet 6 inches long, 57 feet wide, a 2,500-horsepower steam engine, 11 knots and about 10,800 tons of cargo.

3. 27 September 1941

   Liberty Fleet Day

   From dawn to dark, fourteen ships slide into the water on the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf. The first is the SS Patrick Henry, at Bethlehem-Fairfield in Baltimore. In a radio address the President recalls Patrick Henry’s demand for liberty or death, and the new ships take a name: Liberty ships. He asks for a launching a day, then two a day.

   President Roosevelt, Liberty Fleet DayWe must build more cargo ships and still more cargo ships.
4. 1942 · The yards

   Wendy the Welder

   Kaiser’s yards build ships the way Detroit builds cars. Bottoms, bulkheads and deckhouses are made in sheds and lifted onto the ways by giant cranes. Welding replaces riveting, and a new hand can learn it in days. In July 1942 Phyllis Gould becomes one of the first six women welders at Richmond. By war’s end 27 percent of Richmond’s shipyard workers are women, and the town has grown from 20,000 people to more than 100,000.

   

5. 23 September 1942

   Ten days in Portland

   At Oregon Shipbuilding, run by Kaiser’s son Edgar, the keel of the SS Joseph N. Teal goes down on 13 September. Ten days later she is launched, with President Roosevelt watching from his car and his daughter Anna swinging the bottle. Down in Richmond, yard manager Clay Bedford, a dam builder who had never built a ship before 1940, sets out to beat it.

6. 8 November 1942 · 00:01

   Keel down

   Yard No. 2 builds its 47th hull in pieces ahead of time and stages them beside the way. At one minute past midnight on Sunday the keel is laid. The bottom shell and inner bottom follow, and the boilers are aboard by mid-morning. Bulkheads and the shaft tunnel go in next. Seventeen banks of welding machines line each side of the hull, ready for the next section.

7. 9–11 November 1942

   Up from the ways

   On the second day the upper deck goes on, in seven big sections instead of the usual 23, with the forepeak and the fantail. On the third day come the masts, the cargo booms and the deckhouses, lifted aboard already fitted out down to the bunks and the fans. On the fourth day the crews finish the wiring, the welding and the paint, and set the forward gun platform.

8. 12 November 1942 · 15:27

   Into San Francisco Bay

   Four days and fifteen and a half hours after the keel went down, Mrs. James F. Byrnes breaks the bottle and the SS Robert E. Peary slides into San Francisco Bay. About 250,000 parts weighing 14 million pounds have become a ship. She is delivered three days later, and on 22 November she sails for the South Pacific loaded with food and war supplies.

9. 1943–1945

   The bridge of ships

   Eighteen yards on three coasts build 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945, the most ever built to one design. By 1943 the country is turning out about three a day. Kaiser’s seven yards deliver 1,490 ships of all types, 27 percent of everything the Maritime Commission builds, and Richmond’s four yards alone launch 747. The convoys carry the war to every front, and the U-boats lose the race.