Talk:Emergency Shipbuilding Program

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Why is there no mention of Yugoslavia building ships around the 2nd World War as I saw 8n their museums???? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.69.170.144 (talk) 18:25, 1 December 2021 (UTC)

• This is about World War II ships. For World War 1 see Emergency Fleet Corporation Telecine Guy (talk) 16:57, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

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Size

There are many smaller companies in the program like:

• The Auchter Company
• United Concrete Pipe Corporation

wrong data?

gulf shipbuilding - shipbuildinghistory.com disagrees with number in the table

cargill - same problem

i spent a few minutes, but i could not figure out what reference was used for the table. i have the suspicion that shipbuildinghistory data was misinterpreted (cancelled contracts counted).

if there is a disagreement among reputable sources, perhaps another column should be added to the table or a different method to resolve discrepancies should be in place. 158.181.83.72 (talk) 15:16, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

Original research & synth archive

At the time of writing, this article contains a large amount of original research. I'm moving any big sections of uncited material to this talk page section so that anyone who wishes to can rescue them by finding sources.

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The emergency ships

The ships for which all the yards were contracted to build were first designated by the Maritime Commission as EC2-S-C1, but because they were designed for capacity and rapid construction as opposed to speed and gracefulness, lacked the streamlined appearance of the more modern ship designs of the Maritime Commission, such as the standard freighters type C2 ships or type C3 ships, the President had declared them to be "dreadful-looking objects" and from that the term "ugly duckling" became the unofficial name for the emergency vessels. The vessels collectively were being officially referred to as the "Liberty Fleet" ships as of April 1941, and not long after, the term "Liberty Ship" became the standard name applied to all vessels of the class.

Like their British counterparts, the Ocean class, the Liberty ships were of a five-hatch design around 10000 tons loaded displacement powered by the same size of triple-expansion, reciprocating steam engines, but using more modern oil-fired, water-tube boilers. Overall, they were somewhat antiquated for the era and some quiet objection arose on the part of some of the members of the Maritime Commission to devoting so many valuable resources to their construction. Some believed that fewer but faster ships would be able to move as much cargo, since with their added speed, they could make more voyages in any given year, but faster and more complex ships required more time to build, and more importantly, required steam turbines to gain the additional speed.

In 1941, the manufacturers of steam turbines in the U.S., companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse, and Allis-Chalmers, did not have adequate production capacity to build all the turbines demanded by the Navy or for the Maritime Commission's standard dry cargo ships or tankers it was intending to still build. In the end, it was decided that what the looming war was going to require were ships that could be built quickly using prefabrication by workers relatively unskilled in shipbuilding and in greatest numbers with the available resources. With that, the Liberty ship was adopted as the only emergency type to be built, thus was shared by all of the new emergency shipyards. While all the new yards were able to get their first keels laid in a very short time, the first of the Liberty ships to be launched was the SS Patrick Henry, which rolled down the ways at the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard on September 27, 1941.

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Further expansion after the U.S. entry into World War II

The December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent entry of the U.S. into the war caused all previously established production schedules to be further revised dramatically upward. With the need to assist Britain in replacing its lost tonnage and to provide adequate ships to the Army to transport troops and supplies to foreign theaters, in January 1942, President Roosevelt asked that 8 million tons of shipping be built in 1942 and 10 million in 1943. This fourth wave of expansion involved further shortening the time for building the ships and the further addition of building ways at the existing yards, as well as adding new yards to the emergency program. In early 1942, yards for building Liberty ships were contracted to be built in Vancouver, Washington, to be managed by the Kaiser Corporation, and a yard in Savannah, Georgia, which was to be operated by a new company named Savannah Shipyards, although they had no previous experience with building ships. New yards also contracted to be built at this time, but not for the emergency-type ships, were a third yard in Richmond, also to be managed by the Kaiser Corporation, and a yard in Alameda, California, to be managed by Bethlehem. This wave brought the total number of building ways available to the commission to 221.

Incredibly, the 18 million tons of cargo ships (roughly equal to 1800 10,000 ton Liberty ships) were determined by early February 1942 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to not be adequate for anticipated needs, thus the President directed the Maritime Commission to increase the orders to the equivalent of 24 million tons. With no certainty that this astonishing quantity of ships could be built before the end of 1943, the commission increased their contracts with the existing yards for more building ways and to contract for more shipyards to build Liberty ships, as well as to build other types of vessels such as tankers, troop transports, and military-type vessels. For the construction of Liberty-type ships, a new yard was ordered to be built at Providence, Rhode Island, to be managed by the Rheem Corporation, a new yard in Brunswick, Georgia, which would be managed by the J.A. Jones Construction Company, another in Jacksonville, Florida, which would be operated by the Merrill-Stevens Boatbuilding Company of Miami, a yard in Panama City, Florida, which would also be managed by J.A. Jones, and a yard at Sausalito, California, to be managed by the Bechtel/McCone Group. For non-Liberty ship construction, the commission ordered another yard in Richmond to be managed as the others there, by Kaiser, to be known as Richmond #4 and a yard at Swan Island on the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon for the construction of tankers.

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Excerpt from "Material shortages" section

For the most part, this imbalance occurred because the Maritime Commission lacked the influence that the military branches possessed, and that influence ultimately swayed entities such as the Supply Priorities and Allocations Board to decide in favor of the Navy's demands. This disproportionate allocation regimen often left the Maritime Commission without the resources needed to accomplish the goals established for it by President Roosevelt, and only through direct appeal to FDR by Admiral Land did enough of the critical resources make it to the emergency program. These shortages were their most severe during all of 1941 and through much of 1942, but additional steel rolling and plate mills, as well as expanded propulsion machinery manufacturing capability, reduced many of those shortages in the course of 1943, but they were never fully eliminated until the end of the war. Materials such as oil, gasoline, rubber, and grease were rationed for the fighting units, so the Pennsylvania Shipyard had to improvise, but bananas were very cheap, South American markets having been hampered by the war. Combat needs were top priority so alternative substances had to be found for materials such as the grease used to lubricate the ramp down which a boat slid into the water when launching. The boatbuilders found that ships could be launched handily by covering the ramp in a layer of ripe unpeeled bananas. It worked very well until a supervisor decided to cut costs by buying even cheaper green bananas. Of course, they were also very gummy and did not "mush" like ripe ones. The only time this was used, the boat went about one-third down the ramp and stuck. Nearly two days were needed to dig out the keel and lever the boat to the water, where it floated quite well. Thereafter, the shipyard did not use any but well-ripened bananas.

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Excerpt from "Impacts of the program on war production and society"

Training

Since many of the workers hired for the new yards had no shipbuilding experience prior to being hired, schools were set up in the individual shipyards and in the local school systems of the host cities. One of the factors that led to the great success of the Emergency Program was to change the shipbuilding arts from one where a man had to progress through a many-years-long apprenticeship up to become a journeyman and then many years later, a master in their chosen trade. The use of welding allowed ships to be built in modular sections eliminating the time-consuming and highly skilled shipfitting of individual hull pieces to be riveted in place on the building ways. Prefabrication allowed a much more streamlined approach to the building of a ship more akin to modern manufacturing assembly processes where a worker would be tasked with doing one small task in the many thousands of tasks required to assemble a ship. With volume production, that worker could be employed doing that same task repetitively, which would ultimately lead to high productivity due to a worker becoming a master of his assigned task very quickly. Old-timers would scoff at the way the Liberty ships were built by "farmers", as they would say, but the results were far beyond what anyone might have imagined in 1940 when the program began.

Movement of workers

As successful as the Maritime Commission and the shipbuilding companies were in their recruiting efforts, the scale of the national wartime economy was so great that a degree of a labor shortage always existed in the yards, although the shortfall in manpower became more severely felt in the later years of the war. Many of the men employed in the yards in the first years of the program were of age for the draft, and as the war progressed, more of these men left the yards to serve in the military. Other war industries also competed for labor, and many of the cities and towns that hosted shipyards also had other labor-intensive wartime industries, such as aircraft plants. In many cases, the wages were close to what could be earned at a shipyard for work that was not as physically taxing, so a slow but steady movement of labor from one defense industry to another was made, and often shipbuilding lost more labor than it gained.

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The program reaches full production

By the second half of 1942, the yards contracted in the first waves of expansion were fully built and those yards had completed three or more ships per building way. The time for building the ships fell dramatically, as experience was gained by the workers in their jobs and by the management in each yard in the most effective means of construction. One factor that played a major part in getting the productivity so high was the use of welding and prefabrication, in which large sections of each ship's hull or superstructure was built off the building ways and then moved into position only when the assemblers were ready. This method became so efficient that for a single Liberty ship to be fully assembled, launched, outfitted, and delivered went from a program average of almost 240 days at the beginning of 1942 to only 56 days at the end of the year. At the most productive yards on the West Coast, Oregon Ship and Richmond #2, the time a single vessel spent on the ways before launching was only a little more than two weeks. Two particular ships were built in record-breaking times. First in September 1942, the Liberty ship SS Joseph N. Teal was built Oregon Shipbuilding in 10 days. Two months later in November at Richmond yard #2, the SS Robert E. Peary was launching in only 4 days, 15 hours, 29 minutes from the time her keel was laid. While not ever met or repeated during the remainder of World War II, these "stunt" ships came only a little more than one year after the first ships ordered as part of the Emergency Program were launched themselves.

Coming into play during this time was a de facto combining of the Long Range Shipbuilding Program with the Emergency Program, and oversight of the yards became decentralized into four separate regional directors. The programs added together at the peak of output in mid-1943 ultimately employed 650,000 workers in all the Maritime Commission-contracted yards and unknown tens of thousands more manufacturing the components need to assemble the ships. Hurdles which needed to be overcome to reach the levels of production achieved. The Maritime Commission struggled throughout 1942 and the first half of 1943 to get enough steel allocated to it from the War Production Board. With plate mills around the country running beyond their normal capacity, the demand for plate by all war industries, but especially the Navy's shipbuilding, was still more than could be made. New or expanded plate production facilities did not come online until the second half of 1943, when the shortage to steel plate abated. Additionally, constant shortages existed for many of the parts shared between Navy and merchant vessels, such as pumps and valves. Still with all the hurdles faced, the Maritime Commission and the yards contracted to it were able to deliver 8 million tons of shipping to the war effort by the end of 1942 and more than 12 million tons in 1943.

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Changes to ship design and types during 1943

By the time that Liberty ship construction was reaching its maximum output rate in early 1943, the situation became clear to military planners and the Maritime Commission slowing the rate of the building Liberty class vessels and begin building a class with a higher operating speed was preferable. The decision was made to build a class no larger than the Liberty class, but with steam turbine propulsion, with the shortage of turbines having been relieved by the expansion of turbine manufacturing capacity during 1941 and 1942. Beginning in March 1943, with enough turbines, the Victory ship or VC2 type cargo vessels were contracted for at all of the West Coast yards, which had been previously building Liberty ships, as well as at the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard. The first of the new class, the SS United Victory was completed and delivered at Oregon Shipbuilding in February 1944. All the other yards building Liberty ships continued to do so, although many of those yards began building specialized military-type vessels for the Navy, such as landing ships, troops transports, frigates, and escort aircraft carriers. Originally, military types were not expected to be a part of the Maritime Commission's wartime building programs, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff required a high number of specialized vessels be built for upcoming military operations. Whenan inability for Navy contracted yards to meet that demand was determined, the Maritime Commission was asked if it could switch some of its production to meet the Navy's needs. Some types were designed with only military purpose, but which could be built along the standards of merchant vessels. This was especially true of the auxiliary naval vessels that supported the combat ships and landing ships such as LSTs, which had been one of the types in especially short supply in 1943.

Similarly, having a sufficient number of oil tankers was determined early in the program to be as important, if not more so, than dry cargo ships for the war effort. In the fourth wave of expansion in 1942, the commission increased the program's orders for the construction of T2- and T3-type tankers. Ultimately, five yards were committed to tanker construction: Sun Shipbuilding in Chester, Pennsylvania, and Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point, which had both been principally building tankers since the beginning of the program. Alabama Shipbuilding yard in Mobile and the MarinShip yard at Sausalito switched from building Liberty ships to tanker construction and the previously mentioned new yard at Swan Island in Portland, Oregon, managed by the Kaiser Group, was built to construct tankers exclusively.

BrigadierG (talk) 01:39, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

References