Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!cbnews!military
From: mcgrath@nprdc.navy.mil (James McGrath)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Liberty Ships
Message-ID: <1990Jul10.024902.10268@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 10 Jul 90 02:49:02 GMT
References: <1990Jul8.053547.8339@cbnews.att.com>
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
Organization: Navy Personnel R&D Center, San Diego
Lines: 48
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: mcgrath@nprdc.navy.mil (James McGrath)

In article <1990Jul8.053547.8339@cbnews.att.com> doug@daswk2.llnl.gov (Douglas S. Miller) writes:
>
>
>Can anyone out there give me a brief history of these ships or
>references towards same?
>
There is one book in print about the history of liberty ships, which I
saw in our library a few years ago, but I don't recall the author.
However, I sailed on a liberty ship during World War II and can tell you
a few things about them:

The EC-2, or liberty ship, was originally a British design, but was
built primarily by Americans.  It was intended as an emergency cargo
ship--that is, one that could be quickly and cheaply built and that
would carry a substantial cargo.  Henry Kaiser, an American
industrialist who had never built a ship, designed the revolutionary
shipbuilding methods that allowed liberties to be built quickly by
relatively unskilled labor, including thousands of housewives who went
to work in the shipyards.  By using production line methods, modular
design, job breakdown techniques, all-welded construction, and other
methods Kaiser designed a production process that allowed these ships to
be built in about 100 days.  By the end of the war about 4500 liberties
were launched.

A liberty ship displaced about 14,000 tons and could move 10,000 tons of
cargo at a rated speed of 11 knots.  In practice, most liberties moved
at 10 knots or less.  They were manned by 37 civilians and an armed
guard of 26 U.S. Navy gunners.  These were armed merchantmen: 4-inch gun
on the bow, 5-inch gun on the stern cabin, eight 20-mm cannon for air
defense.  I can tell you they were absolutely Spartan and comfortless
ships and had no modern equipment such as autopilot steering or radar.
The liberty ship design had a structural flaw that often caused it to
break in two.  I saw no less than six liberties broken cleanly in two at
the same place: just forward of the midship house.  But the liberty
served its purpose--replacing the multitude of merchant ships sunk early
in the war and moving the massive volume of supplies throughout the
major theaters of war.


Now I have a question for you netters.  I'd like to get a copy of the
log of the liberty ship I sailed during the war.  Logs of naval vessels
can be seen at the National Archives in Washington.  Does anybody know
how to get access to the log of a merchant ship?  (The shipping company
no longer exists.)