Thanks for the great piece. One detail to add: women were able to join this workforce because the federal government created childcare centers associated with the shipyards. See (my wife' article): Susan E. Riley, "Caring for Rosie's Children: Federal Child Care Policies in the World War II Era" https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/3235099?journalCode=pol
mentioned briefly were the hazardous worker conditions at the shipyards. Similar conditions at prior Kaiser projects had company chief doctor Garfield convince Henry Kaiser to do something about this: thus was born Kaiser Permanente (named after a creek), the first concept of "health maintenance" (health problem *prevention*) i.e. HMO, and both a hospital system as well as insurance plan, rather than mere worker's compensation insurance which only helps with care *after* a disease or injury. I can't find proof of this, but I believe I read somewhere that being under the same Kaiser umbrella, KP was able to encourage safety programs at the shipyards to help reduce the risks of injury and thus the need for later healthcare.
By coincidence today I accompanied my wife to the doctor and brought along my laptop to read this article whilst I waited⎯at Kaiser Permanente, probably the most efficient fully integrated, all around best health care system in the United States.
What a great article. It's enjoyable to remember when we could build things. You know if something like the "6 Companies" were given such a contract today, people would scream about corruption and no-bid contracts and underhanded dealings. I get it... but sometimes, strategic realities require cutting red tape. NEPA has to take a backseat to survival.
Prior to his political career, Newt Gingrich was a WWII history professor. He said this in 2008 at a speech in Atlanta:
"December 7th 1941 to August 14th, 1945 is less than 4 years. In less than 4 years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 23 years to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared, today, to be a serious country."
The ruling class only opens the spigots when faced with an existential threat. We could have built that runway a lot more quickly and compensated or relocated everyone in its path, but the ruling class expects airports to show a profit or at least break even. Our ruling class doesn't feel threatened, so it's all about extraction. That makes it hard to do anything except direct subsidies to the most wealthy.
Thanks for another great writeup, Brian! It's easy to forget the sheer scale of coordinating people and material that has to go into a rapid buildup like this. Outside the pressures of war, it's hard to imagine something like this taking place.
In the end you discuss that the US shipyard wasn't able to match the efficiencies of UK shipyards. Do you have found out any explanation of why that is? One would think that the learning curve would catapult the US yards well past the UK ones.
Fortune had a great maritime issue back in September 1937. The US was a major shipbuilding power in the days of sail. The high point was probably 1849 when there was a shipping boom to support the California Gold Rush. The introduction of steam by the British in 1840 and then the depression of 1857 clobbered US ship building, and it never recovered in terms of cost or production. (1857 was the year of the Sepoy Rebellion which led England to change the way India was ruled. It kicked out the East India Company.) The British government massively subsidized ship building both directly and by developing an international mail service to support its world empire.
The US wasn't building a world empire. It was focusing on its inland empire based on rail. That required billions in subsidies of its own. The US did try a few subsidies, but by 1891 the "U.S. foreign merchant marine had almost ceased to exist". The US arranged for some subsidies including mail contracts, but never really built up its merchant marine. When the first world war broke out, England and the other European nations diverted their own shipping to support their war efforts. The US found itself without available shipping which led to the development of Hog Island near Philadelphia as a major government driven shipbuilding site.
I'm not sure of why the US lost its ship building mojo with the rise of steam powered and iron clad ships. The US wasn't a world power until after World War II, and, by then, aviation was increasingly important. Through its history, the US has been more focused on its inland empire. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system required an inland merchant marine, but the railroads were much more important to the economy. The government spent a lot of money developing a continental rail system and then a continental highway system. Both yielded high returns. A better merchant marine just wouldn't pay off the same way it would for the British with their world empire or Japan with its trade orientation and, at times, desire for regional hegemony.
In addition to employing women (and providing ground-breaking daycare facilities), Kaiser was also color blind, happily employing blacks and housing them next to whites in Vanport (near the Vancouver Washington and Portland shipyards), which became Oregon's second-largest city for a time. It is quite possible that Kaiser did more to win the war than almost any other individual, and certainly more than any U.S. civilian.
After the war, Kaiser built automobiles, homes, and hotels and manufactured steel, aluminum, magnesium, and cement. He was also good to his workers, never objected to unionization, and was the first industrialist to earn the AFL-CIO Murray-Green Humanitarian Award.
Thanks, Matthew! I remember reading about it, but I still find it hard to understand why, even at the peak of the mass production era during World War II, the most efficient U.S. shipyards were only roughly on par with the UK’s productivity. After the war, I understand how factors like the Jones Act, low automation, and protectionist policies hindered U.S. shipbuilding efficiency. But during the war, I would have expected the U.S.—with its innovations and focus on mass production—to outperform others in terms of productivity. Was it simply that the priority was on quantity over cost or efficiency, aiming to outbuild the enemy at any expense? Or were there deeper, more systemic issues affecting U.S. shipyard productivity at the time?
So in summary, would it be fair to say that the US shipbuilding industry didn't innovate in terms of efficiency, but in terms of "9 women *can* make a baby in 1 month"? Contrasting the greater efficiency but slower speed of the British shipbuilding industry -- the US went for something like "10 women make a baby in 1 month", the Brits for "1 woman makes a baby in 9 months". The US in essence figured out how to spend resources faster, a la your article about Levittown (https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-levittown-didnt-revolutionize) -- it was good for the demands of wartime, but didn't fit the demands of peacetime.
Yep, definitely. But it's always fun to turn around the "9 women can't make a baby in 1 month" advice, which is generally good advice, with a real world example where "Huh, they literally took a bunch of women and made a 'baby' in 1 month".
Another innovation was the. use of women in ship construction. Ship construction also benefitted from having a work force ready to go via the Great Depression.
The post war boom benefitted from having a large trained workforce that could be reorganized for civilian production.
>more than 1,300 naval vessels, including 8 battleships, 128 aircraft carriers, and 352 destroyers.
I really do not like lumping CVEs with proper carriers this way. The chart is better, although some of the broken-out sections towards the bottom probably shouldn't be (for instance, I'd put the CVLs and Midway with the regular CVs, and lump the APDs in with whichever type they were converted from).
>But it was private companies, some of which had never built ships before, that actually built the yards and ships, and worked tirelessly to increase efficiencies, drive down construction times, and produce enough ships to win the war.
Not entirely. Bigger warships were overwhelmingly built by traditional shipbuilders, and the battleships in particular were mostly a Navy Yard thing. Three of the SoDaks were privately-built, but both North Carolinas and all four (or six) Iowas were assigned to the Navy Yards. The book Warship Builders has a lot of good stuff on this.
>And the standard cargo ship designs created by the commission made extensive use of welding, a then-novel method of ship construction that greatly reduced the amount of steel required to build a ship.
I believe this is no more than 15%.
>Instead of a new, modern design, the British ships would be based on the design for a British tramp steamer, probably the Empire Wind,
There was a recent book from the Naval Institute Press about the origins of the Liberty Ship, though I didn't pick up a copy. My series on the Liberty Ships identifies J.L. Thompson and Sons as the source of the design, and while they did build Empire Wind, I'm not sure if she was the exact source.
>When the US entered WWII, most ships were built using methods not much different from those used on the first iron ships built in the late 19th century.
This is an overstatement. There had been substantial changes in shipbuilding, and battleships coming down the ways in the late 30s and early 40s were significantly more complete than the ships before the Treaty.
> Germany’s “pocket” battleships
This should be "pocket battleships". They weren't battleships of any sort, so the "pocket" can't be split off or discarded. (I will spare everyone the detailed analysis of the Deutschland class, but they're interesting and deeply flawed ships.)
Re welding and ship failures, I believe a lot of it was also poor detail design around things like hatch corners, which hadn't shown up previously because riveted construction tended to catch cracks instead of letting them propagate.
Also, I am slightly disappointed that you didn't mention the Higgins plan to build an actual moving assembly line for Liberty Ships near New Orleans.
>But all this was only sufficient to let the US briefly match the most productive international shipbuilders in terms of man hours (and likely not match in terms of costs, given high US wages).
For reasons that I do not fully understand, there was a substantial difference in US and British shipbuilding productivity during the 40s, across all categories. DK Brown talks about this in Nelson to Vanguard, comparing US and British versions of the River-class frigate. The difference is impressive, with the US method taking a lot more labor but also a lot less time. I can't say exactly how/why, but I suspect there were very different philosophies at work. For instance, Brown has stories about the wiring/piping layout being done by the workers themselves, which sometimes meant that plumbing had to be routed around electrical wiring. Or the fact that British battleship turrets were frequently the limiting factor in ship construction (HMS Vanguard being the obvious example) while this was so much not a thing for the Americans that nobody even acknowledges it as a potential bottleneck.
In all this talk about interyard competition I was only wondering if and how quality was incorporated. You have to have a quality signal in your feedback loop or a competition for who is fastest/most productive will inevitably tend to mean who cuts the most corners.
A very interesting subject, but worthy of better, more deeply researched treatment. I'll confine myself to one example, welding. The U.S. Navy (USN) took a serious interest in electric arc welding starting in 1890. [Peebles, Robert H. (1987): "Navy Shipbuilders 'Discover' Welding." In Daniel M. Masterson (Ed.): Naval History. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources (The Sixth Symposium of the U.S. Naval Academy).] The technology was then very new and not well developed, but the navy saw promise and continued to pursue it. Some purchasers of commercial ships also were intrigued, but there was little commercial follow-up. In 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, the USN found it had urgent needs that could best be filled by welding, and was able to move quickly. Following the war, in response to the widespread belief that arms races had done much to lay the path to war, a variety of treaties limited naval armaments, restricting warship displacement tonnage. In an effort to get maximum capability with constrained tonnage, navies turned to welding to reduce the weight of the hull. The leaders in this were the German Reichsmarine and the USN. [Brown, D. K. (1992): Early Welding for the Royal Navy. In Journal of Naval Engineering (UK) 34 (1).] The USN started more cautiously (and with fewer problems) but kept promoting the development of welding technology and practice and by the time the large building programs of the 1930s began, was using welding wherever possible. [Manning, G. C.; Schumacher, T. L. (1935): Principles of Warship Construction and Damage Control. Annapolis: U. S. Naval Institute.] There were limitations; the heavy face-hardened armor plates for battleships needed to be bolted in place, for instance, since welding would degrade their protective strength. But submarines were 100% welded and virtually all the other ships were well over 95% welded. [Alden, John D. (1979): The Fleet Submarine in the U.S. Navy: A Design and Construction History. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.] In certain places it was necessary to use riveted reinforcement to prevent serious cracking under impulse loads — but after all-welded MarAd ships started literally to come apart at the seams, they too very often received riveted reinforcements. [King, Randolph W.; Palmer, Prescott (Eds.) (1989): Naval Engineering and American Seapower. Baltimore: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America.] So, no doubt out of ignorance rather than malice, Brian Potter seriously misleads us; instead of lagging indolently in we was the navy tlding for ships, the USN was the world leader, and when the early EC2 and T-2 ships started breaking up ithat provided the solution. Nor, unfortunately, is this the only weakness in this interesting and entertaining tale.
Thank you for a fascinating look back at US WW2 shipbuilding.
What is interesting (and depressing) is that the US produced more steel in 1942 than it produces today - even despite a population under 40% that of today.
The web of "fabrication workshops" referenced: I am sure some are still around, but I am equally sure that the absolute, much less relative, numbers are down 90% or more.
Ditto the numbers of companies that actually can build stuff.
Ditto even top level engineering and management experience.
So a reprise of such an effort is likely impossible without decades of capability and capacity rebuilding.
Is it fair to say that some of this was them being willing to sacrifice quality in the name of greater shipbuilding speed? The Liberty ships were often pretty bad. They had a very low speed (making them easy targets for U-boats), and a bad tendency to fracture and crack under pressure.
At their maximum speed of 11 knots, the EC2 "Liberty" ships were faster than the average contemporary merchant vessel of their time. Since they almost always traveled in convoys of many ships, higher speed would have been of little value in many cases.
And yet neoliberals would have you believe that “the government” can never accomplish anything. It’s a lie, of course. What’s astonishing is that the lie was ever believed in the first place, let alone allowed to flourish into hegemony among US elected representatives and policymakers for almost 50 uninterrupted years now.
Look around you. Are you pleased with the results?
What are you talking about? Of course something was accomplished when huge amounts of money was thrown at a problem. Government can spend a lot of money. But the actual efficiencies and accomplishments were made in the private sector. It was a war. It was necessary to fight the fascists but there was not much that was sustainably efficient or productive about it; as detailed in the article. Where government is actually running things (like the public school where I work) results are far less impressive. It sounds like you prefer a war paradigm where people are forced to work in sub-optimal, dangerous conditions to build things designed to be blown up or sunk that planners have deemed necessary.
Perhaps consider for a moment that there is some position between favoring a command economy and one where the government does absolutely nothing -- then perhaps some intelligent discussion can be had about which sort of activities government ought to engage in itself and which it can sensibly leave to "the markets."
Thanks for the great piece. One detail to add: women were able to join this workforce because the federal government created childcare centers associated with the shipyards. See (my wife' article): Susan E. Riley, "Caring for Rosie's Children: Federal Child Care Policies in the World War II Era" https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/3235099?journalCode=pol
mentioned briefly were the hazardous worker conditions at the shipyards. Similar conditions at prior Kaiser projects had company chief doctor Garfield convince Henry Kaiser to do something about this: thus was born Kaiser Permanente (named after a creek), the first concept of "health maintenance" (health problem *prevention*) i.e. HMO, and both a hospital system as well as insurance plan, rather than mere worker's compensation insurance which only helps with care *after* a disease or injury. I can't find proof of this, but I believe I read somewhere that being under the same Kaiser umbrella, KP was able to encourage safety programs at the shipyards to help reduce the risks of injury and thus the need for later healthcare.
By coincidence today I accompanied my wife to the doctor and brought along my laptop to read this article whilst I waited⎯at Kaiser Permanente, probably the most efficient fully integrated, all around best health care system in the United States.
What a great article. It's enjoyable to remember when we could build things. You know if something like the "6 Companies" were given such a contract today, people would scream about corruption and no-bid contracts and underhanded dealings. I get it... but sometimes, strategic realities require cutting red tape. NEPA has to take a backseat to survival.
Prior to his political career, Newt Gingrich was a WWII history professor. He said this in 2008 at a speech in Atlanta:
"December 7th 1941 to August 14th, 1945 is less than 4 years. In less than 4 years, we defeated Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Today it takes 23 years to add a 5th runway to the Atlanta airport. We are simply not prepared, today, to be a serious country."
That was 17 years ago.
The ruling class only opens the spigots when faced with an existential threat. We could have built that runway a lot more quickly and compensated or relocated everyone in its path, but the ruling class expects airports to show a profit or at least break even. Our ruling class doesn't feel threatened, so it's all about extraction. That makes it hard to do anything except direct subsidies to the most wealthy.
Thanks for another great writeup, Brian! It's easy to forget the sheer scale of coordinating people and material that has to go into a rapid buildup like this. Outside the pressures of war, it's hard to imagine something like this taking place.
In the end you discuss that the US shipyard wasn't able to match the efficiencies of UK shipyards. Do you have found out any explanation of why that is? One would think that the learning curve would catapult the US yards well past the UK ones.
Fortune had a great maritime issue back in September 1937. The US was a major shipbuilding power in the days of sail. The high point was probably 1849 when there was a shipping boom to support the California Gold Rush. The introduction of steam by the British in 1840 and then the depression of 1857 clobbered US ship building, and it never recovered in terms of cost or production. (1857 was the year of the Sepoy Rebellion which led England to change the way India was ruled. It kicked out the East India Company.) The British government massively subsidized ship building both directly and by developing an international mail service to support its world empire.
The US wasn't building a world empire. It was focusing on its inland empire based on rail. That required billions in subsidies of its own. The US did try a few subsidies, but by 1891 the "U.S. foreign merchant marine had almost ceased to exist". The US arranged for some subsidies including mail contracts, but never really built up its merchant marine. When the first world war broke out, England and the other European nations diverted their own shipping to support their war efforts. The US found itself without available shipping which led to the development of Hog Island near Philadelphia as a major government driven shipbuilding site.
I'm not sure of why the US lost its ship building mojo with the rise of steam powered and iron clad ships. The US wasn't a world power until after World War II, and, by then, aviation was increasingly important. Through its history, the US has been more focused on its inland empire. The Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system required an inland merchant marine, but the railroads were much more important to the economy. The government spent a lot of money developing a continental rail system and then a continental highway system. Both yielded high returns. A better merchant marine just wouldn't pay off the same way it would for the British with their world empire or Japan with its trade orientation and, at times, desire for regional hegemony.
In addition to employing women (and providing ground-breaking daycare facilities), Kaiser was also color blind, happily employing blacks and housing them next to whites in Vanport (near the Vancouver Washington and Portland shipyards), which became Oregon's second-largest city for a time. It is quite possible that Kaiser did more to win the war than almost any other individual, and certainly more than any U.S. civilian.
After the war, Kaiser built automobiles, homes, and hotels and manufactured steel, aluminum, magnesium, and cement. He was also good to his workers, never objected to unionization, and was the first industrialist to earn the AFL-CIO Murray-Green Humanitarian Award.
Wonderful complement to the airplane article on how the US managed to build so many airplanes during the Second World War. Great as always!
What made UK so efficient in ship building and why US still struggled to compete with international shipbuilders?
Brian wrote another piece on this a while ago. Reading this one reminded me of it and made me go find it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/constructionphysics/p/lessons-from-shipbuilding-productivity?r=epmze&utm_medium=ios
Thanks, Matthew! I remember reading about it, but I still find it hard to understand why, even at the peak of the mass production era during World War II, the most efficient U.S. shipyards were only roughly on par with the UK’s productivity. After the war, I understand how factors like the Jones Act, low automation, and protectionist policies hindered U.S. shipbuilding efficiency. But during the war, I would have expected the U.S.—with its innovations and focus on mass production—to outperform others in terms of productivity. Was it simply that the priority was on quantity over cost or efficiency, aiming to outbuild the enemy at any expense? Or were there deeper, more systemic issues affecting U.S. shipyard productivity at the time?
So in summary, would it be fair to say that the US shipbuilding industry didn't innovate in terms of efficiency, but in terms of "9 women *can* make a baby in 1 month"? Contrasting the greater efficiency but slower speed of the British shipbuilding industry -- the US went for something like "10 women make a baby in 1 month", the Brits for "1 woman makes a baby in 9 months". The US in essence figured out how to spend resources faster, a la your article about Levittown (https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-levittown-didnt-revolutionize) -- it was good for the demands of wartime, but didn't fit the demands of peacetime.
The US could afford to do so.
Yep, definitely. But it's always fun to turn around the "9 women can't make a baby in 1 month" advice, which is generally good advice, with a real world example where "Huh, they literally took a bunch of women and made a 'baby' in 1 month".
Another innovation was the. use of women in ship construction. Ship construction also benefitted from having a work force ready to go via the Great Depression.
The post war boom benefitted from having a large trained workforce that could be reorganized for civilian production.
I seem to remember a long piece on the efficiency of the British yards which went in depth into the disparity. Was that on CP or elsewhere?
Edit: Yes it was. Wonderful pieces, both. https://open.substack.com/pub/constructionphysics/p/lessons-from-shipbuilding-productivity?r=epmze&utm_medium=ios
OK. This is Relevant To My Interests, and sorry for the late response. I was on the road to see a battleship.
I have a longer writeup on the problems with "tonnage" at https://www.navalgazing.net/Naval-Measurements.
>more than 1,300 naval vessels, including 8 battleships, 128 aircraft carriers, and 352 destroyers.
I really do not like lumping CVEs with proper carriers this way. The chart is better, although some of the broken-out sections towards the bottom probably shouldn't be (for instance, I'd put the CVLs and Midway with the regular CVs, and lump the APDs in with whichever type they were converted from).
>But it was private companies, some of which had never built ships before, that actually built the yards and ships, and worked tirelessly to increase efficiencies, drive down construction times, and produce enough ships to win the war.
Not entirely. Bigger warships were overwhelmingly built by traditional shipbuilders, and the battleships in particular were mostly a Navy Yard thing. Three of the SoDaks were privately-built, but both North Carolinas and all four (or six) Iowas were assigned to the Navy Yards. The book Warship Builders has a lot of good stuff on this.
>And the standard cargo ship designs created by the commission made extensive use of welding, a then-novel method of ship construction that greatly reduced the amount of steel required to build a ship.
I believe this is no more than 15%.
>Instead of a new, modern design, the British ships would be based on the design for a British tramp steamer, probably the Empire Wind,
There was a recent book from the Naval Institute Press about the origins of the Liberty Ship, though I didn't pick up a copy. My series on the Liberty Ships identifies J.L. Thompson and Sons as the source of the design, and while they did build Empire Wind, I'm not sure if she was the exact source.
>When the US entered WWII, most ships were built using methods not much different from those used on the first iron ships built in the late 19th century.
This is an overstatement. There had been substantial changes in shipbuilding, and battleships coming down the ways in the late 30s and early 40s were significantly more complete than the ships before the Treaty.
> Germany’s “pocket” battleships
This should be "pocket battleships". They weren't battleships of any sort, so the "pocket" can't be split off or discarded. (I will spare everyone the detailed analysis of the Deutschland class, but they're interesting and deeply flawed ships.)
Re welding and ship failures, I believe a lot of it was also poor detail design around things like hatch corners, which hadn't shown up previously because riveted construction tended to catch cracks instead of letting them propagate.
Also, I am slightly disappointed that you didn't mention the Higgins plan to build an actual moving assembly line for Liberty Ships near New Orleans.
>But all this was only sufficient to let the US briefly match the most productive international shipbuilders in terms of man hours (and likely not match in terms of costs, given high US wages).
For reasons that I do not fully understand, there was a substantial difference in US and British shipbuilding productivity during the 40s, across all categories. DK Brown talks about this in Nelson to Vanguard, comparing US and British versions of the River-class frigate. The difference is impressive, with the US method taking a lot more labor but also a lot less time. I can't say exactly how/why, but I suspect there were very different philosophies at work. For instance, Brown has stories about the wiring/piping layout being done by the workers themselves, which sometimes meant that plumbing had to be routed around electrical wiring. Or the fact that British battleship turrets were frequently the limiting factor in ship construction (HMS Vanguard being the obvious example) while this was so much not a thing for the Americans that nobody even acknowledges it as a potential bottleneck.
On the whole, an excellent post.
In all this talk about interyard competition I was only wondering if and how quality was incorporated. You have to have a quality signal in your feedback loop or a competition for who is fastest/most productive will inevitably tend to mean who cuts the most corners.
A very interesting subject, but worthy of better, more deeply researched treatment. I'll confine myself to one example, welding. The U.S. Navy (USN) took a serious interest in electric arc welding starting in 1890. [Peebles, Robert H. (1987): "Navy Shipbuilders 'Discover' Welding." In Daniel M. Masterson (Ed.): Naval History. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources (The Sixth Symposium of the U.S. Naval Academy).] The technology was then very new and not well developed, but the navy saw promise and continued to pursue it. Some purchasers of commercial ships also were intrigued, but there was little commercial follow-up. In 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, the USN found it had urgent needs that could best be filled by welding, and was able to move quickly. Following the war, in response to the widespread belief that arms races had done much to lay the path to war, a variety of treaties limited naval armaments, restricting warship displacement tonnage. In an effort to get maximum capability with constrained tonnage, navies turned to welding to reduce the weight of the hull. The leaders in this were the German Reichsmarine and the USN. [Brown, D. K. (1992): Early Welding for the Royal Navy. In Journal of Naval Engineering (UK) 34 (1).] The USN started more cautiously (and with fewer problems) but kept promoting the development of welding technology and practice and by the time the large building programs of the 1930s began, was using welding wherever possible. [Manning, G. C.; Schumacher, T. L. (1935): Principles of Warship Construction and Damage Control. Annapolis: U. S. Naval Institute.] There were limitations; the heavy face-hardened armor plates for battleships needed to be bolted in place, for instance, since welding would degrade their protective strength. But submarines were 100% welded and virtually all the other ships were well over 95% welded. [Alden, John D. (1979): The Fleet Submarine in the U.S. Navy: A Design and Construction History. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press.] In certain places it was necessary to use riveted reinforcement to prevent serious cracking under impulse loads — but after all-welded MarAd ships started literally to come apart at the seams, they too very often received riveted reinforcements. [King, Randolph W.; Palmer, Prescott (Eds.) (1989): Naval Engineering and American Seapower. Baltimore: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Company of America.] So, no doubt out of ignorance rather than malice, Brian Potter seriously misleads us; instead of lagging indolently in we was the navy tlding for ships, the USN was the world leader, and when the early EC2 and T-2 ships started breaking up ithat provided the solution. Nor, unfortunately, is this the only weakness in this interesting and entertaining tale.
Thank you for a fascinating look back at US WW2 shipbuilding.
What is interesting (and depressing) is that the US produced more steel in 1942 than it produces today - even despite a population under 40% that of today.
The web of "fabrication workshops" referenced: I am sure some are still around, but I am equally sure that the absolute, much less relative, numbers are down 90% or more.
Ditto the numbers of companies that actually can build stuff.
Ditto even top level engineering and management experience.
So a reprise of such an effort is likely impossible without decades of capability and capacity rebuilding.
Is it fair to say that some of this was them being willing to sacrifice quality in the name of greater shipbuilding speed? The Liberty ships were often pretty bad. They had a very low speed (making them easy targets for U-boats), and a bad tendency to fracture and crack under pressure.
At their maximum speed of 11 knots, the EC2 "Liberty" ships were faster than the average contemporary merchant vessel of their time. Since they almost always traveled in convoys of many ships, higher speed would have been of little value in many cases.
And yet neoliberals would have you believe that “the government” can never accomplish anything. It’s a lie, of course. What’s astonishing is that the lie was ever believed in the first place, let alone allowed to flourish into hegemony among US elected representatives and policymakers for almost 50 uninterrupted years now.
Look around you. Are you pleased with the results?
What are you talking about? Of course something was accomplished when huge amounts of money was thrown at a problem. Government can spend a lot of money. But the actual efficiencies and accomplishments were made in the private sector. It was a war. It was necessary to fight the fascists but there was not much that was sustainably efficient or productive about it; as detailed in the article. Where government is actually running things (like the public school where I work) results are far less impressive. It sounds like you prefer a war paradigm where people are forced to work in sub-optimal, dangerous conditions to build things designed to be blown up or sunk that planners have deemed necessary.
Perhaps consider for a moment that there is some position between favoring a command economy and one where the government does absolutely nothing -- then perhaps some intelligent discussion can be had about which sort of activities government ought to engage in itself and which it can sensibly leave to "the markets."