The first Liberty ship

On Saturday 27 September 1941 the freighter Patrick Henry, the first of the Liberty ships, slid into the water at the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard in Baltimore. War chronologies record this launch and add that Liberty ships would become an important part of the Allied supply system. The record is accurate but needs two qualifications. The launch was not a single event: the day was proclaimed “Liberty Fleet Day”, and from dawn to dusk fourteen ships were launched at yards on the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico. And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, named in many accounts as the man who launched the Patrick Henry, was not in Baltimore that day. According to his daily diary, he spent that Saturday at Hyde Park and at the funeral of Hall Roosevelt, the brother of his wife Eleanor. The ceremonies were, however, accompanied by a message he had prepared for the occasion.

A British design, American yards

By pedigree the Liberty ship was British. In the autumn of 1940 Britain was losing ships in the Atlantic far faster than its yards could replace them. In December 1940 the British Purchasing Mission in the United States therefore ordered sixty freighters from two new yards: at Richmond, California, and at South Portland, Maine. The model was a simple tramp steamer of the J.L. Thompson & Sons yard in Sunderland: five holds, a midships superstructure, an outdated but reliable triple-expansion steam engine and a speed of about eleven knots. The first of these ships, all given names beginning with “Ocean”, the Ocean Vanguard, was launched at Richmond on 16 August 1941. The Richmond yard was built and run by the industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, previously a builder of great dams, among them the Hoover Dam, who had never before built an ocean-going ship.

On 3 January 1941 Roosevelt announced a programme to build two hundred similar ships for the United States, called the Emergency Shipbuilding Program. It was run by the United States Maritime Commission, which modified the British design so that construction would be faster and cheaper still. Coal-fired boilers were replaced by oil-fired ones, and the hull, as in the ships for the British, was joined for the most part not by rivets but by welding, which took far less labour and could be taught quickly to thousands of new workers. The ship was designated EC2-S-C1. It was about 135 metres long and carried some ten thousand tons of cargo. When in March 1941 Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and then the funds to carry it out, the number of ships ordered rose rapidly. Besides the two British yards, the Maritime Commission financed seven more, built from scratch solely for the emergency programme, among them Bethlehem-Fairfield in Baltimore, run by Bethlehem Steel, and Oregon Shipbuilding in Portland, part of the Kaiser group.

The speed of construction depended on the organisation of work, and here Kaiser brought to shipbuilding his experience from construction sites and the motor industry. Instead of assembling a ship piece by piece on the slipway, his yards prepared whole sections of hull, superstructure and double bottom in sheds and yards alongside, and on the slipway the cranes merely joined them together. Welding and assembling ready-made sections could be taught in a few weeks to people who had never worked on ships: farmers from Oklahoma and Texas, construction workers, and soon women too. The method was adopted by other yards, including those on the East Coast. In Baltimore the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard initially had thirteen slipways, and sections were prepared in a former railway-wheel foundry at neighbouring Curtis Bay and brought in by rail.

The ship had a bad press from the start. Roosevelt, looking at the plans, reportedly called it a “dreadful looking object”, and Time magazine wrote of an “ugly duckling”. The ceremonial Liberty Fleet Day was meant to convince the public that these ugly, slow, hastily built freighters were what the country needed.

Liberty Fleet Day

The Patrick Henry, hull number 14 in the Maritime Commission’s register, was the first ship laid down at Bethlehem-Fairfield. Her keel had been laid on 30 April 1941, so she spent 150 days on the slipway. She was named after Patrick Henry, a politician of the struggle for independence, who in March 1775 ended a speech in Virginia with the words “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Her sponsor was Ilo Wallace, wife of Vice-President Henry Wallace. The same day the Star of Oregon, the first ship of the Kaiser yard on the Willamette river, was launched in Portland, the John C. Frémont in Los Angeles, and two British Ocean-type ships at Richmond. Among the other vessels launched that day were ships of standard types built under the Maritime Commission’s long-range programme.

Roosevelt’s message, dated 26 September in the collections of presidential papers, joined industry and politics. The President called for the pace of construction to rise until one ship a day was being launched, and then two. He recalled that freedom of the seas had been the foundation of American prosperity since colonial times, and praised the shipyard workers who that day had struck “fourteen blows” against the threat to the freedom of nations. He rejected the voices of those who would keep American ships in port, and declared that the nation intended, as far as it was able, to protect them from the torpedo, the shell and the bomb. Those words sounded concrete two weeks after the President had announced that the US Navy would shoot without warning at Axis warships in waters vital to the defence of the United States, and after its warships had begun escorting convoys in the western Atlantic. The speech ended with a reference to the ship’s namesake: the Patrick Henry renewed the great patriot’s challenge, and for America, democracy and freedom there would be “no death”; there must be liberty, “world-wide and eternal”. The name “Liberty ship” was already in use by then, and Liberty Fleet Day fixed it.

Launching did not mean readiness to sail. The Patrick Henry spent another three months fitting out and was delivered on 30 December 1941, after the United States had entered the war. Construction as a whole took 244 days.

Place in the war

The first ships took seven to eight months to build, but the yards learned quickly. Hulls were assembled from prefabricated sections welded in sheds, often by women, who from 1942 replaced in large numbers the men called up for military service. In 1943 an average Liberty ship was built in about forty days, and three such ships were delivered every day. In November 1942 Kaiser’s Richmond yard, in a publicity effort, launched the Robert E. Peary four days and fifteen and a half hours after her keel was laid. In 1941–1945 eighteen American yards built a total of 2,710 Liberty ships, the largest number of vessels to a single design in the history of shipbuilding. From 1944 they were succeeded by the larger and faster Victory ships.

Liberty ships carried tanks, ammunition, food and fuel across the Atlantic to Britain, to North Africa and into the Mediterranean, and in the Arctic convoys to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk. The Patrick Henry herself made twelve voyages during the war, among them with convoy PQ 18 to the Soviet Union in September 1942. It was mass shipbuilding that enabled the Allies to survive the worst period of the Battle of the Atlantic: in 1943 new tonnage, built mainly in American yards, clearly exceeded the losses inflicted by German U-boats. The price of speed was defects. Welded hulls cracked in the cold waters of the North Atlantic and the Arctic, and several ships broke in two. Nearly two hundred Liberty ships were sunk as a result of enemy action.

Liberty ships sailed under many flags. During the war one of them, SS Opole, was chartered by the Polish Gdynia–America Line, and after the war the Polish merchant navy bought more than a dozen others. Two of them, the Jeremiah O’Brien in San Francisco and the John W. Brown in Baltimore, survive to this day as floating museums. The Patrick Henry survived the war, ran aground on a reef off the coast of Florida in 1946, and in 1958 was broken up for scrap in the same Baltimore where she had been built.