The launch of United Victory

On 12 January 1944 the cargo ship United Victory slid down the ways at the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation yard in Portland. She was the first of a new series of American merchant ships, which took their name from her and her successors: the Victory ships. It is often stressed that ships of this class played a key role in supplying the Allies. Broadly speaking this is true, but it needs qualifying: a launch did not yet mean a ship ready to sail. United Victory spent another six weeks fitting out, was delivered to her operator on 28 February 1944 and made her first voyage roughly a month later. The first ships of the new type entered service when the Battle of the Atlantic had already been essentially decided, and most of them went to the Pacific.

Successor to the Liberty ship

The Victory type grew out of the experience of a programme that had begun in 1941 with the launch of the Patrick Henry. Liberty ships were built in huge numbers, cheaply and quickly, but they were slow: an outdated triple-expansion steam engine of about 2,500 hp gave them a mere 11 knots. In Atlantic convoys such a ship was an easy target for U-boats and held back the whole group. As early as 1942, soon after it was set up, the War Shipping Administration therefore commissioned the design of a faster cargo ship that could sail in fast convoys and find a use in commercial shipping after the war. The design was designated VC2 (V for Victory, C2 for a medium-sized cargo ship), and the name “Victory” was officially adopted on 28 April 1943.

The new ship was somewhat larger than her predecessor: about 139 metres long and 19 metres in the beam, with a deadweight of about 10,500 tons. She was distinguished by a clearly different hull, with a raised bow and finer lines. The most important change, however, lay in the engine room. Instead of a reciprocating steam engine, most of the ships were given oil-fired steam turbines of 6,000 to 8,500 hp, which allowed speeds of 15–17 knots, 4–6 knots faster than a Liberty ship. The auxiliary machinery was driven by electricity rather than steam. As in the Liberty ships, the hull was welded, but the designers increased the spacing between the frames to make the hull more flexible and less prone to cracking in cold, rough waters, as had happened to its predecessors.

The ships were armed with a 5-inch gun aft, a 3-inch gun forward and eight 20 mm anti-aircraft guns. They were manned by sailors of the Naval Armed Guard, the navy detachments that served aboard merchant ships.

A difficult start

The change of propulsion that was the new type’s chief advantage also became its biggest problem. Turbines and reduction gears were needed at the same time by the navy, which was building destroyers, escort vessels and landing ships on a vast scale. As a result the Victory programme got under way more slowly than planned, and throughout 1943 the yards went on building mainly the proven Liberty ships. The arithmetic was simple: a Liberty ship then took about forty days to build, and every switch of a slipway to the new type meant a temporary fall in output. The United States Maritime Commission, headed by Admiral Emory S. Land, nevertheless decided that a faster and more modern cargo ship would be useful both in the war and after it, in commercial shipping, where the slow Liberty ships would have little chance.

The first ship of the new type was built where Liberty ships had been built fastest: at one of the industrialist Henry Kaiser’s three yards in the Portland area. The Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation, known as Oregonship, lay in the St. Johns district on the Willamette River, not far from its confluence with the Columbia. During the war it built nearly six hundred Liberty and Victory ships; for its workers and those of Kaiser’s two other yards an entire new town, Vanport, was built. As with the Liberty ships, the hull was assembled from large sections welded next to the slipway, and the design was adapted so that each section could be lifted by the weakest crane in the yards of the emergency shipbuilding programme.

United Victory was launched on 12 January 1944. According to accounts of the launch, her sponsor was the wife of the president of the New York publisher Crowell-Collier, whose magazines had campaigned for the construction of fast ships. Under the naming scheme adopted, the next 34 ships were named after Allied countries (hence, among others, China Victory and New Zealand Victory), the following 218 after American cities and a further 150 after American colleges and universities.

The start was slow. By May 1944 only fifteen Victory ships had been delivered to operators. The pace picked up only in the second half of the year, when the yards on the West Coast and in Baltimore switched their slipways to the new type.

The service of United Victory

The Maritime Commission placed United Victory in the hands of a private operator, American President Lines, which ran her on the commission’s account until the end of the war. Like most ships of the type, she served in the Pacific, where the American fleet needed enormous numbers of cargo ships to supply islands captured ever farther from the mainland. In April 1945 she took part in supplying the invasion of Okinawa; on 16 April she was damaged in a Japanese air attack, and her gun crew fought off attacks by kamikaze aircraft. Several sailors were wounded; no one was killed.

After the war, in 1946, the ship was bought by the British shipping company Furness Withy. Converted into a cargo-passenger ship, she sailed from 1948 between Alexandria and New York as Khedive Ismail, and from 1956 as Cleopatra. She was nationalised in Egypt in 1961 and broken up in Pakistan in 1981.

Place in the war

By the end of the war American yards had built 531 Victory ships, and three more were completed in 1946, giving a total of 534. About 414 of them were cargo ships, and 117 were built as attack transports for the navy. Compared with 2,710 Liberty ships this was a modest number, and the whole emergency shipbuilding programme – under which, according to the programme’s historian Frederic C. Lane, the Maritime Commission took delivery of about 5,800 ocean-going ships in 1939–1945 – rested above all on the predecessor. The common view that Victory ships were crucial to Allied supply therefore holds for the final phase of the war and for the Pacific, less so for the Atlantic. Because they began sailing after the German submarines had already lost the battle of the convoys, not one of them was sunk by a U-boat. Their wartime losses came in the Pacific: on 6 April 1945 kamikaze aircraft sank Logan Victory and Hobbs Victory off Okinawa, and on 27 April Canada Victory.

The type’s real importance became apparent after the war. Victory ships carried hundreds of thousands of soldiers home in Operation Magic Carpet – 97 of them were converted into troopships – and as fast, modern vessels they remained in service for decades. About 180 of them sailed during the Korean War; in December 1950 Meredith Victory evacuated about 14,000 refugees from Hŭngnam in one of the largest rescue operations by a single ship in history. About a hundred Victory ships supplied American forces during the Vietnam War, and some were converted into research ships and missile-tracking vessels; one of them was USS Liberty, attacked by the Israelis in June 1967.

The launch of United Victory thus closed one chapter. A programme that had begun in 1941 with slow Liberty ships, built in haste to make good the losses inflicted by U-boats, moved on to faster ships designed with the Pacific offensive and the post-war merchant fleet in mind. The change was possible because Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his administration had, from 1941, expanded the shipbuilding industry to a scale the world had never seen before.