How America Built 2,710 Liberty Ships and Why It Could Not Do So Today

Let me tell you about a ship that was built in four days, fifteen hours and a bit, and then let me ask you how long it takes your local government to approve a parking lot.

The ship was the SS Robert E. Peary, a Liberty ship, launched at Richmond, California, in November 1942. A hull the length of a city block, about eleven thousand tons of deadweight, went from the first keel plate to the water in less than five days, and the whole country got a stunt out of it. The stunt was a message. The message was that a free people with free enterprise and a purpose can do things that command economies and committees cannot. We should have kept that message on the wall.

Where it started: a British order and a bad design

In December 1940, with Britain losing merchant ships to German submarines faster than she could replace them, a British purchasing commission came to the United States and ordered sixty cargo ships. The design was a plain, old-fashioned tramp steamer, based on a British ship built in Sunderland, with a coal-fired reciprocating steam engine. It was not elegant. It was cheap, simple and could be built by people who had never built a ship.

The American government adapted the design, and the Emergency Shipbuilding Program of 1941 turned it into the Liberty ship. The first Liberty ships were launched in September 1941, on what was called Liberty Fleet Day, with the Patrick Henry as the lead vessel. President Roosevelt used the name to make a point: the ship was named for a man who said give me liberty or give me death, and was meant to carry liberty in the holds of freighters. Liberty ships were named after deceased Americans, so every one was a small memorial.

The yard system of the program was built from nothing. Before the war, the American shipbuilding industry was small and depressed. Eighteen yards in all built Liberty ships, and by 1943 they were doing it at a pace that surprised even the planners. The total by the end of the war was 2,710 Liberty ships. Each carried about ten thousand tons of cargo, and together they made up a large share of the merchant tonnage that carried the supplies, trucks, tanks, food and fuel of the Allied war effort. A war is fought by soldiers, but it is delivered by ships.

Henry Kaiser and the assembly line at sea

The legend of the program is Henry J. Kaiser, an industrialist who had built roads and dams and who had never built a ship before 1940. He and his partners set up yards at Richmond, California, and on the Pacific Northwest coast, and he did what no traditional shipbuilder would have done: he treated a ship as a product to be assembled.

Traditional shipbuilding laid a keel and built the hull up plate by plate, rivet by rivet. Kaiser's yards welded instead of riveting, and they built sections of the ship in different shops and joined them in the yard. A bow section might be built in one place, a stern in another, a deckhouse somewhere else, and the pieces would be lifted by cranes and welded together. The idea was mass production. The effect was a collapse in construction time. At the start of the program, building a Liberty ship took more than 200 days. By 1943 the median had come down to a fraction of that, about 39 days per ship, and the best yards did better.

The Robert E. Peary was a showpiece. At the Richmond yard, in November 1942, the hull was assembled from prefabricated sections, and the ship was launched four days and about fifteen and a half hours after the keel was laid. It was then fitted out and delivered within a few more days. The yard had set out to beat a record, and they did it as a publicity gesture, with extra labor and extra planning for one hull, so it was not the normal pace. But the normal pace was astonishing by itself, and the stunt showed what was possible.

The workers

Here I want to talk about the people, because the story is not about machines. It is about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who walked into those yards, many with no previous experience, and learned in days or weeks to weld, to rig, to lay out steel, to run a crane. Many came from farms and small towns. Many came from the South and the Midwest to California, Oregon and Washington, for the work, and the wartime shift of population is one of the great stories of the American twentieth century.

Women took jobs as welders, burners, riveters and machinists in large numbers, because the men were in uniform and the ships still had to be built. The poster image of the woman in the bandana and the work shirt is a cliché now, but behind the cliché were real people who learned a trade fast and did it well. Plenty of them were doing work that their mothers had been told was beyond them. The yards also employed Black workers in growing numbers, in a country that had not yet admitted what it owed them, and that part of the story belongs to the larger history of the home front, including its failings.

The arithmetic is simple. A product that is designed to be built by people who can learn it quickly, in a facility organized for flow, with managers who care about output, will multiply. A good job in a productive yard also paid better than anything most of those workers had known. That is a conservative story if there ever was one: people, a wage, a purpose and a boss who got out of the way, and a government that wanted the result more than it wanted the process.

The numbers, and an honest caveat

Let me give you an honest word about the program, because the people who tell it as a fairy tale do it a disservice. The early Liberty ships had a problem: some of them cracked. Welded hulls, built in cold waters with the steel then available, sometimes developed brittle fractures, and a small number of ships broke in two. Investigations in the war years found that the steel's behavior at low temperatures and the design's sharp corners were part of the problem, and the fix was to change the steel and strengthen the design. The program learned and corrected. That is how production lines are supposed to work.

The speed was also a matter of trade. These ships were built to be good enough, in vast numbers, to outrun the submarines' sinking rate. They were not built to last. Many were scrapped or sold after the war, and some served for years. The point of the program was never beauty. It was throughput. Winning a war of production means producing more than the enemy can destroy.

Why it could not be done today

Now to the uncomfortable part. Could America do it again? The honest answer is no, not quickly, not with its present industrial base, and not with its present habits.

The decline of American commercial shipbuilding is a long story, and part of it was a matter of economics. After the war, foreign yards in Europe and then in Japan and Korea, with lower labor costs and often with government help, took over the world's commercial shipbuilding. American yards came to depend on two kinds of customers: the Navy, which is a single customer with a particular set of needs, and the domestic trades protected by the Jones Act, which requires ships moving cargo between American ports to be American-built, American-owned and American-crewed. A yard that builds mostly for a single government buyer does not develop the habits of a yard that has to sell in a world market. It becomes a contractor, and the contractor learns to optimize for the contract.

A second turning point was policy. For decades the federal government paid a construction differential subsidy to make up part of the cost gap between American and foreign yards. The subsidy was ended in 1981, in the first Reagan budget. There was a free-market logic to that, and I have some sympathy with it: a subsidy that never ends is a habit and not a policy. But what followed was not a flowering of competitive American commercial yards. It was the closing of many of them. The yards that did survive were those with captive customers.

The result by now is a country with a handful of large yards that build warships and a thin base of commercial building. That matters because the skills, the suppliers, the workers and the supply chains that serve a commercial yard are the same ones a navy needs in a surge. When the commercial business goes, the surge capacity goes with it.

I will go into the structure of the problem in more detail in The Shipbuilding Gap with China Is an Industrial Story Before a Navy Story, so let me put the key point here as a numbered argument.

1. A war of any length is a war of replacement. Ships are lost, and the nation that can build and repair faster than its enemy wins the long contest. That was the lesson of 1942, when the Liberty program began to outbuild the submarines.
2. Surge capacity does not exist on paper. It exists in yards, dry docks, trained workers, suppliers of steel, valves and electrical gear, and the habit of running a production line. These are expensive to keep and quick to lose.
3. A base that serves only the government is a narrow base. It lacks the volume, the competition and the discipline of the market, and it cannot expand quickly because it never learned to run at scale.
4. Therefore the question of industrial base is a question of national defense, and not a side issue for economists. We cannot say the answer is "buy it abroad" if the nation we would be buying from is the one we might fight.

The objections

The strongest objection is that the Liberty ship model is a relic. We do not need thousands of simple freighters, the argument goes. Modern warships are enormously more complex than the cargo ships of 1942, and they are built with advanced electronics, special steels and quiet machinery that no assembly-line yard could produce. The world economy, moreover, runs on specialization. It would be wasteful to subsidize an American industry that is less efficient than its foreign rivals, and consumers would pay for it.

That is a serious argument, and part of it is right. We are not going to build 2,710 anything in four years without a national emergency, and we should not try to manage the economy as if one were always coming. But the objection proves less than it claims.

1. Complexity is not an excuse for a thin base. A complex warship still needs steel, yards, welders, pipefitters, electricians and dry docks. The skilled workforce that builds a complex ship is the same workforce, in the same trades, that a healthy commercial yard employs.
2. The merchant marine is part of the military. An army that fights overseas needs cargo ships, and the Navy itself relies on a pool of American-crewed merchant vessels and mariners in time of war. Without commercial ships, there is no sealift.
3. Specialization has a price in a crisis. The efficiency of the global supply chain is real in peacetime and dangerous in war, when the supplier may be on the other side. A free-market conservative can honor Adam Smith and also remember that Smith himself, in The Wealth of Nations, wrote while discussing the Navigation Acts that defence "is of much more importance than opulence."
4. The answer is not to copy the old subsidy. It is to fix what makes American building expensive, from permitting to regulation to taxation to the rules that keep out new entrants, and to let competitive yards grow.

The conservative case for rebuilding

Here is what I'd propose, and notice that it is not a call for central planning. Let the market do what it does best, and make sure government is not the obstacle.

• Reduce the cost of building in America. Streamline the permitting for new yards and dry docks, which can take many years and many agencies. A shipyard is not a casino. The rules should not treat it as though it were one.
• Be honest about the Jones Act. It protects American yards and crews, and it also raises costs on domestic shipping. Conservatives disagree about it, and the debate should be based on real numbers. If the law is to stay, the industry it protects must actually be growing, and if it is not growing, the law has failed on its own terms.
• Use the Defense Production Act with discipline. It is a wartime tool with peacetime habits, as I discuss in The Defense Production Act of 1950 Is a Wartime Tool with Peacetime Habits, and its use should be bounded and accountable.
• Train the workforce. The Liberty yards made welders in weeks. A modern apprenticeship system, with employers and not government agencies at its core, can do the same.
• Fix the buying process. The Navy's record on lead ships and delays, summarized in Zumwalt, the Littoral Combat Ship and the Lessons of Procurement Failure, is a record of requirements that kept changing. A yard cannot run a production line if the customer keeps redesigning the product.

You will notice that none of this involves the government building ships itself, which is a very good thing. The Liberty program worked because the government set a goal, specified the product, and hired private companies and let them figure out how. The lesson was never "more government." It was "clearer purpose, fewer obstacles."

A founding anchor

This is not a modern idea. Article I, Section 8 gives Congress the power "To provide and maintain a Navy," and the Founders knew that a navy was a matter of industry as much as of statute. Their first major act of naval policy, the Naval Act of 1794, authorized the building of six frigates in response to the depredations of the Algerine corsairs. The United States was a shipbuilding nation from its first years, because it was a seafaring and trading nation. Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures argued for making the country independent of foreign nations for military and other essential supplies. We have lost a good deal of what the Founders took for granted.

And the principle is not only military. A people who can build things have a certain confidence, and a people who cannot build things are always at someone else's mercy. The Liberty story is that confidence in its purest form.

For the wider question of whether a strong navy pays its way, see Six Arguments Against a Strong Navy, and Why Each One Sinks. For the nuclear navy that grew out of the same industrial tradition, see Admiral Rickover Built the Navy That Made Nuclear Deterrence Survivable.

What it means for a family

If you live near a port, you know that a shipyard is a town's bloodstream, with its wages, its apprenticeships, its suppliers, its small businesses and its sense that the place makes something real. If you do not, you still pay the bill, because a nation that cannot build its own ships pays someone else to do it, or does without. Picture a young person in a coastal town, with no college plan and a good head for details, who could learn to weld and earn a good living. That is not charity or planning. It is what a working economy does with willing people.

The case in brief

1. The Emergency Shipbuilding Program of 1941 produced 2,710 Liberty ships by the end of the war, and the SS Robert E. Peary, launched in November 1942 in under five days, showed what prefabrication and welding could achieve.
2. The program worked because the government set a clear goal and private firms and ordinary workers, including women welders, figured out how.
3. The decline of American commercial shipbuilding since, including the end of the construction subsidy in 1981, leaves a thin base for any surge.
4. A navy and a merchant marine need commercial yards, trained workers and suppliers, so industrial capacity is a defense question.
5. The conservative answer is to cut the cost of building in America, train workers, buy sensibly and let competition work, and not to centralize.

What you can do: look up the shipyards in your own state or region, and ask your representative through the my-representatives page what is being done to keep them busy, staffed and competitive.