It's a desperate effort to keep Britain supplied in its war effort against Nazi

Germany. But they're being decimated by enemy ships and submarines. In 1940 alone,

Germany will sink over 1,000 Allied ships. Britain is at risk of being

starved of supplies. The Allies response is brutally simple. Find a way to build

thousands of cargo ships and build them faster than Germany can ever hope to

sink them. In just four years, America will construct over 2,700

Liberty class cargo ships and each will be built not in months, but mere weeks.

Some in a matter of days. These ugly and hastily built ships will be loaded to

the brim and sent overseas. And they're going to help the Allies win the war.

By late 1940, much of Europe had fallen to Nazi Germany and the British

Commonwealth now stood alone in its fight. But the island nation was being

starved of much-needed supplies for its war effort. German U-boats,warships and

aircraft were inflicting heavy losses to incoming shipping traffic, sinking ships

faster than Britain could replace them. The United States, although not yet at

war, was playing a vital role in supplying Britain in its war effort. And

its enormous industrial capacity was critical to helping Britain stay in the

fight. But with Germany sinking ships daily, Britain and America desperately

needed a way to keep all that war material moving. The problem was, in the

entire decade prior, America had only built a couple dozen ships. So at the

start of 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt announces the emergency

shipbuilding program. It'll be an enormous effort to produce ships on an

unprecedented scale. But to do that, they'll need to build a special kind of

ship. Dreadful looking objects. That's how President Roosevelt described

Liberty ships when he first saw their design.

Time magazine nicknamed them ugly ducklings.They're not much to look at

and from a design standpoint there's also really nothing remarkable about

them. With 10,000 tons of cargo capacity, they are a large ship for the day, but

they're also obsolete. Their design is 60 years old. Based off a British ship built

in the 19th century, they're powered by an antiquated compound steam engine.

They're under powered. If the Atlantic seas are rough enough

and moving in the wrong direction, a Liberty might not be able to move

forward at all. Most liberties were given like defenses a 3-inch bow gun and a

four or five inch stern gun along with anti-aircraft weaponry. They were crewed by

45 volunteer Merchant Mariner and one or two dozen Navy armed guard. But in

reality, the heroic men who served aboard these ships were vulnerable and paid a

heavy price. But Liberty ships aren't remarkable for their capabilities out at sea.

The history they made was in how they were built. Their design

is deliberately basic. Because that's what's going to allow for thousands to

be built, with most being constructed in just a few weeks. Liberty ships

aren't expected to last. They're engineered lifespan is only five years.

But if a Liberty Ship can make just one single trip across the ocean with cargo,

well that's a success worth the two million dollar price tag. That's how

desperate the situation was. The task of constructing Liberty ships will be

assigned to 18 shipyards to spread across the coastal United States and

they'll soon be producing Liberty ships at an incredible rate. By 1943, these

shipyards will launch a new ship on average every eight hours. There's

two revolutionary changes in shipbuilding that'll make this enormous

feed possible. The first is welding. Up until this point, almost all ships were

built by riveting pieces together, a slow process requiring skill and physical

strength. but Liberty ships workforce would not be skilled. Most would be

plucked off farms and nearly a third would be women. Welding would drastically

speed up the assembly process. The second revolutionary step will bring assembly

line logic to the shipbuilding industry. Instead of building a ship from start to

finish, thousands of components will be

manufactured at the same time, at different locations and then brought to

the shipyard for final assembly. Where it used to take six months to construct a

Liberty sized ship, by 1944 it was taking on average only 42 days.

And shipyards would compete to see how fast they could build them. One yard

would finish a Liberty in a month and another would break this record, doing it

in just three weeks. Then in November of 1942, the Richmond shipyards in

California managed to build a Liberty in just four days and

fifteen hours. And then it broke in two. Okay, so not that particular Liberty ship,

but some early liberties did literally break in half. These ships were notorious

for developing serious structural cracks. You see, welding instead of riveting

meant that cracks could easily spread throughout the hall. Revolutionary

changes in shipbuilding meant there were some kinks to work out.

Out at sea, Liberty ships were vulnerable not because they lacked serious

defensive weaponry, but because they were slow. Convoys of Liberty ships numbering

50 or 60 would lumber along at just 10 miles per hour. At full emergency speed, a

Liberty Ship could push 13 miles per hour. Maybe. But a surfaced German U-boat

could do 20 miles per hour. And that made Liberty's easy prey, especially at night.

To improve the odds, Liberty ships were guarded by escorts. More vulnerable

liberties, those loaded with munitions or fuel, would travel at the center of the

formation. But serving on a Liberty was dangerous and stressful and hundreds

were sunk or critically damaged throughout the war. But by mid 1941, the

sheer number of Liberty's out at sea along with an increase in their armed

escorts, overwhelmed German forces. Advances in anti-submarine technologies

also started stamping out the U-boat threat. By mid 1944, the United States

began to focus on producing a new type of wartime cargo vessel: the Victory Ship,

which would never be produced on the scale that Liberty's were, but there were

larger and faster making them far less vulnerable.

After the war, many liberties were put into the reserve fleet or sold off to

post-war merchant cargo fleets. By the 1960s their ancient design made them far

too expensive to operate and most were sold off for scrap. Today only three

remaining liberties of 2,710 survived to remind us of their enormous contribution

to winning the Second World War.