c



  
  
The Liberty Ships of World War II were an engineering and industrial
solution to a specific military and political problem. The problem was
that is was necessary to build merchant ships faster than the German
Navy submarines could sink them, in order to supply the United
Kingdom and sustain its war effort. The problem was complicated by
the fact that the Great Depression had greatly
reduced U.S. shipbuilding capacity.

Between 1930 and 1937, U.S. shipyards built only 71 merchant

ships. However, 5,777 were built between 1939 and 1945. This was
made possible by changes to construction methods, as well as the
standardized Liberty freighter and similar T2 tanker designs. One
shipyard built a Liberty ship in five days. The massive increase in
production was possible in large part because of a change from
riveted to electric-arc welded construction. Shipyards were organized
for maximum efficiency around the welding process. New welding
equipment was developed for heavy steel ship plate. The German
pocket battleships had pointed out the efficiencies of welded ship
hulls. By saving a thousand tons of weight in the hull, they could carry
that much more armament (Tassava 2003, pp. 90 ² 93).

One of the best known Liberty Ship failures was the ? ?
? .

´At 10:30 pm on January 16, 1943, an explosive boom shattered the

cold night that had settled over the Swan Island shipyard
outside Portland , Oregon . Rushing to the fitting-out docks where the
yard·s T2 tanker vessels were completed, graveyard shift workers
discovered that the yard·s very first ship, the ? ?
? , had
cracked in half amidships. The ship·s deck and side shells had
fractured completely; only the plates running along the bottom of the
[162 m] 532-foot long hull held the fore and aft sections together.µ
(Tassava 2003, p. 87).

Although this wasn·t the first cargo ship failure, it was highly visible, as
the first ship built in the new yard. In March, another tanker, the


, split in half while entering New York harbor. In January
1943, about 20 ship failures occurred, with 4 or 5 suffering Class I
damage or total hull failure like the ? . Twenty Class I
failures occurred in January 1944, with 120 failures in the following
March. Many failures occurred in the open ocean. Since
the ? and

 failures occurred in port, the
ships could be put in drydock, repaired, and put back into service
(Tassava 2003, pp. 88 ² 90).

The solutions fell into three categories ² improvements to shipyard

practice, retrofits of the completed ships, and changes to the design.
Two different anti-fracture design changes were made. The first was to
redraw the Liberty ship plans to round off the troublesome hatch
corners. The second was to install crack-arresting devices, to stop
cracks from propagating through the hulls. It had been observed that
fractures were generally stopped by perpendicular barriers such as
riveted or especially strong seams (Tassava 2003, p. 101). In the early
Class I failures, such as the ? and


the
cracks had been able to travel completely through the hull.

The gunwale bars and the other retrofits were successful. No ship with gunwale
bars ever failed in service. Through the end of the war, only 127 of the
4,694 Liberty ships and T2 tankers ever suffered a Class I fracture, and no ships
with anti-fracture devices failed. Two years after the war ´an official board of
investigation determined that faulty workmanship caused exactly 25 % of the
2,504 fractures which had occurred up to August 1, 1945, that a combination of
inferior workmanship and inadequate design caused another 20 %, and design
so poor that ¶perfect workmanship would have done little to prevent the
failures· caused a stunning 55 %µ (Tassava 2003, p. 103).

The complete case study is provided in Chapter 9 of  




?





A useful review of the Liberty
Ships as well as the problems and solutions of welding was written by
Christopher James Tassava, ´Weak Seams: Controversy over Welding
Theory and Practice in American Shipyards, 1938 ² 1946,µ 


 
Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 87 ² 108 (Tassava 2003). Tassava is a
historian, not an engineer, but does a good job of reviewing the
technical issues associated with the failures. This case study is featured
on the History Channel Modern Marvels 



videotape/DVD. However, the History Channel version seems
oversimplified.
p