The Pacific Fleet

In order to remedy this situation and to facilitate the mission given to it by the act, the Maritime Commission devised a program to build 500 new design merchant freighters powered with either steam turbines or diesels. The 500 total ships were to be built over a 10-year period and contracts for their construction went to both established and new shipyards on the East, West and Gulf Coasts. The new ships would be broken into two groups. First were those constructed to contracts placed by the individual shipping companies to their own designs but where the construction differential between a US and foreign yards to be subsidized by the Maritime Commission. The second group were ships built to standard designs of the Commission and where the contract for the construction of the ships would be to Federal Government's account. It was this shipbuilding effort which became known as the Long Range Program. It was intended that this latter group of ships would be chartered to commercial operators who would use the ships in peacetime but that the ships would be available for use by the Navy in wartime. These included the type C1 ships, type C2 ships and type C3 ships.

Those ships, like their predecessors in the prewar Long Range Program, were built to government contract and then chartered to commercial shipping firms or transferred to the Navy for use as auxiliaries.

Since war appeared to be drawing closer by the year, the Long Range Program grew in importance and in 1940 was accelerated to deliver more of the 500 planned ships sooner than originally scheduled. The fall of France in May 1940 was a watershed for the Commission and the Long Range Program for when Germany was able to move its U-Boat bases to the Brittany coast of France, the Battle of the Atlantic turned drastically against Great Britain's attempts to keep her supply lines open. With losses of merchant vessels far exceeding the ability to replace then in UK shipyards, the British Merchant Shipping Mission arrived in North America with the intention of ordering replacement cargo vessels in the U.S. and Canada. Permission to do so in the U.S. was sought and granted by the Maritime Commission for the U.K. to fund the construction of two new shipyards in South Portland, Maine and Richmond, California and for each to build 30 vessels to UK design. This was the genesis of the Emergency Shipbuilding program which would soon eclipse the Long Range Program in both scope and scale.

Although it was clear that the Emergency Program would be much larger than the Long Range Program, the Commissioners led by Admiral Emory S. Land fought to ensure that the smaller program not be allowed to whither to nothing. All five members of the Maritime Commission realized that the war would come to an end someday and the Liberty ships would not be capable of fulfilling what would be required of the postwar U.S. Merchant fleet. Although by mid-1941 ships were no longer being ordered by commercial operators, ships of the standard designs continued to be ordered by the Commission. As shipbuilding accelerated in 1941 with more ships being ordered for both the Long Range and Emergency Programs, by March 1942 the oversight of shipbuilding was decentralized by the Maritime Commission into four regional offices, one on each of the three seacoasts and the last for the Great Lakes region. With this move the Long Range Program was combined with the Emergency Program for the duration as both programs were supervised as one by the individual Regional offices.

The Emergency Shipbuilding Program (late 1940-September 1945) was a United States government effort to quickly build simple cargo ships to carry troops and material to allies and foreign theatres during World War II. Run by the U.S. Maritime Commission, the program built almost 6,000 ships.

With the defense of both the U.S. and its overseas possessions along with a very strong national interest in assisting Britain in its struggle to keep its supply lines open to both North America and its overseas Colonies, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced what was to become known as the Emergency Shipbuilding Program on January 3, 1941 for the construction of 200 ships very much similar to those being built for the British. He designated that the Program be implemented and administered by the Maritime Commission which since 1937 had been the Federal government department tasked with Merchant Marine development and which had worked very closely with the British Mission in placing its 60 ship order. Immediately the Commission authorized that the two yards building for the British build ships for the U.S. upon completion of their current contracts.

The Maritime Commission also funded the yards to add building ways and realizing that more than two yards would be needed for the program they were expecting to enter into contracts to build new shipyards on the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific coasts of the U.S. In this first wave of expansion seven additional yards were added to those in Maine and California and like those yards were to be for the sole purpose of building only the Emergency type of ships. While all the yards were to be built by private contractors and operated by commercial shipbuilding companies, the new yards were financed by the Maritime Commission with funds authorized by Congress and thus owned by Federal Government.

The ships which all the yards were contracted to build were first designated by the Maritime Commission as EC2-S-C1 but because they were designed for capacity and rapid construction as opposed to speed and gracefulness lacked streamlined appearance of the more modern ship designs of the Maritime Commission such as the standard freighters type C2 ships or type C3 ships, the President had declared them to be "dreadful looking objects" and from that the term "Ugly Duckling" became the unofficial name for the emergency vessels. It was not until April 1941 that the vessels collectively were being officially referred to as the "Liberty Fleet" ships and not long after the term "Liberty Ship" became the standard name applied to all vessels of the class.

Like their British counterparts, the Ocean-class, the Liberty ships were of a 5 hatch design of approximately 10000 tons loaded displacement powered by the same size triple expansion reciprocating steam engines but using more modern oil fired water-tube boilers. Overall they were somewhat antiquated for the era and there was some quiet objection on the part of some of the members of the Maritime Commission to devoting so many valuable resources to their construction. Some believed that fewer although faster ships would be able to move as much cargo since with their added speed they could make more voyages in any given year, but faster and more complex ships required more time to build and more importantly, required steam turbines in order to gain the additional speed.

In 1941, the manufacturers of steam turbines in the U.S., companies such as General Electric, Westinghouse and Allis-Chalmers, did not have adequate production capacity to build all the turbines demanded by the Navy or for the Maritime Commissions standard dry cargo ships or tankers it was intending to still build. In the end, it was decided that what the looming war was going to require were ships which could be built quickly using prefabrication by workers relatively unskilled in shipbuilding and in greatest numbers with the available resources. With that, the Liberty ship was adopted as the only emergency type to be built and thus shared by all of the new emergency shipyards. While all the new yards were able to get their first keels laid in a very short period of time, the first of the Liberty ships to be launched was the SS Patrick Henry which rolled down the ways at the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard on September 27, 1941.

The December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent entry of the U.S. into the war caused all previously established production schedules to be further revised dramatically upward. With the need to assist Britain replace its lost tonnage and to provide adequate ships to the Army to transport troops and supplies to foreign theaters, in January 1942 President Roosevelt asked that 8 million tons of shipping be built in 1942 and 10 million in 1943.

While this rapid expansion was taking place, all other defense industries were also in a maximum production mode to accommodate the orders being placed by the Federal Government for all other manner of military equipment which included the massive wartime Naval Expansion program begun in 1940 with the passage of the Two Ocean Navy Act. So much growth in demand happening simultaneously in industries sharing common materials inevitably led to shortages in steel, propulsion machinery and most all other manner of ship equipment. In many cases the shortages affected the Emergency Program more than it did the Navy's since its programs were deemed of higher priority in the eyes of the many wartime boards set up for deciding on where scarce resources would be allocated. All along the way, the Navy made claim to as much of the raw materials, steel, machinery, manufacturing plant allocations, and labor that it could get.

For the most part, this imbalance occurred because the Maritime Commission lacked the clout that the Military Branches possessed and that clout ultimately swayed entities such as the Supply Priorities and Allocation Board (SPAB) to decide in favor of the Navy's demands. This disproportionate allocation regime often left the Maritime Commission without the resources needed to accomplish the goals established for it by President Roosevelt and it was only through direct appeal to FDR by Admiral Land that enough of the critical resources made it to the Emergency Program.

By the 2nd half of 1942 the yards contracted in the first waves of expansion were fully built and those yards had completed three or more ships per building way. The time for building the ships fell dramatically as experience was gained by the workers in their jobs and by the management in each yard in the most effective means to do the construction. One factor which played a major part in getting the productivity so high was the use of welding and prefabrication in which large sections of each ship's hull or superstructure would be built off the building ways and then moved into position only when the assemblers were ready. This method became so efficient that a single Liberty ship to be fully assembled, launched, outfitted and delivered went from a program average of almost 240 days at the beginning of 1942 to only 56 days at the end of the year. At the most productive yards on the West Coast, Oregon Ship and Richmond #2, the time a single vessel spent on the ways before launching was only a little more than two weeks. Two particular ships were built in record breaking amounts of time. First in September 1942 the Liberty ship SS Joseph N. Teal was built Oregon Shipbuilding in 10 days. Two months later in November at Richmond yard #2, the SS Robert E. Peary was launching in only 4 days, 15 hours, 29 minutes from the time her keel was laid. While not every ship met or repeated these feats during the remainder of World War II, these "stunt" ships came only a little more than one year after the first ships ordered as part of the Emergency Program were launched themselves.

Coming into play during this time was a de facto combining of both the Long Range Shipbuilding Program with the Emergency and oversight of the yards became decentralized into four separate Regional Directors. The Programs added together at the peak of output in mid 1943 ultimately employed 650,000 workers in all the Maritime Commission contracted yards and unknown tens of thousands more manufacturing the components need to assemble the ships. It was not without hurdles which needed to be overcome to reach the levels of production achieved. The Maritime Commission struggled throughout 1942 and the first half of 1943 to get enough steel allocated to it from the War Production Board. With plate mills around the country running beyond their normal capacity, the demand for plate by all war industries, but especially the Navy's shipbuilding was still more than could be made. It was not until the 2nd half of 1943 when new or expanded plate production facilities came online, that the shortage to steel plate abated. Additionally, there were constant shortages of many of the parts which were shared between Navy and Merchant vessels such as pumps and valves. Still with all the hurdles faced, the Maritime Commission and the yards contracted to it were able to deliver 8 million tons of shipping to the war effort by the end of 1942 and more than 12 million tons in 1943.

By the time that Liberty ship construction was reaching its maximum output rate in early 1943, it became clear to military planners and the Maritime Commission that it was preferable to slow the rate of the building Liberty class vessels and begin building a class with a higher operating speed. What was decided was to begin building a class no larger than the Liberty class but with steam turbine propulsion. The shortage of turbines having been relieved by the expansion of turbine manufacturing capacity during 1941 and 1942. Beginning in March 1943, with enough turbines, the Victory ship or VC2 type cargo vessels were contracted for at all of the West Coast yards which had been previously building Liberties as well as at the Bethlehem-Fairfield yard. The first of the new class, the SS United Victory being completed and delivered at Oregon Shipbuilding in February 1944. Although initial deliveries were slow—only 15 had been delivered by May 1944—by the end of the war 531 had been constructed.

The Navy projected a need for a substantial number of new attack transports for the planned invasion of Japan. With the ability to quickly produce the new Victory-class ships, the Navy authorized this class to serve as the basis of the Haskell-class transports.

The Haskell-class, Maritime Commission standard type VC2-S-AP5, is a sub‑type of the Victory ship design. 117 were launched in 1944 and 1945, with 14 more being finished as another VC2 type or canceled. These were built by the War Shipping Administration under the Emergency Shipbuilding program.

The AP5 type attack transports were named after United States counties, without "Victory" in their name, with the exception of USS Marvin H. McIntyre, which was named after President Roosevelt's late personal secretary.

The Haskells were very active in the Pacific Theater of Operations, landing Marines and Army troops and transporting casualties at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. These ships appeared in large numbers in early 1945 and would have been a significant factor in the planned invasion of Japan, scheduled for 1 November 1945. Ships of the class were among the first Allied ships to enter Tokyo Bay at the end of World War II, landing the first occupation troops at Yokosuka. After the end of World War II, most participated in Operation Magic Carpet, the massive sealift of US personnel back to the United States. A few of the Haskell-class were reactivated for the Korean War, with some staying in service into the Vietnam War.