How the Liberty Ship Won WW2 for the Allies

The weapon that was most important to allied victory as we know it was not the T-34 tank or B-17 bomber, or even the atomic bomb, but a simple, cheap, mass produced merchant ship. This is the story of the Liberty Ship.

0:00 - Intro
0:45 - More Shipping Needed
3:00 - What if Merchant Ship was cheap?
4:10 - Ship printer go brrrrrrrr
8:30 - Impact of the Liberty Ship

Animation by:

Artwork by:

Written, Directed and Produced by:

Sources:

L.A Sawyer and W.H Mitchell, The Liberty Ships

Stephen Roskill, War at Sea

Peter Elphick, Liberty: The Ships that won the war

Evan Mawdsley, War for the Seas

Joseph B Fabry, Swing shift: building the liberty ships

Phillips Payson O’Brien, How the War was Won

Naval Staff History, The Defeat of the Enemy Attack on Shipping, 1939-45

Music Credits:

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

Other music and SFX from Epidemic Sound

[historigraph]

Here’s the last historigraph video of the year- originally planned for Wednesday, but thought I would bring it up by a couple of days. Merry Christmas all!

[MortRotu]

Liberty ships are kind of the epitome of the phrase 'amateurs talk armies, generals talk logistics'

[fredeisen]

My father sailed on the Liberty ships during the war and was torpedoed and sunk three times. Once in the Artic and twice in the Med. Thanks for posting a video about the Merchant Mariners

[testy]

You're half way across the atlantic on your first crossing, a storm thunders off the bow. The guy next to you says "you know, they built this ship in like 4 days"...

[spyrosvassilakis]

I'm just going to mention that there are 3 surviving Liberty ships. One of them is a museum in Piraeus. If you ever come to Athens it's worth a visit.

[cladbecaha]

4 and a half days to build a ship! It takes my local council more than that to dig a hole in the road for no apparent reason.

[gregwarner]

I remember taking a Liberty Ship (USS Tutuila ARG-4) from Portsmouth, Virginia to Vung Tau on the Mekong River RSVN in 1966. Long trip. The Pacific ocean is really big at 10 knots.

[MHowells]

WW2 was a resources war and the liberty ship is one of the most prevalent examples of the dominant position the allies had compared to the axis powers

[RomainDelheusy]

"Sir, the enemy is destroying our supply lines with submarines!"
"Just build more ships than they have torpedoes."

[sheboyganshovel]

Every time someone remembers the merchant marine, an angel gets its wings.

[bsaacp]

The ship you show at 5:25 which is broken in half is not a Liberty ship but a Victory ship. Though cracking in the hulls of Liberty ships was happening there were several fixes that solved the problem, the most common of which was the welding of a curved steel beam at the corners of the cargo hatches. The SS Jeremiah, the only full functioning unaltered Liberty ship left has this fix. There were hundreds of ships in WWII that broke in half but if you consider only Liberty ships that did not break in half by running aground, torpedoes, or such external causes, there were only THREE Liberty ships that broke in half. I am the head docent on the SS Jeremiah O'Brien and am very familiar with this undeserved reputation.

[kegginstructure]

My dad did his part in WW II at the Higgins Shipyards in New Orleans, where he was in the engineering / drafting department making Liberty ships. Later in the war, they had enough ships. In early 1945, Dad went with Delta Shipyards, which needed people to make PBY (Navy "air boat") aircraft for the Pacific war. Dad's job with the Liberty ships was called "mold loftsman" - I guess because the plans were in the "mold loft." He made full-scale paper templates for various metal bulkheads. These paper templates were carried to the "torch" guys who would mark off that shape on the hull and then cut. Remember, there were no computers and no mechanized cutting tables like we have now. It was ALL done by hand. The Higgins Shipyard was more famous for the OTHER ships they made - the "Higgins boat" landing craft or LCMC, but Dad was on Liberty Ship duty.

[adamtruong]

I don't believe I understood how stripped down Liberty ships were until this video.

[xczechr]

"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve." Even if this is not a real quote from Yamamoto himself, it was very much true.

[davidvik]

A great quick look at emergency class ship production in the USA. FYI: The first photo of a ship broken in two is of a T-2 tanker at the Swan Island yard in Portland Oregon. The problems were not so much due to the pace of construction as to not fully understanding all welded construction and flaws in the designs such as the square hatch corners on the Libs that focused stress between the deck house and the hatches. The T-2's had to be strengthened along the deck with those already built having an additional piece riveted to the sides at the deck. The T-2 shown was placed in dry dock and put back together.
A very good book in the subject is "Liberty Factory" by Peter Marsh available online.

[biscuitninja]

"Infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars.” That quote by Army General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, summarizes why logistics is so important to the military.

[spychopath]

Give me the impression that the Americans were building Liberty ships faster than the Nazis were building torpedoes.

[earlyriser]

Loved the video on the Liberty Ships as a war winner. It really could not have been done without the ship and shipyards that built them.

[markjohnson]

My grandfather was the captain of four liberty ships during the war. I am proud to say my father still sails as a mate on one of the two remaining operating liberty ships...the John Brown which is docked in Baltimore. I hope to be a part of the crew someday. The Brown is the largest US flagged passenger ship east of the Mississippi.ot is also on of the few remaining steam engines outside of the Great lakes in US waters.

[allangibson]

The preceding designs, which included the "Northeast Coast, Open Shelter Deck Steamer", were based on a simple ship originally produced in Sunderland by J.L. Thompson & Sons based on a 1939 design for a simple tramp steamer, which was cheap to build and cheap to run (see Silver Line). Examples include SS Dorington Court built in 1939.[8] The order specified an 18-inch (0.46 m) increase in draft to boost displacement by 800 long tons (810 t) to 10, 100 long tons (10, 300 t). The accommodation, bridge, and main engine were located amidships, with a tunnel connecting the main engine shaft to the propeller via a long aft extension. The first Ocean-class ship, SS Ocean Vanguard, was launched on 16 August 1941.
At the beginning of WW2 Sunderland was the largest ship building town in the world, at it's height building in excess of 25% of the worlds merchant marine.