How the US Built 5k Ships in WWII

Summary

Among the most impressive manufacturing achievements of the US during WWII was the number of ships it produced. Prior to the war, the American shipbuilding industry had been moribund. Shipyards had been busy during and immediately following WWI, but the huge flood of wartime ships greatly reduced demand for new ones, and American shipyards didn’t produce a single oceangoing hull between 1922 and 1928. The onset of the Great Depression only made things worse, and by 1935 annual tonnage produced by US commercial shipbuilders had fallen to its lowest level in more than 100 years.But under wartime pressure, the US scaled up its shipbuilding enormously. While the US built just 1.4 million gross tons of merchant cargo-carrying ships from 1933 to 1939, between 1939 and 1945 the US built almost 40 million gross tons (along with several million tons more of naval vessels). Over the course of the war, the US built more than 3,600 cargo ships, over 700 tankers, and more than 1,300 naval vessels, including 8 battleships, 128 aircraft carriers, and 352 destroyers.This enormous shipbuilding output was achieved via a combination of government management and private enterprise. The government funded the construction of the ships and shipyards, decided on many of the construction strategies, and closely monitored progress, intervening as necessary when shipyards seemed to be falling behind. But it was private companies, some of which had never built ships before, that actually built the yards and ships, and worked tirelessly to increase efficiencies, drive down construction times, and produce enough ships to win the war.US shipbuilding during WWII took place as two parallel efforts. One effort was the construction of military vessels — battleships, destroyers, submarines, etc. — under the auspices of the Navy. Military vessels were built with some of the most advanced ship technology then available, including radar, sonar, computers, and oil-fired steam turbines, but they were large...