In the early years of the Second World War there were dark days for Britain - cut off from Europe by Nazi Germany, all food, clothing, materials and oil had to be imported across the Atlantic. Seas on which deadly German battleships and U-boat submarines operated. In 1941 Britain and her allies lost 1,200 ships to enemy actions, and in 1942, 1,600 ships were sunk which nearly brought Britain to her knees.
When the USA entered the war, an immediate need was to replace all the lost merchant ships, so as to ferry both civilian and military cargoes to Britain and North Africa.
The USA applied its industrial might to this problem and started to build merchant ships using the advanced techniques that Henry Ford introduced to the manufacture of cars - the production line.
Vast shipbuildng yards were created where 10 ships could be built at the same time, with the workforce specializing in the same work on each. Utilizing a simple design (a British design of 1879) and prefabrication, a 'Liberty' ship could be built in 60 days! There is a fantastic picture of the yard of the ships being built - all a different stages of construction from keel (the bottom of the ship) to the superstructure (the top of the ship) as part of a huge assembly line.
There were 16 shipbuilding yards, and in total they produced 2,710 'Liberty' ships in WWII. An astonishing number.
The ship at San Francisco is called the "SS Jeremiah o'Brien" and is now one of the only two surviving Liberty ships.
