From the Falmanac blog. On December 27, 1941, the first of many Liberty ships, the SS Patrick Henry, was launched at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard near Baltimore. They were originally referred to as "emergency vessels" and mass-produced to help the Allies recover from the losses at the hands of the U-Boats.
Assembly-line techniques brought to the production along with pre-fabricated parts led to a speed that was unknown before then. It took 244 days to build the Patrick Henry and that later dropped to an average of 42 days. One Liberty ship, the SS Robert E. Peary was built in four days at Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California as a publicity stunt.
Around 2,700 were built of which two fully-functional Liberty ships remain: the SS Jeremiah O'Brian in San Francisco and SS John W. Brown in Baltimore. The last one is the last-surviving merchant vessel from the Normandy Invasion. The Patrick Henry survived the war, but was scrapped in 1960.
Glad to see there are two left and they should be turned into museums. Without these ships, the fate of the war could definitely have gone differently.
www.falmanac.com
Check out Wikipedia for an excellent article.
The Greatest Generation. --Cooter
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