Liberty ships were built by the thousand, and one of them went together in less than five days. The Robert E. Peary was assembled at Kaiser’s Richmond, California, yards in November 1942 as part of a special competition among shipyards. In all, 2,751 Liberty ships were built between 1941 and 1945, the largest class of ships built anywhere in the world.
The Peary was not how Liberty ships were normally built. It was a special competition, and the yard’s own manager described it at the time as an experiment in prefabrication rather than a bid for records.
The National Park Service, which manages Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park, records the feat on its page for Richmond Shipyard No. 3: the ship “was assembled in less than five days as a part of a special competition among shipyards.” The page spells the name “Perry”; the ship honored Arctic explorer Robert E. Peary. The same page notes that “by 1944 it was only taking the astonishingly brief time of a little over two weeks to assemble a Liberty ship by standard methods.”
Five days in November 1942
The fullest account of the competition comes from Peary’s alma mater. Writing in the Winter 2021 issue of Bowdoin Magazine, Kathryn Miles reported that the Richmond workforce set out in November 1942 to break the Liberty ship assembly record. Her Bowdoin account, posted March 19, 2021, says the ship’s roughly 250,000 parts were organized into large sections weighing up to 110 tons.
Per that account, the first keel piece went into place at one minute past midnight on Sunday, Nov. 8, and crews worked continuously for the next four days. The Peary launched on Thursday, Nov. 12, at 3:30 p.m. Yard manager Clay Bedford told the United Press that the yard was not primarily trying to break records and that its main purpose was experimenting in new prefabrication methods, Miles wrote.
Bowdoin’s interest is personal. Robert E. Peary graduated from the college in 1877 with a civil engineering degree and became an Arctic explorer, according to the same article.
2,751 Liberty ships, 1941 to 1945
The Peary’s pace stood apart even within a program built for speed. The Park Service’s Teaching with Historic Places lesson on Liberty and Victory ships states: “In all, 2,751 Liberties were built between 1941 and 1945, making them the largest class of ships built worldwide.” The first was the SS Patrick Henry, and later ships were named for figures including explorers, “Daniel Boone to Robert E. Peary,” per the lesson.
The same NPS lesson gives the ships as slightly over 441 feet long and 57 feet wide, able to carry 10,800 deadweight tons, the weight of cargo a ship can carry. It credits prefabrication for the pace: “complete deckhouses, double-bottom sections, stern-frame assemblies and bow units” sped production. By 1944, the lesson says, the average time to build a ship was 42 days. The two NPS figures measure different things: the Shipyard No. 3 page speaks of assembly by standard methods, the lesson of average build time.
Richmond’s share of the work
Richmond was the center of that output. The NPS Shipyard No. 3 page says “More than 747 vessels were built here in the four Richmond Kaiser Shipyards during World War II,” and that all of Kaiser’s shipyards together produced 1,490 ships, 27 percent of total U.S. Maritime Commission construction. Per the Park Service, those ships were completed in two-thirds the time and at a quarter of the cost of the average of all other shipyards.
Few of the fleet remain at sea. The NPS lesson says that of the nearly 3,000 Liberty ships built, 200 were lost during World War II to enemy action, weather and accidents, and only two are still operational: the SS Jeremiah O’Brien and the SS John W. Brown. The O’Brien’s own history page gives a sense of normal pace: she was launched June 19, 1943, at the New England Shipbuilding Corporation in South Portland, Maine, and lists 56 days to build. That page counts her as one of 2,710 Liberty ships, a lower total than the 2,751 the Park Service gives for 1941 to 1945. Shipyard No. 3 itself, the Park Service says, is currently closed to the public while safe methods of public access are developed.
Top image: The Liberty ship Richmond Mumford Pearson is launched at Delta Shipbuilding Co., New Orleans, on Oct. 27, 1942. The Robert E. Peary is not shown. Image Credit: U.S. Navy (NH 75817) — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.