Seventy years ago today, the German U-Boat offensive was at its peak, and the battle that the German Luftwaffe had failed to win in the summer of 1940 was very, very nearly won by Germany’s submarine fleet.

Britain being an island, it depended on foreign trade.  And that trade – and the food, fuel and raw material it provided – were being choked off, rapidly rather than slowly, by the staggering attrition of the world’s merchant fleets.  It was later said that of all the threats the British home island faced during the war, the U-boat threat was by far the one that most vexed Churchill.

The British merchant fleet, and those of the rest of the countries that traded with the UK, were being sunk far faster than the world’s shipbuilding industries could replace them.

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With that in mind, it was 70 years ago today that the SS Patrick Henry was launched.

It wasn’t a warship.  It was, in fact, a dumpy, unprepossessing freighter.  Instead of the steam turbine engines that ran most of the world’s fleets of newer ships, and almost all warships, the Henry was powered by a reciprocating steam engine based on an 1890’s-era British design that could drive the ship at 11 knots, maybe, in smooth seas, but was really designed to keep the ship puffing along at a cruising speed of six knots for weeks at a time.

It was a good-sized freighter – 14,000-odd tons – but by no means remarkable in any other way, except for the sheer simplicity of its design.

And yet it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt that gave the ship’s commissioning speech.

What distinguished the Patrick Henry was that it was the first of 14 ships, more or less exactly identical, that would come down the ways that same day.  As a class, they were called “Emergency” freighters.  They were built by auto magnate Henry J. Kaiser, CEO of the Kaiser Motor Company, at the brand-new Kaiser shipyards and, eventually, at many other such yards around the US, using the same techniques pioneered by the American automobile and consumer products industries.

Shipbuilding had been a craftsman’s business since the dawn of navigation.  Even in ships of the same “class”, there had always been considerable differences; each ship was pretty much a one-of-a-kind project, built from the keel up in a slipway, launched, and replaced by another keel. It was more like building a house – even a tract house – than a car or a refrigerator.

But the “Liberty” ships changed all that; their components were as standardized as those of any automobile; indeed, the Kaiser yards adopted the full assembly line idiom, with the keels being trundled down the ways, with frames and engines and plating and fittings and entire prefabricated sections being riveted or welded on at each successive station.  And so the Liberty ships were effectively identical; there were stories, possibly apocryphal, of sailors boarding docked Liberty ships after nights in port and bunking down for the night, only realizing in the morning that they’d boarded the wrong identical ship.

The Kaiser yard at Vanport, Oregon, on the Columbia River. Henry Kaiser built an entire city of 40,000 to serve the yard.

It was a technique that promised to revolutionize shipbuilding – and, more importantly, build ships faster than the Nazis could sink them.

And that was why President Roosevelt orated long and hard about the contributions of the ship’s namesake, and promised that this ship – not one of the sleek new aircraft carriers on the ways, or the fleets of destroyers and submarines working their way from the drawing board to the builders yards – would bring liberty to the people of Europe.

Because it was the most visible symbol of perhaps the most defining feature of World War II; the complete harnessing of the sheer might of American industry in every possible respect.

Beause the Henry, and her thirteen sister ships launched that day, were the first of 2,710 “Liberty Ships” built during the war.

Think about that.  From seventy years ago today until VJ Day, there were roughly – in fact, almost exactly – 1,400 calendar days.

That means after the initial fourteen-ship orgy of launching seventy years ago today, American industry produced very close to two of these freighters every day. Seven days a week.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg.  The American shipbuilding industry, from 1941 to 1945, produced:

• 33 aircraft carriers
• 6 battleships
• Dozens, plural, of 10,000-ton heavy and light cruisers
• Close to 1,000 destroyers and smaller, slower “destroyer escorts”, many of which served into the 1970s
• Over 200 submarines.
• Over 1,000 “Landing Ship, Tank” ocean-going assault ships.
• Thousands of other freighters, transports and tankers, in addition to the Liberty ships, including over 2,000 “C” class freighters, from the 1,200 ton “C1” class coastal luggers to the 20,000+-ton “C4” heavy lift haulers
• On top of that, well over a thousand tankers.
• Thousands of minesweepers, escort frigates,

A WWII-era "C1" steamer, in civilian use after the war.

All of those were ships – ranging from 1,000 ton minesweepers to 55,000-ton battleships.  It doesn’t even count the uncountable thousands of smaller boats – hundreds of PT Boats, sub-chasers, air-sea rescue boats and “PC” patrol craft, thousands of landing craft, and hundreds and hundreds of anonymous little utility craft; net tenders, buoy tenders, fuel lighters, and every other kind of boat needed to do every single job the Navy (and Army, which had its own navy) needed doing afloat.

The Bethlehem Steel Shipyard on Staten Island, which built cargo ships, tankers, landing craft, and a total of 43 destroyers. You can see some of each, here, with a few tankers for good measure.

And that is on top of the tens, plural, of thousands of aircraft, the 55,000+ tanks, and the hundreds (plural) of thousands of trucks, jeeps and other vehicles cranked out to support and supply not only our war effort, but those of most of the rest of the free and Communist worlds.

And it’s a fascinating look at how very different American industry is today compared to 70 years ago.

As he was planning Pearl Harbor – which was well underway seventy years ago today – Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned his leadership that the strike against Hawaii would have to be a catastrophic one – because if America wasn’t knocked out of the war immediately, our industry would drown the Empire.

As, indeed, it did.

The most amazing comparison?  We couldn’t do it today if we tried.