Many early Liberty ships were affected by deck and hull cracks and indeed several were lost. The armament was a 4 or 5 inch stern gun, a 3 inch bow gun, two 37 mm bow guns, and six 20 mm machine guns. They were staffed by a full crew of about 44 men, plus 12 to 25 national guardsmen. The ships were 441.5 feet long, with a 57 foot beam and a 28 foot draft. The Liberty ship model used two oil boilers and was propelled by a single-screw steam engine, which gave the liberty ship a cruise speed of 11 to 11.5 knots. Because of this, early ships took quite a long time to build - the Patrick Henry taking 244 days - but the average building time eventually came down to just 42 days.
Additionally, much of the shipyards’ labor force had been replaced with women as men joined the armed forces. This was a new technique, so workers were inexperienced and engineers had little data to go on. The ships were designed to minimize labor and material costs this was done in part by replacing many rivets with welds. They were given the designation “EC2-S-C1,” the EC standing for emergency cargo. The Liberty class was designed to fill a void in merchant marine ships as the United States rapidly ramped up its war effort. Image: Wikimedia Commons - Liberty Ship at Sea Design of the Liberty Class The short timescale from design to construction, however, led to the inclusion of several fatal flaws in the ship design, and many ships were lost due brittle steel failures. Nearly 3000 of the ships were built in an extremely short period the first ship was built in just 70 days. Described variously as “dreadful looking” and an “ugly duckling,” the Liberty class of ships nonetheless came to represent the immense industrial might of the United States early on in the war effort. The Liberty ships were a so-called “emergency” class of ships developed during World War II.
0 kommentar(er)
