British Merchant Shipbuilding Mission

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The British Merchant Shipbuilding Mission was a British government working group during World War II. It was put together to have cargo ships urgently needed by Great Britain built in the United States.

history

In the economically poor 1930s, the Joseph L. Thompson and Sons shipyard in Sunderland, under the direction of Robert Cyril Thompson, built a cheap to build and operate tramp steamer, the first unit of which was launched in 1935. After seven sister ships, the first launching of the 10,000 tonne tramp steamer Dorington Court followed in 1939 , a longer, wider and even more economical variant of the basic design. The quality of this construction prompted the British Admiralty on September 2, 1939, the day before Great Britain declared war on Germany, to invite Robert Cyril Thompson, the managing director of the shipyard, to an interview in which he had to explain the construction of the trampoline design.

Against the background of the initially successful German submarine war of the Second World War, there was a rapid shortage of cargo space on the British side. The importance of shipbuilding for the defense of Great Britain was obvious, but the United Kingdom's shipbuilding industry, which was mainly engaged in warship construction, could not absorb the great losses on its own.

As a result, the British government decided to send a task force on new cargo ships under the leadership of Robert Cyril Thompson to the United States and Canada to start an emergency construction program for standard cargo ships as soon as possible. The management of the marine engineering part of the mission was entrusted to Harry Hunter of the North-Eastern Marine Engineering Company. The British Merchant Shipbuilding Mission left Great Britain in September 1940 and carried plans for a greatly simplified version of the Dorington Court, built by Thompson in 1939, and its ship engines, and convinced Admiral Emory Scott Land, the President of the United States Maritime Commission (MARCOM), that a slower, but simply constructed and, above all, quick-to-build tramp steamer is preferable to a higher-quality but more complicated construction in the given situation. On the return trip of the working group from the first USA visit, the Western Prince , on which Thompson was sailing, was sunk by a German submarine. Thompson survived and managed to bring important documents back to Whitehall. On further trips, another variant of the original design was developed, on the basis of which the plans for the type ship Empire Liberty were created in North Sands .

On December 20, 1940, two construction contracts for 30 units of the Ocean type were signed at the Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corporation in Portland, Maine and Todd-California Shipbuilding Corporation in Richmond, California, and with Six Services Inc. , the construction and Henry John Kaiser's engineering office closed. The construction of the shipyards to be built was also carried out with Thompson's assistance. The total construction price was about 96 million US dollars. On April 14, 1941, the keel of the first new Ocean building, the Ocean Vanguard , was laid, and was christened on October 15, 1941.

The actual type ship , built according to the original plans , was launched 55 days beforehand, on August 28, 1941, at Thompson's in North Sands under the name Empire Liberty , but was not one of the ocean ships due to its construction in Great Britain. The Ocean type formed the basis for the development of the Liberty freighter by the New York marine engineering firm Gibbs & Cox. Around 2700 units were produced by him.

After the British Merchant Shipbuilding Mission initiated the construction of the Ocean ships in the United States, Great Britain placed a construction contract for the first 25 North Sands -type ships at Canadian shipyards. These ships were largely built according to the plans of the Empire Liberty and are also known as fort ships because of their name . Starting with Fort St. James , which was launched on October 15, 1941 at the Burrard Dry Dock Company , 354 ships of different types followed for British accounts from Canadian shipyards, whose later units had an attached park in their name.

literature

  • Lewis Johnman, Hugh Murphy: The British Merchant Shipping Mission in the United States and British Merchant Shipbuilding in the Second World War . In: The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord . Vol. XII, No. 3 , July 2002.
  • Frederic Chapin Lane: Ships for Victory: A History of Shipbuilding under the US Maritime Commission in World War II . Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore 2001, ISBN 0-8018-6752-5 .
  • WH Mitchell, LA Sawyer: The Oceans, the Forts and the Parks . Sea Breezes, Liverpool 1966.

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