Emergency Shipbuilding Program
The Emergency Shipbuilding Program (German: emergency shipbuilding program ) was a shipbuilding program carried out by the United States from 1940 to 1945 . It was the largest construction program of its kind ever carried out.
details
Against the background of the initially successful German submarine war of the Second World War , the Allies experienced a shortage of cargo space. After the British government initially initiated an emergency building program for standard cargo ships in the United States and Canada , the crucial importance of shipbuilding for the defense of Great Britain was already evident in the autumn of 1940. When it entered the war, the US government began to convert the Long Range Shipbuilding Program of the United States Maritime Commission (MARCOM) , which had already started in the years before the outbreak of war and designed to build five hundred cargo ships, into the much larger Emergency Shipbuilding Program to convict. The aim of the program, known as Ships for Victory , was to design and build large numbers of cargo ships. In the course of the program, a number of standard ship designs were created under the leadership of MARCOM. In addition to the well-known cargo ship series of Liberty freighters and Victory ships , the list of built ship types also included C1 ships , C2 ships , C3 ships and T2 tankers . By the end of the war, a total of 5,777 seagoing ships were built under the aegis of the Maritime Commission. Although some of the simply constructed war structures were only designed for very short periods of use, the majority of the ships created in this way remained in service until well into the 1960s.
Web links
- Article at Global Security (English)