Ocean (ship type)
 Ocean-type ships
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The ocean cargo ship type , ocean freighter, or ocean class , was a series cargo ship type that was built for Great Britain at various shipyards in the United States during World War II . The ship type was created in 60 units, whose names all began with "Ocean".
history
Against the background of the initially successful German submarine war of World War II, there was a shortage of cargo space on the British side. Although the importance of shipbuilding for the defense of Great Britain quickly became clear, the UK shipbuilding industry, which was mainly engaged in warship construction, even launched the first British standard ship with the type "Y" , but was unable to absorb the great losses on its own. The British government therefore decided to send the British Merchant Shipbuilding Mission , a working group on the construction of new cargo ships under the direction of Robert Cyril Thompson, General Manager of the Joseph L. Thompson and Sons shipyard in Sunderland, to the United States and Canada.
The delegation left Great Britain in September 1940 in order to set up an emergency construction program for 60 standard cargo ships annually as soon as possible. Modeled on the “Y” model, the group carried plans for a simplified version of the 10,000- tonne tramp steamer Dorington Court, built by Thompson in 1939 , and convinced Admiral Emory Scott Land, President of the United States Maritime Commission (MARCOM), that it was slow , but simply constructed and, above all, quick to build tramp steamer design is preferable to a higher quality but more complicated construction in the given situation. On December 20, 1940, two construction contracts for 30 units each were concluded at the Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corporation in Portland, Maine, and Todd-California Shipbuilding Corporation in Richmond, California, and with Henry John Kaiser . 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.
Some ships of the type "Ocean" were in service until the mid-1980s, with the Ocean Athlete being scrapped in 1985 and the Ocean Merchant being entered in the Chinese shipping register as Zhan Dou 26 until 1992 .
Dimensions and data
The dimensions of the standard ocean-type ship were 129.41 meters in length overall (126.80 meters between the perpendiculars), 17.34 meters in width on frames, 11.38 meters in side height to the main deck and 8.18 meters in draft as a full-decker with freeboard. The ship had two continuous decks and seven watertight bulkheads . The load capacity was 10,100 dwt , a little less than the American Liberty type. This was mainly due to the heavier smoke tube boilers compared to the lighter water tube boilers of the Liberty ships. The holds had a volume of 513,000 cubic feet (14,527 cubic meters) and 2400 tons of bunker coal could be taken.
literature
- 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.
Web links
- Fleet list (English) accessed on December 3, 2018
- List of ships with further data (English) accessed on December 3, 2018