Liberty Ships: Extraordinarily Ordinary

today possibly the most requested mega-projects videos so far anytime they do anything about ships people at some have you had a Liberty ships I mean I got to tell you about Liberty ships Liberty ships everywhere and that's what we're covering in today's video but just before we get started I do want to say that it's brought to you by world of warships appropriately it's the thinking man's action game we got more on that in a bit but if you want to get started right now go through the link below enter the code ready for battle 2020 and you'll get a bunch of extra bonuses let's get into it [Music] World War two saw numerous astonishing advancements from battlefield weaponry to medicine from aircrafts to the atom bomb there is something about war that brings out the extraordinary and also loads of death but you know at least we get some tech but one story often overlooked is not about awesome firepower but rather a program that was vital in keeping Britain supplied through its darkest years the Liberty ships don't hold any records they were not big they were not fast and to be fair they were much to look at know if you were to see a liberty ship today you might not give it a second glance other than being like why is there a world war 2 ship here a single Liberty ship is nothing special only when you combine the vast numbers which appeared out of 18 American shipyards between 1941 and 1945 do you get a sense of just how important this mega project was in total 2710 Liberty ships rolled off the production line to assist in the war effort and at its peak in 1943 three new Liberty ships appeared every single day it was and still is the largest number of ships ever produced in a single design and I'm beginning to see why people wanted this video so much that's pretty incredible three ships a day 19:40 it was a bad year for the Allies the British and French forces had been smashed and pushed back to the beaches at Dunkirk only is quite remarkable rescue involving some 850 civilian boats along with countless Navy vessels prevented an all-out disaster things were also deteriorating rapidly in the Atlantic the vast Merchant Navy responsible for transporting supplies across the Atlantic from the United States to Britain was being decimated by the prowling German u-boats in 1940 alone a single year over a thousand merchant ships went down in the chilly Atlantic waters the maths was quite simple more ships were being sunk than were being built and it doesn't take a mathematician to realise that such a ratio is going to quickly get on Sanibel the Martian Navy needed a lot more ships and they needed them quickly in 1940 the British placed an order with the Americans for sixty Ocean class freighters to replace their losses the first of which was the SS Ocean Vanguard and it was launched on the 16th of August 1941 this was a simple design that laid the blueprints for the Liberty ships that were going to follow the design was modified in part with mass manufacturing in mind and was given the name EC 2 SC 1 not exactly a name that rolls off the tongue there but it did mean something EC stood for emergency cargo 2 was for a ship between 120 140 metres long and s was for steam engines and C one was for design C 1 the beauty of the Liberty ships really came in their construction and specifically in their use of welding instead of riveting riveted ships could take several months to assemble but Liberty ships could be done a lot lot faster the first ship took two hundred and forty four days to construct not amazing but still pretty quick but eventually the construction time got down to an average not a record an average of 42 days per ship and these are big ships 120 240 meters that I remember the exact measurements but they're big the record was set on the construction of the SS Robert E Peary and it was completed from scratch in five days and fifteen hours but to be fair this was mostly a publicity to show how fast it could be built and it was never repeated also the kind of wobbled out of the shipyard that day wasn't really finished a lot of extra work needed to be done but again let me repeat five days the ships were composed of several sections there were pre-built in factories across the country then welded together in the shipyards this method of construction meant that the cost was relatively low at the time at about two million dollars which in twenty twenty dollars is thirty six million they were a simple design basically with four to five large cargo holds below the deck and smaller tween decks directly above twin Dexter removable decks that could be used or not depending on the size of the cargo below the on deck the Liberty ships normally had two or three cargo winches with its bridge in the center of the ship now they may not have been the most attractive of ships but they certainly serve their purpose with the capacity of nearly eleven thousand tons they were often used to transport tanks and even boxed aircrafts after the war progressed their role changed but we'll get into that a little bit later on their size member they can accommodate 440 light tanks or 260 medium tanks or perhaps 390 personnel carriers if we're talking about boxes it could have carried a hundred and fifty six thousand boxes of 30 caliber ammunition their water displacement to fourteen thousand two hundred and forty five tons which when we compare to the cargo ships of today is absolutely tiny the pioneering spirit one of the largest cargo vessels in the world displaces a mighty 365,000 tons and has a capacity of four hundred and three thousand tons these things have certainly changed a little bit over time but they also weren't built in five days or an average of 42 days also if you'd like me to do something about cargo ships I feel like I could cover that but then is that boring would it be good to cover like a massive cargo vessel and talk about how that sort of thing is built I mean Liberty ships didn't enter my mind as a subject so if you guys think cargo ships would be interesting use the comments in length the Liberty ships measured one hundred and thirty four point five seven meters which is almost exactly as high as the Great Pyramid of Giza as really high the width or Beamer for being on nautical was seventeen point three meters and you could place three-and-a-half average-sized cars lengthways across its deck now I think this is a big boat five days better draft which is the measurements of the water lines at the bottom of the hull of 8.5 meters the Liberty ships were powered by two oil fired boilers and a triple expansion compound steam engine weighing 140 tons incapable of producing 2,500 horsepower if you're wondering how much 2,500 horsepower is is about the equivalence of 13 large modern SUVs now this isn't an enormous amount of power for a ship especially when compared to a modern ship and it gave them a fairly sedate top speed of about eleven to eleven point five knots which is around thirty miles per hour as I mentioned earlier Liberty ships were remarkable by really being unremarkable now by this point in history the preferred engine aboard newer ships was the steam turbine they were significantly better and faster than steam engines but because there was only a limited number of companies capable of producing them demand was high and they were usually used for true military purpose the less capable steam engine was used as a simpler and cheaper alternative that could be produced rapidly so you know perfect for the old Liberty ship the crew was typically made up of 38 to 62 u.s. Merchant Marines as well as 21 to 40 United States naval arms got the metro Marines were essentially the merchants arm of the crew mainly involved in shipping and logistics while the Navy armed Guard personnel was introduced during world war ii as a way of adding defense firepower to the merchant ships they included coxswains gunners radio men and a bunch of other positions but in reality the Merchant Marines they were often trained in many of these jobs as well today these ships are seen as a vital cog in the war effort but they did receive some somewhat unkind comments from those high up when they first appeared President Franklin D Roosevelt referred to the first ship as a dreadful looking object while Time magazine even went so far as calling it an ugly duckling the president did however play a fundamental role in how the ships got their name the 27th of September 1941 was dubbed a Liberty fleet day as the first fourteen of these emergency vessels emerged from shipyards across the country the first to appear was the SS Patrick Henry launched by President Roosevelt himself his words at the ceremony borrowed from Patrick Henry's 1775 speech delivered to the Virginian Convention on the matter of sending troops to fight in the Revolutionary War which famously finished with the line give me liberty or give me death President Roosevelt made the bold statement that these ships would bring Liberty to Europe and well the name kind of stuck now just before we get into the rest of today's video I want to tell you about some ships that you can use in world of warships today sponsor world of warships is a great way of course other than watching these YouTube videos to kill some time while stuck at home probably it's also gonna take your mind of what's going on in the world so you know that can also be just world of warships really is the thing man's action game and it's a perfect balance of action and strategic gameplay in the game you take command of a massive naval fleet which includes some of history's most iconic warships not Liberty ships you know they weren't battlers that you know the big boys further as you progress through gamyeon like more and more of them and all of the ships are also super details and you can really see that a lot of effort has been made to keep them all super accurate but that's not where the accuracy ends whether effects are also a big part of the game and they mean that you have to change your strategy it's not like oh wow the graphics it really cool it's raining is that I know it's raining so I gotta you know try a different naval strategy just like real life so get started with world of warships today through the link below and use the code ready for battle 2020 and you'll get a bunch of extras if you're a new player seven hundred two balloons seven days of premium time a million credits you're a millionaire in credits in this game and two port slots with Supre ships the USS Charleston and the Japanese ishizuchi maybe on the pronunciation map and anyway with that said let's get back to the video [Music] now it's important to remember that this was wartime in the normal rules we might expect relating to health and safety did not always apply the very nature of the Liberty ships meant they needed to be churned out as quickly as possible but this certainly came with a bit of a problem how and debt cracks became an unfortunate characteristic of many of the Liberty ships this wasn't something that was constrained to this type of ship either across the entire second world war there were reported 1,500 significant brittle fractures on American ships three Liberty ships broke in half completely including the SS John the Gaines which sank on the 24th of November 1943 killing ten on board now the blame was usually laid at the feet of the shipyards who some accused of using inexperienced workers and ineffective welding techniques now this might have sometimes been the case but with thousands of skilled labor is now just joining the Armed Forces it was only natural that the skill level working was gonna drop the British government began testing to see if they could find the exact cause the results were surprising and it was shown that the fractures didn't originate from the weld but rather because of the low temperature embrittlement of the steel used essentially it was the cold temperatures of the Atlantic that were making the steel more brittle and eventually causing cracks to appear however the welding itself was also found to antagonize the problem by allowing the crack to spread whereas when you've got a riveted hull the crack doesn't spread with a welded hull it absolutely does now the combination of cheaper steel and welding it basically gave these ships a bit of a disadvantage but well it was one that they made up for with the huge number of ships that existed oh one sank it's okay we've got thousands more just to exacerbate the situation the ships were often grossly overloaded as you can imagine there was a strong desire to send as much as possible across the Atlantic but this contributed to the structural problems of the ship if they experienced rough seas the entire situation was just made that much worse by September 1943 there was an increasing need for troop transport ships in the first wave 225 Liberty ships were refitted to accommodate troops rather than military hardware most of these could carry a maximum of 550 but thirty three of them were converted to be used on shorter trips and could carry 1,600 people that sounds pretty damn cramped in 1944 the US Coast Guard recommended that the Liberty ships be withdrawn from troop transfer because of whole track while the decision must have weighed heavily on her about to make it the military commitments meant that they continued to be used regardless like I said in war health and safety sometimes just has to go out of the window now remember that these ships have first been designed to carry tanks planes and other hardware they were not particularly pleasing places to spend long journeys on after their conversions they came with a catalogue of complaints from poor sanitation heating and cooling issues to just a lack of medical supplies and substandard storage for food and water the complaints went as high as the US Senate and one would presume the White House bust with the necessity being what it was their use just had to continue later models built did receive slight modifications for that a troop transport and as a result most of the earlier models were eventually returned to cargo only service but the use of Liberty ships for troop transport continued throughout the European theater of conflict redeployment of troops to the Pacific and eventually to bring the enormous numbers of troops home after the final defeat of Japan in 1945 these were of course transportation ships and were never designed to be sent into battle its Stern mounted 4-inch deck gun could be used against surfaced submarines while a variety of small anti-aircraft guns could be used against threats from above these ships would typically travel in a convoy with usually forty to sixty merchant ships along with their military escorts normally numbering eight to ten ships the escorts role was of course do you protect the merchant ships the best they could as the Liberty ships would have little hope in direct confrontation with a heavily armed ship but there are two stories in particular when Liberty ships excels during combat on the 10th of March 1943 the SS Lawton B Evans became the only merchant ship to ever survive an attack by the dreaded u-22 one German submarine to give you an idea of the roof the u2t one fired on 22 ships during the war sinking 21 of them miraculously the SS Lawton B Evans suffered only minor damage after being hit by a torpedo but more was to come for this particular Liberty ship as it distinguished itself the following year off the coast of Italy the contribution of the SS Lawton the evans during the Battle of Anzio has gone down in folklore and rightly so between the 22nd and the 30th of January 1944 as Allied forces landed on the Italian mainland the ship remained off the coast of Italy under heavy bombardment from coastal batteries and repeated aerial attacks perhaps spurred on by the ship's escape the previous year the crew of the SS Lawton B Evans fought back with what little firepower they had incredibly they brought down five enemy planes as well as providing vital covering fire to assist the Allied landings the story of the SS naught in the Evans can perhaps only be matched by what happens on the 27th of September 1942 involving the SS Stephen Hawkins this ship returning to Ciaran armed from Cape Town came face-to-face with the German Cruiser steer a thick fog Hood meant that the two ships managed to come within two miles of each other before catching sight of each other the heavily armed steer ordered the SS Stephen Hawkins to surrender but the Liberty Ship refused the stiff people were probably quite surprised as like guys we can definitely destroy you with ease the steer naturally opened fire but the crew of the SS Stephen Hopkins fought back heroically time and time again as the Gunners fell to enemy fire volunteers sprang into action to replace them and continued the furious defense the fighting was short but fierce leaving both ships smoldering wrecks the SS Stephen Hopkins finally sank at 10 a.m. though the majority of the crew had already been killed during the attack some did escape in a lifeboat drifting for a month before finally washing up on the shores of Brazil so quite far away the steer had been crippled by the liberty ship and was scuttled by its crew less than two hours after the attack it remains the one and only time a u.s. merchant ship sank an enemy surface vehicle [Music] while the Liberty ships might receive much of the attention another shipbuilding program also played a huge role in the outcome of the war the victory ships were a step up from their more primitive earlier siblings and the United States constructed 534 victory ships during 1944 and 1945 many of the lessons learned from the Liberty ships were applied here they came with better engines and a faster top speed of 15 to 17 knots which is about seventeen point three to nineteen point two miles per hour this was four to six knots faster than the Liberty ships the ships were also better armed to protect themselves while still having roughly the same capacity of ten thousand seven hundred tons with the battle for the Atlantic essentially won by the time they were launched not a single victory ship was lost to attack in the Atlantic though some did go down in the Pacific so what happened to all of these thousands of ships once the war ended well 2400 of them survived the war and their paths varied greatly 853 he remains part of the u.s. post-war cargo fleet while 526 was sold to various Greek entrepreneurs and 98 were sold to Italy many of the largest shipping magnates who were to emerge in the post-war years used Liberty ships to start their fleets in 1953 Liberty ships began to be used to store surplus grain in the Hudson River while in the 1960s several were refitted as technical research ships only to Liberty ships the SS John W Brown and the SS Jeremiah O'Brien remain in operation today and both serve as museum ships in 1994 the SS Jeremiah O'Brien took part in the 50th anniversary of d-day making it the only large vessel that participated in Operation Overlord in 1944 to take part in the anniversary so what were once dubbed ugly ducklings certainly played their part in winning the war the Allies these rickety ships that were kind of thrown together quickly kept to the United Kingdom going at a time when many anticipated Hitler's invasion we place a lot of emphasis on time and care when building but in 1941 time was exactly what the Allies didn't have it was very much a case of quantity over quality the achievement of producing so many seagoing vessels in such a short space of time may never be matched we should probably hope that we never need to build at that sort of speed again when we think of World War II we think of the Spitfire or the Sherman tank maybe even the dreaded out of the bomb that the Liberty ships deserved their place in the Hall of Fame as they represent one of the largest collective achievements seen throughout the war from the construction and the many thousands who worked ferociously to churn them out of such speed to the brave crews who steered them through the forbidding waters of the Atlantic some of whom never returned the story of the Liberty ships is one of belligerent and collective [ __ ] and I really hope you enjoyed today's video if you did please do smash that like button below do not forget to subscribe support this program by supporting our fantastic sponsor world of warships rather appropriate today who I'm linking to below and thank you for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 424,526

Rating: 4.9435711 out of 5

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Id: P_vndjqZ7H8

Length: 20min 11sec (1211 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 17 2020