To all my NYC and North Jersey friends, I am coming to the city Wednesday eve for a book talk, to talk about the unsung heroes of WW2 who built America's great Liberty Ships! Would love to see you! www.roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu/events/doug-...
roosevelthouse.hunter.cuny.edu
Doug Most — Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War - Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College
At the start of Roosevelt’s $350 million emergency shipbuilding program, so-called Liberty Ships, which he dubbed “ugly ducklings,” and which exceeded a football field in length, took over six months to build. To speed up the process, as Most writes, the government turned to industrialist Henry J. Kaiser, who had delivered the Boulder Dam ahead of schedule and under budget, but had never built a ship in his life. As German U-boats maintained their pace of attack, Roosevelt and Kaiser initiated a nationwide competition among shipyards to see who could construct ships the fastest. Driven by duty and the thrill of innovation, workers—according to Most—reduced the shipbuilding timeline from months to weeks, and then to days.
