9 SECRET FACTS ABOUT HOW AMERICA BUILT ITS WW2 FLEET THAT NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

In December 1941, the United States had just lost eight battleships in a single morning. The shipyards that were supposed to replace them were running on peacetime schedules. And the man who would ultimately produce more ships than anyone in history had never built a ship in his life. Four years later, America had built over 5,000 warships, 2,751 Liberty cargo ships, and enough naval tonnage to fight two oceans simultaneously and win both of them. This is the story of how that happened — and the nine facts about it that most history books leave out entirely. Henry J. Kaiser was a dam builder. He had never been to sea. In December 1940 he accepted a British contract to build thirty cargo ships, built a shipyard from scratch in Richmond, California, and applied assembly-line principles to ocean-going vessel construction. The Navy establishment laughed. By 1944 his seven yards were producing 27 percent of all American wartime tonnage. His Portland yard set a record in November 1942 that has never been broken — the Liberty ship Robert E. Peary was built from keel to launch in four days, fifteen hours, and thirty minutes. The ships were welded instead of riveted — a method nobody had used on ocean-going vessels before. Naval engineers worried the hulls would crack under stress. They were right. Two ships broke completely in half while sitting in harbor with no external pressure. The Navy quietly improved the steel specifications, added riveted sections at stress points, and kept building. The program was too important to stop. By 1943 women made up 25 percent of the shipbuilding workforce. Kaiser built on-site childcare facilities not as a social program but as a production decision — every worker who couldn't reach the yard was a gap in the assembly line. At peak production his Richmond yards employed 100,000 people working around the clock in three shifts, the majority with no prior shipbuilding experience. When the Navy refused to let Kaiser build aircraft carriers — telling him to stick to cargo ships — he went directly to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt overruled the Navy. Kaiser built 50 Casablanca-class escort carriers at the rate of one every week and a half. The Navy that had rejected his proposal ended up depending on the ships he built. And in 1942, with German U-boats sinking American cargo ships at a catastrophic rate, Kaiser proposed building enormous cargo-carrying submarines that could travel beneath the Atlantic below U-boat patrol depth and deliver supplies to Britain without exposure to torpedo attack. The Navy evaluated the proposal seriously — and declined. The man who had never been to sea had suggested building a new category of warship to win a battle being fought on the other side of the world. If you're new here — Warships Explained covers the real engineering decisions and unexpected turns behind the most famous warships ever built. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. —————————————————————————————— CHAPTERS: 0:00 — Introduction 1:00 — Fact 1: The man who built the fleet had never built a ship 2:15 — Fact 2: A ship built in 4 days 15 hours 3:30 — Fact 3: Welding instead of riveting — and ships broke in half 4:45 — Fact 4: Women built 25 percent of the fleet 6:00 — Fact 5: Kaiser builds carriers over the Navy's objection 7:15 — Fact 6: Japan's attrition strategy collapses 8:00 — Fact 7: Workers trained in weeks not years 8:45 — Fact 8: Liberty ships designed to be thrown away 9:30 — Fact 9: Kaiser's cargo submarine proposal —————————————————————————————— Further reading: Freedom's Forge — Arthur Herman The Liberty Ships — John Bunker Two Oceans: A History of the United States Navy — Samuel Eliot Morison —————————————————————————————— Copyright fair use notice. All media used in this video is used for the purpose of education under the terms of fair use. All footage and images used belong to their respective copyright holders where applicable. —————————————————————————————— #LibertyShips #HenryKaiser #WW2 #NavalHistory #WarshipsExplained #WW2History #AmericanIndustry #USNavy #MilitaryHistory #WW2Shipbuilding