How many people worked to build one Liberty ship?
Upvote:7
This website apparently gives a comprehensive list of all the ships built at The Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore Maryland between 1941 and 1945. It even says which slipway built which ship (but some entries on that are empty), how long it took, and how many days it was on the slipway vs how many days on water. It also has a column called "MC#" which I'm not sure about.
It also says:
Its 13 ways were increased to 16 in the second wave of shipbuilding expansion and at its peak the yard had 27,000 employees
I looked in the chart, and slipway # 16 appears as early as 1941 June.
Sadly, it does not say when the peak employment occurred, but I will go out on a limb and guess it's 1943. I say that just because, to the best of my memory, a lot of WW2 stuff from USA peaked in 1943. If anyone can correct this or find out definitively when the Bethlehem Yard had peak employment, please let me know.
Anyway, according to the table, for the entire year of 1943, nothing but liberty ships were built at all 16 slipways. So trusting Wikipedia's statement that the average build time was 42 days, and 16 slipways with 27,000 workers, this comes out to about 1,700 workers per ship.
Note: For some reason, the table becomes anachronistic when it jumps to "LST" in the middle of the table. You can see the keel laid dates jump from summer 1943 to summer 1942. No clue why it does this, but it does make me worry that the list is not truly comprehensive. You can see the Slipway # missing from that data too.
Upvote:14
Looking at one specific ship yard, the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company:
Nine shipways were constructed, producing 126 Liberty's and 117 larger ships between Dec. 6, 1941 and the end of the war. Peak employment in 1943 was 21,000 employees in three shifts.
Historically, it was typical for a ship to be launched about 1/2 way through construction. If we use that as an estimating factor, then there would be nine each of launched and unlaunched vessels under construction at a time. This would suggest a shift in each dry-dock of about 21,000 / 3 / 18 = ~390 workers.
(As a publicity stunt) the SS Robert E. Peary was launched 4 days and 15 1/2 hours after laying-down of its keel, with outfitting complete ten days after that, by Permanente Metals Corporation (Kaiser) No.2 Yard in Richmond, California
Excerpt from deleted comment:
I doubt shift sizes varied much between ship types - time in drydock by the same team more likely in my opinion. Besides - this would have varied over the course of the war as well. I doubt an estimate closer than 20% is possible without actual timecard records.
P.S.
Shipway - The sloping drydock in which a ship is built and from where it is launched. Not to be confused with a slipway, which is subtly different in important ways.
It's not a Liberty Ship, but here is footage of Titanic's launching in 1911 from its shipway. Note how little of its superstructure has been completed at this point. Comments to the video claim that it is actually of the Olympic, one of Titanic's sister ships, because of the white hull. However here is a picture of the two side-by-side not long after, both with black hulls. This leads me to believe that the white hull in the video has only been primed, on preparation for final painting after launch. A more experienced eye than mine might be able to make a definitive identification from superstructure differences between the two ships.
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