anyone out there can tell me the fastest a samboat was built during the war it will settle a argument for a few of us regards graham
(Thumb) What a wonderful achievement, I wonder if it could be repeated these days?? (Applause)John Rogers said:To add to what Bruce wrote I pulled this off the web acouple of years ago.
In the early days of the program it was evident that the sheer quantity of ships was essential and the solution was "ship built by mile and chopped off by the yard". New shipyards were created by a syndicate formed by Todd Shipyards Inc., and the Henry J Kaiser group.
Once the production lines got under way, the time taken to build a Liberty at Fairfield dropped to as little as 28 days. On the average, it took 592,000 man-hours to build a Liberty Ship. The construction of one Liberty ship required 3,425 tons of hull steel, 2,725 tons of plate, and 700 tons of shapes, which included 50,000 castings.
The Kaiser shipyard in Oakland, California, built the S.S. ROBERT E PEARY, from keel laying to launching, in 4 days 15 hours and 30 minutes. The PEARY was then outfitted, painted, taken on sea trials, the crew was trained and the vessel fully loaded with 10,000 tons of cargo. The PEARY sailed 7 days after the keel was laid.
It was felt that if the ship could make more than one trip it would be cost effective. Luckily, the Battle of the Atlantic swung to the Allied side, and only 196 Liberties were lost in combat. Approximately half the surviving fleet was sold at the wars end, and some of those were still in service in the early 1970's some 25 years later.
John
SAMOKLA, built as JOSE ARTIGAS November 1943, but renamed SAMOKLA prior to entering service for MoWT (Ministry of War Transport), returned to USA in 1948 and Scrapped at Newport News, Virginia 1962. Sorry no photograph available from my sourceHi everybody, i'm trying to track down a photo or anything that might help track some information on the SS Samokla. Dad worked on her and he'd like to see her again - he's 89.
Thanks in advance