Just after midnight on November 8, 1942, shipyard crews in Richmond, California laid the keel of a Liberty cargo ship. On the afternoon of November 12, the finished hull slid into San Francisco Bay. The SS Robert E. Peary had gone from keel to launch in 4 days, 15 hours and 29 minutes, a record no ship of her size has beaten since.

Ships Sinking Faster Than They Could Be Built

The Liberty ship was the plain, slow cargo workhorse of World War II. The United States built 2,710 of them in 18 shipyards.

They were needed badly. In 1941 and 1942, German U-boats and surface raiders sank 2,963 Allied ships, while American yards built 863 to replace them.

The first Liberty ships took months. Across the program, build times fell from about 355 days at the start to an average of 41 days by 1943.

Henry Kaiser's Permanente Metals yards in Richmond borrowed from Henry Ford. Prefabricated sections were put together the way Ford assembled cars, and the yards began racing each other for speed.

Four Days at Yard No. 2

Permanente's Yard No. 2 usually needed about 50 days to finish a Liberty ship. In November 1942, it set out to win the race outright.

The keel went down at 12:01 a.m. on November 8. Much of the ship had already been prefabricated in the yard and staged, ready for assembly.

The rest went together from giant 250-ton sections built in advance, some with the engine already in place. Crews worked around the clock and assembled about 250,000 parts weighing roughly 14 million pounds.

The result was a ship 441 feet 6 inches long, the 47th built at Yard No. 2.

A woman welder in a welding helmet smiles during a pause at the Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, California, February 1943 (Ann Rosener, Library of Congress) — Richmond's yards ran around the clock, and many of their welders were women.

Launch Day

On November 12, after about 26 minutes of speeches, the SS Robert E. Peary was launched.

Guinness World Records still lists her under "Fastest ship building", the quickest time a complete ship of more than 10,000 tonnes deadweight has ever been built. Different sources put the figure between 4 days 15 hours and 4 days 15.5 hours.

Launch was not the finish line. She was delivered on November 15, 7 days, 14 hours and 32 minutes after the keel went down.

A Stunt That Went to War

The record build was partly a propaganda effort, a way of showing the world that America could build ships faster than they could be sunk. Some called her a "stunt ship".

Kaiser called her an "incentive ship" instead, because the race lifted the morale of his workers.

She sailed on her first voyage on November 22, 1942, carrying supplies into the Pacific. On June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day, she carried men and equipment from Cardiff, Wales to Omaha Beach, and kept shuttling to Normandy until September 18.

The Peary was scrapped in Baltimore in 1963. The shipyard story lives on in Richmond, where the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park now preserves the home front of the yards that launched 747 ships in four years.

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