The president of the United States Lines was furious. “Goddammit, Captain,” John Franklin roared when Manning proudly told him about his second U-boat escape. “Will you please stop trying to fool those damn submarines!”8
A year later, the United States Lines ceased all commercial sailings. President Roosevelt ordered the Navy to seize Washington, Manhattan, and the brand-new America and prepare them for war duty. America’s entry into the war seemed imminent.
As the United States Lines shut down its passenger operations, William Francis Gibbs was in the midst of designing a humble cargo vessel, called an “ugly duckling” by Franklin Roosevelt, a ship that would help tip the balance of power in World War II in both Europe and East Asia by delivering crucial American supplies to the front.
William Francis Gibbs could not have been happier when a group of British diplomats came to 21 West Street begging for help. He never much liked the English, nor what he thought of as their condescending politeness, and he relished the chance to be blunt in their presence.
It was the summer of 1940, and America remained officially neutral, but the Todd Shipyards—builders of many of Gibbs’s destroyers—and the U.S. Maritime Commission had brokered this secret meeting. The British delegation was looking for a naval architect to come up with a template for twenty new cargo vessels, all of the same design, that would carry provisions and war materials to a blockaded Great Britain as it continued its lonely fight against the Nazis. Until the Royal Navy developed better methods of finding and chasing down U-boats, the only way to keep supplies flowing to Britain was to build ships faster than the Germans could sink them. And the only way to do that was by negotiating a contract with America’s big shipyards, which could turn out ships in huge quantity thanks to mass-production methods developed by Gibbs & Cox.
Yet William Francis Gibbs did not seem eager to design these ships. “You don’t need them,” he snapped.
The British were stunned by Gibbs’s refusal to prepare plans, and demanded an explanation. Was he turning down a contract?
“If England is within twenty ships of winning the war,” Gibbs said with a wry smile, “she has won the war already.”
“How many would you suggest?” one of the delegates asked.
Gibbs thought for a moment, and said, “Sixty would be a start.”9
Relieved, the British delegation presented Gibbs & Cox with specifications for a basic tramp steamer developed about thirty years earlier. The challenge for Gibbs was to take the design for the tublike vessel and translate it into construction drawings that American shipyards could use. And the answer was a prototype for a simple-to-assemble vessel with interchangeable parts. The hull would be welded rather than riveted. To save on machinery costs and construction time, the 10,000-ton, 442-foot vessels would be powered not by steam turbines, which were too complicated and expensive to mass-produce, but by old-fashioned, reciprocating engines that would drive the ship at only 11 knots—fast enough to make headway in the Atlantic, but slow enough to make them easy pickings for U-boat commanders. The boilers were to burn not oil, which Britain had to import, but coal, which was plentiful in the British Isles.
The new U.S. Maritime Commission chairman, Admiral Emory Land, approved the prototype, and a contract was signed on December 10, 1940. But even with a staff of a thousand Gibbs & Cox quickly ran into trouble. “The lack of detail in the plans they brought from England presented a big problem for American shipbuilders,” naval historian and eyewitness Frederic Lane recalled. As a result, the American staff had to do “considerable interpretation and amplification.”10 For someone who insisted on complete control like William Francis Gibbs, adapting the plans must have been absolutely frustrating, further confirming his dislike of British shipyard practices, with all their bench work and hand fitting. Working long hours, his staff expanded the prototype’s eighty basic working plans into the 550 that the shipyards would need.11
The sixty vessels were built by Todd Shipyards—half of them in California, half in Maine. The keel of the first ship, Ocean Vanguard, was laid down in April 1941; on October 27, she was launched by Admiral Land’s wife.
When the British ships were being planned, Admiral Land also asked that Gibbs slightly refine the design for American use, if—and it looked increasingly likely—the United States entered the war. Gibbs made a few technical improvements and presented a model of this cargo ship to President Roosevelt for approval.
FDR looked at the vessel and called it an “Ugly Duckling.” But he gave his blessing, and American shipyard began cranking them out in preparation for American entry into the conflict.
The public would call it the “Liberty ship.”
For the Liberty ships, Gibbs built on the efficient methods of mass production he had created for the fast construction of his destroyers. Here he sharply reduced the number of parts used, and increased the prefabrication of major sections of the ship. Deck ventilators, funnels, boilers, engine components, even entire hull sections were assembled by subcontractors off-site, hauled to the shipyard, and welded into place. Shipyards became less like high-end couturiers, building each ship to suit an individual customer’s tastes, and more like garment shops, assembling one-size-fits-all products from precut fabrics. The first Liberty ship took 147 days to build; as the learning curve steepened, Liberties began rolling off the lines at an average construction time of 42 days.
The first Liberty ship built for American use was christened Patrick Henry, for the Revolutionary War orator who declared: “Give me liberty or give me death!” Gibbs gave America Liberties… 2,620 of them over the next four years.
Little more than two months after the first Liberty was launched on September 27, 1941, the vital role of Gibbs’s production speed became glaringly apparent following an attack on America’s largest Pacific naval base. During the course of World War II, the humble Liberty ship would carry three-quarters of all of America’s war supplies to destinations in Europe and Asia.12
As the Liberty ships were being put together, Admiral Land found Gibbs hard to work with. He was upset that Gibbs & Cox “pretty generally” ignored most inquiries from the Maritime Commission’s Audit Branch.13 For a time, the admiral decided to let the irregularities pass because of the urgency of the project. But in June 1941, William Francis Gibbs and Admiral Land locked horns over how much money Gibbs & Cox was being paid.
The original agreement with the U.S. Maritime Commission to build the “British Liberties” came to about $600,000 for all sixty ships. When asked to modify the British Liberty design into the EC2 “American Liberty,” Gibbs agreed to drop the price to $750,000 in total. The commission then increased their order to 312 ships, for a total of $1.1 million for the lot.14
The proposition infuriated Gibbs and no doubt business-savvy Frederic. “We have no precedents for low compensation,” Gibbs said to Land on June 24, 1941. He capitulated, however, and told his staff to finish the working plans. But he decided he was through dealing with the Maritime Commission and its admiral. He would concentrate on work for the Navy, which continued to be a loyal client.
Admiral Land was glad to get rid of William Francis Gibbs. “We felt that we paid plenty for it and they felt that we did not pay enough,” Land testified to Congress, “so we just split business with them and said, ‘Good bye boys,’ and we kissed each other on both cheeks and we are running our own show now.”15