Vault of Secrets - Unpopular History

Page 55 The accelerated construction of ships during the Second World War, when the replacement of the fleet that was being actively sunk by the Germans was almost the chief problem, could not be based on the traditions of former shipbuilding, for the cycles of ship construction were excessively long. The cadres of engineers and shipyard workers knew their trade well, but they could not overcome the force of tradition—the traditional technology of design and construction of ships. Shipbuilders, naturally, did not possess the technique of mass and large-series flow production that belonged to other branches of industry, including the automotive, tractor, aviation, and electrical industries, and so on. Disregarding the classical traditional technology of shipbuilding, and rather in spite of it, American industrialists laid down new foundations for the design and high-speed construction of ships. It was on this basis that the very idea of building the Liberty ships according to the technology of mass production was born. Hundreds of plants that had never engaged in shipbuilding were drawn into the creation of the Liberty-type vessels; they quickly learned to manufacture ship components and deliver them for assembly. The period a ship of this type spent on the slipway had normally been more than a year. Now it became many times shorter than under the old technology. The first Liberty ship was built in 250 days; the 56th ship was built in 62 days—four times faster. Beginning with the 330th vessel, roughly three years later, the average construction time reached 35 days—seven times faster. At the Permanente Metals shipyard one of the ships was built in 7 days, 14 hours, and 23 minutes. This is, of course, a record for brevity, unprecedented in the shipbuilding industry. It is more than thirty times shorter than the time required to build the first Liberty ship. The principal factor in this acceleration was an entirely new approach to the organization of ship design and construction—the use of the richest experience of production organization in other branches of industry and the rejection of conservative traditions of design and production technology. A strict principle of narrow specialization of plants was adopted. Ship- -55-

Nikolai Nikolaevich Smelyakov «Business America (An Engineer’s Notes)» (1967)