The Emergency Shipbuilding Program (late 1940 – September 1945) was a United States government effort to quickly build simple cargo ships to carry troops and materiel to allies and foreign theatres during World War II. Run by the U.S. Maritime Commission, the program built almost 6,000 ships.^[1][2][3]

This article possibly contains original research. (August 2022)

By the fall of 1940, the British Merchant Navy (equivalent to the United States Merchant Marine) was being sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic by Germany's U-boats faster than the United Kingdom could replace them. Led by Sir Arthur Salter, a group of men called the British Merchant Shipping Mission came to North America from the UK to enlist U.S. and Canadian shipbuilders to construct merchant ships. As all existing U.S. shipyards capable of constructing ocean-going merchant ships were already occupied by either building ships for the U.S. Navy or for the U.S. Maritime Commission's Long Range Shipbuilding Program, which had begun three years previously to fulfill the goals set forth in the Merchant Marine Act of 1936, the mission negotiated with a consortium of companies made up of the existing U.S. ship repairer Todd Shipyards, which had its headquarters in New York City in league with the shipbuilder Bath Iron Works located in Bath, Maine.^[4][5]

The new yard, called the Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corporation, was to be an entirely new facility located on a piece of mostly vacant land located adjacent to Cummings Point in South Portland, Maine, for the purpose of building 30 cargo ships. The mission, likewise, negotiated with a different consortium made up of Todd along with a group of heavy construction companies in the Western U.S. for the building of a new shipyard in the San Francisco Bay area for construction of 30 ships identical to those to be built in Maine.

That yard was to be called the Todd-California Shipbuilding Corp. It was slated to be built on the tide flats of Richmond on the east side of the bay. The construction companies that made up the second half of that corporation had no experience building ships, but did have an extensive resume with the construction of highways, bridges, and major public-works projects such as the Hoover Dam, the Bonneville Dam, and the massive Grand Coulee Dam. Known as the Six Companies, the members included two companies that were to become driving powers in wartime merchant shipbuilding during the ensuing years, and the men behind those companies were Henry J. Kaiser, who headed the Kaiser Companies, and John A. McCone,^[6] who led the Bechtel/McCone Company.^[3]

Contracts for both yards and the ships were signed on December 20, 1940. All the ships to be built were collectively called the Ocean class and to be of an existing British design for five-hatch cargo ships of about 10,000 tons' load displacement and 11 knots' service speed using obsolete, but readily available, triple-expansion, reciprocating steam engine and coal-fired Scotch-type fire tube boilers. The first of these vessels, the SS Ocean Vanguard was launched at the Todd-California yard on October 15, 1941.^[7][2]

With the defense of both the U.S. and its overseas possessions, along with a very strong national interest in assisting Britain in its struggle to keep its supply lines open to both North America and its overseas colonies, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced what was to become known as the Emergency Shipbuilding Program on January 3, 1941, for the construction of 200 ships very much similar to those being built for the British.^[8] He designated that the program be implemented and administered by the Maritime Commission, which since 1937 had been the federal government department tasked with merchant marine development, and which had worked very closely with the British Mission in placing its 60-ship order. Immediately, the Commission authorized that the two yards building for the British build ships for the U.S. upon completion of their current contracts.^[9]

The Maritime Commission also funded the yards to add building ways and realizing that more than two yards would be needed for the program they were expecting to enter into contracts to build new shipyards on the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific Coasts of the U.S. In this first wave of expansion, seven additional yards were added to those in Maine and California, and like those yards were to be for the sole purpose of building only the emergency type of ships. While all the yards were to be built by private contractors and operated by commercial shipbuilding companies, the new yards were financed by the Maritime Commission with funds authorized by Congress, thus were owned by the federal government. One of the new yards planned for construction was to be in Baltimore, Maryland, and would be run by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation. That facility became known as the Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard for the Fairfield section of Baltimore, where it was located. Bethlehem Shipbuilding was one of the nation's largest shipbuilding companies, having construction yards on the East Coast in Quincy, Massachusetts, on Staten Island, New York, and at Sparrows Point, also in Baltimore.^[2]

On the West Coast, it had yards in San Pedro and San Francisco. Another was to be in Wilmington, North Carolina, and managed by the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company of Newport News, Virginia, which had one of the largest commercial yards in the U.S., and by 1941 was exclusively building large combatant ships for the Navy. That yard was to be called the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company.^[3]

Additionally, yards were authorized to be built on the Gulf Coast at Mobile, Alabama, which was to be operated by the Mobile-based Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company, in New Orleans on the Industrial Canal to be known as the Delta Shipbuilding Company and operated by the American Shipbuilding Company of Toledo, Ohio, one at Houston, Texas on the Houston Ship Channel to be operated by Todd Shipyards and called the Todd-Houston Shipbuilding Corp. On the West Coast, one yard was contracted to be built in Los Angeles at Terminal Island and managed by the Bechtel/McCone Company. That yard would be called the California Shipbuilding Corporation or CalShip for short. The Kaiser Corporation itself received a contract to build a new yard on the Columbia River at Portland, Oregon, which would be known as the Oregon Shipbuilding Corp.

See also: Type C1 ship#C1-B-early-years for details on the first C1-B contracts awarded in 1939

As 1941 progressed, the construction of the emergency yards accelerated rapidly and keels were laid upon the new building ways. Well before the first wave of expansion was underway or the original 60 British ships were delivered, shortly after the Lend-Lease Bill was passed by Congress in March, a second wave of 306 additional ships was ordered, including 112 of the emergency type; the remainder was standard-type vessels and tankers. This additional number of ships required additional building ways, so the Maritime Commission authorized new ways to be added to the yards in both the Long Range and Emergency Programs and also contracted for a second yard to be built for the Kaiser-managed yards in Richmond, California. After this time, the original Kaiser yard became known as Richmond #1 and the new yard as Richmond #2.^[3]

After the May 27^[10] Declaration of Unlimited National Emergency by the President, the Emergency Program was further expanded in a third wave. To accommodate the addition of more ships to be built, additional ways were added to the yards in the program and the schedule of construction accelerated to build more ships per shipway per year. In total, this increase raised the planned output of all merchant shipbuilders to about 500 ships (5 million total deadweight tons) for 1942 and 700 ships (7 million tons) in 1943.^[11]