During the twentieth century man's mechanical genius produced three classic machines. First came Ford's Model T; 15 million of them world on wheels. Then came the Douglas put DC3; 10,691 of them flew most of the military and commercial air routes during and after World War II. Shortly after the DC3 came the EC2, a 10,000-ton ship as homely as a Model T and as ubiquitous as the DC3. In three war years, 18 U. S. shipyards turned out 2,742 of them, the greatest single-ship type fleet the world has ever known. President Roosevelt called the ships "Ugly Ducklings." The rest of the world called them Liberty ships.
The plodding 10-knot Liberty ships were cargo carriers, and most of them were operated by commercial steamship companies, although the Army and Navy used a few hundred of them. Anything that other merchant ships could do, Liberty ships did: they carried millions of tons of freight everything from typewriter ribbons to locomotives – to all the Allied ports of the world; they transported troops, prisoners, mules and war-brides; they sank enemy submarines and shot down aircraft and were in turn torpedoed, bombed, mined and wrecked in all the seas of the world.
From the inception of the building program in 1941 to a description of the last rusty veterans still sailing nearly 30 years later, here is the story of the Liberty ships: how they were prefabricated, built, operated, and eventually disposed of. Basically this is an account of the men of the U. S. Merchant Marine, everyone from "high school lads to old granddads," who went to sea to do a hard and often dangerous job in the combat theatres of World War II. Names such as Anzio, Murmansk, Normandy, and Leyte fill many pages of this book with long forgotten thunder.
– From the dust jacket
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