Abstract
The phrase ‘standard ships’ usually brings to mind World War II Liberty ships built in the USA according to simplified designs that yielded 2710 slow but reliable freighters in a stunning demonstration of American mass-production capabilities. Nick Robins’ useful and nicely illustrated Wartime Standard Ships demonstrates that attempts to construct merchant ships in large series were neither uniquely American nor limited to the Second World War. British, Canadian, Japanese and German shipbuilders were as keenly interested in standard ships as their American counterparts in both world wars, usually to replace tonnage lost as a result of enemy action, and to carry cargo and troops to distant war theatres.
Robins explains that standard vessels like Britain’s A-class and America’s Hog Islanders built during the Great War, or Germany’s Hansa A-Types and Japan’s Type 2A of the Second World War incorporated no-frills designs and could be constructed in large numbers. Such practices were at odds with peacetime design and construction routines in an industry that usually employed craft labour to produce bespoke tonnage. Designers of standard ships at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, J.L. Thompson at Sunderland, Sun Shipbuilding in the USA, Germany’s Deutsche Werft, and other shipyards dispensed with sheer forward and aft, camber, and other intricate curves whose production required advanced skills and complex shop floor machinery. Standard builders usually manufactured prefabricated sections from straight plates and beams in workshops, in contrast to traditional shipbuilders who crafted hulls piece by piece on the shipways. While riveting remained standard practice in all countries during the Great War, American builders embraced welding enthusiastically in the interwar years, laying the groundwork for its widespread adoption in the construction of Liberty and Victory cargo ships and T2-class oil tankers in World War II.
Robins agrees with historian Peter Elphick’s observation that British builders often adjusted standard blueprints and specifications to suit local shipyard layouts, in contrast to their American brethren who were more committed to complete standardisation. In the construction of British Type B cargo ships in World War II, for example, ‘each builder could apply his own variations’ to a degree unheard-of in the USA (p. 79). The difference was partly attributable to the fact that the British usually built standardised tonnage in established shipyards with shipways of varying sizes and limited craneage, while Americans constructed greenfield yards from scratch at Hog Island, Pennsylvania, in World War I, and the Henry Kaiser shipyard in Richmond, California, in World War II that featured uniform-sized shipways and extensive lifting capacity to accommodate prefabrication.
Historians have often stressed that Liberty ships were propelled by outdated reciprocating engines because American industry lacked sufficient production capacity to manufacture more advanced propulsion systems. Though Robins concedes the point, he rightfully stresses the importance of the larger and more sophisticated Victory ship design featuring turbine engines and difficult-to-produce reduction gear that drove Victories at a faster speed over longer distances than Liberties.
German attempts to produce standard ships in World War II produced 400-ton transports, a variety of smaller ferry barges (some of which were built in Italian shipyards), and Hansa A-Type cargo steamers, which were designed to replace Germany’s considerable war losses. Unlike the Americans, whose Liberties were based on British tramp steamer designs of the late nineteenth century, the Germans based Hansa A-Types on more modern interwar designs developed by Deutsche Werft in Hamburg that combined turbine and reciprocating engines. As a result of intense competition with the German navy for shipyard space, only 70 Hansa A-Type out of 128 planned were actually completed.
While Germany built standard ships only from 1939 to 1945, Japan experimented with such designs as early as World War I, when Kawasaki at Kobe built fairly sophisticated 11,600-ton Type A freighters, 45 of which were sold to the USA. In World War II, merchant shipbuilding was managed by the Imperial Japanese Navy, which prioritised the construction of naval tonnage. As a result, Japan’s wartime standard ship construction programme was launched belatedly in 1942. The 11,200 Type 2A design, which was based on Harland & Wolff’s N-Class of Great War vintage, produced 131 units, Robins reports with reference to S.C. Heal’s Ugly Ducklings: Japan’s World War II Liberty Type Standard Ships (2003).
Robins does a fine job chronicling the design, construction and post-war fate of many standard ships. Venturing beyond design and technology history, Robins also notes that the massive shipbuilding programs contributed to gluts in post-war ship markets, particularly in the 1920s, when many wartime programs continued long after the Armistice and eventually led to a sharp decline in demand for new tonnage. At times the reader wishes for systematic comparisons between American, British, German, and Japanese standard designs and construction practices. Though Robins gives ample credit to other students of the subject whose works he quotes, his book does not include footnotes or references to archival material. These shortcomings notwithstanding, Wartime Standard Ships is a valuable addition to the literature that should be read by anyone interested in twentieth-century ship design, construction, shipyard labour, the maritime economy, and the dynamics of wartime industrial mobilisation.