Many weapons and inventions were credited with winning World War II, most famously in the assertion that “the atomic bomb ended the war, but radar won the war.” What is less well known is that both airborne radar and the atomic bomb were invented in British laboratories, but built by Americans. The same holds true for many other American weapons credited with the Allied victory, in particular, the Liberty Ship and the Landing Ship Tan. Both were innovated by British naval architects, but adopted, adapted and built in extraordinary quantities by American engineers (e.g., Gibbs and Cox) and area shipbuilders (Newport News and Norfolk Naval Shipyards).
Ferreiro shares stories of how these vessels brought vital arms, supplies, and troops to the front lines across the globe, culminating in Allied victories.
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And thank you all for coming this evening um you can see that the title of this evening’s discussion and I do hope it is a discussion is a little bit different from the title of the book the title of the book is Churchills American Arsenal uh The Innovation the
Partnership behind the innovations that won World War II um please note the aircraft that uh Winston Churchill is looking at please pay pay attention to that the title of this uh uh discussion this evening is Churchill’s American Armada uh because it focuses on two of the many many um examples of how Britain
And the United States collaborated to build the war-winning inventions of the second world war and in this case it’s the um Landing ship tank program which Newport News is well known for and the Liberty ship program uh which also has ties to this area uh many uh inventions and weapons
Were credited with winning World War II probably the most famous quote is by Lee dubridge who was the head of the MIT radiation laboratory responsible for building many of The Radars and he had vested interest in this um he said the atom bomb only ended the war radar won
It so you can attribute the uh victory of world War II to many things in fact um uh almost any one of these could be given some kind of title uh Airborne radar uh I’m sure many of you are anxious to see masters of the air coming
To um is it Apple TV is it Apple TV coming soon um in the middle that’s the P-51 Mustang the all- American fighter except that you notice that Winston Churchill was standing next to the first models that’s because the British uh specified the airplane gave the money to
The United States to build it built the factories um it was a uh German American engineer who designed the Mustang with the help of a British aerodynamicist and when the plane was put into full operation in this configuration it was uh constructed with a British Rolls-Royce engine All-American
Fighter no um British red American Born um penicillin another British invention that was mass-produced in the United States the atomic bomb was a British idea that was brought to the United States we’ll be talking about Liberty ships and Landing ships tanks um all of them could be uh uh could be considered
As helping turn the tide of the war all of them had the distinct uh uh characteristic of being a collaboration between two Nations Britain and the United States to bring to fruition um in this talk I’m just going to be talk uh focused on the bottom two the idea of a special relationship
Is first and foremost in our minds that certainly wasn’t the case uh when the Germans had swept across Europe in June 1940 uh to had uh occupied most of the continent threatened to cut off the sea lanes and certainly threaten to invade Britain complete submission seemed imminent uh but it was only by
Combining the scientific and Engineering talents of Britain and the United States to develop weapons and inventions that could defeat the Nazi uh war machine could they hope to turn the tide of War retake the continent and finish the job and yes um this book and this discussion
Is is primarily focused on the European theater knowing that World War II was the largest conflict in mankind that took place on every single continent including Antarctica so it is impossible to take in the entire conflict this is going to focus on one important part of the war
And probably most important is at this time um that special relationship between Britain and the United States had yet to be for forged at the beginning of the war uh France and Britain were the two Nations that had the special relationship you may remember they had defeated Germany
In World War I together yes they had some help from the United States but they were primarily responsible and they were very closely Allied during the very early stages of the second world war and more importantly together they outnumbered and outproduced the Germans on paper Britain and France together
Could defeat Germany Britain certainly didn’t think that it needed to come to the United States for help except maybe in a few minor uh areas of aircraft and Machine Tools it was the lightning defeat of both the British forces and the French forces um in May and June of
1940 that changed this Dynamic completely Not only was France now out of the picture but as you can see uh from this left-hand photograph although 330,000 Allied troops uh were saved from the beaches of dunker tens of thousands of weapons and pieces and and and tanks
And uh other equipment were left on the countryside roads and on the beaches of dunker in other words the British army was back at home but they were toothless um it was only after um uh this uh rapid uh uh retrenchment that the Blitz and the Battle of Britain began and they
Started to the Germans started to systematically destroy the factories and the shipyards that Britain needed to rebuild in order to take uh the continent fighting on the beaches fighting on the Seas and oceans uh British shipyards especially which were overburdened and under attack could not possibly build enough ships and this was
The largest ship building Nation on Earth uh to bring the troops necessary the armor to retake Europe Churchill had just become Prime Minister and he knew that Britain could not uh even hope to rebuild its Army then increase its Army and then be able to take that Army
Across the channel to uh uh reconquer Europe without American help Don Kirk had completely changed the equation it was at this point that Britain came to the United States to ask for help um not just to for with money but also to uh produce uh weapons that Britain had been
Developing over the years and to take British ideas and inventions and make them indust rustal products uh some of you have heard of the lend lease program that was the program that allowed the Americans to essentially build uh many of these weapons many of these um pieces
Of equipment uh more or less on credit uh with the very thin promise that they would be returned after the war in good condition which uh everybody understood was going to be uh a lot uh not not going to happen but it gave uh Roosevelt the ability to sign into law probably
One of the most important acts of uh that part of this uh of the 20th century as I said I’m going to talk about two of many examples uh they are the Liberty ships and the landing ships tanks so we’ll start with Liberty ships and you may uh
Remember this scene from uh the movie Greyhound great movie um and the Liberty ships which we think of as being this uh wonderful American innovation of um how to get things done quickly uh as an All-American product began Life as a British program and it started with these two um
And I’m going to use the word men uh because the primary um uh actors in many of these dram Ras were men but there are incredibly important areas where I’ll be talking about uh the other half of the equation uh on the left hand side that’s Robert sirel Thomas he was managing
Director of Thompson and Sun’s shipyards in Britain it’s near Newcastle and they produced uh very efficient but slow ships there about 10 knots uh for cargo transport uh when Britain realized that they uh needed to to uh supplement the ship building that they already had as I had mentioned the shipyards were under
Attack uh the shipyards were producing uh carriers battleships they were repairing War damage ships um so they needed a another source to build Merchant ships uh they asked uh Thompson to lead what was called the um uh British Merchant ship mission to come to the United States uh and ask for
60 ships to be built uh in and around uh the the states in the space of two weeks from October to November of 1940 uh they hired a a plane and visited 30 sites over the course of just two weeks they never slept in a hotel they
Slept on the airplane as it flew from one destination to another finally they decided um to work with uh the person on the right um Henry J Kaiser that’s his wife Bess um who was known better as a civil engineering genius frankly uh he was responsible for uh the grand kie Dam
Now the Hoover Dam um many other civil projects and one thing he knew how to build was infrastructure and he’d already constructed two shipyards that were building ships while the shipyard was being built around the ship so the British merchant ship Mission contracted with Kaiser in two different
Uh sites one was Richmond on the west coast near San Francisco the other one was Portland Maine to build what were called um ocean class ships they were essentially the same ship that Thompson was building in Britain just built to um American industrial standards it was a very inexperienced
Team that Kaiser brought to the shipyards in fact and this is in Congressional testimony one of the shipyard managers turned to uh his associate and said so when do we pour the Keel and I I wish I was making that up but that that actually was said um but
They knew what they were doing when it came to constructing shipyards um once the contract was l let uh let me get the figures uh here um they began construction 2 weeks after the contract and the first ships were coming off the line uh within four months after the
Contract was signed Thompson himself only stayed for the initial signing of the contract he then went back to Britain by fast passenger ship but it wasn’t fast enough to escape the uots his ship was struck by a torpedo sunk Thompson managed to get off the ship um
Into lifeboats um many of the PE passengers survived and he was uh uh uh had his wits about him he got the he he kept the contract for the uh for these ocean class ships and the shipyards in his briefcase took it with him on the Lifeboat he was rescued after several
Days um came home dried out the contracts had them retyped they were signed and they were but that by this time they were already building the ships but you couldn’t simply take a British plan and build it in an American Shipyard now I’m a naval architect I’ve
Been designing ships for many years and I had the opportunity of being trained as a British Naval Constructor and working in the French navy so I’ve seen firsthand the difference between construction plans in each country and it’s it’s like looking at a a da Vinci drawing with you know backwards
Lettering you know you can’t simply take it and and and work on it you have to translate it into American and the company that did that was Gibbs and Cox this is William Francis Gibbs on the cover of Time Magazine and some of you may be familiar with the company because
Their archives used to be here in the museum I’ve actually made uh great use of them they’re now over in Christopher Newport um uh you may have also had uh the biographer of William Francis Gibbs Stephen ujifusa who wrote uh the book a man in his ship uh wonderful book if you
Have a chance to get it after you buy my book um please do it’s a it’s a great portrait of uh William Francis Gibbs and the company that he created which became one of the most important engineering companies of World War II um something
Like 70 % of all of the US Navy fleet was designed by his firm and Thompson was quite impressed uh in Britain the uh the shipyards did their own drawings they did their own plans uh this was the first time he came across a naval Architecture Firm they didn’t exist
Thompson was wary but he was very impressed he said British marine engineers and Builders um and this explains what Gibson Cox did um tend to to leave many details off the drawings footnote um that’s because many British Engineers start work in the factories before they move to the drawing rooms
And then into the engineering offices so when they come to the engineering offices they know how the factory works and they can they can write on the drawings to shop floor standard and everybody knows what that means but in the United States engineers and this is
True today um are train were trained to put every single nut bolt and and widget and and rivet um onto the drawings because there wasn’t that same Factory floor engineering drawing room standard and so uh 80 drawings might suffice to build an engine in Britain and and this
Is true um when the Americans got it and they they saw 80 drawings they wired back said we asked for all the drawings the British said those are all the drawings and they had to come up with 500 more drawings before they could build the
Engine so this is an unsung part of the enormous work that went into making the fleet that became the Liberty ships and you can see the DNA of the Liberty ship there’s the Liberty ship at the bottom but the ship at the top is where it all
Began so just to recap the history um Thompson’s Shipyard was building what was called the Empire class Empire wave Etc uh and that was the ship that the Americans agreed to build for the British as the ocean class which was the ship at the bottom 60 of them were built
By the uh Americans meanwhile Britain built another 20 of these uh Empire class and then Canada built another 200 U of these same British ships because they had very similar um uh engineer Ing and and ship building to to the British but Gibbs and Cox took the Empire class drawings translated them
Into American drawings they became the ocean class so as uh the Kaiser yards were building them and I’m going to refer to my notes Here uh the first one was actually launched in um August of uh 1941 put into commission um the maritime commission which was in charge of the American
Emergency cargo Fleet decided it also needed uh inexpensive but quick to build uh cargo ships looked around said we want those ocean ships we want another 2,700 of them and so they took the ocean class they just made them into Liberty ships that’s why I said the Americans
Just took over the British and they we made them into Liberty ships and built um started put getting them off the construction line the first one was the SS Patrick Henry that was launched in September of 1941 um so while the British were building the Americans were building on
Alongside uh and it became uh as you can see a total of 3,000 ships uh from that one design probably the largest uh single class of oceangoing ships in modern history from that one design by Thompson but it wasn’t just Liberty ships it was also Liberty from discrimination both for women and for
Minorities at least for a little while and perhaps in a very limited way one of the things that the shipyards were faced with right away is lack of literal Manpower probably you all know that most of the men were either called called to Duty or they were serving in some other
Way and in order to fill the um enormous uh production calls not just in shipyards but in aircraft factories Etc uh women and minorities uh stepped up and very often it was both um here you can see um several uh African-American women working in the Kaiser shipyards in
Richmond Virginia and no that isn’t Rosie the Riveter riveting was the old technology these were state-of-the-art um uh engineers and Fabricators these Wendy welders and their names are given in the National Archives which I was very happy to see because so often uh there are faces but
You don’t see the names and these women and there were many men um were responsible for creating these fleets but women working in the shipyards were faced with other problems number one um child care so for a period of time the US government funded shipyards and other
Companies to provide child care on site and uh the companies themselves were providing Health Care on site Kaiser shipyards and Permanente a medals in particular um this woman that’s um uh Hannah Peters had been born in Germany but uh she moved to California and she was uh hired by the Kaiser
Shipyards and Permanente a medals um to make certain that their women were being taken care of um because they had different problems that that than the men did and they she started one of the first um gynecological departments um and they were caring for 23,000 staff um there were similar
Expansions in other shipyards and if the names Kaiser Shipyard and Permanente medals means anything to you it’s probably because the only vestage of that once powerful Shipyard conglomerate is now Kaiser Permanente the the health care organizations that they had created to take care of their workers not just
The women men also um became the Kaiser Permanente um group and Kaiser Healthcare uh and that’s really what started the whole process of linking uh American Health Care to American um employers ultimately there were 18 shipyards around the United States that built the Liberty ships this is from the
Smithsonian um rather Antiquated frankly exhibit on uh shipping which I do do hope one day will be brought back up to um uh made a little bit more uh modern uh some of those ships were built under the uh Newport News ship building flag uh in a shipyard in North Carolina of
The total of uh 2,751 Liberty ships um 126 were built by Newport new ship building there in uh North Carolina and you can see it’s very much of an assembly line method of uh the less completed ships are off to the right the more completed ships are to
The left the crews and workers move from one ship to another doing their um their work um as the ship progresses and they’re launching uh one ship every few days uh at the at their Peak and Liberty ships were at War around the globe fleets some of which you saw in the
Still from uh Greyhound uh they were able to survive the uh high seas of the North Atlantic very slow 10 knots but they they sailed in convoys they went to the ends of the Earth and they brought uh equipment from from the United States Canada and elsewhere to everywhere on the
Globe now I want to talk about the landing ship tank lsts and this is from another Tom Hanks film Saving Private Ryan very famous scene um at the end of the um D-Day scene and the thing you you uh should notice well the first thing you’ll probably immediately notice is those are
CGI um lsts Landing ship tanks but they’re also not uh during that initial wave these ships were far too valuable to bring in the initial assault um this is what kept the supplies going in the followon echelons so if you ever see a movie where you an LST is in the front
Wave somebody’s uh not telling the story accurately this is accurate there were hundreds of lsts all along the beaches and the elegy for lsts was written probably best by Churchill himself he said and I’ll quote him from his volume five of the second world war
Um in this period of the war all the great strategic combinations of the western Powers were restricted and distorted by the shortage not of Tanks but of vehicles and the letters LST Landing ship tank are burnt in the minds of all those who dealt uh with military
Affairs in that period all turned on lsts and that was absolutely critical because you needed that kind of car carrying capacity to U make sure that not only were the first uh uh echelons supported but then there was a continuous feed of men and Equipment onto the shores for the next
Six months to eight months of uh invading the continent that’s not quite what he said in April 1944 just before the D-Day invasion which had to be pushed um from May to June because of lack of lsts and Churchill wired George C Marshals the Destinies of two great
Empires seem to be tied up in some godamn things called lsts um you won’t find that in his histories but you will find it in the actual um archives um the LST and I had to write this one down was the multi-purpose ship that was everything the Allies never knew they
Always wanted until it became available yeah I know that sounds like a bad romantic comedy um but lsts were absolutely vital uh and it wasn’t understood how vital they would be until the British attempted to do um uh what they thought they could do
Which is to um land a land a fleet of sorry land uh troops ashore capture a city and then bring in the heavy equipment the doctrine at the time was uh the only way to bring heavy equipment like tanks and trucks and artillery and other vehicles was to capture a port
That you could then crane all the stuff off the ships onto Wares and then drive it off but in order to take a city you needed to bring in troops well Britain tried that in September of 1940 in darar sagol against the uh vishi French and it
Was a disaster they simply could not get the troops um onto the shore um in any kind of orderly fashion and then they found they needed heavy equipment in order to to take the city so it was this um terrible cycle where they couldn’t get tanks and other equipment onto the
Shore because they needed to take the city but they couldn’t take the city without heavy equipment so in October of 1940 specifically October 27th 1940 um Churchill uh gathered his staff around in a now disused Underground Station that’s the station um it’s the down street Tube Station and
That is the birth place of the LST and the birth date of the LST is October 27th 1940 because that’s when Churchill uh explained to his staff that the problem was you couldn’t take a a port without heavy vehicles and tanks but you couldn’t um land heavy vehicles and
Tanks because you couldn’t take them across the ocean and uh which required deep draft ships and put them on a beach which needs shallow draft to get up onto the beach and he said go solve the problem get the best engineering mins uh in the country to figure out how you can
Take a tank across the ocean and land it on the beach in less than 10 feet of water and that’s the diagram that was drawn and of course we know that the best engineer mines in the country are naval Architects and the naval architect who was first assigned to this he was called
The naval Constructor is this man Roland Baker Royal Corps of Naval Constructors and he was given the assignment figure out how do you how to build a ship that can cross an ocean with tanks and land it on Shore and he came up with this concept just a few
Months later um it was the first LST Landing ship tank and it had this and let me make sure that this works it had this bridge so this was constructed by a a a a actually a bridge building company that could be uh deployed from the bow of the ship and
You can barely see it here um across the waves and allow tanks to drive up over the waves and onto the beach and it was a great idea but they could only build about three of these things because this mechanism was very complicated the design um was relatively complicated and
Britain simply didn’t have the uh people or the uh Industries to be able to build these not in the few single or dozens but in the hundreds and thousands that would be necessary to take the continent now I want to point out that that picture of Roland Baker uh is from one
Of my old professors uh in Britain and a friend of mine DK Brown who was trained by Roland Baker and David K Brown taught me how to design warships so from him to Brown to me now the Americans were aware of what was going on because of this man Ned
Cochran another unsung hero uh and he was at the Forefront of lend lease um he was the British call it sandid he was assigned to the British admiralty the Royal Corps of Naval construction uh in 1940 to understand what the needs were of the British Navy for a whole host of
Things how to fight submarines how to operate in um convoys because the Americans in the fall of 1940 knew that uh at least the US Navy knew that it was going to get into this War sooner or later and they better know what it’s going to take to um get
Involved so Cochran was able to um be part of the rcnc for several months and I did that too about 80 years later um well no not 80 sorry about 40 years later um while uh the Americans and the British were talking and uh negotiations began which culminated in the lend lease
Program that started in March 1941 and immediately the British started coming to the United States asking to build ships that they needed that Ned Cochran had already figured out um would be of service to both the British and the Americans primarily in anti-submarine Warfare um but they were also starting
To think about how they would build Landing ship tanks and those conversations um culminated in uh October and November of 1941 so there was a gestation period um the British had sent another delegation uh in the fall of 1941 to ask the Americans to build under lend leas Landing ships so
Um Cochran who was the head of the Bureau of ships came to um his head of ship design and this is John C Neer Meer who trained my bosses um when I worked in the naval sea systems command um who trained me on how to design warships from John Meer Meer to
My bosses to me so from the two sides this is one of the things that got me very interested in this topic as you probably figured out I was able to contact the family of the Neer Myers and here’s what happened November 4th 1941 about 2:00 in the
Afternoon Cochran sits down with NE and says here’s a single sheet of paper this is what the British are looking for they want a ship that can go 10 knots and carry this many tanks and go this far so neita me about the course of two hours
Sits down with a sheet of paper um sketches it out does a few calculations um and then he’s got to leave because you can see that um quitting time in the main Navy Building in Washington DC was everybody filing out out and Neer Meer
Was one of the few people who had a car that uh could drive in his car pool and he had to get to that car pool to make sure they left on time because one of the carpool members was Heyman rickover who was a stickler for punctuality to the point where he told
Neer Meer if I’m uh if you ever get to the pickup Point uh where you’re supposed to pick me up and I’m not there keep going which NE Meer did several times once when it was pouring rain and Rick over was running after the
Car nto Meer drove home to his uh to his house that’s the house in Chevy Chase Maryland had dinner went upstairs to the second floor this is where his study was unrolled a sheet of paper started drawing a a larger scale version of his LST uh on that paper um on his tracing
Paper his drafting table 6ot drafting table um asked the son to get him coffee the son brought the coffee spilled the coffee on the drawing um didn’t have time to clean it up rolled it up went back to work the next day they looked at it the British delegation looked at it
Said Yep this is what we want coffee stain and all it was sent by Courier to Britain who said build me some of those what did they build they built what John meter Meyer Drew now I know that perhaps in the back it’s a little bit hard to see but this
Is his sketch and it’s on a sheet of paper about 9 in by 4 in um and I have listed in number four and number two pencil of a ship that can carry um 500 tons of uh tanks land in about two and a half or three feet of water there’s a
Lot more detail in here this for Naval architect this is this is the equivalent of seeing an original drawing by Leonardo da Vinci you know of of his Mona Lisa and how he figured out the the muscles that that work the smile this is the equivalent because if you are able
To look and it’s in my book so that’s another reason you will see that the sketch he made is almost identical to the LST that was built almost exactly one year later the sketch was um dated November 4th um 1941 uh the lsts uh came the first ones came off the
Line in just over one year from that point by the way um Roland Baker I want to point this out um was in the United States at this time and worked in Neer Meyer’s office on the design of the LST so the two together um uh actually
Developed the American LST so why why is this important um because uh at first the Americans did not want to build the landing ship tank they said you British don’t need this um and in fact the uh the the uh the chief of Naval operations uh who was briefed on the
British LST program told the British Mission you don’t need this so we’re not going to build it um he told them that on December 5th 1941 the British came to the White House on December 6th and um Harry Hopkins who was FDR’s right-hand man said I don’t
Know what the Navy thinks it’s talking about we need them let me see if I can get Roosevelt tomorrow that was Saturday December 6th 1941 December 7th within a within a few days the uh uh FDR said I don’t we’re going to build these and uh we’re going
To build them for the Americans and so very quickly the LST became an American program just like with the Liberty ship detail design went to Gibbs and Cox um most of the shipyards that built the lsts were these Prairie shipyards along the um uh uh Mississippi River Ohio
River dravo Evansville Chicago bridge um eventually 16 shipyards uh built the LST including Newport News and Kaiser in Vancouver they were so critical to the war effort that here at Newport News um uh one of the carriers that was under construction the cv13 Franklin um on slipway
11 nice detail huh um was taken off out of the slipway so they could build six lsts and you don’t move an aircraft carrier uh for no reason so this tells you how important the United States considered it the very first LST which was the 383 was delivered on October TW
Was delivered sorry I was wrong October 27th 1942 um and where was it delivered Newport News and there’s LST 383 um in a trial launching a smaller landing craft um off of it uh you can see that that uh the um the local crowd was dedicated or had a
Ceremony to launch these lsts and the supervisor of ship building sup ship said just a year later of the various building yards this is to Newport News um you were next to last to start and that was absolutely true dravo on the Mississippi was the first one to start
But you Newport News were the first ones to complete the vessels um there were a total of 1,50 lsts built 18 of them at Newport News um who who ordered them originally the British they got 113 we got the rest and they were used um all across
The world most famously in uh the invasion of Normandy as I said they were uh in the follow-up echelons they warrant uh this is an actual picture this is not a CGI um um and they were used for the buildup for the invasion they they delivered tanks Vehicles
Equipment um they launched landing craft they evacuated casualties and uh PS they became Hospital ships they became command ships they became repair ships they even launched aircraft in Normandy alone there were 230 lsts carrying equipment supplies and people across the channel and in the Pacific uh the Marine
Corps which is uh one of the most Innovative uh agencies in the entire federal government uh figured out how to use lsts not to land directly on the shores but to launch these um amphibious tractors called am TRS uh which were the only things shallow enough to go up over
The reefs and into the atol to go on their island hopping campaign even the famous Higgins boats um couldn’t be used all that uh often and as effectively as lsts with these amtr which would deploy uh 1002 200 would come ashore and just overwhelm the Invaders so lsts and
Liberty ships um both of which were British and American projects both of which um have part of their Heritage here in the Newport News area were absolutely essential for winning the war um I just want to point out and some of you already know this that uh uh there
Are remaining examples of both um the LST 325 Museum in Evansville ill uh Indiana um which I’ve been to and uh that’s the the John W brown and Baltimore is the closest one to here but there’s another Liberty ship in um San Francisco the Jeremiah Brown and one in
Pereus just outside of Athens um the these two Shipyard these two ships as I said were products of Newport News but they were the product more importantly of the amazing intense cooperation between the United States and Britain and it’s these alliances and this cooperation that is critical to
Maintaining strength around the globe um Nations that have the best and most long lasting alliances are the ones that last and maintain their strength the longest this is a lesson that we know even today and it’s our alliances and it’s our ability to cooperate around the world
That makes us even today not just in World War II the indispensable Nation thank [Applause] you
1 Comment
Thank you for shining the spotlight on another hidden or forgotten sector of American History.