Emergency Shipbuilding program

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

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 to constructing ocean-going merchant ships were already occupied by either work of 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.

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 thirty cargo ships. The Mission likewise, negotiating 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 thirty ships identical to those to be built in Maine.

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