Скачать или смотреть America Ran Out of Steel — So This Risky Idea Saved the War

January 16, 1943. Portland, Oregon.

The SS Schenectady—a brand-new Liberty ship worth $2 million—suddenly breaks completely in half while docked. No torpedo. No enemy action. The ship was 8 days old.

This wasn't an isolated incident. By early 1943, nearly 1,500 Liberty ships were showing catastrophic hull cracks. 7 ships broke completely in half. 3 sank, killing crews. America was building ships faster than any nation in history—3 per day at peak—but they were death traps.

The problem? America had run out of steel. Out of skilled workers. Out of time.

The solution came from an unexpected source: Henry Kaiser, a dam builder who'd never constructed a ship in his life. His radical idea: replace 300,000 hand-hammered rivets with electric arc welding. Build ships in 42 days instead of a year. Train housewives to weld in 6 weeks.

Everyone said it would fail. The British Admiralty warned the welds would crack. Naval architects called him insane. Then the ships started literally tearing themselves apart in cold water.

The fix came from Dr. Constance Tipper, a British metallurgist at Cambridge who discovered why steel becomes brittle at 29°F. Her solution—rounded corners and crack arrestors—dropped the failure rate from 7% to under 0.5%.

By D-Day, these "disposable" ships had become the foundation of the largest invasion in history. Without them, there's no Normandy. No victory in Europe. No end to the war.

This is the untold story of the 2,710 Liberty ships, the 243,000 merchant mariners who sailed them (9,521 died—higher casualty rate than any service except the Marines), and the welding revolution that changed warfare forever.


🎬 CHAPTERS:
00:00 - The Ship That Broke in Half
04:30 - America's Steel Crisis
09:00 - The Dam Builder Who Changed Everything
14:00 - The Welding Science That Saved Lives
20:00 - Building a Ship Every 42 Days
26:00 - Running the U-Boat Gauntlet
32:00 - D-Day's Secret Weapon
37:05 - The Ships That Wouldn't Die

#LibertyShips #WWII #Engineering #NavalHistory #DDay #MerchantMarine #HenryKaiser #Welding #MilitaryHistory #documentaryfilmmaking

© 2025 [@ww2fills]. Historical documentary. Educational use.
All archival footage used under Fair Use for educational/historical commentary.

Liberty ships,
World War 2,
WWII documentary,
D-Day,
Naval history,
Henry Kaiser,
Merchant Marine,
Military history,
Engineering documentary,
Shipbuilding,