For part I, see Henry J. Kaiser, Entrereneur.
In 1940, Henry J. Kaiser joined with the Todd shipbuilding company to bid on a contract to build 60 merchant ships for the British government, which desperately needed ships to import supplies during the war. Todd would build half the ships in its East Coast shipyards, while Kaiser would build the other half from a yet-to-be-built shipyard in Richmond, California.
Kaiser’s Oregon Shipyard on Swan Island in Portland.
Kaiser, of course, had never built either a ship or a shipyard in his life, but that didn’t faze him. When he told British and, later, American officials how fast he thought he could build ships, they thought he was delusional — no one had ever built ships that fast. Yet he revolutionized the shipbuilding business, bring assembly line techniques to an industry used to custom, one-off designs.
With the help of other members of the Six Companies, Kaiser built seven shipyards in Portland and Richmond capable of building 58 ships at one time. By the end of the war, these yards had built 1,490 ships, an average of about one per day. Most of the ships were the type of merchant ship known as Liberty ships. But Kaiser also built 12 other kinds of ships, including troop transports, landing ship tanks, and escort carriers. In all, Kaiser supplied more than a quarter of all U.S. ships built during the war.
