Whilst the U.S.A. did not enter World War I until April 1917, U.S. merchant ships were being sunk by German U-Boats well before then as they crossed the Atlantic with supplies.
By the end of the War, around 5,000 Allied merchant ships and around 15,000,000 tons of merchant shipping had been sunk by the Germans. The Allies need to build more ships, but there was a scarcity of steel. On 7th September 1916, The United States Shipping Board was created and its job was to manage merchant shipping in the U.S. and find ways to build more ships. They found concrete..
The U.S.S.B. looked to Europe, and in particular to Norwegian Nicolay Fougner, who had built 'Namsenfjord', the World's first seagoing concrete ship.
The outcome, a programme to build 43 concrete ships, cargo ships and tankers, of a scale previously never attempted. 12 were completed.
We have covered the Life & Times of all 12 WWI era U.S. Concrete Ships of the Emergency Fleet l, with background detail and in-depth Blogs about each ship.
Progressively, we are also Blogging about the many other concrete vessels built in the U.S.A. in the World War I era