Jack of All Trades: Cramp Shipbuilding, Mixed Production, and the Limits of Flexible Specialization in American Warship Construction, 1940-1945

Naval shipbuilding was one of the most ambitious industrial undertakings of World War II. A marginal business, in 1939 employing only twelve shipyards, it expanded over the course of the war into a massive network of shipbuilding firms, engineering works, steel mills, and specialty producers that built the world's largest fleet. At its peak in 1944, warship building employed one million shipyard workers, a million others in collateral industries, and consumed one-fifth of the nation's steel output in the construction of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and thousands of smaller combatants.

The industry has received far less scholarly attention than aircraft production and merchant shipbuilding, the textbook examples of American wartime industries that manufactured planes and ships in mass-production formats. Case studies of Ford Motor Company's B-24 bomber plant in Willow Run, Michigan, and Liberty ship construction at the Henry Kaiser shipyards have documented its core characteristics, including design freezes, the extensive use of interchangeable parts, and far-reaching subdivision of production sequences. Some studies of the wartime economy have challenged the widespread assumption that mass production reigned supreme in most industries, calling attention to weapon systems whose designs changed significantly during the war. In fighter aircraft production, for example, the Army Air Forces froze designs only temporarily to enable contractors to complete one thousand five hundred planes at a time before specifications changed for the next batch. Batch production, in short, has emerged as an important theme in studies of industrial mobilization alongside the traditional focus on mass production.¹

Naval shipbuilding, which produced some of the war's largest batch items, remains something of a black box. The available evidence suggests that the design of major combatants—unlike that of Liberty ships and most aircraft—changed considerably from one vessel class to the next and even within a given series while the ships were already under construction. Naval vessels were more technologically complex than cargo ships and tankers, requiring armor, ordnance, gun directors, and other specialty items unheard-of in merchant construction. Lastly, major combatants were built in far shorter production runs than their non-naval counterparts. The Liberty ship program, for example, produced two thousand seven hundred vessels, one hundred times as many as the largest wartime cruiser program.²

Rapid design changes, product complexity, and short production runs are familiar themes of studies of batch production and flexible specialization that provide valuable tools to unlock the box. The recent literature has demonstrated that manufacturers of producer durables that underwent major technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries relied on multipurpose production equipment, skilled labor, and subcontracting in industrial networks of specialty suppliers to accommodate continuous innovation in the engineering trades. These structures and dynamics were also evident in shipbuilding. Versatile production equipment enabled first-class yards to construct passenger liners, battleships, aircraft carriers, tankers, cruisers, cargo ships, destroyers, airplane tenders, and troopships. Shipbuilding also relied on skilled workers who comprised more than 50 percent of the industry's workforce and possessed many all-around skills as well as the focused expertise necessary to build a large variety of ships. Highly specialized subcontractors produced armor plate, turbines, boilers, shafts, and propellers in local, regional, and sometimes national production networks. Shipbuilding was in many respects a classic case of batch production and flexible specialization.³

The present study adds two facets to the recent literature. First, flexibility was sometimes at odds with specialization. Shipyards exhibited a high degree of versatility that enabled them to build a large variety of vessels, and many even branched out into non-marine work to survive hard times in shipbuilding. That said, extreme production flexibility also carried the danger of an ineffective scattering of resources in design, project administration, and construction. In prosperous times, many firms concentrated on fairly narrow product lines that took maximum advantage of their design expertise and production facilities, and they shunned projects that were not well suited to their core competencies. Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia, for example, focused...