Shipyards in Wartime
The shipyard workers shown here are laying the keel of the Joseph N. Teal, a 10,500-ton “Liberty” freighter bound for the war in the Pacific in 1942. Amidst scaffolding, tools, and wires, these workers at Henry J. Kaiser’s shipyard in Portland, Oregon, constructed the entire ship in just ten days after the keel was laid, to shatter all previous shipbuilding records. Kaiser was the king of shipbuilding on the West Coast, with massive yards in Portland and the San Francisco Bay area. In all, Kaiser’s workers built nearly 1,500 ships in three years, one-quarter of the total constructed during the war. © Bettmann/Corbis.