World War 2 In Review

American Liberty Ship SS Stephen Hopkins. Last Stand of the SS Stephen Hopkins. Painting by John Alan Hamilton (1919–1993). (Imperial War Museum) On Sunday morning, 27 September 1942, the German raider Stier and blockade runner Tannenfels were awaiting a rendezvous with a tanker. Suddenly a ship emerged from a rain squall. She was an American Liberty ship, the   Stephen   Hopkins.   However,   the   German   vessels did not know her name. The captain of the ship, Paul Buck, thought them to be harmless freighters but upon close examination through his glasses, he spotted big guns on the lead ship and went to a General Alarm. The captain of the Stier, Franz Gerlach, considered her another defenseless target. The Stier (ex-merchant vessel Cairo, HSK 6, ship number Schiff 23 [for signal purposes], Raider J) was armed with six 5.9-inch guns, two 37-mm anti-aircraft guns, four 20-mm anti-aircraft guns, and two 21-inch torpedo tubes (submerged). She also carri...

A heavily retouched photo of a U.S. "Liberty" cargo ship (U.S. MARAD design EC2-S-C1), circa 1941/42.  Liberty ships were a class of cargo ship built in the United States during World War II under the Emergency Shipbuilding Program. Although British in concept, the design was adopted by the United States for its simple, low-cost construction. Mass-produced on an unprecedented scale, the Liberty ship came to symbolize U.S. wartime industrial output. The class was developed to meet British orders for transports to replace ships that had been lost. Eighteen American shipyards built 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945 (an average of three ships every two days), easily the largest number of ships ever produced to a single design. Their production mirrored (albeit on a much larger scale) the manufacture of "Hog Islander" and similar standardized ship types during World War I. The immensity of the effort, the number of ships built, the role of female wor...