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

Abstract

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.