Liberty Ships, Master List of Names

Liberty home page

This page links to an alphabetic list of all Liberty ships produced during the Emergency program. Each ship listing contains the following information: yard where built, the hull number assigned by the Maritime Commission; the hull number assigned by the builder; the number of the way on which the ship was built, the date on which the keel was laid; the date on which the ship was launched; the date on which the ship was delivered to the Maritime Commission; type of vessel.
The listing below is provided here because it contains information not readily available elsewhere, either on the web or in printed form. All information was obtained during 1996 from handwritten and typescript records in the Historian's Collection, Records of the United States Maritime Commission, at the National Archives.
On an ongoing basis, hypertext links are being added to provide additional information. Please note that it is not my aim to be exhaustive, as this is incidental to my professional interests in the economics of technological change.
Ships that survived the war were either (i) tied up in various holding areasaround the U.S. coast (these ships were generally scrapped in the early 1960s); (ii) sold commercially around 1947-49 (these ships invariably changed owners and names several times; few of them survived after 1975). If you want to know what happened to a particular ship after or during the war, basic information on name changes, major conversions, and dates of scrapping or loss are given in L.A. Sawyer and  W.H. Mitchell, The Liberty Ship [Lloyds of London Press Ltd, second edition, 1985; this is out of print but readily available through inter-library loan from your local library]. From that book, you can find out if a ship was sunk. If so, more detail may be found in A Careless Word...a Needless Sinking  by Arthur R. Moore, and U.S. Merchant Vessel War Casualties of World War II  by Robert M. Browning, Jr. You might also try the links on my Liberty home page, several of which have tabulated information from these books and collated them with photographs.
I am indebted to Bob Hoernke of Trinity, NC for help in completing this list. Bob kindly checked every entry on this list using independent historical documents, and provided hundreds of corrections.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z
  
NOTES
Names. Names are in alphabetical order in natural language. (e.g. the A Frank Lever is under A.). Every ship is listed by its name at launching only. Subsequent name changes (with the exception of ships delivered to the navy or offered for lend-lease, most name changes took place after the war) are not recorded in the master list. If you are certain the vessel you are searching for was a Liberty ship but its name is not here, you will probably find it in Sawyer and  Mitchell's book contains an index of subsequent names. Individuals searching for information on SAM class ships (with names such as Samtana, Samtorch, Samfleet, etc.) provided to the British under the Supplemental Defense Appropriations Act of 1941 (the "lend-lease" ships) should be aware that for some of these vessels the "Sam***" name is not the original vessel name.
Yard. The following codes are used to indicate shipyards:
            AL: Alabama
            BF: Bethlehem-Faififield
            CA: California Shipbuilding Corporation.
            DE: Delta
            HO: Todd-Houston
            JB: Jones-Brunswick
            JP: Jones-Panama City
            KV: Kaiser Vancouver
            MA: Marinship
            NC: North Carolina
            NE: New England
            P1: Kaiser-Permamante Yard #1
            P2: Kaiser-Permamante Yard #1
            RH: Rheem Manufacturing Co.
            SE: Southeastern
            SJ: St. Johns River
            WK: Walsh-Kaiser
Some superficial details about yards can be found here.
Vessel Type.  If the entry is blank, then the ship was a standard Liberty (Z-EC2-S-C1). The following codes designate modified Liberty ships:
                Z-EC2-S-C2: Tank Carriers
                Z-EC2-S-C5:  Boxed Aircraft Transports
                EC2-S-AW1: Colliers
                Z-ET1-S-C3: Tankers
                "Delivered incomplete" indicates the ship was transferred to the navy before completing outfitting. These ships were converted to hospital ships, troop carriers or (in one instance) a training ship. Ships converted to troop ships after some service as a freighter are not listed as delivered incomplete.