- Baldwin quotes: 'The most frequent -- and to me one of the most important -- criticisms of my friends,' he writes, 'is the slowness of the hips being built... They dewll on the fact that the ships today are nothing more than floating targets for any submarine.
'A ship doing between 15 and 22 nautical miles an hour is in their opinion an almost imporrible victime for a U-boat.
And such ships can be built easily in their opinion.
Instead, our Victoryh [Liberty] ships do little better than ten miles and English ships are built to do only eight and nine.'
In fact, those 2,700 Liberty ships maxed at around 13 mph (11.5 knots) on their 2,500 HP engines.
But the US was also building 500 Victory ships, whose 8,500 HP engines drove them to nearly 20 mph (17 knots).
But the first of the faster Victory ships was not delivered until 1944, by which time the U-boat Battle of the Atlantic had been pretty much won by the Allies.
So the need for speed was not so great there.
Still, the Pacific was different, in that longer distances made faster speeds a logistical advantage.
Libery Ship compared to Victory Ship:
