Simply and quickly built, lacking many crew amenities, the Liberty ship was the “Ugly Duckling” of the Battle of the Atlantic.  The Liberty design was conceived in response to an early recognized problem of a worldwide shortage of medium size general purpose cargo ships.  Their direct ancestor was the World War I Hog Island freighter design. The Liberties were the first ship to be built using assembly line technology.  They were thus assembled from components that were produced at a distance from the shipyard’s ways, in some case hundreds of miles from the ocean.  By the end of 1942, these components had so grown in size and complexity that finally their only constraints were the dimensions of the railroad tunnels and the carrying capacity of key bridges across the U.S.!  They fundamentally changed shipbuilding philosophy and so played a critical role in sustaining the vital flow of war material in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters.  Prefabrication, simplified designs, and rigidly enforced production line methods allowed the US to fully replace the catastrophic losses of the early war period.  Later modified into no less than 8 major variants, the Liberties consistently fulfilled the everchanging requirements of a global war.