How America Built an Aircraft Carrier Every Week and Changed Naval Warfare Forever

The U-Boat Killer That Built Itself: How America Won the Atlantic
In 1943, German U-boats were strangling Britain through a calculated campaign of merchant ship destruction in the Mid-Atlantic Gap—a deadly zone beyond the reach of land-based aircraft. Winston Churchill called it the only thing that truly frightened him during the war. The Allies were losing the Battle of the Atlantic, and with it, possibly the entire war.

Enter Henry Kaiser, a construction engineer with no naval experience, who made an impossible promise: build 50 aircraft carriers in one year. The Navy laughed. Traditional carriers took 20 months to build. But Kaiser understood something revolutionary—ships weren't precision instruments, they were factory products.

Using assembly-line techniques borrowed from Ford, modular construction, and welding instead of riveting, Kaiser's Vancouver shipyard employed housewives and farmers who learned to weld in four days. They built the Casablanca-class escort carriers—slow, ugly ships mockingly called "Kaiser coffins" and "Combustible, Vulnerable, Expendable."

Yet these "paper ships" closed the Mid-Atlantic Gap, hunted U-boats to near extinction, and turned the tide of the Atlantic war. At peak production, Kaiser launched one carrier every week. The weapon wasn't the ship—it was the shipyard itself.

The ultimate test came at the Battle off Samar, where Kaiser's escort carriers faced the largest battleship ever built and survived. This is the story of how American industrial scale defeated German tactical brilliance, and how mass production became the most powerful weapon of World War II.