Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard
Baltimore, Maryland
source: Sawyer & Mitchell

©
Maryland

When it was decided to establish an emergency shipyard in Baltimore the famous Bethlehem Steel Company was the obvious choice of leadership, for this company was already operating a large yard next to its Sparrows Point steelworks to the south-east of the city, and it also had important repair facilities within the harbor. As with other builders, most of Bethlehem's berths were committed to naval work. In January 1941 it was arranged that a Bethlehem subsidiary should operate the new yard - Bethlehem-Fairfield - so named after the suburb in which it was situated.

The largest of the emergency yards, it originated with thirteen spacious ways, of which two were existing ways only in need of restoration. By using equipment in an idle Pullman railcar plant 21 miles from the slips the yard gained a start on other yards and was the first to launch a Liberty ship. At the Pullman plant steel was not only cut, rolled and even furnaced - in general, fabricated - but was also welded into sections, limited only in size by the capacity of the railcars that carried these units to the slipways. In the yard itself even larger sections were put together, some units from these early days of pre-fabrication weighing more than 22 tons. Later, the largest sub-assemblies at the yard were forepeak sections of nearly 50 tons. In May 1942 the yard was ordered to give priority construction to the building of LSTs on the Liberty slipways, and was given contracts for 45 - later reduced to 30. These LSTs occupied twelve of the sixteen ways from August to December of 1942, for by the end of 1942 the original yard layout had been modified and an additional three slips added.

Some two years later, by January 1945, the total employees at the yard had risen to a figure in excess of 27,000.

Generally, here, as in all yards, high productivity depended upon continuous production of a single type of ship without interruption. But despite the priority breaks and type-changes throughout the years the yard acquired one of the best speed records on the East Coast, and it maintained a consistently low production cost figure, the average per ship being in the region of $1.34 million. As with all shipbuilding, bonus wages were paid for fast work, and it was from this yard that some workers were put on trial in a civil court for deliberate bad welding, being convicted of 'making war material in a defective manner.' Trials such as this were the deterrent to similar malpractices and also ensured that ships were constructed to the best possible standards.

After the war Bethlehem-Fairfield was given title to facilities that had cost in the region of $35 million, although in June 1941 the anticipated cost had been less than $10 million. Before thus disposing of the yard the Maritime Commission had estimated that the cost of restoration of properties here (and at the California Shipbuilding yard) in accordance with the terms of the leases, would jointly total more than $44 million.

Liberty ship output: 385 vessels

USMC Numbers	Yard Numbers
MCE 14-63	2001-2050
301-312	2051-2062
913-1022	2063-2172
1755-1853	2203-2301
2405-2419	2302-2316
2585-2683	2317-2415

World War II Construction Records of Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyards, Inc.

Information about the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard.