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Jack of All Trades: Cramp Shipbuilding, Mixed Production, and the Limits of Flexible Specialization in American Warship Construction, 1940–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Thomas B Heinrich
Thomas B Heinrich*
Affiliation:
Baruch College, History, 55 Lexington Ave., New York, NY, USA. E-mail: tlheinrich@msn.com
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Extract

Naval shipbuilding was one of the most ambitious industrial undertakings of World War II. A marginal business, in 1939 employing only twelve shipyards, it expanded over the course of the war into a massive network of shipbuilding firms, engineering works, steel mills, and specialty producers that built the world's largest fleet. At its peak in 1944, warship building employed one million shipyard workers, a million others in collateral industries, and consumed one-fifth of the nation's steel output in the construction of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and thousands of smaller combatants.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , June 2010 , pp. 275 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2010. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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