Bay. It was delivered for service on 15 November, setting an additional record of 7 days, 14 hours and 32 minutes from laying the keel to delivery. The record speed of the construction was a propaganda effort intended to show that the United States could produce ships faster than they could be sunk. Normally, the Permanente yard took an average of about 50 days to build a Liberty ship. In fact, though, it could not realistically be done much faster as there was not enough steel or capacity to build them at such a pace. The ship was referred to as a "stunt ship", though Henry Kaiser referred to it as an "incentive ship" because of the boost that it provided to his workers' morale. Nonetheless, the extreme rapidity of the Robert E. Peary construction illustrated how successfully US shipyards had adopted methods of mass production that had been pioneered in the motor industry; at the start of the Liberty ship program, the ships took an average of 1.4 million man-hours and 355 days to build, but by 1943 the figures had come down to under 500,000 man-hours (or 57 man years) and an average of 41 days. Service career Robert E. Peary sailed on her maiden voyage on 22 November. She was operated by the Weyerhauser Steamship Company and first served in the Pacific Theatre, sailing to Noumea, New Caledonia before heading onwards to Guadalcanal. She sailed to the Atlantic Ocean, in April 1943, and operated there for the remainder of the war on the convoy routes to Europe, ferrying prisoners of war from North Africa and serving off Omaha Beach on D-Day. She was withdrawn to the Wilmington Reserve Fleet in December 1946, and was scrapped in June 1963, at Baltimore, Maryland. See also Vickers Wellington LN514, a British World War II bomber built in 24 hours References External links American Merchant Marine at War website Website for Liberty Ship SS Jeremiah O'Brien Website for Liberty Ship SS John W. Brown Liberty ships Ships built in Richmond, California 1942 ships