By the fall of 1940, the British Merchant Navy (equivalent to the United States Merchant Marine) was being sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic by Germany's U-Boats faster than the United Kingdom could replace them.
The new yard, called the Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corporation was to be an entirely new facility located on a piece of mostly vacant land located adjacent to Cummings Point in South Portland, Maine for the purpose of building thirty cargo ships.