Woman Discovered Why Ships Split in Half — The Navy Buried Her Name for Decades

Woman Discovered Why Ships Split in Half — The Navy Buried Her Name for Decades

In 1943, the SS Schenectady split completely in half while docked in Portland. Within months, over 2,500 Liberty Ships reported catastrophic structural failures. Nineteen broke apart at sea. The US Navy's emergency investigation missed the root cause—until a night shift welder named Bessie Hamill brought test plates to her supervisor and challenged decades of engineering assumptions.

This is the untold story of how Liberty Ships became "suicide boxes" and how the Victory Ship program revolutionized modern welding. When Henry Kaiser's shipyards were producing vessels in just 42 days, nobody realized that the welding sequence itself was locking residual stress into every hull—stress that would explode in the cold waters of the North Atlantic.

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SOURCES:
Maritime Commission Emergency Investigation Reports (1943-44)
Kaiser Corporation Welding Test Documentation
National Archives - WW2 Shipbuilding Records
Bureau of Ships Technical Correspondence
Contemporary Fracture Mechanics Studies

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Видео Woman Discovered Why Ships Split in Half — The Navy Buried Her Name for Decades канала WW2 Tales TTB