During 1915 and 1916 U.S. shipyards began to fill up with orders from European shipping interests, principally British and Norwegian, involved in resupplying the Allies during World War I. On 29 August 1916 President Wilson signed the Naval Appropriations Act of 1916 which provided for a major increase in the size of the Navy, further adding to the order books of U.S. shipyards. The Federal Shipping Act of 7 September 1916 established the United States Shipping Board (USSB) to promote the development of an American merchant marine and to regulate foreign and domestic shipping. To this end it authorized the Board to form one or more corporations for the "purchase, construction, equipment, lease, charter, maintenance, and operation of merchant vessels in the commerce of the United States." Upon U.S. entry into the war the Shipping Board on 16 April 1917 organized under the laws of the District of Columbia with a capital stock of $50,000,000 the "United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation" (EFC) and delegated to it the execution of its construction program. The first general manager of the EFC, General George W. Goethals, informed the chairman of the Shipping Board on 13 July 1917 that he had already let or agreed upon contracts for 348 wood ships and 77 steel ships and was negotiating contracts for 100 more wood ships. (It was argued that wood ships would not interfere with steel ship construction.) He then stated that his main reliance for geting the greatest amount of tonnage in the shortest time would be on the construction of fabricated steel ships of standard pattern, in new yards and to some extent in existing yards. Finally, on 3 August 1917 he implemented a Presidential order of 11 July 1917 that requisitioned all steel ships under construction in the U.S. of over 2,500 tons deadweight capacity, 413 ships in all, to expedite their construction by adding labor and cutting out refinements. As these were completed each yard would turn to the production of a single type of ship for which it was best suited. By the end of its first annual reporting period on 31 October 1917 the Corporation had over 1,000 employees in 16 offices in various parts of the country supervising the building of 1,118 vessels in 116 shipyards at an annual cost of somewhat over a billion dollars. (Other figures show 375 wooden, 58 composite, and 305 steel vessels under contract and 413 requisitioned ships for a total of 1,151.) The EFC controlled substantially all the shipbuilding of the country other than of naval vessels, and its program called for the completion in 1918 of eight times the tonnage delivered in 1916.
This portion of the Shipscribe site contains lists by Norman L. McKellar of Tamworth, Australia, of all the ships built and requisitioned under this program. His lists, which identify all of the ships with their career histories and the designs to which those built under government contracts were constructed, were published in The Belgian Shiplover (TBS), the mimeographed journal of the Belgian Nautical Research Association (BNRA). Distribution was mostly limited to the group's several hundred members, and TBS was never widely available and of course is even less so today. McKellar's work however still remains the only known listing of the requisitioned and contract-built ships of the American World War I merchant shpbuilding effort, and it was added to the Shipscribe site in 2007 with the kind permission of the author's widow, Mrs. Hazel McKellar. Since then Shipscribe has added a large amount of material including photographs from his own research in the U.S. National Archives and elsewhere to fill out McKellar's work, which however was rarely contradicted by the official information.
McKellar's introduction to his main list, "Steel Shipbuilding under the United States Shipping Board," may also be seen here. His article on "American Wooden Shipbuilding in World War I" with its introduction may also be seen here. Both introductions add much information to the above, which was taken primarily from the 31 October 1917 USSB annual report.
