At the beginning of 1941, the United Kingdom was standing alone against the Nazi empire in Europe, and not much of the smart money was on it holding out for more than another eight or 10 months.

But it wasn’t the threat of invasion or Blitzkrieg that posed such an existential threat to the island kingdom. It was starvation. The battle for the survival of England was being fought on, and under, the waters of the Atlantic, where a Nazi blockade enforced with submarines threatened to cut off supplies of food.

But the lost cargoes weren’t the biggest problem. It was the ships themselves. The U-boats were doing a yeoman’s job of reducing the merchant fleet to dangerous levels. And shipbuilding wasn’t exactly in a boom at the time. World War I had left the world with a glut of ships, many of them hastily built hulks of obsolete and inefficient design. These were still floating around in the late 1930s, keeping the market for new hulls depressed, and the Great Depression hadn’t exactly been good for demand either. The American and British merchant fleet was old, slow and small — on the eve of what was obviously about to be the greatest demand for its services in history.

Something had to be done, and fast, or the United Kingdom would eventually fall to the Nazis — and with it, Canada.

Luckily, the United Kingdom had Portland on its side.

More specifically, it had a trio of new shipyards in Portland and Vancouver, Washington, built just a few years earlier by one of the most remarkable industrialists in the history of the world: Henry J. Kaiser, of Richmond, California.

Kaiser, who made his money early in life with a construction and engineering company, had dabbled in shipbuilding during the 1930s. But unlike some other industrial magnates with whom Adolf Hitler’s authoritarian-progressive message resonated at first (Henry Ford, for instance), Kaiser had no illusions about the nature of the Nazi beast. He’d been actively pumping resources into helping the refugees of Hitler’s conquests for some years, and on the home front, he’d been making plans to be there when his country finally shook off its isolationism and realized it needed him.

A visit to one of Henry Ford’s factories had convinced Kaiser he could pump out capital ships the same way Ford made cars. Instead of having a keel laid and swarms of workers tripping over each other attaching stuff to it, subassemblies could be built in parallel operations. And with his engineer’s eye, he noticed shipbuilding used a lot more riveting than it needed to. Riveting was a time-intensive process that demanded a great deal of arm strength. Welding, on the other hand, could be done by almost anyone after a suitable period of training.

With an eye on Europe and a confidence that if he built it, they would come, Kaiser set about building, from a clean-sheet design, a suite of seven shipbuilding facilities laid out to take advantage of mass-production techniques. Four of these shipyards were in Richmond; three of them were in Portland and Vancouver.

But this wasn’t entirely a leap of faith on Kaiser’s part. A delegation of British officials had approached him and other West Coast businessmen in 1940 about doing some contract work for the U.K., essentially mass-producing cargo ships. The Brits had settled on a design based on a large tramp steamer originally engineered by British shipbuilders Thompson and Sons — a design specifically engineered to operate very efficiently at low speeds using a minimum of horsepower to haul a maximum of cargo, which was what was needed to make a profit in the shipping business during the Great Depression.

(A persistent rumor claims the Liberty Ship design dates from 1879, which would be a neat trick considering the triple-expansion engine that propels it wasn’t invented until 1880.)

The British design was really ugly. But then, so was a Jeep. It wasn’t designed to wow onlookers with sweeping, elegant lines; it was designed to be cheap to build and operate, and get a job done with minimal drama.

Kaiser, and the other American shipbuilders who soon got involved in the project to rebuild America’s fleet, thought it could be done even cheaper yet. So when word came down that the U.S. would be launching its own shipbuilding campaign, Kaiser put his money where his mouth was — lots of it.

It would turn out to be a good investment.

You could make a pretty solid case that the final outcome of World War II first became inevitable on Sept. 27, 1941, when the S.S. Star of Oregon — tied with two other Liberty Ships launched the same day for the distinction of being the first — slid down the ways and into the waters of the Columbia River for the first time.

The Star of Oregon had taken 131 days to build at Kaiser’s new Oregon Shipbuilding Co. yard in Portland. This was an impressive performance at the time, but it would pale to insignificance later. By the following year, with America fully involved in World War II, new hulls would be sliding into the river at a pace of one every three days — and that was just in the three Portland-Vancouver shipyards; down south, the four Richmond yards were cranking them out, too. The S.S. Joseph P. Neal, launched from Oregon Shipbuilding on Sept. 23, 1942, took just 10 days to build. One of the Richmond yards took this as a challenge and responded with a 24-hour-a-day frenzy that resulted in the launch of the S.S. Robert E. Peary in just four and a half days — a record that still stands.

And these weren’t small ships. Each one was 441 feet long and 56 feet wide, and could lug 18 million pounds of Jeeps, airplanes, soldiers or anything else without being overloaded — which they frequently were. Their engines were 2,500-horsepower steam plants of the old-fashioned reciprocating-piston type, already obsolete at the outset of the war but fuel-efficient and easy to manufacture, which pushed them to a pathetic, but adequate, 11 knots. (You can see one of these engines in action in the 1997 movie “Titanic.” The engine-room scenes were shot with 5-foot-tall actors to make things look bigger, in the engine room of the S.S. Jeremiah O’Brien, one of two remaining operational Liberty Ships.)

Hitler’s submarine fleet, of course, could not even make a modest dent in this kind of production. The dream of bringing England to its knees with a submarine blockade was, almost immediately, gone for good. The best the Nazis could aspire to now was to inflict some temporary scarcity; the British and Americans could, if necessary, overrun the U-boats with sheer numbers.

As it turned out, though, they didn’t have to. Rapid advances in anti-submarine technology, together with the systematic destruction of the Luftwaffe, had turned the hunters into the hunted by about halfway through the war. Three-quarters of German submariners didn’t survive the war. And almost none of the submariners who were scourging the seas in 1942 were alive just three years later.

By the war’s end, about 2,750 bottles of Champagne had been smashed over the hulking gray bows of brand-new Liberty Ships. Of those, just 200 or so fell prey to the torpedoes of the minions of Hitler and Tojo.

After the war, the stolid efficiency of the Liberty Ship design made them useful for shipping companies. Designed with a five-year lifespan in mind, they soldiered on in many cases for much longer than that. Today, though, only two remain in original serviceable condition, both museum ships: The John W. Brown in Baltimore, and the Jeremiah O’Brien in San Francisco.

Kaiser’s Liberty Ship program changed Oregon, and especially Portland, in many ways. The shipyards’ massive demand for workers brought tens of thousands of newcomers to the Portland area, many of them members of ethnic minorities; Portland’s current reputation as a fairly cosmopolitan city probably springs directly from this sudden influx of fresh cultural energy. The burst of shipbuilding activity had a halo effect, too, with other smaller shipyards getting in on the action; one of them built the 173-foot submarine chaser on which pulp-novelist-turned-religious-leader L. Ron Hubbard’s short and colorful career as a Navy ship commander played out.

You can still find Liberty Ships in Portland if you know where to look — or, rather, scavenged parts of them. At the Port of Portland, there are two floating docks that are pretty obviously ship hulls that have been flattened and paved over. These are all that remains of the S.S. Jane Adams and the S.S. Richard Henry Dana, two members of the fleet of Liberty Ships that saved the United Kingdom — the fleet that Portland and Vancouver did so much to help build.

(Sources: Bourneuf, Gus Jr. Workhorse of the Fleet. Houston: American Bureau of Shipping, 1990; Hillegas-Elting, James V. “Star of Oregon,” Oregon Encyclopedia, oregonencyclopedia.org; Redden, Jim. “The Forgotten Ships,” Portland Tribune, 6-03-2009)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. For details, see http://finnjohn.com. To contact him or suggest a topic: finn2@offbeatoregon.com or 541-357-2222.