The four lines to the deep tanks are 4-inch diameter lines and have around 32 couplings. Lines from the engine room to the forepeak tank, the bilge wells in the forward three cargo holds, and the #1 and #2 cargo deep tanks are joined with the couplings. Victaulic Style 77 flexible grooved couplings are the equivalent of these couplings today. In more than 70 years of service, the couplings never leaked or required replacement.įound on the grooved carbon steel piping of the ballast system are flexible malleable iron Victaulic couplings, which at the time were referred to as standard couplings for grooved steel pipe. The grooved couplings visible on the piping today are the original couplings installed in 1942. According to Schneider, there is no known record of any maintenance being performed on the ballast lines. Another element of its longevity is the systems selected and installed all those years ago, including the ballast lines that are joined with Victaulic grooved couplings.Īccording to Mike Schneider, a retired Navy captain and volunteer on the Brown for more than 25 years, while not all of the ballast lines are still used for their original purpose, “the lines still have fluid in them so they have to be integral or pipelines with integrity we can’t have any leaks in them.”įor more than 70 years, the lines have remained leak-free. The longevity of the Brown can be credited to the students and instructors who lovingly cared for the ship during her years as a high school, and to the all-volunteer crew that returned it to operating condition and continue to maintain it today. Still powered by a reciprocating, triple-expansion steam engine, a relic from an earlier time in maritime history, the Brown’s engine is fed with steam from two oil-fired boilers and drives a single four-bladed propeller 18 feet in diameter. Liberty ships like the Brown were not expected to last much longer than five years, but the 441-foot-6-inch-long Brown looks and sails almost exactly as she did at the end of the war. Brown is one of only a few ships listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In 1983, Project Liberty Ship acquired the Brown and, in 1988, moved the vessel to the harbor of her birth where it serves as a memorial museum ship to this day. From 1946 to 1982, the ship served as a floating maritime high school in New York City. Immediately following the war, the Brown carried government cargoes to help rebuild war-torn Europe. She also served an important supporting role for the invasion force of southern France during Operation Dragoon in August 1944. Most of the rest of the ship’s wartime voyages were to the Mediterranean Sea, including duty during the Anzio landings. Her maiden voyage was to the Persian Gulf, carrying military equipment for Russia. In total, the Brown made 13 voyages during and immediately after World War II. Brown saw duty in many Mediterranean ports during invasions and steamed in convoys that were attacked by enemy aircraft and submarines, but it was never seriously damaged.
Around 500 soldiers at a time could be transported aboard the ship. The Brown was fitted out to carry troops as well as cargo. Launched at the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore on September 7, 1942-Labor Day-the Brown was crewed by about 45 civilian merchant seamen, and its guns were manned by 41 Navy Armed Guard personnel assigned to the ship.
Brown is one of two surviving fully operational Liberty ships preserved in the U.S. From beans to bullets and, in some cases, troops, each ship carried almost 9,000 tons of cargo. during the war was shipped on Liberty ships. Two-thirds of all cargo that left the U.S. These vessels were designed as economically and quickly built cargo steamers that formed the backbone of a massive sealift of troops, arms, materiel and ordnance to every theater of the war. 2,710 of these vessels were of a design that became known as Liberty ships. To address the sudden need for supplies overseas during World War II, the United States government launched the Emergency Shipbuilding Program in 1941 that resulted in the construction of more than 5,700 cargo ships for the U.S. Seventy years later and still leak-free: World War II Liberty Ship tests longevity of grooved piping systems