valuable cargo

[ozzysoldier]

dit the allies use mainly smal merchants for valuable cargo like for example ammo?

Anything to support the war effort across the pond would have been shipped out and over to Britain

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by ozzysoldier

dit the allies use mainly smal merchants for valuable cargo like for example ammo?

Yes. As far as I know they never had a policy to ship high-value cargoes on larger ships, so ammo sometimes ended up on smaller vessels.

Wouldn't those ships have be hunted by the u-boats just as desperately the larger cargo ships as well though?

[iambecomelife]

Originally Posted by -SWCowboy.

Wouldn't those ships have be hunted by the u-boats just as desperately the larger cargo ships as well though?

I think larger ships would have been the priority, unless there was intelligence information that a certain ship had a valuable cargo.

I read somewhere that Liberty Ships tended to get hit often and were considered "unlucky" by merchant crews. IMO this was simply because they were relatively large at 7200 tons. Most dry cargo ships of the era were between 1500 - 6500 tons.

Ahh, learn something new every day! Right on, that makes sense

[seafarer]

I'd also mention, from things I've read, that many merchants had widely variable cargo loadouts. It was not at all uncommon for one hold to have crates of ammo, another machine parts, and decks with planes and other whole items. Reading about the Malta convoys, the cargo ships would have pallets of 5 gal. tin cans full of aviation kerosene and crates of .303 ammo for the planes all in the same hold. The aviation fuel cans also tended to leak

I suppose as the allied merchant fleets built up, loadouts may have become more rigidly organized, but at least early on, it was a really mixed bag. The only guideline seemed to try to load each ship to the maximum to move the most goods as possible in each convoy.