Given the need for carriers that could escort convoys and provide aerial antisubmarine protection, in 1942 Henry Kaiser proposed to the Navy a conversion of the Liberty ship to create a small aircraft carrier capable of fulfilling that role, promising fast production in the numbers necessary to provide what was essentially secondary naval air power. Using a new submerged arc welding technique, a Liberty ship could be built in an average 42 days. The Casablanca class escort carriers were adapted from the Liberty ship design by Kaiser Shipbuilding Company and were the first escort carriers designed and built as such from the keel up. Known to their crews as “jeep carriers,” “Woolworth flattops,” “Kaiser coffins” and “one-torpedo ships,” the joke went around that CVE stood for the three most salient characteristics of an escort carrier: combustible, vulnerable and expendable. There is a desperate effort to keep up appearances with somewhat inadequate materials and not wholly successful results.”

In 1944, a journalist traveling aboard the USS White Plains wrote, “A jeep carrier bears the same relation to a normal naval vessel that is borne to a district of fine homes by a respectable, but struggling, working class suburb.

Magnum force warship