 Old-timers would scoff at the way the Liberty ships were built by "farmers", as they would say, but the results were far beyond what anyone might have imagined in 1940 when the program began.As successful as the Maritime Commission and the shipbuilding companies were in their recruiting efforts, the scale of the national wartime economy was so great that a degree of a labor shortage always existed in the yards, although the shortfall in manpower became more severely felt in the later years of the war.Many of the men employed in the yards in the first years of the program were of age for the draft, and as the war progressed, more of these men left the yards to serve in the military.