Congrats! Not many folks will have had such a unique, historic experience.

If you're looking for a book about the firsthand experience, you might consider Augusta Clawson's The Shipyard Diary of a Woman Welder, which was a bestseller when it was released in 1944. Clawson, a writer from New York, traveled west to work at Kaiser's Richmond No. 1 shipyard, and her writing is breezy, with a lot of "gee whiz" attitude. It's not a historical work, but it's a first-person account written contemporaneously with events, and it's a fun one at that.

Bath is a bit of an odd duck in terms of WWII shipbuilding, but only because of the vast scale of the wartime industry. Bath dates to the 19th century, and even before the United States entered the war, it was running full-tilt with U.S. Navy contracts and some from the British government, too. It benefited greatly from wartime expansion (financed with low-interest loans from the federal government), but it was an existing facility with a workforce that was already present. A lot of the prototypical "Liberty Ship" shipyards that we think of, like those created by Kaiser or Higgins, were developed particularly for the war. They sprang up without pre-existing infrastructure or industry, and so they garnered a bit more attention.

Nationwide, the figures are astonishing: The United States built more than 50,000 landing craft, 3,100 Liberty ships (including EC2 and VC2 types together), 1,100 more merchant ships (mostly tankers), and more than a thousand warships. Entire shipyards were built in Wisconsin, Illinois, Oregon, California and elsewhere to meet the demand. Hundreds of thousands of Americans moved to these new shipyards, demanding vast new housing complexes, schools, restaurants and other facilities.