SOUTH PORTLAND – Hundreds of people turned out Saturday for the dedication of the Liberty Ship Memorial to honor the 30,000 men and women who built the famed cargo vessels.

From 1941 to 1945, the shipyards that lined the South Portland waterfront churned out 236 Liberty Ships, and another 30 ships for Great Britain. The ships were used to transport troops and supplies to Europe during World War II.

“They helped defeat tyranny overseas,” Fred Thompson, who helped raise $320,000 for the memorial, said during the ceremony at Bug Light Park. “We are here today to dedicate a monument to these ships, the people who built them, and the sailors who sailed them.”

The memorial, which replicates the steel-frame bow of a Liberty Ship, was the vision of Ed Langlois, who died three years ago. Langlois, the founder of the South Portland Shipyard Society, wanted a way to preserve the memories of his fellow shipyard workers.

Some of those workers attended Saturday’s ceremony.

Shirley Wilder, 86, showed up at the shipyards to apply for a job as a welder.

“I remember the supervisor asking me, ‘How do I know you can weld?'” she said. “So I said to him, ‘How do you know I can’t?'”

Former Gov. Kenneth Curtis, the dedication’s keynote speaker, noted that many of the shipyard workers were in their teens, some of them in high school.

“They turned out ships in record numbers,” said Curtis, a former president of Maine Maritime Academy.

And Franklin Emery, 85, president of the South Portland Shipyard Society, not only helped build a Liberty Ship, he also sailed on one to France.

“Without the Liberty Ships,” he said, “we’d be working for Hitler now.”