The Jeremiah O'Brien is a class EC2-S-CI Liberty ship, launched on June 19, 1943, from the New England Shipbuilding Corporation in South Portland, Maine. Named after the Revolutionary War ship captain Jeremiah O'Brien, she was one of 2,710 Liberty ships built to carry the staggering volume of cargo needed to sustain the Allied war effort. Deployed to the European Theater of Operations, she made four round-trip convoy crossings of the Atlantic -- voyages where the threat from German U-boats was constant and the margin between delivery and disaster was measured in torpedo ranges. When the invasion of Normandy began on June 6, 1944, the O'Brien was there, and she made 11 cross-channel round-trips to support the beachhead in the weeks that followed.

After the war, the Jeremiah O'Brien was mothballed like thousands of other ships that had served their purpose. She sat in the reserve fleet for decades, gradually rusting toward the scrapyard. But a group of preservationists saw something worth saving. Moved to Fort Mason on the San Francisco waterfront near Fisherman's Wharf, she became a museum ship dedicated to the men and women of the United States Merchant Marine. In 1984, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated her a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark. Two years later, she earned National Historic Landmark status. Her triple-expansion steam engine, similar to the ones that powered RMS Titanic, proved so photogenic that footage of it was used in James Cameron's 1997 film to depict the doomed liner's own machinery.

In 1994, the impossible became real. Restored to seagoing condition by a volunteer crew of World War II-era veteran sailors and cadets from the California Maritime Academy, the Jeremiah O'Brien steamed through the Golden Gate bound for France. She went down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, and across the Atlantic for the first time since the war. After stopping in London, where she berthed alongside HMS Belfast, and Portsmouth for D-Day commemorations, she continued to Normandy for the 50th anniversary of Operation Overlord. She was the only large ship from the original invasion fleet to return. For the veterans aboard, many of them in their seventies, the voyage was both a homecoming and a farewell.

Today, the Jeremiah O'Brien sits at Pier 35, making several passenger cruises each year around San Francisco Bay. Of the 2,710 Liberty ships built during the war, only two remain operational -- the O'Brien and one other. A third survives as a static museum ship. On May 23, 2020, a four-alarm fire at a warehouse near her berth at Pier 45 threatened to destroy the vessel, but the fireboat St. Francis and local firefighters saved her. She was relocated permanently to Pier 35 in 2023. The ship is completely restored to her original World War II configuration, her engines still capable of turning the screws that once carried her across the Atlantic under threat of torpedoes. She is, in the most literal sense, a survivor.