The Eagle-class patrol craft were anti-submarine vessels of the United States Navy that were built during World War I using mass production techniques.

The submarine chasers' range of about 900 miles (1,400 km) at a cruising speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph) restricted their operations to off-shore anti-submarine work and denied them an open-ocean escort capability; their high consumption of gasoline and limited fuel storage were handicaps the Eagle class sought to remedy.

In June 1917, President Woodrow Wilson had summoned auto-builder Henry Ford to Washington in the hope of getting him to serve on the United States Shipping Board.

Wilson felt that Ford, with his knowledge of mass production techniques, could immensely speed the building of ships in quantity.

Apprised of the need for anti-submarine vessels to combat the U-boat menace, Ford replied, "what we want is one type of ship in large numbers."

First, Ford engineers built a full-scale pattern at the company's Highland Park facility, giving both the Ford team and the Naval officers an opportunity to correct flaws in the rough initial design and decide on the placement of all rivet holes in the craft, as well as allowing the carmaker's production experts the chance to compose specifications for the manufacturing and assembly processes.

Not built on slipways from which they could slide into the water, the hulls moved slowly from the assembly line on enormous, tractor-drawn flatcars.

The plan was to fit the Eagles out with all the basic equipment of a warship—turbines, weaponry, wiring, etc.--after launch, but this quickly became a choke point due to the cramped spaces on the boats themselves, and violated Ford's own mass production ethos.

At the ensuing Congressional hearings, Navy officials successfully defended the boats as being a necessary experiment and well made while Ford profits were proved to be modest.

However, historian David Hounshell states that "the Eagle boat venture cannot be considered successful by the standards of the war era or the present," and today serves as a case study in the history of technology to illustrate the difficulty in transferring knowledge and techniques between superficially similar, but fundamentally different, fields of endeavor.

Despite the handicap of their size, they serviced photographic reconnaissance planes at Midway in 1920 and in the Hawaiian Islands in 1921 before being supplanted by larger ships.

Eagle boat 34, as related in Max Miller's 1932 book I Cover The Waterfront, shared the yearly duty alternately with the Navy tug USS Koka of capturing elephant seals on Mexico's Guadalupe Island for the San Diego Zoo.

[5] Five of the Eagle Boats were transferred to the United States Coast Guard in 1919 but proved unsuitable for service because poor maneuvering characteristics and sea-keeping qualities.