SS Robert E. Peary was a Liberty ship which gained fame during World War II for being built in a shorter time than any other such vessel.

Named after Robert Peary, an American explorer who was among the first people to reach the geographic North Pole, she was launched on November 12, 1942, just 4 days, 15 hours and 26 minutes after the keel was laid down.

[2] After 26 minutes of speeches, Mrs. Maude Byrnes, the wife of the head of Roosevelt's Economic Stabilization Office, christened the ship and it was sent down the slipway into San Francisco Bay.

[4] The record speed of the construction was a propaganda effort[6] intended to show that the United States could produce ships faster than they could be sunk.

[8] Nonetheless, the extreme rapidity of the Robert E. Peary's construction illustrated how successfully US shipyards had adopted methods of mass production that had been pioneered in the motor industry; at the start of the Liberty ship program, the ships took an average of 1.4 million man-hours and 355 days to build, but by 1943 the figures had come down to under 500,000 man-hours (or 57 man years) and an average of 41 days.

She was operated by the Weyerhauser Steamship Company and first served in the Pacific Theatre, sailing to Noumea, New Caledonia before heading onwards to Guadalcanal.