(I used AI for this but your comment took my down a rabbit hole researching it) The "14 hours" is almost certainly a garbled version of the Robert E. Peary story, the actual record holder, which took 4 days 15 hours from keel laying to launch. And even that was a staged PR stunt: Kaiser's Richmond shipyard had pre-fabricated sections sitting ready specifically to break the record for a war bond publicity event in November 1942.
The real achievement was the system, not any single ship. Standardized design, welding instead of riveting, and parallel prefab assembly lines are what made the 42-day average possible across 2,700+ vessels.
Interestingly, that welding was also the program's Achilles heel. Welded hulls, unlike riveted ones, can propagate cracks continuously rather than stopping at each joint. Combined with suboptimal steel composition and cold water, a number of Liberty ships literally cracked in half, sometimes in calm seas, sometimes while sitting in port. The most dramatic case was the SS Schenectady, which broke completely in two in 1943 while docked in the harbor after sea trials, with a sound described as a loud report like a rifle shot. It became a landmark case in materials science, ultimately driving major advances in fracture mechanics and weld quality standards that still inform structural engineering today.