Philip Franklin hoped that the Army would give his son some direction in life.
John Franklin took basic training at Camp Plattsburgh, New York, with other young men from prominent New York families. He was then assigned to a unit in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, “an awful place,” where the Army put Sergeant Franklin in charge of a pack of mules. “When the order was given to clean out the right or left hind foot,” he wrote, “there was a murmur of profanity up and down the line.”7
Eager to escape mule duty, Franklin volunteered for the 301st Battalion of the Army Tank Corps. Unlike Camp Plattsburgh, this was no silk-stocking outfit. While driving these newfangled contraptions up and down the muddy fields of Camp Meade, Maryland, Franklin grew to know the tough tank crews—men who were “big and powerful, ex-regular army sergeants, soldiers of fortune, taxi drivers, bums—all chosen for some particular attribute, all enthusiastic, and all imbued with the commendable but rather stupid idea of getting a crack at the Germans before the war’s end.” Some perhaps had a criminal past. In short, they were men much like those who worked on his father’s ships. But Sergeant Franklin loved his unit. He was also impressed by the commanding officer of the 301st: a young captain named Dwight D. Eisenhower.
When the battalion was ready to deploy, Eisenhower become very upset when he learned that there was no ship available to carry his men to Europe. “I’m going to New York and see if I could get this outfit moved overseas,” he announced to his men.
Sergeant Franklin approached his CO. “Sir,” he said, “if you’re going up to New York to get this outfit moved, you’d better take me with you.”
“Just why should I take you with me?” Captain Eisenhower asked.
“Sir, my old man has a lot to do with moving troops.”
“Is he in the Army?”
“No sir. He has too much sense to get mixed up with the Army.”
“What’s his job?”
“He is chairman of the Shipping Control Committee,” Franklin answered.
“What the hell is that?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Sergeant Franklin replied. “But I understand he has a lot to do with moving troops.”
Eisenhower and his subordinate boarded a train to Manhattan.
Philip Franklin, surprised to see his son and even more surprised to see his son’s commanding officer, invited them into his office. “Sit down, boys,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
The twenty-seven-year-old Eisenhower explained that the 301st Battalion was “the most valuable outfit in the American Army.” He intended to lead it straight to Berlin, he continued. “It was essential to the outcome of the war that the outfit be shipped immediately.”
Franklin then called his wife. “Laura, Jack and a Captain Eisenhower are here. They’ll be coming to dinner with us tonight. And by the looks of them, you’d better have a good meal ready.”
Eisenhower protested, saying that he had to return to Camp Meade by sundown.
“Captain,” Philip Franklin replied firmly, “I gather from your conversation that you came here to get this outfit shipped overseas. I will not be able to give you any information until dinnertime. I’ll see you boys at six o’clock.”
The two soldiers soon found themselves in the parlor of the Franklin residence on East Sixty-First Street, sipping tea and munching on cinnamon toast with Mrs. Franklin. The plain-spoken Captain Eisenhower, who had grown up in a wood frame house in Abilene, Kansas, must have been taken aback when he was waited on by a uniformed butler.
Philip Franklin was home at six, as promised. “Well, Captain,” he announced, “the Olympic got in this morning…. I’ve arranged for this outfit that you think so highly of to be assigned to her for transporation overseas.”
On March 28, 1918, the men of the 301st Heavy Tank Battalion joined some six thousand other troops on Olympic bound for Europe. As a child, Sergeant Franklin had frequently traveled to Europe with his father on White Star ships, but the sight of this majestic, four-stacked liner dressed for war made a deep impression on the young soldier. To Franklin, “the old gal,” Titanic’s sister, was “very dear to my heart.”8
The war meant that public rooms were packed with standee bunks and that the kitchens served army meals. A stripped first-class stateroom accommodated Sergeant Franklin for the seven-day voyage. The rest of his regiment bunked in the pool, near the most fought-over real estate on board: toilets and showers.
Captain Dwight Eisenhower was not aboard. Shortly after getting back to Camp Meade, Eisenhower discovered that they were going to keep him there; his value as a man who trained other men was just too great. John Franklin remembered Eisenhower having tears in his eyes. “I presume a West Pointer who did not get overseas in the war, considered his career ruined,” Franklin recalled.9
Six days out of New York, as Olympic approached the U-boat infested waters surrounding the British Isles, John Franklin was called to the captain’s cabin. He found Bertram Hayes, famed White Star master in peacetime, looking terrified.
Hayes pushed a telegraph across his desk. It ordered him to turn his big ship around and rendezvous with a destroyer escort many miles astern. “What do you think of that?” Hayes asked the young sergeant, in his mariner’s brogue. “I’ve told ’em to go to hell! I’m not going to turn this ship around out here!”
Hayes kept his ship on her original course, although at a top speed of 22 knots a skillful U-boat commander could still hit the overloaded liner. In the middle of the night, Franklin heard a soldier running up and down the corridor shouting, “All hands on deck to boat stations!” If the ship were hit, Franklin knew that a hundred of his fellow soldiers would drown. The night wore on, the seas grew rough, and the sleep-deprived troops struggled to keep their footing as the great ship rolled from side to side on her zigzag course.
It was not until 7 A.M. that John Franklin and his fellow soldiers saw the hills of the French coast. Just inside the protected confines of Brest harbor, Hayes shut down the engines and Olympic glided to a stop.
During the next few months, Sergeant John Franklin would see heavy fighting in France. On September 29, he took part in the breaking of the Hindenburg Line on the Somme Canal. Promoted to lieutenant, Franklin was awarded the British Military Cross for “gallantry and devotion to duty” during the attack upon the canal from Le Catelet to Bellicourt, on September 29, 1918.10
After the war, Franklin would stay with the U.S. Army in Paris until his father ordered him back to New York and the shipping business. But Franklin did not start under father Philip’s wing at IMM. Instead, as his father had done before him, he worked his own way up in the industry.
The Army experience gave the academically lackluster Harvard dropout a much-needed boost in confidence and street smarts. Eventually John Franklin would succeed his father as America’s most prominent shipping executive, one who understood how transatlantic liners could tip the balance of power in another world war.
While young Franklin fought on the battlefields of France, William Francis Gibbs toiled away in a cramped Manhattan office. But despite having steady work as a salaried IMM employee, the thirty-one-year-old Gibbs was frustrated. With America’s entry into the war, Morgan and Franklin had put the superliner project on indefinite hold. Although work continued on the superliner, he was distracted by smaller, less interesting wartime conversion projects.