Gibbs wondered what was to happen to his superliner project after the war was over. But he had another interest as well. Scanning the shipping news one day, he came across a story in the Evening World suggesting that, if placed in peacetime service and run by an American crew, a refurbished Leviathan could capture the Blue Riband from Mauretania.11
Once the war was over, Gibbs thought he would have his chance to make his mark. Not only would he build one, maybe two 1,000-foot-long ships, but America had seized a fabulous war prize: the biggest ship in the world, along with dozens of fine liners from the German imperial fleet. America, which had neglected its commercial shipping for fifty years, now found itself with a modern fleet that could compete with the British head-on after the war.
For Gibbs, the free German ships were manna from heaven. If operated by a capable American company, Leviathan could generate the cash flow and public support needed to finance the construction of his own thousand-foot-long superliner.
As Gibbs dreamed, another man despaired.
It was November 1918, and the head of the mighty HAPAG shipping line was watching imperial Germany collapse around him. Albert Ballin had seen his superb Vaterland serving his nation’s enemy. Other German ships had been sunk, or trapped in American ports. Imperator was docked in Hamburg, rusting and neglected. The last of his three big ships, the incomplete Bismarck, was almost certain to be seized as war reparations. And socialist rioters were surging through the streets of Hamburg. As a shipping executive, Ballin described dealing with maritime unions as “the most hateful duty which is connected with my work.” And now these same people bayed for the HAPAG chairman’s blood.12
On November 9, 1918, a broken, depressed Ballin swallowed a massive, fatal dose of sleeping pills and Kaiser Wilhelm II, convinced the fatherland was stabbed in the back, abdicated the German throne. “Better an end with dread, then dread without end,” Ballin once said.13
Germany surrendered two days later.
7. A GIANT LIVES AGAIN
In December 1919, a few months after the armistice, William Francis and Frederic Gibbs boarded Leviathan at her Hoboken pier with a directive from Philip Franklin and the U.S. Shipping Board: create a set of working plans of that enormous ocean liner from scratch. These blueprints, detailing the ship’s current configuration, were required by shipyards putting together renovation bids. Their employers, the International Mercantile Marine, had announced these plans would be used to convert her back into a luxurious passenger liner, the biggest flying the American flag.
Leviathan had just been decommissioned from two years of strenuous trooping duties, and was a total wreck, inside and out. Her gray hull was streaked with rust, her interiors gutted, and her machinery worn out. It was hard to imagine that this ship, only six years old and the biggest afloat, had once been the German imperial flagship Vaterland, the apple of Albert Ballin’s eye.
On that cold December morning, the Gibbs brothers assembled their team on the liner’s upper deck, which was caked with bird droppings. With the ship’s three massive funnels towering behind his thin frame, the overall-clad William Francis Gibbs gave a rousing speech—peppered, as his brother remembered in utter amazement, with some “extraordinary cuss words.” The young designer then dispatched his men to their work.1
To Gibbs, a great ship like Leviathan was not just a technical puzzle. One had to understand the ship in the same way one had to get to understand a person’s likes, dislikes, and quirks.
“There was nothing to go by but the ship herself,” he said. “We knew nothing whatever about her. We did not even know where her center of gravity was, and there was therefore nothing upon which we could base our distribution of weights. To do the work set for us it was necessary to measure every inch of the ship, working from the inside.”2
Gibbs’s team would spend nearly every day between December 1919 and April 1920 working to develop construction drawings and specifications. One hundred draftsmen took over the ship’s former Ritz-Carlton restaurant on the promenade deck, setting up tables on the scuffed floor and pinning drawings on the cracked walnut paneling. The cavernous domed room, once the haunt of the imperial German elite, was cold and drafty in winter and stifling hot as spring arrived. Soiled army blankets, ripped drapes, and smashed plumbing fixtures were strewn throughout the passenger areas, which stank of mildew. Bits of plaster and broken glass lay underfoot, and bayonet-mutilated paintings flapped from their gilt frames.
It was worse in the machinery spaces in the lower reaches of the ship. Determining the underwater hull shape of the vessel and its center of gravity was a monumental task because there was no dry dock in America big enough to hold Leviathan. Water dripped on the men’s faces as they lay on their backs inside the ship’s cramped bunkers and double bottom measuring every nook and cranny.
Gibbs, who always wore a stiff derby hat on site, reveled amid the wreckage. He hated the constant requests for tours of the vessel, but for the right audience he became adept at talking about ships in ways that laymen could understand.
He explained to one group of visiting congressmen how to find a ship’s center of gravity. “You take the ship, 921 feet—or as it happened to be in that case exactly 921.8 feet on the water line—and you divide that into 20 sections,” he began. “Then at each of those sections you go on the inside of the ship, and measure the width of the ship at the water line and at given distances below the water line. Then you lay that out on a drawing. And to make a long story short the result of that is finally you get the shape of the ship on those 20 sections.”3
The congressmen were astonished by Gibbs’s phenomenal, perhaps photographic memory, as well as his immense charisma. They could see that the odd-looking young man in a derby hat had captured the loyalty of his fellow IMM designers and workmen. The sickly child had become a leader of men.
But Gibbs was busy with more than his assigned IMM work. On his own, he continued to refine his superliner design, and he let the congressmen know that he was still hard at work on something even more impressive than this German war prize. In reply to a question about whether it was harder to design a new ship or rebuild an existing one, Gibbs said the work on Leviathan was more difficult. “I am in a good position to say as to that,” he added. “Because we have designed ships of almost identical size—in fact, a little bit bigger than the Leviathan.”
“What ships have you designed larger than the Leviathan?” a congressman asked.
“These ships designed a thousand feet long that the Shipping Board spoke of some time ago.”
“Are the specifications prepared?” Walsh queried.
“Not final and complete,” Gibbs replied. “But all the necessary information has been prepared by which the specifications could be finally prepared.
“They were designed by the IMM?”
“Designed by me,” Gibbs answered firmly.
“For the Shipping Board?”
“I designed them originally for IMM,” Gibbs said. “They have been in process for about four years.”4