When asked about the Morro Castle disaster, Curran blamed it on a system that overworked and poorly trained the crew. “No wonder the Morro Castle was a mess,” Joe Curran said. “They just lined us all up on the pier, glanced at our papers, and said ‘You, you, and you.’ No questioning, nothing.”29
The disaster galvanized Curran to become a leader in the fledging National Maritime Union. With the cooperation of a labor-friendly White House, Curran hoped that the new union would bring better pay, benefits, and hours to American sailors.
The last thing Curran wanted was America to be operated like the ill-fated Morro Castle, or for American shipping companies to switch to flags of convenience. He gave a fiery speech to three thousand of his followers at the New York union hall. “Even if [the shippers]… do change flags and their ships are sunk they will squawk for American protection,” he shouted as he shook his fist in the air. “Flag-swapping will put 10,000 seamen out of work.” He then threatened to show Roosevelt and Admiral Land of the Maritime Commission that his men meant business. “If they put alien seamen on these ships we are going to take 10,000 sailors onto the White House porch, and picket the Maritime Commission… until they drop.”30 Many in Congress also dismissed the move to Panamanian registry as a “subterfuge” to rid American ships of expensive American crews.
John Franklin responded by saying that the move was not a matter of cheating American sailors, but an act of desperation to keep his American company in business. “If we go out of business now,” Franklin asserted, “we can’t expect to come back later and say, ‘Gentlemen, we’re sorry, but we’ve been out to lunch.’”31
For Big Joe Curran there was no let-up in his demand for “more pork chops,” or for his indignant, near hatred of ship owners. But Curran deeply admired John Franklin, the no-nonsense Harvard dropout. According to Franklin’s daughter Laura, the two would frequently meet at John Franklin’s Upper East Side apartment to settle disputes over a scotch and soda.32 Here, in private, union boss Curran was “Joe,” and John Franklin was “Jack.”
Even though she was barred from the North Atlantic run, Franklin’s new flagship America met with near-universal praise. But John Franklin’s father Philip, who had hired William Francis Gibbs to build a thousand-foot superliner back in 1916, did not live to see America’s launching. The former president of IMM died on August 14, 1939, at his family’s Maryland estate.
In the end, United States Lines vessels stayed under the American flag. America was allowed to make a few cruises to the Carribean during the 1940 season, while the United States was still at peace, and other United States Lines ships sailed emergency runs to Europe to bring American nationals home.
By then the North Atlantic had once again become a killing field. The ocean liners of all nations were now key wartime assets, as well as valuable targets.
During World War II, William Francis Gibbs’s organizational genius would help change the course of the conflict, as well as earn him a level of respect he never enjoyed in peacetime. Roosevelt’s secretary of the Navy, Charles Edison (son of the inventor), would later say: “If I ever made a contribution to the Navy, it was keeping William Francis Gibbs in the picture.”33
And America’s wartime industrial machine—the Arsenal of Democracy—would finally make Gibbs’s dream of a great American superliner a reality.
15. A FULL MEASURE OF TOIL
From the first days of the war, the world’s great peacetime liners had been gradually disappearing, whether into wartime service or destruction.
Two days before Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, the Norddeutscher Lloyd flagship Bremen was docked in New York alongside the Queen Mary, Ile de France, Aquitania, and Normandie. Rather than risk seizure by the United States, Berlin ordered Bremen’s Captain Ahrens to leave New York without passengers and sail at full speed back to Germany.
As the blacked-out Bremen slipped out of New York under cover of darkness on August 30, 1939, nine hundred crewmen lining her decks gave the Nazi salute to the Statue of Liberty.1 Should the valuable potential war prize be intercepted, the German high command ordered her captain to set her on fire. Painted battle gray and strapped from stem to stern with fuel drums, Bremen dashed across the Atlantic at 30 knots, her top speed, calling first at the Soviet port of Murmansk and then arriving at Bremerhaven, docking near her sister Europa, which had been in port when war broke out.
Hitler planned on using both vessels as troopships in his invasion of Great Britain. But in March 1941, Bremerhaven’s citizens awoke to see a towering blaze roaring on the waterfront. One of the ship’s officers had boxed the ears of an insubordinate cabin boy. Enraged, the young man set Bremen on fire. The gutted, twisted Bremen heeled against the dock and smoldered for days.2 The wreckers then fed the ship’s remains into the Nazi munitions factories. Europa continued to sit neglected at her berth until the end of the war, although two huge doors were cut in her side should she be needed to transport troops for an invasion of Great Britain.
The British liners docked in New York in September 1939 stayed in their relative position of safety in the then-neutral United States, their masters waiting for the British Admiralty to assign them war duties. The biggest one, Queen Mary’s new running mate, was born in the crucible of conflict. On March 3, 1940, a gray-painted Queen Elizabeth slipped out of her fitting-out berth at Clydebank, Scotland. Her cavernous interiors were bare, her new furniture and artwork left in storage. Her skeleton crew of four hundred officers and men thought that they were bound for Southampton for sea trials. At 83,673 gross tons, 1,031 feet long, and 118 feet wide, Queen Elizabeth was the largest passenger ship in the world and an easy target for Nazi bombers. As his ship cleared the harbor, Captain John Townley opened a sealed letter with his instructions: set a course to New York City, at full speed.
To divert German intelligence, the British leaked a rumor that Queen Elizabeth would dock in Southampton the next day. Sure enough the Luftwaffe made a sweep over the city the day of her presumed arrival. Southampton went up in flames, but Queen Elizabeth was already several hundred miles out to sea. Run at her top speed of nearly 30 knots, black smoke streaming from her two stovepipe funnels, Queen Elizabeth successfully evaded German submarines and bombers. After a harrowing five-day voyage, Queen Elizabeth arrived in New York City on March 7, 1940. There were no cheering crowds or gushing fireboats to meet the new Cunard flagship. Tugs nudged the massive liner to her berth at Pier 90, where she and Queen Mary, also painted gray, would await war duty.
Also taking refuge in New York was the great French liner Normandie and her smaller running mate, Ile de France. But on June 25, 1940, France fell to the Nazis. Free French ally Britain swiftly took command of Ile de France. The liner prepared for war duty in British service, while Normandie remained marooned at Pier 88.