Although burdened with work for the Navy, William Francis Gibbs and his firm made time to help supervise the reconditioning of Ile de France as a troopship before she departed for service in Asia from Todd Shipyards on Staten Island. He found that by American standards, the glamorous Ile de France was a horrific firetrap. In the words of one official, to refit Ile de France and other French liners for trooping duties, “bold stripping and redesigning was the only course open to making the ship safe,” and “no firm in Britain could have done the work in less time.”3
Within a few months, both Queen s departed New York for wartime trooping duties in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Designed to carry 2,500 passengers in peacetime, the two Cunard superliners were each refitted to carry up to 16,000 soldiers per trip. The liners traveled alone because they were too fast for escorts to keep up with them. Their only defense against bombers was antiaircraft guns and other light armament mounted on their upper decks. Their only defense against U-boats was their 30-knot speed. This was too fast for a German U-boat commander either to set his torpedo sights on or intercept, because his submarine could only make about 10 knots.
By this time, only a few American ships were braving the North Atlantic passenger routes. A dark wartime pall had fallen over Manhattan even though the United States remained neutral—the gray-painted passenger liners at the piers, the news about German atrocities against the Jews and Poles, and the streams of refugees arriving every week were sinister signs that this was a war that America probably could not avoid.
As the war escalated, even clearly marked American ships found themselves on U-boat targets.
In the early morning of July 11, 1940, the United States Lines flagship Washington was stuffed to the gunnels with more than one thousand people fleeing the Nazi onslaught. After only six months of fighting, the Nazis now occupied or controlled most of Europe. France had fallen two weeks earlier. Russia and Germany had signed a nonaggression pact and carved up Eastern Europe. In preparation for a future land invasion, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to gear up for a vicious bombing of Great Britain that he thought would pummel her cities, destroy her industries, and break her people’s will. At sea, German U-boat commanders struck savagely at any Allied shipping bound for British ports—except ships flying the American flag.
For passengers anxious to reach the United States, the options were shrinking. The Italian Line had just laid up its superliners Rex and Conte di Savoia—both ships would become casualties of war, bombed and sunk at their anchorages. Because Italy was still technically neutral, the United States Lines had shifted its main European port to Genoa—though many worried that it was only a matter of time before company president John Franklin canceled all future commercial sailings.
Ships that did sail were packed. On one voyage, conductor Arturo Toscanini bunked up with the ship’s chief surgeon, and cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein slept on a smoking room sofa.4 Few passengers carried many worldly possessions with them. Most felt lucky to be on board at all. A westbound transatlantic ticket had become one of the most valuable commodities in Europe.
As Captain Harry Manning raced Washington at full speed along the Portuguese coast on the morning of July 11, he felt that his liner was safe from the U-boat threat. To make absolutely clear that Washington was a neutral ship, the company had emblazoned two enormous banners across the ship’s hull. Bracketed by two painted American flags, it read: WASHINGTON: UNITED STATES LINES. Yet the markings did little to quell the tension on board. The ship was jammed with anxious American expatriates fleeing Paris and London, as well as a few fortunate Jewish families.
America’s best skipper had more than his ship to live for now; he had recently married Florence Isabella Trowbridge Heaton, a passenger he had wooed during a recent trip. The marriage, which produced one daughter, would be a failure. “I couldn’t serve two masters,” Manning retorted when asked why.5
Manning also knew that his overloaded vessel could only make about 20 knots, too slow for her to avoid a Nazi torpedo.
At six in the morning, just before the dawn, Manning scanned the horizon with his binoculars and saw a dark object spring to the surface.
A Morse lamp blinked from the U-boat’s control tower. “Stop ship. Ease to ship. Torpedo ship!”
The instructions were in English.
Manning barked out, “All stop.”
Washington slowly drifted to a halt and bobbed gently in the swells.
“Abandon ship,” the U-boat commander then blinked.
Manning prepared for a general evacuation and sounded the alarm calling all hands to boat stations. In response to the screeching sirens, passengers jumped out of their beds and trooped to the open decks. The crew swung the boats out and loaded them with women and children first. “Watertight doors were closed,” Manning recalled, “the general alarm was sounded…. Not a passenger showed signs of hysteria or confusion. The crew behaved well, obeying orders without question or criticism…. We maintained radio silence.”
All this time, one of the officer cadets pounded furiously away at the switch of Washington’s Morse lamp. “American. Washington.”
The U-boat commander was unmoved. “Ten minutes,” he signaled back.
Manning could not believe what was happening. The U-boat commander wanted not only to sink a neutral ship, but a passenger liner loaded with women and children.
He ordered that the cadet keep signaling, “American. Washington.”
“I wanted to convince the submarine commander by blinker that he was in error in assuming that we were a belligerent craft or to keep talking until the break of dawn revealed it to his own eyes,” Manning recalled. “It was ticklish. I know how ‘trigger itch’ will work in such a case and how an overenthusiastic young officer might be anxious to sink such a fat prize, as we indubitably appeared magnified by the gloom.”6
The charade continued for ten minutes, as hundreds of bleary-eyed passengers shivered on the boat deck, lifebelts strapped around their chests. The lifeboats dangled from their davits, swinging above the waves.
Manning and his officers waited. “We held our breath on the bridge,” he said, “and awaited the blast that would announce the doom of the finest ship under the American Flag.”
Suddenly, the signal blinking from the U-boat’s conning tower changed.
“Thought you were another ship; please go on, go on!”
Manning ordered “Full ahead,” and Washington left the U-boat in her wake. Yet Manning insisted that passengers stay at their boat stations. Sure enough, at 6:53 A.M., another U-boat surfaced.
Manning knew his passengers were already traumatized, and he did not want to have yet another showdown. “Rather than risk another encounter,” Manning said, “I swung the ship into the sun again which brought the unwelcome neighbor dead astern and steamed away. The submarine made no move, possibly the sun blinded him, and it soon disappeared astern.”7
Washington called the next day at Galway, Ireland, where Manning picked up another few hundred refugees. He then pushed his ship at full speed ahead to New York City, where the overloaded ship arrived safe and sound on June 21.