The Big Ship
Just ahead, through rain and haze on the morning of July 7, 1952, Bishop Rock appeared on the United States ’s radar. The tiny granite island, England’s westernmost tip, marked the end of the transatlantic run for passenger liners clocking their time from Ambrose Light outside New York. For decades the swiftest of liners, the Queen Mary and her rivals, had sped across the ocean, vying for the Blue Riband, a speed award that carried no purse but worldwide prestige.
This morning everybody aboard the United States knew she was setting a new ocean-crossing record and would return the Blue Riband to America for the first time in a century. Ever since the ship’s keel had been laid, at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in the winter of 1950, her speed had been a worldwide source of speculation. Her owner, the United States Lines, had encouraged the notion that she was fast, but nobody associated with the liner would say exactly how fast. The U.S. Navy considered her maximum speed top secret. If war came, shipyard workers could convert her rapidly into a troopship dependent on her swiftness to evade submarines. The admirals saw no point in letting a potential enemy know what she could do.
Now the ship was breaking the record easily, on her maiden eastward voyage. The captain, Commodore Harry Manning, stood his watch impatiently on the bridge. Since he could not see the island through the rain and haze, he called periodically for radar ranges and bearings. Belowdecks many travelers had been awake all night, waiting for the moment.
It came at 5:16 A.M. The United States had crossed in three days, ten hours, and forty minutes, at an average speed of 35.59 knots. She broke the Queen Mary’s 1938 record by ten hours and two minutes. Her band broke into The Star-Spangled Banner,” champagne corks popped, and a conga line of passengers wormed its way through the ship. They didn’t know it, but they were present at a final glorious high point in the era of ocean liners. The United States was the fastest ship yet, but above her were passing much faster passenger airliners. Civilian air transportation was becoming safer, cheaper, and more reliable each year. No matter how fine or fast a ship the United States was, ultimately she would not be able to compete.
The U.S. Navy wasn’t the only guardian of secrets about the ship as it was built and launched. William Francis Gibbs, the United States ’s designer, had made secrecy his trademark. As a Harvard undergraduate in the first decade of the century, he had taught himself ship design by redrawing plans for British battleships. He would lock his door to keep out prying classmates and then sketch and study, covering the walls and floors with his work.
Gibbs believed that secrecy was a vital business attribute. Secrecy provided its keeper with a competitive edge; laxness only invited trouble. When the deluxe French liner Normandie came to New York on her maiden voyage in 1935, Gibbs sneaked into her power plant, studied the machinery (in the process studying her Gallic designers), and then dictated a report on her propulsion system. Nobody would learn similar details from the United States if he could help it.
Gibbs was a brilliant and complex man. By turns he could be dour, acerbic, ingratiating, profane, blunt, stubborn, and inspired. He was a genius at industrial organization who had no formal training as a marine architect. He kept detailed files not only of letters and documents but also of individual conversations, and when he wanted to defend a position or crush an opponent, he drew on this material.
He was an engineer who brought major technological breakthroughs in other fields to ship design, yet at the same time he was surprisingly superstitious. He refused to sign a letter thirteen paragraphs long, and he carried in his pocket a small piece of wood to tap on for luck. He was Francis to his family, Sir Francis to shipowners and builders who resented his high-handedness, and the Undertaker to opponents.
The SS United States was Gibbs’s greatest achievement. He first dreamed of building her around 1908. Delayed by two world wars and the Depression, he kept his dream alive for more than four decades. For a long time his favorite toast reminded everyone of his belief in the liner. “Everything you want. Doubled,” he would say. “And the big ship.”
The United States was a state-of-the-art creation in her time, combining the proven and the new. Her engines were the most powerful available, and the extensive use of aluminum on her required the development of innovative building techniques. She represented the synthesis of everything Gibbs had learned in a lifetime of shipbuilding.
Gibbs was born to a wealthy Philadelphia family on August 24, 1886. Even as a boy he wanted to design ships, and he read about them, drew them, and watched them pass the Gibbses’ summer home in New Jersey. His father opposed his choice of a career and struck a bargain with him that required him to attend Harvard College and law school. Only then, if his childhood ambition persisted, could William Francis become a marine architect.
Gibbs kept the bargain. Harvard didn’t give him a degree, but he graduated from Columbia University Law School and worked briefly as an attorney. In 1915 he quit and began work on his first ship-design project. He chose to begin big, designing a thousand-foot-long liner that would sail across the Atlantic at thirty knots to provide weekly service between North America and Europe. He also hoped to create a new port at Fort Pond, near Montauk Point on Long Island, where he envisioned the creation of a company town in which crews, officers, and support personnel would live.
Somehow Gibbs won a meeting with the top executives of International Mercantile Marine, a shipping company founded by the financier John Pierpont Morgan. Gibbs presented his plans; his brother Frederic gave a cost analysis. The two men persuaded the firm’s officers to approve the project.
They did design work on the liner, including hull testing on models, until America entered World War I, in 1917. Gibbs then left IMM to serve with the U.S. Shipping Control Committee but returned when the war ended. The work resumed and continued until 1922, when it was shelved because of a worldwide postwar shipping glut. Gibbs’s efforts on the thousand-footer were not wasted though. He gained from it a solid understanding of the challenges associated with big liners. His next project, the refitting of the former German liner Vaterland , enhanced that knowledge.
In 1919 IMM won the job of returning that ship, renamed Leviathan , to service. She had been seized during the war and now was permanently in U.S. hands. William Randolph Hearst attacked IMM’s ties to Britain’s White Star Line and called for an all-American operation to refit the ship. The U.S. Shipping Board responded by asking the Gibbs brothers themselves, instead of IMM, to oversee the job.
The Gibbses left IMM and launched a spirited attack on the problem. When the ship’s German builders, Blohm & Voss, demanded a million dollars for a set of the vessel’s plans, Gibbs did his own survey, developing data and recreating the blueprints. He directed the entire project, which included switching the liner’s boilers from coal to oil, upgrading the ventilating and electrical systems, and strengthening bulkheads. He even wrote regulations and designed uniforms for the ship’s crew. He handled logistics for the first three voyages, including hiring the crew and buying the food. And he tried to buy the Leviathan . Perhaps he dreamed of owning a ship line, but the ship went instead to a new organization, the United States Lines.
With the completion of the Leviathan project, jibbs had about a decade’s experience in ship lesign behind him, but no design of his had been built from scratch. That finally happened in the 1920s and established his reputation as a safety advocate. His first assignment was for the liner Malolo . Built for the Matson Lines, the ship had many safety features that Gibbs considered crucial, among them extra-strong bulkheads and watertight doors. The ship’s trials, in 1927, were conducted in foggy weather, and during them the Malolo was rammed by another vessel. Gibbs saw the accident from the bridge. He activated the watertight doors; they closed, stopping the flooding, and the Malolo remained afloat. The ramming occurred at one of the bulkheads, a calamity that had formerly been considered fatal for any ship. Gibbs’s insistence on safety was vindicated and, like his penchant for secrecy, became a trademark.
Gibbs’s company survived through the lean Depression years by merging in 1930 with the firm of Daniel H. Cox, a yacht designer, to become Gibbs & Cox, headquartered in New York City. Gibbs not only managed to find work in the 1930s but also contributed to major advances in marine engineering. While designing ships for the Grace Lines, he adapted for maritime use steam-turbine engines pioneered by electric-power companies ashore. Turbines in that industry ran at higher temperatures and higher pressures than those at sea, using steam typically at one thousand degrees Fahrenheit as opposed to a ship engine’s three hundred degrees. The new turbines also were more compact and more efficient than older ones. Gibbs immediately saw their value to the U.S. Navy. They could increase the fleet’s steaming radius without increasing fuel consumption. And the engines’ reduced size and weight would allow warships more room for arms and ammunition.
In 1933 Gibbs & Cox designed a Navy destroyer incorporating the new turbine technology. Conservative admirals opposed the change; they feared that Gibbs’s engines might break down or, worse, explode. Gibbs won the battle on the strength of both his extensive knowledge of the new technology and his skill at Navy Department politics. By the end of World War II he was being widely hailed for his foresight in pursuing the change in engines.
Turbine technology also played an important role in Gibbs’s design for the America , a 723-foot passenger ship he conceived for the United States Lines in 1938. The largestever American liner at the time, the ship had features that were later echoed aboard the United States : racily raked, teardrop-shaped smokestacks; a narrow hull that bolstered the ship’s speed and permitted passage through the Panama Canal; vast oil stores; and standards-setting compartmentalization belowdecks.
In the late 1930s Gibbs became convinced that another world war lay ahead and began expanding his firm accordingly. When the United States entered the fighting, he played a key role in ensuring Allied maritime supremacy. He did the major design work on the war’s simple, reliable, standardized merchantman, known as the Liberty ship, on the LST (landing ship tank) landing craft, and on destroyers, cruisers, and icebreakers. Probably his greatest contribution to the war effort, though, was not his design work but his part in bringing assembly-line construction techniques to shipbuilding. The concept ran counter to the traditional shipyard view that every vessel was a custom job.
Gibbs had begun designing wartime merchantmen for the British before the United States entered the war, and he adapted this work for the Liberty ship. The vessel was rugged and versatile. As workers gained experience with its relatively simple construction, the time it took to build it dropped from months to days (see “The Ships That Broke Hitler’s Blockade,” Invention & Technology , Winter 1988).
By war’s end Gibbs & Cox was the world’s largest private ship-design operation. The company employed about three thousand people and often handled daily material orders worth a million dollars. Gibbs had begun assigning people to his “big ship” project in 1943, while the firm was still at the height of its war work. His hopes for the vessel began to be realized in 1946, when the United States Lines agreed to build the ship for transatlantic service.
Gibbs & Cox designed the liner to fill two roles. First and foremost, it would be a traditional passenger ship, carrying large numbers of customers across the Atlantic. Second, it could serve as a troopship during wartime. The America , seized by the Navy in 1940 and renamed the USS West Point , had carried more than four hundred thousand troops to and from both theaters of fighting. Stripped of its finery and repainted bluegray, it won high praise from naval officials and the soldiers it carried on its solo dashes—and such fond sobriquets as “GI Ferry Deluxe” and the “Gray Ghost.” Moreover, the United States was going to be expensive, and troopship adaptability could help win government subsidies. Ultimately the ship cost at least seventy million dollars to build, and the federal government paid forty-two million of that.
Gibbs designed the ship with safety features throughout. An officer in the wheel house could shut all of the ship’s watertight compartments to control flooding if the hull was punctured. She was extensively fireproofed. The ship’s cabin walls were sheets of asbestos-laced Marinite, and her carpeting, draperies, and linens were treated to resist flame. The aluminum cabin doors were filled with fire-blocking insulation. Aluminum was substituted for wood throughout the ship, even for paneling and furniture. The ship’s publicists claimed that the only wood aboard was in the butcher’s block and the pianos.
And she was big. While not the world’s longest liner—at 990 feet she was 41 feet shorter than the Queen Elizabeth — the United States was and is the largest passenger vessel ever built in America. From keel to the top of her smokestacks, she measured 175 feet. Passengers resided in 694 roomy, airconditioned staterooms. She had nineteen elevators, two cinemas, and three libraries. Below the passenger spaces sixty compartments were available to carry the ship’s regular load of 2.3 million gallons of fuel oil. The shafts driving her four massive propellers were four feet across.
Speed, though, more than size and safety, established the United States ’s reputation. Her top trial speed was 38.32 knots, a remarkable pace; the France’s maximum speed was 35.2 knots, the Queen Mary ’s 32.84. Commodore Leroy J. Alexanderson, the liner’s last skipper, remembers that “with her speed, she could outrun some destroyers,” a remarkable accomplishment for a vessel of her size. “She was really something.”
Two main factors combined to make her swiftness possible: her powerful engines and her comparatively low weight. Her engines were the strongest available, similar to those on aircraft carriers of the time. The power plant, engineered by Westinghouse, featured turbines that could develop a high 975 pounds of pressure and thousand-degree heat and a total horsepower of 240,000, or 60,000 for each of the ship’s four propeller shafts. The Queen Mary produced just 158,000 horsepower, 39,500 per shaft. Of course, the United States didn’t generally operate at top speed; engine wear and tear and fuel costs made that impractical.
To keep the ship’s weight down, the builders used a great deal of aluminum, about twenty-two hundred tons, the most in any structure on earth or sea at the time. Most of this lightweight metal went into the superstructure, but it also found its way into furniture, lifeboats, handrails, and even the lifeboat oars. Aluminum wasn’t always easy to work with. Where it made contact with steel, which was used in the hull, electrolysis could occur and eat away at the aluminum. Engineers insulated the two metals with neoprene, a synthetic rubber, using strips of neoprene tape to separate plates and tubes of the substance in rivet holes. Aluminum not only made the ship lighter but also increased its stability, by reducing its top-heaviness, making the ship both safer and more comfortable in rough waters.
The strongest available steel was used also to save weight. And Gibbs prohibited the use of a heavy deck covering. Teak is a traditional material; Gibbs considered it not only a fire hazard but also too heavy, at ten pounds per square foot once installed.
The United States ’s combination of lightness and powerful engines gave her an exceptionally high power-to-displacement ratio, far greater than that of any of her contemporaries. The liner’s horsepower (240,000) divided by her maximum draft displacement in tons (47,300) gives a ratio of 5.074. The Queen Mary ’s was only about 2.
The United States also had the fastest hull around. It was not any radical departure; her lines came from existing ones developed in the Taylor 60 series of ship hulls, named for Rear Adm. David W. Taylor, a distinguished chief constructor for the Navy. It was improved with the help of tests on models. It was only 101.5 feet at its widest point; with a length of 990 feet, the ship had a high length-to-beam ratio comparable to those of 1950s aircraft carriers.
Taken as a total engineering project, the United States did not represent a breakthrough. She was, rather, the ultimate refinement and highest expression of the transatlantic liner. The attention to detail that went into her construction marked the zenith of American maritime know-how, the amalgamation of the best work that could be had from 800 vendors in 168 cities. Her construction enjoyed heavy press coverage, and when she set out on her maiden voyage in July 1952, she was universally expected to take the Blue Riband. When she arrived in New York from Newport News, Virginia, just before the run, the city turned out to cheer her. Tugs hooted a welcome, and fireboats sprayed plumes of water. The United States Lines had cannily scheduled the departure for the eve of the Fourth of July.
The United States Lines chose Commodore Harry Manning, a legendary character in the American merchant marine, to captain the ship on the historic first passage. He had become a national celebrity in 1929 after conducting a daring mid-ocean rescue of stranded sailors. In 1940, while Europe was at war and the United States neutral, he had stared down the skipper of a Nazi U-boat on the high sea. The German stopped Manning’s vessel, demanded he abandon it, and then prepared to torpedo it. Manning disembarked his passengers in lifeboats, remained aboard himself, and argued with the German by signal lamp. Finally the submarine commander gave up and left Manning and his charges unmolested. He took them back on and continued on his way.
At one point during the United States ’s maiden trip a vessel over the horizon sent Manning a congratulatory message. The captain, it turned out, was one of the men Manning had saved in 1929. Later the French liner Liberté passed nearby to salute the new American ship. And in an act heavy with symbolism, the Queen Mary , the Blue Riband holder since 1938, met the United States crossing the other way. She dipped her colors in a salute that was also a figurative handoff of the speed honor. Such moments made the trip seem like something scripted by Hollywood. The vessel was filled with vacationers as well as reporters. William Francis Gibbs was aboard for the only round trip he would ever make on the liner. From the time the United States left harbor, the speed record was a tantalizing focal point, and the daily runs were impressive, covering distances of 696, 801, 814, and 833 nautical miles.
The seizure of the Blue Riband only whetted Gibbs’s passion for the liner. From 1952 until his death in 1967, he visited the ship on almost every New York departure and arrival. As the vessel left the city, he would drive down along the New York waterfront in a chauffeured limousine, following her as she made her way toward the open sea. Once the United States was on the ocean, Gibbs would call her daily, speaking to the captain and the chief engineer about everything from fuel consumption to passenger morale.
In operation the United States offered a pleasant crossing. Passengers could dance their way across the Atlantic, play bingo, and go to church on Sunday. The ship attracted students visiting Europe, celebrities such as Salvador DaIi and Marion Brando, and regulars including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. On a typical journey during her 1950s heyday, she might have carried 1,750 passengers and 1,000 crew. Many of the men and women who served on her called her a “happy ship,” the highest accolade a sailor can offer, and the crew affectionately nicknamed her the Big U. But as beloved as she was for her speed, modernness, and efficiency, she was not especially beloved as a traditional luxury liner. The absence of wood and rich decor in favor of metals and sleek lines gave her an aesthetic coolness in keeping with the decorative spirit of the time.
Gibbs & Cox worked on liners, freighters, and Navy vessels in the 1950s and 1960s, and Gibbs became closely involved with the development of a massive fire-fighting pumper for New York City. But the United States always held the highest place in his heart. A tradition arose that as the liner passed Gibbs’s New York office, the captain blasted a salute on her horn. When Gibbs died, on September 6, 1967, Commodore Alexanderson gave that signal as a farewell to the man who had persevered with his dream of the big ship.
The United States ceased operation within three years of Gibbs’s death. Only two ships besides the United States — the SS France and Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth 2 —were still plying the North Atlantic between New York and Southampton. Rising operating costs and the airplane had already driven the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth from the sea; Gibbs’s ship bowed to the same pressures. She returned to Hampton Roads, Virginia, near Norfolk, to retire, and almost from the instant she was laid up, people tried to find new uses for her. Supporters suggested making her into a floating hotel, a dormitory for Alaskan oil-field workers, a tourist attraction, or a New York City park. Nothing came of these ideas. Nor has anything come of plans by her current owner, Richard Hadley, a Seattle real estate developer, to put her to sea as a cruise liner.
In 1989 authorities at the Norfolk terminal moved her to an abandoned coal pier nearby. Norfolk needed the space to accommodate a rise in shipping business. The United States took what may have been her final voyage that spring, when tugs pulled her the short distance to her new home.
For anybody who loves ships, the United States today is a heartbreaking sight. Many of her furnishings are gone, sold at auction. Her paint is peeling, and her once bright, distinctive red, white, and blue funnels are faded and flaking. A walk through her is a trip into a disheveled time capsule. A closet holds old Christmas decorations; a filing cabinet yields old crew rosters, plans of the day, and cruise reports. Litter is everywhere. A random pile contains baggage slips, crew passes, and 1960s-vintage tour brochures for Europe.
Despite her sorry shape the United States retains her dignity. She is worn, old, and perhaps ultimately destined for the breakers, but she still looks strong and fast. Anyone who walks on her deserted decks today—she is not open to the public—will still sense two things: first, the brilliance of William Francis Gibbs, and second, that the SS United States was a technological thoroughbred.
