However, by the end of that year, Gibbs would be overseeing an even bigger effort than building Liberty ships: the construction of a naval fleet that would battle the Axis in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
On December 8, 1941, William Francis dictated a memorandum to the 1,200 people who worked for him at 21 West Street:
To: The Staff
War having started with Japan it is fitting that I should remind you of the vital position of this organization in National Defense.
Each of you well know that I appreciate the high technical and ethical standards and esprit de corps which you have helped maintain.
We now face the supreme test for which we have been trained and organized during the years we have toiled together. I am confident each of us will vie in giving the full measure of toil, cooperation and loyalty which will insure that this organization serves the Nation and the Navy to the limit of its latent capacity.
I have always been proud of you, but never more than in this hour when we face together this solemn responsibility. I know I can count on each of you to do his utmost.16
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor immediately transformed America into a wartime nation, with all of its industrial might now focused on producing enough bullets, bombs, tanks, and airplanes to overwhelm the enemy. All work on civilian ships ceased: the nation needed destroyers, cruisers, aircraft carriers, and troop transports, and needed them fast. This was what William Francis Gibbs had been waiting for, and he was ready to step into the center of the war machine.
On December 12, President Roosevelt formally seized the laid-up Normandie for use as a military transport. Her name was changed to USS Lafayette, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox ordered that the French flagship be converted into a troopship right at her pier—not by Gibbs & Cox, but by Robins Dry Dock & Repair Company. During the next two months, workmen dismantled and carted away the ship’s lavish Art Deco furnishings and artwork. In their place came thousands of standee bunks and slabs of heavy linoleum flooring that could take the punishment of army boots.
USS Lafayette was scheduled to depart for Boston for a final dry docking and inspection on February 12, 1942, before loading her first troops.17
But on the afternoon of February 9, 1942, the workers at nearby Gibbs & Cox noticed a column of orange smoke rising from the Hudson River liner piers. Looking to the north, they could see the enormous troopship afire.
Two workmen had been removing a steel pillar from USS Lafayette’s first-class Grand Salon with acetylene torches. Sparks landed on a pile of kapok lifejackets, sending flames shooting up to the ceiling. Before fire hoses and extinguishers could be trained on the conflagration, the fire had found its way into the cork insulation used in Normandie’s construction. The fire spread from one huge salon to the next, gorging itself on paint, rags, and wood scraps. Like Morro Castle, the ship had no automatic sprinklers. Within half an hour, USS Lafayette was ablaze from bow to stern, casting a pall of smoke over Manhattan.18
William Francis Gibbs found the fire appalling—and familiar. It seemed that fire had been a constant scourge for passenger vessels, and it seemed that ships of the French Line especially had a tendency to go up in flames. In 1939, Normandie had actually been trapped in its dry dock at Le Havre by the burning of the French liner Paris when she heeled over onto her side.
The burning of Normandie/Lafayette in 1942 was one more reminder to Gibbs that he was right to be so fanatical about fire safety measures in the ships he designed. He also took a special pleasure in having designed the world’s most powerful fireboat, Fire Fighter, which had a retractable, fifty-five-foot-tall water tower that could shoot three thousand gallons per minute.19 Fire Fighter, which worked in New York City waters, was among the fireboats that rushed to the scene and doused the burning ship’s decks with river water.
Admiral Adolphus Andrews of the U.S. Navy directed the fireboats to direct their huge jets to the stricken liner’s upper works. As the liner listed farther away from the pier, gangplanks snapped from their moorings and plummeted into the Hudson. The New York Fire Department raised a sixty-foot ladder against the ship’s prow, and one by one, 2,500 trapped workers inched down to the street. The inferno injured ninety-three men and killed two.20
In New York that day was Normandie’s designer, naval architect Vladimir Yourkevich, who had escaped from the Nazi invasion of France. As he watched the ghastly spectacle unfold, Yourkevitch asked Admiral Andrews to tell his workers to open Lafayette’s sea cocks. She would then sink only a few feet and settle on the river bottom, upright and secure.
“This is a Navy job,” the admiral snapped, and ignored the suggestion.21 Yourkevitch turned his back on the burning superliner and left. He knew what would happen next. In the early morning hours of February 10, the burned-out USS Lafayette drunkenly rolled over her port side and sank into the Hudson River mud.
Before the Navy erected a huge fence to shield the capsized giant from the gawking public, the Hearst-controlled New York Journal American wrote an editorial capturing the tragic demise of the French flagship. “Get a little closer—as close as a triple line of police, Army and Navy men will permit—and the chill of desolation that creeps along your spine is almost overpowering. For the finality of death lies like a clammy hand across the prostrate Normandie as it tilts unhappily in its shallow watershed waiting for whatever fate the future may bring.”22
The military saw a draft of the article, called it demoralizing, and censored it.
The Navy asked William Francis Gibbs to assess what should be done with the former French flagship, which was now blocking two piers and tying up valuable waterfront space. Should it be broken up on the spot or salvaged and refitted? Gibbs & Cox responded quickly, urging that she should be rebuilt as a troopship, able to carry nearly 19,000 soldiers.23
Yet it was not to be. Over the next two years, the charred Lafayette was stripped of its upper decks and slowly righted. By January 1944, the hulk was moved to the Todd Shipyards in Brooklyn. The following year, the Navy declared the former Normandie surplus, and the wreck was towed to Bayonne, New Jersey, and cut up for scrap.
Yourkevitch rushed to the site. Over the hiss of acetylene torches and wrenching of steel, he pleaded to the owners of his beloved ship to stop demolition. Even the hard-bitten scrap yard owner was moved by the Russian naval architect’s despair. “I think it broke his heart,” he recalled.24
Gibbs never forgot the Normandie fire. Like the Morro Castle disaster, it was another tragic reminder of how quickly fire could destroy a passenger ship.
Less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the war propelled Gibbs to meteoric fame, and his firm to extraordinary prosperity. Some of the publicity was unwelcomed, and he regretted letting at least one reporter into his office. On September 28, 1942, Time magazine placed an image of William Francis Gibbs, complete with battered brown fedora, steel-rimmed glasses, and deadpan, dour visage, on its cover. The backdrop was a bustling shipyard. Hailing him as a “technological revolutionist,” Time noted that the Liberty ship program boosted commercial ship production by more than 70 percent. War mobilization had reached a fever pitch, and his team designed not just destroyers, but also cruisers and landing craft.