But composing the “score” was the easy part. He would need to be not just the composer, but the conductor as well, supervising and coordinating every aspect of the ship’s design and construction. First he had to meet with his old acquaintance John Franklin, the president of the United States Lines and recently returned from war duty.
Even before the war ended, William Francis Gibbs’s mind was drifting away from destroyers and landing craft and back to his real love: passenger liners. Though his staff was overwhelmed with war work, he set about designing a prototype for a medium-sized passenger ship, a scenario that would be more palatable to conservative American steamship executives than a superliner. The resulting prototype, titled Design 11811, was no superliner—far smaller than the 1,019-foot Queen Mary, and only about 65 feet longer than America, the Gibbs-designed liner that had been the last significant American passenger ship built before war broke out. She was still a ship to be reckoned with, in her advanced technologies and speeds that benefited from Gibbs & Cox’s learning curve in the war years. The estimated cost to build her was $31.5 million. He submitted Design 11811 to the Maritime Commission for consideration.
But shortly after the war ended in Europe in May 1945, Gibbs learned through back channels that his design was one of four under consideration by the Maritime Commission. Two other naval architects presented slightly smaller and slower (25-knot) vessels, which would be less expensive to produce. It was the fourth design—prepared by James L. Bates, chief of the Maritime Commission’s Bureau of Engineering—that posed the biggest threat to Gibbs. Bates’s “Design IV” called for a true superliner: 930 feet long, with a top speed of 30 knots and a cost of $39 million. This proposed liner promised to be a Queen Mary competitor in size and speed. It also meant that Gibbs’s Design 11811 was neither the grandest nor the cheapest of the four ships before the Maritime Commission. And Bates no doubt would have the support of Admiral Emory Land, who still chaired the Maritime Commission and who was no friend of William Francis Gibbs.
Gibbs knew he had to move beyond Design 11811. He needed “to build a much larger ship than 11811, and not to increase the speed well above the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth would be to overlook a most valuable commercial asset in North Atlantic competition.”7 Not only that, but he had to convince John Franklin, who was undoubtedly seeking a federal subsidy for operating a new liner, to accept his design, not one produced by the government.
Sometime in early 1946, William Francis sat down at his drafting table in the Glass Menagerie and drew up some preliminary drawings and specifications for a true superliner that would best Bates’s proposal. It was not that difficult for him—it was pretty much the same ship he and his brother had designed three decades ago in their parents’ attic, only this time it incorporated all the breakthrough innovations and design refinements gained during years of experience. Above all, Gibbs specified that this ship would have, as he said later, “the power of survival,” specifically “staying afloat and not burning up in case of an accident, collision, or fire on board.”8
When he felt that he had perfected his conception of a thousand-foot-long liner, he strode across the drafting room, sketches in hand, and approached Thomas Buermann, a young designer in the Hull Scientific division. Then, standing next to Buermann’s drafting table, William Francis laid out the parameters for the design of a big ship, bigger than anything the firm had ever worked on. But as Buermann listened, he realized that his boss already knew exactly the ship he had in mind.
Gibbs said he wanted to see preliminary designs for a ship 988 feet in overall length and 940 feet at the waterline, with a side-to-side beam of 101.5 feet, and a 31-foot draft from the waterline to the bottom of the keel.9
“This was on a Monday morning,” Buermann recalled. “He said, ‘I will be back Saturday afternoon to get the product.’”10
It had to be ready for a meeting that the Gibbs brothers would have with the president of the United States Lines, Brigadier General John Franklin, who needed to be convinced to build not just another passenger liner, but the finest, fastest, safest, most beautiful ship ever built.
Franklin himself was looking for a new design for an ocean liner, but he still was not sure that building a big one was a good idea.
Unlike William Francis Gibbs, who tried unsuccessfully to maintain joint positions at his private firm and the government-run war effort, John Franklin took a leave of absence from the presidency of United States Lines to take command of the Water Division of the Army’s Transportation Corps. Franklin traveled as far afield as Australia to coordinate the movement of Allied troops on all fronts. He knew the importance of the job, from his own service in World War I, when as a young sergeant he helped his commanding officer, Captain Dwight Eisenhower, pull strings to get their heavy tank battalion aboard Olympic. Franklin also had a hand in the creation of some five thousand vessels of all kinds. In his memoirs, he calculated that he had helped the Maritime Commission construct “50,000,000 tons of ships” for a total cost of $15 billion. “So as you can imagine,” Franklin wrote, “the whole thing got to be pretty much of a rat race at times.”11
For his efforts, Franklin was appointed a brigadier general.
During Franklin’s time in the military, his longtime colleague Basil Harris served as interim president of United States Lines. At war’s end, the United States Lines Company would operate only American-flagged passenger liners and cargo vessels, as opposed to ships under British registry.12 Vincent Astor, the firm’s largest stockholder, threw his financial weight into the business. In Franklin’s absence, Harris began laying plans for the company’s postwar expansion. “Monopoly on the seas is not the aim of American shipping,” he said at a speech at Rutgers University in late 1944. “We want our fair share, not more. But with a greatly increased foreign trade after the war, the British need have no fear that since the United States gets its fair share, Britain’s slice will be smaller. There will be ample for all.”13 Out of all the shipping companies, United States Lines had borne the heaviest share of the war effort, dedicating to military service the three largest vessels flying the American flag. After several years of wartime battering, Washington and Manhattan were in no shape to be restored to their prewar luxury. The former vessel was partially rebuilt as an austerity service passenger liner, while the latter was mothballed. Only the relatively new America was fit for a complete overhaul and restoration for transatlantic service.
Rebuilding the merchant marine had been one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s priorities during the waning months of the conflict. In October 1944, Roosevelt had called for a “bold and daring” strategy to rebuild America’s cargo and passenger fleet. The ailing president directed Admiral Land and the Maritime Commission to prepare a plan for rebuilding the American merchant marine with a new fleet of modern, comfortable passenger liners and cargo ships.