William Francis Gibbs put the news story about Roosevelt’s directive to the commission in his memorandum book.14
After Roosevelt’s death by a massive stroke on April 12, 1945, his successor as president, Harry Truman, decided to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America thus saw the end of World War II and detected the first hints of the Cold War. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman did not grow up sailing off New Brunswick’s Campobello Island; nor was his office, like FDR’s, filled with ship models and nautical paintings. In fact, the failed haberdasher and landlubber from Independence, Missouri, had virtually no idea of what it meant to love the sea and ships, though as an enlisted soldier during World War I he had traveled to the trenches aboard a seized Germany liner. In any case, as a matter of national prestige and security, Truman engaged himself in the rebuilding of the American merchant fleet with gusto, supporting the expansion of the passenger vessel fleet as “an important element of national security.” In addition, he ordered that the many recent advances in naval technology “must be incorporated” into America’s passenger liners, for “a well-balanced modern merchant fleet.”15
On May 16, 1945, a week after V-E Day, Harris wrote Maritime Commission chairman Vice Admiral Emory Land with a specific request. “We are now convinced that an investigation should be made into the feasibility, practicability and commercial possibilities of constructing two 30-knot vessels to maintain a weekly express service to Channel ports,” Harris wrote, and that “the United States Lines has the experience and facilities, and would undertake to operate the service on some mutually satisfactory basis.”16
Admiral Land responded to Harris two weeks later. He scolded the United States Lines president for not being specific enough in his request for an economic study. “One conclusion that might be drawn from your letter,” Land wrote back, “is that the ‘burden of proof’ is passed from United States Lines Company to the U.S. Maritime Commission. Another conclusion that might be drawn from it is that the United States Lines Company is not prepared to make a definite commitment to the project.”17 Land wanted a firm capital commitment from the United States Lines before he would think about committing government money to a feasibility study.
William Francis knew that Land had a staff of naval architects on the government payroll and that James L. Bates, the head of the Maritime Commission’s Bureau of Engineering, was already working on his own designs for large transatlantic liners. If Land remained chairman of the Maritime Commission after the war, Gibbs would probably not be the man to design the new liners. William Francis hoped that Land, who had already served a full career as a Navy officer, would resign from the Maritime Commission when the war ended.
When General Franklin retook the reins of the United States Lines, he sensed that finally the federal government seemed willing to help him build at least one new passenger liner. But the cautious shipping man was still concerned about cost, and he wanted as big a construction subsidy as possible in order to move forward.
As the United States Lines management made plans for postwar expansion, the Gibbs & Cox team refined their designs for the superliner prototype in preparation for the big meeting between William Francis Gibbs, his brother, Frederic, and General John Franklin. They decided that the best place to start was the hull of the America. That ship’s design drew on Normandie and Bremen, leading to a medium-sized liner that was sturdy and capacious, but also had a relatively slim hull below the waterline. The crucial design metric was the “prismatic coefficient,” a measure of the fineness of the underwater portion of the ship’s hull. This crucial metric is defined as the volume of the hull divided by the multiple of the waterline length and the cross-sectional area of the mid ship (widest portion) of the vessel. A vessel with a high prismatic coefficient has a hull similar to a rectangular box, with a blunt bow and stern. Such vessels were built for capacity rather than speed, and were not very efficient as they moved through the water. A vessel with a low prismatic coefficient, like America, had a sharp bow and stern and a wide center section, and often sacrificed stability for speed.
For his new liner, William Francis wanted a very low .559 prismatic coefficient, which meant that the new design, Design 12201, had an even narrower underwater bow than America, as well as less mass in the stern section.
America’s hull also had one severe design flaw: the underwater portion of the prow was almost perpendicular, leading to excessive pounding in heavy weather and a reduction of speed. To fix the problem, Gibbs ordered Buermann to design the underwater portion of the new ship with its prow raked forward, decreasing the drag on the hull.18 And rather than a large bulbous bow like those of the European vessels, the superliner was given a very small bulb. It was a refinement of the feature pioneered by Gibbs’s mentor, Admiral Taylor, nearly forty years before.
A low prismatic coefficient meant that something had to be done to lighten the ship’s upper works, namely the superstructure—those several decks rising above the hull that house a passenger ship’s most expensive accommodations. To lower the ship’s center of gravity and to increase its stability, 12201’s designers decided that its superstructure would be built of a lightweight materiaclass="underline" aluminum. This would not hurt the ship’s structural integrity, since the hull itself would be supported by the solid steel strength-deck below the superstructure. The ship would also have a relatively low profile compared to European liners: a hull depth, from the strength deck to the keel, of 74 feet, 3 inches. By contrast, Queen Mary’s hull had a depth of 92 feet, 6 inches.19 She also had more and heavier superstructure decks than the Gibbs & Cox prototype. Queen Mary’s upper decks were made of steel and packed with heavy woodwork and overstuffed furniture.
William Francis would later hint that he used the proportions of two famous German vessels, not the British ships, as models. One was Leviathan, a ship that he had refurbished in the 1920s and knew well. The other was Europa, Bremen’s surviving sister ship. Gibbs acknowledged “the remarkable agreement in length and beam” between Design 12201 and the German ships, “the variation being largely in the strength deck and the greater height of the superstructures above the strength deck, in the case of the Leviathan and Europa.”20 His lower, lighter superstructure would be an advantage. He also gave his ship a draft shallower than either of the two older ships’: a mere 31 feet.
The shallow draft was possible because of the aluminum superstructure, which also eliminated the need for upper deck expansion joints that had proved so dangerous on older liners. Gibbs’s chief naval architect, Matthew Forrest, said later that if Design 12201 had used conventional construction techniques, five such joints would have been required—“a never-ending source of trouble… they leak, they creak, and they groan… a nuisance requiring continual upkeep.”21 Nor would the ship have split funnel uptakes, which had so compromised the superstructure decks in Leviathan and Majestic and made them vulnerable to cracking in heavy seas.