• At 35 knots, Bates’s 1,006-foot design would require 204,000 shaft horsepower, 2.9 percent more horsepower than Design 12201, and consume 10.9 percent more fuel.
Bachman’s calculations and model tests confirmed to Gibbs that Design 12201 was by far the more efficient ship.
It was another year until President Truman gave the Maritime Commission approval to proceed with plans to finance this new passenger liner. In the meantime, another interesting document landed on Gibbs’s desk, this time from his friends in the Navy Department. “Through Naval Intelligence,” William Francis wrote to his brother, “information has been obtained with respect to a German express liner under design by Dr. Gustav Bauer of the Weser Yard at Bremen in 1938, the purpose being to win the blue ribbon back for the Germans in competition with the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth.”
The Gibbs & Cox design team found themselves facing a fearsome-looking beast of a ship, each line and curve oozing with 1938 Munich-era Nazi swagger. It would have stretched 1,024 feet in length and had a beam of 111 feet. Judging by its size and engine power, cost had been no object. “This vessel,” Gibbs observed, “was provided with five propellers driven by a turbo-electric plant. The normal power was slated to be 240,000, for a speed of 34 knots and a maximum power of 300,000.”6
The proposed ship would have been a super-Bremen, and Gibbs had been an ardent admirer of German engineering and sleek styling. The war had stopped its construction, but Gibbs still wanted to know how the newly discovered Aryan übermenschen vessel might have stacked up against Design 12201. He asked Matthew Forrest and Walter Bachman to find out. The two ran the model tests and calculations at the David W. Taylor Model Basin in Maryland. On May 3, 1947, Bachman phoned his boss and reported that Design 12201 needed 12 percent less horsepower than the German design to achieve a cruising speed of 33 knots. The following month, another member of the team provided a more detailed report. To achieve 35 knots, Design 12201 required 231,000 horsepower, while the German ship needed 235,500.7
After looking over the figures, Gibbs believed he could confidently tell the United States Lines and the Maritime Commission that his design 12201 was a more efficient design than both the German vessel and the two proposed by James L. Bates.
One lesson from Gibbs’s design philosophy was clear: bigger did not necessarily mean better, let alone faster. He drew an analogy to the progress made in locomotive design during the past forty years. The new lightweight diesel locomotives, he said, had a 62 percent power-to-weight ratio increase over the old steam locomotives of forty years before. Likewise, Design 12201’s tonnage would be a fraction of her European rivals’ of the late 1920s and the 1930s. Queen Mary’s ratio of horsepower per ton of ship was 2.04, Normandie’s was 2.34, and Europa’s 1.68.8
“It is submitted,” Gibbs concluded, “that these larger displacement ships are consistent only with the past and the limitations of obsolescent engineering, and not with the general principle that higher speed with economy of fuel necessitates light weight.”
To General Franklin, who had been in charge of transporting American soldiers by sea during the war, a critical advantage of Design 12201 was its potential as a troop transport. To back that up, Gibbs sent Design 12201 plans to Admiral Frederick E. Haeberle, a top U.S. Navy ship constructor with extensive experience in designing large naval vessels. The admiral gave a nod to the superliner in an April 27, 1947, report. He echoed Churchill’s sentiments about the military importance of the Queen s: a superliner that could be converted into a troopship was an essential addition to the United States armed forces. The construction of moderate-sized liners might be all well and good for commerce—that wasn’t up to Haeberle to say—“but if questions of national defense and security are taken into account and given proper weight, I believe that most of the arguments in favor of the larger type of vessel are valid.”
About Design 12201, the Navy man had one criticism: he thought the two stacks were too big. But Haeberle wrote that “the vessel on the whole has a very pleasing appearance both above and below the water. There is nothing radical about it and it is clean-cut and neat.” As for the ship’s designer, the admiral concluded that Gibbs was the man for the job because of his knowledge of both commercial and naval construction. He “knows the problems and personnel of both fields very well,” the admiral commented. “I think he has combined the two in a splendid ship.”9
Finally, on March 11, 1947—nearly a year after General Franklin accepted the Gibbs superliner design—President Harry S. Truman formed a five-person advisory committee to develop postwar plans for the expansion of the American merchant marine. Any expansion, Truman insisted, was to serve the nation’s domestic economy and its national security. Heading the President’s Advisory Committee of the Merchant Marine was K. T. Keller, chairman of the Chrysler Corporation. Among the others was Vice Admiral Edward L. Cochrane, former chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Ships. Still one of William Francis Gibbs’s most ardent admirers, Cochrane had defended Gibbs & Cox during the House war profiteering investigation in 1944. And like his predecessor, Admiral David W. Taylor, Cochrane had an intense interest in Gibbs & Cox’s Design 12201.
“We used all our pre-war passenger vessels, one-third of which were more than 20 years old, as transports or fleet auxiliaries,” Truman wrote in his mandate to Advisory Committee members. “Some of these were sunk or badly damaged, and many others were so drastically altered for war use that their complete reconversion to peacetime needs is not economically justified.”10
That the merchant fleet was not “well balanced” had never been more evident. Because of the enormous output of cargo vessels during the war, freight divisions of the major shipping lines now had hundreds of high-speed Victory ships and tankers perfectly suited to be operated on peacetime trade routes. Passenger liners were a different story. Attacks and accidents had reduced the passenger fleet from 127 ships with berths for 40,000 before the war to 36 ships with berths for less than 9,000 passengers.11
By then the United States Lines had put its remaining passenger and cargo fleet back into commercial service, with America making her maiden transatlantic voyage in late 1946. Those boarding her on that trip found her Art Deco interiors restored to their prewar luxury. The United States Lines had also poached kitchen staff from European lines by offering higher American wages, and boasted that chefs who “once cooked for the King of the Belgians and the Ile de France now work on the America.”12 Her new captain was also the commodore of the United States Lines: Harry Manning. But apart from the stripped-down Washington, the popular liner ran alone. She desperately needed a suitable, much larger running mate.
As America settled in to her schedule of crossings, Commodore Manning would find himself fuming about the country’s failure to support shipbuilding. He blamed midwestern and southern politicians who did not grasp how important an American shipping industry was to the nation’s commercial strength and international standing. “Our merchant marine policy history of the past has been like a hospital patient’s fever chart,” he would one day say. “It leaps up frantically when something serious goes wrong. Then it falls. Interest dies. It costs an awful lot of money to run a shipping enterprise that way.”13