Meanwhile, the Cunard Line looked forward to a rosy postwar future. Queen Mary, her troopship duties over, joined her sister, Queen Elizabeth, on the North Atlantic run on July 31, 1947. In the months that followed, the Queen s were both booked to capacity, ferrying the likes of Winston Churchill and Duke Ellington across the Atlantic, as well as thousands of immigrants fleeing war-devastated Europe for a new start in America. Cunard had decided that the Blue Riband of the Atlantic would remain with Queen Mary, and the bigger Queen Elizabeth was never opened up to full speed. Still, Cunard chairman Sir Percy Bates’s dream of a weekly, two-ship express service between Southampton and New York had become reality. The hard-nosed businessman did not live to see it, however; he died just before Queen Elizabeth’s peacetime maiden voyage.
William Francis Gibbs followed the Queen s’ weekly runs, methodically keeping track of their travel times and average speeds. He would cut out stories from the shipping news for his memorandum book—bad weather delays, broken bones caused by their notorious rolling, and any mechanical breakdown. But with his own superliner finally promising to leave the drawing boards, he was a happy man. The radio play-by-play of a Yankees game frequently blared in the background as he and his team worked and planned.
More liners arrived in New York harbor. Some were old favorites. Overcoming bomb-ravaged shipyards and factories, the French Line reintroduced the legendary Ile de France for passenger service in 1949. The Dutch revived their flagship, Nieuw Amsterdam, which had debuted only months before the Nazis invaded Poland. Others were new arrivals. The Italian Line, who had lost most of their vast fleet to torpedoes and bombs, launched an ambitious new shipbuilding campaign. Within a few years, the Italians would launch two elegant new sister ships: Cristoforo Colombo and Andrea Doria.
For a brief period, United States Lines appeared to have had the option of running another refurbished German vessel with America: the Norddeutscher Lloyd liner Europa, which the U.S. Army had captured in 1945 at her Bremerhaven dock (aside from Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, and Ile de France, the only other European superliner to survive the war). But the once-proud German Blue Riband holder was found to be badly neglected and obsolete—not to mention a firetrap. Her old electrical system consisted of solid copper electrical cables wrapped in rubber and cotton and nestled in wooden raceways. The setup caused several small electrical fires during several trooping voyages bringing American GIs home from the front.14 Cracks also began forming in her hull, caused in part by her split funnel uptakes.15 The United States Lines rejected her, and the United States government gave Europa to France in 1946 as reparations for the lost Normandie. The French, unable to build a new ship themselves, were willing to spend the money to completely transform the old German liner into the Gallicized Liberté. Her Germanic Art Deco interiors were ripped out and replaced by furnishings and art salvaged from Normandie.
General Franklin easily accepted the loss of the money-draining former Europa. It was best to use the company’s resources for new construction, not a twenty-year-old German “also-ran.”
William Francis Gibbs could not agree more.
Yet even as new and refitted ocean liners were prospering, there were signs that Atlantic travel might be on the cusp of a new era. From his office, Gibbs could see propeller-driven airplanes taking off and landing from the newly opened LaGuardia Airport. Aircraft design had advanced by leaps and bounds in the crucible of World War II, and Marine Age magazine warned that out of 640,000 people who crossed the Atlantic in 1947, 464,000 traveled by ship and 160,000 by plane. Experts began predicting that planes would continue to eat into the liners’ share of the transatlantic business.16
William Francis read the article but was not worried about his yet-unborn ship. Of course the public wanted speed, he figured, but wealthy travelers also craved comfort, and few tourist-class passengers could afford to fly. Also, many people still thought that flying was unsafe. Finally, the new propeller planes were cramped, loud, and bumpy, especially during wintertime, over-ocean flights. Aircraft might have been fast compared to ships, but for travelers, being trapped in a flying metal tube for twelve hours or more—without any of the creature comforts available at sea—could seem very long indeed. All of this held down demand for air travel. “It is believed that air traffic will supplement this ship and not harm it,” the naval architect wrote in a memo to his brother, “since the ability to leave New York on Wednesday and do business in London on Monday will mean that the average person will welcome the sea voyage either one way or the other, and for some time to come it is obvious that safety will be on the side of the ship.”17
At United States Lines headquarters on Broadway, General Franklin thought that expanded passenger service was vital to the company’s future, and that this new ship would do it.
With the basic superliner design pretty much complete, Franklin was ready to sell it to his company and to the U.S. government. On March 13, 1947, General Franklin presented the Gibbs & Cox design to the United States Lines board of directors, headed by Vincent Astor. In the thirteen months since the Broad Street Club lunch, his superliner Design 12201 had been measured against the competition and come out ahead. Harry Truman had only two days earlier shown a new government commitment to building technologically advanced passenger ships, and Admiral Haeberle at the U.S. Navy was about to come out with his positive report on superliners and, in particular, Design 12201. The response by the United States Lines board was also positive. But the company directors insisted on one important caveat: the company’s contribution could not exceed half of the estimated $50 million price tag. The rest, the board said, must be borne by the federal government and the subsidies provided by the 1936 Merchant Marine Act.
The day after the board approved the superliner concept, John Franklin contacted Gibbs & Cox and told them to get a complete set of plans ready so that he could make the case to the Maritime Commission for a 50 percent construction subsidy. This would be a reach because the standard subsidy under the Merchant Marine Act was only 331/3 percent. A 50 percent subsidy would be awarded only in extraordinary cases, but Franklin was convinced that Design 12201 represented an extraordinary passenger liner.
As his older brother supervised the design of the vessel, Frederic Gibbs steadily worked his adding machine in his solitary, austere office at One Broadway. Frederic’s first goal was to demonstrate that operating a large passenger liner could turn a reasonable profit for its owners. His second was to convince the Maritime Commission why the maximum construction subsidy was justified—namely that high American shipbuilding costs made it prohibitively expensive to produce a ship with private funds alone. His third was to show why the government should provide an operational subsidy—to compensate the vessel’s owners for high American labor and maintenance costs in order to make such a big ship competitive with European rivals. It was tedious but essential work.
United States Lines vice president Colonel Raymond Hicks tweaked Frederic’s calculations and projected that an average, two-week round-trip transatlantic voyage would bring gross receipts of $464,720. Next came a long list of expenses, including unionized crew wages and overtime. The annual operating subsidy would defray these labor costs by slightly more than 50 percent; the figure was the same for marine insurance and other miscellaneous costs. Repairs and maintenance, such as annual dry-docking and overhaul, would receive a nearly 60 percent subsidy. But fuel, the biggest single expense, was the sole responsibility of the company. Frederic estimated that the ship would burn 8,000 tons of fuel oil each round trip, which meant $83,000 every two weeks to keep her bunkers filled.