But at Gibbs & Cox, neither brother was fazed. William Francis had suspected for some time that Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson was planning to make the move. The outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula in June 1950 had caught America unprepared. Not until September did General Douglas MacArthur’s daring Inchon landing put U.S. forces on the offensive. By then political and military leaders in Washington were frantically working to rebuild a military that had been stripped of men and equipment by the demobilization and budget cuts after World War II. The Pentagon wanted ships, and they knew where to find a big one. In fact, during the summer, the Newport News Daily Press reported that a plan was being “kicked around by Washington officialdom… to abandon the construction of the superliner” in favor of some kind of military vessel.12 Still, there was no public announcement about what exactly would be done with the Big Ship until September 16, 1950—when American GIs were still on the beachhead at Inchon.
During their meeting, the brothers assured the two anxious women that they would do everything in their power to get the ship back.
“This will not happen,” Frederic Gibbs calmly told Dorothy Marckwald and Anne Urquhart.13 William Francis promised to make good on the interior decorating contract and quietly asked his staff to keep working.
The seizure electrified the press, and reporters immediately started digging. News accounts appeared that claimed modifications to the ship’s design were permanent, not cosmetic, making it very difficult for her to be reconverted into a passenger liner. On October 29, 1950, Walter Hamshar of the New York Herald Tribune reported that United States’ big ballrooms and lounges would be cut up into smaller messes and wardrooms, and that almost all private toilets and showers, necessities for luxury passenger service, would be eliminated from the deck plans. The completion of the ship as a troop carrier, Hamshar reasoned, “will probably cut several million dollars from her estimated construction cost of $70,300,000, but the savings will not benefit taxpayers.” This was because while construction costs would be reduced, the savings would be eaten up by the new installations needed to support the estimated 14,000 troops it would carry: additional freshwater tanks, condensers, lifeboats, windbreaks, and gun mounts.14
Savings or no savings, Defense Secretary Johnson and his Air Force and Army allies on the Joint Chiefs of Staff were determined to follow through on the seizure. But within days of the decision, Secretary Johnson was gone from office. The president had shared Johnson’s cost-cutting approach but was fed up with his bombastic management style. On September 19, he called Johnson into the Oval Office and told him, “Lou, I’ve got to ask you to quit.”15
Johnson was dumbfounded, but quickly complied. Within days, a new secretary of defense sat in the office—retired five-star general George C. Marshall, the respected Army chief of staff in World War II whom Churchill had called “the organizer of victory,” and more recently, secretary of state and author of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe.
Sensing an opportunity, Admiral Edward Cochrane, chairman of the new Maritime Administration (successor to the old Maritime Commission), decided to have a word with the new secretary of defense, who the admiral knew valued efficiency. Cochrane was convinced that if United States were rebuilt as a troopship, much of the work could not be undone, at least not cheaply, and that the ship could not be completed in time to meet the urgent troop-carrying capacity of the moment. On November 1, just a month and a half after the seizure, Secretary of Defense Marshall announced that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had “reconsidered their previous recommendation and now recommend that the ship be completed as a commercial passenger liner.” Marshall wrote Cochrane the same day, thanking him for his “whole hearted cooperation in this matter and wish[ing] to assure you that we shall endeavor to keep our requests as modest and reasonable as the international situation may permit.”16
What happened at the meeting between Marshall and Cochrane is not known. What is known was Cochrane’s unswerving admiration for William Francis Gibbs, whom he had helped clear from war profiteering charges in 1944. Like Admiral David W. Taylor before him, Cochrane was a staunch supporter of a dual-purpose luxury liner. Cochrane was the deus in a deus ex machina rescue of the Big Ship.
Hearing the news, General Franklin was jubilant. “We are delighted to have our ship back!” he told one reporter.17 But the tug-of-war between the United States Lines and the U.S. government was far from over.
In the month and a half that the ship’s fate had hung in the balance, it was never actually “tools down” at the yard. Once the word came down that the ship would be completed as originally planned, as a passenger liner, work continued with renewed vigor. The riveting and welding continued apace. As the hull rose, crews carefully coated it with red antifouling paint below the waterline, and jet black above. No longer a dull steel mass, she now shone in the morning sunlight as a stream of workers arrived each day, tools and lunch boxes in hand.
As the construction moved from the hull to the superstructure, the unique ship design presented the shipyard with other challenges. United States was the largest user of aluminum in any construction project up to that time. Almost the entire superstructure would be made of the light metal, as well as the two funnels, deck ventilators, lifeboats, railings, and davits. There were good reasons. Using aluminum above the steel strength-deck greatly reduced the ship’s overall weight, and allowed for a finer, narrower hull than had ever before been possible on a transatlantic liner. The ship would also have a greater margin of stability and lower center of gravity than any other ship in her class, without sacrificing spaciousness in the premium, upper-deck passenger areas.
But the Newport News shipyard workers were frustrated to no end once they completed the hull and began work on the superstructure. “That was the biggest mass of aluminum we’d ever worked with in a shipyard,” Tom Paris recalled, “and therefore we had a lot of problems.”18
Aluminum presented big construction dilemmas that steel did not. Unlike steel, aluminum lost strength when heated—all plates had to be carefully hammered and shaped by hand. Also, aluminum plates could not be welded together, and conventional riveting would weaken the metal and accelerate aging. This meant that in building the superstructure, over a million aluminum rivets had to be cast and then annealed (superheated to over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit), making them easier to shape while cold. They were then deep-frozen at 40 degrees below zero, which slowed the hardening process as they aged. When needed by workmen, they were dipped in alcohol, put in insulated boxes, and then pounded into the plating. Once put in place, the cold rivets hardened in warm temperatures and locked the aluminum plates firmly into place.19 It was a tedious, slow process, and frustrating to those used to working with steel. According to Tom Paris, the crews would set a section of aluminum in place one day, set rivets in it that night, and then wait till the following morning before the rivets had set, at which point they could move on.20 One consolation for the workers was that the aluminum superstructure deflected much of the intense Virginia sun that beat down on their pith helmets.
Still another problem was that when aluminum comes into contact with steel, the result is an electrochemical reaction known as galvanic corrosion. To stop it, an insulator has to be inserted wherever the metals might come in contact. On United States, the base of the aluminum superstructure joined the steel hull at the promenade deck. If the two metals are put into direct contact and then exposed to an electrolyte such as seawater, an electrical current forms, and ions from the aluminum superstructure migrate over to the steel hull. The aluminum corrodes and disintegrates, and the ship comes apart.