Churchill rolled the cigar in his mouth. “The threat of an invasion has faded from our national consciousness. And so you see us awkwardly struggling with it in the war cabinet room. And you see my countrymen coping with it daily.”
When he pushed his cup away, we knew our visit was over. Clay and I stood quickly.
After hearing Churchill time and again on the BBC, I thought his voice foreign in the depth of its sadness. “War is a tragedy anywhere and anytime. But for an Englishman, war on the home soil is more than tragedy. It is an alien conceit. The image will not form in the mind. How does one prepare for the unthinkable?”
General Clay had no answer. The prime minister walked us to the door, the gravity of his words seeming to slow him. He lifted his chin. “But we shall see. They haven’t hurt us yet, not much.”
For once, the great man was wrong. At that moment, the disasters that became known as the Three Blows were underway, and they would bruise Britain and America to the bone.
6
Troops called the ship the Gray Ghost because its Cunard colors had been painted over with camouflage gray. The RMS Queen Mary was the queen of the express liners. The liner and her sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, were Great Britain’s most prestigious and visible symbols of maritime might. Before the war it won the fabled Blue Ribband for the record Atlantic crossing, just under four days.
Since 1940 it had been a troop transport, shuttling Australians, Canadians, Britons, and Americans around the world. On this voyage it sailed east from New York carrying 10,554 United States soldiers and a crew of 910 officers and men, the first time in history more than ten thousand persons had voyaged on one ship. The weight of Queen Mary’s passengers was such that the troops were ordered to remain perfectly still as they sailed over the Holland Tunnel, to prevent the GIs from gathering on one side to bid farewell to New York City. A list of even five degrees would have caused the ship to scrape the top of the tunnel.
The captain had not known the Cunarder’s precise course until it passed the Ambrose Lightship, when he opened sealed orders given him at the shipping office. Gourock, on the Firth of Clyde, near Glasgow.
I spoke with Private Dennis Rawley four months after the war ended. He had boarded the ship in New York carrying the same equipment as everyone else: a helmet, a canteen, a full field pack, cartridge belts, two barracks bags containing summer and winter uniforms and a few personal belongings, and his Ml rifle. He was handed a blue button and told to attach it to his uniform blouse. The ship was divided into three self-contained, vertically separated areas, red, white, and blue, and the soldiers were restricted to their portion of the ship. Blue was the stern.
Private Rawley was frightened at the beginning of the trip. Rumor had it that Hitler had offered the equivalent of a quarter million dollars and an iron cross with oak leaves to the U-boat captain who sank the Queen Mary. But Rawley had been told that twenty-four oil-fired water tube boilers pushed the ship through the water at almost thirty knots, faster than anything the Germans had afloat. For most of the journey, the Queen Mary would not bother with convoys. It would simply outrun the Kriegsmarine. Nevertheless, his fear returned when 150 miles out of New York the four destroyer escorts signaled “Good Luck” and fell away.
Cunard billed the Queen Mary as the “Stateliest Ship Afloat,” and Rawley had expected his trip to be in the lap of luxury. By the time he found his standee bunk, jammed with a hundred others in the dry swimming pool, the private was sorely disappointed. Miles of plush Wilton carpeting, all the fragile fittings, over two hundred cases of crystal, china, and silverware, the better furniture, and 2,100 stateroom doors were in storage in warehouses along the Hudson. Thousands of canvas bunks, stacked six high and separated by only eighteen inches, had been installed on the promenade deck, the ladies’ drawing room, the squash court, and every other conceivable place above and below decks. The Queen Mary’s two thousand portholes and windows had been blacked out. Austin Reed’s famous tailor shop in the Main Hall had been made into a stockade. Other shops had been converted to military offices. The cocktail bars had been transformed into dispensaries and the main ballroom into a hospital. Steel blast shutters were installed above the bridge windows. Hundreds of sandbags protected vital areas of the superstructure. Little luxury to any of this, he thought.
Topside, among the louvers and exhaust ventilators, were a six-inch gun, five three-inch high-low angle guns, thirty-four 40mm and 20mm cannons, four Browning heavy machine guns, and four antiaircraft rocket launchers. Daily drills made for quite a show, and large crowds gathered, especially for the rockets.
A degaussing girdle which neutralized magnetic mines had been installed on the ship, along with an Asdic underwater noise-detection system. A mine-sweeping paravane system, consisting of two torpedo-shaped devices secured by cables to a winch on the bow, were designed to cut the mooring cables of submerged mines.
On the third day out, at the same time General Clay and I were having tea with the prime minister, Private Rawley was sitting on a bench in the prewar first class dining room, which served as the enlisted personnel mess. The mess seemed to be in chaos. Meals were served continually from 6:30 in the morning to 7:30 at night, two meals a day in six staggered sittings. While one group ate, another waited in line near the first group’s shoulders. The mess was a din of clanging kits and silverware and shouted conversation that rose to storm level. A choking haze of cigarette smoke filled the room.
During that meal the private sat next to a left-hander, who kept bumping Rawley’s elbow, spilling his peas back to his tin. Before he could swallow his last bite, a line of new arrivals walked up behind them and demanded their turn at the tables. Rawley shoved an entire biscuit into his mouth and rose from the table.
He returned to the crap game on B deck. The rule against gambling was universally ignored. Rawley estimated that at any given time there were four hundred crap and poker games on board. Christ, it was fun, meeting those fellows, rolling the dice, telling filthy jokes, and chewing each other up. The gamblers hadn’t cared if Rawley didn’t know anything about craps. He settled down among six others of C Battery, 49th Field Artillery, laying a dollar on the line. The shooter, from the Bronx, knew all the lingo and kept up a mesmerizing patter as he tumbled the dice in his hand, then rolled them out. He was on a streak, with a pile of bills in front of him big enough to use as a pillow. Another seven, a natural, just like before the meal. The shooter swept up Rawley’s dollar. The private put down his last dollar against the shooter. Learning had been expensive. The dice rolled. A four. C Battery cheered. Four was a tough point.
“Little Joe, coming out,” the shooter urged, rattling the dice and tossing them. Sure enough, each die showed two spots. The men groaned. The shooter jubilantly pulled the bills to him.
“Busting out saved my life,” Rawley told me. “I didn’t have one thin dime in my pockets, so I left the game and went up number four companionway to A deck, then aft toward the three-inch gun mounted on the former Veranda Grill. The ship’s emergency steering gear was under the gun. I had no reason to go there, other than I didn’t have anything else to do.”