A Man and His Ship

Author:Steven Ujifusa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

After making a series of frantic phone calls, William Francis and Frederic Gibbs grimly called a meeting with their decorators in September 1950. Dorothy Marckwald and Anne Urquhart, who had been working for months on the ship’s interior, came to Frederic’s austere office at One Broadway. The two decorators had just been given word: United States, a third of the way through construction, was being seized by the Pentagon and would be completed as a troop transport. Military brass called General John Franklin of United States Lines to break the news, and Franklin then told the decorators that their contract was canceled and their services were no longer be needed. The two women were devastated—after two decades of designing interiors for Gibbs & Cox liners, this would be their crowning achievement.

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.

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