The intense rivalry between Queen Mary and Normandie became far more than just a speed competition between two ships. It became a clash of national wills. Financed by the French government Normandie was sleek, modern and served as giant floating ambassador for France and French style in the 1930s. The stolid, sturdy and old-fashioned Queen Mary symbolised Britain’s long-established maritime supremacy. By 1937 however, it was Queen Mary leading the race both in terms of speed (averaging 32 knots across the Atlantic) and in profits. Cunard ordered a sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, to cement this commercial dominance. As Queen Elizabeth neared completion in January 1940, Cunard’s rivals Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (CGT) placed the order for their counter-challenge, Bretagne.
CGT was taking no chances with Bretagne. After Normandie was conclusively proven to be slower than Queen Mary, CGT directors demanded that Bretagne should be capable of achieving at least 35 knots. The new ship was also intended to literally overshadow the Cunard queens. Bretagne would be longer than Normandie, and significantly larger; surviving plans anticipated a colossal tonnage of 100,000.
CGT turned to Normandie’s designer, Vladimir Yourkevitch, to draw up plans for Bretagne. Yourkevitch, a young Russian naval architect who fled to France after 1917, was just as obsessed as Norman Bel Geddes with streamlining. Unlike Geddes, he actually got to build his design, to great acclaim. Normandie’s sleek welded hull, teardrop funnels and smooth superstructure were years ahead of typical ship design in the 1930s.
Vladimir Yourkevitch with models of his Normandie design, c. 1934.
He planned to take this even further with the Bretagne project. He drew up two plans for the new superliner. The first design was essentially a larger version of Normandie, with only two funnels instead of three. The second was bold and revolutionary. In this design, Bretagne would have a single funnel, split into two up the sides of the vessel. This would create vastly more deck and interior space. Yourkevitch planned to capitalise on this space, and included a massive glazed area on the top deck, to be filled with however many a la carte restaurants and luxury suites CGT wished. Yourkevitch also stressed to CGT bosses that the radical new design would further boost Bretagne’s planned speed and would virtually guarantee a transatlantic triumph over the Cunard queens.
The first, more conservative design for Bretagne. The second radical design is at the top of the page.
Yourkevitch was surprised, if not totally devastated, when CGT directors branded his ideas “trop futuriste” and instead approved the first, more conservative design. CGT scrambled to raise money for the project. Normandie’s construction had been funded by loans and subsidies from the French government, but the company had paid nothing back by 1940. Despite this, company executives were astonishingly confident (some would say utterly deluded) their government would step to finance the nation’s new flagship. Planning for Bretagne, and CGT’s attempts to secure funding came to an abrupt end in May 1940. The German invasion, collapse of the French Republic, and the subsequent occupation of CGT’s port of Le Harve for the next four years killed the Bretagne project in its cradle. By the time war finally ended, CGT had lost Normandie in a catastrophic fire in New York. Building Bretagne was now ultimately pointless and the project was officially cancelled in late 1945.
Model of Bretagne’s radical second design, showing the enormous glazed top deck.
It is doubtful that Bretagne would have been a success if war had not broken out. Despite Normandie’s iconic nature, the ship was unprofitable and expensive to run; the even larger Bretagne would have been much the same. However, Bretagne’s second, radical design was very much ahead of its time and proved an accurate depiction of the future, with most cruise ships bearing a close similarity to Yourkevitch’s bold, but doomed, plan.
5) Amerika/Viktoria (1940)
Just as Bretagne, and indeed France, were being crushed in 1940, so Nazi Germany’s own superliner project was being perfected. Victorious in Europe, Hitler was at the height of his power in the summer of 1940, and believed that an enormous and fast passenger liner would be the key to securing the international prestige of the Third Reich.
The project dated back to 1937 when the Nazi government invited proposals from German shipping lines for ship designs which would boost Germany’s national prestige. Representatives from North German Lloyd (NDL) travelled to Berlin and presented to government ministers plans for (the surprisingly named, given the rabid nationalism of Nazi Germany) Amerika. The reichministers were pleased that NDL had understood their brief; Amerika was to be 1075 feet long and would weigh at least 80,000 tonnes. Much like CGT and Bretagne, NDL aimed for Amerika to travel at 35 knots, securing the honour of the fastest transatlantic crossing for Germany.
Amerika – this design includes the large yellow observation room in place of a crow’s nest.
Amerika’s design seemed initially similar to Bretagne. The ship would be sleek and streamlined and would feature a single funnel. Unlike Bretagne, this funnel would be massive and imposing. A novel element of the design was a large box-like structure instead of a crow’s nest which could act as an observation station for the captain. Amerika’s most radical departure was in its engineering. NDL’s engineers calculated that to achieve 35 knots, a massive output of 300,000 horsepower would be required. Consequently, Amerika would need huge engines and an unprecedented five propellers to generate sufficient horsepower. The fuel costs would have been immense, but the government was content to throw money at the project in the quest to establish German greatness on the high seas.
Tourist poster circulated in America c. 1938. A desire to present Nazi Germany as a sophisticated and attractive destination lay at the heart of the Nazis’ superliner project.
At the outbreak of war, the project was suspended. But with the German victories in 1940, and the seemingly inevitable defeat of Britain, Nazi leaders once more looked to the nascent superliner project as a way to cement the Third Reich as Europe’s new superpower. The ship was renamed Viktoria in order to celebrate military success but also to cater to Hitler’s increasing hostility to the USA and it’s material support for a beleaguered Britain. Plans briefly proceeded again and even a model was built and tested in Bremerhaven. However, by the autumn of 1940 it was clear that Britain was in no way defeated, and thus no end to the war was in sight. With the high seas blocked to German commercial ships, the Viktoria project was put on hold. Within a few years, Nazi Germany would be engulfed by the fires of war and the Amerika/Viktoria project disappeared into oblivion.
If ever completed, the launch of Amerika/Viktoria would have inevitably become another grand Nazi propaganda event, like this launch in 1938.
We have no way of knowing what Amerika/Viktoria would have been like if completed. But given the nature of building projects in Nazi Germany, it is not hard to imagine the Amerika/Viktoria; vast, stark and imposing, designed to reduce and overawe the individual. Despite never progressing beyond a model, the ambition of Amerika/Viktoria gives a glimpse of the hubris of a fascist regime at the height of its power.
Coming in Part 3: Nukes, Universities and Cities… all afloat!
Any history buff or liner enthusiast will be familiar with the names of some of the world’s greatest ships. Titanic, Lusitania, Queen Mary, Normandie and United States are just some of these great vessels that have gone down in history as either tragic disasters or triumphs of engineering. But liners such as these may not have been so venerated if the plans of shipping companies around the world had come to fruition. Throughout the 20th Century, vessels were planned, designed, and even partially built which could have rivalled or even eclipsed the most famous of ocean liners. That they remained either plans on a drawing board or a collection of unassembled steel plates is a testament to the unpredictable nature of world events and particularly the destructive nature of the 20th Century.
1) Constitution (1916)
America came very close to building its own superliner decades before the famed United States of 1952. Ironically, the man who designed the pioneering United States was also the force behind a similar, stalled attempt in the early 1900s to spread the stars and stripes across the seas. William Francis Gibbs was fascinated with ships since childhood and despite lacking any formal training, became obsessed with naval architecture and grew up determined to one day design the ultimate ocean liner. Aged 30, he quit his legal career and joined with (some would say dragged along) his brother to design a then unheard of 1,000 ft long ship which he intended to submit to financiers. Essentially enthusiastic amateurs, the brothers Gibbs must have been amazed when both J.P. Morgan and the United States Navy offered to jointly finance their liner, tentatively given the not-exactly-thrilling name of Constitution.
William Francis (left) and Francis William (right) Gibbs (really!) c. 1919.
It was not hard to see why Morgan and the Navy were interested in Gibbs’ childhood dream. Constitution would have been an enormous vessel at 56,000 tonnes, and would have more than filled a recent Titanic-shaped hole in Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine company, which had financed the doomed liner. The fact that Constitution seemed to be modelled on (if not outright copied) from the Titanic’s design helped to convince Morgan representatives to sign off on the planned ship after just one meeting with Gibbs. The Navy also saw the advantages of having partial control over Constitution which would have travelled at a staggering 30 knots, a speed which no ship would exceed until 1936. Such a fast ship at the nation’s disposal could be advantageous if the United States were sucked into the war raging in Europe at the time.
It was the First World War which first stalled Gibbs’ grandiose plans. Although a large-scale model was built and tested in late 1916, the USA’s entry into the war in 1917 put a halt on any work relating to Constitution. The Navy’s attention shifted to warship construction and Morgan’s finances suffered as a result of the conflict, putting paid to any prospect of any investment into huge superliners.
Gibbs single-mindedly continued to work on the designs and lobbied for financial support to start work on Constitution. He had hoped that the end of the war in November 1918, and the USA’s new status as a world power would see a resurgence of interest in his beloved superliner. But suddenly Gibbs’ plans became irrelevant; the USA simply seized Germany’s largest liner, Vaterland, as war reparations. Renamed Leviathan, the former German vessel was only a little smaller and slower than the planned Constitution and only needed peacetime conversion to become America’s flagship. A quick and cheap conversion of an already functioning liner clearly outweighed the prospect of building an amateur’s design from scratch.
Leviathan (formerly Vaterland), the cheaper alternative to Constitution.
Gibbs would never give up on his dream of building America’s finest ship and developed his skills as a naval architect over the following decades. By 1950, he had the expertise as well as the passion and was well-placed to again approach the Navy, this time with his design for the legendary United States. Although Constitution had never really progressed beyond a test model, for Gibbs it was a very real project which taught him a lot of lessons, launched him on a path to a career as a successful maritime architect and ultimately, helped to eventually fulfil his childhood dream.
An older and wiser Gibbs looking at his masterpiece, SS United States.
2) Oceanic (1928)
Whilst the fierce rivalry on the Atlantic between ocean greyhounds Queen Mary and Normandie is well known and considered to be the golden age of the liner, it is less well known that the two giant ships were very nearly faced with a third rival. This lesser known third rival also has the distinction of being the only ship listed here on which construction actually began. As a result, White Star’s Oceanic is far more than just a forgotten set of plans and potentially could have transformed the history of transatlantic travel.
Ever since the Titanic disaster, her owners, the White Star Line, had limped along, their prestige and profits severely damaged by the unprecedented tragedy. White Star had lost a large portion of their fleet in the First World War and although the line joined Lord Kyslant’s shipping consortium in the 1920s, it was haemorrhaging money by the middle of the decade. The line’s directors were desperate; only a spectacular new flagship could stave off financial ruin and restore confidence in the company.
Initial plans didn’t tick the spectacular box. The first design for Oceanic (the third White Star ship to bear the name) was essentially a copy of the company’s Olympic – already 15 years old by this point. A second set of designs showed a more radical vessel, with a cruiser stern and squat funnels, but the projected size was only about 51,000 tonnes.
The third design for Oceanic; now at last suitably impressive for White Star.
A third set of plans finally gave White Star what they were looking for. Oceanic would retain the cruiser stern and three squat funnels, but would be a colossal 1050 feet long and weigh over 80,000 tonnes. Most significantly, it was intended the ship would have a service speed of 30 knots, and thus able to make the transatlantic crossing in less than 4 days. White Star’s directors, along with the head of the consortium, Lord Kyslant, were elated and placed the order with Harland & Wolff shipyard on June 18th 1928; construction began just ten days later. The date and rapidity of the work is especially significant as it gave White Star a valuable lead in the race to build the world’s greatest liner. Their rivals, Cunard and Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (CGT) were planning vessels of similar speed and proportions to Oceanic. These vessels, which would later become the Queen Mary and the Normandie, were still just sets of blueprints as Harland & Wolff’s workers were busy hammering rivets into Oceanic’s steel plates. It seemed inevitable that Oceanic would be the first of these huge, fast liners to debut and thus dominate the market.
Size comparison between Oceanic, Normandie and Queen Mary.
But Oceanic never debuted. It was often assumed that the Oceanic was one of the first high-profile victims of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The same financial crisis and subsequent Depression would see work stall on Cunard’s Queen Mary for almost 3 years. Work eventually resumed on Queen Mary; Oceanic was consigned to oblivion. The abrupt cancellation of the vessel actually predated the Wall Street Crash and was the responsibility of the ship’s (and White Star’s) owner, Lord Kyslant. Kyslant delayed progress on Oceanic just a few weeks after the ship’s keel was laid, arguing that the vessel should be fitted with diesel-electric engines instead of steam turbines (which he had approved of in the planning stages). After bitter arguments with Harland and Wolff’s exasperated designers, Kyslant won the argument, and wasted almost two months in the process. At the same time, it was discovered that Kyslant’s shipping combine was essentially a massive fraud. A Treasury audit revealed that the combine had been using its vital reserves to pay its directors, including Kyslant himself, generous dividends. Simultaneously, Kyslant had lied about company profits to attract investors. Far from a profitable combine, Kyslant’s shipping empire was utterly bankrupt and at least £10 million in debt. No sooner than the Treasury audit was complete, Kyslant was arrested and later tried and imprisoned for fraud. The revelation that there was literally not a penny left to finance construction doomed the Oceanic.
Accurate representation of Lord Kyslant’s financial and personal fortunes by 1929.
White Star and Harland and Wolff were able to scrape together additional funds, but not enough to complete the giant Oceanic. As a result, it was decided to scrap Oceanic and scavenge the materials to build two, much smaller vessels. Oceanic’s keel was cut into two, and from the two pieces eventually emerged Britannic and Georgic. Their profiles, and especially their short funnels, give some idea of how Oceanic may have looked.
Britannic in New York at the end of her career in 1960.
Oceanic (even if she only existed as a collection of steel girders and plates) represents a great ‘what if?’ in the history of liners. Without Kyslant’s interference and then conviction, it seemed likely that Oceanic would have been completed well before Cunard’s Queen Mary and CGT’s Normandie. With a head start in the intense transatlantic competition, Oceanic may have been able to keep White Star afloat and restore its former glory. It is not inconceivable to imagine Oceanic becoming a symbol of national pride like the Queen Mary later would. Instead, four years after the cancellation of the project, an all-but ruined White Star Line was forced to merge with Cunard and thereafter the company would slowly vanish, as its fleet was gradually scrapped to way for more Cunard vessels. Oceanic was intended as the great renaissance for White Star; instead, she proved to be its downfall.
3) ‘Whale Ship’ (1932)
If Oceanic was a very real project that very nearly came to fruition, the so-called ‘Whale Ship’ was little more than an extremely imaginative pipe-dream. But although the vessel never travelled further than the planning stages, elements of the design were revolutionary would eventually found their way into a huge range of modern vehicles which we take for granted today. The bizarre ‘Whale Ship’ was simultaneously a pie in the sky and an accurate vision of the future.
The ‘Whale Ship’ was the product of the feverish imagination of Norman Bel Geddes. A Broadway musical set designer throughout the 1920s, Geddes opened up his own design studio in 1927. The studio was supposed to focus primarily on small commercial products such as cocktail shakers and radio cabinets. But quickly Geddes turned his studio into a design factory for his ever grandiose flights of fantasy. Geddes and his team began designing various fantastical projects; a bubble shaped car, a nine-deck amphibious plane, even an ultra-modern city Geddes named ‘Futurama’.
Norman Bel Geddes surveys his model of ‘Futurama’.
In 1932 Geddes showcased the model of his design for an ocean liner. His design was unlike anything yet conceived and was colossally ambitious. Resembling a giant torpedo more than a liner, Geddes dubbed his vessel the ‘Whale Ship’ due to the two giant ‘humps’ which were actually funnels, and the staggering size his ship would be. The vessel would be 1800 feet long and weigh 82,000 tonnes. Carrying 2000 passengers and 900 crew, the ship would be fast enough to reduce the journey between Europe and America to a single day.
Geddes was under no illusions. The grandiose and fantastical nature concept was unlikely to become a reality. The ‘Whale Ship’ and similar futuristic designs were mostly created to feature in Geddes’ 1932 book Horizons, presenting an art-deco-inspired view of what the future might bring. Nevertheless, the ‘Whale Ship’ captured the imagination of the public during the 1930s. Newsreels and featurettes such as the one linked below showcased Geddes’ model as the ocean liner of the future and took pride in extolling the speed benefits of its innovations.
Posters and postcards heralding the ambitious designs of the future were popular in the 1930s.
Geddes’ design may never have sailed, but it did travel to Hollywood. The ‘Whale Ship’ (or at least a model of it) featured in the comedy film The Big Broadcast of 1938. Satirising the intense rivalry going on at the time between the Queen Mary and the Normandie, the film features a similar transatlantic speed race between the fictional ships Gigantic and Colossal. It is no coincidence that the model for Colossal is a carbon copy of the real Normandie, and Gigantic is clearly based on Geddes’ ‘Whale Ship’. Incidentally, Gigantic is shown to win the race, a screenwriting choice which hints at the popularity of Geddes’ innovative design.
The decidedly dodgy model of Geddes’ design featured in The Big Broadcast of 1938.
Geddes knew full well his ship would likely never be built. What he perhaps didn’t anticipate was that many of the features of his liner would eventually become standard on virtually every form of transport. As can be seen from the ‘Whale Ship’ model, and his other designs, Geddes was obsessed with streamlining. The ‘Whale Ship’s’ hull was designed to reduce wind and water resistance as much as possible. In the 1930s, such aerodynamics were a novel idea. Today, ships, cars and planes are all streamlined as far as possible. In particular, modern trains, especially Japan’s bullet train, owes much to Geddes’ ship design. The ‘Whale Ship’ may have never progressed beyond a series of sketches and a couple of models but it has left an important and highly visible aerodynamic legacy all around us today.
Imagine you’re a passenger (let’s even say a first class passenger) on board an ocean liner in the early 1900s. Your routine will be much the same; a leisurely breakfast, a brisk walk around deck (for the umpteenth time) to take in the sea air, lunch and afternoon tea, perhaps some reading, dinner and evening coffees (or cigars and brandy if you’re after something stronger). As you drift off to sleep in your cabin little do you know that there is a fiery underworld just a few decks below. In this underworld, there is no brandy, no reading, no air even; instead a dark, reeking and unbearably hot boiler room populated by men. At least they look like men; it’s hard to tell with their soot-covered faces, half-naked grimy bodies, and dark sullen eyes. This is “The Black Gang”, and it is these people who keep the ship alive.
Poster for Aquitania c. 1914. Coal furnaces kept ships alive.
In a sense, we can think of early steamships as trains. Trains require coal shovelled into a furnace continuously to create the steam to power the engine. On the early steamships of the mid 1800s, the process was exactly the same and only on a little larger scale. Within fifty years however, it was on an unimaginable scale. Providing a 40,000 tonne ship with enough power for the massive engines required hundreds of furnaces (162 on the Titanic, for example) and each furnace required several men to shovel coal literally 24 hours a day into the hungry fires.
A typical, though artificially lit, boiler room, c. 1910.
Steamship companies would go out of their way to keep the interiors of their ships clean and habitable. Not so for the boiler rooms. Excess amounts of coal would be funnelled in through coal hatches either on deck or in the hull; you can imagine the suffocating clouds of thrown up coal dust blanketing every inch of space in these boiler rooms. Being at the very bottom of a ship, there was no natural light, in fact no light except from the fires, and barely any ventilation. The size of the boilers themselves created cramped, dark, hot and sulphurous conditions for the men tasked with feeding the incessant fires.
A typical “black gang” – enjoying some much-needed shore leave in Liverpool c. 1912.
The stockers themselves were nicknamed “The Black Gang”, unsurprisingly because their bodies and faces were quickly covered in coal dust once a voyage vegan. But they were called black for other reasons too; they were “a breed of ruthless men”. There was little criteria for becoming a stoker, any strong man in a port city who was capable of picking up a shovel would do. But the strongest were more often than not thugs and brawlers, for whom a month’s work on a transatlantic liner was a convenient escape from the police. Once they had descended into the scorching boiler rooms, the stokers would be further brutalised. Typically working in 5 or 6 hour shifts, they would strip to the waste to cope with the heat, but this meant their skin would be seared by the radiation. At the very least their hands would quickly be blistered and their hair singed. Open furnaces could sometimes overflow; the more experienced stokers wore clogs to avoid the amputation of a charred foot. As a final assault on the senses, the noise would have been deafening. Constant shovelling, the roar of the flames, the slamming of furnace doors combined to turn a ship’s engine room into a particularly industrial vision of hell.
This screenshot from Titanic (1997) gives a good impression of the horrendous conditions on Atlantic boiler rooms.
Subjecting already hard men to these conditions often had lethal consequences. There are many accounts of stokers fighting each other with red hot shovels and tongs, and the losers being bludgeoned against the grimy steel walls. Superiors or officers would stay well clear of the battling stokers. Disturbing rumours abound of those who tried to intervene and discipline “The Black Gang”. On one ship an officer who tried to intervene was never seen again. It quickly transpired he had been brained with a shovel by a vengeful stoker, who them promptly incinerated the officer in one of the massive furnaces. Whether or not the officer was conscious was unclear and the rest of the stokers took ghoulish delight in stating that they could have sworn they smelt burning flesh and heard screaming from within the boiler, echoing all the way up the funnel.
Many were rumoured to have been incinerated in a ship’s boiler.
If stokers were not murderous they were sometimes mutinous. Olympic’s “Black Gang” helped bring the ship to a standstill in 1912 when they refused to sail unless additional lifeboats were fitted in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster (a very understandable request!). Less fair was the mutiny on the Cunard liner Ultonia, where the “Black Gang”, appalled by their conditions and tired of being treated like galley slaves, broke into the alcohol stores and went on a rampage. As passengers hid under their bunks, the stokers seemed about to take over the ship. Although order was restored, the captain was forced to use the deck crew to feed the boilers as it was too great a risk to put the stockers back down below. When Ultonia finally reached New York, the entire “Black Gang” deserted in the night and disappeared into the streets.
The boiler room clearly was a black (in every sense of the word) underworld which contrasted with the order and civility on the upper decks of passenger liners. It is little surprise that after World War One, almost all shipping companies took the opportunity to convert the ships to oil, with the effect of reducing the engineering crews from hundreds to a few dozen specialists. With oil, the underbellies of liners became much cleaner, safer, quieter, and certainly less murderous. But if anything the brutality of “The Black Gang” was really down to the greed of shipping companies themselves. In the quest for speed and profit they lavished attention on passenger amenities whilst shoving more boilers and more men into dark and nightmarish conditions below the waterline. Concerned to maintain schedules, companies and captains pushed stokers harder and harder. It is therefore little wonder that “the fires of Hell” in ship’s boiler rooms created many monsters and brought out the darker impulses in the crews of ocean liners.
The Only Way to Cross 