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Great Luxury Liners 1927-1954 A Photographic Record by William Miller Jr SoftCov
Great Luxury Liners 1927-1954 A Photographic Record by William H Miller Jr
Soft Cover
160 pages
Copyright 1981
CONTENTS
Berengaria
Mauretania
The Mauretania
Alaunia
Homeric
Majestic
Leviathan
Hamburg
France
Paris
Ile De France
President Roosevelt
Scanstates
Llangibby Castle
Lancastria
Santa Barbara
Bermuda
Malolo
Stella Polaris
The Giants
Europa
Bremen
Empress of Britain
Rex
Conte Di Savoia
Normandie
Queen Mary
The Depression
Depression Runs
Scrapping
The Trend Toward Cruising
Effects of the Slump
Leviathan
Belgenland
Pilsudski
Solonies, Crusing and the Mails
Britannic
Washington
Lancastria
Calamares
Santa Paula
Oriente
Monarch of Bermuda and Queen of Bermuda
Albertville
Iroquois
Strathmore
Karanja
President Hoover
Milwaukee
Hazards at Sea
Monte Sarmiento
Nieuw Amsterdam
1939
The Approach of War
Destruction of the Paris
Georgic
Mauretania
Colombie
Columbus
The Last Sailing of the Bremen
The Sinking of the Athenia
Transporting Refugees
Commercial Crossings Cease
Maintaining Neutrality
The War Years
The Spring of 1940
Stockholm
Oslofjord
Royal Refugees
Ile De France
Queen Elizabeth
The Destruction of the Normandie
Salvaging the Normandie
Westerland
Volenadam
Troop Transport
Wartime Sinkings
Monterey
Wilhelm Gustloff
Ancon
Returning Troops
A Welcome Home
The Postwar Period
Europa Becomes the Liberte
Stravangerfjord
The Return of the Queens
Refitting the Nieuw Amsterdam
Stockholm
Caronia
Orontes
Orcades
Himalaya
Oronsay
President Wilson
Return of the Ile De France
Batory
America
Saturnia
Conte Biancamano
Giulio Cesare
Cristoforo Colombo
The End of the George Washington
Independence
Maasdam
Flandre
United States
INTRODUCTION
For me, one of the lasting pleasures of working on my book The Only Way to. ,Cross was meeting others irresistibly drawn to the great ocean liners. One such was Bill Miller, then chairman of World Ship Society's Port of New York Branch. Now, happily for steamer buffs everywhere, he has launched this impeccable treasury of steamers from the last half-century.
He has started, after looking at ships of the twenties, with a turning point in ship design, the Ile de France (1927), the French Line's dreamboat. Masked by a conventional profile, passenger spaces were dazzling vistas plucked intact from the Exposition des Arts Dof 1925. Not a motif, grill or line, not a stick of furniture or meter of fabric was derivative; everything on board was new. Those controversial interiors marked a decorative watershed and most ships that followed in her wake adhered to the same relentless modernity. Tudor, Jacobean, Palladian or Baroque styles, traditional steamship ideals that had dominated ocean-going public rooms since the great sailing steamers, examples of which can be seen in some interior photographs, were hopelessly out of style. The era of the modern liner had begun.
In short order, the Ile had four competitors, a pair each from Germany and Italy, Astonishingly resurgent German yards fielded the Bremen and the Europa - low, rakish racers in the tradition of the turn-of-thecentury Deutschland. On her maiden voyage the Bremen wrested the Blue Ribbon for speed in crossing the Atlantic from the venerable Mauretania, the Cunarder which had held it in triumph since 1907. From Genoa and Trieste, the second pair of new ships, the Rex and the Conte di Savoia, were Mussolini's bid for a share of the Atlantic riches; the Rex took the speed prize from the Bremen.
New giants were in the offing. The Normandie and the Queen Mary, the great 1,000-footers, sailed miraculously out of the Depression, vessels of such ponderous dimension that they silenced the statistical one-upmanship of the Western Ocean shipbuilders. In the summer of 1935, the Normandie dashed across the Atlantic both ways, faster than any before her. The Queen Mary, her cross-channel rival, subsequently shaved hours off the French ship's time, keeping the
coveted speed honors until the United States, William Francis Gibbs's brainchild, swept the seas forever in 1952.
In September of 1939, the lights of Europe went out. The ships' brilliant upperworks were cloaked in gray. Sailings became furtive - strategic rather than celebratory. As in 1914-1918, the world's liners ensured the swift delivery of tens of thousands of soldier-passengers.
Peace brought a promising surge in shipping. The fifties seem, in fond retrospect, a mid-century evocation of Edwardian extravagance as new tonnage carried millions across the seas. The Queens operated in glorious tandem; a white Italian fleet steamed proudly out of the Mediterranean; a flock of Dutch sisters rallied about the prewar NAmsterdam; as the Libert, the ex-German Europa assumed the redand-black funnels of the French Line, joining in lavish service with the revamped, two-funneled Ile; the United States and America carried the stars and stripes on the cold northern run while the Independence and Constitution offered Yankee alternatives on the southern route. It was a golden decade on all the world's sea lanes, peak years of maritime indulgence.
Then, abruptly, the ships were doomed, cut short by the ominous, ubiquitous shadow of the passenger jet. Even De Gaulle's imperishable gift of the France came too late and the inevitable decline began. By the late sixties, irreversible attrition took its toll. Both Queens were withdrawn, one to become a California carnival of dubious stability, the other destroyed by a suspicious fire on the eve of a renaissance. The United States languishes at her Norfolk pier.
Sadder still was the end of steamship service between Le Havre and New York, between Tilbury and Sydney, between San Francisco and Honolulu. As each ship stopped sailing, there was none to replace her, with the single exception of the Queen Elizabeth 2, teethed on adversity and plagued by misfortune, that still carries the colors of a new breed of Cunard cruiseships. Cruising may save the ships, although it seems an uncertain economic area. Leisure sailing, the enjoyment of shipboard life for its own sake, with exotic ports within lazy reach, has spawned new flotillas along the warm-water routes, towering white wedding cakes of ships, floating hotels for a new generation of passengers. One can only hope that these fair-weather clients will find shipboard life as enchanting as their parents and grandparents did.
But if cruising enjoys a vogue, crossing has almost vanished. Links between Old World and New, West and Far East, temperate and tropical, are all aerial now - swift, anonymous and essentially graceless passage between shores. People who yearn for the old way - and I think their number is legion - must turn now to the record. In these haunting pages they should find solace, an evocative look at 25 splendid years. Bill
Miller's fleets steam past in glorious review, a golden jubilee retrospective of the world's passenger liners. I have dwelt on the giants, but Miller has seen to it that ships great and small are part of the immortal parade. We are indebted to him for his initiative, scholarship and devotion in assembling this anthology, for remembering so well in a world that finds it too easy to forget.
JOHN MAXTONE-GRAHAMNew City, New York Christmas, 1980
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