The Normandie That Failed (1942)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2905

Breezing through a volume of Popular Mechanic for 1942 I came across an article on refitting the French ocean liner, the Normandie.  The only thing I knew about her was that the ship was the subject of one of the all-time great travel posters (pictured below). The imagery for February 1942 was vastly different. It turns out that when the general war began in Europe the Normandie was in NYC harbor where it was more or less immediately interned. As a matter of fact after just a short while this great ship was tied up next to the RMS Queen Elizabeth and the Queen Mary, which meant the world's three largest ocean liners were cheek and jowl to one another in NYC.  After Pearl Harbor the ship was put under the command of the U.S. Coast Guard, and after a very brief period the command was transferred to the USN. That's where these plans come in, to re-purpose the ship into an aircraft carrier:

But that was not to be and construction plans were made to transform the ship into a troop transport

Then came the Great Misfortune.  In February 1942--the month that this Popular Mechanics was issued--the Normandie (renamed the USS Lafayette) caught fire, flamed out, capsized, and died. There was some amount of rumor and innuendo that the ship was sunk as a result of foreign intrigue, but a board of inquiry found otherwise.¹ It seems that in the course of refitting that a blow ironically and tragically set on fire a pile of life preservers that were made of very buoyant by highly flammable fibre from the great kapok tree. The very effective fire suppressor was disengaged after the French sailors were led off, and, well, seemingly a lot of other unfortunate things played into one another to the critical result. It was a fatal fire for the ship. I recall seeing very unsettling pictures of the Normandie in LIFE magazine, capsized in shallow water and winter ice mud.

 There were efforts to revive her, retrieve her, bring the great ship back to life in one way or another, but all attempts failed, and the Normandie was sold for scrap in 1946 and was completely gone by 1948.

Notes.

1. "The investigation found evidence of carelessness, rule violations, lack of coordination between the various parties on board, lack of clear command structure during the fire, and a hasty, poorly-planned conversion effort."--Wikipedia