The luxurious British ocean liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, the largest and fastest passenger
ships in the world, were requisitioned by the British Admiralty for duty ferrying American
GI’s to the European battles happening across the Atlantic. The RMS Queen Mary was a key factor
in winning the first battle at El Alamein, and her ability to carry whole divisions of troops
made her a threat to enemy forces, especially during her participation in Operation Bolero.
Generally speaking, the men who traveled aboard the Queen Mary preferred her to
all other troopships or military vessels, but, the ship had one major downside, she was easy
to roll even in mild seas…so much so, she was referred to in the early years by the endearing,
and yet ominous nickname: The Rolling Mary.
Now, all ships roll with the sea, but the Queen Mary was quite
famous for rolling easily and frequently. You see, her metacentric height was not low enough.
The Queen Mary was originally designed and constructed specifically to carry a total of 27
double-ended scotch boilers, but during her final year of construction, Cunard decided they wanted
to use 24 yarrow boilers instead, leaving only 3 scotch boilers on the ship, the Yarrow boilers
were more fuel-efficient, however, they also weighed a little less than scotch boilers.
The result was that the ship would be ever so slightly top-heavy. The difference was calculated
to be imperceptible, but in the end, the ship would roll quite noticeably even in mild seas.
It was once said by an officer that a strong breeze would cause the ship to roll the milk out of a cup of tea.
In the first few months of her operating life, over 20
miles of bakelite handrails were retro-actively added to the ship, so passengers could hold on.
Despite her famous rolling, it didn’t render the ship dangerous on a fair-weathered crossing,
but…there came a day during the war that the ship would be put to the ultimate test.
In December of 1942, the Queen Mary was carrying roughly 16,000 American troops
on a journey across the Atlantic towards Scotland.
She ran into a rather nasty storm that churned the seas around her, she encountered swells up
to 65 feet, and gale-force winds that whipped sea spray against her hull.
The Queen pitched backwards as she crested the waves, and suddenly, she plunged into a rather
deep trough, and rising above her was a massive wave larger than any she’d experienced before.
It was a rogue wave towering over 90 feet tall, it slammed into her starboard side,
knocking loose the lifeboats, smashing windows on the bridge, and punching open various portholes
throughout the ship. The force had caused the ship to roll 52 degrees off vertical, only 3
more degrees of tilt and she would have certainly capsized, killing most, if not everyone aboard.
With great determination, the mighty Queen of the Sea slowly righted herself, overcoming the
forces of the ocean with the strength of her engines and the power of her rudder.
Many of the men aboard had either been washed into the hallways, or been injured
as the violent rolling had thrown them about. The GI’s began donning their life vests as
they had assumed they were by a torpedo, they were soon assured the danger was over…the Mary
had survived the worst that the sea could throw at her. This incident would go down
in history as one of the greatest potential disasters the Queen Mary had ever overcome.
With her reputation for safely transporting hundreds of thousands of troops across the
oceans of the world, you can imagine the level of trust that war officials had for this ship.
Whenever Defense commanders from either the United States or Great Britain needed to hop across the
pond, they often chose to travel aboard the Mary. One war official in particular, had always had a
fondness for the stately liner even in her peacetime service. During the war,
he often traveled to meet with U.S. officials and did so under the pseudonym
“Colonel Warden”. This was necessary for him to safely travel without being tracked by the enemy.
His real name was Winston Churchill, the famous Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
He always preferred to stay in the same cabin suite on Main Deck, and though the cabins had
their furnishings removed to make way for several bunks, whenever Churchill was scheduled to cross
the Atlantic, his private stateroom would have to be restored with all its fine furnishings. And the
crew knew to keep a couple bottles of Scotch stocked aboard the ship, specifically for him.
Churchill loved the Queen Mary, and often dictated the use of certain public rooms.
The first-class drawing room, for instance, would be used as a conference room whenever he was on
board with a large group of officials. Otherwise he would use his own cabin as a board room.
During one of his secretly scheduled voyages to the United States on May 4th, 1943
the ship was loaded up with 5,000 German prisoners of war. The prisoners were kept in
the lower cargo and mail holds within the bow of the ship. There are many stories of
the living conditions the POW’s experienced during the voyage. It’s sometimes said that
they were locked in there for the duration of the journey and when it came time to feed them,
the food was often lowered to the various levels through the forward hatch on the Forecastle deck.
The cargo holds were cold, cramped, without any furnishings and were among the most dangerous
places to be on the ship during rough weather because the bow of the ship could rise and fall
by 30 or more feet within a matter of seconds. The men inside wouldn’t have been able to stand for
very long, and would likely be clinging to each other so they didn’t tumble about the steel decks.
As Churchill boarded the ship in secrecy at 4 am, he was warned that lice had been
found on the Queen Mary, and that he may want to take a different ship,
to which he responded, “I can scratch as well as anyone.”
On the return trip to Scotland, the ship was carrying 15,000 troops when the Mary narrowly
avoided a massive explosion just 300 feet from the hull. To this day no one knows for sure what
the cause of the explosion was, but it is widely believed the ship triggered a mine.
This leads one to wonder just how effective the degaussing strip along her hull, really was.
While the Queen Mary constantly broke records with the sheer number of human lives being carried on
her various voyages, she reached her highest record ever on July 25th 1943 when she sailed
with a grand total of 16,683 souls onboard. No vessel in human history has ever carried that
many people at once, not before that day, and not ever since. She still holds that record.
Perhaps one of the most important days in the entirety of the Mary’s war time service came
on August 4th 1943. Winston Churchill and other British war officials were traveling to Quebec
to attend a planning conference for the Normandy invasion. They converted the third class smoking
room into a planning room, to rehearse their proposals for the allied committee.
Churchill had brought with him models of the Mulberry Harbours, they were the artificial
harbors that would help facilitate offloading of supplies onto the beaches of Normandy.
He wanted to test them before presenting them to the allies,
so he and his admiral went up to his stateroom bathtub, to build a makeshift model of the beach.
He set up the Mulberry Harbours while the Admiral made waves in the bathtub water,
at Churchill’s insistence, they continued to test the models until 2 am in the morning.
It was on this voyage that Winston Churchill and his officials had planned the final battles
of the war. Some might say these plans could have been conducted on any ship,
that it was merely a coincidence that it happened on this one. But anyone who knows Churchill’s love
of this grand liner, knows that it was always destined to be done aboard the Queen Mary.
With the ship being used mainly as a workhorse, transporting the troops,
it’s rather fascinating how the Queen Mary attained little vandalism during
those 6 years of duty to the British Admiralty.
The ship’s master, Commodore Bisset of the British Merchant Navy,
made it a point to speak to all the American troops at the start of each voyage and
explain to them the importance of the ship’s rare and exotic wood paneling, and the various artworks
created by both American and British artists alike. His plea for them to not deface the ship
was heard by everyone aboard. And Commodore Bisset had offered an alternative to the troops, telling
them that they may carve words and pictures into the ship’s teak wood railing on the Sun Deck.
Over the course of several years, thousands of men carved images and messages on that railing.
The Commodore asked Cunard to keep the carvings so that future generations can
appreciate the rails as a memorial for the brave men who sailed the ship to war.
But Cunard would later order the rails to be sanded smooth and refinished.
Although they did keep a six-foot section, and later donated it to the U.S. Army Archives.
The British Commodore bragged about the good discipline the Americans had, it was proven
to him on a particular voyage when the Mary had to sail out of New York during low water.
Loaded with 15,000 troops, it was estimated the Queen’s keel would barely clear the Hudson Tunnel
by a mere 4 feet. If the men on the ship gathered to one side while waving goodbye to their country,
the ship could list and strike the underwater tunnel. So the Commodore alerted all the men of
their orders ahead of time, and when the ship was ready to cross over the tunnel,
Bisset commanded them over the loudspeaker, and every man spread out and stood motionless.
The Commodore later mused, “It worked. I have never in my life seen grown men stand so still.”
After the D-day invasion, the Queen Mary would be rerouted to bring fresh reinforcements directly to
Europe. She spent the final year of war, battling voyage after voyage to supply the allied forces
with their much needed GI’s. Winston Churchill could see that the end of the war was in sight,
due in no small part to the two Cunard Queens. And when May of 1945 rolled around,
allied forces claimed their victory. Six years after it had begun, the war in Europe
was finally over. In the coming months, the Japanese would surrender,
and the United States would officially announce the end of the Second Great War.
The Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth weren’t quite done with their duty,
they were both tasked with ferrying the war veterans, both men and women, back home.
The Queen Elizabeth specifically transported Canadians to Halifax, Nova Scotia,
while Queen Mary transported Americans to New York. Every time the Mary arrived, she paraded up the Hudson
to the roar of cheers, and cries of joy, proudly clutching her brood of brave servicemen and women.
With each arrival, the city erupted louder. It was an unforgettable moment in the life of the
stately ocean liner, she was celebrated not just as a successful troopship, but she was regarded as
a valiant war veteran to people the world over.
In January of 1946 the Mary was sailing to
Southampton to be refitted for a new mission, to carry thousands of war brides and their
children to the United States to be with their American husbands. The grey paint on her funnels
was stripped away and repainted with the Cunard colors, although the rest of her hull remained
grey, and inside the ship, most of the steel bunks were removed, and hundreds of beds and cribs were
installed in the various cabins. In February she made her first voyage carrying the war brides,
the kitchens aboard the ship were busy around the clock preparing bottles of warm baby formula.
It took 9 months between 1946 and 1947 to refit the Queen Mary for luxury passenger service in
an effort that has been described as the largest reconversion job ever undertaken on a merchant ship.
"The second-greatest liner in the world, the Queen Mary, which did such great war work as a trooper,
"is to resume her transatlantic service at the end of July."
"Equipped, of course, with the last word in radar,
"she's been having her luxury accommodation brought equally up-to-date."
"Altogether, the 81,000 tonne Cunarder, will soon be providing high-speed service on her old run.
"incidentally earning many urgently needed dollars for Britain."
Her thousands of pieces of furniture, dinnerware, cutlery, artwork, and fittings that
had been stored at various docks around the globe were all carefully shipped back to Southampton.
It was during this time that Cunard took the opportunity to modernize some of the spaces for
the new mid-century aesthetics.
For example, the area on Promenade Deck called Piccadilly Circus
had its original chestnut wood panneling replaced with panels of pastel-colored hide.
The new leather coverings also helped to reduce noise echo.
The staterooms themselves were in relatively good shape, they just required a basic cleansing, some
repainting, and re-installation of the furniture. All in all, the Queen Mary was returned to proper
working order as a luxury ocean liner, and on July 31st, 1947,
the ship was ready to resume her peacetime service as the Queen of the North Atlantic.
During the largest war in world history, the RMS Queen Mary had served a most honourable duty.
She transported 810,730 troops to war, many of whom would never return home.
She steamed 570,000 nautical miles across the world on more than 75 voyages.
She set a new record for the most people transported on a single voyage with 16,683 souls on board;
the first ship ever, capable of transporting whole divisions of soldiers at a time.
In those dark days, she helped win the first battle at El Alamein, she led the efforts of
Operation Bolero, she survived a collision with a British cruiser, she came close to capsizing when
struck by a 90-foot rogue wave, and she narrowly avoided a direct hit with an underwater mine.
All of this, while enemy submarines around the world spent six years hunting her down
in an effort to claim a large bounty. Sir Winston Churchill credited the
two Cunard Queens by saying that their troop-carrying capacity and fast speed
had helped the allied forces to shorten the war by a year. A very big compliment, indeed.
By the year 1967, the Queen Mary was no longer needed for transatlantic service,
airplanes had become the dominant means of getting across the oceans. When Cunard
announced they were retiring both Queens, it was as if the world felt a sudden shudder,
letters flooded in pleading with Cunard not to scrap the ships. The Queen Mary was won at auction
from the most unlikely of bidders, the California community of Long Beach had put up the largest
sum to acquire the famous Queen and promised that their intentions were to preserve her.
The Mary would need to sail to Long Beach under her own power, one last final voyage,
the longest distance she had ever undertaken in her life.
The British people gathered at Cunard’s Southampton docks for one final wave goodbye to the grand old lady:
like saying bon voyage to a dear old friend.
Too big to fit through the Panama Canal, she spent 39 days at sea, sailing around the dangerous Cape Horn.
Even in her advancing age, she was still quite strong, arriving safely in California,
and greeted by the largest flotilla of vessels she had ever encountered,
over 5,000 watercraft had come to meet her. Ships of the US Navy blasted their horns as
the USS Long Beach flew signal flags that read “Welcome home Queen Mary”.
And here she sits, living out her retirement in the calm waters of the harbor,
a piece of history, seemingly frozen in time.
In 1972, the Queen Elizabeth was in Hong Kong being converted to a floating university
when she caught fire and sank. Such rare artifacts and history were lost forever.
But the Queen Mary still stands, she isn’t lost, she is still here, ready to teach new generations,
not just about the golden age of travel, but about our veterans who served in a war so devastating,
it altered the course of humanity forever.
By walking her decks, you can step back in time if only for a moment, to appreciate a piece of
our world heritage. And you can marvel at her rare Art Deco style, all tucked away
within the grand halls and lounges of this stately liner, this heroic veteran, RMS Queen Mary.