The Normandie fire

At around 2.45 a.m. on 10 February 1942, at Pier 88 on the west side of Manhattan, the burnt-out hull of the Normandie rolled over onto her port side. Once the most beautiful liner in the world, she had for a few weeks been the troop transport USS Lafayette (AP-53). The ship settled into the mud on the bed of the Hudson River, lying at an angle of about 80 degrees. Crowds of New Yorkers watched the smoking wreck from the piers, and for the next eighteen months it was one of the most dispiriting sights in the city.

According to a widespread account, the liner caught fire and capsized in New York harbour, and although the cause was most probably a welder’s torch, the press was full of talk of conspiracies. That is correct, with one clarification of dates: the fire broke out on the afternoon of 9 February, and the ship capsized in the early hours of 10 February.

Haste

The Americans had taken over the Normandie on 12 December 1941, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to her transfer to the navy. Her conversion into a transport for some 15,000 troops was to take a few weeks. The first voyage was scheduled for 14 February 1942. The plan was unrealistic from the start. Several thousand workers of the Robins shipyard were working on the ship at the same time, and the crew of the future warship, numbering fewer than five hundred men at the end of January under Captain Robert Coman, was only just getting to know the enormous and unfamiliar hull. On 6 February the navy agreed to postpone the voyage in order to remove some of the upperworks and improve stability, but the very next day an order came from Washington to keep to the original date. Work resumed at a feverish pace.

Thousands of life jackets filled with kapok, a light plant fibre that floats well but burns easily, were brought aboard. They were stored in the former grand first-class lounge, where lacquered wooden panelling still hung. The ship’s fire-protection system, which had once made the Normandie one of the best-protected ships afloat, had been disconnected during the conversion.

The fire

At around 2.30 p.m. on 9 February a worker, Clement Derrick, was using a torch to remove steel stanchions in the lounge. Sparks fell on a pile of life jackets, which instantly caught fire. Men on board tried to put out the flames with hand extinguishers and blankets, but a strong north-westerly wind drove the fire towards the bow. The New York Fire Department arrived some ten or fifteen minutes later, only to find that its hoses did not fit the French couplings on the ship. Within an hour the fire had engulfed the three upper decks.

Firemen on the pier and on fireboats poured water onto the superstructure all afternoon. At around 6 p.m. the fire was judged to be under control. The water, however, several thousand tons of which had been pumped in, was running down to the lower decks and collecting on the river side. The list increased. The ship’s designer, Vladimir Yourkevitch, who came to the scene, proposed opening the seacocks so that the hull would settle evenly on the shallow bottom by the pier. Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, commander of the Third Naval District, refused to let him aboard and did not take his advice. Shortly after midnight Andrews ordered the ship abandoned, and in the early hours of 10 February the Lafayette capsized, nearly crushing one of the fireboats. Journalists were kept away from the pier.

One man died: Frank Trentacosta of Brooklyn, a member of the ship’s fire watch. According to the navy, nearly three hundred people received medical treatment – sailors and Coast Guardsmen, firemen and shipyard workers, suffering from burns, smoke inhalation or exposure.

Sabotage?

In February 1942 Americans were quick to believe in sabotage. For a month German U-boats had been sinking ships off the East Coast, and the newspapers wrote of spies. Rear Admiral Andrews was in fact also responsible for defending that coast against the U-boats. A fire in the largest ship in the port, on the eve of her first wartime voyage, looked like enemy work. Inquiries were conducted by the navy, the FBI and a special subcommittee of the House of Representatives chaired by Congressman Patrick Drewry. All of them found the fire to be an accident, the result of negligence, breaches of regulations, lack of coordination between the navy, the naval district and the shipyard, and a hasty, badly planned conversion. No evidence of sabotage was found, and nothing emerged after the war to suggest that German intelligence had anything to do with it.

Doubts remained. Alfred Hitchcock cut a shot of the capsized wreck into his 1942 film Saboteur, implying with the villain’s smile that it was his handiwork. The navy, as the director recalled, was furious.

Another version proved the most enduring. In March 1942 the Office of Naval Intelligence in New York, fearing sabotage in the port and contacts between fishermen and U-boats, began cooperating with the underworld, which controlled the waterfront and the longshoremen’s unions. Through Meyer Lansky, the imprisoned Mafia boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano was drawn into the arrangement, and in May 1942 he was moved to a more comfortable prison. This cooperation was later called Operation Underworld. Years later it was claimed in gangland circles that men of Albert Anastasia or of his brother Anthony had set the Normandie on fire to convince the authorities that the port could not be protected without the Mafia. This version is known only from the accounts of those involved. No document confirms it, and the welder’s-torch explanation is well documented. The 1954 report by New York State Commissioner William Herlands on naval intelligence’s dealings with the Mafia made no mention of arson.

Place in the war

The wreck blocked a pier the fleet needed. The navy decided to raise it. The remains of the superstructure were removed, hundreds of openings in the hull were sealed and the water was pumped out. This salvage operation, one of the largest and most expensive in history, costing some 5 million dollars, also served to train navy divers, who were later needed in the captured ports of Europe and the Pacific. On 7 August 1943 the hull was righted. Repairs, however, were judged too costly, and the shipyards and workers were needed elsewhere. The Lafayette never sailed under the American flag. In October 1945 she was struck from the Navy List, and a year later, with the approval of President Harry Truman, she was sold for scrap for a little over 160,000 dollars. Breaking up at Port Newark was completed in 1948.

The loss of the Normandie deprived the Allies of a ship that could carry an entire division across the Atlantic in a single voyage, at a time when troopships for moving forces to Britain were in short supply. The British Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, her former neighbours on the New York waterfront, carried hundreds of thousands of soldiers during the war. In the US Navy the disaster became a warning against diffused responsibility and the neglect of fire-safety rules on ships under conversion, and the cooperation between naval intelligence and the Mafia that began in its shadow had, according to some historians, a sequel in 1943 in the preparations for the landing in Sicily. In 1946 Governor Thomas Dewey, who had once sent Luciano to prison, commuted his sentence in exchange for deportation to Italy.