The seizure of the Normandie

On 12 December 1941, five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and a day after Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, Coast Guard officers dismissed the French crew of a ship that had been lying at Pier 88 in Manhattan for more than two years and took possession of her. She was the Normandie, the pride of the French merchant marine and the largest and fastest liner of her day. Captain Hervé Lehuédé and his men had to leave the ship, and the American government took her over under the right of angary – the right, recognised in international law, of a belligerent state to requisition, against compensation, property of neutral states located on its territory. A few days later President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed to transfer the liner to the Navy, which decided to convert her into a troopship.

Chronologies state briefly that the United States “seized the French ship Normandie”. That is correct, with one qualification: the ship was not captured, since she had long been under American control. She was formally taken over by the Coast Guard, which since 1 November 1941 had been operating as part of the Navy, and the Normandie formally joined the American fleet only at the end of the month.

A ship that was France’s showcase

The Normandie was built by the Penhoët yard at Saint-Nazaire for the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique. She was launched in October 1932 and sailed on her maiden voyage from Le Havre to New York on 29 May 1935. She was more than 313 metres long and of more than 79,000 gross register tons, increased to over 83,000 after a refit in 1936. Her hull, designed by the Russian émigré Vladimir Yurkevich (in France, Vladimir Yourkevitch), had a slender line and a bulbous bow, and her turbo-electric propulsion allowed her to exceed 30 knots. On her very first voyage she won the Blue Riband, crossing the ocean in just over four days, and from then on she competed for it with the British Queen Mary. Her Art Deco interiors, with a dining room longer than the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, made her a floating exhibition of French decorative art. Commercially she was not a success: most of her berths were first class, and she often sailed half empty.

Two years at the pier

On 28 August 1939 the Normandie arrived in New York on her last pre-war voyage. When France entered the war, the company did not risk sending her back across an ocean where U-boats were hunting, and the ship stayed at the pier with part of her crew. The United States, which had declared its neutrality, had neither reason nor right to detain her, but nor would it have allowed her to be armed. In March 1940 the two largest British liners, the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, berthed beside her and soon sailed away to serve as troopships. The Normandie stayed.

After the fall of France in June 1940 the ship became a political problem. She belonged to a French shipowner, and thus indirectly to the state governed by Marshal Pétain from Vichy, with which Washington maintained diplomatic relations. The Americans feared that the crew might scuttle or damage the ship in port, or that Germany would demand that she be handed over. According to some accounts, Coast Guard officers had been standing guard on board since May 1940. In the spring of 1941 the fears grew. In March the crews of Italian ships lying in American ports wrecked their engines to keep them out of American hands, and the Coast Guard seized those ships. In May, when Admiral François Darlan met Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden on 11 May and Vichy began collaborating openly with the Reich, the American government took the Normandie and other French ships in its ports into “protective custody”. The French crew, supervised by American guards, looked after the boilers, the engines and the fire-protection system.

From Normandie to USS Lafayette

The war that Congress declared on Japan on 8 December sealed the ship’s fate. The United States was short of tonnage for carrying troops, and it was hard to leave idle a liner that could take a whole division on board. Conversion into an aircraft carrier was considered, but the simpler and quicker idea of a troopship won out. On 20 December the Navy’s Auxiliary Vessels Board recorded the President’s consent to transferring the ship to the fleet. On 27 December the Navy signed a conversion contract with the Robins Dry Dock company, part of the Todd group, and on 31 December Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox approved a new name: USS Lafayette (AP-53). The name of the Marquis de La Fayette, the French hero of the American War of Independence, was meant to recall the old alliance between the two nations and soften the impression that America had simply taken France’s most beautiful ship. Once converted, the liner was to carry about 15,000 soldiers at a time, and her first voyage was scheduled for 14 February 1942.

When the ship was taken over, not only the French captain but the whole team that had looked after her for two years went ashore. With them went the continuity of supervision over the elaborate fire-protection system, which was meant to detect and put out any fire before it became dangerous. The work was directed by several bodies at once – the Navy, the New York naval district and the shipyard – and the deadlines were changed several times.

Place in the war

At about 2.30 p.m. on 9 February 1942 sparks from a welder’s torch set fire to a pile of life jackets stuffed with flammable kapok, stored in the former first-class lounge. The fire quickly spread through the wooden fittings. The ship’s fire-fighting system had been disconnected, and the New York Fire Department’s hoses did not fit the French couplings. Firemen on the pier and on fireboats poured thousands of tons of water into the hull. The ship began to list, and at about 2.45 a.m. on 10 February she capsized onto her port side and settled on the bottom of the Hudson River. One man was killed, and several hundred firemen, sailors and workers were injured or overcome by smoke.

A congressional committee found the fire to have been an accident, caused by carelessness and haste during the conversion. Many Americans nevertheless suspected sabotage, and New York gangsters later claimed that they had set the ship alight to persuade the authorities to cooperate with the imprisoned Mafia boss Lucky Luciano in protecting the port. The Navy did indeed enter into such cooperation, but there is no evidence of arson. The wreck was raised in August 1943 after one of the most expensive salvage operations in history, but repairs were judged too costly. The Lafayette never sailed under the American flag. In 1946 she was sold for scrap.

The seizure of the Normandie was one of many steps by which, in the first days of the war, the United States gathered everything that could serve to carry troops across the oceans. Of the three great liners that had lain side by side in New York in 1940, the two British ones carried hundreds of thousands of soldiers during the war, while the French one carried none. Her fate became a warning against haste and diffused responsibility, and for the French a symbol of the loss of the most beautiful ship they had ever built.