February 1942, the fire ladders of the FDNY spring into action at an alarm.
At Chelsea, right on the waterfront, something big is burning.
As they approach, bells ringing.
They can see a great column of smoke reaching high into the sky.
Arriving on scene, they’re confronted with a giant.
The palatial French line of Normandy is on fire.
Building fires are one thing, but handling a burning ship is another.
Pumping too much water in can make the massive structure.
All 80,000 tons of it roll over.
The steel skeleton of the ship can begin to glow with heat.
Metal plates can warp and bend.
Entire decks can collapse.
This will be unlike any fire most of the firemen have ever had to deal with before.
And as France’s pride burns, her designer tries desperately to warn of impending disaster.
But he will be ignored.
SS Normandy was an icon of the 1930s.
Sleek, powerful, and above all, luxurious.
But war would overtake her glamorous career and see her seized by France’s allies for conversion into troop ship duties.
A conversion that would never be finished.
Instead, she would burn.
And the story of the fire that destroyed her leaves many questions unanswered to this day.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs.
And uh as much as it pains me to retell it, this is the story of the blazing inferno that destroyed the SS Normandy.
Normandy, a palatial French wonders ship so grand and spectacular that she became a legend.
At the time of her maiden voyage, she was the largest ship in the world.
And her innovative hull design, the brainchild of Russian naval architect Vladimir Yovich, also made her the fastest.
When she steamed into New York for the very first time, an estimated 100,000 people crowded Dockside to celebrate her record-breaking transatlantic crossing, in which she’d managed to shave a staggering 10 hours off the time of the previous record holder, the Italian liner Rex.
But the Normandy wasn’t only built for sheer speed.
Her interiors redefined art deco elegance with sparkling fountain-like illuminated columns throughout that earned her the nickname the ship of light.
Normandy’s first class was an almost overwhelming feast for the senses.
From the massive dramatic guilt panels to the elaborate carvings, floor to-seeiling artwork and decor that reflected pure French decadence.
In terms of sheer magnificence at sea, there was simply no comparison before or since.
For 4 years, she reigned the seas, the pinnacle of ship building and the pride of her home country.
But tragically, the sparkle of this wondership was not to last.
The year was 1941 and the world was on the brink of an allout bloodbath.
The rise of Nazi Germany and Hitler’s bloody campaign on Europe were casting a heavy paw over the world at large with no end in sight.
During this time, the Atlantic had become the focus of a brutal battle with the Allies fighting to maintain control of pivotal shipping routes which had become infested with deadly German Ubot.
Varying troops across these wartorrn waters required large, fast, and sturdy ships capable of outrunning coordinated convoys of hubot known as wolfpacks.
Often the solution was found in the mighty ocean liner.
Agile, strong, and capable of carrying thousands of souls across the ocean.
Once converted for wartime duties, these luxurious floating palaces were capable of turning the tides of war.
At this point in the conflict, many of the world’s most famous liners were caught in limbo.
their home countries still debating on how best to use them for the war effort, while others were devising plans to safely retrieve their ships from foreign harbors.
Such was the case for the crown jewel of the French fleet, the SS Normandy, which lay mothal in New York Harbor, her crew stripped of their duties, and her future uncertain.
When the war had broken out in 1939, she’d been held at her birth at Pier 88 in New York once she had landed there, as it was far too risky to send her home through war torn waters to a country caught in the crossfires.
And so there she waited, the days turning to months.
A year passed and the news was going from bad to worse.
Normad’s home country of France had finally fallen to the Nazis and roughly 40% of the country’s territory was carved out into a Nazi puppet state known as Vichy France.
This left the Normandy and much of the rest of the majestic French fleet of ocean liners with no place to call home.
Many of them laid up in New York while the rest were divvied up between the Germans and the Vichy French to repurpose as military transports.
It wasn’t just the French going without their fleet either.
Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth as well as the Aquitania Braymond and others joined the Normandy in this early war purgatory in New York City.
But slowly and surely as the war raged on, the Normandy’s British and German counterparts were pulled from their births and sent home for their wartime assignments.
But there would be no such luck for the lovely Normandy.
She remained mothballled, her skeleton crew bored nearly to tears, her sparkle diminishing under layers of dust.
Legally, the Normandy remained in French hands, but it was unknown if or when she would ever reach her next port of call.
Now, she was a sitting duck, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before she’d be called up for the war.
The only questions were when and for which side.
She was known the world over for being a strong, towering, and blisteringly fast ship and nothing if not a capable seafarer.
While still technically the property of her owners, the company general transatlantic or CGT French line, that company was now in the hands of the Nazi aligned Vichy French government, casting an ominous shadow over the ship’s future.
Nervous whispers of sabotage or espionage seemed to be on everyone’s lips, especially since the French skeleton crew that remained on board were openly loyal to the Vichy regime.
On April 15th, 1941, the FBI intercepted a report written by a German spy by the name of Kurt Ludvig.
In the report written in invisible ink was the message at Pier 88 North is still Normandy.
The Germans intentions behind the message were anyone’s guess, but clearly the situation was delicate to say the least.
Meanwhile, the Normandy had become a spectacle of the New York waterfront, attracting tourists and onlookers curious to feast their eyes on the Versailles Palace afloat.
Almost three years since she had last birthed in New York, she remained frozen in time.
An almost cruel reminder of the elegance and prosperity of the country that had built her, a country that now she could no longer call home.
Then dawn broke on December 7th, 1941, that day which would live in infamy.
With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States had officially been pulled into the Second World War.
Within days, Germany and Italy joined with their ally Japan to declare war on America.
And with that, all the great powers of the world were poised to unleash hell.
It was to be arguably the darkest, bloodiest time in world history.
For the Normandy, this meant a somewhat less uncertain future.
Of course, she was officially seized by American authorities just days later on December 12th.
A statute known as the right of angry dictated that the United States was within its rights to declare ownership of enemy property on its territory.
And with the Normandy having not moved an inch since 1939, and the Vichy French now officially a belligerent nation, the ship was put squarely into American hands.
But what to do with a ship like the Normandy? She was a powerhouse of a thing, and debates swirled around whether she would be more capable as a troop ship, an aircraft carrier, or even as an armed auxiliary cruiser.
The most obvious choice would have been to convert her for troop ship duties, much like her Cunard and Frenchline counterparts had.
But even once her conversion was underway, there was speculation that the plans might change, with some arguing that a single well-placed torpedo could mortally wound the ship thanks to the arrangement of her watertight compartments.
And insisting she would be better suited as an aircraft carrier.
And just to add more confusion to the matter, the New York Times was quick to erroneously print that the military had been in talks to see her converted to a raider.
All this debate did very little to change the original plan.
After a frustrating amount of back and forth, it was decided that Normy’s future would look much like the ocean liners that had been caught in the crossfires of war before her.
Britain was simply put in dire need of troops, and a ship with the capacity and speed of Normandy could alleviate this strain in just a single quick hop across the Atlantic.
But she would need to be made ready very soon.
The initial deadline given to complete that conversion was January 31st, and the ship would be ready for her first sailing on the 14th of February.
This meant she would need to be stripped bare and completely fitted out for wartime duties, ready to be guided out of her birth just 5 weeks after her acquisition.
This tight deadline highlighted two immediate glaring problems.
The first being that it would require nothing short of a miracle to complete the conversion from the world’s largest luxury liner to a Spartan troop ship, including all equipment and weapons called for by the military in that short time frame.
But the second being possibly the most dire of the two.
The Americans simply weren’t familiar with their new ship to ensure that the conversion could be completed safely and efficiently.
Nor, it appears, did they care enough to learn.
While the French Skeleton crew had taken the New American crew through the basics of running and maintaining her engines and given them a crash course in the ship’s operation, almost all of the manuals, signs, labels, and written instructions on board were in French, and there simply wasn’t enough time to deal with the language barrier or to learn the new ropes of an unfamiliar ship.
The Americans were just going to have to do it the American way.
Now, the first order of business would be to contract out the conversion work itself.
Normandy had been built by the deft, skillful hands of the Itellier Eshantier de la shipyard in San Nazair, France.
And now she was to be ripped to shreds by the Robins dry dock and repair company, a subsidiary of Todd Shipyards based in Brooklyn.
In elegant a solution though it was, the truth was that no shipyard or dry dock in New York was large enough to accommodate the massive liner.
So she would need to stay at Pier 88 with workers coming to her instead.
The decision to entrust the conversion of the majestic liner to an unheard of third rate shipyard was one of convenience, if not necessity.
But there was no denying that it would be a far cry from the kid glove treatment she had received at her dry dock back home.
Before any work could begin in earnest, though the ship would have to be gutted.
By Christmas of 1941, the once palatial Normandy was swarmed with workers from the Chelsea Warehouse Company, eager to strip her bare and rinse her clean of everything that had once made her beautiful.
2,400 van loads of valuables were unloaded from the Normandy and put into storage, totaling between 6 to 8 million.
Decor, fixtures, artwork, rugs, glass panels, and much of the rest of the ship’s valuables were organized and stored away with care.
But it would be a very long time before any of it saw the light of day again.
Gone were the guilt panels, the sparkling illuminated columns, the statues, and the artwork.
Even the famous sign beneath the ship’s funnels bearing her name was pulled clean from the deck.
There would be no longer any use for a sign bearing the name Normandy because now should be known as the USS Lafayette.
It was of course important to make sure that the world’s largest passenger ship would have adequate fire protection during the conversion.
The French had seen to it that their elegant flagship was more than well equipped to deal with a fire at sea.
On board, she was fitted with all the latest technology to prevent, detect, and extinguish fires in short order.
The ship featured an ultramodern sprinkler system throughout, plus a state-of-the-art early detection system, fire doors, water pumps, 224 fire alarms, and nearly 250 fire cupboards filled with all manner of firefighting equipment, plus 504 fire hose connections.
and a direct line to the New York Fire Department right from her bridge.
On board were 84 fire stations which all needed to be patrolled and checked throughout the day.
Each time a crew member passed a station, they pressed a button to light up a light corresponding to the station on the central control board.
Once all 84 lights were lit, the new rotation began.
For all intents and purposes, Normandy should have been a fireproof fortress.
Unfortunately, all of this equipment can do very little to stop a fire without the crew members to man it.
In the business, that’s what we call foreshadowing.
When occupied by her French crew, she was fully manned with 20 firemen.
In American hands, this was reduced to eight, and many of those assigned to fire duties had received little to no firefighter training, and some never bothered to take part in fire drills and had never been assigned to fire stations at all.
To make things even worse, her direct connections to the New York City Fire Department had been disabled during work on the bridge.
It was simply never repaired.
In mid January, Walter Kidden Co.
conducted a survey of the ship’s firefighting equipment.
Thoronus was not the name of the game at this point for the Americans, and this survey amounted to checking three or four or more of the more than 600 fire extinguishers on board, noting that they would be ineffective since they were not built to American specifications.
It was recommended that all fire extinguishers be removed and replaced with their American counterparts, but no replacements ever arrived.
It was also found that the ship would require fire hose couplings that could be compatible with American fire hoses.
Though an effort was made to replace the couplings with compatible ones, the job was never finished, leaving the ship with a jumbled combination of American and French hose connections.
As work progressed, every deck, public space, crew area, and cabin was being swarmed with thousands of men working around the clock to complete the conversion work in short time.
It wouldn’t be enough to simply strip the Normandy to nothing and paint her gray.
Bunks were needed to accommodate up to 14,800 troops.
The dog kennel became an armory.
The children’s playroom became the radar room.
The lush and lively winter garden became a washroom.
Its floor to-seeiling windows overlooking the bow were blacked out with sheet iron.
Bars became troop cantens.
The once luxurious dining saloon became a mesh hall.
All the pomp and splendor that made the Normandy a floating palace was now replaced with spartan utilitarian accommodations meant strictly for the theaters of war.
Where the Normandy spirit once sang like a majestic chorus, the Lafettes now seem to drone in bleak marching cadence.
But I guess that’s war.
Meanwhile, by the end of January, the deadline to complete all of this work was creeping closer by the second.
Time was clearly not on the Navy’s side.
She was still due to sail on the 14th of February, and please made to the Bureau of Ships for an extension of just a few weeks were denied.
If the scene aboard the Normandy had already been a disorganized mess, it was about to devolve into full-blown chaos.
More people now flooded the decks of the Normandy than she had ever carried during her years of passenger service.
Security became an almost comically impossible task given that members of the military, surveyors, and contractors from various companies.
They were all coming and going around the clock with no way of vetting the legitimacy of anyone who stepped on board.
This had actually been demonstrated rather elegantly in early January by a newspaper reporter named Edmund Scott, who had been given one single assignment by his superiors at PM newspaper.
See if you can get on board the Normandy.
Well, the report Scott later wrote for the newspaper wouldn’t find its way to print because it would leave America’s newest and largest ship open to sabotage.
But the story read, “For the last 2 days, I’ve been wandering all over the Normandy.
I’ve been lighting imaginary fires.
I’ve been planting imaginary bombs.
I’ve succeeded in destroying a dozen times over the second biggest ship in the world.
” Normandy, it seemed, was impossible to secure.
Coast Guardsman RM Epstein later said, “A handful of us were supposed to check thousands of workers.
They wore buttons, Todd, Robins, etc.
, but Christ, you could have worn a Mickey Mouse button and walked around.
” So went the final months of the Normy’s life.
Keeping her safe stood secondary to making her fit for war.
There was simply too much to be done in such a short amount of time, and the manpower needed to do it all created a security and logistics nightmare.
By early February, 3,182 men were charged with various tasks aboard the Normandy.
And amidst the cacophony of workers hammering, soaring, and welding their way through the ship, one task in particular had given the workers pause in the early days of conversion.
The removal of the four towering column light fixtures mounted to the floor of the Grand Lounge.
While they could easily remove the decorative glass that covered the fixtures, the stansions or the poles that remained mounted to the floor would require an acetylene torch to take out.
Now, with fire safety being paramount, it was initially decided that this would be too much of a hazard to attempt right away.
And with more pressing matters at hand, the job was shelved for later.
Dawn broke on February 9th, 1942.
The Normandy would need to be made ready for war in under a week’s time.
Henry Mikin, who was the overseer of the Robin’s dry dock workers on board, was tasked with assembling a team and devising a plan to finally remove those pesky metal stansions from the Grand Lounge.
The task itself was a fairly small, inconsequential one.
Like much of the fixture removal around the ship, it was merely another box to be checked off on the to-do list.
Mikin tapped Alonsus Gateley, the company’s welding supervisor, to spearhead the job, who then pulled welder Clement Derek from his task in the new water distilling plant located in the area of the swimming pool on D-De and charged him with the task of cutting through the four stansions using his welding torch.
Derek would be aided by nine other workers who would each lend their skills to make sure the stansions could be removed safely.
He would be in charge of cutting through the steel columns while the rest of his cohort would man guide ropes to steadily lower the stansions to the ground after they’d been completely cut through.
All the while, fire watchers stood by, one man protecting the area with a metal shield, another holding a board made of asbestous above the shield to contain any errant sparks that may try to ricochet off.
And there were buckets of water kept by as well to contain any flames that could erupt.
The task wasn’t overly complex, nor was it in any way much different from the hundreds of other similar welding tasks that had come before it.
The men got to work guarding the posts down as Derek cut through them one by one.
The fire watchers being careful to guard against the sparks emitting from the welder’s torch.
Save for one wayward ember that set a small piece of paper al light and was quickly extinguished.
All went more or less according to plan.
The workers came to cut the final stansion.
Once Derek completed his cut, the stansion would be guided to the ground by the workers and they could go on their merry way.
As the welder went in to free the metal column from its base, 18-year-old Charles Collins, who’d been helping out with the asbestous shielding, saw something flash out of the corner of his eye.
A spark from Derek’s torch had flown off and escaped the shields, landing on a nearby bail of life preservers, which all happened to be filled with capok, a very buoyant, very light, but highly flammable material.
Within seconds, the bail ignited.
Collins hardly had time to react before the fire spread to the other nearby bales of life jackets.
In total, over 1,400 of these extremely flammable things had been stacked in virtually every corner of the Grand Lounge, and soon they were being reduced to kindling for an outofcrol blaze.
The workers sprang into action to contain the fire, beating at it with their coats, rugs, anything they could get their hands on.
But sadly for the Normandy, the fire was quickly spreading, and almost everything that played out after this point could only be described as a comedy of errors.
Leroy Rose, another worker helping with the task, took it upon himself to retrieve the emergency water buckets nearby, but he immediately spilled one and accidentally poured the other on a fellow worker.
Another worker valiantly attempted to toss away some of the bales, only to have one break open over a flame, sending burning life jackets raining down all over the place.
Three separate fire hoses were found to either not be functioning at all or had American fittings that wouldn’t fit with the French stand pipes nearby.
At the same time, a sailor pulled a fire extinguisher from a cabinet and attempted to use it to dampen the flames, only to find out he had no idea how to use it, and he he quickly gave up on the idea altogether.
Within just a couple of minutes, flames were now eating their way through the entirety of the Normy’s Grand Lounge, and the men on board [music] were simply too poorly trained and illquipped to stop it.
They needed help and fast.
A member of the fire watch team telephoned the bridge, alerting the coast guardsman stationed there of the blaze and begging him to notify the fire department via the direct line on the bridge.
But then ineptitude struck once again.
This of course was the line that had been disabled early in the conversion and it had never been reconnected.
The fire would have a 12 full minutes of eating the Normandy from the inside out nearly unabated before the New York City Fire Department was even notified.
Finally, a sailor ran down the gangway in a panic, alerting a passing police officer who was able to activate the nearby fire alarm on the pier.
Within just 3 minutes, fire trucks began descending on the pier, their sirens wailing, their men scrambling to deploy fire hoses and find their way aboard the burning ship.