Sometimes it’s the little things that have enormous consequences. An old proverb has it that for want of a nail—and intermediate steps—a kingdom was lost.
The proverb came to mind in January of this year, when television screens showed the cruise ship Costa Concordia capsized on the island of Giglio, off the coast of Italy. Reportedly, the ship’s master diverged from the planned course to give passengers a closer look at the island. Obviously, the look was far too close; the rocky shore tore open the hull, and progressive flooding ensued. For want of following the correct course, the ship was lost.
One can imagine the scene on board as the emergency overtook the 952-foot ship. The lights went out, and the passengers were in the dark—both literally and figuratively, because the initial announcements were reassuring but wildly inaccurate. Fear engulfed the crowd with the swiftness of a highly infectious disease. The ship’s increasing list made the launching of lifeboats difficult, and for some passengers, rescue never came. What had begun as a dream-vacation voyage ended in nightmare. Indeed, some survivors are probably still experiencing sleep intruded upon by flashbacks to that night of disaster.
Seventy years earlier, almost to the week, another great passenger ship faced enormous consequences as the result of something small that went awry. The 1,029-foot French liner Normandie was among the most famous ships in the world when she made her debut. With her sleek lines and extravagant interior, she was a wonder to behold. She had art deco designs and spacious public rooms—opulence embodied as an exhibition of national pride. Her first voyage, which ended in New York on 3 June 1935, earned her the Blue Riband prize for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic to date.
In the years that followed, she regularly plied her trade between New York and Europe. But by 1939, as the drumbeats of approaching war sounded ever louder, the Normandie took refuge at the huge French Line pier on the West Side of Manhattan. On 3 September, the same day Britain and France declared war on Germany, the United States officially interned the great liner. She remained there with a French crew but no passengers.
In the spring of 1941, with France having fallen to German forces, the U.S. Coast Guard sent a detachment of men to guard the ship against sabotage. The Normandie’s prolonged limbo came to an end in December of that year, shortly after the United States entered World War II. The Coast Guard, by then officially part of the Navy Department, took possession of the ship and displaced her French crew. Later that month, the ship was transferred to the Navy and renamed the Lafayette in honor of the Frenchman who aided the American colonists in their 18th-century war of independence.
The Navy’s plan was to convert the liner to a troopship that could carry thousands of American soldiers to Europe. Conversion work got under way in a hurry at the liner’s pier on the Hudson River. As Robert Cressman has written in an excellent Lafayette article in the online Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, the Navy ordered a commissioning date of 11 February 1942. The first sailing was scheduled for three days later.
On 9 February, with work proceeding at a frantic pace, a workman’s welding torch accidentally set afire a bale of kapok life jackets in the vast, open main salon. Wind accelerated the flames, which spread quickly. The New York Fire Department poured water into the ship from pumpers on the starboard side ashore and fireboats to port. Within a few hours, the conflagration was under control, but much of the water used to put out the fire remained in the ship, and more entered through openings in the hull.
In the early hours of 10 February, the day before she was scheduled to be commissioned, the Lafayette capsized to port, rolling through an arc of nearly 80 degrees. Another proverb comes to mind: “Haste makes waste.” Eventually the superstructure was removed and the hull turned upright and salvaged in 1943. But the ship was too far gone to be of any military value to the nation that sought to use her.
In the meantime, footage of the would-be troop transport made a five-second cameo appearance in the 1942 Alfred Hitchcock suspense movie Saboteur. The film had an implausible plot in which a defense worker was falsely accused of burning a California aircraft factory that was actually set on fire by a Nazi agent. The innocent man and his new girlfriend traveled across country to New York in search of the German.
Near the end of the film, the saboteur took a cab ride down Manhattan’s West Side. The German looked out the taxi’s window and saw the capsized Lafayette. The next shot revealed him with a slight smirk of satisfaction. Hitchcock said of the scene, “The Navy raised hell with Universal [Pictures] about these shots because I implied that the Normandie had been sabotaged, which was a reflection of their lack of vigilance in guarding it.” Despite the Navy’s protests, Hitchcock kept the scene in his movie. That brief filmed interlude was among the few contributions the steel leviathan made after coming into American hands.
“For want of a nail . . .”