9/269/2007

Queen Mary Saw Service in Peace and War
By Tom Range, Sr.

The Queen Mary

On September 19, 1967, 40 years ago, the RMS Queen Mary completed her final voyage, her 1,001st crossing of the Atlantic.  Her maiden voyage was completed in May 1936.  She bears the name of the queen-consort of King George VI, the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom during the 1930s, the period in which the ship was constructed.

The Cunard Line Queen Mary, designated RMS for Royal Mail Steamship upon her entry into service, proved to be a popular rival to the French ship Normandie.  In her first year of sailing, Queen Mary exceeded the speed of her French rival and captured the Blue Riband award, with average speeds crossing the Atlantic in excess of 30 knots.  Her record speeds in 1938 crossings were not exceeded until 1952, by the American ship SS United States.

At the start of a fateful voyage, the Queen Mary sailed for New York on September 1, 1939.  By the time she arrived, the Second World War had started, and she was ordered to stay where she was, joining her great rival Normandie, which had been interned when France fell to the Nazis.  In 1940, the pair was also joined by Queen Mary's running mate Queen Elizabeth. 

Rather than keeping them bottled up, it was decided to use them as troopships.  So, the Queen Mary left New York for Sydney, Australia where she, along with several other liners, was converted into a troopship to carry Australian and New Zealand soldiers to the United Kingdom.  Eventually joined by the Queen Elizabeth, they were the largest troopships involved in the war, often carrying as many as 15,000 troops in a single voyage.  During this period, because of their wartime gray camouflage livery and elusiveness, both "Queens" received the nickname "The Gray Ghost."  Because of their size and prestige, their sinking was such a high priority for Germany that Adolph Hitler offered the equivalent of $250,000 and the Iron Cross to the U-boat commander who could sink them.

During her World War II service, from March 1940 to September 1946, Queen Mary carried a total of 765,429 military personnel, up to 15,000 troops on each voyage and steamed a total of 569,429 miles.  Prime Minister Winston Churchill was a passenger three times on his way to conferences in North America.  She even carried nearly 13,000 G.I. war brides and their children to the United States. 

After her military service she resumed peacetime passenger service by July 1947.  The "Queens" dominated the transatlantic passenger trade.  But in 1958, the first transatlantic flight by a jet began a completely new era of competition for the Cunard Line's Queens.  After many voyages, winters especially, Queen Mary sailed into harbor with more crew than passengers. 

By 1965 the entire Cunard fleet was leaving a wake of red ink.  Hoping to continue financing their still under construction Queen Elizabeth 2, Cunard mortgaged Queen Mary and the rest of the fleet.  Finally, under the combination of age, lack of public interest and inefficiency in a new market, Cunard announced that Queen Mary would be sold.  Many offers were submitted but it was Long Beach, California who beat the Japanese scrap merchants. And so, Queen Mary was retired from service in 1967, while her running mate Queen Elizabeth was withdrawn in 1968.  The RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 took over the transatlantic route in 1969, and in turn was joined in 2004 by RMS Queen Mary 2.

RMS Queen Mary departed on her "last grand cruise" on the morning of October 31, 1967, destination Long Beach where she arrived on December 9, 1967.  The city of Long Beach acquired ownership of Queen Mary, now no longer an RMS, where she still serves as a tourist attraction.  She received international attention once again when she appeared in the 1972 motion picture "The Poseidon Adventure" as a stand-in early in the film for the ill-fated fictional ship SS Poseidon, which was overturned by a huge tidal wave, an incident that nearly happened to Queen Mary in 1942.