The streamlined profile of the Normandie.

The Normandie was an ocean liner built in Saint-Nazaire, France in 1935. Originally, she measured 79,280 tons, but when the 81,000 ton RMS Queen Mary was launched, the French Line added a large deckhouse that brought the Normandie's tonnage to 83,423 tons.

The poster Normandie (1935) is Cassandre's most famous design

Though she was designed to represent France in the nation-state contest of the great liners, and though she was built in a French shipyard, parts of her came from all over Europe. The innovative design of her hull was done by Vladimir Yourkevitch, who had been a ship architect in the Imperial Russian Navy before the revolution. The ship's great rudder was built by Skoda in Czechoslovakia. The steering mechanism, including the teak wheel, came from Edinburgh. The most famous poster of the Normandie was made by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre who, like Yourkevitch, was a Russian emigrant to France.

She was 1,029 feet long and 118 feet wide, and was capable of 31 knots. She seemed like a little chunk of France herself and was the second ship to have an outdoor swimming pool. (The Italian liner Rex was the first.) On the Normandie's maiden voyage she became the Blue Riband holder, the world's fastest ship, beating the Rex. Her interiors were marvels of Art Deco and the Streamline Moderne style. Many of her sculptures and wall paintings made indirect or direct allusions to Normandy, the province of France for which she was named. Drawings and photographs from the era show a series of vast public rooms of great elegance. The children's dining room was decorated by Jean de Brunhoff, who covered the walls with Babar the Elephant and his entourage.

The menus kept in archives and museums are witness to the variety and excellence that came out of her kitchens. This ship was a floating promotion of the most sophisticated French cuisine of the period.

The interiors were filled with long perspectives and spectacular entryways such as long, wide staircases in order to give a suitable frame to the many upper middle class ladies who saw an Atlantic crossing as a way to show off their clothes and jewels, and sometimes their husbands.

In addition to a novel hull shape which made it possible for her to attain her great speed at lesser power expenditure than that of the other big liners, the Normandie was filled with technical feats. She had turbo-electric engines which eliminated the massive gearing of other liners and made control and maintenance much easier. The machinery of the top deck and forecastle, normally an eyesore or an annoyance for passengers on the other liners, had been integrated within the ship, giving up nearly all of the exposed deck space to the passengers, and concealing it completely. An early form of radar was installed to detect icebergs and other ships. She was the first liner to have a gyroscopic compass system.

The Normandie had been laid up in New York Harbour along with the Ile De France, another French liner, in the summer of 1939 when World War II started. They were both seized when France fell to the Germans and Japan attacked Pearl harbour.

By 1941 the United States Navy decided to convert the Normandie into a troopship, the aptly named USS Lafayette. On February 9th 1942, during the conversion, sparks from a welding torch ignited a fire in a stack of thousands of lifevests that had been stored in the first class dining room. No woodwork had been removed so the fire spread rapidly. The ship had a very efficient semi-automatic fire extinguishing system, but all of the original crew had been removed (the US feared the possibility of sabotage) and the US Navy personel and the contractors did not know how to turn it on. They all fled the ship. The water being poured from fireboats caused her to turn over, crushing a fireboat and getting still more water in the decks. When the fire was extinguished, the world's most expensive salvage operation started, but when the hull was finally righted in 1943 there was no longer a need for such a large troopship. Eventually the French Line planned to cut her down to size but in the end she was scrapped.

Side elevation and cutaway, revealing the vast amount of internal space devoted to the Normandie's public rooms

Specifications

• 79,280/83,423 gross tons
• 1,029ft (313.6m) overall length / 118ft (36m) beam.
  
• Engines: steam turbo-electric, four electric motors driving four screws, 130,000 shaft horsepower, designed speed 29 knots.
• 1972 passengers (848 first-(cabin) class, 670 tourist class, 454 third class), 1345 crew.
  

References

• Brinnin, John Malcolm. The Sway of the Grand Saloon : a Social History of the North Atlantic. New York : Delacorte Press, 1971
• Coleman, Terry. The liners : a history of the North Atlantic crossing. Harmondsworth, England : Penguin Books, 1977
• Fox, Robert. Liners: The Golden Age. Die Grosse Zeit der Ozeanriesen. L'Age d'or des paquebots.[trilingual text ] Cologne: Konneman, 1999.
• Kludas, Arnold. Record breakers of the North Atlantic - Blue Riband Liners 1838-1952, Chatham Publishing, London, 2000.
• Maddocks, Melvin The Great Liners. Alexandria, Virginia: Time-Life Books, 1978.
• Maxtone-Graham, John. The Only Way to Cross. New York: Collier Boooks, 1972.