SS Bremen came in Germany in December 1939. However, the British forgot that they were dealing with the owner of the Blue Ribbon, though in the distant year 1933.Īlready being in the open ocean, SS Bremen built up the maximum speed and easily left the British cruiser behind.įrankly speaking, this did not save the ship. Britain asked the US not to let the ship go to sea, because they were afraid that the liner would be converted by the Germans into the military transport.Īs a result, Britain sent the cruiser which was to escort SS Bremen to the English port. The beginning of the war caught off guard the owner of the Blue Ribbon in the port of New York. The famous SS Bremen had the same tragic story. The crew was afraid of the ship’s seizure by the American or British cruisers that found it. The German Columbus liner, which had the world's first outdoor swimming pool and which was to become significant for HDL, was flooded by the crew in December 1940 near the US coast. "Gray Ghost" became the record holder when she transported 16,082 people across the Atlantic! In general, the ship survived the war well and we will return to her.Īnti-aircraft installations were set on the ship to protect from aircrafts. The remaining nearly 3,000 people were forced to stay permanently on the deck. However, only 12,500 beds were installed. Additional bunks were installed on the ship. Over the years of the war, "Gray Ghost" transported more than 1.5 million people!Īt the end of 1941, it was decreed to increase the capacity of English transports to 15,000 people. Since May 5, 1940, the ship began to participate in the transfer of troops from the Commonwealth countries to England. All the "luxury" was removed from the ship and the capacity was increased from 2,139 passengers to 5,500. The liner began to be popularly called "Gray Ghost". The ship was urgently repainted in protective colors (gray-steel).
Was "called into service" on March 1, 1940, when she was traveling with passengers to New York. One part of ships was sunk, another part left as reparations after the war. German companies we spoke about in the previous parts lost almost all their fleet. We’ll follow the history of companies and individual ships. In this article, we will not go according to the chronology of events. An emergency refitting of the once luxurious liners began in accordance with the needs of the time. Since the beginning of the war, large ships were in high-demand because they served as military transports and hospitals. We will talk about its influence in this article about the history of cruise industry. This destructive war could not but affect the industry. The most terrible war in the history of mankind. We finished the last article on the fact that the Second World War began.
We continue our virtual journey through the