March marks the 70th anniversary of RMS Queen Elizabeth’s secret wartime maiden voyage across the Atlantic to join her sister ship RMS Queen Mary in New York harbour. First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, had ordered the liner to leave its Clydebank fitting-out basin and make its heroic dash to safety.
Churchill had known only too well the vital role the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth would play in the war. The liners, working in tandem, could transport whole armies across the globe in a matter of weeks.
With untested engines and no sea trials, Hitler’s naval experts had ruled out a trans-Atlantic crossing for the liner’s maiden voyage. The British spun a web of intrigue to dupe Berlin into believing that the Queen Elizabeth would sail to the southern English port of Southampton. German High Command signalled its U-boat fleet to locate and sink the Queen Elizabeth in the Irish Sea. A squadron of Luftwaffe bombers flew over the Solent but failed to find its target.
Secrecy was maintained to the last, depriving New Yorkers of the opportunity to lay on a suitable welcome for this ocean queen. The first they knew of her courageous voyage was when the liner, cloaked in battleship grey, emerged from a sea mist on the morning of March 7th.
The liner was refitted as a troop carrier, steaming nearly half a million miles and transporting some 800,000 Allied personnel during the war years.
Hundreds of thousands of GIs were later repatriated aboard the Cunard White Star liners, earning the Queens a special place in American hearts.
To commemorate the 70th anniversary of this remarkable voyage, Ulster author AJ Davidson has written Churchill’s Queen, a fictional thriller based on the events of early 1940. He links attempted sabotage to the liner’s destruction 32 years later in Hong Kong harbour.
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