Gray Ghost: The R.M.S. Queen Mary at War

The outbreak of the Second World War on September 3, 1939, found the R.M.S. Queen Mary nearing the end of her 143rd Atlantic crossing. She had sailed from Southampton four days earlier with a record 2,332 passengers aboard, the vast majority of whom were Americans hoping to escape the general European holocaust that suddenly seemed inevitable. Now those halcyon days of shipboard galas and sumptuous banquets, of celebrity passengers and trans-Atlantic speed records was over. The world was at war.