The Cunarders

"At $100 a night you can sleep in an A-deck suite whose decorations may include peach glass and python-skin fabrics. . . . You open the bathroom door by a plastic composition knob that is warm to the touch. . . . In one ballroom indirect colored lights change automatically with varying tunes of the dance orchestra. . . ."

In June 1936 these items struck FORTUNE'S staff as noteworthy about the new $35 million, 81,235-ton Cunarder Queen Mary. Through the prewar years, the Queen Mary carried Britain's flag in the race of the Atlantic superliners. In August 1938 she set an Atlantic round-trip speed record (31.65 knots). Last week, after four years of wartime anonymity, the Queen Mary returned to the headlines.

In peace, the Queen Mary could accommodate 2,100 paying passengers. In war, she can pack 12-20,000 troops onto her decks, into salons and cabins stripped of luxury and into hold space which no peacetime sybarite ever saw. When German submarines were taking their highest toll, the Queen Mary relied on her speed to dash unescorted through and around their hunting grounds. Some of her 1942 highlights, as revealed by the British last week :

> She steamed once, fully laden, through a pack of 25 submarines. Not one was able to train a torpedo on her.

> She took half a fully equipped division from Britain to Suez, perhaps saved the Eighth Army and enabled it to come back at El Alamein.*

>Axis agents laid a trap for her on a South Atlantic crossing with 10,000 U.S. troops aboard. Submarines were waiting, spies in Sao Paulo, Brazil were prepared to flash word of her exact course when their secret radio station was discovered just in time. The Italian Government was so sure that the trap would work that Rome announced her sinking on the appointed day.

Troops aboard the Queen Mary are fed twice daily, consuming 73 tons of food a day. They sleep Box & Cox on deck, in hammocks and in cramped holds, shoot craps on any cleared deck space. Officers and official passengers are jam-packed into the choicer cabins; nothing less than an ambassador can hope to get space to himself.

Third in size among the world's superliners, the Queen Mary's 1943 story when told will be more exciting than her 1942 saga. Her old speed rival, the Normandie, is slowly being righted after catching fire in New York Harbor (TIME, Aug. 16). Biggest of them all, the Queen Elizabeth (1,030 ft. long) is still on the censored list, though the Nazis know perfectly well what she's doing.

* The U.S. Army's Air Transport Command claims similar credit: it flew a badly needed batch of antitank ammunition from Miami to Egypt.

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