Normandie Burns

Some 1,500 workers swarmed over her vast bulk, twisting her elegance into a bleak wartime pattern for the Navy. Then one bright, blithe afternoon this week a puff of smoke drifted across her promenade deck. A few minutes later, the deck was completely ablaze. After two and a half years of idling at a Manhattan pier, the Lafayette (as the U.S. had renamed the Normandie), a ship into which the French had poured $60,000,000 and some 2,500,000 man-days of labor, was in danger of turning into a fire-blackened hulk.

Whirled along by a fresh, northwesterly breeze, the flames licked hungrily along the wooden decks of her broad promenade. Heavy grey smoke roiled up, hiding her great outlines even from watchers in Manhattan's nearby skyscrapers.

Inside the ship, pitch-black after the lighting system was fouled, police emergency crews stumbled in search of workmen who had failed to get out at the first warning. Some 200 workmen and firemen were injured or overcome; one died.

As tons of water poured into the Lafayette, she listed 16 degrees to port, snapping her hawsers like rubber bands. Trying to keep her from capsizing, the Navy ordered holes cut in an empty water tank on the starboard side, to pump in water for balance. But early next morning, as the tide came in and lifted her heavy stern from the shallow river bottom, the Lafayette toppled, rolled over ignominiously on her side.

To first suspicions of sabotage, Rear Admiral Adolphus Andrews, commandant of the Third Naval District, made blunt reply. Said he: "The fire started . . . when a civilian worker . . . was using ah acetylene torch to remove an ornamental lamp from the salon wall. A spark from his torch apparently leaped into a pile of life preservers. . . ."

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