RMS Queen Mary

Hitler put a price on this ship: a million Reichsmarks and the Oak Leaves to the Knight's Cross for any U-boat captain who sank her.

RMS Queen Mary was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank in Scotland, and began life as job number 534. Construction started in 1930 and stalled for years in the Great Depression before Cunard finished her. She sailed her maiden voyage from Southampton on 27 May 1936 carrying five dining areas and lounges, two cocktail bars, two swimming pools, a grand ballroom, a squash court and a small hospital. That August she took the Blue Riband, lost it to Normandie in 1937, took it back in 1938, and held it until the SS United States claimed it in 1952.

The war changed her completely. Painted navy grey and stripped of her furniture, carpet, china and paintings, she became a troopship, and between the grey paint and her speed she picked up the name Grey Ghost. She and Queen Elizabeth were the largest and fastest troopships of the war, often sailing out of convoy and without escort because no U-boat could catch them. On one voyage in 1943 she carried over 16,600 people, which still stands as the record for the most people ever carried on one vessel at one time.

That speed had a cost. On 2 October 1942, under orders not to stop under any circumstances, she cut through one of her own escorts, the light cruiser HMS Curacoa, off the Irish coast. 338 lives were lost. Queen Mary steamed on with a fractured stem, because stopping in those waters meant torpedoes.

Cunard retired her in 1967 as the jet age took the transatlantic trade. The City of Long Beach bought her, she left Southampton for the last time on 31 October 1967, and she has been moored there ever since as a hotel, museum and convention space, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.