To be even more confusing, the first nuclear powered freighter was the "N.S.
Savannah" launched in the 1950s by President Eisenhower I think, and able to
sail around the world without refueling.
The "S.S. Savannah" was an actual ship later, probably in the "Savannah
Lines" company that docked on the West side of NYC and in Savannah, GA. My
Mom sailed on it. It was renamed according to the National Archives, for the
"Battle of the Atlantic" and is recorded as picking up about 240 German
prisoners off a "raider" on our coast. Her uncle, Leman Urquhart, a
naturalized US citizen, was a Master Mariner, Savannah harbor pilot, and then
recent Captain of the "City of Atlanta" which was one of the early torpedoed
by U-123 off the North Carolina coast. (off "Diamond Shoals") There were two
survivors. An excellent historical review of the issues in the Atlantic in
World War II is in Michael Gannon's "Operation Drumbeat: the Dramatic True
Story of Germany's First U-boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War
II," Harper, Row, 1990. A high school classmate, a TV journalist, interviewed
the U-123 captain before he died. Another interesting social history of the
place where the "City of Atlanta" and other "City" ships and others built in
West Chester, PA has been written, but I think confined to the era just
before the boom in shipbuilding.
There's a story that when they had to name all the Liberty ships, names were
ran out of from the Navy, so they started using names of cabinet members and
others, some who had served in the Army! An excellent museum designed by the
museologist who assisted designing the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC is
in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. It is dedicated to the World War II era only
from 1940 to 1945 and is called the "Wright Museum" after its inspired
creator. The front of the museum has a Sherman tank crashing through its
front wall and quite startling if one is not aware of it. It had on exhibit
the only surviving tank from the "operation" immortalized in the film, "A
Bridge Too Far," one of whose stars was Sean Connery, who is moving back to
Scotland after a 45 year self-imposed exile.
George Myers
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