The fire was under control by nightfall, but the badly listing Normandie capsized the next morning. (National Archives)

Talk of sabotage was in the air following the Normandie's loss. Had someone slit the fire hoses? Were German spies working on the ship?

It was shortly after 2:30 in the afternoon on February 9, a cold, clear Monday in 1942. Over at Pier 88 on West 49th Street in New York City, Clement Derrick was removing the last of four stanchions in the Grand Salon of the SS Normandie, a lavish ocean liner that was being converted into a troopship, the USS Lafayette. As his welder's torch penetrated the metal, sparks suddenly spat out onto nearby bales of burlap that had been wrapped around the ship's highly flammable life preservers. The resulting shower of fire could not be quenched, and by 3 p.m. much of the luxury liner, the pride of a once-free France, was engulfed in flames. Dark black plumes of smoke reached across Manhattan, propelled by a brisk northwest wind. New Yorkers looked up as the oily smoke became a scrim across the midday sun.

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Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was in the middle of a radio speech, assuring New Yorkers that the nickel subway fare would not be raised, when word of the burning Normandie reached him. The mayor cut short his speech and raced to the pier. By now hundreds of New Yorkers, following the smoke and the sounds of sirens, had arrived to watch as streams of water from a line of fireboats tried in vain to quell the blaze. Bellevue Hospital sounded its dreaded seven bells—the signal for a citywide catastrophe—and at nearby Pier 92, where the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth had their berths, a makeshift hospital was set up for the workers who were being carried off the stricken ship.

Crowds of people had gathered for blocks along the waterfront. As the fire raged, more fireboats arrived. For hours their fountains of water flooded the ship's cabins. Soon there was more water than fire. Then, at 3:40 p.m., just as the mayor and Rear Adm. Adolphus Andrews, commander of the U.S. Navy's 3rd Naval District, were attempting to board the wounded vessel, it suddenly lurched several feet to port. It was the beginning of the end.

The deathwatch took on a carnival atmosphere as skyscraper windows all over the city were thrown open so New Yorkers could watch the awful spectacle. The pier was alive with firemen and ambulance crews, with hawkers and food vendors, all watching as the great ship began to drown in the water that was meant to save it.

It took 12 hours for the Normandie to die. At precisely 2:35 the following morning, with the acrid smell of burning metal still hanging over Times Square, the elegant creature rolled over on its port side and gave up the fight. The following day, thousands of New Yorkers showed up at the pier to gape at the destroyed ship. Five-year-old Miki Rosen saw it from the inside of the family car: "My father wanted us to see it because it was an historical event. I was terribly frightened by this enormous thing that I knew was supposed to be upright and bobbing up and down. It didn't even look like a ship. It was a mass of iron floating in the water."

Talk of sabotage was in the air. Had someone slit the fire hoses? Were German spies working on the ship? Was it perhaps gasoline that spurted from the sprinkler system? What the hapless Clement Derrick knew to be an accident was a troubling mystery to New Yorkers—one that would spur them to extraordinary measures to feel safe again.

For New Yorkers, and for the entire country, the possibility that the once-glorious ship had been brought down by Germany or the Vichy government was very real. In a Brooklyn courtroom just a month earlier, 33 German agents had been sentenced to serve a total of more than 300 years in prison. They had been led there by counterespionage agent William Sebold, a 42-year-old German American. Operating under the name Harry Sawyer, Sebold was set up in an office on 42nd Street, where the FBI observed his meetings with New York–based spies through a two-way mirror. A year before, the FBI had set up a shortwave radio station on Long Island so they could listen in on conversations between German spies in New York City and the men in Germany from whom they took orders.

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