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Steamboats & Ferries
"The Exodus shook the conscience of the world and brought forth the state of Israel."
-- David C Holly, author of Exodus, 1947
Following its long hard service in World War II, the formerly elegant luxury steamship President Warfield was sold for scrap in July of 1947. Within days, the ship was purchased for $40,000 by the Jewish underground military organization, Haganah, whose leaders hoped to relocate Holocaust survivors from refugee camps in Europe to Palestine. The ship was gutted and refitted with wooden bunks to accommodate some 4,500 passengers, who crowded aboard at Sete, France, and then steamed toward Palestine with British warships in pursuit of the illegal expedition.
The ship, renamed Exodus 1947 and sailing under the Mogen David flag, was rammed by two British destroyers in a battle 20 miles off the coast of Palestine. The refugees were forces to board three British vessels and return to France. Suffering for a month in wretched, unsanitary conditions and scorching heat, they began a hunger strike to focus world attention on their plight. Eventually, they were sent to displaced persons camps in Germany and were allowed to leave only after the State of Israel was established by United Nations mandate a year later. Just blocks from Wilmington's earliest Jewish neighborhood, Pusey & Jones shipyard workers had built the ship that helped launch a nation.
The President Warfield, renamed Exodus 1947, was photographed by the British Admiralty in July 1947, as she steamed into the port of Haifa with some 4,500 Jewish refugees aboard and the Mogen David flag hoisted to the masthead following their desperate attempt to reach Palestine.
Far Left: The steamship President Warfield was built by Pusey & Jones for the Baltimore Steam Packet Company (The Old Bay Line), and launched at Wilmington, on February 6, 1928. Named for the Old Bay's former president, S. Davies Warfield, who died just months before the ship's completion, this 330 foot "Queen of the Bay" with its 170 staterooms, elegant dining rooms and salons, and a yacht-like grace, was so lavishly furnished that its final cost was nearly a million dollars.
The ship's speed and maneuverability may not have been fully appreciated in 1928, but became important during World War II when it was requisitioned, first as a troop and supply ship to aid the British, and then as a US Navy ship in the Normandy invasion at Omaha Beach. |