USS Wakefield (AP-21) - Commercial and Pre-war Service

Commercial and Pre-war Service

After trials in and off the Delaware River, Manhattan departed New York City at midnight on 10 August 1932 for her maiden Atlantic crossing. Arriving at Hamburg 10 days later, she made the return voyage to New York in 5 days, 14 hours, and 28 minutes - a record for passenger liners. Proudly carrying the title of "the fastest cabin ship in the world", the liner continued to ply the North Atlantic from New York to Hamburg, via Cobh, Ireland, Southampton, England; and Le Havre, France, into the late 1930s. When Germany recalled her ships from the high seas during the Sudeten Crisis in September 1938, Manhattan was en route to Hamburg but immediately came about and put into British and French ports instead, to bring back anxious American travelers who feared that they would be engulfed in a European war.

After war broke out a year later, she made voyages to Genoa and Naples, Italy. Following the Allied collapse in the lowlands of western Europe in the spring of 1940, she made a transatlantic crossing in July to repatriate American nationals from Portugal. With the European war endangering commercial shipping of neutral nations, Manhattan was then withdrawn from the once-lucrative transatlantic trade and placed in intercoastal service from New York to San Francisco, via the Panama Canal and Los Angeles.