The 1940s are the emptiest decade in this directory, for an obvious reason: it was a decade of war, when passenger ships were built in tiny numbers, requisitioned, sunk or worked to exhaustion, and almost none survived into preservation or modern service. A single ship represents the entire ten years here — Sunnhordland, launched in 1943 and still listed as active at just 1,105 gross tons. That a small wartime-built vessel, rather than any liner, is the decade's sole entry is itself the honest story. The great ships of the 1940s that readers might expect were mostly completions of pre-war plans or immediate post-war liners, and they have nearly all gone to the breakers. What remains is this one modest survivor, still working more than eighty years after her launch.
