Sidney Bernstein, Baron Bernstein would help the new Allies, Britain and America, to understand each other. He read and advised on early drafts of "Mrs. Miniver" (1942), the film starring Greer Garson as the heroic mother of a wartorn British family, which MGM made after a meeting of MGM executives with Bernstein in Hollywood. As the invasion of France loomed, Bernstein brought his friend Alfred Hitchcock back from Hollywood to Britain to work on two short documentary films for the post-invasion French audience. As the war wound to its close, Bernstein heard the first reports of extermination camps, visited Belsen himself, and was determined
SS Empire Miniver Columbia River Shipbuilding Company in Portland, Oregon. Though she was completed too late for the war, she was commissioned into the Naval Overseas Transportation Service (NOTS) of the United States Navy as USS "West Cobalt" (ID-3836) in January 1919. After her one overseas trip for the Navy—delivering grain products to Danzig—she was decommissioned in May 1919 and returned to the USSB. "West Cobalt" had a relatively uneventful merchant career for the USSB and, after her 1933 sale, for the Lykes Brothers Steamship Company. In June 1940, "West Cobalt" was sold to British interests and renamed "Empire Miniver". Just over four