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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday, October 8, 2025: Everlasting

Above, we see the camouflaged 180-foot Balsam/Cactus class sea-going buoy tender USCGC Evergreen (WAGL-295) during World War II while fighting the “Weather War” against the Germans on the Greenland Patrol. Note her SLa radar set on her mast and covered 3″/50 DP mount behind her stack. Harder to make out are her 20mm Oerlikons, depth charge tracks, Mousetraps, Y-guns, and WEA-2 series sonar set.

To be sure, she was a war baby, built in Duluth for an economical $871,946, but would go on to put in nearly a half-century of dedicated service to the country. She really set the bar for the term “multi-role.”

The 180s

In 1916, the Revenue Cutter Service and Lifesaving Service were merged to form the Coast Guard, to which the Bureau of Lighthouses was added on 1 July 1939, and as such, all U.S. lighthouses, tenders, and lightships became USCG installations and ships. The thing is, the lighthouse and buoy tender fleet was a hodgepodge of antiquated single-use vessels to which the Bureau had been looking to replace with a new series of 177-foot lighthouse tenders modeled after the USLHT Juniper, the last vessel designed by the Bureau.

Taking these plans, the Coast Guard made some changes and produced a 180-foot/950-ton single-screw steel-hulled ship that incorporated some new features that the USLHS never needed (an ice-strengthened bow, search and rescue equipment and mission, allowance for armament, etc. al). The first of these, USCGC Cactus (WAGL-270), was appropriated for $782,381 on 20 Jan 1941 and laid down at Marine Iron & Shipbuilding Corporation, Duluth, Minnesota, on 31 March.

Almost all of these hardy ships were built either at Marine or at Duluth’s Zenith Dredge Company very rapidly in three subclasses: the “A” or “Cactus” class, “B” or “Mesquite” class, and “C” or “Iris” class (with all named for trees and bushes). All ships of the three subclasses have the same general characteristics, but with slight differences (e.g., the “A/Cactus” class tenders may be differentiated from the other two classes of 180-foot tenders by their unique “A” frame main boom support forward and their large 30,000 gal fuel tanks that allowed an economical 17,000nm cruising range on their gentle diesel suite.)

The last to come off the ways was USCGC Woodbrush (WAGL-407), which commissioned 22 Sept. 1944. The building process entailed an average of 192,018 hours of labor per vessel.

Meet Evergreen

Our subject was laid down as hull number CG-102 at Duluth’s Marine Iron & Shipbuilding Company on 15 April 1942.

She was launched just ten weeks later on the day before Independence Day.

Evergreen commissioned on 17 March 1943, LT John E. Klang, USCG, commanding. Her construction took but 336 days. The new tender spent her first month in service tending AtoN and breaking ice on the Great Lakes before heading to the Atlantic to get into the “Big Show.”

Weather War

Following a short shake down and availability at the Coast Guard Yard, Evergreen embarked four civilian U.S. Weather Bureau personnel, set off on 18 August 1943 from Boston bound for a spot between the Davis and Denmark Straits off Greenland dubbed Weather Station No. 2, a location she would rotate with the identical but geographically distant Weather Station No.1 off and on over the next ten months other than trips back to Boston or Argentia, Newfoundland when relived. She alternated this duty with sisters USCGC Sorrel and Conifer, each typically clocking in for three-week stints.

Officially there to steam in a 100-square-mile area to provide weather and position reports to transatlantic flights as an aid to the Army planes flying over the Northern Route (from Newfoundland, Labrador, and Iceland to Britain), this was not “cake” duty as one cutter, Muskeget, was sunk on Weather Station by a U-boat in 1942, taking her entire crew and her Weather Bureau met detachment to the bottom.

Evergreen chased a few submerged sonar targets on her days in the box and bumped into wayward Allied shipping but came away unharmed.

Her weather patrol duty came to a close in July 1944, when she was transferred to the Greenland Patrol, leaving Argentia in the company of the 125-foot patrol boat USCGC Frederick Lee (WSC-139) to escort the merchant ships SS Biscaya and SS Aragon to the frozen Danish territory, firing 16 rounds from her Hedgehog on a suspicious sonar contact along the way.

She would remain part of the Greenland Patrol through 30 September 1945, heavily involved in cargo runs, icebreaking to keep harbors open, shuttling Navy and Army personnel around the region, coming to the assistance of the icebound cutter USCGC Northland, and handing over four German prisoners of war to the Provost Marshal at Narsarssuak on Halloween 1944.

Permafrost

Post-war, Evergreen was homeported in Boston and reverted to her original task: tending buoys. Her guns, depth charges, and Hedgehogs landed; she took on the more traditional black hull and buff superstructure livery of a USCG working boat.

In 1948, Evergreen began service as the International Ice Patrol’s unofficial oceanographic vessel, continuing the work of mapping the ocean currents near the Grand Banks and surveilling bergs during the season. Sheep-dipped Aerographers Mates (AG) and Sonarmen (SO) performed the task of carrying out oceanographic observations.

Evergreen served in this capacity off and on until 1982.

Evergreen was held up as a shining example of the IIP’s success on the occasion of the Patrol’s unofficial 50th anniversary in 1962, having been founded in the aftermath of the 1912 loss of the RMS Titanic.

An attached USCG PAO and camera crew dutifully captured her patrol that year and reported back on the USCG’s experimental efforts to read the tea leaves of ocean currents in the region, then mark and, if needed, destroy dangerous bergs headed for the sea lanes.

In 1963, Evergreen was redesignated as the Coast Guard’s first dedicated oceanographic vessel, WAGO-295.

She soon received the first computer installed aboard a government-operated oceanographic research vessel. She also transformed her livery for the third time, earning an all-white scheme, replacing the black and buff that she had carried since the late 1940s. The hard-to-keep-clean livery and her frequent deployments earned her several nicknames during her far-flung service, including “Evergone,” “Cutter Neverseen,” “Never Clean,” and just “The Green.”

Nonetheless, she had an impact.

As noted by a USCG Oceanography publication:

By 1965, Evergreen’s computer and lab had enabled much more rapid evaluations of berg data, in turn allowing for rapid warnings of the ice patrol. In 1966, Evergreen was sent on an oceanographic cruise of the tropical Atlantic off the coast of Brazil, where routine temperature, salinity, and oxygen measurements were made.

Evergreen’s work transformed how the Coast Guard addressed oceanography, and her sea-going lab was replicated on all 35 high-endurance cutters by 1968. An oceanographer’s mate rating was established for the service the same year, with an eight-week school set up on Governor’s Island.

After NOAA was created in 1970, Evergreen’s oceanographic role decreased but did not go away entirely, at least not for another decade.

In 1979, the IIP began using satellite-tracked oceanographic drifters to determine the currents and no longer had a need for an oceanographic vessel to conduct surveys in support of operations.

By this time, Evergreen had moved on to other duties anyway.

Walking the beat

Evergreen had survived an engine room fire and flooding in 1968 that sent her to the Coast Guard Yard for an extended period.

She took on the appearance quite different from the rest of her class, with a new superstructure, no buoy tending gear, a bow thruster (exotic for the 1970s), and improved electronics.

Following her repair, she shifted homeport from Boston to the Yard, from where she still made ice surveys during the season but also engaged in other oceanographic and SAR research.

In 1974, the cutter’s homeport was changed to New London, Connecticut. She roamed from Labrador to the South Atlantic Bight in 1976, conducting current surveys.

Three of the 180s, Evergreen and sisters USCGC Citrus (WLB-300) and Clover (WLB-292) were eventually redesignated as Medium Endurance cutters (WMEC) to combat the rising drug trade and replace smaller 143-foot Sotoyomo-class fleet tugs that had been transferred from the Navy in the 1950s. Citrus was redesignated WMEC-300 in June 1979 to replace USCGC Modoc (WMEC-194, ex-Bagaduce), while Clover became WMEC-292 in February 1980 to replace the old tug Comanche (WMEC-202, ex-Wampanoag).

Citrus and Clover looked very much like Evergreen’s 1967-68 scheme.

Evergreen had her designation changed in May 1983 after the service’s oceanography program was all but shuttered.

These “white hulled” conversions entailed the removal of their remaining buoy handling gear and reassignment to predominantly LE and SAR patrol duties.

Armament was the provision to mount two M2 heavy and two M60 GPMGs (not always carried) as well as the cutters’ own small arms lockers. This was later augmented by two 40mm Mk 19 grenade launchers in the mid-1980s. They also picked up SPS-64(v)1 navigational radars.

Some of Evergreen’s more noteworthy drug seizures included that of FV Glenda Lynn off Long Island with 27 tons of marijuana on board in May 1983 and the 25 September 1984 seizure of the yacht Margie 150 mi SE of Nantucket Island carrying 4 tons of marijuana.

End game

Starting in 1972 with the USCGC Redbud, which was decommissioned and transferred to the Philippines, the Coast Guard began whittling down the 180s. Before the end of the decade, four further 180s, all from the earliest Cactus variants (Balsam, Cowslip, Woodbine, and Tupelo), were taken out of service and disposed of.

Three of the 180s were lost in accidents.

• Cactus ran hard aground in 1971, and the damage was so extensive that the government decided to decommission the vessel rather than repair her– nearly 30 years into her service career.
• In January 1980, USCGC Blackthorn collided with a commercial tanker in Tampa Bay, Florida, and capsized the buoy tender, taking 23 members of her crew to the bottom.
• In December 1989, USCGC Mesquite grounded on a rock pinnacle jutting from the bottom of Lake Superior, which damaged her so severely that the USCG decided to decommission the old gal, and she was scuttled by a commercial salvage company in 1990.

With the service moving to commission the new and much more capable 225-foot Juniper class of ocean-going buoy tenders, the writing was on the wall for the remaining 180s. Evergreen decommissioned on 26 June 1990 and was turned over to the Navy at Patuxent River two months later.

She wound up in deeper waters than the Titanic off the coast of North Carolina after giving up the ghost to Navy shelling and target practice during a fleet exercise on 25 November 1992.

She only narrowly avoided a coup de grâce from the brand-new USS Arleigh Burke (DDG 51), which found her, and then soon after lost her, before the destroyer’s 5-inch gun could be brought to bear.

As detailed by a former Burke crewman in CIC, the conversation went something like this:

“Bridge, Combat: Surface target lost by radar. Last bearing zero-zero-zero relative, range 6,000 yards.”

Followed shortly by:

“Bridge, Sonar: Underwater target acquired, bearing zero-zero-zero relative, range 6,000 yards, depth increasing.”

Evergreen earned the Unit Commendation twice, the Meritorious Unit Commendation three times, and almost too many Arctic Service Medals to count.

Epilogue

Little remains of Evergreen that I can find.

She has a few of her logs and war diaries, along with her 1971 plans, which have been digitized in the National Archives.

The Coast Guard Art Program has memorialized her in at least two paintings.

Today, the Marine Science Technician (MST) rating, established in 1970 during the time of Evergreen’s service, carries on the legacy of the Oceanography Mate.

For more information about the 180s in general, the MARAD has a great 73-page PDF report on them here, while the LOC has a great series of images from the Planetree, a Mesquite subclass sister.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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