Warship Wednesday November 21
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out every Wednesday for a look at the old steampunk/dieselpunk navies of the 1866-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week.
– Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, November 21
Here we see the coastal schooner Claire Crouch around 1960. She was origanlly built in 1917 as the De Lauwers in Holland, during World War One for a Newcastle shipping company. The old schooner, at the time known as the Argosy Lemal was taken up for use by the US Army in 1942 for use in the US Army Small Ships Section, functioning as a radio communication vessel in the Arafura and Timor Seas during World War II. With a 12 man crew of mixed nationality civilian crew members and skipper, and seven army signal corps commo guys, the ship was one of the odder vessels in the war. Her wartime service sounds like a Joseph Conrad novel:
In the Thompson’s publication for the COMH United States Army In World War II-The Technical Services-The Signal Corps: The Outcome (Mid-1943 Through 1945), S/Sgt. Arthur B. Dunning, Headquarters Company, 60th Signal Battalion, related that he and six other enlisted men of that unit were ordered aboard her on 9 September 1943, at Oro Bay, New Guinea, to handle Army radio traffic. The commander of the ship reported to naval authorities, not to General Akin. After six months’ service along the New Guinea coast, the skipper was removed for incompetence. His replacement was no better. Among other things, he obeyed to the letter Navy’s order forbidding the use of unshielded radio receivers at sea. Since the Signal Corps receivers aboard the ship were unshielded and thus liable to radiate sufficiently to alert nearby enemy listeners, the men were forbidden to switch them on in order to hear orders from Army headquarters ashore. As a consequence, during a trip in the spring of 1944 from Milne Bay to Cairns, Australia (on naval orders), the crew failed to hear frantic Signal Corps radio messages to the Argosy Lemal ordering her to return at once to Milne Bay to make ready for a forthcoming Army operation. On the way to Australia the skipper, after a series of mishaps attributable to bad navigation, grounded the Argosy hard on a reef. Most of the crew already desperately ill of tropical diseases, now had additional worries.
The radio antennas were swept away along with the ship’s rigging, and help could not be requested until the Signal Corps men strung up a makeshift antenna. Weak with fevers and in a ship on the verge of foundering, they pumped away at the water rising in the hold and wondered why rescue was delayed till they learned that the position of the ship that the skipper had given them to broadcast was ninety miles off their true position. As they threw excess cargo overboard, “some of the guys,” recorded Dunning, “were all for jettisoning our skipper for getting us into all of this mess.” Much later, too late for the need the Signal Corps had for the ship, the Argosy Lemal was rescued and towed to Port Moresby for repairs to the vessel and medical attention to the crew, many of whom were by then, according to Dunning, “psycho-neurotic.” Besides Dunning, a radio operator, there were T/4 Jack Stanton, also a radio operator; T/Sgt. Harold Wooten, the senior non-commissioned officer; T/4 Finch and T/5 Burtness, maintenance men; and T/5 Ingram and Pfc. Devlin, code and message center clerks. Dunning described the Argosy as a 3-mast sailing vessel with a 110-horsepower auxiliary diesel engine. “She was the sixth vessel,” he wrote, “to be taken over by the Small Ships Section of the U.S. Army, her primary purpose was handling [radio] traffic between forward areas and the main USASOS headquarters.”
The Army kept the ship until 1949 for use in the Pacific. She then transferred back into civilian service as a mothership carrying fuel and food to offshore fishing fleets and running cargo along the Australian coast under the name of Booya. On 24 December 1974, Booya was moored near Fort Hill wharf with four crew and one guest on board as Cyclone Tracy approached. She put to sea to avoid the stormand Booya was last seen at about 8.00pm leaving Fort Hill wharf. For the next 29 years she remained missing, presumed sunk with the loss of all lives in the huge seas whipped up by Cyclone Tracy’s 300 km/h winds. She was just recently found– still inside Darwin Harbor (!) in sixty feet of water. Police divers dredged the hull searching for the bodies of the five people that had been onboard. No bodies were found but personal belongings such as jewellery and clothing were recovered. These were offered to the families and friends of those onboard.
Side Scan sonar of the Booya turned turtle on the bottom of Darwin Harbor
Specs
Tonnage: 254 GRT (Argosy Lemal)
Length: 117 ft 5 in (35.79 m)
Beam: 24 ft 5 in (7.44 m)
Draught: 10 ft 4 in (3.15 m)
Propulsion: Sails, 1 x 2SCSA oil engine, 79 hp (59 kW) (as Argosy Lemal)
Sail plan: Schooner
Armament: (sidearms of Army signal detachment)
