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Warship Wednesday Nov. 13, 2024: One Busy Bug

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024: One Busy Bug

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. 80-G-684905

Above we see the Balao-class fleet submarine USS Bugara (SS-331), in her gun-less Fleet Snorkel configuration, off Oahu on the 14th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Commissioned some 80 years ago this week on 15 November 1944, you wouldn’t think she’d even have a chance to get in the Big Show before the war ended.

You’d be very wrong about that.

The Balaos

A member of the 180+-ship Balao class, she was one of the most mature U.S. Navy diesel designs of the World War Two era, constructed with knowledge gained from the earlier Gato class. U.S. subs, unlike those of many navies of the day, were “fleet” boats, capable of unsupported operations in deep water far from home. The Balao class was deeper diving (400 ft. test depth) than the Gato class (300 feet) due to the use of high-yield strength steel in the pressure hull.

Able to range 11,000 nautical miles on their reliable diesel engines, they could undertake 75-day patrols that could span the immensity of the Pacific. Carrying 24 (often unreliable) Mk14 Torpedoes, these subs often sank anything short of a 5,000-ton Maru or warship by surfacing and using their deck guns. They also served as the firetrucks of the fleet, rescuing downed naval aviators from right under the noses of Japanese warships.

Some 311 feet long overall, they were all-welded construction to facilitate rapid building. Best yet, they could be made for the bargain price of about $7 million in 1944 dollars (just $100 million when adjusted for today’s inflation) and completed from keel laying to commissioning in about nine months.

An amazing 121 Balaos were completed through five yards at the same time, with the following pennant numbers completed by each:

  • Cramp: SS-292, 293, 295-303, 425, 426 (12 boats)
  • Electric Boat: 308-313, 315, 317-331, 332-352 (42)
  • Manitowoc on the Great Lakes: 362-368, 370, 372-378 (15)
  • Mare Island on the West Coast: 304, 305, 307, 411-416 (9)
  • Portsmouth Navy Yard: 285-288, 291, 381-410, 417-424 (43)

We have covered a number of this class before, such as the sub-killing USS Spikefish and USS Greenfish, the rocket mail-slinging USS Barbero, the carrier-slaying USS Archerfish, the long-serving USS Catfish, the U-boat scuttling USS Atule, and the frogman Cadillac USS Perch —but don’t complain, they have lots of great stories.

Meet Bugara

Our subject was the first (and only) U.S. warship named for the common label for the Rainbow surfperch (Hypsurus caryi), a multicolored little guy found along the coast of California. Laid down on 21 October 1943 at Groton, Connecticut by the Electric Boat Co, she was launched on 2 July 1944, and sponsored by Mrs. Anna A. Perry, the wife of Annapolis All-American football legend Capt. Lyman Spencer “Pop” Perry (USNA ’19), who at the time was serving as a Commodore of training operations on the West Coast.

80-G-448203

Commissioned at the U.S. Submarine Base, New London, on 15 November 1944, Bugara’s plankowner skipper was T/CDR Arnold Frederic Schade (USNA ’33). He was the youngest submarine commander in the Navy for a time and started the war on the training boat USS R-12 (SS 89), then was XO on the famed USS Growler (SS 215) when his commander in February 1943, CDR Howard Walter Gilmore, earned the MOH the hardest way.

In all, the 32-year-old Schade was the veteran of eight previous war patrols, including the last two as Growler’s skipper. He already had a Navy Cross and Silver Star on his jacket for sinking a trio of Japanese destroyer leaders on the 4th of July 1942 and for five other ships on the second patrol.

Bugara’s crew was one of veterans, no surprise as the Navy had been at war for three hard years when it was formed. Of the sub’s nine officers that made up her wardroom and seven chiefs in her goat locker, they counted no less than 73 war patrols among them, including one LT (j.g) with the unintentionally ironic last name of “Sinks” who had nine patrols on his own.

After abbreviated shakedowns and post-delivery maintenance, Bugara left New London for the Pacific via Panama on Christmas Day 1944. After all, there was a war on.

First Patrol

This overhead view of the Bugara (SS-331) was taken during torpedo practice firings off Panama Bay in January 1945 while heading to the Pacific. The torpedo retrieving davits are rigged, which are used for hauling the practice torpedo out of the water. Note at this point she only has one 5″/25, forward, as well as a twin 40mm Bofors aft. USN Archive photo # 19-N-76588.

Bugara cleared Pearl Harbor on 21 February 1945 on her 1st War Patrol and steamed directly to recently secured Saipan, ordered to patrol north of Luzon, Philippines in support of the Iwo Jima campaign.

A snooze fest with Japanese shipping already largely sanitized from the area, she fought off a typhoon and had to crash dive for several enemy aircraft while on the surface. In fact, she encountered far more fellow Allied submarines on patrol– American (USS Perch, Besugo, Blueback, Tuna, Tigrone, Puffer, Spot, Sea Fox, Hake, and Pargo), British (HMS P-248) and Dutch (Hr.Ms. K-14)– than she did anything else.

Disappointingly, the only Japanese vessels she spotted that were large enough to warrant a torpedo were marked as hospital ships. The only “action” her crew saw was in destroying a floating mine via gunfire.

It was essentially a qualifying cruise, with 29 of the 36 crewmembers who lacked their “Dolphins” earning them while underway.

On 21 April 1945, Bugara ended her inaugural patrol at the big Allied sub base at Fremantle, Australia after steaming 13,724 miles in 59 days.

Award of a Combat Insignia was not authorized for the patrol by COMSUBPAC.

Schade noted, “Morale of all hands is high despite the lack of combat opportunity.”

Second Patrol

After a three-week turnaround that included installing a second 5″/25 on her aft deck– the so-called gunboat submarine configuration— and director antennae for her APR, on 16 May 1945 Bugara sailed out of Fremantle for her 2nd War Patrol, ordered to hunt in the South China Sea off Hainan and serve as a floating “Log Joint” lifeguard station for aircrews downed at sea during the Okinawa campaign.

As on her first patrol, Bugara met or operated with other Allied subs on just about every day she was underway, and only a few local native craft– Chinese junks from which she would barter cigarettes for fresh fish– were spotted. Likewise, while on her first patrol, she often had to cope with Japanese aircraft, they too were scarce and instead, she typically logged voice contacts with passing four-engine Navy PB4Y Privateers.

On 20 June 1945, Bugara ended her monotonous 36-day patrol at recently liberated Subic Bay, where, in a twist of fate, she tied up next to the new Fulton-class sub tender USS Howard W. Gilmore (AS-16), named after Schade’s old boss on Growler.

Bugara logged zero enemy contacts despite the fact she steamed 10,118 miles across the Western Pacific, waters that the Empire had owned just a year prior.

Award of a Combat Insignia was not authorized for the patrol by COMSUBPAC.

Such boring late-war patrols often drove eager submarine skippers to think out of the box to find a fight.

For instance, in April 1945, USS Bluegill under LCDR Eric Barr landed some Australian Commandos followed by a short party of his own on the deserted low-lying reef of Pratas, some 160 miles southeast of Hong Kong, and “captured it.” 

57 Sunk!

Shifting operations further south where the Japanese may still have some naval and merchant assets and with the new Loran navigation system installed, on 14 July 1945 Bugara departed Subic Bay to begin her 3rd War Patrol, ordered to the relative backwater of the Gulf of Siam where the Japanese had been unabated since early 1942.

The 29-day patrol report makes absolutely great reading and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

On the night of 23 July, she put a “Commando Party ashore north of Lem Chong Pra– armed to the teeth with demolition equipment,” but had to take them back off the next morning just before dawn “highly embarrassed as the jungle had been so thick they couldn’t get off the beach.”

While a six torpedo spread against a small Japanese convoy on the early morning of 20 July yielded no hits– all of the fish running deeper than their settings– she had much better luck with her guns. In fact, while a normal load of “fish” was 24 torpedoes, Bugara had instead left Subic with just 12 (apparently worthless) torpedoes but with a full 240 rounds for her 5-inchers including 60 rounds of VT, stowing four racks full of ammo in her torpedo room instead.

In all, she made contact with 62 small surface vessels and, after finding them to be under Japanese control, sent at least 57 to the bottom in a series of one-sided gun actions over the fortnight between 24 July and 7 August, many in the dark.

From her War Patrol report:

She even ran into a batch of canoe-borne Malay pirates while in mid-attack on a Chinese schooner and performed actions worthy of the days of Stephen Decatur and Edward Preble.

In all, she fired 201 rounds of 5-inch, 291 of 40mm, and 400 of 20mm, finding in fact that the VT fuzed shells were not ideal as they were fired typically too close (within 600 yards on average) to arm.

Realizing that many of the crews on these wooden coasters and schooners were natives working under threat of death, Bugara’s crew went to great lengths to save them, even though on one occasion she had to submerge when a strange aircraft approached and left her rescues bobbing in the Gulf of Siam for a few minutes until she surfaced again after it had passed. Keep in mind that during this period she was working in typically just 10 fathoms (60 feet) of water, almost bottoming when completely submerged.

This also allowed her to glean some good old-fashioned HUMINT, with one particularly friendly Chinese who spoke pidgin English kept aboard for a couple of weeks as a translator. Schade included it with a wish list of items should he be sent back to the area:

On 17 August 1945, Bugara ended her final patrol of WWII at Fremantle, two days after Japan announced its unconditional surrender. Bugara and her crew were finally awarded the Submarine Combat Insignia for a patrol.

Few late-war subs could beat her record of “bunny bashing” in gun actions. The only one I can think of was Bill Hazzard in USS Blenny (SS-324) which bagged 62 mischievous Japanese vessels.

Bugara’s 3rd Patrol was the subject of at least one patch by her crew, emblazoned with a “57” on a hapless skull.

Bugara’s WWII patches. NHHC 2017.001.020 and NHHC 2017.001.021.

Sent with SubRon 5 to Subic Bay in September, she patrolled local waters there into mid-November when her squadron was ordered to clear Japanese-held islands in the South China Sea. This included Bugara sending large and heavily armed landing forces ashore at Tizard Bank and Itu Aba, where all they found were destroyed weather and radio stations.

Arriving back at San Diego in February 1946, three months later, she was back in Pearl Harbor, SubRon 5’s next home port.

There, as part of Operation Road’s End, on 28 May 1946, Bugara successfully sank her only Japanese ship via torpedo– the captured Type AM (I-13-class) submarine I-14 in a test of the new Mark 10-3 exploder– which worked.

A huge aircraft-carrying submarine (the largest submarines ever built until U.S. Poseidon SSBNs of the 1960s), I-14 was sent to the bottom in deep water off Barber’s Point at deliberately unrecorded locations along with four other captured enemy boats (I-400, I-401, I-201, and I-203) to keep their technology out of Soviet hands.

I-14 and I-400 alongside USS Proteus (AS-19), in Japanese home waters, after WWII. Note: the crew of deck and another sub (unidentified) along in the background. NH 50387

These boats, had the war gone on long enough, were part of a Japanese plan to wage biological warfare against cities in Southern California, in retaliation for the U.S. firebombing of Japanese cities, or alternatively an attack on the Panama Canal– keep that in mind the next time someone says the A-Bombs didn’t have to be dropped.

To prove to Stalin that these went to Davy Jones, the Navy filmed the sinking of all these big I boats– in beautiful color.

Bugara received three battle stars for her service in World War II, one for taking part in the Iwo Jima campaign (12-16 March 1945), one for Okinawa (17 March to 4 April 1945, and one for her third patrol (14 July 45 – 17 Aug 45) as well as an Occupation Service clasp for July- August 1948 when she returned to the area on a West Pac patrol.

Korea

Stationed at Pearl Harbor when the Norks crossed the 38th Parallel into South Korea in June 1950, she was soon sent forward on a series of war patrols off the embattled peninsula that was broken up by a five-month Fleet Snorkel conversion at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard in late 1951 that saw her guns landed, a snorkel fitted along with better sensors, and a new, streamlined fairwater that covered her scopes installed.

Compare these two silhouttes.

Bugara received two Korean War battle stars during the conflict, logging four periods in theatre (5 Oct-28 Nov 50, 20 Jan-18 Jun 51, 20 Apr-4 Jun 54, and 14-27 Jul 54).

She also survived a crack-up during the conflict with the escort USS Whitehurst (DE-634) that left both vessels damaged but gratefully without any casualties, and each soon returned to work.

That’s not going to buff out

By August 1955, she was transferred to San Diego as part of SubRon 3.

USS Bugara (SS-331), May 1956. Shown while operating off San Diego. 80-G-696504

Same as above. 80-G-696503

USS Bugara (SS-331) off Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, December 7, 1955. 80-G-684904

She would fall into a decade of drills training evolutions, shipyard availabilities, and regular WestPac deployments and SEATO exercises where she would typically interact with the growing Japanese, Filipino, Australian, and Taiwanese fleets.

USS Bugara with an S-2 Tracker overhead, likely in an ASW exercise. Submarine Forces Museum

She also got a bit of payback against tin cans for her Whitehurst damage.

In April 1958 while using a practice torpedo against USS Yarnall (DD-541), which was set to run at 30 or 40 feet, it actually ran at 10 and smacked the Fletcher class destroyer on the port bow.

Yarnall’s skipper radioed, “We’ve been hit and are taking on water.”

Bugara’s skipper offered assistance.

Yarnall’s captain replied, “You can go to hell!”

Then came…

Vietnam

During the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, no less than 60 different submarines were operational off Vietnam at some time between 1964 and 1975, many staying long enough to earn campaign stars. Most, 42, were old “smoke boats,” such as Bugara, including many of her sisters. Eighteen others were modern SSNs which were utilized more sparingly.

Vietnam War. June 1969. Sailors aboard the guided missile frigate USS Brooke (DEG 1) watch as the Gato-class submarine USS Bluegill (AGSS 242) travels on the surface. Official U.S. Navy photo (K-74080)

Most of these boats would be tasked with providing “special” undersea reconnaissance and surveillance.

In 1968, at the request of COMNAVFORV RADM Kenneth L. Veth, the Seventh Fleet deployed a submarine just off the coast of Sihanoukville (Kampong Saom) Cambodia to monitor shipping traffic. COMNAVFORV and 7th Fleet later pioneered tracking inbound gun-carrying trawlers passing through the strait between the Chinese mainland and Hainan with submarines working with over-the-horizon P-3s. The result was the ability to track a trawler’s passage, sight unseen, with the final act being an interception by surface assets and destruction. Sculpin in one known 1972 incident, tracked a Chinese trawler from its homeport across some 2,500 miles to the Southern coasts of South Vietnam, where it was sent to the bottom by the RVN Navy.
 
 
Communications intelligence personnel on board the submarine intercepted a message from the trawler that made clear the enemy was unaware of the submarine trailing her until the last hours of the mission. During the passage from Hainan, the submarine’s sonarmen became intimately familiar with the trawler’s distinctive shaft and propeller sounds. Periscope photographs of the white-colored trawler confirmed their analysis.

They also performed submerged lifeguard duty for downed aviators between Hanoi and Haiphong and the carriers on Yankee Station.

A U.S. Navy Sikorsky SH-3A Sea King from Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 2 (HS-2) “Golden Falcons” sits on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CVS-12) for a deployment to the Western Pacific and Vietnam from 12 August 1965 to 23 March 1966. In the background is the Fleet Snorkel Balao-class submarine USS Segundo (SS-398).

Others, such as Perch and Tunny, would carry out commando raids near shore. Submarines carried UDT 11 and UDT 12 frogmen to their dangerous missions in Operations Starlite, Jackstay, Dagger Thrust, Blue Marlin, and scores of other amphibious operations during the war.

Some, such as USS Salmon (SSR-573), would lay mines off North Vietnamese harbors. 

They also served as an OPFOR “tame wolf” for the carriers’ escorts, embarked SH-2/3s, and land-based P-3 Orions to keep their ASW skills sharp should a Russki boat come poking too close.

A U.S. Navy Sikorsky SH-3A Sea King from Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 8 (HS-8) “Eightballers” from USS Bennington (CVS-20) is seen flying over an unidentified Fleet Snorkel conversion submarine during the carrier’s deployment to the Western Pacific and Vietnam from 30 April to 9 November 1968.

Many of these submarines still have the exact details of their Vietnam service classified. They don’t call it the “Silent Service” for nothing. 

Those who tallied up multiple Vietnam campaign stars included USS Grayback (8 stars), Razorback (5), Tunny (5), Barbel (4), Bluegill (4), Bonefish (4), Sea Fox (4), Swordfish (4), Tang (4), Salmon (3), Scamp (3), Tiru (3), Wahoo (3), Barb (2), Blueback (2), Bonefish (2), Carbonero (2), Pomfret (2), and Rasher (2).

Our girl Bugara beat out all but Grayback and received an Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal and seven campaign stars for her service during the Vietnam War.

Bugara was, by most accounts, the first submarine ordered into Vietnamese waters with a war face on since WWII, assigned to Task Force 77 for operations in the South China Sea as a result of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in August 1964.

In 1965, Bugara passed her 6,000th dive on her 21st birthday.

Steaming cross-Pacific in 1966 allowed her the rare treat of “Tying the Knot” by doing surfaced and submerged 360-degree turns at both the Equator and the 180th meridian.

She appeared in several films and broadcasts highlighting the American Navy in Vietnam as she was one of the few subs to make port calls in Thailand (Bangkok, Ko Sumui, and Satahib) and Vietnam (DaNang) in addition to her regular WestPac calls at Subic Bay, Australia (Perth and Geraldton), Yokosuka, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Kaohsiung and Keelung).

On 7 July 1967, she loaded and fired four exercise torpedoes. She also carried one war shot torpedo, serial #63813 which she would use on the 11th to send the stricken Buckley-class destroyer escort ex-USS Currier (DE-700) to the bottom in deep water off California.

ex-USS Currier (DE-700) SINKEX by USS Bugara, 1967. (Photo: Bugara Veterans’ Group)

Close up. (Photo: Bugara Veterans’ Group)

Currier, who had received two battle stars for WWII service and one for Korea, had been with the Fleet Sonar School since 1954 and was sent to mothballs for seven years before her SINKEX.

Part of Bugara’s 1968 enlisted crew with non-reg black berets of the type commonly available in Vietnamese markets, complete with embroidered Dolphin insignias. (Photo: Bugara Veteran’s Site)

Bugara’s 1969 Bangkok mooring, complete with locals. (Photo: Bugara Veteran’s Site)

With the ASW vendetta between The Bug and the 7th Fleet’s escorts continuing, in 1969 she was hit by a practice MK 44 torpedo shot by an American destroyer. The torpedo failed to shut down as it was expected to, causing a big hole in Bugara’s aft superstructure. While the exercise torp was never recovered, months later its transducer and nose of the torpedo were found in a space outside of the pressure hull below the aft torpedo tubes.

Her 12th and final post-Korea WestPac cruise was capped in August 1969 when she arrived home in San Diego. She logged her 7,000th dive later that year.

Despite a year-end yard period and battery renewal that would have bought Bugara another half-decade of service, the first week of January 1970 instead brought a flash from the CNO that the five remaining Fleet Snorkel boats (our girl plus USS Medregal, Segundo, Carbonero, and Sabalo), considered too obsolete to transfer overseas much less to keep in service, were to be prepped for use as mobile targets for Mk. 48 torpedo service weapon tests.

Bugara (SS-331) possibly off San Diego, 11 June 1970. Note the four-man MK 7 Mod 6 swimmer delivery vehicle (SDV) on her pressure hull. Photo courtesy of Cole Smith and atlanticfleetsales.smugmug.com. Via Navsource

Bugara in the end cheated to torpedo its meal and made her final dive on her own terms.

Decommissioned and Stuck from the Naval Register on 1 October 1970, ex-Bugara was slated to be expended in a SINKEX off the Washington coast.

However, in the tow from Mare Island to her death ground, our girl sank in a towing accident in the Strait of Juan de Fuca about 4 miles NW of Cape Flattery on 1 June 1971, with no injuries or lives lost. The next day, the Navy sent an NRF reserve ship out from Tacoma, USS Uhlmann (DD-687), to find the sunken hulk with sonar, and later DevGroupOne sent out an early deep-diving robot to film Bugara upright on the ocean floor.

In all, she stacked up a full dozen battle/campaign stars– three for WWII, two for Korea, and seven in Vietnam. In addition to the 57 “little boys” she sent to the bottom in 1945 in gun actions, she also deep-sixed a big Japanese I boat postwar and a tin can that was past its prime. All in all, not a bad run in 26 years.

Epilogue

Little remains of Bugara on dry land. Her WWII Jolly Roger-style battle flag has faded into history and I believe her bell was still aboard when she sank.

Her records are in the National Archives.

She rests 800 feet below the surface of what is now the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.

In September 2008 ex-USS Bugara was surveyed by NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer as part of that oceanographic vessel’s shakedown cruise in a test of her state-of-the-art multibeam sonar system (Survey ID EX0801).

In 2017, she was surveyed as part of a larger expedition by NautilusLive.

She had a fairly active veteran’s group that, from what I can tell, had their last reunion in 2017 and has been offline for the past several years (archived here). They still maintain a group of images on Flickr, heavy on those released by NautilusLive.

She had 16 skippers between 1944 and 1970, the most noteworthy of which was Arnold Schade. Once he left Bugara in February 1946 he went on to other submarine commands, including SUBCOMLANT, a role in which he advised President John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Commander Middle East Force in 1963-64, he earned the Legion of Merit and later pinned a Gold Star to his Distinguished Service Medal. VADM Schade retired in 1971 after 38 years of service– ironically the same year as Bugara.

Schade passed at the age of 91 in San Diego and is buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, Section CBEE, Row 2, Site 121.

She also had the deepest-dived Navy man in history as part of her wardroom during the Cold War. Bugara’s XO in 1962-63 was LCDR Don Walsh. Two years before being piped aboard the sub, he and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard, while aboard the bathyscaphe Trieste (DSV-1), made the record maximum descent in the Challenger Deep, dropping into the darkness to 35,813 feet.

The world’s record descent, man’s deepest dive, had taken nine hours.

Krupp Sphere to Bathyscaph Trieste, 1960. Jacques Piccard center left and Lieutenant Don Walsh stand next to the sphere alongside an unidentified naval officer and civilian. National Museum of the U.S. Navy Photograph. NMUSN-4764

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024: The Ones That Got Away

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024: The Ones That Got Away

Above we see the period depiction by renowned German maritime artist Willy Stöwer of the armed sailing ship (segelschiff) SMS Ayesha off Hodeida (now Al Hudaydah, Yemen) in January 1915, to the warm welcome of allied Ottoman troops. Stöwer, best known for his decades of painting battleships, cruisers, and U-boats, apparently made an exception for the humble Ayesha, as she had an incredibly interesting story that began some 110 years ago this week.

And a tale rather different from the one shown above.

The Background

Part of Admiral Maximillian von Spee’s Eastern Squadron, the 4,200-ton Dresden class of light cruiser SMS Emden was detached from the rest of Von Spee’s force to become an independent raider in the Western Pacific, as the main force of five cruisers made for the Eastern Pacific and, ultimately, the South Atlantic. In doing so, Emden was sort of a sacrificial rabbit to draw away the British, Australian, French, Russian, and Japanese hounds as Von Spee made his exit.

In an epic 97-day patrol, Emden captured 23 merchant ships (21 Brits, one Russian, one Greek) with 101,182 GRT of enemy shipping, sending 16 to the bottom, releasing three, and keeping as four as prizes. In each encounter with these unarmed merchies, Emden practiced “cruiser rules,” in which all passengers and crew on board these ships were brought to safety. She took off the kid gloves and accounted for two warships by sucker punching the 3,500-ton Russian light cruiser Zhemchug and the 300-ton French destroyer Mousquet as they slumbered in Penang harbor in British Malaysia.

German cruiser SMS Emden off Madras. Artwork by Hans Bohrdt. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Fire from Bombardment of Madras by SMS Emden

Emden also bombarded oil depots in Madras, India, sending shivers through the Raj, and tied up dozens of allied warships in running her to ground. This included four brawlers– any of which could make short work of the smaller German warship– that had closed the distance to within just 50 miles of the raider: the 14,600-ton British armored cruiser HMS Minotaur, the 16,000-ton Japanese battlecruiser Ibuki, and the twin 5,400-ton Australian light cruisers HMAS Sydney and Melbourne.

This game all cumulated in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands on 9 November 1914.

Direction Island

The remote Cocos (Keeling) Islands, two desolate flat, low-lying coral atolls made up of 27 islets in the Indian Ocean some 800 miles West of Sumatra, in 1914 only had a population of a few hundred. The British colony was defacto ruled by the Clunies-Ross family, which had settled the archipelago in the 1850s, and whose paterfamilias generally served as the resident magistrate and Crown representative.

Modernity had reached this corner of the British Empire, with the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company, in 1901, establishing a cable station on Direction Island on the top of the Cocos chain with submarine cables eventually running to Rodrigues (Mauritius), Batavia (Java), and Fremantle.

By 1910, this had been complemented by a Marconi wireless station, making it a key link in the communication chain between India and Australia.

A link worthy of breaking, in the mind of Emden’s skipper, Fregattenkapitän Karl von Müller.

Arriving just offshore of the Cocos over a deep trench– Emden needed at least 18 feet of seawater under her hull to float– in the predawn of 9 November, a landungskorps was assembled and ready to go ashore, seize the station, wreck it, and withdraw with any interesting portable supplies to feed the cruiser’s 360-member crew.

Going ashore at dawn in a steam pinnace and two whaleboats was Kpt. lt Hellmuth von Mücke, Leutnants Schmidt and Gysling, six petty officers, and 41 ratings, including two signalmen who knew what to destroy and a former French Foreign Legionnaire who was good with languages (among other things). Expecting resistance from a company-sized garrison at the colony, Mücke raided Emden’s small arms locker, taking four Maxim guns– each with 2,000 rounds of ammunition– 29 dated Gewehr 71 rifles, and 24 Reichsrevolvers.

With a strange warship offshore, disguised by a false fourth funnel, overhearing a coded signal from Emden to her prize ship-turned-tender Buresk, and three small boats filled with armed men headed in from the sea, the wireless station went into alert and started broadcasting at 0630 about the unknown man-of-war, only to be jammed by chatter from Emden’s powerful Telefunken wireless set turned to maximum power.

However, the part of the message broadcast before the jamming– “SOS strange ship in harbor,” and “SOS Emden here”– reached HMAS Sydney, escorting a convoy some 50nm away. The Australian cruiser replied that she was on the way to investigate. Her call letters, NC, led Emden’s signalmen to think she was the cruiser HMS Newcastle, which ironically was also in the Far East just nowhere near Emden, and they estimated by her signal strength and bearing that she was over 200 miles away.

In short, Emden’s skipper thought they had more time, but was very wrong. 

Once landed, Von Mücke’s shore party got busy wrecking. Local photographers A.J. Peake and R. Cardwell, apparently EETC employees, began snapping photos documenting the activities of the landing party over the next two days.

The force soon captured and wrecked the undefended telegraph office without a shot– the island’s entire arsenal amounted to a “few 12 bore guns and two small and ancient pea-rifles”– cut three of four underwater cables, and felled the station’s transmission mast via explosives. This caused collateral damage as coral shot around like shrapnel, holing buildings and destroying the island’s supply of scotch. 

Emden’s launch grappling for cable at Direction Island. NLA obj-149336815

The Eastern Extension Telegraph Company office after the German raid, 9 November 1914. NLA obj-149337412

The bottom of the mast with the wireless hut at the back. NLA obj-149338323

The wireless mast as it lay across the garden. NLA obj-149338122

More shots of the destroyed cable station. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, AWNS-19150107-39.

Under the German flag, Direction Island, November 1914. Note the sun helmet and Mauser of the German sailors. NLA obj-149336272

At 0900, with Emden spotting an incoming ship and soon acknowledging it was not her tender Buresk, the cruiser cleared decks and signaled her shore party to return immediately.

“Landing party having been recalled by the Emden, leaves the jetty but turns back on seeing Emden putting to sea.” In the background is the copra schooner Ayesha, owned by the Clunies-Ross family.” Note the white-uniformed officer complete with pistol belt. NLA .obj-149337219

“The Emdens’ landing party left the island on their futile attempt to rejoin their ship, Direction Island, 1914.” NLA obj-149336127

Not able to catch up to the withdrawing Emden, her away force returned to the docks on Direction Island. Soon signs of a battle could be seen over the horizon.

View from the beach of Direction Island with the battle between the SMS Emden and HMAS Sydney in the far distance. NLA obj-149338507

Unknown to Von Mucke and his men, nor to the colonists on Direction Island, Emden, and Sydney clashed between 0940 and 1120 in a one-sided battle that left the German cruiser grounded and ablaze on North Keeling Island with more than half of her 316 men aboard dead, missing, or wounded.

German raider, SMS Emden is sunk by Australian Cruiser, HMAS Sydney, RAN collection.

German cruiser SMS Emden beached on Cocos Island in 1914

Sydney suffered four fatalities and a dozen wounded.

Von Mucke knew that Emden was either sunk or had fled over the horizon and that the only warship coming to collect them would likely be an enemy. He set up his Spandaus on the beach and waited.

A German Maxim gun and ammunition boxes were set up to repel landings at Direction Island, on 9 November 1914. NLA obj-149337513

Meet Ayesha

The local coconut and cargo hauler, the 97-ton, 98-foot three-master schooner Ayesha, was anchored just off the docks on Direction Island, with Von Mucke’s crew passing close by on their way to the island that morning. She was a fine-looking vessel, for a coastal lugger, and typically sailed the local waters with a crew of five or six mariners and a master.

The schooner Ayesha, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, November 1914. NLA obj-149336020

Ayesha in open water State Library of Australia PRG-1373-29-15

The solution, to Von Mucke, was to seize the schooner, requisition supplies from the station, and load his men on board with the hope of heading to Dutch Sumatra, some 800 or so miles away, where they could figure out the next steps.

He boarded her with one of his officers for an inspection.

From a June 1915 New York Times interview with Von Mucke translated from the Berliner Tageblatt:

I made up my mind to leave the island as soon as possible. The Emden was gone the danger for us growing. I noticed a three-master, the schooner Ayesha. Mr. Ross, the owner of the ship and the island, had warned me that the boat was leaky but I found it a quite seaworthy tub.

“Schooner Ayesha commandeered by Germans being prepared for the voyage” Sails have been bent to the booms and forestays. AWM P11611.027.002

Germans commandeer cable station stores to provision the yacht Ayesha, owned by the Clunies-Ross family after the German raider SMS Emden was driven ashore at North Keeling Island by HMAS Sydney on 9 November 1914. On the evening of 10 November 1914, a party from the Emden used the Ayesha to escape from the island. AWM P03912.001

A German landing party at Direction Island, preparing to go aboard the yacht Ayesha, after their ship the German raider SMS Emden was destroyed by HMAS Sydney on 9 November 1914. AWM P03912.002

The master and mate were released from their duties, although they warned Von Mucke the ship’s hull, thin, “worn through” and overgrown, could not handle an ocean voyage. Inspecting the hold, the wood was indeed “red and rotten, so much so, indeed, that we stopped our scratching as we had no desire to poke the points of our knives into the Indian Ocean.”

On the evening of 10 November, the Germans used the Ayesha to escape from the island.

The locals– according to both German and British reports– actually gave the Germans three cheers as they left. Von Mucke said they went even further and asked for their autographs. Emden’s fame had proceeded them.

“Steam pinnace taking last of Germans aboard the Ayesha. The Germans are waving to the British, who have given them three cheers.” NLA obj-149339081

It wasn’t until the next day, 11 November, that sailors and Marines from HMAS Sydney arrived at Direction Island to find out that the Emden’s shore party had come and gone, with a decent head start.

A party of armed sailors from HMAS Sydney lands on Direction Island, on 11 November 1914. A party from the German raider Emden had landed and taken possession of the cable station on the island, but on the evening of the 10th, they escaped in the schooner Ayesha, which belonged to the owner of the island. AWM EN0390

Von Mucke raised their small war flag and christened the schooner SMS Ayesha (Emden II) to three hurrahs from her new crew. Nonetheless, she struck her flag soon after and sailors soon went over the side to paint over the ship’s name. Word had to have gone out and the British were no doubt looking for her.

Ayesha’s navigational equipment was limited to a sextant, two chronometers, and a circa 1882 Indian Ocean Directory, filled with quaint old high-scale charts and notes made as far back as the 1780s. With 50 men crowded onto a ship designed for five, they fashioned hammocks from old ropes and slept in holds and on deck.

Even more limited was the crew’s kit, as the men had landed on Direction Island for a raid and only had the clothes on their backs and cartridges in their pouches.

The whole crew went about naked in order to spare our wash…Toothbrushes were long ago out of sight. One razor made the rounds of the crew. The entire ship had one precious comb.

Further, Ayesha’s canvas was old and rotten, and three of the schooner’s four water tanks had been contaminated with salt water.

She had enough canvas to rig fore and aft sails on the main and mizzen and two square sails on the foremast. Still, these were threadbare and had to be patched constantly as they “tore at the slightest provocation.”

One condemned sail was rigged over the ballast for use as a shared bed by ratings, which sounds almost enjoyable until you find out that the schooner leaked so bad that water rose over the ballast at sea and typically sloshed around just below the sail bed.

From Von Mucke’s later book, as translated in 1933 and republished by the USNI:

Below deck, aft of the hold, were two small cabins originally fitted with bunks, but in these, we were compelled to store our provisions. Swarms of huge cockroaches made it impossible for human beings to inhabit them.

Another old sail was rigged up to catch and filter rainwater into three repurposed Standard Oil cans for drinking which was rendered palatable by “a dash or lime juice of which we had fortunately found few bottles among the provisions of the former captain.”

Gratefully, it turned out that the crew’s former Legionaire was a crack chef and managed to cobble together decent meals from the larder of rice and tinned beef.

At night, the only light was two oil lamps that “gave off more smoke than light.”

Most of the armament was secured down below, with the Spandaus concealed and arranged to fire through loopholes on deck should they be needed.

Leaving the steam pinnacle behind for the islanders to use, Von Mucke originally towed the two cutters from Emden behind the Ayesha, as there was no tackle available to bring them aboard nor deck space to house them but eventually, they were lost. Soon all they had in terms of small boats were a pair of jolly boats that the schooner carried in small davits, each able to hold two men. At times of doldrums, they were put out to tow the schooner with the help of Emden’s lost cutter’s long oars. 

After 16 days at sea wandering towards Sumatra and keeping over the horizon from steamers, Ayesha was intercepted by the Dutch Fret-class destroyer Lynx (510 tons, 210 feet oal, 30 knots, 4×3″, 2xtt) on 26 November and was escorted into Padang in Wester Sumatra the next day.

Given 24 hours in port, Von Mucke was warned by Lynx’s Belgian-born skipper “I could run into the harbor but whether I might not come out again was doubtful.”

Von Mucke related that at the time he “felt truly sorry for the Lynx. It must have been very irritating to her to have to trundle behind us at the wonderful speed of one knot, a speed which, with the light breeze blowing, the Ayesha could not exceed.”

The Dutch did not allow Ayesha to take on clothes, charts, or tackle, as they could have added to the warship’s effectiveness. What was allowed were some tinned provisions and ten live pigs, the latter stored in a makeshift pen around the chain locker. 

They left the Dutch port with reinforcements as two reserve officers, LTs Gerdts and Wellman, who had been interned at Pandang on German steamers earlier in the war and wanted to cast their lot with Von Mucke. Once smuggled aboard under darkness via rowboat, as berthing was already a problem, their spaces were found on the deck under the mess table.

The German schooner was towed back out to sea on the evening of the 28th. She was followed out of territorial waters by the Dutch cruiser De Zeven Provincien.

Another bright spot of her brief stay in the Dutch East Indies was that the local German consul managed to smuggle the crew a small bundle of chocolate, cigarettes, and German newspapers. There was also a promised rendezvous location out to sea in a fortnight or so with a German merchant steamer that was still afloat and filled with enough coal to steam anywhere on the globe.

With a few weeks’ worth of food left from the stockpile removed from Direction Island, but relying largely on rainwater for drinking and bathing, the schooner spent the next two weeks wandering West into the Indian Ocean, keeping hidden while drifting towards her promised rendezvous.

Finally, in heavy seas near South Pagai in the Dutch Mentawai Islands on 14 December, Ayesha spied the Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL) freighter Choising (ex-Madeleine Rickmers), a slight vessel of just 1,657 tons. Still, she was the best Christmas present Von Mucke could ask for.

The meeting, in the fog and mist, was probably traumatic to the complement of the steamer whose ship’s officers and engineer were German, and most of the crew were Chinese. 

Up flew our ensign and colours. The steamer ran up the German flag. The crew climbed aloft into the shrouds, and three cheers rang from deck to deck. As usual, our men were dressed in the manner customary in thc Garden of Eden, a costume which necessity had forced upon them. The men of the Choising confided to us later that they were speechless with astonishment when suddenly, out of the fog, emerged a schooner, the shrouds of which were filled with naked forms.

Having sailed Ayesha for 1,709 sea miles, the crews waited until the waters calmed on the 16th to transfer to the steamer then scuttled the schooner, Emden’s final victim. They removed Ayesha’s wheel and figurehead and took them along to their new ship. 

Willy Stöwer – Ayesha im Indischen Ozean nach Treffen mit Choising

The overloaded Choising set out West across the Indian Ocean towards Yemen on the Arabian peninsula, part of the now-German allied Ottoman Empire. Thumbing through Choising’s Lloyds book, the freighter assumed the identity of the Italian steamer Shenir, which was similarly sized and had the same general layout.

This included painting Shenir, Genoa on her bow and crafting an approximated Italian flag from sailcloth and a green window curtain from the captain’s cabin.

They stayed out of the shipping lanes, celebrated a low-key Christmas and New Year at sea, and after entering the Bab-el-Mandeb, passing close abreast of two British gunboats in the darkness, made it to Hodeida on 5 January 1915, having crossed 4,100 miles of the Indian Ocean successfully.

Cruise of the Emden, Ayesha, and Choising. Bestanddeelnr 22032 010

Arabian Nights

With the French cruiser, Desaix spotted near Hodeida, Von Mucke and his men bid Choising farewell. With no Ottoman naval officials to turn to, she went across the straits to Massawa in Eritrea which was under Italian control and still neutral, intending to link up with the cruiser SMS Konigsberg which they thought was still off the coast of Africa but was trapped upriver in the Rufiji.

Choising, remaining in Somaliland, would go on to be seized by the Italian government once that former German ally declared war against the Empire in May 1915. This led to her final service as the Italian-flagged Carroccio. As part of a small Italian convoy, she was sent to the bottom of the Adriatic Sea on 15 May 1917 off the coast of Albania by the Austrian destroyer Balaton in a messy surface action known today as the Battle of the Strait of Otranto.

Meanwhile, contrary to early rosy reports that the Turks welcomed Von Mucke with open arms in Hodeida and soon spirited them via train up the Hejaz railroad to Constantinople and from there to Germany, it would be five long months of slogging across Arabia to Damascus before the Germans had any sort of safety.

Overland from Hodeida, from Von Mucke’s book

The reason for choosing the port was simple: 

Our only knowledge regarding Arabian ways and customs was a ” round the world’ guidebook that would have answered the purposes of a sight-seeing couple on their honeymoon very well. From it we learned that Hodcida is a large commercial city, and that the Hedjaz railway to Hodeida was in course of construction. As the book was some years old and as one of my officers remembered that years ago he had met a French engineer who told him that he had been engaged in the construction of a railway to Hodeida, we took it for granted that the railway was completed by this time.

Nonetheless, the word would precede them, hence Willie Stower’s fanciful depiction of the long-scuttled Ayesha arriving at a big red carpet Ottoman welcome at Hodeida. 

Another such propaganda piece from 1915:

With the railway incomplete, the journey, which is a bit off subject for a Warship blog, included a three-day firefight with a battalion-sized force of Arab rebels, unruly camel caravans with wary Bedouins watching from the dunes, creeping up the uncharted coast on local fishing dhows (zambuks), and avoiding being kept as “guests” by local Turkish garrison commanders and sheiks looking to add the Teutonic travelers to their muscle.

SMS Emden crew is attacked by Arabs on their desert hike to Jeddah, Der Krieg 1914/19 in Wort und Bild, 35. Heft

Finally arriving at the terminus for the Hejaz railroad at Al Ula, a trek of 1,100 miles from Hodeida on 7 May, the force met Berliner Tageblatt correspondent Emil Ludwig, who was waiting for them, and within days they were being hosted by the German counsel in Damascus. By this point, their firearms cache had been whittled down to one machine gun, a few revolvers, and just 13 rifles, the rest bartered along the way for food, safe passage, boats, and camels; or lost in zambuk wrecks. 

The photo of the Damascus meeting shows the Emden’s men complete with crisp new Turkish uniforms and fezes! 

Besatzungsmitglieder von SMS Ayesha im Garten des Kaiserlichen Konsulats in Damaskus 11. Mai 1915. 2) Kapitänleutnant Hellmuth von Mücke, 3) Konsul Walter Rößler. Note the Gewehr 71 Mausers.

Then came an even larger show in Constantinople, attended by foreign legations and German RADM Wilhelm Souchon, former commander of the Kaiser’s Mediterranean Squadron and current unofficial commander of the Ottoman fleet. Souchon had a gift for the men: Iron Crosses sent directly from Berlin.

Six of the 50-man forces that had landed at Direction Island six months prior had been left behind, three killed by rebels, and three by assorted diseases and accidents. Of Emden’s 360 crew, virtually all except Von Mucke’s detachment were dead or POWs by this point in the war– to include the Kaiser’s own nephew. The same could be said broadly for all the fine young men of Von Spee’s squadron.

The arrival of Captain Mücke with the SMS Emden’s landing party in Constantinople

Captured German photograph of the captain and officers of the Ayesha being presented to the Turkish authorities by the American Ambassador. Figures from right to left are (1) Enver Pasha; (2) German Ambassador; (3,5,6) Officers of the raider Emden; (4) Provost of Town; (7) Admiral Suchow Pasha of Goeben. AWM A011403

Captured German photograph showing the arrival of the officers who escaped from the raider Emden after commandeering the yacht Ayesha, with the German flag which saved them from falling into the hands of the enemy. AWM A01402

They were lucky.

Soon after Von Mucke’s trip up the Arabian peninsula, another group of Von Spee’s men, elements of the crew of the river patrol boat SMS Tsingtau including Kptlt. Erwin von Möller, LtzS Hans von Arnim, Vizesteuermann Heinrich Deike, Karl Gründler, Heinrich Mau, Arthur Schwarting plus Turkish ship’s cook Said Achmad, sailed the coastal schooner Marboek for 82 days from Sumatra where they were interned to the Arabian coast at Hadramaut, then headed out overland for Sana, much like Von Mucke.

They were all killed in the desert by rebels on 25 May 1916.

Epilogue

Von Mucke, whose interviews with Emil Ludwig soon circled the globe, spent some time as head of a Turko-German river flotilla in the Euphrates, then finished the war back in Germany as head of the Danube Flotilla. You could say the Kaiserliche Marine wanted to keep him from being lost at sea. Sadly, half of the men who had returned with him from Emden had been killed later in the Great War. 

His mug was snapped often and widely distributed. A dashing hero with a romantic tale.

Capt. Von Mucke & bride & sailors of EMDEN LOC ggbain-20400-20461v

Kpt. Von Mucke in Berlin LOC ggbain-19500-19578v

He also penned two thin wartime books, one on each of the vessels he served on during the conflict.

Postwar, retired from the Navy after an 18-year career, he had six children and earned a living in Weimar Germany through writing and conducting lecture tours, retelling his story. Turning to politics, he briefly held a seat in the Saxon state parliament, flirted with the Nazis (membership number 3,579) before they rose to power, then by 1930 had become an outspoken pacifist and member of the Deutschlandbund, an anti-Nazi group. Banned from writing after 1933, he was labeled a communist and tossed into concentration camps on at least two occasions. Despite the fact his naval pension had been suspended, he volunteered for combat with the Kriegsmarine in 1939 at age 58 but was rejected because he was considered politically unreliable.

Remaining in East Germany post-WWII, Von Mucke wrote pamphlets against the rearmament of West Germany for the communists but soon fell out with them as well. He passed in 1957 at age 76 and is buried in Ahrensburg.

As she sat in shallow water along the reefs off Keeling and was extensively salvaged over 40 years, literally tons of souvenirs of Emden exist, primarily in Australia, where her bell and several relics are on display at the AWM in Canberra while two of her 10.5 cm (4.1 in) SK L/40 guns are in parks in the Canberra and Sydney.

Relics from Sydney and Emden’s battle on display at the Australian War Memorial

It is also likely that many tons of her good Krupp steel armor plate were recycled for use by the Japanese Combined Fleet, as her salvors for long periods in the 1920s and 30s were from Yokohama.

However, little, if anything, survives of Ayesha other than period photographs and romanticized postcards, along with the works of Von Mücke.

She is remembered in postal stamps of the Cocos Islands, for obvious reasons. 

The small 4×6 Reichskriegsflagge flown over Keeling by Emden’s Landungskorps, then our subject schooner and brought back to Germany in 1915 with Von Mücke and the gang at some point was put on display in the Marienkirche (St. Mary’s Church) in Lübeck.

Then in the 1930s, it was passed on to Kapt. Julius Lauterbach. A HAPAG reserve officer who had served on the liner Staatssekretär Kraetke before the war and as Emden’s 1st navigation officer during the conflict. He left the cruiser with a 15-man prize crew put aboard the captured 4,350-ton British steamer Buresk in September 1914 to serve as a tender. Captured after Emden was destroyed and Buresk scuttled, he escaped along with 34 other Germans held by the British in Singapore during the Sepoy Mutiny in February 1915. Returning to Germany on his own, (like Von Mücke he also wrote a thin book published during the war, “1000£ Price on Your Head – Dead or Alive: The Escape Adventures of Former Prize Officer S. M. S. Emden”) he was given command of a trap ship (German Q-ship), and subsequently the raider SMS Mowe. In 1955, Lauterbach’s widow donated the flag to German militaria collector Karl Flöck who placed it on display at the Gasthaus zum Roten Ochsen in Cologne for years until it went up to auction in 2009. It is now in private hands.

The tale of Emden has been told numerous times in numerous ways, but it generally left out that of Von Mucke and his refugees. Of note, a 2013 German film, Die Männer der Emden, included it. The trailer includes camels, suffering, and a bit of swashbuckling, as it should.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024: Floating Powerhouse

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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, Oct. 30, 2024: Floating Powerhouse

Photograph by Walter E. Frost, City of Vancouver Archives, CVA 447-8946.1

Above we see the Buckley-class destroyer escort USS Whitehurst (DE-634) of ResDesDiv 273 as she makes a port call in Vancouver on 31 July 1965.

At just over 300 feet long, she doesn’t look like much, but by this time in her career, she had already fought in WWII– sinking a Japanese submarine some 80 years ago this week– earned battle stars during Korea, cruised off Vietnam, and would go on to live forever on the silver screen.

The Buckleys

With some 154 hulls ordered, the Buckleys were intended to be cranked out in bulk to counter the swarms of Axis submarines prowling the seas.

Just 306 feet overall, they were about the size of a medium-ish Coast Guard cutter today but packed a lot more armament, namely three 3″/50 DP guns in open mounts, a secondary battery of 1.1-inch (or 40mm), and 20mm AAA guns, and three 21-inch torpedo tubes in a triple mount for taking out enemy surface ships.

Buckley-class-destroyer-escort-1944 USS England by Dr. Dan Saranga via Blueprints

Then there was the formidable ASW suite to include stern depth charge racks, eight depth charge throwers, and a Hedgehog system.

Powered by responsive electric motors fed by steam turbines, they could make 24 knots and were extremely maneuverable.

Class-leader, USS Buckley (DE-51), cutting a 20-knot, 1,000-foot circle on trials off Rockland Maine, 3 July 1943, 80-G-269442

Meet Whitehurst

Our subject carries the name of Ensign Henry Purefoy Whitehurst, Jr. who, originally scheduled to graduate in February 1942, was matriculated early from Annapolis with the rest of his class 12 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, becoming the second Class of 1941.

Rushed to the Pacific, Henry was lost along with 233 shipmates aboard the heavy cruiser USS Astoria (CA 34) when “Nasty Asty” was sunk early in the morning of 9 August 1942 by Japanese surface forces at the Battle of Savo Island. The young officer was 22.

Ensign Henry Purefoy Whitehurst, Jr. 16 Feb 1920-9 Aug 1942. He is remembered on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial.

Laid down on 21 March 1943 at San Francisco by the Bethlehem Steel Co and launched on 5 September 1943, USS Whitehurst (DE-634) was sponsored by Ensign Whitehurst’s grieving mother, Mrs. Robie S. Whitehurst, and commissioned on 19 November 1943.

Her plankowner skipper was T/LCDR James Robert Gray, USN, 78836, (USNA ‘37). As a young LT(jg), he was the officer of the deck on duty aboard the high-speed minesweeper USS Wasmuth (DD-338/DMS-15) at Pearl Harbor and got the ship underway and fighting, claiming one plane downed. He then served as Damage Control Officer on the heavy cruiser USS New Orleans (CA-32) at Coral Sea and Midway. Whitehurst was his first command.

Headed to War!

Following sea trials, calibration tests, and shakedown off the West Coast, Whitehurst arrived at Pearl Harbor on 4 February 1944 and then got underway for the Solomons three days later as part of a small convoy.

Such work, riding shotgun for troop transports, LCIs, and LSTs on slow and steady (8-9 knot) runs, would be her bread and butter.

She took part in the Palau, Yap, Ulithi, Woleai raid (30 Mar 44 – 1 Apr 44), and, from 26 April through 7 June, she was upfront for the Hollandia operations followed closely by Toem-Wakde-Sarmi and Biak landings, including a very close brush with Japanese shore batteries off the latter.

From her War Diary:

She then joined in the operations to clear out the Northern Solomons from 22 June into early October, which for our tin can meant escorting the PT-boat mothership USS Mobjack (AGP-7) as she shifted ports, patrolling for Japanese submarines and surface contacts, conducting exercises and drills as part of Escort Division 40.

By this stage of the war, the Solomons had become a backwater.

It was there, at Blanche Harbor on Treasury Island on 1 September, that LCDR Grey was relieved by LT Jack Carter Horton, DE-V(G), USNR, 96845. Grey was being sent on to command USS Lawrence C. Taylor (DE 415). Horton, who had gone through the wartime midshipman school with 738 fellow “90-day wonders” at Northwestern University in Chicago, knew Whitehurst well– he had been her XO since commissioning.

The death of I-45

On 12 October, Whitehurst got underway from Humboldt Bay with orders to escort Task Unit 77.7.1, the fueling force for the 7th Fleet for the upcoming invasion of the Philippines. This included four oilers (Ashtabula, Saranac, Salamonie, and Chepachet), the civilian tanker Pueblo, and three fellow Buckleys: the sequential sisters USS Witter (DE-636), Bowers (DE-637), and Willmarth (DE-638).

Nearing the Philippines, Japanese activity increased and folks got jumpy. Just after 0200 on 17 October, a sharp echo underwater led to a radical course change, and a pattern of 13 depth charges dropped over the side as a precaution. Whitehurst’s War Diary notes, “The contact was evaluated as a large fish due to its erratic movements and narrow width.”

Creeping through the Ngaruangl Passage on 20 October, three days later they steamed through the Surigao Straits into the Leyte Gulf, anchoring off Homonhon Island, with her log taking care to note, “This part of the island in Japanese hands.”

Starting the next morning, at 0826 on 24 October, Whitehurst’s tanker group began a four-day running fight with Japanese ground-based aircraft, fending off a series of air attacks by Betty twin-engine and Val single-engine bombers as they repeatedly shifted positions. This included making emergency turns, burning both chemical and oil smoke, and filling the air with 3″/50 and 20mm shells whenever planes came within range. All the while the force managed to conduct underway refueling and escape the battleships and cruisers of Nishimura’s “Southern Force,” although they observed the flashes in the distance of the Battle of Surigao Strait over the night of 24/25 October.

Just when things started quieting down, at 0325 on 29 October Whitehurst observed a strong underwater explosion “some distance away” and received word via TBS that the Butler-class destroyer escort USS Eversole (DE-404) had been torpedoed and sunk by the Japanese Type B2 submarine I-45, taking 80 of her crew to the bottom.

Japanese submarine I-45 (B-class new type-1), on speed trial run off Sasebo, 1943

Whitehurst was detached from her task unit to screen the sistership USS Bull (DE-402) which was picking up what would be 136 survivors from the lost greyhound.

Picking up a sonar contact as she closed with the scene, Whitehurst delivered a series of four barrages of 7.2-inch Mk.10 Hedgehog charges and was rewarded with a series of secondary underwater explosions.

Just after dawn, a large (500-yard by 2,000-yard) oil slick was observed, filled with debris.

From her War Diary:

Japanese Sixth Fleet HQ had no further contact with I-45 and she is presumed lost with LCDR (promoted CDR posthumously) Kawashima Mamoru and his 103-member crew, removed from the Imperial Navy List on 10 March 1945.

Back to work

Continuing her involvement in the Philippines through the end of the month, a role that included blowing up random floating mines with rifle fire, on 2 November Whitehurst was dispatched to escort the damaged oiler Ashtabula to Hollandia for repairs. There, she witnessed the horrific disintegration of the USS Mount Hood (AE-11), packed with 4,500 tons of high explosives, in Seeadler Harbor.

Ordered to leave the harbor with a force of small LSMs and LCTs for Humboldt Bay the same day, by 12 November Whitehurst headed back to the Philippines as escort for Echelon L-13, a mix of 23 LSTs in four columns and 11 merchants in another four columns.

Entering the Surigao Strait by the 19th, enemy planes were sighted off and on over the next few days, cumulating with an attack on the 21st by two Kawasaki Ki-48 “Lily,” with one of the twin-engine light bombers shot down in flames. Whitehurst’s gunners contributed 382 rounds to the effort.

Sent back to Manus in December, she remained in the Admiralty Islands on interisland convoy runs and training duties, drydocking in January 1945, and then escorting the destroyer tender USS Sierra (AD-18) and repair ship USS Briareus (AR-12) to Purvis Bay in the Solomons in February.

Then came a well-earned 10-day R&R period in Australia, reporting to Ulithi afterward for the next big show.

Okinawa

Assigned to TF-51 along with two destroyers, USS McDermut (DD-667) and Leutz (DD-481), and the escort USS England (DE-635), Whitehurst and company formed the anti-submarine screen around the light cruisers USS Mobile and Miami for the assault and occupation of Okinawa Gunto, leaving Ulithi at the end of March.

By 6 April, the first Japanese aircraft out of Okinawa were engaged by Whitehurst, whose gunners fired 263 rounds that day.

At 1500 on 12 April the Divine Wind came to Whitehurst.

Three Japanese Vals closed with the destroyer escort and two were shot down by the ship’s gunners. The third, in a steep 40-degree angle dive, smoking from 20mm hits, crashed into the ship’s bridge at 1502.

The entire bridge structure was enveloped in flames– with all the pilothouse and CIC personnel killed outright– and all control and communications lost. By 1507, with secondary control restored, with gun control conducted by voice, the ship’s force was fighting the fires that were under control by 1515.

The minesweeper USS Vigilance (AM-324) and assault transport USS Crosley (APD-87) came alongside the smoking warship to render medical assistance and rescue.

All of the men in the ship’s radio room as well as those in the forward gun crews had been either killed or seriously wounded by bomb fragments. In all, Whitehurst suffered 31 deaths and 37 wounded while six men were missing in action, presumed blown overboard. Overall, the casualties amounted to a third of the crew. 

With Vigilance leading the way and a signalman from the minesweeper on Whitehurst’s deck passing commands back and forth via semaphore flag and handheld blinker lamp, the damaged escort made the protection of the Kerama Retto anchorage by 1830.

Four days later, patched up enough to make for the sea once again, Whitehurst joined a slow convoy bound for recently occupied Saipan and arrived there on the 20th. On the 22nd, she received a dispatch ordering her back to Pearl Harbor for battle damage repairs and alterations. Arriving in Hawaii via Eniwetok on 10 May, where she unloaded munitions and entered the Naval Yard two days later.

P.I. Powerhouse

The brutal month-long campaign to Liberate Japanese-occupied Manila, once considered one of the most beautiful of cities in the Far East, had left the Philippines’s capital a pile of rubble amid destruction perhaps only surpassed by Warsaw.

Manila, Philippine Islands, Feb. 1945. (U.S. Air Force Number 59680AC)

According to post-combat accounting, the fighting destroyed 11,000 of the city’s buildings, leaving 200,000 Filipinos homeless in addition to the 100,000 killed when the smoke cleared in early February 1945. Survivors had no running water, sewage treatment, or electricity.

That’s where Whitehurst and her sisters came in.

Gen. Kruger’s Sixth Army engineer train, tasked with helping to stand Manila back up in addition to pursuing the Japanese into northern Luzon, was soon operating two floating diesel powerplants to provide the city with a trickle of power.

Responding to the call, USS Wiseman (DE-667), one of Whitehurst’s sisters, was given a set of ship-to-shore power reels and transformers, allowing her to send juice into the Manila Electric Service by using the destroyer escort’s main propulsion plant.

Two large cable reels and a transformer were added between the X-position director and the smokestack. The transformers installed as part of the conversion provided electricity in six different voltages ranging from 2,400 and 37,500 volts using the ship’s GE generators

Photo of a power cable reels on the USS Wiseman (DE-667) from the open bridge. The Wiseman helped provide power to Manila for a time in 1945. U.S. Navy Memorial Foundation Collection: Frank M. Frazitta Papers. 0677-048-b1-fi-i6. East Carolina University Digital Collections. https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/24920. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024

As detailed by DANFS on Wiseman’s mission:

Arriving at Manila on [March] 23d, she commenced furnishing power to that nearly demolished city on 13 April and, over the next five and one-half months, provided some 5,806,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In addition, Wiseman’s evaporators furnished 150,000 gallons of drinking water to Army facilities in the harbor area and to many small craft. Her radios were also utilized to a great extent. Placed at the disposal of the Navy’s port director, the ship’s communication outfit was used to handle harbor radio traffic until the director’s equipment arrived and was installed ashore.

As part of her yard period in Pearl Harbor following her kamikaze strike, Whitehurst received a similar set of ship-to-shore transmission reels, which she tested on 1 July 1945 by illuminating a test grid ashore at the Navy Yard.

3 July 1945: Whitehurst at Pearl Harbor, undergoing Inclining tests, note her TEG conversion reels are visible behind her stack. (U.S. Navy photo, National Archives #19LCM-DE634-3)

Receiving munitions, provisions, and new crew members (including a new skipper), she spent three weeks on a series of speed and maneuvering trials, augmented by gunnery and ASW exercises then shoved off on 25 July bound for the Philippines.

On 14 August 1945, Whitehurst, which had just escorted the jeep carrier USS Core (CVE-13) from Ulithi to Leyte, arrived at Manila’s inner harbor and tied up, reporting to Sixth Army to relive Wiseman.

She soon after started lighting up the P.I. at a regular 13,200 volts (5.8746E-25 MWh), 24×7.

She would continue this unsung yet vital post-war recovery service for more than two months until relieved on 26 October.

Her services were needed in Guam, and Whitehurst steamed there in early November where she tied up and supplied electrical power to the dredge YM-25, in support of the 301st Naval Construction Bn, into 1946.

No less than six other destroyer escorts– all Buckley class ships– were at some point converted into floating Turbo-Electric Generators (TEG) in such a manner: USS Donnell (DE-56), Foss (DE-59), Marsh (DE-699), Maloy (DE-791), HMS Spragge (K-572, ex-DE-563) and HMS Hotham (K-583 ex-DE-574). Notably, Donnell, which had been extensively damaged by a torpedo from U-473 in May 1944, was reclassified IX-182 and used to supply shore power off Omaha immediately after D-Day.

This allowed them to operate in important expeditionary and humanitarian roles if and when needed, a trick some of them would be called to do in later conflicts. For example, Foss and Maloy went to the aid of blacked-out Portland Maine in 1947 while Wiseman and Marsh powered the respective Korean ports of Masan and Pusan in 1950 during the Korean War.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Korea

Finally returning to CONUS in April 1946 after more than nine months of service as a floating generator, Whitehurst was decommissioned six months later and placed in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet at Green Cove Springs, Florida. She earned six battle stars for her World War II service.

Not all of her sisters were as lucky. Four had been lost during the war: USS Fechteler, sunk by U-967 northwest of Oran, Algeria 5 May 1944; Rich; lost to mines off Utah Beach 8 June 1944 just months after joining the fleet; Bates, sunk by kamikazes off Okinawa 25 May 1945; and Underhill, sunk by a Japanese Kaiten human torpedo northeast of Luzon 24 July 1945. Meanwhile, England, like Whitehurst, was damaged by suicide planes off Okinawa, but unlike our subject was not repaired following the war.

The truth was that the peacetime Navy had little use for slow DEs with their open gun mounts when so many modern, fast, and well-armed new destroyers were just leaving the shipyards.

Port broadside aerial view of destroyer escort USS Whitehurst (DE-634) November 30 1949 USN 200669

When the Norks crossed the 38th Parallel during the summer of 1950 into South Korea, Whitehurst was dusted off and recommissioned on 1 September 1950. Sent to the Far East as part of Escort Squadron 11 (CortDiv 112), she earned three battle stars (First UN Counter Offensive, Communist China Spring Offensive, and UN Summer-Fall Offensive) for her activities during the Korean War in the seven months between 25 February and 19 September 1951.

She reportedly added a 13-year-old war orphan, one Jimmie Pon Son, to her crew. 

Gilligan patrol…and movie star

Remaining in the Westpac until 1955, she transferred to Pearl Harbor for another year of service that included poking around the remote islands and atolls of the U.S. Trust Territories for the Pacific, winning hearts and minds by providing aid and medical care for the locals while enforcing fishing regulations and low-key looking for Japanese hold outs.

With an 11-foot draft and the ability to easily launch rubber rafts due to her low freeboard, littoral surveillance came easy.

For instance, take this deck log note from March 1957 into account:

By June 1957, she was one of the last destroyer escorts remaining on active duty in her WWII configuration (if you disregard her TEG equipment).

This led to the ship and her crew being placed at the disposal of 20th Century Fox for six weeks for Dick Powell to film The Enemy Below.

Dubbed the fictional USS Haynes in the film, Whitehurst appears in several significant passages, all filmed in amazing DeLuxe Color.

Reserve Days, and her final mission

Once filming wrapped, Whitehurst was sent to the 13th Naval District at Seattle, Washington in October 1957 to serve with Reserve Escort Squadron 1 (ResCortDiv 112) as a Naval Reserve Training ship, used for weekend cruises one weekend per month and a two-week summer cruise per year.

Decommissioned a second time on 6 December 1958, Whitehurst remained “in service” as a training asset, keeping up her regular drill work.

USS Whitehurst (DE634), note the post-war hull numbers

This continued until October 1961 when she was recommissioned a second time during the Berlin Wall crisis, manned by activated reservists, and sent to Pearl Harbor to join Escort Squadron 7 for 10 months.

Buckley class USS Whitehurst (DE-634)

It was during this time that she was sent to Vietnam in March 1962 along with Escort Division 71. Operating in the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam, she conducted training of South Vietnamese naval officers out of Danang.

Postwar view of Whitehurst, with her distinctive cable reels on the 01 level amidships

Decommissioned a third time on 1 August 1962, she returned to her weekend warrior NRT job in Seattle as part of Destroyer Squadron 27 (ResDesDiv 273) where, during a 1963 refit, she landed much of her WWII armament and her TEG reels.

Her summer cruises, longer two-week affairs, often ranged as far as Canada and Mexico.

Whitehurst, City of Vancouver Archives. 31 July 1965.

This quiet reserve life continued into October 1968 when she was shifted to Swan Island outside of Portland, Oregon, becoming an NRT vessel there.

On 12 July 1969, Whitehurst was struck from the Navy List as the likelihood of her offering anything as a training asset was slim. By that time, she was one of the final members of her “disposable” class still in the Navy’s hands, a record only surpassed by a handful of fellow NRT ships which lingered into the early 1970s.

Stripped, she was towed to sea by USS Tawasa (ATF-92) and sunk as a target by the submarine USS Trigger (SS-564) on 28 April 1971 in deep water off Vancouver Island, during the development of the MK 48 torpedo– its first live warshot test.

28 April 1971 ex-Whitehurst quickly slides beneath the waves. This photo was taken by the Trigger’s Periscope Photographer, Tom Boyer.

In her ending, she served the Navy one last time by helping to test new weapons and train new bluejackets in their use.

Likewise, 11 of her class were disposed of in similar SINKEXs between 1967 and 1973: ex-USS Lovelace, ex-James E. Craig, ex-Otter, ex-Darby, ex-J. Douglas Blackwood, ex-Alexander J. Luke, ex-Vammen, ex-Loeser, ex-Currier, ex-Cronin, and ex-Gunason.

Epilogue

Few relics remain of Whitehurst.

Her war diaries and deck logs are in the National Archives. 

She has a memorial at the Museum of the Pacific War in Texas. 

A website DE634.org, endures to keep her memory alive. Their last reunion listed, combined with veterans of USS Silverstein, Walton, and Foss, was in 2020.

As for her first skipper, James Grey, went on to command two other destroyer escorts and a troopship, including sea time during Korea, then served in several high-level shore assignments until he retired in 1960, capping 23 years with the Navy. He passed in Sunnyvale, California in 2002, aged 87.

Her first XO and second skipper, 90-day wonder Jack Horton, who commanded the ship during the battle against I-45 and somehow survived the kamikaze his ship took to the bridge six months later, mustered out in December 1945 and, settling in Houston, passed in a sailing accident on the Gulf of Mexico in 1970. Life is funny like that.

The Navy has not seen fit to commission a second USS Whitehurst.

However, The Enemy Below endures, and she is still beautiful in rich DeLuxe Color.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday Oct. 23, 2024: A Tough Little Wolf

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday to look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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, Oct. 23, 2024: A Tough Little Wolf

Nationalmuseet, Danmark, asset THM-3367

Above, we see the Danish Soridderen (Sea Knight) class torpedobåden patrol boat Søulven (Sea Wolf)—also cited in the West as Soloven, Soeulven, and Søulv —as she passed near the Trekroner Søfort at the entrance to the Copenhagen harbor before 1920.

A small boat with a fearsome name, her skipper and crew proved all-heart during the Great War, and a noteworthy British admiral doubtlessly owed his life to her pluck.

The Søridderen trio

Between 1879, when Hajen, Torpedobaad Nr.4, joined the fleet through Svaerdfisken, which entered service in May 1913, the Royal Danish Navy fielded 40 assorted torpedo boats across several different classes to include designs from British (Samuel White, Yarrow, Thornycroft), French (Forges & Chantiers), German (F. Schichau) and domestic (Burmeister & Wain, Orlogsvaerftet) yards. No less than 17 of these were still in service by the time Gaviro Princep caught up to Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, and set the world alight.

In 1911, a program of three new German Schichau-designed boats and a matching set of three British Yarrow-designed boats were ordered. The lead ship would be built overseas in each case, and the two follow-on units would be constructed domestically. This led to the Schichau-designed and built 250-ton Tumleren (and Orlogsvaerftet-constructed sisters Vindhunden and Spaekhuggeren) and the 230-ton Yarrow-designed and built Søridderen (accompanied by the Burmeister & Wain-constructed Flyvefisken and Soulven).

The ships were competing designs of similar size, armament, and capability with the Tumlerens running 250 tons, 186 feet long, 18 feet on the beam, and with a 6-foot draft while the Søridderen went 181x18x6 feet.

The German-built Danish torpedobåden Tumleren. Note her trainable torpedo tubes. THM-3340

Both classes were coal-fired steam turbine-driven and fast (27.5 knots), as well as armed with five 18-inch torpedo tubes (one fixed in bow and four trainable on deck) and two 12-pounder 3″/52 M.07 QF guns.

Danish Torpedobåden Tumleren i Svanemøllebugten, 1915, by Christian Benjamin Olsen. These boats were notoriously smokey especially when using the thrifty Danish navy’s (preferred) cheap coal to stretch training dollars.

The Søridderens went a bit faster than designed on trails, hitting 28.3 knots.

Søridderen class member Flyvefisken, seen in a color period postcard. THM-30779

Søridderen member Flyvefisken, the port view seen underway. THM-4490

Jane’s 1914 listing for the Søridderen class.

The British-designed ships were also seen as more seaworthy than the German-designed boats. However, the events of 1914 precluded further orders.

Meet Soulven

Our subject carried a traditional Danish navy moniker and repeated one used by one of the Scandinavian country’s first batch of torpedo boats, a little 95-footer built in France that remained in service until 1911.

Photo showing the first torpedo boat Søulven, Torpedobaad Nr.5, launched in 1880 at anchor in Copenhagen. The picture also shows the visiting German armored battery ship Heligoland and the French cruiser Chateau Renault. Photographed Sep 8, 1891. THM-9524

The second Danish torpedo boat Soulven joined the fleet in 1911, likely recycling most of the crew of her namesake which was decommissioned at the same time.

Note her forward bow tube and trainable singles.

She would spend her first three years as a training ship, and there are some great images of her pier side conducting training with Madsen light machine guns complete with massive 40-round detachable box magazines. A treat for any gun nerd!

Soluven crew at Flådens Leje with Madsen LMGs THM-6173

Soulven note bridge and Madsens THM-6175

THM-6175 inset

War!

When the Great War began in August 1914, Denmark armed-up to protect her neutrality, having just fought Germany in 1864 and the Brits in 1807. This meant mobilizing 52,000 reserves and new drafts to add to the professional 13,000-man Army and building the 23 km-long Tunestillingen line of defenses outside of Copenhagen. Likewise, the Danish Navy dusted off its guns and torpedo tubes and began to actively patrol its waters.

With that, Soulven left her training duties behind and became the flagship of 1. Torpedobådsflotille, assigned to patrol in the Oresund, the strait that separates Denmark and Sweden.

Torpedo inspection on board Soulven 1914 THM-4687

Her skipper at this time, and dual-hatted commander of the 1st TBF, was Kapt. Eduard Haack, 43, a career regular with 28 years of service on his seabag that included tours in the Danish West Indies (Virgin Islands) on the old steam frigate Jylland, Med cruises on the gunboat St. Thomas and cruiser Hejmdal, a stint as an officer instructor at the service’s NCO academy, service aboard the coastal battleships Iver Hvitfeldt and Herluf Trolle, command of a section of the naval mine corps (Søminekorpsets), and command of the icebreaker/OPV (inspektionsskibet) Absalon on the Greeland-Iceland-Faeroes beat.

Haack was a professional.

Haack, on Iver Hvitfeldt before he war. THM-4745

The E-13 Affair

It was during this time that the British started sending small E-class submarines through the Skagerrak and the Kattegat around Jutland then through the Oresund and across the Baltic to the Tsarist port of Revel in the Gulf of Finland. HMS E-1 and E-9 made it by October 1914, while E-11 turned back. They would soon be joined by HMS E-8, E-18, and E-19. One of their less fortunate sisters was HMS E-13.

Around 2300 on 17 August 1915, while E13 was attempting to make the passage through the Oresund to join the other British Submarines operating with the Tsar’s Navy, she experienced a gyro compass failure and ran aground in the mud on the Danish Island of Saltholm, her hull surrounded by nine feet of water.

English submarine E13 grounded on Saltholm THM-12243.

Spotted by the old (circa 1888) Danish Thornycroft-built torpedo boat Narvalen at 0500 on the morning of 18 August, the Dane dutifully notified E13 they had 24 hours to get unstuck or be interned for the duration. LCDR Geoffrey Layton, RN replied that he understood and would work to free his boat. His executive officer, LT Paul Leathley Eddis, was sent ashore to see if he could arrange a tug. 

Soon after, at 0620, two German S90-class large torpedo boats on patrol, SMS G132, and G134, likewise spotted the disabled British sub, with her crew resting atop E13’s casing. The 215-foot S90s were really more destroyer than TB, and ran large at 535 tons, carrying an 88mm gun, two 2″/40 guns, and three torpedo tubes.

S90-class Hochsee-Torpedoboot SMS S-125, a good representative of her class. Photographed by A. Renard of Kiel, probably before 1911. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command NH 45400

To guard the beached sub, flotilla leader Søulven arrived on the scene at 0845 with Narvalen’s sister Støren. The Danish bathtub battleship Peder Skram, armed with 9.4-inch guns and swathed in as much as 8 inches of armor, was just over the horizon and making steam for the area.

With the greenlight from RADM Robert Mischke, head of the Küstenschutzdivision der Ostsee, by radio, at 1028 the German torpedo boats went on the offensive.

Signaling “Abandon Ship Immediately,” G132 and G134 heeled over and made maximum revolutions for the grounded E13, sailing into Danish coastal waters with their guns blazing. Some 15 British submariners were killed outright.

English leave E13 after the shelling, 19 Aug. 1915 THM-4679

Despite being outgunned by the two larger German boats, Søulven’s skipper, Kapt. Haack gave the order to move his boat directly between E13 and the German guns to shield the British, with the Dane calling on the Germans to halt. The maneuver worked and at 1035, the German boats turned away and left Danish waters, having closed to within 300 yards of the submarine. Haack noted that the German commander of G132 raised an arm in the air as a sign that the protest was accepted.

The Danes soon went to work rescuing the survivors of E13, including Storen’s boatswain, one AFP Olsen, who reportedly dived into the frigid water and pulled a wounded Tar, Leading Seaman Herbert Lincoln, off the bottom. Olsen would be awarded an Albert Medal by the British government for his action, but not allowed by the Danish Foreign Ministry to accept it.

The wounded were passed on to Peder Skram, who would take them to Copenhagen. The recovered bodies of 14 of the 15 men lost were loaded aboard Søulven’s sister Søridderen and brought to Lynettehavnen. The 15th was later recovered and joined his shipmates. 

The reaction in the British and Scandinavian press to the German violation of neutrality was understandable.

What occurred over the next several days in Denmark was an outpouring of mourning for the British submariners who were killed in their waters. This included some 200 Danish sailors providing an honor guard for the recovered bodies during a funeral procession in Copenhagen where the survivors of E13, clad in Danish dress uniforms, were assisted in carrying their shipmate’s coffins to the refrains of Handel’s Dead March. The proceedings were well-attended by the international legations.

Photos from the event show Haack and his men prominently.

THM-3427

Note the Remington falling block 1867s with sword bayonets. THM-3426

THM-3421

While most foreign bodies recovered in Danish waters during the war– such as Jutland sailors buried at Frederikshavn cemetery– were simply interred in Danish soil with military honors, London approved a Danish ship to carry the E13 crew remains to return speedily to England.

This led the procession solemnly to the Det Forenetede Dampskibsselskab (DFDS) steamer SS Vidar (1,493 tons) while a crowd of thousands of Danes stood by to observe in procession, with Dannebrogs lowered at half-mast across the country.

Vidar carried the remains to Hull, accompanied by the Danish torpedo boats Springeren and Støren as escorts. Vidar carried a Danish Ministry of the Navy’s representative, CDR Rørd Regnar Johannes Hammer, a Knight Commander Dannebrogorden, with 39 years of service on his record, who was responsible for the steamer’s grim cargo. Most were later interred at the Haslar Royal Naval Cemetery. 
CWGC in Hampshire. 

The British consul in Denmark, Robert Erskine, commended the Danish authorities for the dignity and efficiency with which the handling of the dead was conducted.

As for the survivors, interned for the duration of the war under international law, they were put up at the Copenhagen Naval Yard under very loose custody– referred to by the Danes as engelske orlogsgaster (“English military guests”)– and allowed to travel around the city on their own recognizance.

The crew of the English submarine E13 before leaving for Russia in 1915. Half of these men would perish in Danish waters and the other half would cool their heels in Copenhagen for the duration. Had it not been for Soulven, their story would have been likely very different. THM-4680

The Danes likewise “entertained” assorted German naval personnel as well during the war, such as the crew of Zeppelin L.3. 

German Navy zeppelin LZ-24 (Luftschiff.3) participated in 24 reconnaissance missions over the North Sea, including the first raid on England on 20 January 1915. She was scuttled by her crew after a forced landing caused by an engine failure during a snowstorm on Fanø Island, Denmark on 17 February 1915. The crew were interned. Remnants of the zeppelin are displayed in a museum in Tonder, Denmark.

Rather than enjoy this comfortable prison, E13‘s skipper, LCDR Layton, accompanied by his No. 1, LT Paul Leathley Eddis, released himself from polite custody/parole, leaving a note behind to explain his actions, and made his way back to England via Sweden three months later.

The rest of E13’s crew remained in Denmark until after the Armistice. The sub’s third officer, Sub-LT William Garriock, RNR, was left behind to command these marooned submariners. 

Largely to prevent the Germans from attempting to do so, the Danes recovered E13 and towed it to Copenhagen.

E13 grounded at Saltholm, 1915 THM-6768

Shell-wrecked English submarine, E13, beached at Saltholm THM-12244

Salvage work on English submarine E13 at Saltholm THM-12245

English submarine E 13 under tow between pontoons and salvage steamers Odin and Thor. 1915. THM-4482

Her shell and shrapnel-ridden hull were on public display for the world to see.

English submarine E13 at Copenhagen harbour THM-12255

As were recovered relics including her pierced periscope and a shot-up prayer book.

The sub was put in drydock at Orlogsvaerftet, with her interned sailors allowed to come and claim personal property and mementos. Several even reportedly helped in the ultimately futile three-year effort to repair the vessel and place it in Danish service.

Ultimately, E13 was refloated and tied up alongside the Danish submarine tender Helka in 1918, used for training purposes.

Tender Hekla, British, submarine, E13 1918 THM-8938

THM-6767

U-bådsstationen, Cophenhangen. Petty officers aboard the Danish submarine tender Hekla in 1918. The group was photographed on deck in front of the ship’s stack. To the right is the tower of the salvaged HMS E13. THM-3494

In February 1919, after the Danish Navy washed their hands of the hulk, the British sold it to a local Danish company for its scrap value.

But back to our Søulven.

Continued Service

Søulven, returning to her role in protecting Denmark’s territorial sea, conducted several rescues and police actions in the Oresund before the end of the war, including capturing Swedish smugglers on two different occasions.

Photo showing the bridge of a torpedo boat with her bow 3″/52. To the left of the picture is the torpedo boat Soulven underway, seen from the front to port. Taken in the 1920s. THM-22312

Transferred to the reserves in 1929, along with her two sisters, Søridderen and Flyvefisken, and the three rival Tumlerens, they were collectively stricken in 1935-1937 and disposed of after they were replaced by the new and very strongly armed torpedo boats of the Dragen and Glenten classes.

Their hulls were stripped of anything usable and scrapped, with their 3″/52s recycled for use as coastal artillery around the Danish littoral for another decade. 

Danish Den næstnordligste 7,5 cm kanon i Hørhaven from old torpedo boats

Epilogue

Of our cast of characters, Soulven’s skipper and commander of the 1st TBF during the Great War, Eduard Haack, finished the war as head of coastal defense for Northern Denmark. He retired from the Navy in 1920, with his last post as inspector of lighthouses. He became chief ship inspector at Statens Skibstilsyn, the Danish Shipping Authority, the next year, and remained in that post until 1936. He then helped organize the Icelandic Shipping Authority and received, among other things, a knighthood in the Icelandic Falcon Order (Islandske Falkeorden) and was made a commander of the Dannebrogordenen order. Capt. Haack passed in 1956 and is buried at St. Olai cemetery in Kalundborg, aged 85.

The German admiral who gave the go-ahead for the attack on E13, Mischke, would end the war as a vizeadmiral and pass in 1932. His family is the owner of Lahneck Castle, which he purchased in 1907.

The two torpedo boats used in the attack on E13, G132, and G134, at the end of the war were disarmed and served as minesweepers out of Cuxhaven. Retained briefly by the Reichsmarine they were scrapped in 1921.

E13’s skipper went on to be known as ADM Sir Geoffrey Layton, GBE, KCB, KCMG, DSO. After returning to England via Sweden in time for Christmas in 1915, he was given command of the experimental steam submarine HMS S-1. Transitioning to capital ships in the 1930s, he started WWII as commander of the 1st Battle Squadron, consisting of the battleships HMS Barham, HMS Warspite, and HMS Malaya. Sent to command the ill-fated China Station in September 1940, he handed it over to Tom Phillips just before the Japanese went ham in the Pacific in December 1941. He went on to command British forces in Ceylon through 1945. Retiring in 1947 as head of Portsmouth, he passed in 1964.

ADM Layton

Layton’s XO, LT Paul Eddis, survived continued submarine service in the Great War only to be killed when his boat, HMS L24, was tragically lost with all hands in a collision with the battleship HMS Resolution off Portland on 10 January 1924. Subs are a dangerous game even in peacetime.

Speaking of which, the funeral transport for E13’s 15 recovered sailors, the Danish steamer Vidar, was herself sent to the bottom during WWII while traveling from Grimsby to Esbjerg via the Tyne with coal and general cargo, torpedoed by the German submarine U-21 (Kptlt. Wolf-Harro Stiebler) in the North Sea in January 1940– four months before Germany invaded neutral Denmark. In tragic irony, she carried 15 of her crew to the bottom.

The very well-marked Vidar. Photo courtesy of Danish Maritime Museum, Elsinore

The Danes would recycle the name of Soulven for use with a new class of fast torpedo boats ordered in the early 1960s from Britain (heard that before?). This Danish third torpedo boat Soulven (P 515) would serve from 1967 to 1990.

Danish Sea Lion Class Vosper PT boat MTB P 515 Søulven (The Sea Wolf)

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International.

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday Oct. 16, 2024: Skill and Perseverance

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024: Skill and Perseverance

Official U.S. Navy Photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. Catalog #: 80-G-272783

Above we see, some 80 years ago this week, the Cleveland-class light cruiser, USS Houston (CL-81), making like a submarine with her decks nearly awash. This is not an optical illusion. She is seen under tow on 17 October 1944, after she had been torpedoed twice by Japanese aircraft during operations off Formosa. The first torpedo hit Houston amidships on 14 October. The second struck the cruiser’s starboard quarter just 43 hours later while she was limping away.

A ship with a standard design displacement of 11,744 long tons, it was later estimated that, in the above image, she was so full of water that she was at some 20,900 tons.

The Clevelands

When the U.S. Navy took off the shackles of the London Naval Treaty and moved to make a series of new light cruisers, they based the design on the last “treaty” limited 10,000-ton Brooklyn-class light cruiser, USS Helena (CL-50), which was commissioned in 1939 (and was torpedoed and sunk in the Battle of Kula Gulf in 1943).

The resulting Cleveland class was stood up fast, with the first ship laid down in July 1940. Soon, four East Coast shipyards were filling their ways with their hulls.

The Cleveland class, via ONI 54R, 1943

The changes to the design were mostly in the armament, with the new light cruisers carrying a dozen 6″/47 Mark 16 guns in four triple turrets– rather than the 15 guns arranged in five turrets in Helena as the latter’s No. 3 gun turret was deleted.

The modification allowed for a stronger secondary armament (6 dual 5″/38 mounts and as many as 28 40mm Bofors and 20 20mm Oerlikon guns) as well as some strengthening in the hull. Notably, the latter may have worked as one of the class, USS Miami (CL-89), lost her bow to Typhoon Cobra but lived to tell the tale.

Much overloaded at more than 14,000 tons when fully loaded, these ships were cramped and top-heavy, which led to many further mods such as deleting catapults, aircraft, and rangefinders as the conflict went on to keep them from rolling dangerously.

Although 52 hulls were planned, only 27 made it to the fleet as cruisers while nine were completed while on the craving dock to Independence-class light carriers. A further baker’s dozen (of which only two were completed, and those too late for WWII service) were reordered as Fargo-class cruisers, which was basically a Cleveland with a single funnel and a redesigned, more compact, superstructure.

Remarkably, although the Clevelands saw much hard service in WWII, none were lost in action. No other cruiser design in history has seen so many units sail off to war and all return home.

The Cleveland class in the 1946 edition of Jane’s.

Meet Houston

Our subject is the third U.S. Navy warship to carry the name of the Lone Star State’s city which itself is named in honor of Sam Houston.

Originally slated to be named USS Vicksburg, CL-81 was renamed on the ways to honor the sacrifice of the Northampton-class heavy cruiser USS Houston (CL/CA-30) which was tragically lost in a storm of Japanese torpedoes during the Battle of Sunda Strait on 1 March 1942, a vessel whose legacy is cherished in her home state. That ship’s 1,000-man crew all either perished or were “rescued” from the sea by the Japanese and sent to hellish POW camps.

That doomed cruiser had a special link to her “hometown” and would visit it three times between 1930 and 1939, collecting a special Silver Service donated from public subscription from city leaders.

USS Houston (CA-30) view taken at Houston, Texas, in late 1930, when the ship visited the city after which she had been named. Courtesy of Captain Henri H. Smith-Hutton USN ret., 1976 NH 85177

Two months after CA-30 was lost, 1,000 young men, the “Houston Volunteers,” mustered for service to replace those lost on the cruiser and, sworn in by RADM William A. Glassford before a local crowd of 150,000, unveiled a 60-foot model of the vessel before leaving directly for Naval Training Center San Diego aboard five special trains.

Likewise, the Harris County War Bond Drive raised over $85 million, enough to not only replace the USS Houston but also to build the light carrier USS San Jacinto (CVL-30). Don’t mess with Texas, indeed.

30 May 1942. Caption: “1000 men of Houston, Texas are sworn into U.S. Navy in a mass enlistment ceremony to replace 1,000 lost on cruiser ‘Houston’.” University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. do8941zg26p

Building the new USS Houston (CL 81) at Norfolk Navy Yard, Norfolk, Virginia, for launching on June 19, 1943. Workmen lifting a steel deck plate weighing many hundreds of pounds into place. Photograph released May 31, 1943. 80-G-68627

Building the new USS Houston (CL 81) at Norfolk Navy Yard, Norfolk, Virginia, for launching on June 19, 1943. Looking through the huge anchor-eye are John W. Jackson and Wilson Majors, both steamfitters. 80-G-68632

When it came time to find a sponsor for this new cruiser, Mrs. Claud Hamill, who led the campaign to raise funds for the second cruiser Houston, was the logical choice. She led a group of 20 Houstonians to the event and christened the vessel “on behalf of the people of Houston who ensured the perpetuation of a beloved American name in a great fighting ship!”

“Norfolk, Va., 19 June 1943– Mrs. Claude Hammill, of Houston, Texas, smashes a bottle of champagne against the bow of the new cruiser, Houston, as the ship starts down the ways at her launching 19 June 1943 at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., Newport News, Va. In the picture reading from the extreme left are Senator Tom Connally, of Texas, Governor Coke Stevenson, of Texas, Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce, Mayor Otis Massey, of Houston, Lieutenant Commander Wilson Starbuck, Public Relations Officer of the Fifth Naval District, and (front) Rear Admiral O.L. Cox, Supervisor of Shipbuilding at the Yard.” University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. do9829b816n

Future USS Houston (CL-81) Being christened by Mrs. Claude Hamill at Newport News, Virginia, 19 June 1943. 19-N-47116

USS Houston (CL-81) launched, at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company shipyard, Newport News, Virginia, 19 June 1943. 19-N-47114

Commissioned on 20 December 1943, she would spend the next four months conducting shakedown and training cruises ranging from Boston to the Caribbean.

Her first skipper was Capt. William Wohlsen Behrens, a 45-year-old Mustang who had served during the Great War as an enlisted man on submarine patrol off the Atlantic Coast later picked up his butter bar after attending Temple University.

And his cruiser was beautiful!

USS Houston (CL-81) off the Norfolk Navy Yard, Virginia, 11 January 1944. She is painted in Camouflage Measure 32, Design 1d. Photograph from the Bureau of Ships Collection in the U.S. National Archives. 19-N-60240

Same as the above. Note her extensive radar fit including SG, SK-2, Mk 13, and twin Mk 25 radars. 19-N-60241

Same as the above. Just a great example of Measure 32, Design 1d for modelers. 19-N-60239

USS Houston (CL-81) vertical photograph of the ship underway off Norfolk, Virginia, 12 January 1944. This gives a fantastic view of her dozen 6″/47s, dozen 5″38s, 24 40mm Bofors, and 21 Oerlikons as well as her twin stern cats. 80-G-214194

USS Houston (CL-81) off Norfolk, Virginia, 12 January 1944. She is painted in Camouflage Measure 32, Design 1d. 80-G-214200

USS Houston (CL-81) underway off the U.S. East Coast, on 26 January 1944 on shakedown. NH 50219

War!

Catching orders to head to the Pacific, Houston arrived at Pearl Harbor on 6 May 1944 via the Panama Canal and San Diego and by the end of the month would join VADM Marc Mitscher’s fast carrier Task Force 58 at Majuro Atoll.

Her baptism of fire would occur in June as she screened those flattops on their raids of the Marianas and the Bonins— losing one of her Kingfishers to an accident on the 12th– before turning to Saipan for the Marianas campaign by mid-month.

After spending two weeks screening TF 58 as its carries haunted Saipan from 90 miles offshore during “The Marianas Turkey Shoot,” Houston was dispatched on 27 June, along with sister USS Miami (CL-89) and six escorting destroyers, as a surface action group with orders to shell Japanese-occupied Guam and Rota.

Houston let her big guns sing for the first time, delivering 542 6″/47 HC shells and 313 of 5″/38 AA Common. Her spotting planes reported her guns to have knocked out a dozen aircraft on the ground and set alight a factory building and three large fuel storage tanks.

Of this action, Behrens noted that “While the expenditure of ammunition was high for the results obtained on targets other than the airfield, I consider it well spent, in view of the experience gained by all hands. Firing at the radio or radar stations at Rota and Guam eliminated the nervousness apparent in firing at these first targets on both islands. The performance of all personnel was most satisfactory.”

Early September found her on another sortie with USS Miami, this time joined by sister USS Vincennes (CL-64), to plaster Japanese positions on Angaur, Peleliu, Ngesebus, and Palau. This time she spent 884 6-inch and 661 5-inch shells. Miami narrowly beat her, ripping off 900 of each. 

Houston then rejoined her carrier task force and screened it during airfield reduction strikes in the Philippines before returning to Peleliu to support the forces landing there in mid-September.

October saw her weather a 60-knot tropical storm at Ulithi Atoll on the 3rd before standing out against Nasei Shoto and Formosa as part of Task Group 38.2– the fleet carriers USS Bunker Hill, Intrepid, and Hancock; the light carriers USS Independence (loaded with night fighters) and Cabot; the battlewagons USS Iowa and New Jersey; and the anti-aircraft cruisers USS San Diego and Oakland. By the 10th, the TG was sending aircraft on raids against Okinawa.

On 11 October, Houston’s deck log noted “several enemy snoopers” probing the TG’s boundary and at least one unidentified submarine was spotted.

Behrens noted, “It does not appear that tomorrow’s strike on Formosa will be a complete surprise to the Japanese.”

Indeed, 12 October saw much excitement, with Houston splashing four Japanese land-based torpedo bombers while filling the air with 5,000 rounds of AAA and suffering two men with shrapnel wounds. The aircraft included new radar-equipped Mitsubishi Type 4 Ki-67 Hiryu (flying dragon)(“Peggy”) Army twin-engine heavy bombers of Imperial Army Air Force (IJAAF) Air Combat Group (Hiko Sentai) 98.

Houston helped repel another attack the next day, in which the brand-new Baltimore-class heavy cruiser  USS Canberra (CA-70) suffered damage. The leviathan, part of nearby Task Group 38.2, was holed by a Type 91, Mod. 3 torpedo that hit below her armor belt at the engineering spaces and blew a jagged hole in her side, killing 23 men outright. Due to the location of the wound, a whopping 4,500 tons of water flooded her after fireroom and both engine rooms, leaving the cruiser dead in the water and had to be taken under tow by the cruiser USS Wichita (CA-45).

With Houston ordered to take the limping Canberra’s spot on the screen the next day, just after sunset on the 14th, the flying dragons of Hiko Sentai 98 caught up to her as night fell. She struck down three of the attackers but caught a tough-to-fight torpedo directly under her hull.

USS Houston (CL-81) view looking aft, showing damage to the ship’s stern area resulting from a torpedo hit amidships received off Formosa on 14 October 1944. This photo was taken while Houston was under tow, but prior to the second torpedo hit on 16 October. Note the OS2U floatplane that had been jarred off the port catapult, breaking its wing on impact with the aircraft crane. 19-N-106304

From Behrens’ report:

The Excruciating Limp

As with the stricken Canberra, which was being slowly pulled away from Formosa by Wichita, a heavy cruiser, USS Boston (CA-69), came to the stricken Houston’s aid and took her under tow on the morning of the 15th. By midnight both Canberra and Houston were under tow to Ulithi for repairs at a stately 5 knots.

Houston transferred no less than 776 of her officers and men to escorting destroyers while a force of 450 remained behind to attempt to save their home. The radio room was ordered to destroy most of the ship’s codes and ciphers in case she had to be abandoned.

A destroyer alongside the damaged USS Houston (CL-81) (right) on 15 October 1944, removing excess crewmen after she was torpedoed by Japanese aircraft off Formosa. Photographed from USS Boston (CA-69). Note OS2U floatplane on Boston’s port catapult. 80-G-272781

Her men waged war against the sea and their home’s own warren of twisted steel and buried their found dead in the briny embrace of the warm and unforgiving blue Pacific. Among the dead was her engineering officer, CDR William H. Potts (USNA 1927), killed when Main Engine No. 1 was wrecked. Two other men trapped in the after fire room had been killed by fatal burns.

USS Houston (CL-81). Burial at sea for crewmen killed when the ship was torpedoed off Formosa on 14 October 1944. Photographed while Houston was under tow on 15 October. 19-N-110835.

With an 8-degree starboard list and a draft of 34 feet (against a normal mean maximum of 25 feet), Behrens ordered the cruiser’s port anchor jettisoned and her port chain payed out to 90 fathoms to keep the ship as even as possible.

Everything quickly got primitive as the ship was flooded to the third deck and the heat of the tropics set in:

The fleet tugs USS Munsee (ATF-107) and Pawnee (ATF-74) assumed the tows of Canberra and Houston on 16 October.

Then, that afternoon, the Japanese caught up to Houston once again and she soon caught another torpedo that wrecked her hangar and flooded her steering compartment.

Japanese aerial torpedo explodes against the ship’s starboard quarter, during the afternoon of 16 October 1944. Houston had been torpedoed amidships on 14 October, while off Formosa, and was under tow by USS Pawnee (ATF-74) when enemy torpedo planes hit her again. USS Canberra (CA-70), also torpedoed off Formosa, is under tow in the distance. The original photograph is in the USS Santa Fe (CL-60) Log, a very large photo album held by the Navy Department Library. NH 98825

Behrens noted that, “In the midst of the action, our towing vessel, Pawnee, sent us a very encouraging message saying, ‘We’ll hold on,’ and continued to make the usual 5 knots in the right direction.”

Later that afternoon, Behrens ordered more of his crew taken off by escorting destroyers. By dusk, there only remained 48 officers and 152 men left on board– with six of them too gravely wounded to risk moving. With sick bay in the dark and with no ventilation, the cruiser’s guest cabin was converted to a hospital, and the wounded were brought on deck whenever conditions permitted.

On the 17th, assisted by four gasoline-driven pumps sent over by Pawnee, Houston decreased her draft to 32.5 feet and her list to 6 degrees.

This slow parade continued for days, with the Diver-class rescue and salvage ship USS Current (ARS-22) arriving alongside and sending over experts and the fleet tug USS Zuni (AT-95) taking Houston in tandem tow with Pawnee.

With almost zero reserve buoyancy left, the days were spent lowering–by hand, block, and rope– 130-pound 6″/47 shells from the shell decks of the four main turrets to the lower handling rooms to help shift the cruiser’s center of gravity.

Armored doors were unbolted and, wrestled above deck, were cast overboard. Searchlight and gun director platforms were torched off and either used for patching material or thrown over the side as were many 20mm and 40mm guns. Abovedeck ammo stores were tossed. Anything too vital to Deep Six was transferred to LCVPs and whaleboats to give to escorting destroyers to store. Rank didn’t exist and officers worked on the repair parties alongside ratings.

Luckily, fresh water had been stored in forward voids as ballast and was siphoned off for cleaning and drinking. Behrens observed, “It had a strong paint and rust taste but did much to quench the thirst.”

On the morning of 27 October, with the help of several tugs, a still very wet and soggy Houston slipped through the Mugai Channel and moored alongside the repair ship and floating workshop USS Hector (AR-7) at Ulithi Atoll, wrapping a 1,250nm mile tow that took 13 days, at an average rate of 4 knots.

Behrens finished with this observation:

USS Houston (CL-81) alongside USS Hector (AR-7) at Ulithi Atoll, 1 November 1944. She was under repair after being hit by two Japanese aerial torpedoes on 14 and 16 October, during operations off Formosa. An LCM is passing by in the foreground. 80-G-373678

After temporary repairs, Houston proceeded to Manus on 14 December under tow by the tugs USS Lipan and Arapaho and escorted by a screen of three destroyer escorts and a coastal minesweeper. Making 6.5 knots, the little convoy (Task Unit 30.9.14) made Manus six days later.

The advantage of having a forward-deployed Advanced Base Sectional DryDock (ABSD) became readily apparent. After waiting in Seeadler Harbor over the Christmas holidays, Houston entered ABSD No. 2. after USS Reno (CL-96) floated out on 7 January 1945.

Overhauls of two light cruisers at a Pacific Base inside ABSD, circa 1944-45. USS Reno (CL-96) and USS Houston (CL-81) 80-G-K-2963

USS Houston (CL-81) damage to the ship’s hull, amidships, from a Japanese aerial torpedo hit received off Formosa on 14 October 1944. The torpedo struck the ship on her bottom, inboard of the starboard bilge keel, while she was in a turn, producing the inward displacement of bottom plating seen here. Photographed in an ABSD floating drydock at Ulithi Atoll while Houston was under repair, circa November 1944. 19-N-105803

After three weeks in dry dock, Houston floated out on Valentine’s Day 1945 and, with only No. 2 and 3 main engines and Nos. 1, 2, and 4 boilers available, she was able to operate under her own steam for the first time in four months and logged a remarkable speed of 23.4 knots.

By 16 February, along with the wounded but patched up Reno and the tin can USS Bowers (DE-637), Houston and company left Manus for Pearl Harbor, zig-zagging at 16 knots. Arriving in Hawaii on 24 February, after a three-day port call and much-needed libo, Reno and Houston set course for San Pedro, California on 27 February.

Crossing through “The Ditch” a much different cruiser than when she passed just 10 months prior, Houston eventually steamed to the New York Navy Yard, arriving on 24 March 1945. Reno followed her almost the whole way, only peeling off at Charleston three days prior.

Six months later, with an extensive rebuilding almost complete, the war ended with Houston still in New York.

Houston received three battle stars for World War II service.

Capt. Behrens was relieved and was assigned duty as Commander, Naval Training Center Bainbridge, Maryland, and served there in the rank of Commodore.

Peacetime Showboat

Her repairs complete, our subject visited her namesake city just after VJ Day to show the flag and line the decks for Navy Week in October 1945. Besides, she needed to show the taxpayers and Bond buyers what they paid for back in 1942.

Crowd on shoreline along the Houston Ship Channel to welcome the USS Houston (CL-81) light cruiser during Navy Week, October 1945. University of Houston Libraries Special Collections. do66558f697

Civilians along the Houston Ship Channel welcome the USS Houston (CL-81) light cruiser during Navy Week, October 1945. Sailors in uniform line the decks. University of Houston Libraries Special Collections do26967446b

Civilians along the Houston Ship Channel welcome the USS Houston (CL-81) light cruiser during Navy Week. Sailors in uniform line the decks. The cruiser carries two new Curtiss SC-1 Seahawk floatplanes– a type that only entered service in October 1944– with their wings folded. University of Houston Libraries Special Collections do5460qs96s

From April to December 1946, Houston was sent on a European and Mediterranean cruise, visiting cities in Scandinavia, Portugal, Italy, and Egypt.

Stockholm. Ships include the elderly (circa 1915) 6,700-ton Swedish coastal battleship (Pansarskeppet) HSwMS Sverige along with the light cruiser sisters USS Houston and USS Little Rock (CL-92), while the new Gearing class destroyers USS Perry (DD-844), Glennon (DD-840), Warrington (DD-843) and Cone (DD-866) are arrayed at pier side and in the distance, along with Swedish jageren (destroyers). Eskaderbild.eskader på Stockholms Ström 11. Juli 1946. Sjöhistoriska museet. Fo219541

Following a second Med cruise with Cruiser Division 12 in 1947, upon returning to Philadelphia, Houston decommissioned 15 December 1947.

Placed in reserve, she swayed on Philly’s redlead row until, stricken from the Navy List on 1 March 1959, she was sold for scrap to Boston Metals on 1 June 1961 and scrapped.

Epilogue

The Clevelands, always overloaded and top-heavy despite their hard service and dependability, were poor choices for post-war service and most were laid up directly after VJ Day with only one, USS Manchester (CL-83), still in service as an all-gun cruiser past 1950, lingering until 1956 and seeing much Korean War duty, successfully completing three combat tours with no major battle damage.

Six went on to see further service as Galveston and Providence-class missile slingers after an extensive topside rebuild and remained in service through the 1970s. One of these, USS Little Rock (CL-92/CLG-4/CG-4) has been preserved at the Buffalo Naval & Military Park, the only Cleveland currently above water.

The third USS Houston has a marker at the National Museum of the Pacific War. 

She is remembered in maritime art and scale models.

Her war diaries and reports are digitized in the National Archives. 

Her 79-page war damage report is epic, noting:

That Houston survived two torpedo hits which produced a precarious stability condition, extensive flooding, serious loss of structural strength amidships and a severe gasoline fire is due for the most part to the intelligent approach of her personnel to the damage control problems with which they were confronted and the skill and perseverance with which they carried out the control measures initiated.

USS Houston (CL-81) Plate I, Torpedo Damage. Formosa. 14-16 Oct. 1944. Profile of Vessel Heeled 30° to Port

As for her wartime skipper, RADM Behrens retired from the Navy in 1947, capping a 30-year career across two World Wars. Not bad for a Mustang.

He earned a Navy Cross for his time on Houston:

“For extraordinary heroism as Commanding Officer of the USS Houston, during action against enemy Japanese forces off Formosa on October 14, 1944. With his ship dead in the water and listing violently in the heavy seas following an enemy aerial attack, Commodore (then Captain) Behrens remained steadfast and calm, efficiently directing damage control measures and the removal of personnel to other ships in the formation before his crippled ship was taken in tow by another cruiser. With his ship again under attack by hostile aircraft two days later, he inspired his officers and men to heroic effort, maintaining control and contributing in large measure to his ship’s successful return to a friendly port. By his valiant leadership, determination, and grave concern for the safety of his ship and her crew. Commodore Behrens upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”

RADM Berhens passed in 1965 and is buried in Arlington, Sec: 2, Site 994-1

His son, VADM William Wholsen Behrens, Jr. (USNA 1943), survived WWII service in the Submarine Force with six war patrols and a Silver Star to prove it then was involved in 28 amphibious operations during Vietnam. He capped his service as the first head of the newly organized National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 1972 and passed in 1986. He is also in Arlington. Good genes in that family.

The fourth USS Houston (SSN-713) was an early Flight I Los Angeles class hunter killer. Launched in 1981, this submarine was christened by Barbara Bush, wife of then Vice President George Bush which was appropriate as, while a Navy Avenger pilot (of a plane he named “Barbara”) in WWII, Bush crashed in the Pacific and was rescued by a submarine. The luckiest of her namesakes, she served a long career (33 years, 11 months, and 1 day) without loss and was decommissioned in 2016.

USS Houston (SSN-713) port quarter view of the nuclear-powered attack submarine USS Houston (SSN-713), foreground, and the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kenney (CV-67), background, departing Hampton Roads for a patrol. August 17, 1982. DN-ST-89-01391

The Navy desperately needs a fifth Houston, and maybe a first USS Behrens.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International.

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

PRINT still has its place. If you LOVE warships you should belong.

I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday Oct. 9, 2024: A Cat with Several Lives

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2024: A Cat with Several Lives

Photo by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD/Défense

Above we see, some 85 years ago this week in October 1939, a bachi-clad fisherman-turned-sailor and his hard-bitten cat mascot, aboard the merchant marine trawler Roche Noire (Black Rock), requisitioned and armed by the French Navy in the early days of WWII to serve as an auxiliary minesweeper (dragueur de mines auxiliaire). Sadly both the fisherman and his cat are lost to history.

As for Roche Noire, it wasn’t even her first war.

The RN’s Battle Trawlers

When the early days of the Great War showed that the British, while rich in battleships and cruisers, were lacking in small coastal escorts and mine warfare craft, the Admiralty soon turned to trawlers.

Dozens were taken up from trade in Hull and other fishing ports, others were requestioned on the builder’s ways, and still others were purchased from overseas. e.g. the large fishing fleets maintained in Spain and Portugal. 

Trawlers on patrol at Halifax, CWM

By 1916, with the Royal Navy hungry for an ever larger number of such hardy coastwise vessels, and many fishing boat yards near idle, the Admiralty soon placed orders for what would be an amazing 609 armed trawlers by the end of the war– many of which wound up being canceled.

As detailed by “British Warships 1914-1919” by F J Dittmar & J J Colledge, the RN ordered “military class” trawlers to three “standard” (and yes, that needs to be quoted) designs, this would include the 156-strong Mersey class (665 tons full load,148 feet oal), some 280 of the Castle/TR class (550 tons, 134 foot oal) and 173 members of the Strath class (429 tons full, 123 feet oal).

Lord Talbot was one of the new Admiralty Mersey class of trawlers. All were capable of using an auxiliary sail rig as shown.

Using a simple coal-powered boiler with a single vertical triple expansion reciprocating engine generating between 480 and 600 ihp depending on class, these vessels had a top speed of around 10 knots.

A stoker tending fires in an armed trawler. IWM (Q 18996)

Crewed by 15 to 20 men/boys, they had allowances in their plans for hydrophones and wireless sets, although precious few carried either– with the extra berths used for such specialists needed to operate the gear.

Most had the very basic armament of a single deck gun, typically a 3″/40 QF 12-pounder 12 cwt salvaged from retired destroyers and torpedo boats, placed well forward, along with whatever small arms could be scrounged.

The crew of a British armed trawler, including a boy sailor, receiving gun instruction. Great War. IWM (Q 18974)

Sailors on board British Steam trawler HMT Strathearn firing her 12-pounder gun, Great War. IWM (Q 18965)

A few carried larger 4-inchers, while some had to make do with smaller 6-pounders. Occasionally they would carry a bomb thrower (early depth charge projector), and some had basic mechanical sweeping gear installed.

Small arms were as motley as the trawlers themselves. 

Naval Reservists at Rifle Drill on a quayside; fixing bayonets. The crew of a British armed trawler drilling on shore. Great War. Note that the rifles appear to be a curious mix of Canadian Ross rifles, German Mausers, and old Lee-Metfords! IWM (Q 18972)

Same as above. You have to love the Martini-Henry cartridge cases. IWM (Q 18973)

The Straths were the smallest of the three designs. Compact little steam trawlers.

Ordered from a mix of 13 yards starting in February 1917, the most prolific of these builders would be the Scottish firm of Hall, Russell & Co Ltd, in Aberdeen, who had 66 under contract.

With so many different yards going all at once, the design inevitably changed from yard to yard and sometimes even from hull to hull, while the Admiralty itself contributed to the chaos by ordering minor “non-standard” changes of their own.

Delivery of the first standard Strath, HMT George Borthwick, occurred in August 1917.

With so many warships in need of names, these armed trawlers (His Majesty’s Trawler, or HMT) were bestowed the names drawn from the official crew rosters of ships at Trafalgar in 1805, with the Straths, in particular, coming from members of the crew of HMS Royal Sovereign and of Nelson’s HMS Victory.

Meet HMT William Barnett

Roche Noire entered the world in December 1917, constructed over four months at Hall, Russell (as Yard No. 622)  as a more or less standardized Strath-class armed trawler with a T3cyl (12, 20, 34 x 23in) engine constructed by the Dominion Bridge Co of Montreal.

Our subject as built was christened with the name of Petty Officer (Gunner’s Mate/Gunsmith) William Barnett, 31, of Scotland, who appeared on HMS Victory’s list of the 820 men who were awarded prize money and a Government Grant for enemy ships destroyed or captured during Trafalgar.

Digging deeper into Barnett’s service, he was born in Glasgow and volunteered for service in 1803 on the 64-gun HMS Utrecht as a Landsman before his transfer to Nelson’s flagship– where he would serve through Trafalgar. He would go on to serve on HMS Gelykheid, Zealand, Ocean, Salvador Del Mundo, Milford, and Prince Frederick, advancing to the rate of Armourer’s Mate, leaving the service in 1814.

Any gunner who sailed for more than a decade against Bonaparte deserves a ship named in his honor!

HMT William Barnett’s Admiralty Number was 3632.

Great War

Sadly, I could find no details of HMT William Barnett’s Great War service. Suffice it to say she almost assuredly spent 11 months across 1918 in a mix of dodging U-boats, escorting coastal traffic, searching for those lost at sea, guarding anti-torpedo/submarine nets at anchorages, and training young ratings.

Of her class, one member, HMT Thomas Collard (3686), was sunk in March 1918 by the German submarine SM U-19 while escorting the armed merchant cruiser HMS Calgarian North of Rathlin Island. Her crew survived.

Some deployed as far as the Adriatic and Aden.

Another classmate, HMT James Fennell (3753) would be wrecked at Blacknor Point, Portland.

Royal Navy armed trawlers in Dover harbor. IWM (Q 18226)

Eight early Straths (HMT Charles Blight, Peter Barrington, Joshua Budget, Richard Bowden, John Britton, Thomas Billincole, James Bashford, and Michael Brion) were loaned to the U.S. Navy during the war for patrol/mine work, specifically in laying and later taking up the Great North Sea Mine Barrage. The Americans would dispose of them in 1919.

British armed trawlers minesweeping in the North Sea. IWM (Q 18987)

Post-war, 23 Straths that were still under construction were canceled in 1919 while another 45 others that were sufficiently complete were finished to mercantile standards (unarmed) and sold as trawlers.

The 94 surviving members of the class in RN service were, following the dismantling of the North Sea Barrage, paid off slowly between 1919 and 1926– including Barnett— and, disarmed, were disposed of on the commercial market.

River Kelvin. Built 1919 for Scott & Sons Bowling Glasgow as Strath Class Trawler HMT George Lane. 05/1923 Acquired by Consolidated Steam Fishing & Ice Co Grimsby renamed River Kelvin. 09/1927 Registered to Consolidated Fisheries Ltd. 12/1938 Transferred to Lowestoft renamed Loddon registered LT 309. 1958 Sold to Craigwood Ltd Aberdeen. Photo via Deepseatrawlers.co.uk

Peacetime: Gone Fishing

Sold to Val Trawlers of London in 1919, Barnett became what she was designed to be from the outset– a commercial fishing boat. Named Valerie IV (sometimes seen as Valerie W), she would continue on this service out of Hull and Milford until October 1924.

Moving across the Channel, her registry soon changed to Soc. Nouvelle des Pecheries a Vapeur (New Steam Fisheries Co), in Arcachon along the Bay of Biscay just southwest of Bordeaux. With the name of Valerie IV no doubt needing a more Gallic upgrade, she became Roche Noire (ARC 3918).

In 1934, SNPV went belly up and its assets were liquidated by Credit de l’Quest. This left Roche Noire to be scooped up for a bargain price by Saint-Nazaire Penhoët Shipyards and Workshops, and operated by Nouvelle société de gestion maritime (New Maritime Management Company) out of Bordeaux (radio call sign TKED).

War! (Again)

With so many retired Straths floating around (pun intended) in 1939, it was a foregone conclusion several wound return to martial service.

Three ex-HMTs– William Hallett, James Lenham, and Isaac Harris— which had been sold on the commercial market in 1921, were taken back up by the RN in 1939– with Harris lost in December.

Three Straths in Australian waters, ex-HMTs William Fall, Samuel Benbow, and William Ivey; were taken up by the RAN as coastal minesweepers.

HMAS Samuel Benbow was in Sydney Harbour during the Japanese midget submarine attack in 1942. RAN image

Ex-HMTs William Bentley and Thomas Currell became Kiwi mine vessels in the RNZN.

Strath class HMT Thomas Currell as RNZN minesweeper during World War II

Meanwhile, in France, our William Barnett/Valarie IV/Roche Noire was requestioned by the French Navy in August 1939– even before the beginning of the war– and given hull number AD 355. Armed with a single elderly 75mm Schneider modèle 1897, she was to serve as an auxiliary minesweeper.

In October, during the doldrums of the “Phony War,” she was visited at Brest by photographer Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot who captured an amazing series of images of the (re)armed Admiralty trawler and her laid-back crew, now in the ECPAD archives.

Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Note her recently installed 75mm Schneider modèle 1897. Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Note the mix of uniforms and civilian attire, augmented with bachi caps. Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Dressing salted cod. Again, the only “uniform” item on many is the bachi. Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Raidoman is at work. Among the “war installations” for the trawler was a radio set and searchlight. Other than that, she was all 1918. Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Note her searchlight. Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Commanded by a Petty Officer. Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Who may have come from the retired list. Chalutier dragueur de mines auxiliaire Roche Noire, Oct. 1939, Brest, by Eugène Robert Philippe Petiot/ECPAD

Sadly, our humble Roche Noire was caught up in the fall of France in June 1940 and got the short end of the stick.

Two weeks after the “Miracle of Dunkirk” and just three days before the Armistice that brought about the Vichy regime, all ships fit to go to sea in Brest were ordered to either make for England or French colonies in Africa, ultimately carrying some 80,000 Commonwealth, Free Polish, and French troops with them.

The last ships to leave on the night of 18/19 June included the incomplete battleship Richelieu (bound for Dakar with just 250 shells and 48 powder charges for her main battery) and a flotilla under RADM Jean-Emmanuel Cadart composed of the five liners and cargo ships transporting 16,201 boxes and bags of gold– carried from Fort de Portzic by garbage trucks– escorted by the destroyers Milan and Épervier as well as the auxiliary cruiser Victor Schœlcher, bound for Casablanca.

Unable to sail, the torpedo boat Cyclone, patrol boat Étourdi the non-functional submarines Agosta, Achille, Ouessant, and Pasteur, the condemned tanker Dordogne, the auxiliary minelayer Alexis de Tocqueville, avisos Aisne, Oise, Laffaux, and Lunéville; the old armored cruisers Waldeck-Rousseau, Montcalm, and Gueydon; and a host of net-laying vessels, tugs, and assorted cargo ships were scuttled. They were joined by the armed trawlers Mouette, Trouville, Roche Noire, and Flamant.

Many of the crews of the scuttled ships made it out with RADM Cadart’s gold-carrying flotilla, so Roch Noire’s fishermen may likely have gone on to further adventures in North Africa and Senegal. 

The port facilities were likewise sabotaged, with 800 tons of gasoline and assorted ammunition stocks blown up.

Joachim Lemelsen’s 5th Panzer Division entered Brest on the 19th, and the Germans found little of immediate use, with the fires reportedly taking several days to die down.

Bundesarchiv Bild 101II-MW-5683-29A, Brest, June 1940

The strategic port would go on to endure 1,553 days of occupation and a 43-day siege before the Germans surrendered in September 1944.

And, Back to Fishing

Immediately after taking control of Brest in 1940, Kriegsmarine VADM Eberhard “Hans” Kinzel would inspect the facility to see what was salvageable.

In his report, he would note:

The auxiliary minelayer Alexis de Tocqueville, the auxiliary patrol boat Mouette, and the auxiliary sweepers Roche Noire, and Flamant are recoverable, but the three latter are of little interest to the Kriegsmarine and could be returned to the Government of Herr Laval to ensure supplies for the population.

Shortly after, Roche Noire was raised and, after a stint in Vichy use, was removed from the French naval rolls in November 1941. She was allowed to return to fishing.

Post-war, she continued to harvest her stocks from the deep for over a decade.

In 1957, she was sold across the Channel again, returning home to be added to the inventory of Wood & Davidson – J. Wood, Aberdeen. That year she was listed in Lloyds as FV Shandwick.

Eventually, all things come to an end, and our little trawler, which served in both wars, was finally broken up in 1964.

Epilogue

Little remains of the hardy Strath-class armed trawlers, save for a few wrecks and scattered relics. 

Some models are available.

The City of Aberdeen, where many Straths were completed, maintains several models, photos, and records of these otherwise forgotten trawlers.

German VADM Kinzel, who moved to resurrect our little trawler at Brest in 1940, survived the war only to take his own life in June 1945 near Flensburg.

And, while the Admiralty hasn’t elected to recycle the names of the old Strath class, Armourer’s Mate William Barnett included, HMS Victory, currently under a “Big Repair,” endures at Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday Oct. 2, 2024: Slow Going

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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, Oct. 2, 2024: Slow Going

File-450-44 U.S. Navy Yard, SC 1 March 1944. Port Broadside, Down View

Above we see the Porter-class destroyer USS Moffett (DD-362) underway in Charleston, South Carolina passing under the Cooper Bridge on 1 March 1944. She was headed to the Big Apple, to undertake one of the screwiest– and most important– convoys of the war.

The Porters

Designed as “Gold-plater” destroyer leaders (of which 13 were allowed under the London Naval Treaty) to host a commodore of a four-piper DESRON and likewise make up for the American shortfall in light cruisers in the early 1930s, the eight twin-stack Porter-class destroyer leaders (381 feet oal, 1850 tons, 50,000shp, 37 knots, 8x 5-inch guns, 8x torpedo tubes) generated 50,000 shp to allow for 37 knots. The torpedo battery carried a reload, allowing the ships to pack 16 Mark 11 or 12 (later Mark 15) torpedoes.

A typical 1930s Porter:

The Porter class destroyer USS Balch (DD-363) underway, probably during trials in about September 1936. Note her superstructure including her large aft deck house, twin 4-tube torpedo turnstiles amidships, and twin funnels. NH 61694

They even had a class of follow-on half-sisters, the Somers, with a slightly different topside appearance to include three 4-tube torpedo turnstiles and a single funnel:

Somers class USS Jouett (DD 396), starboard view, at New York City 1939 NH 81177

Another thing that the Porters and Somers shared besides hulls was their peculiar Mark 22 mounts for their twin 5″/38 guns. These were limited elevation gun houses that relegated these rapid-fire guns to being capable of surface actions only.

As noted by Navweaps:

“Their low maximum elevation of +35 degrees of elevation was adopted mainly as a weight savings, as it was calculated that these ships would only be able to carry six DP guns rather than the eight SP guns that they actually did carry. The Mark 22 mounting used a 15 hp training motor and a 5 hp elevating motor.”

Check out those funky Mark 22 turrets! Somers-class sister USS Warrington (DD 383) arriving at New York City with Queen Mary and King George VI on board, 1939. Also, note a great view of her quad 1.1-inch AAA mount in front of the wheelhouse. LC-USZ62-120854

Most of the Porters and Somers would have their low-angle 4×2 Mark 22s replaced later in the war with 3×2 Mark 38 DP mounts, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Still, these destroyers got their SP 5 inchers into the fight during the upcoming war, as we shall see.

As for AAA, most as commissioned carried two “Chicago Piano” quad 1.1-inch mounts and a pair of flexible water-cooled .50 caliber MGs, guns that would soon be replaced during the war with 20mm Orelikons and 40mm Bofors.

Official U.S. Navy photograph, now in the collections of the National Archives. 80-G-21955

Meet Moffett

Our destroyer was the first (and so far only) in U.S. naval service to carry the name of RADM William Adger Moffett (USNA 1890) who earned a Medal of Honor while skipper of the cruiser USS Chester in a daring and dangerous night landing in 1914 at Veracruz, later became known as the architect of naval aviation and was killed in the loss of the airship/aircraft carrier USS Akron (ZRS-4) in 1933 at age 63– just six months shy of his mandatory retirement.

RADM Moffett, the Navy’s first Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, a position he held until he died in the crash of the rigid airship USS Akron (ZRS 4) in 1933. His MoH is on display at the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola.

Moffett (DD‑362) was laid down on 2 January 1934 at Quincy, Massachusetts by the Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation.

Launched on 11 December 1935, she was sponsored by Miss Beverly Moffett, the daughter of the late admiral.

She was commissioned at Boston on 28 August 1936.

Quiet Interwar Service

Soon after delivery, Moffett, assigned to the Atlantic Fleet, slipped into a cycle of summer cruises to the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, where she took part in exercises and gunnery drills in addition to regional port calls.

When FDR kicked off the Neutrality Patrol, Moffett once again roamed to points south, her old stomping grounds. In 1940, Moffett, operating out of Puerto Rico, was part of the task group keeping tabs on the Vichy French West Indies fleet based at Martinique and Guadeloupe that included the carrier Bearn and the light cruisers Jeanne d’Arc and Émile Bertin.

By August 1941, Moffett was detailed to escort the heavy cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31) as the latter carried Roosevelt to the Atlantic Charter Conference with Churchill at Argentia, Newfoundland.

Soon after, things got hot.

War!

Post Pearl Harbor, Moffett once again ended up in South Atlantic waters, tasked with a series of patrol and convoy missions including several voyages to West African parts.

USS Moffett (DD-362) in South American waters with a bone in her teeth, 15 January 1943. 80-G-64929

USS Moffett (DD-362) in South American waters, 15 January 1943. Note her depth charge racks. 80-G-64931

U-128

On 17 May 1943, as Moffett and her Somers-class half-sister USS Jouett (DD-396) were on escort duty south of Recife, Brazil, and were directed to a nearby surface contact where PBMs of VP-74 had spotted and fired a German submarine, the Type IX-C U-128 (Oblt. Hermann Steinert), some 42 days out of Lorient.

Two PBMs commanded by LCDR H.S. Davis, USNR, and LT(jg) H.C. Carey, USN, cripple the German submarine, U-128, in South Atlantic. One plane dropped depth bombs bringing her to the surface, while the second machine-gunned her. USS Jouett (DD-396) and USS Moffett (DD-362) led to the scene by one of the planes and finished her with direct hits. The PBMs dropped life rafts and the destroyer picked up many survivors. Shown: Eruption of water after depth charges. The conning tower may be seen (center), incident #3219. Photograph released May 17, 1943. 80-G-42064

Moffett fired 150 shells of 5-inch Common at the sub, hitting the boat at least six times.

Once U-128 took her final dive, Moffett stood by to rescue the survivors, numbering 51–four of which later died of wounds, a combination of chlorine poisoning and shrapnel. As detailed in later ONI interrogations of U-128’s crew, Moffett’s officers and crew “received high praise from all prisoners for the good treatment received while aboard her.”

The impounded property taken from U-128’s crew, as noted by Moffett in her report:

U-604

Across three days in August, while escorting the Omaha-class light cruiser USS Memphis (CL-13) and a merchant ship to windswept Ascension Island, Moffett made contact with what is believed to be the Type VIIC U‑604 (Kptlt. Horst Höltring) and fought the German so hard that her new skipper, LCDR Gilbert Haven Richards (USNA 1933) thought it was two different engagements.

With Navy aircraft in support, the running fight ensued through the night until the submarine surfaced some 95 miles north of Trinidad the next morning, with Moffett smothering her in shells until she disappeared.

From her report: 

Three days later, while still escorting Memphis, and again with the aid of aircraft, a sonar contact was regained and a submarine believed badly damaged by Moffett’s depth charges.

As DANFs notes, “In the dark and confusion of action, a friendly aircraft mistaking Moffett for the enemy made two strafing runs which caused minor damage. The stricken submarine was finally scuttled by her crew on 11 August; Moffett was credited with the kill.”

Throughout the action, Moffett’s gunners expended 28 star shells and 104 rounds of 5-inch common. She also suffered 13 men injured by blue-on-blue strafing.

From her report:

Then came a refit at Charleston followed by her most taxing convoy experience, this time in the North Atlantic.

Convoy NY‑78

On 25 March, designated TF 67, Moffett got underway from Pier 80 in the North River to join Convoy NY-78 (sometimes incorrectly seen as YN-78) as its sole destroyer and convoy commander. The “NY” convoy code denoted a New York-to-Britain slow convoy of which 57 transited between August 1943 and November 1943.

However, NY-78 would be very special indeed, and the Overlord landings depended on it.

USS Moffett (DD-362) underway at sea on 26 March 1944, leaving New York as the convoy boss of NY-78/TF-67. Note that she still carries four twin 5/38 low-angle gun mounts. 80-G-233588

The primary goal was to move 34 large (250 feet on average) railway car barges (or car floats) a type of vessel common in the Big Apple but rare and desperately needed for the logistics end of the D-Day landings, to Europe.

Workers from Arthur Tickle Engineering preparing “pickaback” barges for D-Day invasion, 1944. Source: National Archives

Capable of carrying 1,000 tons of deck cargo but only drawing 6 feet while doing it, these would be needed to move ammo and fuel into the landing beaches starting D+1.

A pickaback convoy heads out to the Narrows. National Archives.

These big barges, unlikely able to make the tow across the Atlantic in any sort of heavy seas, were specially modified into “Pickabacks” which meant lashing smaller composite barges taken up from coastal trade– including oil barges and wooden scows– to their decks, installing stronger cleats for the haul, reinforcing the hulls and decks via timber and concrete, making it all watertight by adding new covers and hatches– often replacing repurposed manhole covers– and welding on large skegs to cut down their tendency to yaw.

These Pickabacks took months to prepare, under the guidance of Capt. Edmond J. Moran, the scion of the NYC area’s go-to tugboat operation, Moran Towing. Work was done across a half-dozen Hudson area shipyards and terminals to rush the project to completion. Interestingly, since the barges were too large to lift via crane, the solution to make the Pickabacks was to install seacocks in the bottom of the railway car floats while in the bottom of a dry dock, open the dock, and allow the barge to submerge, float in the scows atop it, then close and slowly drain the dock, stacking the whole affair upon itself where it could then be lashed together.

From an August 1945 Popular Science piece published “Now it can be told” style:

Moffett’s point man would be the newly commissioned Buckley-class destroyer escort USS Marsh (DE-699) which was sailing on just her third Atlantic convoy. Her left and right arms would be Marsh’s sisters, USS Runnels (DE-793) and USS Tatum (DE-789), who were fresh off their shakedown and on their first convoy run. The Auk-class minesweeper USS Staff (AM-114)— destined to be the leading ship of the minesweeping group that led the invasion on D-Day– would also tag along.

A force of a dozen small 173-foot subchasers-– PCs 564, 565, 567, 568, 617, 618, 619, 1232, 1233, 1252, 1261, and 1262-– would accompany the force as a way to get them to Europe, where they would be desperately needed just off the surf line during the landings.

To tow the 34 Pickabacks, the convoy had a motley mix of two dozen tugs that would remain in Europe for Overlord. This included the large 205-foot Cherokee/Abnaki-class fleet tugs USS Kiowa (AT-72), USS Bannock (AT-81), USS Pinto (AT-90), USS Abnaki (AT-96), USS Alsea (AT-97), and USS Arikara (AT-98); the Texas-built 143-foot Admiralty tug HMS Emphatic (W 154), the smaller 143-foot Sotoyomo-class rescue tugs ATR-97, ATR-98, and ATR-99; the 165-foot wooden hulled ATR-4, ATR-13, and ATR-15; and 10 large 186-foot ocean-going Maritime Commission contracted V4-M-A1 tugs (Black Rock, Bodie Island, Farallon, Gay Head, Great Isaac, Hillsboro Inlet, Moose Peak, Sabine Pass, Sankaty Head, and Trinidad Head) owned by the WSA and operated by civilian mariners of Moran Towing. As with the barges, these craft would all be needed on D-Day both to beach the ammo barges and to tow the hundreds of massive concrete caissons as part of Operation Mulberry. Later, they towed damaged ships to Britain for salvage or repair.

To provide fuel for the short-legged flotilla, the old oiler USS Maumee (AO-2), which had been in mothballs before the war, was sent along. Too slow for fleet work at just 13 knots top speed, but that wouldn’t be a problem on NY-78.

Highlights distilled from Moffett’s March and April 1944 War Diaries.

Sound contacts were reported on almost every day at some point, requiring general quarters and investigation. The convoy stretched out over more than 10 miles, sometimes twice that much, leaving Moffat to order individual PCs to form clusters and smaller sub-convoys inside the group. Every night brought an order to darken ships and every morning brought the need to inspect the spiderweb of towlines and count noses.

A pickaback convoy depiction, via Aug 1945 Popular Science

So many lines bridles and towlines were lost that Maumee’s machine shop set to nearly round-the-clock work turning fathoms of 1 5/8-inch beaching gear wire rope and thimbles into new bridles. Stragglers were a fact of life.

On 27 March, Convoy UC-16, composed of empty fast-moving tankers and freighters headed back from Britain to pick up waiting cargos in New York, was sighted in the distance, speeding away.

On 30 March, a mysterious keg was spotted, bumping along the convoy route. Moffett deep-sixed it via 544 rounds of 20mm and 81 of 40mm. The lagging Pinto group reported a barge down by the stern.

April Fools Day brought a breakdown, of ATR-4, which was ordered to be taken in tow by ATR-15, which in turn broke down the next day.

3 April brought an open-ocean chase down of separated barges lost from Bannock’s tow.

4 April saw Moffett’s HFDF picking up German radio transmissions and the convoy standing by while HMS Queen Mary raced by later in the morning.

5 April saw Moffett investigate an abandoned life raft found adrift. Ordered to clear the derelict, the destroyer hit it with an impressive array of ordnance– 643 rounds of 20mm, 111 of 40mm, and a Mark VI depth charge– to no avail. As noted by her log, “Raft punctured but still afloat.”

6 April saw an all-day effort to save a sinking barge in the Pinto group, with Moffett sending a 14-man DC party to dewater the vessel via portable pumps. With the barge saved, the boat returning the DC crew to the destroyer flipped in rough seas, leading to a SAR operation that stretched into the dark but recovered everyone. The next day would not be so lucky, with two of her complement in a rubber raft crushed between the destroyer and ATR-97 in heavy seas during efforts to chase down two adrift barges. The bodies were buried at sea.

And so it continued, with the deck log reading increasingly dicey, and refueling efforts repeatedly canceled due to heavy seas. Likewise, more and more barges were breaking loose. While early on in the convoy it was news if one was adrift, twos and threes became standard by the 11th.

On 12 April, ATR-98 reported a one-foot hole in her engine room following a collision in heavy seas with Abnaki. Within 40 minutes the crew, unable to counteract the flooding, were abandoning ship. Within an hour, Moffett had proceeded to the scene of the sinking tug and recovered all 44 survivors, with no casualties.

On the 16th, the lead barge being towed by ATR-4 broke in two, requiring her to heave to in heavy seas and restring her entire tow group, with the assistance of a PC and Emphatic.

The 17th brought a confusing day that began with a stack fire on USS Staff, and a 14-hour running battle with phantom sonar contacts and perceived torpedo sign that earned 19 depth charges from Staff, PC-619, and Moffett:

By the afternoon of 18 April, land-based British planes were sighted. It was over. 

The next morning, the convoy dispersed as Maumee, all the remaining tugs and barges, along with PCs 1233, 1252, 1262, and 1263 made for Falmouth under Admiralty orders while Moffett and the remaining units made for Plymouth, capping a 25-day epic run. A 3,400nm trek that averaged just under six knots!

After transferring the survivors of ATR-98 ashore, Moffett had 48 hours to replenish her bunkers and storerooms, then shoved off and headed home on the 22nd via Milford Haven and Belfast.

As for the Normandy landings, at least 16 of the large NYC rail barges delivered were loaded and towed to the landing areas where they were beached at high tide at D-Day and allowed to dry out. They were unloaded by trucks alongside when dry and LCVPs when wet. As the Navy notes on its Operation Neptune history: “During the D+12 storm [which disrupted the Mulberry harbors] this reserve supply of ammunition proved very necessary.”

Original Caption: CPU 11-15-11 Date: Rec’d 14 June 1944 Taken By: CPU 11 Subject: Beach on the coast of France, showing debris and wreckage in the foreground. Casualty evacuation boats in readiness. The barge grounded, Landing craft and ships in the background. 80-G-252564

The tugs gave yeoman service off Normandy, with some of the civilian-manned V4s making as many as 10 shuttle trips carrying Mulberry components, often while sidestepping German E-boats, midget subs, fire from shore batteries, mines, and aircraft.

The humble Pinto and Arikara earned Navy Unit Commendations– rare citations for tugs– off France as part of Combat Salvage and Fire Fighting Unit Force “O,” clearing wrecks from the beach area reserved for the erection of the artificial harbors and taking damaging fire in the process. Many of these tugs would pivot to the Med to take part in the Dragoon Landings in August.

The mighty USS Pinto (ATF-90) motors up the Elizabeth River on October 17, 1944, following an overhaul at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard

The dozen 173-foot subchasers brought over in the convoy formed PC Squadron One and served as control craft for the waves of LCIs headed to the beaches on D-Day, where PC-1261 was sunk off Utah Beach by a German coastal battery 58 minutes before H-Hour.

Coming in close– skirting the surf line– the PCs traded fire with German pillboxes in an attempt to support the landings. They also pulled wounded from the water and, later that day, did the same with bodies. Then came a full month of picket duty off the beaches, intermingled with repulsing German air and boat attacks– PC-619 downed a Heinkel He 177 on D+4 and picked up its sole survivor. They shuttled senior officers and dispatches from England to Normandy, blew up floating mines with their 20mm guns, escorted coal barges from Newcastle to France, and PC-1262 even patrolled down the river Seine, escorting a load of potatoes to the emaciated citizens of Rouen. The vessels of PCRON1 went on to blockade the Channel Islands, fight it out with E-boats, rescue freezing survivors from the SS Leopoldville, and were among the first American ships in a German port during the war, sailing into Bremerhaven to occupy the port in May 1945.

While the vessels of Convoy NY-78 went on to great things, Moffett’s war was on the last few innings.

End Game

Moffett, aerial view, in Hampton Roads, Virginia, 13 June 1944 80-G-236743

Moffett, late war in Measure 32/3d camouflage scheme.

Moffett went on to ride shotgun on several late war convoys from the East Coast to the Med and back including UGS 48 (July 1944: Hampton Roads – Port Said), GUS 48 (Aug 1944: Port Said – Hampton Roads), UGS 55 (Sept. 1944: Hampton Roads – Port Said), GUS 55 (Oct 1944: Port Said – Hampton Roads), UGS 62 (Dec 1944: Hampton Roads – Gibraltar), UGS 71 (Jan. 1945: Hampton Roads – Southern France), and UGS 83 (March 1945: Hampton Roads – Gibraltar).

Of note, Moffett was typically chosen to carry the TF/Convoy commander on these runs, which would include over a dozen, usually newer, escorts and as many as 70 merchies. She had a reputation for good luck and success– plus space for a commodore.

These convoys were largely anti-climatic milk runs except for UGS 48 which was twice attacked by enemy aircraft including an ineffective night attack by German He 111s and a follow-up by Italian S.79 torpedo bombers of Gruppo Buscaglia-Faggioni, leaving a Liberty ship (MV Samsylarna) damaged.

Moffett’s diagram of the He 111 attack, which saw the German bombers come in at mast top level at 2 a.m., defeating the destroyer’s SC-type radar:

Moffett at the Boston Navy Yard, 12 September 1944. 19-N-70743

After UGS 83, Moffett made for Boston NSY in April 1945 to begin extended repairs.

Following VE-Day, she was towed to Charleston for an extensive refit that planned to beef up her AAA suite and replace her 5-inchers with newer models.

Moffett aerial view, in Hampton Roads, Virginia, 13 June 1945. 80-G-236748

Moffett at Charleston, South Carolina, 1 July 1945. 80-G-365146

However, she was still in the yard at VJ Day and this reconstruction was halted.

She decommissioned on 2 November 1945, spent 14 months in mothballs, and then was stricken and sold for scrap on 16 May 1947 to the Boston Metals Co. of Baltimore.

Moffett only received 2 battle stars for World War II service.

Epilogue

Few relics other than postcards and canceled postal stamps remain of Moffett.

Her War Diaries are digitized in the National Archives. 

The Navy has not used the name “Moffett” for a second warship, perhaps because they renamed the old NAS Sunnyvale in California to Moffett Field, a moniker that endures even after the Navy pulled out in 1994, turning it over to NASA.

Of her our greyhound’s sisters, class leader Porter was torpedoed and lost at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in 1942; Selfridge survived a torpedo in the night action at Vella Lavella, and Phelps was damaged by shore battery fire off Saipan in 1944. Like Moffett, none survived long after the war, and all were soon scrapped, made obsolete by newer Fletcher, Sumner, and Gearing-class destroyers.

Speaking of which, Moffett’s sixth skipper, Capt. Gil Richards– who was in command during the grueling multi-day battle with U-604 and the crazy NY-78 convoy– ended the war as the commander of the new Gearing-class tin can USS Kenneth D. Bailey (DD-713).

Postwar, in the summer of 1946, Richards was hospitalized at Bethesda Naval Hospital suffering from “the rigors of continuous sea duty,” and soon retired to civilian life. Moving to New Jersey, he died in 1983, aged 72. His civilian life was as successful as his Navy life, but his son noted, “His heart never left the U.S. Navy.”

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International.

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The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

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Warship Wednesday Sept. 25, 2024: Fearless Outpost

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024: Fearless Outpost

Above we see the business end of the Surprise class three-masted canonnière de station, Zélée in her gleaming white tropical service livery, before 1915.

Some 110 years ago this week, this humble colonial gunboat stood up to a pair of German armored cruisers that outclassed her in every way, and in the end, forced them to retire empty-handed.

The Surprise class

Built for colonial service, the three sisters of the 680-ton Surprise class– Suprise, Décidée (Decided), and Zelee (Zealous)– were compact steam-powered gunboats/station ships, running just 184 feet overall length and 26 of beam with a mean draught of just over 10 feet.

They were one of the last designs by noted French naval architect and engineer Jacques-Augustin Normand, who built the country’s first steamship.

Composite construction, they were wooden framed with a hull of hardened steel plates sheathed in copper below the waterline. The hull was segmented via nine waterproof bulkheads. A small generator provided electric lighting topside and belowdecks as well as a powering a large searchlight atop the wheelhouse. Radio sets would be retrofitted later.

Using a pair of Niclausse boilers (Surprise had cylindrical boilers) to supply steam to a horizontal triple expansion engine of 900 horses, they had a maximum speed of 13.4 knots and a steaming radius, on 75 tons of mid-grade coal, of 2,700nm at 10 knots. They carried three masts and were rigged as a barkentine, reportedly able to make six knots under canvas to stretch that endurance.

Armament was a pair of Mle 1891 3.9″/45 guns, fore and aft with limited firing arcs, four Mle 1891 2.6″/50 9-pounders on the beam, and six M1885 37mm 1-pounder Hotchkiss rapid fire guns including one in the fighting tops of each mast and two on the bridge wings.

No shell hoists meant chain gangs to reload from an amidships below deck magazine. While torpedo tubes would have been ideal for these slow gunboats, there seems to have been no thought to adding them.

Crew would be a mix of six officers and 80-ish ratings including space for a small det of marines (Fusiliers marins), to be able to land a platoon-sized light infantry force to rough it up with the locals if needed. Speaking of the locals, in line with American and British overseas gunboats of the era, when deployed to the Far East these craft typically ran hybrid crews with most service and many deck rates recruited from Indochina and Polynesia, which had the side bonus of having pidgin translators among the complement.

Meet Zelee

Our gunboat was the second in French naval service to carry the name. The first was a trim 103-foot Chevrette-class corvette built at Toulon for the Napoleonic fleet and commissioned in 1812. Armed with a pair of 4-pounder cannon and 12-pounder carronades, she saw extensive service in the Spanish Civil War in 1823, was on the Madagascar Expedition in 1830, and later, after conversion to steam power in 1853, was used as a station ship in assorted French African colonies for a decade then, recalled to Lorient, spent another 20 years as an accommodation ship and powder hulk before she was finally disposed of in 1887 after a long 71-year career.

She is probably best known for taking part in Jules Dumont d’Urville’s second polar expedition to Antarctica together with the corvette Astrolabe, a successful four-year voyage that filled reams of books with new observations and charts. The report on the expedition (Voyage au pole sud et dans l’Océanie sur les corvettes l’Astrolabe et la Zélée exécuté par ordre du roi pendant les années 1837-1838-1839-1840) spans 10 volumes alone.

The expedition discovered what is known as Adélie Land, which endures as France’s Antarctic territory and base for their Dumont d’Urville Station. Zelee’s skipper on the voyage was LT (later VADM) Charles Hector Jacquinot, a noted French polar explorer in his own right who went on to be a big wheel in the Crimean War.

The Corvettes Astrolabe and Zélée in the ice, likely near the coast of Antarctica, 9 February 1838. By Auguste-Etienne-François Mayer c. 1850, via the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Our second Zelee was the third of her class and laid down at Arsenal de Rochefort in April 1898, built in the same slip that sister Décidée had just departed. Of note, Surprise was constructed by Normand at Le Havre and completed in 1896.

As completed, she originally carried a black hull. Her first of eight skippers was LT Louis Rémy Antoine Exelmans.

French gunboat Zélée, fitting out near the aviso Mésange, in 1899 at Rochefort.

Canonnière Zélée sur la Charente, 1900, soon after delivery.

Same as the above.

Quiet Antebellum Service

Soon after delivery, class leader Surprise was later joined by sisters Décidée and Zelee caught orders for the Far East.

Painted white and given a lot of leeway in appearance, they roamed, typically separately, from Indochina to China where they served on the Yangtze and as station ships in Nanchang, to Japan, New Caledonia, and Polynesia.

Décidée Saigon

French Canonnière de station Surprise, Haiphong, with canvas covering her decks and her laundry aloft. Surprise would later be moved to Africa, where she would remain until 1916. 

The gunboat Zélée in Hanavave Bay, Baie des Vierges, Fatu Hiva Island, 1910. Collection: The Marquesas Islands

Zelee while visiting Australia. Australian National Maritime Museum. Samuel J. Hood Studio ~ Object № 00035067

French Zélée gunboat Papeete Tahiti 

In December 1913, Lieutenant de Vaisseau Maxime Francois Emile Destremau (Ecole Navale 1892) arrived to take command of Zelee, then stationed in the backwater Tahitian capital of Papeete.

While ostensibly a “French” colony since 1880, at the time the little harbor only had 280 French residents along with over 350 British and Commonwealth, 215 Chinese, 100 Americans, 50 Japanese, and some 30 or so Germans as well as a few Greeks, Swedes, and Spaniards. The truth was you were far more likely at the time to hear English on the narrow palm-lined streets of Papeete than French.

The colony had big plans. It was even slated to receive, sometime in 1915, a station de téléphonie sans (TFS) wireless station. Until then, it had to rely on semi-regular mail services from France, typically a six-week trip at its most rapid.

As for Destremau, the 37-year-old lieutenant had seen over 20 years of sea service including on the avisoes Scorff and Eure, the cruiser Eclaireur, and the early submarines Narval, Gustave-Zéde and Pluviose. His mission in French Oceania consisted mainly of showing the Tricolor from island to island and doing the old “hearts and minds” thing that goes back to the Romans.

Destremau, who had spent his career largely at Toulon and Brest, seemed to enjoy his Pacific deployment, creeping his shallow-draft gunboat into atolls that rarely saw the Navy.

In a February 1914 letter home, related via Combats et batailles sur mer (Septembre 1914-Décembre 1914) Avec cinq cartes dressées par Claude Farrère et Paul Chack, Destremau wrote:

Since yesterday we have been sailing in a truly strange way. We have crossed a large lagoon of about sixty kilometers, of which there is no map and which is full of submerged rocks. You can distinguish them by the change in color of the water and you avoid them as best you can. After four hours of this exercise under a blazing sun, we are very happy to arrive at the anchorage, where I find a charming little village hidden in the coconut trees. As the Zélée had never been there, we were given a real ovation. A meeting on the water’s edge of the entire population in full dress; gifts of coconuts and chickens, and organization of songs for the evening. Ravishing choirs, extremely accurate voices, and harmonies of a truly astonishing modernism. Just ten men and ten women are enough to compose an ensemble in at least six parts, with solo calls, an ensemble in at least six parts, with solo calls, admirable rhythm, and measure!

Postcards exist of her idyllic time in Polynesia.

gunboat Zélée (left) and the armored cruiser Montcalm in Tahiti in 1914

Tahiti Papeete Harbor– Arrival of Australian and American Couriers, Zelee is in the center background, with a giant Tricolor

Tahiti. – Pirogues ornées, 14 Juillet 1914, et Zelee

War!

In early August 1914, the entire armada under the command of RADM Albert Louis Marie Huguet’s Division navale d’Extreme-Orient— a force whose area of operation spanned from the Bay of Bengal to the Yangtze to Noumea to Tahiti– was not very impressive and, worse, was thinly spread.

His flag was on the cruiser Montcalm (9,177 tons, 21 knots, 2×7.6″, 8×6.4″, circa 1902), then steaming to New Caledonia after a rare visit to Polynesia. Another old cruiser, Dupleix (7,432 tons, 20 knots, 8×6.4″, circa 1903), was in Chinese waters. The dispatch vessel Kersaint (1,276 tons, 16 knots, 1×5.5″, 5×3.9″, circa 1897) was laid up at Noumea but was soon to be rearmed. Décidée was in Saigon. And in Polynesia was Zelee.

That’s it.

When the news hit that France and Germany were at war on 6 August– three days after the fact– Zelee was visiting the island of Raiatea, about 150 miles west of Tahiti. Immediately, the 36-year-old artist Joseph Ange Léon Octave Morillot, a naval officer who had resigned his commission in 1906 while on Polynesian station to go native, paint local topless women, and smoke opium, presented himself to Destremau and voluntarily returned to duty as a reserve ensign.

Setting out for Papeete with the news and an extra officer, Zelee arrived on the 7th.

By that time the colony was in full panic mode, with the belief that the German Bussard-class unprotected cruisers SMS Geier and Cormoran (1900t, 15 knots, 8×4.1″/35 guns, 2 tt) were typically in Samoa, just a five-day steam away from Tahiti. As Tahiti was a coaling station for the French fleet, some 5,000 tons of good Cardiff coal was on hand, which would make a valuable prize indeed.

As far as coastal defenses at Tahiti, as early as 1880, the French Navy had built a fort equipped with nine muzzle-loading black powder cannons to protect the entrance to Papeete but it had fallen into disrepair, its garrison removed in 1905 and its guns dismounted. As noted, by 1914, “the artillery pieces were lying limply on the ground among the flowers and moss. The gun carriages, covered with climbing plants, were firmly secured by a tangle of perennial vines of the most beautiful effect. In short, the tropical forest, exuberant, had reclaimed its rights and buried the battery.”

The island’s Army garrison consisted of a Corsican lieutenant by the name of Lorenzi and 25 Troupes Coloniales. When the Tahitian gendarmes were mobilized, they added another 20 locals and a French adjutant. Soon the word got around and reservists stumbled forward until Lorenzi commanded a mixed force of 60 rifles, who were soon drilling 12 hours a day.

French reservists also come running. each of whom is assigned a post. From the bush, we see emerging, with long beards and tanned skin, Frenchmen steeped in the land of Tahiti and who have become more Maori than the Maoris themselves, men who live, love, and think in Tahitian. At first, they hesitate a little to speak the beautiful language of France, but very quickly they find it again in their heads the marching songs that they sang every day during the field service hikes, so hard under the tropical sun.

With the possibility that two German cruisers, capable of landing a 150-man force, could be inbound, and with the likelihood that Zelee could survive a gun battle with either, the decision was made to write off the gunboat and move most of her men and guns ashore to make a dedicated land-based defense.

Destremau had a small wardroom– Ensign 1c PTJ Barnaud as XO, Ensign LSM Barbier, Ensign RJ Charron, Midshipman H. Dyevre, Midshipman 2c JA Morier, and Asst. Surgeon (Medecin de 2e classe, Medecin-major) C. Hederer. Meanwhile, his crew numbered 90.

Using sweat, yardarm hoists, and jacks, the crew dismounted the stern 3.9-incher (for which there were only 38 shells), all four 2.6-inchers, and all six 37mm 1-pounder Hotchkiss guns. They left the forward 3.9 mount and 10 shells.

Rigging a line from the harbor to the top of the 100-meter hill overlooking it, a roadcrew was formed to slowly muscle up the five large guns to the top. Meanwhile, the six Hotchkiss guns were mounted on as many requisitioned Ford trucks from a local copra concern– primitive mobile artillery– led by Ensign Dyevre. Ensign Barnaud formed a group of 42 riflemen who, with Dyevre’s gun trucks, formed a mobile reserve.

Destremau (center, with cap) and his staff in Tahiti: Ensigns Barbier and Barnaud, midshipmen Dyèvre and Le Breton, colonial infantry LT Lorenzi.

One of the ship’s engineers formed a section of dispatch riders mounted on proffered bicycles. The signalers formed a series of semaphore stations at the top of the hill battery visible to the old fort 18 km to the east, and the end of the lagoon five km to the west. Bonfires were built to signal at night. Within days, telephone lines connected the whole affair. Two old bronze cannons were mounted at the hilltop semaphore station and Pic Rouge in the distance, ready to fire as signal guns. Gunners mined the channel markers, ready to blow when needed. Likewise, plans were made to burn the coal depot.

The colony’s resident Germans as well as the Teutonic members of the captured Walküre’s crew, were interned and moved to the island of Motu-Uta in the harbor. In deference to their neighbors, they were not placed under guard, simply left in their own tiny penal colony in the middle of paradise.

The painter Morillot, taking it upon himself to become a one-man recruiting officer, made daily trips to the island’s interior in search of warm bodies. Soon there were more volunteers than there were rifles or positions on the gun crews.

With the whole island in a state of tense pre-invasion alarm, on 12 August the British-built German Rhederei line cargo steamer Walküre (3932 GRT) appeared offshore. Loaded with a cargo of phosphates from Chile and headed to Australia, she was unaware of the state of war.

Ensign Barbier, racing to Zelee with a skeleton crew, managed to raise steam and, with 10 shells quickly returned to the gunboat by Dyevre for its sole remaining 3.9-incher, soon set off to pursue the German steamer.

With Dyevre leading the boarding crew, pistols in hand, Walküre was captured without a shot. Impounding the vessel– with the support of her mixed British and Russian crew– our gunboat and her prize returned to Papeete to the reported wild cheers of her colonists.

By 20 August, the colony was as ready as it was going to get, with the five large guns of the ersatz battery commanding the harbor and pass, trenches dug, observation posts manned, 150 armed if somewhat motley irregular infantry, and six 37mm gun trucks, all there was to do was wait.

They had a month to stew.

Enter Von Spee

While Geier and Cormoran never made it to Tahiti, Admiral Maximillian Von Spee’s two mightiest ships in the Pacific, the 11,400-ton twin armored cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, did.

Scharnhorst and her sister were very distinctive with their four large funnels.

With a mission to seize the port and its desperately needed coal supply, and with no Allied warships within several days of the isolated colony other than our tiny (and largely toothless Zelee), it should have been a cakewalk.

With each of the big German cruisers packing eight 8.2-inch and another six 5.9-inch guns, and able to put a battalion size landing force ashore, the sight of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau appearing like a phantom from the sea smoke just 2,000 meters off the reef at Papeete at 0630 on 22 September 1914 was a shock to Destremau.

The signal cannon fired and the phones rang. Soon, Papeete became a desert as its inhabitants, long ready to bug out, took to the interior.

Orders came quick.

Barbier was ordered to rush to Zelee with 10 men and light her boilers, to ram the German cruiser closest to the pass once she had enough steam. The coal yard was set alight. The channel beacons went up in a flash of light and smoke. A crew on Walküre rushed to open her seacocks and she soon began settling on the bottom of the harbor.

Ensign Charron, in charge of the battery, was ordered to hold his fire until small boats began to gather for a landing which was logical as the popguns wouldn’t have done much to the German cruisers but could play god with a cluster of packed whaleboats.

By 0740, after a 70-minute wait, after steaming slowly in three circles just off the reef, first Scharnhorst and then Gneisenau opened up on the town and as retribution for the billowing smoke from the prized coal yard and the sinking Walküre.

By 0800, the fire shifted to Zelee, whose funnel was making smoke.

By 0820, the wrecked gunboat was filling with water, Barbier and his men moving to abandon their little warship– the crew in the end finished the job of the Germans by opening Zelee’s water intakes to the harbor.

Some accounts list 14 shots of 8.2-inch and another 35 of 5.9-inch fired by the German cruisers by 0900, others put the total count higher to 80 shells. Von Spee, afraid the harbor could be mined, retired, his plan to fuel his ships with French coal spoiled. He would miss those irreplaceable shells at the Falklands in December.

Two residents of the colony, a Polynesian child and a Japanese expat, were killed as well as several injured.

Estimates that as much as half of Papeete was destroyed in the bombardment.

The bombardment of Papeete, capital of Tahiti, a French possession in the Pacific. Showing a panoramic view of Papeete, capital of Tahiti, after being shelled by the German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The numbers indicate: 1. German prisoners under an armed guard, after having been compelled to assist in clearing away the debris resulting from the bombardment. 2. The market where all perishable food (…?) 3. Ruins of the back premises of Messrs A B Donald Ltd., with the Roman Catholic Cathedral in the background and the signal station on the hill to the right. Supplement to the Auckland Weekly News, 22 October 1914, p.43. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections AWNS-19141022-43-01

Divers went down to Zelee just hours after the Germans steamed away, and recovered the ship’s tricolor. It was presented to Destremau.

German propagandists remembered the raid in spectacular fashion, complete with incoming fire from shore batteries and the ships coming in far closer to the harbor.

Die Kreuzer Scharnhorst and Gneisenau beschießen Papeete, die Hautpstadt von Tahiti, by Willy Moralt, via the Illustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges 1914.

Epilogue

Zelee would be partially salvaged in 1925 but remains a well-known dive site in the Tahiti area.

Her on-shore 3.9-inch gun is preserved at Bougainville Park in Papeete.

Sister Surprise would also be lost during the war, torpedoed by U-38 in December 1916 in Funchal on the island of Madeira.

Décidée survived the conflict and went to the breakers in 1922.

The French navy recycled Zelee’s name once again in 1924 on the 285-ton remorqueur-patrouilleur Zelee (ex-Lakeside) which served into 1950.

As for the German freighter Walküre, she was salvaged and repaired, then sold to an American company and would remain in service until 1925.

The painter Morillot hung up his uniform after the bombardment and returned to his painting, opium, and women, passing in 1931.

Denigrated by the governor general of Tahiti– who hid in a church during the bombardment while Destremau handled the defense– our gunboat skipper was ordered back to France to face an inquiry board. Given interim command of the destroyer Boutefeu while the board hemmed and hawed about meeting, Destremau died in Toulon of illness on 7 March 1915, aged but 39.

His decorations came posthumously.

He was cited in the order of the army nine months after passing (JO 9 Dec. 1915, p. 8.998):

Lieutenant Destremau, commanding the gunboat La Zélée and the troops in Papeete, was able, during the day of 22 September 1914, to take the most judicious measures to ensure the defense of the port of Papeete against the attack of the German cruisers Sharnorst and Gneisenau. Demonstrated in the conduct of the defense operations the greatest personal bravery and first-rate military qualities which resulted in preserving the port of Papeete and causing the enemy cruisers to move away.

After the war, he was awarded the Legion of Honor in March 1919.

A street in Papeete carries his name.

The salvaged flag from Zelee was maintained by Destremau’s family until 2014 when, on the 100th anniversary of the gunboat’s loss, it was returned to the French Navy who maintain it as a relic at the Papeete naval base.

The colony’s newest station ship/gunboat, the 262-foot Teriieroo a Teriierooiterai (P780) arrived at Papeete in May after a two-month transit from France.

The more things change… 

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

If you liked this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International

They are possibly one of the best sources of naval study, images, and fellowship you can find. http://www.warship.org/membership.htm

The International Naval Research Organization is a non-profit corporation dedicated to the encouragement of the study of naval vessels and their histories, principally in the era of iron and steel warships (about 1860 to date). Its purpose is to provide information and a means of contact for those interested in warships.

With more than 50 years of scholarship, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.

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I’m a member, so should you be!

Warship Wednesday Sept. 18, 2024: Passing the Cup Around

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile 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

If you enjoy my always ad-free Warship Wednesday content, you can support it by buying me a cup of joe at https://buymeacoffee.com/lsozi

Warship Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024: Passing the Cup Around

Netherlands Institute of Military History (NIMH) photo 2000-364-26

Above we see the business end of the Polish submarine Orzel while on the builder’s ways at NV Koninklijke Maatschappij De Schelde in Holland in 1937, showing her four-pack of forward 21.7 inch torpedo tubes.

Some 85 years ago this month the boat and her crew would be homeless and looking for some revenge.

The Polish submarine program

Left with only about 90 miles of coastline along the Baltic by the Versailles framers, the Polish Navy (KMW) for the 1920s was made up very simply of a half-dozen small (300-400 ton) ex-German torpedo boats, two slow ex-Russian gunboats, four flat-bottom FM-class German coastal minesweepers, and some shallow-draft river monitors.

Following a military alliance with France, it was decided to build a proper navy base, operate an near condemned French protected cruiser (ex-D’Entrecasteaux, laid down in 1894) as a stationary training ship, and start exploring options for more modern warships to include battleships, cruisers, destroyers and submarines with varying degrees of success.

Speaking to the final type, Warsaw cobbled together enough cash (and French-backed loans) by 1928 to buy a trio of new Normand-Fenaux-type (enlarged French Saphir class) minelayer submarines.

Trim little 1,250-ton boats that ran just 257 feet overall, they carried four bow tubes and a trainable twin tube atop the pressure hull along with the ability to carry and deploy 40 mines.

These three boats– Wilk (Wolf), Rys (Linx), and Zbik (Wildcat)– were delivered by the early 1930s from three different French yards (A C de la Loire Nantes, A C Augustin-Normand, and CNF) after significant delays and were never really successful, reportedly being noisy and prone to leaks.

Polish submarine Wilk visiting Stockholm in 1932 Fo37710C

However, the Wilks were the cradle of the Polish submarine force, and soon after the Poles in 1933 moved to order four larger submarines in two flights as a believed counter to German pocket battleships. After consulting French, British, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, and American firms for designs, the KMW went with the conjoined submission from NV Koninklijke Maatschappij De Schelde, Vlissingen and Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij.

The design was based on the one-off experimental Dutch Hr.Ms. O 16— a 1,200-ton/251-foot advanced ocean-going welded double-hulled design using high tensile St52 steel yielding a 330-foot depth rating and hydraulic surface controls while being capable of hitting 18 knots while carrying 8 torpedo tubes.

The Dutch submarine Hr.Ms. O 16 fitting out in late 1936. Note the masked 88mm gun forward of her sail. At the time of her commissioning, she was the largest submarine in the Dutch Navy. Sent to the Dutch East Indies in 1939, when war came with Japan two years later, she sank three Japanese troopships and damaged two others before she was sunk by a mine in December 1941. NIMH

The Polish boats would be larger (1,473 tons, 276 feet oal), faster (19.44 knots– capable of chasing down Russia’s Gangut-class battlewagons), and even more heavily armed with a full dozen tubes (4 bow/4 stern 550mm, and 2×2 external 533mm trainable) along with room to carry 20 steel fish.

Her plant used a pair of Dutch-licensed 6QD42 Sulzer diesel engines for surface running, another pair of Brown Boveri electric motors for subsurface, and two 100-cell batteries.

Sulzer diesel’s 2000-364-53

Big for a Baltic boat, she had a range of 7,000nm at 10 knots and could remain underway for 90-day combat patrols. The reason behind this was to allow the class the capability to conduct long-term combat operations without depending on their (few and easily seized/blockaded) bases and, to state the obvious, would allow these subs to range out of the Baltic and interdict enemy shipping (be they Russian or German) on the Atlantic in time of war.

The Poles, who had a military alliance with France at the time, went with the Wzor 1924V, which was the big 21.65-inch French STST 24V (683 pound TNT warhead, 3,300 yards @45 knots) torpedo for her in-pressure-hull tubes and, for her topside trainable tubes, the Wzor AB, a new 21-inch Whitehead steam torpedo (660-pound warhead, 3,300 yards at 47 knots) designed for use from the deck-mounted launchers of the British-made Polish Grom-class destroyers.

When it came to deck guns, whereas the Dutch O 16 had an 88mm DP gun and a twin 40mm AAA, the Orzel would go just a bit larger with a single low-angle 4.1-inch L/40 wz.36 Bofors forward in a revolving bubble-shaped mask in front of the sail and a twin Bofors atop the rear of the sail that could be lowered into a watertight shaft, augmented with a twin 13.2mm Hotchkiss heavy machine gun mount. The big Bofors had four watertight ready lockers capable of holding 21 shells between them while a magazine capable of storing another 100 rounds was located amidships under the auxiliary control room, with a chain gang passing shells forward during a prolonged surface engagement. The same magazine held 1,200 40mm shells and six boxes of 13.2mm ammo as well as small arms.

The Poles wanted four submarines and eventually ordered two, Orzel (Eagle) and Sep (Vulture) from the Dutch, with a second pair– Kuna (Marten) and Lasica (Weasel)– ordered in France to a slightly modified design (lighter steel and no deck gun) in late 1938 from AC Augustin Normand and AC de la Loire Nantes. The French pair saw work suspended on them in April 1939 and both would be destroyed on the slipways by the Germans during the war.

The cost for the planned two new Dutch-built subs was 21 million zlotych, a figure that would be satisfied in part (10 percent) by Polish agricultural products and raw materials sent to Holland, 15.44 million zlotych from the Polish government generated by bonds sold on the Warsaw Stock Exchange largely to French and British investors, and the balance, about 3.5 million zlotych, raised via a combination of public subscription into the Fundusz Obrony Morskiej (Maritime Defense Fund) to include schoolchildren’s campaigns and a 0.5 percent garnish on the pay of Polish Army and Navy’s officer and NCO corps.

As a side note, there was enough money left over from the subscription that the Polish Navy planned to order a class of 17 motor torpedo boats– one named after each of the country’s provinces– but the war intervened.

The Dutch thought the finished product was so nice that they ordered a follow-on pair of subs based on the Orzel design but with minor tweaks. The two boats, Hr.Ms. O 19 and O 20, ditched the masked deck gun design for a simpler standalone 88mm DP and reduced the number of torpedo tubes to add 10 vertical mine tubes along each side of the casing outside the pressure hull, each capable of carrying two mines. They were notably the first submarines equipped with working snorkels.

One of Orzel and Sep’s near sisters, Hr.Ms. O 20 seen entering Curacao in the Dutch West Indies in November 1939. Both O 19 and O 20 managed to escape the Germans in 1940 and sailed for the Allies during the war, being lost in 1941 and 1945, respectively. NIMH 2158_015360.

Meet Orzel

On 29 January 1936, the Polish Navy signed a contract with the Dutch submarine concern for the construction of two submarines to the modified O 16 design.

Our subject was the first of her class laid down, as Yard No. 205, at De Schelde, Vlissingen, on 14 August 1936. Her sister, Sep, was laid down three months later as Yard No. 196 at nearby Rotterdamsche Droogdok, Mij.

zoetwaterinstallatie desalination plants 2000-364-52

Orzel was launched on 15 January 1938, with 35-year-old Kmdr.ppor. (CDR) Henryk Kloczkowski, a former cadet of the Tsar’s Imperial Navy– and nephew of RADM Wacław Kloczkowski– who had graduated from the French submarine school (École de Navigation Sous-Marine) in Toulon, appointed as her first skipper.

15 January 1938. The Polish submarine ORP Orzel is being towed here by a tugboat from the shipyard to another location, after the launching festivities. On the forecastle the Dutch Chief Supervisor of the shipyard, Mr. Meerman. Saluting on the bridge the Polish naval officer (supervision for the construction kltz. Niemirski. NIMH 2000-364-34

17 October 1938, construction of the Polish submarine Sep at the Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij (RDM), showing her just after launch being pulled by a yard tug. NIMH 2158_072978

By late January 1939, she had finished her builder’s trials including torpedo tests in Den Helder and speed trials in Norwegian waters in the Oslofjord, then was handed over to her Polish crew in a ceremony held on 2 February.

Matka chrzestna okrętu podwodnego ORP “Orzeł” generałowa Jadwiga Sosnkowska (z kwiatami), kontradmirał Józef Świrski, poseł RP w Holandii Wacław Babiński i gen. Stanisław Kwaśniewski w czasie wodowania okrętu.

Feb 2 1939 Orzel commissioning plankowners at the Vlissingen yard canteen 2000-364-62

2 February 1939. The consecration of the Polish submarine ORP Orzel by the chief chaplain of the Polish miners in Limburg, Father Hoffman. The boat was christened by Mrs. Jadwiga Sosnkowska, wife of General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, who was head of the Committee for Matters of Armaments and Equipment (in the photo she is arranging the flowers). During WWII, Sosnkowski would become the CiC of the Polish military in exile before he was demoted over his protests about the Warsaw Home Army being left to rot in 1944. NIMH 2000-364-33

On 5 February, the newest Polish submarine left Vlissingen and headed into the Baltic for Gdynia, arriving there on the 7th to a welcoming crowd.

Polish submarine Orzel arriving home via Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe

It was there that a plaque was ceremonially unveiled, mounted on the ship’s conning tower, informing that the boat was built in part with public contributions from the FOM.

Sep joined her sister Orzel in Poland in April.

The sisters then spent the next several months on a series of shakedown cruises in the Baltic– there were clouds on the horizon.

War!

On 24 August 1939, two days after a speech from Hitler to his commanders all but saying war was inevitable with Poland, the Polish military went on alarm and began quietly mobilizing as the world slow-walked into the opening conflict of WWII over the next week.

Orzel spent that week checking and rechecking her systems, taking on a full load of torpedoes and shells, and provisioning. Her skipper was handed several sealed orders in different envelopes aligned with various plans, and some $9,000 in gold and Polish banknotes should he have to put to sea and refuel elsewhere.

By 0700 on 1 September, three hours after the start of the German invasion, Orzel left her pier and submerged in the Bay of Gdansk where she survived her first depth charging of the war that evening. Her orders, as part of the Polish Navy’s Worek Plan, were to watch for the old battlewagon KMS Schleswig-Holstein, should the pre-dreadnought leave Danzig, and put her on the bottom.

German battleship Schleswig-Holstein bombarding a Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte in the Free City of Danzig, Sept 1939. Orzel was ordered to take her out if the opportunity arose. 

With Schleswig-Holstein staying put and after dodging several Kriegsmarine destroyers and being bombed several times by German aircraft while on the surface, and with a malfunctioning compressor, LT Kloczkowski decided on his own to abandon his patrol zone on the morning of 4 September and head to Swedish waters near Gotland. Claiming illness and signaling back and forth with naval command, Kloczkowski ordered his boat to Tallinn in neutral Estonia on the night of the 14th.

Once in Tallinn, on a 24-hour stay under the rules of war, the crew went ashore for baths, Kloczkowski to the hospital, and the malfunctioning compressor was sent off for local repair.

Well short of 24 hours, the Estonian gunboat Laine/Laene (ex-Russian Sputnik, 400 tons, two 75 mm L/50 Canet guns) came alongside Orzel and put a detachment of armed sailors aboard, informing the remaining officers and crew aboard that the sub was being interned.

Breakout

Orzel was untied and towed deeper into the Tallinn military port facility, flanked by two armed minelayers. Meanwhile, the Estonians seized and removed the boat’s maps, navigation log, and small arms before sealing its radio compartment.

Polish submarine Orzel at Tallinn’s military harbor. The 400-ton Estonian sidewheeler minelayers Suurop (1x 47mm gun) and Ristna, formerly the Russian Apostol Piotr and Apostol Paviel, are visible to the left. Eesti Meremuuseum MM F 7318.

The disarmament continued for the next two days with the Estonians impounding and removing Orzel’s deck gun breech, 14 of 20 torpedoes, and the shells from her magazine.

Having seen enough and unwilling to sit out the war in an Estonian internment camp, Orzel’s XO, Kpt.mar. (Lt.Cdr.) Jan Grudzinski, rallied the sub’s crew on the night of 17/18 September– 85 years ago today– and made a move to release themselves from custody.

Overpowering the two Estonian sailors on her quarterdeck and casting off at 0300 on 18 September, Orzel motored out on her quiet electrical suite until sentries on shore spotted her leaving the darkened harbor and opened fire with a 130mm coastal defense battery firing 14 shells blindly into the night. Sending the crew below, the Polish submarine submerged as soon as she had depth under her keel and headed towards the Finnish Aland Islands, with the Estonian Navy giving short and apparently half-hearted pursuit.

As for Poland’s four other submarines, sister Sep managed to make it to Swedish waters on 17 September along with the damaged submarines Rys (on the 18th) and Zbik (on the 25th) after the latter two had laid their mines. They were disarmed and interned first in Nynäshamn (Vaxholm) and then in Mariefred for the duration.

Polska ubaten ORP Sep interned in Nynäshamn, guarded by Pollux, Vedett Boat No. 52 (ex 1st class torpedo boat, b. 1909) in September 1939. Fo37714A

Only Wilk, having sown her mines, managed to skirt German dragnets then thread the Danish straits (Oresund) on 14/15 September and, once in the North Sea made for British waters.

With Orzel’s crew champing at the bit to fight rather than be interned again, and Polish exile forces in London advising that the Germans claimed her crew had killed the two Estonian sailors aboard, Grudzinski headed to Gotland as best she could without charts and put the two “resurrected” men (electrician Roland Kirikmaa and conscript sailor Boris Mahlstein) ashore in the sub’s dinghy at Östergarnsholm in Sweden on 21 September. Grudzinski had left the Estonians with $50 each, a bottle of liquor from the sub’s medicine locker, and a letter of commendation. They arranged to return home via plane before the week was out.

Orzel then turned back to sea and patrolled unsuccessfully for German ships over the next two weeks just off Oland. Lacking charts, she grounded twice during this period, sustaining some minor damage to her keel and the bow outer torpedo caps. This, coupled with chipped propeller blades and oil leaks, would seem to point to the logical move to opt for the quiet life in Sweden.

However, electing to follow in Wilk’s footsteps, Orzel then began heading West on 7 October.

The boat’s navigator, 24-year-old LT Marian Mokrski, his charts impounded, was left with only a dated German edition of the Baltic List of Lights and Fog Signals (Verzeichniss der Leuchtfeuer und Signalnstellen) and navigational tables (Nautische Tafeln). Using those, along with his personal knowledge of the Baltic Sea and its straits from previous passages (and apparently an eidetic memory), created three hand-drawn navigational charts covering the span from Leningrad, through the Strait of Oresund, and around Denmark via the Skagerrak into the North Sea. A cadet of the 1937 tranche (graduated 2nd in his class), he had previously been a sonar officer on the Wicher-class destroyer ORP Burza and had sailed on a nine-month exchange with the French on the training cruiser Jeanne D’Arc.

When they cleared Jutland and made it into the relative safety of the North Sea on 12 October, Grudzinski presented navigator Mokrski with the most valuable items on the boat– the last two cans of pineapple– and a hand-written commendation in front of the assembled crew.

Two days later, nearing the Isle of May, Orzel transmitted her recognition signals to the Admiralty and soon rendezvoused with the destroyer HMS Valorous who guided her ultimately to Dundee where Wilk was tied up undergoing repairs.

Free Polish Navy service

By December 1939, Wilk and Orzel had been rearmed with a mixture of French torpedoes and British 21-inchers in sleeved tubes, then received hull numbers (85-A for Orzel, 64-A for Wilk), picked up a few Lewis guns, and were placed under British orders by the Free Polish forces in London. As such, each sub had its crew augmented by an RN submarine force officer and two communications ratings for liaison purposes.

Orzel and Wilik in Roysth, 1940, LIFE William Vandivert

Orzel and Wilik in Roysth, 1940, LIFE William Vandivert

Orzel and Wilik in Roysth, 1940, LIFE William Vandivert

As part of the 2nd Submarine Flotilla, they were assigned to the tender HMS Forth.

Kpt.mar. Jan Grudziński, the skipper of the Polish Navy submarine ORP Orzeł seated in the boat’s fin in Scotland, 1940. IWM (HU 110081)

“Close-up of the conning tower of the Polish Navy submarine ORP Orzeł (Eagle) as she returns to her depot ship at Rosyth, 11 January 1940. Lieutenant Commander Jan Grudziński, the ship’s commander, is at the front on the right. Her pennant number (85A) has been obscured by the censor.” IWM (HU 76134)

“Gunners of the Polish Navy mine-laying submarine ORP Wilk (Wolf) manning a 100 mm Schneider 1917 gun in Rosyth, January 1940. Another submarine, ORP Orzeł (Eagle), can be seen alongside a British submarine depot ship in the background.” IWM (HU 128170)

Orzel sailed as part of the escort for Convoy ON 6 in late December 1939, then Convoy HN 6 in January 1940.

Sent out on her 2nd (1st Atlantic) War Patrol in February, she lurked off the coast of neutral Denmark for three uneventful weeks looking for German blockade runners heading into the Baltic and raiders headed out.

She was made a darling of the press, an emblem of Free Poland. 

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

Orzel in Roysth, Scotland LIFE photo by William Vandivert

She repeated the Danish search in March for her 3rd War Patrol with the same result, narrowly missing seizing the German transport Helene Russ (993 GRT) in the fog on the 11th of that month.

Then came her 4th War Patrol, departing the Firth of Forth on 3 April 1940 for the waters off Lillesand, Norway.

At the same time, as part of Operation Wesserübung, the German occupation of neutral Denmark and Norway, some 1,900 German troops were allocated to capture Bergen and Stavanger under RADM Hubert Schmundt’s Kriegschiffgruppe 3. One of the transports of 1. Seetransportstaffel– loaded with 330 soldiers and Luftwaffe personnel, six 2 cm FlaK 30 and four 10.5 cm FlaK 38 anti-aircraft guns, 73 horses, 71 vehicles and 292 tons of provisions, animal feed, fuel, and ammunition– was the requisitioned Hamburg Süd freighter MS Rio de Janeiro (5177 grt).

Built by Bremer Vulkan as Santa Ines in 1914, Rio de Janeiro sailed originally out of Stettin on runs to South America and had survived the Great War because she was interned in Valparaiso for the duration, sold to Hamburg Süd by the British in 1921. Finding herself in Argentine waters in 1939 when WWII started, she only made it back to Hamburg in January 1940 by the skin of her teeth through the Royal Navy blockade– just to be impounded by the Kriegsmarine for what would turn out to be a one-way trip to Norway.

Off Lillesand on the morning of 8 April, Orzel and Rio de Janeiro bumped into each other.

From Admiralty logs, via Uboat.net: 

0945A/8, Sighted a suspicious merchant vessel to the south. Closed to investigate. The vessel was seen to fly no ensign and was proceeding on a course of 240°. She was high in the water indicating very little cargo.

1100A/8, Closed enough to read the ships name which was Rio de Janeiro with place of registration being Hamburg.

1110A/8, Surfaced and signaled the vessel to stop which she did.

1112A/8, Ordered the vessel to sent a boat. There appeared to be very little movement on board so fired warning shots with the Lewis guns which unfortunately was the only armament available as the deck gun is still inoperative.

1120A/8, Ordered the vessel to abandon ship in 15 minutes.

1130A/8, A boat was lowered but it made very little attempt to close Orzel. So ordered the vessel once more to abandon ship and that they had 5 minutes left to do so before a torpedo would be fired.

1135A/8, Sighted a Norwegian motor boat approaching. There was still no sign of movement on board the merchant vessel.

1145A/8, Fired a torpedo while the Norwegian motorboat was still clear. a slight explosion was seen and the vessel heeled. She was still 1.8 nautical miles outside territorial waters.

1150A/8, Dived. The vessel showed no signs of sinking. More boats were seen to be lowered.

1155A/8, Sighted a Norwegian aircraft approaching. Orzel circled underwater to give the enemy crew time to pull clear before finishing off the ship with a second torpedo which blew up to ship on hitting.

About 180 Germans who survived the Rio de Janeiro sinking, were rescued by local vessels and landed at Lillesand and Kristiansand. The waterlogged and very much uniformed Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe troops freely told the Norwegians that came to their aid that they were bound for Bergen on invitation from the King’s government. The intel made its way to the Norwegian government where it was met with skepticism.

Likewise, Orzel, who came back to inspect the wreckage and found expired German soldiers adrift on the waves, reported the incident back to London.

Ordered to a different patrol zone and with the German invasion of Norway on in full force, Orzel on the 10th tangled with the German auxiliary patrol vessel V 705/ex-Carsten (258 GRT) in the Skagerrak without either side coming away damaged. She then spent the 12th through the 15th dodging a series of German bombs dropped on her while on the surface and depth charges while submerged, logging 111 ash cans and 20 bombs.

She ended her 4th patrol at Rosyth on the 19th.

“Close-up of the conning tower of the Polish Navy submarine ORP Orzeł (Eagle) as she returns to her depot ship at Rosyth after taking part in operations off Norway during which she accounted for two enemy transport ships, 19 April 1940.” IWM (HU 76132)

Her 5th War Patrol began just a week later, sent back to Norwegian waters. Unsuccessful, she returned to Rosyth on 11 May.

Orzel’s 6th Patrol, starting 23 May, would be her last. She failed to confirm receipt of signals from England on 1 June, was listed as overdue from 8 June, and feared lost on 11 June.

Her 60-man crew, along with three RN submariners– LT Keith D’Ombrain Nott, Radio Operator Walter Fordyce Green, and Telegraph Operator Leslie William Jones– are still on patrol.

Epilogue

The Cold War-era Polish Navy recycled Orzel’s name for a pre-owned Soviet-built Project 613 (Whiskey class) submarine (292, ex-Soviet S-265) that served from 1962 through 1983, and for a Project 877E (Kilo class) submarine (291) that has been in service since 1986. The latter is one of the only Warsaw Pact era subs still operational, the oldest Kilo-class submarine in active service, and the only operational submarine in the Polish Navy, having spent most of the past decade in a series of overhauls and updates.

In 2016, prewar Dutch 1:50 scale builder’s sheets for the original Orzel were restored at the Polish Navy Museum in Gdynia.

The site also has several Orzel-related exhibits including models, the Bofors guns of her sister Sep, and one of Grudzinski’s sailor’s books.

Polish Navy Museum relics of Orzel and Sep

The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, home to thousands of relics from the old Free Polish days, has several Orzel items including LT Mokrski’s hand-drawn escape charts from the 1939 Baltic breakout and her builder’s model from De Schelde.

Model of ORP Orzel presented by her Dutch constructors De Schelde 1938 PISM

Mokrski chart via PISM

Mokrski’s feat, one that can be admired by any mariner, has become a navigational exercise at the Polish Naval Academy thanks to a cadet in 2021 who painstakingly recreated his chart. 

Since 1942 when the Polish government in exile issued its own stamps, there have been dozens of pieces of philately with Orzel appearing on them.

Similarly, she is remembered in maritime art.

1940 ORP Orzel vs Rio Janeiro – Gregorz Nawrocki

1940 Polish submarine Orzel – Grzegorz Nawrocki

Polish submarine ORP Orzeł 8 .04.1940

She is also remembered in a variety of scale models, one of which has sat on my desk for years.

DeAgostini Atlas 1:350 scale Orzel

At least two Polish-language films, one in 1958 and another in 2022, have been produced about our subject with the first having the benefit of Orzel’s sister, Sep, standing in as a submarine double, which was odd because the latter by that time had her original Bofors gun replaced by a Soviet model.

Monuments to Orzel exist at Lillesand (the site of the Rio de Janeiro sinking), Tallin at the site of the Estonian Maritime Museum, and Gdynia. The two overseas posts are often visited by Polish naval attaches to lay wreaths and pay respects.

The broken hull of Rio de Janeiro was discovered off Norway in 2016.

As for the wreck of Orzel, she has been repeatedly searched for with the SANTI Finding the Eagle (Santi Odnaleźć Orła) project mounting no less than 10 expeditions since 2014, chasing down leads. How she met her final end is unknown. 

Her plank owner commander, the controversial LCDR Henryk Kloczkowski, left marooned in Estonia after Orzel escaped into the Baltic, and was arrested by the NKVD when the Soviets illegally occupied Tallinn in the summer of 1940.

Escaping the sort of final march that most other Polish officers suffered in Soviet captivity, Kloczkowski managed to attach himself in 1941 to Gen. Władysław Anders’ Polish Army in the East. Once this force was transferred to the British via the Caspian Sea and Iran in 1942, Kloczkowski was summoned to London to be brought before the Polish Maritime Court on charges over his actions on Orzel in September 1939. Demoted to the rank of sailor and given a four-year prison sentence, the latter was suspended so he could sail out on a series of American Liberty ships on dangerous Atlantic convoys. Surviving the war, he settled in Portsmouth, where he passed in 1962.

Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.

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Warship Wednesday, 11 September 2024: You Have to Go Out…

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Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 time period and will profile 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, 11 September 2024: You Have to Go Out…

USCG Photo #: 16079-A Photographer: J. N. Heuisy

Above we see a member of the 35 so-called “Buck and a Quarter” Active-class Coast Guard cutters rushed into completion to deal with bootleggers during Prohibition, the USCGC Jackson (WPC-142) as she appeared in 1927 in her original “rum-buster” haze gray configuration. Don’t let the bone in her teeth fool you, she is probably just making revolutions for 10 knots– her designed top speed.

These choppy little 125-foot gunboats were designed to serve as subchasers in times of war and Jackson, along with her sister Bedloe, did their part during the conflict, atop an unforgiving sea, to the bitter end.

The 125s

These cutters were intended for trailing the slow, booze-hauling “Blacks” mother ships of “Rum Row” along the outer line of patrol during Prohibition.

Constructed for $63,173 each, they originally had a pair of 6-cylinder 150hp Superior or Winton diesel engines that allowed them a stately speed of 10 knots, max, but allowed a 4,000 nm, theoretically Atlantic-crossing range– an outstanding benefit for such a small craft.

While slow, this was deemed at first adequate as most of the Blacks were cheapy acquired and nearly condemned old coasters and fishing schooners salvaged from backwater ports around New England and the Maritimes for their shady last hurrah. 

For armament, they carried a single 3″/23 cal deck gun for warning shots– dated even for the 1920s– a Lewis gun or two for serious use, and a small arms locker that included everything from Tommy guns to .38s. In a time of conflict, they could tote listening gear and depth charge racks left over from the Great War, but we’ll get to that later.

Taking advantage of one big contract issued on 26 May 1926, the class were all built within 12 months by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, New Jersey (although often listed as “American Brown Boveri” due to their owners at the time, the Swiss Brown Boveri corporation).

The class was named in honor of former historic cutters from the Coast Guard and its preceding Lighthouse Service, Revenue Marine, and Revenue Cutter Services.

Meet Bedloe

Commissioned 25 July 1927 as USCGC Antietam (WPC-128) after a circa 1864 Revenue Cutter Service centerboard schooner of the same name that was a nod to the pivotal Maryland Civil War battle, this hardy 125-footer was first stationed in Boston under the 1st CG District where she served for eight years, accomplishing her hallmark law enforcement and SAR duties but also breaking light ice when needed.

The USCG sent no less than 11 of the first 125s to Boston, where they were desperately needed to parol the New England coastline. Besides Antietam, they included USCGC Active (WPC-125), Agassiz (WPC-126), Alert (WPC-127), Bonham (WPC-129), Dix (WPC-136), Faunce (WPC-138), Fredrick Lee (WPC-139), Harriet Lane (WPC-141), General Greene (WPC-140), and Jackson (WPC-142).

These new cutters were based at the Charleston Navy Yard and arrived in a haze-gray livery, built to take the “Rum War” to the bootleggers.

Five 125-foot cutters– likley including Antietam– at Charleston Navy Yard Boston late 1920s. Boston Public Library Leslie Jones Collection.

Once the Volstead Act was repealed, the 125s got a more regal peacetime USCG white and buff appearance.

Cutter Antietam in the Boston area, likely during a summer regatta around 1930. Boston Public Library Leslie Jones Collection 08_06_004565.

USCGC Antietam, later Bedloe in 1930, likely in the Boston area. USCG Photo.

With cutters needed on the Great Lakes and the downturn in cutter tempo that accompanied the end of Prohibition, Antietam transferred to Milwaukee in May 1935, a station that typically meant a winter lay-up once the lakes froze over.

Of note, on 1 December 1937, Antietam was used as a dive platform for a famous deep dive in Lake Michigan by Max Gene Nohl that set the world’s then-deep dive record of 420 feet. Nohl, using a self-contained suit with a heliox (helium/oxygen) breathing mixture pioneered by what would become DESCO, had earlier made history from the cutter’s deck the previous April when she hosted the first live underwater broadcast to a national audience by WTMJ over the NBC-Blue network.

On 10 April 1937, Max Nohl (shown in the dive suit) along with John Craig made a dive on the shipwreck Norland to perform another early test of the newly designed diving suit in conjunction with testing the helium-oxygen mixture that Dr. End and Max had been working on. The dive took place off the deck of the Coast Guard cutter Antietam (note the “A” on her whaler) about five miles out from Milwaukee’s breakwater, via the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Between 1939 and 1940, most of the 125s in the Coast Guard’s inventory had their often cranky original diesels replaced by new General Motors 268-As. Rated for 600 hp, they were capable of breaking 14 knots (vs the designed 10) in still seas. However, the radius dropped down to 2,500nm @ 12 knots and 3,500 @ 8.

Then came WWII in Europe and the need for the Neutrality Patrol. This was long before FDR’s 1 November 1941 Executive Order 8929 that transferred the Coast Guard to the Navy Department.

With the Navy short on hulls, Antietam was pulled from her Wisconsin home and ordered to Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1940. There, her armament was beefed up at the Tietjen & Lang yard to include stern depth charge racks and the capacity to carry 10 cans. To acknowledge the upgrade, in February 1942, the 125s were redesignated from WPC (Coast Guard patrol craft) to WSC (Coast Guard sub chaser.)

Assigned to the EASTSEAFRON (Eastern Sea Frontier), Antietam was stationed out of Stapleton, Staten Island, where she saw service as a coastwise convoy escort along the eastern seaboard. It was in this duty that she proved a godsend to those souls on the sea and was involved in several rescues including that of the unescorted Gulf Oil tanker SS Gulftrade (6,776 tons) after she had been sunk by U-588 (Victor Vogel). Antietam pulled 16 Gulftrade survivors out of the ocean on 9 March 1942.

It was around this period that our cutter would be further up-armed with a pair of 20mm/70 Mk 4 Oerlikon AAA guns, a Mousetrap Mk 20 ASWRL, swap out their goofy little 3″/23 for a 40mm Bofors single Mk 1, and pick up a SO-model surface search radar set. So equipped, they had become subchasers in reality rather than just names.

The 125-foot Coast Guard Cutter Cuyahoga ready to depart from the Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay, Md., Feb. 11, 1945. U.S. Coast Guard photo. Note her 40mm Bofors crowding her bow. By mid-war Antietam and her sisters had a similar appearance.

As the Navy was looking to use the name “Antietam” for a new Essex-class fleet carrier (CV-36) that was under construction at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, our patrol boat was unceremoniously renamed USCGC Bedloe on 1 June 1943. Shortly after, she was dispatched to Navy Section Base (NSB) Morehead City, North Carolina, to join the Chesapeake Escort Group (T.G. 02.5).

The AOR of TG 02.5, as seen on the cover of its war diary

Morehead City served as the link in the coastal escort chain between Norfolk and Charleston and its vessels– a mix of auxiliary motor minesweepers (YMS), miscellaneous Yard Patrol craft (YPs), random patrol yachts such as USS Cymophane (PYc-26), a handful of 110-foot patrol boats (PC) and subchasers (SC), augmented by a dozen Coast Guard 83 footer “Jeeps of the Deep”— was a motley assortment to say the least. A couple of 97-foot converted trawler hulled coastal minesweepers, USS Kestrel (AMc-5) and USS Advance (AMc-63) puttered around on sweep duties just in case the Germans laid a few eggs.

Antietam/Bedloe, and her sister Jackson, were about the brawniest vessels the Morehead City group had at its disposal.

USCGC Bedloe, probably 1944. Note her stern depth charges and SO radar set. USCG Photo #: A-8125.

Meet Jackson

Repeating the name of one of the 13 circa 1830s Morris-Taney class 73-foot topsail schooners ordered for the service USCGC Jackson (WPC-142) commissioned 14 March 1927. Like her sister Antietam/Bedloe, she was immediately assigned to Boston.

Four 125-foot cutters at Charleston Navy Yard Boston late 1920s including, from the outside, USCGC Fredrick Lee, General Green, and Jackson. Boston Public Library Leslie Jones Collection.

Like Antietam, Jackson painted over her haze grey for a more Coastie white and buff scheme post-Prohibition.

A black and white photograph of the Coast Guard Cutter Jackson passing through the Cape Cod Canal on the day of the Canal Bridge Opening, August 15, 1935. Nina Heald Webber Cape Cod Canal collection. MS028.04.022.005

Reassigned in the late 1930s to U.S. Coast Guard Stations Rochester and Greenport, New York in the Great Lakes, Neutrality Patrol work saw her armed and assigned to Norfolk on 1 July 1941 for anti-submarine patrol and coastal escort duty.

This typically boiled down to escorting one or two merchies at a time along cleared (for mines) routes at speeds hovering around 10 knots. Some faster vessels took their chances and ran the coastline on their own which didn’t always work.

One such instance was the unescorted and unarmed tanker SS Tiger (5,992 tons) which on April Fool’s Day 1942 caught a torpedo from U-754 (Hans Oestermann) just as she reduced speed and signaled with blinkers to pick up a pilot off Cape Henry, Virginia. Her complement taken off by the Yippee boat USS YP-52, Jackson and the tug Relief brought a salvage crew by the listing tanker to attempt to tow it to Norfolk but the hulk was uncooperative and sank in the Chesapeake.

On 20 July 1944, Jackson was made part of Task Group 02.5, joining sister Antietam/Bedloe.

Then came…

SS George Ade

An EC2-S-C1 break bulk cargo carrier, SS George Ade (7176 tons) was built by Florida-based J. A. Jones in 1944. Based out of Panama City, while carrying a mixed load of cotton, steel, and machinery from Mobile to New York, the brand new Liberty ship was unescorted (!) and steaming on a non-evasive course (!!) off Cape Hatteras when she came across by the Schnorchel-equipped Type IXC U-518 (Oblt. Hans-Werner Offermann) on 12 September 1944.

Hit by a Gnat that destroyed her rudder and flooded the shaft alley, she was effectively dead in the water. Her Naval Armed Guard fired a few rounds in U-518’s direction, keeping the boat away but she was a sitting duck.

The Great Atlantic Hurricane of September 1944

Four days before George Ade was torpedoed, Commander Gulf Sea Frontier issued an advisory that a tropical hurricane centered east of the Leeward Islands was moving northwest at 10 knots. Aircraft recon on 11 September found a system with a radius of 150 miles and warnings “This is a large and severe storm” were flashed.

It would grow into what we today would deem a Category-4 monster.

Guantanamo to New York Convoy GN-156 on 12 September came across the storm’s periphery and logged 47-knot winds, later upping to over 65 which scattered the convoy although no casualties were reported.

On the night of 12 September, the refrigerated stores ship USS Hyades (AF-28), escorted by the Somers-class destroyer USS Warrington (DD-383) only two days out of Norfolk bound for Trinidad, encountered the hurricane between West Palm Beach and the Bahamas as the storm moved North.

USS Warrington (DD-383), photographed by Navy Blimp ZP-12, 9 August 1944. Just five weeks after this image was snapped, the destroyer would be at the bottom of the Atlantic. 80-G-282673

As noted by DANFS:

Later that evening, the storm forced the destroyer to heave to while Hyades continued on her way alone. Keeping wind and sea on her port bow, Warrington rode relatively well through most of the night. Wind and seas, however, continued to build during the early morning hours of the 13th. Warrington began to lose headway and, as a result, started to ship water through the vents to her engineering spaces.

The water rushing into her vents caused a loss of electrical power which set off a chain reaction. Her main engines lost power, and her steering engine and mechanism went out. She wallowed there in the trough of the swells-continuing to ship water. She regained headway briefly and turned upwind, while her radiomen desperately, but fruitlessly, tried to raise Hyades. Finally, she resorted to a plain-language distress call to any ship or shore station. By noon on the 13th, it was apparent that Warrington’s crewmen could not win the struggle to save their ship, and the order went out to prepare to abandon ship. By 1250, her crew had left Warrington; and she went down almost immediately.

From Warrington’s War History:

A prolonged search by Hyades, Frost (DE-144), Huse (DE-145), Inch (DE-146), Snowden (DE-246), Swasey (DE-248), Woodson (DE-359), Johnnie Hutchins (DE-360), ATR-9, and ATR-62 rescued only 73 men of the destroyer’s 321 member watch bill– and these were spread out for 98 miles from the destroyer’s last position!

Coordinated by the jeep carrier USS Croatan, whose escorting tin cans did a lot of the work in pulling men from the water, the group commander signaled on 14 September, “Sharks very active. Am making every effort to locate and recover living before dark as those so far rescued are very weak.”

Further north, New York to Guantanamo Convoy NG-458, with 15 tankers and 17 freighters escorted by two frigates and a few PCs and YMSs, encountered the unnamed hurricane for 18 hours across the 12th and 13th, and reported: “winds estimated 130-150 knots and seas 50-60 feet.” The COMEASTSEAFRON War Diary for the period notes, “It was impossible for a person to remain exposed to the wind because the tremendous force of driving spray was unbearably painful. Visibility was nil, and all ships and escorts were widely scattered.”

One man, LT North Oberlin of USS PC-1210, was swept overboard “and undoubtedly drowned.”

Another small escort, PC-1217, had her bulkhead plates buckled and several compartments flooded– including her radio shack. Her communications knocked out and long missing from the rest of the convoy, she limped into Mayport alone on the 16th– self-resurrecting from among the missing thought dead.

One ship that never arrived in port was the 136-foot baby minesweeper USS YMS-409, which foundered and sank, taking her entire crew of 33 to the bottom.

Photo from the collection of LT(jg) Bernard Alexander Kenner who served on board YMS-409. He departed a few days before the ship left port and sank off Cape Hatteras. He kept this photo for over 61 years along with a list of his former crew mates who perished, via Navsource.

Further up the coast, the USCG’s Vineyard Sound lightship (LS-73), anchored before the shallows off Cuttyhunk, Massachusetts, was also claimed by the storm, taking her entire crew.

The 123-foot United States Lightvessel 73 (LV 73 / WAL-503) on her Vineyard Sound station where she served from 1924 through 1944. On 14 September 1944, she was carried off station during a hurricane and sank with the loss of all hands. USCG photo

…Back at the George Ade

Late on the afternoon of 12 September, some 14 hours after the attack by U-518 that left her dead in the water, the salvage ship USS Escape (ARS 6), escorted by our previously mentioned Bedloe and Jackson, arrived and took her in tow.

Struggling against the ever-increasing seas with the hurricane inbound, Ade and Escape hove to on 14 September some 12 miles off Bodie Island, North Carolina in 13 fathoms of water, where they reported 100-knot winds and 50-foot seas. Ade suffered one of her anchors, two lifeboats, and four rafts carried away.

However, the tow’s escorts, Bedloe and Jackson, had vanished.

At around 1030 on 14 September, Jackson was struck hard by seas while laid her over her port side, a roll from which the 125-footer could not recover. Given the order to abandon ship, her complement too to four life rafts, which all swamped/flipped and sank within 30 minutes. This left her crew afloat and on their own…in a hurricane.

Bedloe, meanwhile, was entirely unaware of the disaster with her nearby sister due to the strong seas and nil visibility. At around 1300 local, she suffered three severe rolls to port, the last of which left her that way until she submerged three minutes later. Of her crew, 29 were able to abandon ship on three life rafts.

Rescue

With Bedloe and Jackson failing to report to shore following the storm, and George Ade and Escape confirming their separation from the escorts, the 5th Naval District launched an air search beginning with four Coast Guard-operated OS2U3 Kinfishers from CGAS Elizabeth City taking to the air at first light on the morning of the 16th. At this point, the survivors of Bedloe and Jackson had been on the sea for two days.

The first group of men, the three waterlogged rafts from Bedloe with but just 21 remaining men, were spotted 10 miles off Cape Hatteras. Three of the Kingfishers landed and taxied to the rafts to give aid to the injured.

Pilots and radio operators knocked off their shoes and then dove into the water to help pull semi-conscious men onto the wings of the bobbing planes.

Eight of the Bedloe’s crew had perished over the night of the 15th from a mixture of injuries and exposure. Two more would die shortly after rescue.

A Navy blimp dropped emergency rations.

Navy airship hovers over two OS2Us and a CG launch with picked-up survivors of the USCGC Bedloe, 16 September. USN ZP24-2906

With the Kingfishers on hand as a guide, a Coast Guard 30-foot motor lifeboat, CG-30340, from the Oregon Inlet Lifeboat Station, 15 miles away, raced to the scene and brought the survivors ashore.

BM1 William W. McCreedy from the Oregon inlet Lifeboat Station, who assisted in the rescue of the survivors from the Bedloe said the first thing he saw was a man doubled up in a small raft, his eyes resembling “a couple of blue dots in a beefsteak.”

“He flashed a beautiful smile that couldn’t be missed,” McCreedy continued. “I felt I had looked at something a man sees once in a lifetime — sort of thought I had come to the edge of heaven. Then, as though his last will to fight had been lost when he saw us, he jumped into the water. The radioman grabbed him and held him in the raft. I went overboard to help and the three of us dragged the raft down. The unconscious man’s foot was twisted in the lines, but I cut him free and we put him in the boat.” Just before reaching shore, the man reached, stroked McCreedy’s face and mumbled “We made it.” Then he died.

Once back at Oregon Inlet, a Coast Guard PBM with a doctor aboard flew the men to Norfolk for treatment.

Original caption: “Coast Guard survivors of hurricane disaster recover in Norfolk hospital: eight of the 12 survivors of the hurricane sinking of the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Bedloe are shown recovering in the naval hospital at Norfolk, Virginia. They were rescued by Coast Guard air and seacraft after clinging to life rafts for more than 50 hours in shark-invested [sic] Waters 15 miles off the Virginia coast. All suffered from shock and exposure, as well as lashing by the stingers of ‘Portuguese men-of-war.’ the cutter Bedloe was sunk at the height of the hurricane on Thursday, about the time that the Coast Guard Cutter Jackson went down in the same area. In all, 19 were rescued and 49 officers and enlisted men are missing in the twin disaster. In this group, left to right, are Coast Guardsmen Jerry VanDerPuy, seaman, first class, of. . . .Sheboygan, Wisconsin; John Kissinger, soundman, third class, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Robert Greeno, seaman first class, of Monroe, Michigan; Robert Hearst, seaman first class, of Latonia, Kentucky; Joseph Martzen, soundman second class, of. . . .McAdoo, Pennsylvania.; Michael J. Cusono, radioman third class, of Schenectady, NY, Pearcy C. Poole, chief radioman of Lakewood, N.J. and Joseph Ondrovik, coxswain of Bellville, Michigan.” Date: 14 September 1944. USCG Photo 1248 Photographer: “Kendall”, U.S. Coast Guard photo.

The search for the floating Jackson survivors continued into the night of the 16th, with Navy Blimp K-20 following up on a report from a Navy SB2C Helldiver that two groups of men were sighted in the water 18 miles offshore. USS Inflict (AM-251), on her shakedown cruise between Charleston and Norfolk, joined the rescue.

Aided by dropped water lights from the aircraft, whaleboats from the minesweeper recovered 12 men who had been adrift for over 60 hours, hounded by sharks and Portuguese men-of-war. Of these, the ship’s pharmacist’s mate found one man had a gangrene infection, another appendicitis, a third a broken leg, and a fourth a dislocated shoulder and cracked ribs, while all suffered necrotic salt water ulcers, hypothermia, and general fatigue.

Pushing her twin ALCO diesels to their max to break 14 knots, Inflict made Norfolk on the morning of the 17th and her charges were rushed to the Naval Hospital.

Later that day, USS PC-1245 recovered the floating bodies of four from Bedloe.

The air and naval search for the cutters’ lost members continued until the evening of the 18th. No less than 116 planes and six blimps had been aloft in the search.

In all, 22 men from Bedloe are still marked “missing” while another four who were recovered died. Of Jackson’s crew, which spent more time in the sea– almost all of it treading water– 21 are still somewhere under the waves.

This bill from Poseidon was paid, along with the 251 souls from the destroyer Warrington, LT Oberlin of PC-1210, the 33 minemen aboard YMS-409, and a dozen lightkeepers on LV-73.

Epilogue

Separate courts of inquiry conducted by ComFive and COMEASTSEAFRON inquired into the loss of Bedloe and Jackson:

Coast Guard Historian William H. Thiesen suspected Jackson succumbed to waves pushed ahead of the storm’s eyewall, while Bedloe was sunk by rogue waves formed on the backside of the eyewall, writing in a 2019 Proceedings article that, “It is possible that both cutters were victims of a phenomenon called the ‘three sisters,’ a series of rogue waves that travel in threes and are large enough to be tracked by radar.”

Post-war, the Coast Guard would use both cutters’ names a third time, with USCGC Jackson (WPC-120), ex-USS PCE(R)-858, and USCGC Bedloe (WPC-121), ex-USS PCE(R)-860. In typical Coast Guard fashion, “Both of the new cutters remained berthed at Curtis Bay, Maryland due to a lack of personnel,” and were later decommissioned and sold in 1947.

Today, Jackson rests, broken in two, southeast of Nags Head in 77 feet of water in NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary. Navy EOD visited the site in the 1990s to remove ordnance and depth charges.

Sister Bedloe is close by, intact but on her side in 140 feet of water, and, while her depth charges were removed by the Navy, NOAA notes she still has live shells aboard.

The USCGC Maple in 2022 hosted a Coast Guard chaplain, divers, and an underwater archaeologist for four days while the sites were visited, mapped, and honored.

The Coast Guard Art Program has also saluted the cutters.

“The Fate of Cutters Jackson and Bedloe,” Louis Barberis, watercolor, 16 x 23. US Coast Guard Art Program 2005 Collection, Ob ID # 200503

As for the SS George Ade, the Liberty ship made it back to Norfolk where she was drydocked and repaired, returning to service on 18 December 1944.

Ade’s shot away rudder and damaged screw/shaft following the hit from U-518 and surviving a hurricane at sea immediately after. Photos: MARAD.

Post-war, Ade was transferred to the National Defense Reserve Fleet, in Mobile, Alabama, and, after 20 years in mothballs, was sold for scrap in 1967.

As for U-518, she was sunk on 22 April 1945 in the North Atlantic north-west of the Azores by depth charges from the destroyer escorts USS Carter (DE 112) and USS Neal A. Scott (DE 769), with all hands lost including Oblt. Hans-Werner Offermann. Ade was the final ship the U-boat had torpedoed.

U-518 via Deutsches U-Boot-Museum, Cuxhaven-Altenbruch, Germany

The Atlantic holds its dead.

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