Tag Archives: USCG
Warship Wednesday Oct. 14, 2015: The great return of the hurricane Apache
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take off every Wednesday for a look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1859-1946 time period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all of their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places. – Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015: The great return of the hurricane Apache
Here we see the U.S. Revenue Marine Cutter Apache decked out with signal flags sometime after 1906 and before 1910.
In her 59 years of service to the nation, she saw three wars, served in three (five if you really want to argue the point) different branches of the military, and helped deliver one of the most remembered victory speeches in U.S. history.
Ordered from Reeder and Sons, Baltimore, Maryland in 1890, the new 190-foot iron-hulled revenue cutter was commissioned into the U.S. Revenue Marine on 22 August 1891. She was built for coastal operations, capable of floating in 10 feet of seawater, but with a 6:1 length to beam ratio and hardy steam plant with twin screws was able to operate in blue waters far out to sea if required.
She cost $95,650.
The new cutter had provision for an auxiliary sailing rig, although not equipped as such. Armed with a trio of small (57 mm, 6-pounder) deck guns and demolition charges, she could sink floating derelicts at sea which were a hazard to navigation, as well as hole smugglers who declined the offer to heave to and be inspected.
Named the Galveston in service, she shipped to that port for her home base in October 1891.
As Galveston, completed. Note the twin stacks and rakish bow. Click to embiggen and you will notice the wheel and compass station on her stern as well as an uncovered 57mm popgun way forward (the other two are under tarps amidships)
There, for the next 15 years, she was the Revenue Marine’s (and after 1894 the renamed Revenue Cutter Service’s) presence along most of the Texas coast. She participated in Mardi Gras celebrations, transported local students “for educational purposes to study Galveston Harbor,” patrolled regattas, enforced oyster seasons, and performed other USRM/USRCS functions as needed.
Revenue Service Cutter USRC Galveston, participating at Mardi Gras New Orleans 1900
When the Spanish American War broke out in 1898, instead of chopping to the Navy like most of the large cutters, Galveston was ordered to New Orleans where she took on field pieces from the local militia and stood to in the Mississippi River delta to assist in repelling a potential Spanish naval thrust to the Crescent City.
After the war, she went back to Galveston where she encountered the super-hurricane of 1900 that left some 8,000 dead.
Root, USCG Photo
Aboard the USRC Galveston during the storm was assistant engineer Charles S. Root, later founder of the USCG’s Intelligence Service, who volunteered to lead a rescue party in the destroyed coastal town. A call for volunteers went out to the ship’s crew and eight enlisted men stepped forward to accompany Root, but first had to round up the swamped and damaged cutter’s whaleboat.
Within half-an-hour of volunteering, Root and his men deployed, performing a mission more common to Lifesaving Service surf men than to cuttermen. The small group overhauled their whaleboat, dragged it over nearby railroad tracks and launched it into the overflowing streets. The winds blew oars into the air, so the men warped the boat through the city using a rope system. One of the rescuers would swim up the streets with a line, tie it to a fixed object and the boat crew would haul-in the line. Using this primitive process, Galveston’s boat crew rescued numerous victims out of the roiling waters of Galveston’s streets.
At around 6:15 p.m., the Galveston Weather Bureau anemometer registered over 100 mph, before a gust tore the wind gauge off the building. Later, Weather Bureau officials estimated that at around 7:00 p.m., the sustained wind speed had increased to 120 mph. By this time, assistant engineer Root and his rescue party returned to the Galveston having filled their whaleboat with over a dozen storm survivors. By this time, even the cutter’s survival seemed doubtful, with demolishing winds stripping away rigging and prying loose the ship’s launch. Meanwhile, wind-driven projectiles shattered the cutter’s windows and skylights in the pilothouse, deckhouse, and engine room covers.
Not long after Root returned to the cutter, Weather Bureau officials recorded an instantaneous flood surge of 4 feet. Experts estimate that the sustained wind speed peaked at 150 mph and gusts up to 200. The howling wind sent grown men sailing through the air and pushed horses to the ground. The barometric pressure dropped lower than 28.50 inches, a record low up to that date. By then, the storm surge topped 15 feet above sea level. The high water elevated the Galveston so high that she floated over her own dock pilings. Fortunately, the piling tops only bent the cutter’s hull plates but failed to puncture them.
Within an hour of returning to the cutter, at the height of the storm, Root chose to lead a second rescue party into the flooded streets. Darkness had engulfed the city and he called again for volunteers. The same men from the first crew volunteered the second time. The wind still made the use of oars impossible, so the crew warped the boat from pillar to post. As the men waded and swam through the city streets, buildings toppled around them and howling winds filled the air with sharp slate roof tiles. But the boat crew managed to rescue another 21 people. Root’s men housed these victims in a structurally sound two-story building and found food for them in an abandoned store. The cuttermen then moored the boat in the lee of a building and took shelter from flying debris and deadly missiles propelled by the wind.
The hurricane remains the worst weather-related disaster in U.S. history in terms of loss of life. Root and his volunteer crew were (posthumously and only in recent years) awarded Gold and Silver Lifesaving Medals respectively for their actions in September 1900.
After the storm, Galveston was repaired and made ship-shape again before receiving a major refit in 1904, which included replacement of her entire engineering suite. Later her bowsprit was modified as after that time it was considered the 1891-designed provision for sail power was obsolete.
In 1906 she was renamed USRC Apache and reassigned to the Chesapeake region, based in Baltimore, the city of her birth.
After refitting as Apache, note single stack and much-modified bowsprit and streamlined rigging.
Apache gave yeoman service enforcing customs and quarantine laws and saving lives. During the great blizzard of January 1914, she was credited with helping save 15 threatened fishing vessels trapped in ice and snow on the Chesapeake.
She participated in fleet drills with the Navy, transported D.C. politicians and dignitaries up and down the Bay, and generally made herself useful.
During World War I, she kept regular neutrality patrols with a weather eye peeled for U-boats and German surface raiders, becoming part of the new USCG in 1915.
When the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, she was transferred to the Navy along with the rest of the service. Painted haze gray, her armament and crew were greatly expanded in her service to the 5th Naval District.
In 28 months of Navy service, USS Apache continued her coastal patrol and search and rescue activities all along Hampton Roads, the approaches to the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay in general.
Returned to the USCG in August 1919, she regained her standard white and buff scheme, landed most of her armament– keeping just a sole 3″/23 caliber deck gun– and went back to working regular shifts for another two decades.
Coast Guard cutter “Apache” firing salute of the unveiling of the statue of Alexander Hamilton, May 1923. LOC Photo
Finally, at the end of 1937, with 46 years of hard service to include two wars and a superstorm under her belt, USCGC Apache was decommissioned, replaced by a much newer and better-equipped 327-foot Treasury-class cutter.
However, Uncle still owned her and, while other lumbering old retired cutters were brought back for coastal patrol duties in World War II, Apache languished unused and unwanted at her moorings.
Then in 1944, the U.S. Army took over the old ex-Apache and utilized her as a radio transmission ship.
Sailing to Australia, she was painted dark green, refitted with generators, receivers, cables, antennas, and two 10kW shortwave transmitters to serve as a MacArthur conceived press ship to follow along on the invasions to Japan. She was manned by a crew of a dozen Army mariners, staffed by some 25 Signal Corps radiomen, and carried several civilian war correspondents, thus keeping them away from the Navy’s flagships.
This floating Army broadcasting station sailed north from Sydney in September 1944, arriving at General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters at Hollandia, New Guinea on October 10. Two days later, U.S. Army Vessel Apache joined a flotilla of American war vessels for the return invasion of the Philippines.
For the next 18 months, little Apache relayed American Armed Forces Radio Service and the Voice of America via shortwave all over the Philippines, off the coast of Korea, and then further south off the coast of China.
She was the first to broadcast MacArthur’s “I have returned” speech in October 1944 to the island chain.
Following the fleet to Tokyo Bay, she stood near USS Missouri for the surrender and continued her radio programming operations until 20 April 1946 when she was replaced in service by the Army vessel Spindle Eye, a converted freighter with much more powerful transmitters.
Decommissioned, Apache was sold for scrap in 1950.
I cannot find any surviving artifacts from her.
Specs:
Displacement: 416 tons (700 full load, naval service)
Length: 190′
Beam: 29′
Draft: 9.3
Propulsion: Compound-expansion steam engine; twin screw with 1 propeller to each cylinder; 15.75”and 27” diam by 24” stroke, replaced with triple-expansion steam engine, 17”, 27”, 43” diam by 24” stroke with a single propeller in 1904.
Maximum speed: 12.0 knots
Complement: 32 officers and men as commissioned; 58 WWI USN service; 37 U.S. Army in WWII.
Armament: 3×6 pdrs as commissioned for derelict destruction as completed
(1918) Three 3″/23 single mounts and two Colt machine guns, one Y-gun depth charge launcher, stern-mounted depth charge racks
(1920) 3″/23
(1944) As Army vessel carried small arms which may have included light machine guns.
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Navy sets the record straight, 72 years after the fact
One of the longest standing bits of USCG lore was that the sea service chalked up the only U-boat victory ever in the Gulf of Mexico when on 1 Aug, 1942, Coast Guard Grumman J4F-1 Widgeon, No.V-212, piloted by Chief Aviation Pilot Henry Clark White, Coast Guard Aviator No. 115, along with crewman RM1c George Henderson Boggs, Jr., were patrolling about 100 miles south of the air base at Houma, Louisiana, at an altitude of 1,500 feet. They spotted a U-boat on the surface and immediately dove on the target. The U-boat crash dived but at just 250 feet, White released all of his ordnance, a single depth charge into the dark Gulf water below. Afterward the crew saw a slick on the surface and reported the attack on RTB.
Well after the war, the Navy awarded the kill, that of U-166 commanded by one Oberleutnant zur See Hans-Gunther Kuhlmann, which went missing about that time with her entire 52 man crew according to German records. White was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and Boggs was awarded the Air Medal.
Grumman J4F-1, No.V212 of the United States Coast Guard preserved at the National Museum of Naval Aviation at Pensacola, Florida
Well, it turned out that in 2001, U-166 was found– right next to her last victim, the SS Robert E Lee which she sank on 30 July, 1941– the day *before* White and co bombed their credited submarine.
You see, in the end, the Navy realized that a little 173-foot subchaser, PC-566, which was escorting the Lee and attacked a periscope it saw directly after her charge was sent to the bottom, were in fact responsible for scratching the unterseeboot in question.
The craft, one of the 343 (not a misprint) PC-461-class submarine chasers built between 1941-44, was a light 450-ton ship who, powered by a pair of diesels, could barely break 20-knots, but they were built to escort much slower merchantmen such as the Lee. Armed with a single 3″/50 a 40mm gun mount, 3 20mm guns, and depth charges, they were built to bring the pain to German and Japanese subs. Manned by a 65-man crew PC-566 was commanded by LCDR Herbert Gordon Claudius, USNR, on that fateful day.
That’s 173-feet of sub-killer right there. Photo from The Ted Stone Collection, Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, VA via Navsource
Now, long after Commander Claudius has left us and PC-566 was scrapped (in 1978, after being transferred to Venezuela in 1961), SECNAV Ray Mabus, with CNO Adm. Jonathan Greenert in tow, posthumously awarded the Legion of Merit with combat “V” to the patrol coastal skipper and set the record straight last month.
Oh and White’s attack? According to records by the Germans, another boat, U-171, was attacked but survived by a flying boat in the Gulf around that time and location. So yes, the Coasties did attack a German sub, but it was the Navy, in the end, that brought down U-166.
And Herbert Gordon Claudius, Jr. has the medal to prove it.
USCG to name new Sentinel class cutter for BMCS Horne
Back in 2012 I blogged about Senior Chief Horne, who while serving on an 87 foot WPB off the California coast, lost his life.
Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Terrell Horne III of Redondo Beach and three others were on an inflatable boat in pursuit of suspected drug smugglers in a panga. Investigators say that the panga was running dark with no lights on when it was spotted near Santa Cruz Island around 2 a.m. Sunday.
The Coast Guard cutter Halibut deployed its small boat, and the crew chased after the smugglers with its law enforcement lights on.
Authorities say the suspects suddenly turned, and at a high rate of speed, hit the Coast Guard inflatable head-on, throwing two Coast
Guard members into the water.
Horne, 34, sustained a traumatic head injury and was pronounced dead at the Port of Hueneme. The other Coast Guard member suffered minor injuries.
Well, the Coast Guard is remembering Senior Chief Horne by gracing one of the new 154-foot Sentinel class fast response cutters, now under construction at Bollinger Shipyard, with the cutterman’s name. The ship will have a heck of a monicker to live up to.
Coast Guard doing a lot of snake wrestling
In the past few months, USCG units deployed in South Texas have been swamped with Operation Sea Serpent, described as “a joint law enforcement operation aimed at stopping Transnational Criminal Organizations from using maritime routes for illicit activity and to protect our living marine resources national assets from exploitation.”
Bottom line is that it consists of Coast Guard Maritime Safety and Security Team members, working with small boats (87-foot WPBs, 33-foot law enforcement boats, etc) as well as aviation assets such as HC-144 Ocean Sentry and MH-65 Dolphins operating in the EEZ around South Padre Island and other points south to nail Mexican lanchas creeping north into U.S waters to snag red snapper, sharks, and other tasty Gulf seafood.
A Coast Guard crew seizes 450 red snapper from a lancha caught off the coast of South Padre Island, June 1, 2014. Courtesy photo: U.S. Coast Guard
Earlier this month the coasties announced they have tracked 85 lancha sightings, all of which have been suspected of illegally poaching in U.S. waters. The Coast Guard has seized 27 of them and compelled another 33 back south across the U.S./Mexico border. Then yesterday came the news that they caught another one.
From the release:
At approximately 3:45 p.m. on a routine patrol, a Coast Guard Station South Padre Island boatcrew aboard a 33-foot law enforcement boat sighted a 20-foot Mexican fishing boat, also known as a lancha. Once spotted, the lancha ceased movement and was intercepted 19 miles offshore and 2 miles north of the maritime border with four people aboard.
“So far this year we have had a record number of sightings and seizures, mostly with large amounts of red snapper on board. And they target many of our popular recreational fishing spots like oil rigs and reefs,” said Cmdr. Daniel Deptula, the response officer of Sector Corpus Christi.
The lancha was actively fishing without a legal permit and had caught 130 red snapper in U.S. waters. The red snapper were all dead and packed in ice. The lancha was towed back to Station South Padre Island and the four crewmembers were turned over to Customs and Border Protection.
By the way, where I live the feds have restricted the red snapper season to just nine days, with a maximum of just two per day.
Bounty Survivors Jayhawked
Coast Guard HH70J #6031 rescuing survivors of the Tall Ship Bounty. Good thing they had Gumbi suits on.
The constant “Altitude” alarm in the cockpit is telling of how high the wave action was during the Hurricane.
State of the Coast Guard
Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Bob Papp’s State of the Coast Guard Address
February 23, 2012 Navigating Uncertain and Stormy Seas was just realeased.
http://www.uscg.mil/seniorleadership/DOCS/SOCGA%202012_FINAL_23FEB%20FINAL.pdf
He mentions current building projects:
“Since last year, we have awarded contracts to construct the 4th and 5th National Security Cutters. We’ve also received funding for NSC #6 long lead time materials… two things made this possible: the strong support of the Congress, and the excellent work of our acquisition workforce.
We are also grateful to Secretary Napolitano and the President for requesting full-funding in the 2013 budget to complete NSC # 6 . . . as well as money to continue the Offshore Patrol Cutter, or OPC project.
We have 18 new Fast Response patrol boats on contract, and we’ll commission the first one in April.
Response Boats Medium –
We have delivered 82 boats to date – and we will receive 30 more this year.
We have accepted 13 new “Ocean Sentry” Maritime Patrol Aircraft – and numbers 14 and 15 are under contract . We have six missionized C-130J Maritime Patrol Aircraft numbers 7 and 8 are under contract, and thanks to Congress’ support, we will begin building the 9th later this year.
Patrolling the high seas requires multi-mission cutters and maritime patrol aircraft capable of sustained offshore operations. These assets are the most expensive to acquire and operate. Much of our current fleet of high and medium endurance cutters is beyond 40 years old – costly to repair, and in need of replacement.”
Also the Arctic is growing in importance and the new NSC Bertholf (WMSL-750) will be heading there. This is an important step to sovereignty.
At 4500-tons and armed with a 57 mm gun, 20mm Close-In Weapons System, 4 50 Caliber Machine Guns, 2 M240B 7.62mm Light Machine Guns and space for two helicopters, along with passive EW and SRBOC systems, it is about as heavily armed as current US Coast Guard cutters get. Of course, I'd like to see a few Harpoons, six Mk 32 Torpedo tubes and maybe a RAM missile system on her too, but that's just me.
Papp goes on to say, ” Coast Guard polar ice breakers are the only ships in our national inventory capable of performing this mission, and right now, HEALY is our only operational polar ice breaker. We are working hard to return POLAR STAR to operations in 2013 – and when she returns, we will regain one of the most powerful conventional ice breakers in the world – and another 10 years of service from her.
I want to be clear. This is only a bridging strategy. As I mentioned earlier, this is an example of scaling back where we must in the short term, so that we can do all that our Nation requires of us in the long term.
We need to come to a Whole of Government determination on the capabilities and resourcing our Nation must provide to protect our Arctic interests.”
Its a start. Call your congressman and be sure to tell them we need some new, armed icebreakers in the polar regions, while we still can. How much more shovel ready can you get?
Captain Mike- The Passing of a Gulf Coast Hero
Captain Mike: A soldier’s tale of sail and service
By Petty Officer 2nd Class Bill Colclough
In 1967, a young man left the crawfish-boiling heat of New Orleans for the matching steam and torrent of Vietnam. He was shot down three times as a Huey helicopter door gunner near Dau Tieng in southeast Vietnam. He survived all three; but on the fourth one, the dice came up snake eyes. Flying above Cambodia, which was off limits to allied forces, a large force of North Vietnamese Army regulars barraged the chopper with heavy fire. Bullets shattered his left arm, pierced his left leg, and shrapnel peppered several other parts of his body. His crew chief managed to apply pressure to his left arm’s artery during a 15-minute flight back to the aid station in Dau Tieng.
As the helo approached the landing zone, they had to hover the ground as medics loaded him on a stretcher because the left side of his body was severely damaged. Then, violent winds from the rotor blades thrust him to the ground flat on his face. Medics brought him into the aid station. He stopped breathing, but he was still conscious – barely. He was aware of what was going on in the room but could make no sign that he was present. He was just sentient enough to hear a medic utter, “Don’t waste the blood on him.” He thought to himself: Waste the blood, waste the blood! Someone … an angel perhaps, did … ‘waste’ some blood. A nurse, actually, saved his life.
Barely 20 years old, Mike Howell almost bled to death.
For his combat actions in more than 400 missions, Howell received two Purple Hearts, the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with “V” Device, Army Commendation Medal and several other combat medals including the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star.
Discharged from the U.S. Army, he got married in 1968. Two years later, he and his wife had a daughter and then divorced. Following the divorce , he bought a step van, converted it into a camper and headed for the mountains. He wandered the country and spent a year in the Rockies. Then, in 1975 he showed up at his family’s house and delivered the news: he bought a boat called Manana for $1,200.
With renewed prospects and a desire to be part of something greater than himself, he became an active member of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.
“He was never bitter since he believed in what he was doing and had a patriotic spirit that would stay with him throughout his life,” said Jim Buras, a 35-year Coast Guard Auxiliarist and former colleague of Howell. “I think, for Mike, the Auxiliary was an organization that he, as a boater, could relate to, and over the years his spirit motivated many to follow his lead.”
“He was in a lot of physical agony and very tormented,” Susan Briggs, Howell’s sister, remembered. “The Manana kind of saved his life; it really enabled him to live with great purpose – to make sure that the blood that was ‘wasted’ was not really wasted.”
The Manana, which his sister said the U.S. Navy referred to as a “large, inoperable white elephant,” eventually became a 55-foot long-range charter and salvage boat. After months of painstaking refurbishments, he started Manana Charters in 1979. Howell was now officially Captain Mike.
In 1980, out of the blue like a dolphin darting the surface, Howell decided to take the Manana down to Cuba. At the time, Fidel Castro released several thousand “undesirables”, which was an assembly of economic and political refugees, to immigrate to Florida. Just one problem: as an operational facility of the Coast Guard, his Manana was not permitted to assist in the relief operation. His fix was simple. He had his facility status pulled and removed all markings, decals and life jackets and anything related to the Coast Guard from his boat.
“He made several trips and brought Cuban refugees back to the U.S.,” Buras recalled. “He then returned to New Orleans and resumed his duties with the Auxiliary; it may have been his association with his boat that got him the attention for his next event.”
In February 1981, Howell thwarted an attempted coup by white supremacists to overthrow the government of Dominica as part of Operation Red Dog. If it were an excerpt from a Hollywood screenplay, it would probably be rejected out of hand as totally implausible.
Except ..
Ku Klux Klansman Mike Perdue approached Howell at a marina in New Orleans and spun a yarn that the Central Intelligence Agency needed his boat for a covert operation. Unconvinced, Howell notified the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Now working undercover, Howell and three ATF agents, posed as Howell’s crewmembers, met Perdue at a predetermined location, loaded a van and proceeded to the marina to board a boat with automatic weapons, shotguns, dynamite and a black and white Nazi flag. When they arrived at the marina, local police were waiting and arrested Perdue. Local media dubbed it “Bayou of Pigs,” after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion.
“No one in the Auxiliary realized at the time that his crew had a full-time FBI agent placed there for his protection,” said Buras.
During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he literally rode out the storm aboard the Manana in the Municipal Yacht Harbor. Not only did the boat serve as an auxiliary generator for Coast Guard Station New Orleans, but he also replaced channel markers displaced from the storm surge. In the wake of Katrina, his Manana became a refuge for many pets that Coast Guardsmen had rescued from the flood. The members brought them to him for care and feeding because he was known throughout the community as a animal lover. And, when the Deepwater Horizon exploded and spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, BP Amoco PLC contracted his vessel to assist with cleanup efforts.
A year later his heart succumbed to complications from his combat injuries, and he passed away. Naturally, Captain Mike had a flotilla in his honor. Twenty-plus yachts and Coast Guard response boatcrews escorted his family in a waterborne procession. Approximately 250 people attended his burial at sea offshore New Orleans. Howell’s extended family scattered his ashes into the Gulf of Mexico.
“My family and I were so grateful for the support and the stories his Auxiliarists shared,” Briggs said. “The Coast Guard fixed him; he would do anything to help a person in need.”
From Sept. 26, 1947 to March 26, 2011, Captain Mike hopped from one lily pad of historical event to another. For one benevolent buccaneer, each day was a treasure chest rich with enchantment. The captain has crossed the bar, and his unwasted remains make way on the seas of tomorrow.
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