Summer of 1910, Cordova, Alaska: An armed naval landing party dispatched from the U.S. Revenue Service Cutter Rush— which is seen in her gleaming white and buff livery tied up to the pier behind the group. It should be noted that during this period in the Territory’s history, the USRCS served largely the same role as the Army’s horse cavalry during the settlement of the Old West, being typically the only armed federal force in most of the region.
Photo by: U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office, VIRIN: 221215-G-G0000-109.
With a typical complement of eight officers, a USPHS surgeon, and 40 ratings, you are looking at a big hunk of the 175-foot cutter’s manpower. Note a boxcar of the short-lived Copper River Railway, a line that only ran from the copper mines at Kennecott to Cordova.
Of interest, besides the Navy-pattern jumpers, leggings, and dixie cups, the “Revenuers” are armed with Army Krag pattern .30-40 caliber bolt-action rifles and clad in SpanAm period USMC Mills cartridge belts, sans suspenders, as better seen in this inset:
The Marines had used the 12-pocket M1895 belt for the old clip-fed straight-pull Lee-Navy 6mm rifle, which was retired by the Navy in 1907.
The circa 1895 belts, originally black, aged to more charcoal and then gray tone, especially after long periods in salt air
The 4th Revenue Cutter named after Richard Rush, John Quincy Adams’s Secretary of the Treasury, our 300-ton hermaphrodite steam schooner was built in 1885 by Hall Brothers of San Francisco for $74,000.
The service, always pinching pennies, recycled the old boiler and 400 h.p. compound-expansion steam engine of the previous 140-foot circa 1874 cutter of the same name, of which she was officially a “reconstruction.”
U.S. Revenue Cutter Rush rides at anchor off Seattle in the early 1900s
Stationed on the West Coast, she roamed the next 27 years from Alaska– where she typically made an annual summer Bearing Sea Patrol– to Washington and California where she cruised during the winter.
Her service included operating under Navy control during the Spanish-American War– when she likely picked up the Krags for her small arms locker to augment her trio of 6-pounders. During the conflict, Rush served with the understrength Pacific Squadron protecting vessels traveling between San Francisco and the Klondike gold fields.
As detailed by the USCG Historian’s Office:
She became famous for her dogged pursuit and prosecution of seal poachers who quickly learned that if they wanted to get in a large hunt, they’d have better “Get there ahead of the Rush!”. The term is also “Get there early to avoid the Rush” and “Beat the Rush“, but all date back to this single ship and the work of her crews in Alaskan waters.
She retired in 1912 and sold to the Alaska Junk Company for $8.500 on 22 January 1913.
The later USCG would recycle the name Rush two additional times, for a Prohibition-era 125-foot “Buck and a Quarter” (WSC-151) that would continue to serve until 1947 including WWII service as a subchaser, and the Hamilton-class 378-foot cutter (WHEC-723) which commissioned in 1969 and continued to serve until 2015 including stints off Vietnam where she delivered naval gunfire support to troops ashore and interdicted weapon-carrying North Vietnamese junks.
Here we see the mighty U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Seneca (CG-17), a warship that served in both World Wars and had a tussle or two while enforcing some unpopular laws.
Classified when constructed as a “derelict destroyer” for the then-U.S. Revenue Marine designed to deep-six semi-submerged vessels on the high seas while towing in those still salvageable, she was built by Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company in Virginia and commissioned 12 November 1908, named after the storied Native American tribe of the Iroquois confederation formerly living in New York state.
At least four Seneca’s served in the Navy during the Civil War and Great War while a fifth, AT-91/ATF-91, was a 205-foot Navajo-class fleet tug built during WWII and sunk as a target in 2003. However, the Revenue Service cutter that is the subject of this post was the first cutter by that name.
Built at a price of $244,000, she was a follow-on to the five modern cutters ordered at the turn of the Century, that, at 200~ feet and 1,200-tons were decent steel-hulled vessels that could serve their peacetime use as well as be capable modern naval auxiliary gunboats in times of conflict.
Constructed with lessons learned from those craft, the one-off Seneca tipped the scales at 1,259-tons and went 204-feet overall. Able to float in 18-feet of seawater, her twin boiler plant could chug her along at an economical 12-knots. A quartet of 6-pounders (57mm guns) and a supply of naval mines and explosives for scuttling completed her armament.
Early in her career, with black hull and buff stack
Her first “job” was helping to police the massive Hudson-Fulton international naval parade in New York. Her commander during the Hudson-Fulton parade was Captain J. C. Cantwell, USRCS, and she was shown off to both visiting dignitaries and naval personnel.
Seneca immediately went to a harder line of work, in 1909 towing the stricken White Star liner RMS Republic, which sent the first wireless distress signal in history via the then-novel Marconi apparatus after the vessel was mortally wounded in a collision with the steamer Florida off Nantucket.
Then, of course, there was the derelict duty and anti-smuggling work.
Seneca with a derelict in tow
As part of her tasking to destroy derelicts, Seneca put to sea from New York on 10 Feb 1910 following a report from the Dutch steamer Prins Wilhelm III of a dismasted, waterlogged sailing vessel far offshore. After searching all day, Seneca found the battered and broken three-masted schooner Sadie C. Sumner of Thomaston, Maine, nearly swamped but with a cargo of cypress timber. Over the course of the next four days, Seneca had to pull the reluctant schooner to port, losing the tow at least three times in heavy seas. She finally made Hampton Roads in one piece.
In March 1913, Seneca responded to the first International Ice Patrol, established in the aftermath of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Operating out of Halifax, Nova Scotia and ranging as far as Iceland, Seneca made no less than 10 patrols in the next three years looking for wandering ice, on one occasion saving adrift survivors of the British freighter Columbian.
During this time the Revenue Marine became part of the new Coast Guard, and Seneca changed her title and took part in the increasingly tense neutrality patrol work as the world descended into the Great War.
Upon the U.S. Declaration of War against the Kaiser in April 1917, the new service became part of the Navy. Accordingly, Seneca landed her battery of 6-pounders, picked up a new one of a quartet of 3″/50 cal guns, and for the next 28 months served as a haze gray colored gunboat for the Navy.
Seneca was assigned to Squadron 2, Division 6, of the Atlantic Fleet Patrol forces, heading to Europe along with the other large blue water cutters on convoy escort and general anti-submarine missions. Assigned to Base 9 (Gibraltar), Seneca joined the cutters Algonquin, Manning, Ossipee, Tampa, and Yamacraw.
USCGC Seneca. Description: (Coast Guard Cutter, 1908) Members of the ship’s crew pose on board, circa 1917-1918. The original image is printed on postcard stock. Donation of Charles R. Haberlein Jr., 2009. U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 106709
Venturing into U-boat-infested seas proved dangerous for the small group of cutters. The small Ossipee, 165-feet of rock and roll, escorted an impressive 32 convoys consisting of 596 Allied vessels and made contacts with enemy submarines on at least 8 occasions, on one of these reportedly side-stepping a torpedo by about 15 feet. Tampa was not so lucky, sunk just six weeks before the end of the war by a torpedo hit with all hands; 111 Coast Guardsmen, 4 U.S. Navy personnel, and 16 passengers.
Seneca herself ran 30 convoys and escorted 580 ships, plucking 81 survivors from the torpedoed RN sloop HMS Cowslip in April. 1918 off Gibraltar, and 27 survivors from the stricken British freighter SS Queen in June.
Then came the Wellington.
Part of the 21-ship Convoy OM-99, outbound from Milford Haven to Gibraltar, the 5,600-ton freighter Wellington suffered an explosion that blew the first 30-feet off her bow and Seneca, responding to the scene, chased off a surfaced U-boat with her 3-inchers. Sending over a 20-man crew of volunteers to help keep the coal-laden merchantman from foundering with the hopes of making for Brest, about 350 miles away on the French coast.
While they could slow the flooding, and make 7.5-knots, a storm set in and the act turned hopeless, with 1LT Fletcher W. Brown ordering the boarding crew and remaining Wellington sailors to abandon ship and take their chances in the water.
Coast Guard Cutter SENECA places a damage control crew on board the torpedoed tanker WELLINGTON in an attempt to keep it from sinking September 16, 1918.
However, 11 went down with the freighter and were awarded the Navy Cross for their heroism while Acting Machinist William L. Boyce received the Navy Distinguished Service Medal for staying in the engine room until the very end. The final message from Wellington, sent by Electrician 2nd Class Morrill C. Mason, USCG: “We are turning over, you’ve done everything you could. Goodbye.”
In all, Seneca received three letters of commendation from the Admiralty for her service in Europe. She fired upon or dropped depth charges on no less than 21 occasions, often credited with sinking one submarine, though post-war analysis never firmed that up.
Chopping back to Coast Guard duty in 1919, she picked up her white scheme, but she still had another battle to fight.
Once enforcement of the Volstead Act began in January 1920, it was the Treasury Department that was given the unpopular task of enforcing Prohibition, and “T-men” of the newly formed Bureau of Prohibition (which became ATF in 1930 and was transferred briefly to the Justice Department) became a popular term at the time for those engaged in the act of chasing down bootleggers, speakeasies and those with hidden stills. It should be noted that Elliot Ness and his “Untouchables” were T-men and not G-men of the FBI, as is commonly believed and for every public hero of the force, there were heavy-handed and unprofessional agents such as “Kinky” Thompson who gave the work a black eye– literally.
Nevertheless, as a branch of the Treasury going back to the days of Alexander Hamilton, the Coast Guard became responsible for enforcement on the seas, fighting booze pirates and rum-runners smuggling in territorial waters. The agency was hard-pressed to chase down fast bootlegging boats shagging out to “Rum Row” where British and Canadian merchantmen rested on the 3-mile limit loaded with cases of good whiskey and rum for sale.
This led the agency to borrow 31 relatively new destroyers from the Navy, an act that would have been akin to the USN transferring all the FFG7 frigates to the Coast Guard during the “cocaine cowboy” days of the 1980s.
However, Seneca and the other legacy cutters held their own as well.
Seneca, August 4, 1922, Harris & Ewing, photographer, via LOC
One of the more infamous on Rum Row was William “Bill” McCoy, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Nautical School in Philadelphia who went on to sail the seven seas for two decades before he opened a boatyard in Florida. Picking up first one schooner and then another, the 130-foot British-flagged Arethusa which he renamed Tomoka, McCoy specialized in running liquor from the Bahamas and Bermuda as well as from the French islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (where Arethusa flew a French flag and went by the name Marie Celeste) to New England, reportedly making $300,000 in profit for each trip. His profits were high because he never stepped on his booze and cut it with water, with his whiskey being passed off as “the real McCoy.”
It was a night in November 1923 when Seneca came across McCoy and his hooch-laden Arethusa off the New Jersey coast.
From Rum Wars at Sea:
Agents in cooperation with the Coast Guard put into effect without warning the principal of search and seizure beyond the 3-mile limit, realizing the likelihood of legal complications. The cutter Seneca arrived near Tomoka at daybreak and found the schooner riding placidly at anchor. The ship was first boarded by agents, and as soon as they were on board a fist fight developed in which all hands took part. The agents, though badly beaten up, were able to search her and found 200 cases of whiskey remaining from an original cargo of 4,200. Then Tomoka got underway with the agents on board. Seneca ordered her to stop. When she disregarded this, the cutter sent two shots screaming across her bows with the desired result. She was then boarded by a larger group of coast guardsmen from Seneca and seized.
It was the end of McCoy’s rum-running days and he soon headed off to federal prison on an abbreviated sentence, with Arethusa sold at public auction.
Still, Seneca proved a scourge for those who remained in the business.
Aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Seneca, Prohibition agents examine barrels of alcohol confiscated from a rum runner boat. Via LOC
Aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Seneca, Prohibition agents stand amidst cases of scotch whiskey confiscated from a rum runner boat. Via LOC
One of the rum runners against its nemesis: the K-13091 alongside the Coast Guard cutter Seneca at the end of the chase, 1924. Via LOC. Note the 1903s and BAR
Badly worn out, Seneca was placed out of service in 1927-28 for reconstruction and spent the rest of Prohibition stationed in New York, transferring to San Juan in 1932 and Mobile in 1934. Showing her age, she was decommissioned 21 March 1936 and stored at the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore to make room for the new 327-foot Treasury-class cutters then under construction.
In September, the 28-year-old disarmed cutter was sold to the Boston Iron and Metal Co., of Baltimore, Maryland for $6,605, who did nothing with her and subsequently resold her to the Texas Refrigeration Steamship Line to turn into a banana boat on the Guatemala to Gulfport run. However, TRSL went bankrupt and Seneca never left Baltimore, leaving her to be reacquired at auction by Boston Iron, who still owned her in 1941 and weren’t doing anything with the old girl.
With another war coming, the Coast Guard took Seneca back into service in 1941. However, she was deemed to be in too poor a condition for escort duty and was instead shuffled to “The Real” McCoy’s alma mater, the Pennsylvania Nautical School in Philadelphia for use as a training vessel. Seneca, renamed Keystone State, replaced the old 1,000-ton gunboat USS Annapolis in September 1942.
During this time, admission requirements at the school were raised to high school graduates between the ages of 17 and 20 years and students were instructed in dead reckoning, the duties of an officer; theoretical and practical marine engineering; and in handling boats. Some 2,000 young men cycled through the school in the war years.
In April 1946, the Maritime Commission made the newly-decommissioned Artemis-class attack cargo ship USS Selinur (AKA-41) available to the school as Keystone State II, and Seneca was returned.
She was scrapped in 1950, one of the last vessels built for the Revenue Marine Service still afloat at the time.
The Coast Guard command holds a Veteran’s Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., Nov. 11, 2012. The area where the Coast Guard World War I memorial, which honors the fallen crew members of the Cutter Seneca and Cutter Tampa, was placed is commonly referred to as Coast Guard Hill. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Timothy Tamargo
From Arlington:
Architect George Howe and sculptor Gaston Lachaise captured the spirit of the Coast Guard’s legendary steadfastness in the monument’s rock foundation and pyramid design. Above the Coast Guard motto Semper Paratus (meaning “Always Ready”), is a bronze seagull with its wings uplifted. The seagull symbolizes the tireless vigil that the U.S Coast Guard maintains over the nation’s maritime territory.
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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, USCGCApache was decommissioned, replaced by a much newer and better-equipped 327-foot Treasury-class cutter.
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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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.
Nearing their 50th Anniversary, Warship International, the written tome of the INRO has published hundreds of articles, most of which are unique in their sweep and subject.
Here at LSOZI, we are going to take out 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.
– Christopher Eger
Warship Wednesday October 22, 2014 the Overachieving Gresham
USRC Gresham 1902; photo by A. Loeffler, Tompkinsville, N.Y.
Here we see the gunboat (err. Revenue Cutter) Walter Q. Gresham of the United States Revenue Cutter Service (USRCS) in 1902. This hearty little Great Lakes cutter had a life far removed from the one she was originally designed for.
The USRCS was a branch of the Treasury Department established by an act of Congress on 4 August 1790, (which predates the actual U.S. Navy’s official establishment date however that service uses the older date of the establishment of the Colonial Navy as its basis) and was tasked with counter-smuggling operations in peacetime and serving as a backup to the Navy in war. The USRCS merged with the Lighthouse Service and Lifesaving Service to become the USCG in 1915. But back to the ship.
The USRCS decided in the 1890s to build five near-sisterships that would be classified in peacetime as cutters, but would be capable modern naval auxiliary gunboats. These vessels, to the same overall but concept but each slightly different in design, were built to carry a bow mounted torpedo tube for 18-inch Bliss-Whitehead type torpedoes and as many as four modern quick-firing 3-inch guns (though they used just two 6-pounder 57mm popguns in peacetime). They would be the first modern cutters equipped with electric generators, triple-expansion steam engines (with auxiliary sail rigs), steel (well, mostly steel) hulls with a navy-style plow bow, and able to cut the very fast (for the time) speed of 18-ish knots. All were built 1896-98 at three different yards.
USRC McCulloch in full rig. Note that McCulloch is indicative of the five ship class she came from with the exception of having a three-masted barquentine rig where as the other ships, being about 15-feet shorter, had a two mast brigantine auxiliary rig. Painting, Coast Guard Academy Museum Art Collection.
These ships included:
–McCulloch, a barquentine-rigged, composite-hulled, 219-foot, 1,280-ton steamer built by William Cramp and Sons of Philadelphia for $196,000.
–Manning, a brigantine-rigged 205-foot, 1,150-ton steamer, was built by the Atlantic Works Company of East Boston, MA, for a cost of $159,951.
–Algonquin, brigantine-rigged 205.5-foot, 1,180-ton steel-hulled steamer built by the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $193,000.
–Onondaga, brigantine-rigged 206-foot, 1,190-ton steel-hulled steamer built by the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $193,800.
The fifth ship was the Gresham.
Launched on 12 September 1896, was a brigantine-rigged 206-foot, 1,090-ton steel-hulled steamer built by the Globe Iron Works Company of Cleveland, OH for $147,800. She carried the name of Walter Quinton Gresham, an epic overachiever.
Maj. Gen of Volunteers, the great and Honorable W.Q. Gresham (1832-1895)
Born in 1832 in Indiana, Gresham was a bar-certified attorney and elected state Representative by the time the Civil War broke out. He soon became the 29-year old colonel of the 53rd Indiana and fought at Corinth, Vicksburg, and Atlanta where he was invalided out with a shattered knee and the rank of (brevet) Maj.Gen. of Volunteers. This helped supercharge his political career and he soon became a federal judge appointed by Grant, then Chester Arthur’s Postmaster General and later his Secretary of the Treasury (for a month) before picking up a seat on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals while twice running for the Republican presidential nomination. At the time the gunboat, which carried his name, was ordered, he was serving as Secretary of State in President Grover Cleveland’s Cabinet and died in that office May 28, 1895, hence his name was used to christen the newest cutter. Again, back to the ship…
USRC Walter Q. Gresham commissioned on 30 May 1897 after being accepted by the government three months earlier. While two of these ships were intended for blue-water work on the East Coast (Manning) and West Coast (McCullough), Gresham and near-sisters Algonquin and Onondaga were ordered for Great Lakes service, hence their construction in Cleveland and their homeporting in Milwaukee and Chicago. Since the 200+ foot long cutters were too long to fit through the locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway, they would be landlocked into the lakes their whole life (more on that in a minute).
When commissioned she caused a diplomatic crisis. You see, since these three cutters had a new-fangled torpedo tube and modern guns, the Canadians and their British big brothers objected that the ships were in violation of the 1817 Rush-Bagot Convention and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. These two acts limited U.S./British-Canadian arms build-ups along the border region between the two countries and to this day regulate how heavily armed ships can be along the Great Lakes.
Well, just 11-months after Gresham‘s commissioning, war broke out with Spain and, as her two blue water sisters were rushed to serve with the Navy, the USRCS decided to withdraw the three lake-bound ships and put them to good use elsewhere. To get them past the locks in the St. Lawrence, they sailed to Ogdensburg, NY, where they were cut in half, shipped through the canal, and rejoined on the Atlantic side. Gresham officially belonged to the Navy 24 March-17 Aug 1898, but she saw no service in that war.
Gresham cut cleanly in two and barged through the St. Lawrence locks. Her other two sisters were subjected to the same fate.
However, the war ended in August 1898, before Gresham could be reassembled. Not wanting to get the Canadians riled up again, the USRCS left Gresham, Onondaga, and Algonquin on the East Coast where they served as any respectable white-hulled cutter of the time did. Algonquin set off for the West Indies and Onondaga moved to Philly while Gresham lived the life of a New England cutter, based in Boston.
She used her popguns to sink derelict vessels found at sea. She patrolled fisheries looking for interloping foreign trawlers and poachers. Nantucket Island was only able to get supplies and mail during especially harsh winters by the use of Gresham as an ersatz icebreaker.
U.S.R.C. Gresham, flagship of the patrol fleet, America’s Cup races. Library of Congress photo.
She served as the official government presence at a number of the fashionable sea races of the time. This led to a collision during a regatta with Sir Thomas Lipton’s beautiful steam yacht, the Erin, in which the Gresham‘s torpedo tube scraped alongside the hull of that fine ship. The fault was all on Lipton’s ship by the way.
Gresham saved mariners in distress, including famously the “palatial” steamship RMS Republic of the White Star Line (yes, the Titanic‘s company) when she collided with the Italian liner Florida near Nantucket and foundered in 1909. That incident was the first time a CQD distress call was issued on the new Marconi radio device. Standing alongside the stricken ship, Gresham along with other ships and the cutters Mohawk and Seneca helped save more than 1200 passengers and crew.
In 1915 she, along with the rest of the cutter service became part of the new U.S. Coast Guard and she was given pennant number CG-1, her name by that time just shortened to Gresham, without the Walter Q. part.
When war erupted, she was transferred to the Navy for the second time in 6 April 1917 and remained in the fleet until Aug. 1919. Her sail rig was removed as were her 57mm and 37mm popguns, her wartime armament was greatly increased and was depth charges were fitted, which added several hundred tons to her weight and several feet to her draught. During the war, she escorted coastal convoys, watched for U-boats and naval raiders, and helped train naval crews. Interestingly enough, her old collision-mate Erin, while serving as the armed yacht Aegusa in the Royal Navy, was lost to a German mine during the war.
Returning to her normal peacetime cutter activities in the Coast Guard, to which was added policing and chasing after rumrunners in the 1920s (for which some water-cooled Brownings were installed) Gresham entered a quiet chapter in her life. Her armament was greatly reduced and by 1922, her torpedo tube was deactivated as all of the Navy’s stocks of the aging Whitehead Mk3 torpedoes were withdrawn from service.
In 1933, Gresham was again assigned to the Navy and was sent to Cuban waters to monitor the situation there. As part of the Navy Special Service Squadron she was used to patrol the Florida Straits during a series of revolts that eventually put Fulgencio Batista in power in Cuba. In this she served with a number of other Coast Guard vessels sheep-dipped to the Navy to include the Unalga for two years, alternating between Key West, Gitmo, and San Juan.
She was decommissioned 19 January 1935 just before her 40th birthday, which is about right for a Coasty hull. She was then sold for her value in scrap metal on 22 April 1935, the last of her five-ship class to remain in the Coast Guard’s service. Cleveland-built sisters Algonquin and Onondaga had been sold in 1930 and 1924 respectively and disposed of. Cramp-built McCulloch, who served with Dewey at Manila Bay, was sunk in a collision 13 June 1917. Boston-built Manning likewise was sold for scrap in 1931. The Coast Guard just did not have use for a bunch of slow old tubs.
Until World War II came along, anyway.
In 1943, the Coast Guard found Gresham still afloat in some backwater somewhere in the Chesapeake and reacquired her, the sole remaining ship of her class. She was old, with 47 years on her hull. She was in exceptionally poor condition– still with her original cranky vertical, inverted cylinder, direct-acting triple expansion steam engine fired by four single-ended boilers fed by coal.
Nevertheless, she could hold a few guns and maybe scare off a U-boat or two so she was bought (sum unknown) on 21 January 1943 and renovated in Baltimore.
Gresham during WWII. Notice her sail rig is long gone and, for the first time, she has a visible hull number. Photo from Navsource.
Two months later she was relatively seaworthy and, armed with a sonar, radar, depth charge racks and guns, placed into commission as the USS Gresham (WPG-85) on 25 March 1943. Assigned to coastal convoy escort, moving from port to port up and down the East Coast, she was not liked very well. Since her best possible speed was just 8-knots, she slowed the convoys down and they often decided to leave Gresham in port rather instead. In these terms, she served as a guard ship in New York for most of her 13-month WWII service.
Decommissioned 7 April 1944 before the war even ended, she was sold for scrap for a second time.
However, she just wouldn’t die.
In 1946, she was being used by one Nicholas D. Allen of Teaneck, NJ, converted to a tug and renamed T. V. McAllister. He apparently wasn’t very successful with Gresham as in turn he sold her to the Weston Trading Co. of Honduras who renamed the elderly vessel, Trade Winds.
She became a coaster and banana boat along the Caribbean, flying a Panamanian flag. Then in February 1947 she quietly became one of the 12 vessels purchased in America by Ha’Mossad Le Aliya Bet to carry Jewish refugees from Europe, many only months out of concentration camps, to Palestine past the British blockade. Appropriately, Gresham was in good company, as at least three of the other vessels, Unalga (who she had served with in the old Navy Special Service Squadron), Northland, and Mayflower, had served in the Coast Guard at one time or another as well.
Her scant 27-man crew consisted mostly of young American Jewish volunteers with former naval and military service under their belt. She was prepared for its voyage to Palestine at Lisbon, Portugal and PortoVenere, Italy. Yehoshua Baharav Rabinowitz was in charge of the work in Portugal and Avraham akai was in charge in Italy. The vessel, under the Hebrew name “Hatikva” (The Hope) sailed from Bocca di Magra, Italy on May 8th 1947 carrying 1,414 Ma’apilim refugees. Israel Rotem was its commander and those accompanying him were Alex Shour and Meir Falik; the radio operator was Nachum Manor. Soon five Royal Navy destroyers, enforcing the blockade on Palestine, were tailing the old tub.
c. May 1947 Hatikva loaded with Jewish refugees Algerine Associates photo from Paul Silverstone’s Aliyah Bet Project Aliyah Bet Project. Note that her mast has been stepped.
One of these ships pulled alongside and called to the captain, “Your voyage is illegal, and your vessel is unseaworthy. In the name of humanity surrender.”
On May 17, 1947, the Hatikva was forcibly intercepted, rammed, and captured by the destroyers HMS Venus and HMS Brissenden. Upon boarding, RN sailors and Royal Marines used tear gas, rifle butts, and batons to enforce their directives and ordered the ship to Haifa to unload where it sat while the American crew was interned on a British prison ship. (For an excellent in-depth story of this action and the American’s fate, read Greenfield’s, The Jews’ Secret Fleet: Untold Story of North American Volunteers Who Smashed the British Blockade)
With Royal Marines coming aboard. Note her old pilot house, a relic from the 19th century.
Later the Israeli Navy was able to reclaim Hatikva in 1948 after independence, but after sea trials, the desperate organization realized they were not that desperate, and sold her for scrap in 1951.
ex-Gresham, then Hatikva of the Israeli Navy (אוניית_מעפילים_התקוה) around 1948. This is the last known picture in circulation of her.
However, Hatikva/Gresham beat the scrappers once more it seemed. She popped up in Greek ownership in the 1950s and found herself back on the other side of the Atlantic again as an unpowered barge, her superstructure, funnel, and mast removed. She was last semi-reliably seen in the Chesapeake Bay area as late as 1980.
Her ultimate fate is unknown, but she may in all actuality be afloat somewhere in Blue Crab country, hiding out as a houseboat in some back eddy or grounded on a mudflat somewhere. If only boats could talk, Gresham would have had much to say. The Spanish American War, both World Wars, a revenue cutter that was deconstructed then reassembled, gunboat, coast guard cutter, freighter, refugee ship…talk about an epic tale. After all, how many ships have been sold to the breakers and lived to tell the tale not once, or twice, but three times!
The Gresham/Hatikva is well remembered in Israel and in the European Jewish community as a whole. This summer a group of 800 French Jewish students announced plans to recreate the voyage of the historic ship.
As a final note on the ship, Israel’s national anthem is named Hatikva, of course it is about the movement overall, but still; there is a small hatttip to the tiny Gresham in there every time it is played.
And Walter Quintin Gresham himself? He was buried in Section 2 of Arlington National Cemetery a little to the right of the grave of Union cavalry master Phil Sheridan.
The former seaplane tender made cutter USCGC Gresham
In 1947, the Coast Guard took possession of a 311-foot long gently used seaplane tender, USS Willoughby (AGP-9; AVP-57) and renamed her USCGC Gresham (WAVP/WHEC/WAGW-387) in honor of this long serving vessel and remained in service until 1973. However, if the reports of the original Gresham making it to 1980 are true, her namesake outlived her by almost a decade.
Armament:
1896: Two 6-pounder 57mm, one 1-pounder 37mm, three .50 cal. machine guns, and one bow torpedo tube
1918: 3 x 4-inch guns; (1500 rounds of ammunition stored in two magazinesfore and aft); 16 x 300-lb depth charges; 4 x Colt machine guns; 2 x Lewis machine guns; 18 x .45 Colt pistols; 15 x Springfield rifles.)
1930: 2 x 6-pdrs RF, 3 x .50-cal watercooled for rumrunners, tube deactivated.
1943: 2x 3″/50 (singles) 4x20mm/80 (singles), 2 depth charge racks, 2 K-gun depth charge projectors, 2 mousetrap depth bomb projectors, QCL-8 sonar, SF-type surface search radar.
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