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 As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”
Warship Wednesday, March 19, 2025: Bucoup Malchanceuse
Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 64442
Above, we see the unique cuirasse d’escadreBouvet of the French Marine Nationale sitting quietly at anchor, likely in the Mediterranean in the 1900s. More a floating castle than a man-o-war, this tumblehome-hulled battlewagon would find herself very unlucky in the Dardanelles some 110 years ago this week.
The “Sample Fleet”
While France and Britain were at peace since 1815, there was still enough lingering animosity between the two traditional enemies that, when the Royal Navy began work on a series of eight new 1st rate warships that would become the Royal Sovereign-class battleship in 1888– vessels that hit 14,000 tons, carried four 13.5-inch guns, and were clad in as much as 18 inches of armor but could still make 17 knots or better– the French knew they needed a response.
This led the French naval ministry to order four, and later a fifth, new and experimental battleship around a series of mandatory specs: 14,000 tons or less, a “diamond” gun arrangement with turreted 12-inch guns fore and aft and 10.8-inch guns amidships, an armor plate topping out at 18 inches, and a speed of at least 17 knots. Dubbed the “flotte d’échantillons” (sample fleet), the idea would be that the ministry would pick and choose what worked best from these one-off prototypes and come up with the best design moving forward.
The first four ships were all designed by four different esteemed French naval architects and built at four different domestic yards at roughly the same time to cut down on the suspense:
Charles Martel, designed by Charles Ernest Huin, built at Arsenal de Brest 1891-1896
Jauréguiberry, designed by Amable Lagane, built by F et C de la Méditerranée, La Seyne-sur-Mer 1891-96
Carnot, designed by Victor Saglio, built at Arsenal de Toulon 1891-1896
Masséna, designed by Louis de Bussy, built at A et C de la Loire, Saint-Nazaire 1891-1897
French pre-dreadnought battleship Masséna, alongside one of her sisters
Before any of the above Echantillons had entered service, Charles Ernest Huin received the singular honor of drafting a fifth design that would begin construction at Arsenal de Lorient in January 1893. Regarded as a bit of a genius by the French, the 57-year-old Huin had graduated from the École Polytechnique during the Crimean War, sat on the Gavres Commission on artillery development, and became general director of the Gironde Shipyards in Lorient in 1881 where he designed the early battleships Hoche, Brennus, and Marceau before his Charles Martel design, picked as first of the Echantillons to be laid down, drew interest.
Hoche, seen operating in relatively flat waters along France’s Atlantic coast in 1890, was one of Huin’s babies
Huin’s swansong is our subject.
Meet Bouvet
Although a continuation of the sample fleet concept, our Bouvet would be a testbed for several new technologies. Whereas the other four Echantillons used Lagreafel d’Allest boilers, Bouvet would carry 32 (!) more modern Indret-Bellville boilers arranged on three engines driving three shafts (three of the four sample ships were twin shafters). She went a bit heavier than the preceding battleships, but with 15,000 shp available, she was designed to make 18 knots in theory and could steam 4,000nm on 10 knots with 980 tons of good coal in her bunkers.
While she carried a similar armor plan, Bouvet’s was improved Harvey nickel steel face-hardened armor with a higher tensile strength against incoming projectiles than that used on previous French ships. Further, while she had roughly the same hull type, it was not cut down to the main deck at the stem, and she carried a downsized superstructure with a pair of smaller military masts compared to the previous Echantillons, all of which suffered from dramatic stability issues in any sort of seas.
Her drawings on paper seem elegant.
She also had more modern guns, albeit of the same caliber as the four prior sample ships. Rather than two single Canon de 305 mm/45 (12″) Model 1887s as on Charles Martel, she had updated 305 mm/40 (12″) Model 1893s as her main armament. Capable of firing 770-pound AP shells to 13,000 yards at about one round per minute, these guns would later be mounted in two twin-gun turrets on the follow on the Gaulois, Iena, Suffren, Republique, and Liberte battleship classes.
Bouvet, bow shot, showing off her forward 12-inch gun
Note all the light guns in her superstructure
The secondary battery was a pair of 274 mm/45 (10.8″) Model 1887/1893s in amidship single gun turrets, an experimental model only carried on Bouvet and the sample ship Massena. Her sloping tumblehome hull form was largely to allow these “wing” guns a wider field of fire.
Battleship Bouvet beam turrets.
The tertiary armament was downright wild, with eight single 5.5″/45 M1891s, another eight 3.9″/45 M1891s, a dozen single 47mm/40 M1885 3-pounders, five single 37mm/20 M1885 1-pounders, and a pair of Hotchkiss 37mm 5-barreled Gatling-style guns. This was deemed more than enough to tackle incoming waves of enemy torpedo boats.
Bouvet, Janes 1914
Speaking of torpedoes, she maintained four separate 17.7-inch torpedo stations, two amidships above water with single tubes on trainable turnstiles, and another two submerged forward with fixed tubes that simply fired 90 degrees outward from the beam. Each station had its own magazine, and Bouvet could carry a dozen M1892 Whitehead-type fish, which had a 1,100-yard range and carried 220 pounds of guncotton.
Modern, she carried four dynamos that allowed for force ventilation belowdecks, electrical lighting, and six high-output searchlights. Heady stuff for 1892.
The Salad Days
Bouvet was ordered 8 April 1892 from Lorient Arsenal at a cost of £1.2 million, or 21 million French francs. Laid down to a completed design by Huin on 16 January 1893, she was launched 27 April 1896, her hull decorated with trees.
Named for the trio of famed 18th/19th century French navigator/admirals Bouvet, our battleship was at least the third to carry the name under the Tricolor, preceded by a steam aviso famously sunk off Haiti in 1871 in a storm just after she fought the German gunboat SMS Meteor off Havana (see: Warship Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020: A German and a Frenchman walk into a Cuban bar…).
Bouvet fitting out
Bouvet was completed and was commissioned in June 1898, amid the spectacular naval developments of the Spanish-American War.
Bouvet circa 1900, Symond & Co photograph, IWM Q 22256
She joined the Mediterranean squadron and visited the Italian sovereigns in 1900, before becoming flagship of the entire French fleet for a couple of years. She then participated in several diplomatic voyages to Spain, Italy, Greece, the exotic Ottoman ports, and other spots in the region before taking part in numerous maneuvers and exercises in the Med.
For a time, she was a favorite subject of naval postcards.
Notably, she participated in the large French naval review at Cherbourg in July 1900, suffered a minor collision with the battleship Gaulois in 1903, and assisted in the international response to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy.
It was a quiet life.
By 1907, she was given an overhaul that included deleting her above-deck torpedo tubes and other minor efforts to help trim her top-heavy design. By the summer of 1908, with better battleships taking their place in the fleet’s 1st and 2nd Battleship Divisions, Bouvet was downgraded an assignment in the 3rd.
In and out of ordinary, her roles increasingly took on a more auxiliary tasking outside of the spotlight, no longer the proud flagship of her early career.
Battleship Bouvet in Toulon harbour 1912, BNF image
By 1913, the French Navy had a surplus of steel-sheathed, steel-hulled battlewagons, each class generally better than the last in an evolutionary sense, and all more advanced than Bouvet. Going past the Echantillons, they had three 11,000 ton Charlemagnes, the one-off 9,000-ton Henri IV, the 12,725-ton Suffren, two 15,000-ton Republiques, three 14,000-ton Democraties, six 18,000-ton “semi-dreadnought” Dantons, four modern 23,000-ton Courbets mounting a full dozen 12″/50 guns, three brand-new 24,000-ton Bretagnes with ten 13.5″/45s, and a class of five 25,000-ton Normandie class dreadnoughts under construction. With all that– including 13 legit dreadnoughts and six semi-dreadnoughts for the battle line and 10 still functional pre-dreadnoughts for expeditionary use– the need to keep the cranky and grossly obsolete Echantillons on the Navy List any longer was fading.
The four earlier sample ships were soon withdrawn. Charles Martel was placed in reserve in 1912 before being decommissioned outright in early 1914, permanently disarmed to become a floating barracks hulk at Brest. Carnot was placed in reserve in January 1913 and, disarmed, was used as an accommodation ship at Toulon. Massena, suffering an explosion in 1913, was withdrawn from service and hulked, pending scrapping.
Jaureguiberry and Bouvet were transferred to the Division de complément (Supplementary Division) and assigned to fire control development and gunnery training, respectively, surely the last stop before being laid up. These two ships were reportedly left in poor condition, with maintenance funds diverted to newer and more capable battleforce elements. After all, why waste money on ships earmarked for disposal?
War!
The Great War saved Bouvet and fellow sample battleship Jaureguiberry from the scrappers. Ordered to arm up and make ready for combat– with German and Austrian ally Italy thought ready to enter the conflict at any moment and German RADM Souchon’s Mediterranean Squadron at large– the two dated but still useful warships were soon escorting troopships in the Med. These included both French colonial troops heading to the Metropolitan Republic and British/Indian troops likewise headed to the Western Front.
Bouvet, May 1914, BNF
Once Souchon’s squadron, the battlecruiser SMS Goeben and the cruiser Breslau, had fled to the Dardanelles under the protection of Ottoman guns, and Italy gave assurances they had no immediate intention of honoring their pact with Berlin and Vienna, Bouvet soon shifted to Greek waters to join the force gathering there should the German ships attempt to break back out into the Med.
This force soon made the logical transition to supporting the doomed Franco-British Gallipoli campaign in 1915 once the Turks found themselves in the war. By late February 1915, a force of 16 British battleships under VADM John de Robeck and four French ones (Suffren, Bouvet, Charlemagne, and Gaulors) under RADM Emile Guepratte, augmented by a host of cruisers (including a random Russian) and destroyers, began to try to force the straits.
Among the 230 artillery pieces that supported the Dardanelles, defenses were at least 10 aging Krupp 24 cm (9.4-inch) K L/35 fortress guns from a batch of 30 pieces shipped to the country in 1889. They could heave a 474-pound shell via bagged charges out to a range of 8.1 miles.
Ottoman 24 cm artillery at the Rumeli Medjidieh battery Bouvet. That shell hoist would dramatically fail on 18 March 1915
Relatively obsolete by the Great War, they could still be deadly should an enemy ship obligingly get close enough to find out. Four of these were installed in the masonry fort at Rumeli Mecidiye Tabyası (Fort No. 13) on the European shore of the peninsula, backing up a pair of larger but less capable 28cm L/22s.
Ottoman 24 cm artillery at the Rumeli Medjidieh battery, 1915. Shown are the battery commander, Captain Mehmet Hilmi (Şanlıtop) Bey, and 2LT Fahri Bey.
Beyond the guns, the Turks had sown almost 400 mines in 10 fields, most laid by the humble little Ottoman minelayer Nusret.
Turkish Minelayer Nusrat
On the morning of 18 March 1915, a three-part attack was launched to reduce the Ottoman’s central forts, with the four most powerful British battlewagons (HMS Queen Elizabeth, Lord Nelson, Agamemnon, and Inflexible) kicking off the assault with a heavy two-hour bombardment from 8 miles out, followed by a second prong– the four French ships– boldly sailing to within just 5,000 yards to destroy the fortifications at point blank range, relying on their heavy armor to shrug off any remaining Turkish guns. Meanwhile, the 12 remaining British battleships would line up in a third division in three groups to provide covering fire and then follow the French in.
The problem with that plan was that the first bombardment was nowhere near as effective as the British thought it would be, and Nusret had crept in to sow an 11th minefield that the British and French didn’t know about.
The day would prove very bad for the Allied forces.
Inflexible, Queen Elizabeth, and Agamemnon in the British first line, along with Irresistible and Ocean in the second line, started taking hits, most from the little Rumeli Mecidiye battery but also other guns at Dardanos and Sogandare.
The French, drawn point blank with the forts, got the worst of it, with Suffren, flagship of RADM Guepratte, receiving 14 hits in 14 minutes and set ablaze, effectively out of the fight. Gaulois was hit twice, with one lucky shell plunging and penetrating her hull under the waterline, forcing her to retreat and beach on Tavsan in the Rabbit Islands to keep from sinking, the wounded Charlemagne at her side.
Bouvet received at least eight hits from Rumeli Medjidieh’s 9.4-inch guns, riddling her masts and funnels and putting her forward turret out of action. Not grievously injured, she answered the signal to withdraw and promptly stumbled into one of Nusret’s mines at 13:58 just under her starboard 10.8-inch mount.
Never having an abundance of stability, she quickly started to roll and, with water pouring down her funnels, turned turtle and sank in less than a minute, taking a stunning 660 of her 710 crew down with her.
Bouvet sinking after being mined 18 March 1915. Note how close to shore she is. Photo via the Surgeon Parkes collection. IWM SP 682A
A handful of waterlogged and shocked survivors were plucked from the water by the battle-damaged Agamemnon.
Survivors from the French battleship Bouvet coming on board the battleship HMS Agamemnon on 18 March 1915 during the Anglo-French naval attempt to force the Dardanelles. The Bouvet struck a Turkish mine and sank with the loss of over 600 of her crew. IWM HU 103301
With Roebuck ordering his ships to withdraw from the failed effort to reduce the forts, Irresistible and Ocean likewise struck Turkish mines and quickly sank within sight of Bouvet’s watery grave. Irresistible sank with the loss of only 12 of her 780 crew and had her survivors rescued by Ocean then, following the holing by that ship, she slowly sank and the combined crews were taken off by the destroyers HMS Jed, Colne, and Chelmer which were able to come alongside. Of note, the British battleships, while similarly dated, were not tumblehome designs, and Ocean only lost a single crewman in the battle.
Epilogue
Both at the time of the sinking and in modern Turkey, the loss of Bouvet was widely celebrated and remembered.
Le Bouvet aux Dardanelles
Illustrated First World War, Sinking of Bouvet
German wartime postcard depicting the sinking of Bouvet
Sinking of Bouvet
“Bouvet’nin Çanakkale’de Batışı (The Sinking of Battleship Bouvet at the Dardanelles)” by Turkish maritime artist Diyarbakırlı Tahsin Bey
“Bouvet’nin Çanakkale’de Batışı (The Sinking of Battleship Bouvet at the Dardanelles)” by Turkish maritime artist Diyarbakırlı Tahsin Bey
Charles Huin didn’t live long enough to see his penultimate battleship fail so spectacularly. Retiring from the French navy in 1902 after almost 50 years of service as a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur, he was struck by a car and killed on a Paris street at age 76 in December 1912 while on his way to collect his pension from the Ministry.
Charles Ernest Huin
RADM Guepratte, who commanded the French force on the fateful day that Bouvet was lost, was relegated to a desk job at Bizerte for the rest of the war and then retired. He passed in November 1939, gratefully missing out on the twin humiliations of Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940 and Toulon in November 1942. Post-war, historians rehabilitated his record and came to the conclusion he got a bad rap, and he is generally seen as a naval hero of sorts today in France, with a destroyer (D632) and frigate (F714) named after him. After all, he was ordered by Roebuck and Carden to take his four obsolete battleships right down the Turks’ throat and by all means should have lost all four.
The French Navy went on to recycle the Bouvet name twice- for a Free French auxiliary in WWII and a Cold War era Surcouf-class destroyer (D624) in operation between 1952 and 1981.
For years, it was believed that Bouvet sank only due to the 9.4-inch coastal artillery hits.
The Ottoman battery commander who landed the hits on Bouvet and several of the other ships, Capt. Mehmet Hilmi Şanlıtop, despite winning a series of decorations, including the Iron Cross, was cashiered post-war in the aftermath of the end of the empire. Welcomed into the ranks of the newly formed Turkish Army in 1920, he eventually retired as a colonel of artillery. He wrote a book about his service and passed in 1946. A statue of him stands near the location of the battery today, which is now a museum.
The Rumeli Medjidieh site, disarmed in 1919, today contains a single 9.4-inch Krupp fortress gun, albeit one moved from another fort. The site has bronze statues of Capt. Şanlıtop and his XO, along with Corporal Seyit Ali Cabuk, who famously hand-carried three 474-pound shells up to one of the 9.4s from the magazine to the breech after the shell hoist failed during the latter stages of the Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles on 18 March 1915, the rounds credited with hitting Ocean.
The story of Bouvet’s ultimate loss by mine strike caught up to the public.
The Ottoman minelayer Nusret, retired from naval service in 1955, was sold to commercial concerns and, derelict, sank in 1989.
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.
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 As Henk says: “Warship Coffee – no sugar, just a pinch of salt!”
Warship Wednesday, March 12, 2025: Spymaster Farm
“Received from Office of Naval Intelligence,” U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command, NH 64250
Above we see the beautiful new kleiner kreuzer SMS Dresden as she transits the Kiel Canal under the Levensau High Bridge in early 1908. Caught at sea in August 1914 in bad repair and already on her way back to Germany, she would end up being the last of the Kaiser’s cruisers at large on the high seas, sent to the bottom some 110 years ago this week.
The Dresden Class
The two Dresden-class light cruisers– our subject and the infamous SMS Emden— were ordered as part of the Kaiserliche Marine’s 1905-06 program to a modification of the earlier Königsberg class design and used the same hull form, armament, and armor plan but carried slightly different machinery. Some 388 feet long, they had a 44-foot beam and drew 18 feet of water under their hull.
Armament consisted of ten 4.1-inch SK L/40 naval guns— the standard weapon of almost all of Germany’s smaller cruisers and large colonial gunboats– in six single shielded pedestal mounts and four casemated, with 1,500 shells for these guns held in the magazine.
The German light cruiser SMS Dresden in a harbor. Note her forward 4.1-inch guns. IWM (Q 53072)
The secondary armament consisted of eight 2″/52 SK55 popguns with 4,000 rounds between them, backed up by a pair of submerged bow-mounted 17.7-inch torpedo tubes with space in the magazine for five fish. Landing party equipment included four Maxim machine guns and enough rifles, revolvers, and packs to outfit a company-sized force drawn from the 343-member crew. A light 6cm L/21 boat gun on a carriage along with 241 shells was also part of the ship’s bill.
When it came to armor, they carried a 3.1-inch belt of Krupp nickel steel along with 3.9 inches of protection over their conning towers and engines and about an inch over the deck. Meanwhile, the gun shields on the 4.1″/40s were two inches thick. Damage control was built into the design with 14 watertight compartments and a double-hulled bottom.
Dresden class cruiser diagrams Janes 1914
When it came to engineering, both used 12 coal-fired Schulz-Thornycroft marine boilers with Dresden using four Parson’s steam turbines generating 15,000shp while Emden had two reciprocating VTE engines that produced a less powerful 13,500shp. Likewise, Dresden carried more coal bunkerage (860 tons) while Emden could only stow 790 under normal conditions. Speed was virtually the same (23.5 Emden, 24 Dresden) as was cruising range with Emden having a longer (3,760nm) endurance at 12 knots while Dresden could only steam 3,600 but at 14 knots. Äpfel zu Organen.
Meet Dresden
While sister Emden was constructed at KW in Danzig, Dresden was laid down at the same time as Yard No. 195 (Ersatz Comet as she was originally to be named to replace the 19th-century sloop of that name) at Blohm & Voss, Hamburg. Launched on 5 October 1907 with Lord Mayor of Dresden, Otto Beutler, as a sponsor, she was commissioned on 14 November 1908, beating Emden to the fleet by eight months.
Outfitting Dresden class cruiser in Stettin
Meeting some early disaster, while on her shakedown on 28 November, Dresden was involved in a collision with the two-masted Swedish sailing ship Cacilie, sinking the Swede and sending the cruiser back to Hamburg for six months of repair, which was followed by a turbine explosion on follow-up trails.
Dresden at Wilhelmshaven in 1909. Farenholt Collection NH 65782
Finally emerging ready to serve, Dresden set sail under Kapitän zur See Eduard Varrentrapp in a three-ship task force along with the 6,500-ton training cruisers Victoria Louise and Hertha, bound for New York, where they would join the 3,700-ton Ostamerikanischen station cruiser (stationskreuzer) Bremen. Of note on Bremen during this period was a young ensign, one multilingual Wilhelm Canaris, who at the time was planning to spend his career in torpedo boats.
Peacetime ship of intrigue
The four German ships, Dresden included, arrived in New York in late September 1909 to attend the international naval review as part of the 300th Hudson-Fulton Exhibition. The force, under the command of the white-bearded and well-mustached 65-year-old Grossadmiral Hans von Koester– the first German naval officer to hold the rank– would take in the sites and become one of the more celebrated contingents, with thousands of ethnic Teutons and recent emigres from the region in NYC at the time.
Dresden was extensively photographed in the fortnight she spent on the Hudson.
German cruiser SMS Dresden. Picture taken between 24.September and 9.October 1909 during the Hudson Fulton fleet parade in New York. Note protected cruisers Victoria Louise and Hertha, other units of the German Squadron, in the background. Bain News Service collection, LOC 04281.
Dresden during Hudson-Fulton. H. C. White Co. image. LC-DIG-stereo-1s43331
Dresden during Hudson Fulton with her glad rags flying. Detroit Publishing postcard. LOC LC-D4-22624
Dresden during Hudson Fulton. Detroit Publishing postcard. LC-D4-39223
Photographed before World War I, probably at New York. NH 43303
Returning to Germany, Dresden suffered another collision, this time with the light cruiser Konigsberg, and spent some time in the training division in the Baltic.
She was beautiful in all respects, as shown off in period postcards.
She was then along with the cruiser Strassburg, dispatched to join the Mittelmeer-division in the Med between April and September 1913 under the command of FKpt Fritz Ludecke, where she kept tabs on the Balkans as the region descended first into war with the Ottomans and then among themselves, giving birth to the new nation of Albania.
SMS Dresden at Swinemunde
In December 1913, with Ludecke swapped out for FKpt Erich Kohler so that Ludecke could take command of the new light cruiser SMS Karlsruhe, Dresden skipped a much-needed overhaul to hold down the Ostamerikanischen station for six months as Bremen returned home after spending nearly 10 years in the Americas. The plan would be that Karlsruhe, her shakedown finished, would arrive in the summer of 1914 to tap Dresden out and take over the station. Joining Dresden for this deployment, fresh off a year in the Baltic on torpedo boat duties, was a now Lt. Canaris, who had proven very capable when on the old Bremen of making and utilizing local contents across Latin America.
Bremen, fresh from evacuating 1,200 European civilians during the Mexican revolution along with the HAPAG steamers Kronprinzessin Cecilie and Bolivia, was relieved on 21 January 1914 and returned home to Germany, via Port-au-Prince, on 13 February, leaving the station in Dresden’s hands.
With Germany backing Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta, Dresden got involved with the local affairs at a ground level. Besides continuing to evacuate nearly 2,000 American and European non-combatants to HAPAG liners alongside British and U.S. warships during the occupation of Veracruz, the cruiser sent a detachment of armed sailors to guard the German embassy in Mexico City and helped the HAPAG steamer SS Ypirangaescape U.S. custody in April 1918, the latter filled with 30 train car loads of German-made Mauser rifles and cartridges bound for Huerta in violation of the American weapons embargo on the dictator. The German-flagged steamer SS Bavaria likewise arrived with another load of guns in May.
Canaris’ contacts and agents in the region, cultivated during his time on Bremen, often proved invaluable. The young officer had a reputation as a “fixer.”
Vera Cruz, Mexico, warships off Fort San Juan de Ulua near the time of the U.S. landing in April 1914. The three ships in the foreground from left to right are the German cruiser Dresden, the Mexican gunboat Nicolas Bravo, and the Spanish cruiser Carlos V. The ship behind the bow of Carlos V may be the Mexican Zaragoza as Bravo’s sister Morales was probably in the Pacific at this time. NH 42501
However, no matter how many guns the Germans sent, they arrived too late to help Huerta turn the tide against the Constitutionalists of Carranza, Obregon, and Villa in the north and the Zapatistas in the south. “El Chacal,” with his Federal Army soundly defeated at the Battle of Zacatecas in July 1914, resigned his office. His ride out of the country? Dresden, with Canaris as the general’s interpreter and handler, took him into exile as far as Kingston, Jamaica along with his vice president, Aureliano Blanquet, and their families.
The deposed dictator would later work with German naval spymaster Kapt. Franz von Rintelen during WWI on a series of anti-American and anti-Mexican for that matter initiatives until he passed under sketchy circumstances in Fort Bliss, Texas, with Von Rintelen writing after the war that, perhaps, Huerta was poisoned.
This brings us to…
War!
The fresh and brand-new Karlsruhe, finally complete and deployed to American waters on her maiden cruise, rendezvoused with the well-worn and homebound Dresden at Port-au-Prince, Haiti on 26 July 1914. The ships respective skippers changed places with Kohler, who was intimately aware of the current situation in the theatre, cross-decked from Dresden to Karlsruhe to take command of the new cruiser while Ludecke, who handled the vessel’s commissioning and shakedown, took up residence in his old cabin on Dresden for what he expected to be a ride back home. Likewise, Dresden transferred ordnance, spare parts, and even part of her small arms locker to Karlsruhe as the latter would need them more.
About that.
With the two cruisers departing Haiti on the evening of 26 July, they intercepted a radio message stating that diplomatic relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia had been broken off and war in Europe was imminent. Karlsruhe made for Havana to top off her provisions and coal bunkers, then, instead of roaming West into the Caribbean, sortied East towards the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Ludecke in Dresden, heading back to Germany with not enough coal to make it there without stopping to refill her bunkers, was ordered to turn around and engage in independent cruiser warfare (Handelskrieg: commerce raiding) in the event of war– a suicide mission for a ship in Dresden’s condition some 4,800 miles away from home and in waters teaming with British warships.
Topping off at St. Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands on 31 July, Dresden made ready for war and sailed south in radio silence.
By 3 August war was at hand and Dresden turned wolf. Pairing up with the HAPAG steamer Corrientes out of Pernambuco which was placed at her disposal, the cruiser began stopping passing merchant ships off the coast of Brazil to inspect their papers. Encountering four British vessels, she let two go (SS Drumcliffe and SS Hostilius) on parole after deeming their cargo to be neutral and sank two whose cargo was considered contraband: SS Hyades (3,352 tons) on 14 August and SS Holmwood (4,223 tons) on 26 August.
A fictional depiction of SMS Dresden firing at Mauretania. Zeichnung von Paul Teschinsky, August 1914. Illustrierte Zeitung, 1915
Headed further into the South Atlantic, Dresden was joined by the HAPAG steamers Prussia, Baden, Persia, and Santa Isabel. The Admiralty then dispatched orders for her to proceed into the Pacific with her train to link up with the Bremen-class light cruiser SMS Leipzig which, after an eight-year tour in Chinese waters as part of VADM Maximilian von Spee’s East Asian Squadron (Ostasiengeschwaderszusammentreffen), had been dispatched to relieve the light cruiser SMS Nürnberg on the west coast of Mexico, where the latter had been protecting German residents during the revolution. Picking up coal and provisions at San Francisco in August just after the outbreak of the war, Leipzig melted into the Southeast Pacific, lurking between Baja and the Galapagos Islands, where she, like Dresden, soon picked up a train of coal-carrying German steamers (Anubis, Abyssinia, Amasis, and Karnak of the DDG Kosmos line).
After a stopover to effect repairs before rounding Cape Horn, Dresden transitioned to the Pacific.
Panic ripped through the Western seaboard of Canada as Dresden and Leipzig were believed in the area (they never got within 1,000 miles), with the Canadian government rushing the newly-formed Cobourg Heavy Battery from Quebec and its two new 60-pounder 5-inch BL guns for a transcontinental rail trip to establish an emergency coastal battery (at Point Grey– now the University of British Columbia) to protect Vancouver. Likewise, the Condor-class sloop HMCS Shearwater landed two QF 4-inch naval guns for positioning in Stanley Park, named for Lord Frederick Stanley, Governor General of Canada in 1888. The RCN’s largest warship, the old Apollo-class protected cruiser HMCS Rainbow, missed Leipzig by only a day at San Francisco in mid-August.
Following an invitation from the British Ambassador in Tokyo, the 9,500-ton Japanese armored cruiser Izumo was dispatched to Esquimalt as reinforcement. The Japanese cruiser Asama, battlecruisers Kurama and Tsukuba, and the patchwork battlewagon Hizen (former Russian Retvizan) later joined her in what the IJN referred to as the American Expeditionary Force (Amerika ensei-gun) under RADM Keizaburo Moriyama. A separate Japanese task force built around the battleship Satsuma and cruisers Hirado and Yahagi sailed as the Special Southern Expeditionary Force (Tokubetsu nanken shitai) to search the Philippines, Palau Islands, and East Indies area and after Coronel moved towards the South-Central Pacific with the battlecruiser Ibuki. Had Spee crashed into either of these forces, it would have no doubt been one of the most interesting naval clashes in history.
Linking up with Leipzig off the west coast of Chile on 3 October, the two cruisers and their train of makeshift supply tenders on 12 October joined Von Spee’s primary force– the big, armored cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the light cruiser Nürnberg— at Easter Island. The admiral’s squadron had been on the run from their homeport at Japanese-besieged Tsingtao since August and had stopped along the way to plaster French Tahiti (wasting 80 irreplaceable shells to level Papeete) and sweep the Marquesas Islands on the ever-present search for coal.
Besides her guns, Dresden’s very handy fixer, Canaris, was able to provide the admiral with intel, garnered via his carefully cultivated contacts around the continent. He was one of the first to pass the reports of a British cruiser force approaching from the Horn.
From 26–28 October the squadron coaled in Cumberland Bay of the volcanic and sparsely populated Isla Más a Tierra (Robinson Crusoe Island)– it’s as remote as it sounds, situated some 350 west of Chile– and made ready. There, the auxiliary cruiser Prinz Eitel Friedrich, which had been raiding in Australian waters with little luck, arrived and took over reasonability for the collier train.
By 1 November, Von Spee’s force would mix it up in the lopsided sea battle of Coronel against British RADM Craddock’s 4th Cruiser Squadron. While recounting the whole engagement is beyond the scope of this blog post, suffice it to say that Dresden, unscathed, accounted well for herself, landing a reported five hits on the Town-class light cruiser HMS Glasgow and one on the armed merchant cruiser Otranto. However, she expended 102 shells she could not recover from magazines that were already depleted.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, on the evening of 4 November in deep water east of Trinidad, Karlsruhe mysteriously met her end at the hands of an explosion that has yet to be explained. She sank in just 27 minutes, taking two-thirds of her crew to the bottom with her. Until then, she had a successful raiding career, taking 17 prizes.
The same week, in the Indian Ocean, on 9 November, Dresden’s sister, SMS Emden, was defeated in a battle with the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney near the Cocos Islands, having collected 23 prizes. The number of German cruisers on the high seas was shrinking rapidly.
Back in the Pacific, Von Spee’s squadron sailed triumphantly into Valparaiso to coal and replenish, unafraid of the Royal Navy for a change.
German Vice Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee’s cruiser squadron, leaving Valparaiso, Chile, on November 3, 1914, following the Battle of Coronel. U.S. Naval Historical Center Photograph NH 59638
Dresden in Valparaiso, Chile, November 1914. Blickrichtung Backbord Richtung Bug
Dresden in Valparaiso, Chile, November, 1914
After replenishing at Valparaiso with the rest of the victorious squadron, Dresden was released to patrol the area and sank the British steamer North Wales (3,691 tons) on 16 November.
Crossing back into the Pacific, Von Spee anchored his force at remote Picton Island on 6 December and called a council of his skippers. Leaving Prinz Eitel Friedrich and the collier train hidden along the south coast of Argentina, he wanted to take his cruisers and raid the British coaling station at Port Stanley in the Falklands. His captains for the most part disagreed with only Capt. Schonberg of the Nürnberg sided with Von Spee and urged to break up the squadron to proceed on independent raiding sorties ending in either internment or a trip back home. The loss of Emden was sobering.
Von Spee, being the boss, went his way and on 8 December crashed headlong into British VADM Doveton Sturdee’s waiting force of two hulking battlecruisers (HMS Invincible and Inflexible along with the cruisers HMS Cornwall, Kent, Carnarvon, Glasgow, and Bristol; and the old battlewagon HMS Canopus.
It was over by late afternoon, with Strudee’s flotilla of bruisers chasing down Von Spee’s smaller cruisers and pounding them one by one beneath the sub-polar waves of the South Atlantic.
A German light cruiser in action, Dresden’s profile, probably at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, 8 December 1914, by William Lionel Wyllie, RMG PV3152
The Splashes of Canopus’s Guns- Scharnhorst and Dresden at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, 8 December 1914, about 13.30, William Lionel Wyllie, RMG PV1022
light cruiser Dresden at the Battle of the Falklands painting by Alexander Kircher
Of Von Spee’s cruisers off the Falklands that day, only the turbine-powered Dresden, with Ludecke pushing his stokers and boilers to the point of breaking– somehow hitting a record 26 knots on cranky engines– managed to gain a few miles on her pursuers and, with darkness falling, slip into the nameless fjords and inlets of Tierra del Fuego
Von Spee and four of his cruisers found themselves in the embrace of Poseidon that day along with 2,200 German sailors– including both of the admiral’s sons.
Sinking of the Scharnhorst painted by Admiral Thomas Jacques Somerscales currently on display at the Royal Museums Greenwich
Endgame
For a time, the world thought Dresden was dead, lost with the rest of Von Spee’s squadron.
However, she was still very much alive. She had suffered no damage in the clash. With the help of one of Canaris’ contacts, the German-Chilean mariner and harbor pilot Albert Pagels, Dresden was able to hide in the Punta Arena region, with Pagels guiding the cruiser into scarcely charted Quintupeu Fjord for safekeeping.
“SMS Dresden of the shores of Chile, 1914”
Eventually, the word got out and the British, along with the rest of the world that could do basic cruiser math, knew Dresden was still at large, a fleet in being if nothing else. Canaris provided constant reports on British fleet movements, and she was able to relocate a few times during this period, keeping one step ahead of the Royal Navy.
On 18 January 1915, Dresden was able to take on 1,600 tons of coal– twice her normal load– from the NDL freighter Sierra Cordoba. Ludecke nursed a plan to strike out across the remote Southern Pacific, skirting Antarctica until rising north to raid the Solomon Islands and, coaling at the Dutch East Indies, head into the Indian Ocean.
On 27 February, she sank the British barque Conway Castle (1,694 tons), her last prize, bringing her total to 12,927 tons of Allied merchant shipping.
German surface raiders– both actual cruisers and hilfkreuzers– captured or sunk an amazing 623,406 tons of Allied shipping in the Great War.
Nearly bumping into the cruiser HMS Kent at 11,000 yards on 8 March, Dresden lit all boilers and cranked almost 25 knots against Kent’s 22 to keep over the horizon successfully. However, this five-hour chase drained her bunkers dry– down to her last 80 tons– and a promised replenishment shipment on the NDL steamer Gotha, coming out of Montevideo with 3,000 tons of coal and spare parts for Dresden’s turbines, was likely not coming. It was clear the time came to end the race.
Ludecke ordered his ship to the closest neutral port, Robinson Crusoe Island, and made ready to intern Dresden under the safety of Chilean supervision, anchoring 500 yards offshore. Informing the Admiralty by coded wireless message of his status, he received “Seine Majestät der Kaiser stellt Ihnen frei, aufzulegen” (“His Majesty the Emperor gives you the freedom to hang up”) in reply.
Last Cruise of Dresden, via Canaris, by Heinz Hohne
On 9 March, Ludecke reported to the local governor at Robinson Crusoe of his intentions, who simply shrugged– he had no police or soldiers to take the cruiser into custody on an island with 45 inhabitants– and said he would send a letter by sail coaster to the mainland for orders how to proceed. In the meantime, Ludecke ordered Dresden’s guns elevated and pointed harmlessly at the island’s dormant volcano, with her steam punt tied to her stern ready to pull her around to face an incoming threat in extremis. With coal so low, shore parties were landed to retrieve wood to burn in the boilers for heat and auxiliary power.
While the Chilean navy three days later dispatched the protected cruisers Esmeralda and Ministro Zenteno to accept Dresden’s passage into internment, it was the British who found her first.
On the foggy morning of 14 March 1915, with many of the German cruiser’s complement ashore, a squadron made up of the cruisers HMS Kent and Glasgow along with the auxiliary cruiser Orama, appeared on the horizon– bird-dogged there by a decrypted wireless signal. Any question of the battle’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. The three British man-o-wars carried a total of 34 6- and 4-inch guns against Dresden’s 10. Nonetheless, as her pinnacle turned Dresden’s scarcely manned battery seaward, her fate was sealed.
SMS Dresden at Juan Fernandez Island, 14 March 1915. The white flag of surrender is flying from the foremast. IWM Q 46021
Capt. John Luce, Glasgow’s skipper, opened fire on Dresden at 3,000 yards despite the fact both ships were inside Chilean territorial waters. He had orders to destroy the German and, having faced off with her unsuccessfully at Coronel and the Falklands, took them seriously. Four minutes into the battle, with Dresden firing all of three rounds, she raised the white flag and struck her colors. Canaris motored out in the pinnacle for parley while Ludecke ordered her scuttled via a mix of open sea valves and torpedo warheads in her magazine.
Within a half hour of Glasgow’s first shot, Dresden capsized to port at 1115 and sank in 230 feet of water. Seven members of her crew were killed, three outright and four from wounds. Another 14 were seriously injured. The British suffered no casualties.
German cruiser Dresden surrendered and on fire after engagement with Royal Navy cruisers at the Battle of Mas a Teierra, March 14, 1915. Library of Congress Lot 9609-20
Sinking off the coast of Chile, 1915. NH 528
Sinking of Dresden, British postcard
Epilogue
Strongly worded notes of protest flew between London, Santiago, and Berlin over the sinking and violation of neutrality.
Most of Dresden’s crew survived the ship’s final battle.
As they were on Chilean territory, they were not picked up by the British as PWs and instead were, awkwardly, interned. After waiting five days on Robinson Caruso Island as guests of the local governor, existing on a cargo of 1,000 lobsters, they were picked up by the tardy Esmeralda and Ministro Zenteno then were deposited on Quinquirina Island, adjacent to Coronel.
The crew from German cruiser Dresden Aboard Chilean Cruiser Esmeralda, German war newspaper, May 1915
Settling into an easy life, funded by the German embassy in Santiago, the men kept chickens and cows, and tended neat gardens. The city of Dresden took up a public subscription for gifts sent to the crew for the Christmas of 1915. Two men died while in exile, one in 1916, and the other in 1917.
Allowed flexible leave periods, many men simply released themselves from their gilded cage, aided by the German naval attaché, KKpt August Moller. Kplts Kurt Nieden and Friedrich Burchardi, along with ObltzS Kurt Hartwig were among the first to leave, the latter arriving in Germany just three months after Dresden’s sinking and, switching to submarine duty, earned a Blue Max as the skipper of SM U-32, sending 44 enemy ships to the bottom including the battleship HMS Cornwallis.
Canaris followed suit. Traveling under a Chilean passport arranged by Moller, “Senior Reed Rosas” arrived in Europe on a Dutch steamer in October 1915, including a stopover at Plymouth. Within a few months, Canaris would be reassigned from the surface fleet to Directorate N, naval intelligence, and, still traveling as Rosas, would proceed to Spain to set up a spy network before joining the U-boat arm himself.
Canaris was a good surface sailor and a better submariner but proved most suited to the role of spymaster, running the Abwehr from 1935-45. Turning against his boss in the end, he perished just before the war was over at the hands of his own countrymen.
Another officer, Lt. Lothar Witzke, his leg broken in the sinking of Dresden, escaped Chilean confinement in early 1916 and, proceeding to California, joined German intelligence and was named as part of the munitions explosions at Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in 1916 and Mare Island in 1917. Subsequently arrested by U.S Army counterintelligence, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not conducted due to the Armistice, and ordered released by President Coolidge in 1923. He was welcomed with an Iron Cross when he returned home. He later, without a shock here, worked for the Abwehr.
The largest group of Dresden sailors to leave Chile, six officers and 45 men led by Lt. Karl Richarz, escaped an old three-master barque, Tinto (137 feet, launched in 1852). They arrived some four months and 12,000 miles later in Germany via Iceland and Norway. This feat was accomplished despite inadequate charts and condemned sails, with a stop (and release) by the British armored cruiser HMS Minotaur as a cherry on top. One of the officers aboard, a young ensign Friedrich Wilhelm Fleischer, would go on to become a vice admiral during WWII only to end that war in a British PW camp. Jack Higgins would borrow the story for the basis of “Storm Warning”albeit changing the date to 1944.
As for Ludecke, Dresden’s final skipper, he remained in exile, reportedly untethered after the loss of his proud ship. He did not return to Germany until the end of 1919. Retained by the Reichsmarine briefly until March 1920, he was the operations officer for the fleet’s sole remaining cruiser squadron’ until he retired at the rank of rear admiral. He passed in 1931, aged 58, having only written briefly of his wartime experience, a chapter in a forgotten 1920s German text.
Ludecke served 30 years in the German Navy. He is seen to the left of Von Spee during the council of the admiral’s skippers at Picton Island on 6 December 1914.
Of Dresden’s other skippers, her Hudson-Fulton commander, Varrentrapp, went on to command the battleships SMS Schleswig Holstein and Konig Albert during WWI, ending the conflict as a rear admiral in charge of the defenses of Wilhelmshaven. He was discharged in 1919 and passed in 1928, aged 60. Erich Köhler, who Lüdecke relieved in July 1914, perished at age 41 aboard Karlsruhe when the ship went down.
One other Dresden crewmember deserves mention. Immediately after the sinking. A rating on Glasgow noticed a pig swimming in the water and succeeded in rescuing him. The crew named said swine “Able Seapig Tirpitz” and he served as their mascot for a year before being transferred for shoreside duty at the Whale Island Gunnery School at Portsmouth.
Late in the war, he was auctioned off for charity but his “trotters” were turned into a carving set delivered to Glasgow while the head was mounted.
Both relics made their way to the Imperial War Museum, where the head is now on display, as Catalog No. EPH 9032 in the First World War Galleries. IWM Q 47559 IWM (Q 20554)
It seemed that almost all of the German cruisers that Dresden sailed with died in battle, the ship something of an albatross for the Kaiserliche Marine.
Besides Karlsruhe, Dresden’s own sister Emden, and the other four cruisers of Von Spee’s squadron, Konigsberg, who she literally bumped into in 1910, would scuttle up the Rufiji River in Africa in July 1915, her crew eventually captured by the British in 1917. Likewise, the old Bremen was sunk in the Baltic by a mine in December 1915. Strassburg, who she patrolled the Balkans with back in 1913, would be sunk at least twice in WWII.
The Japanese only disbanded the Amerika ensei-gun patrol force in May 1915, after Asama was recovered from being grounded off Baja in shallow water. The secondary Tokubetsu nanken shitai had been ordered back to Japan in January 1915 following Von Spee’s death off the Falklands. It was the beginning of the Combined Fleet’s experimentation with squadron operations outside of home waters. It would not be the last.
As for Dresden herself, as Robinson Crusoe gets little traffic, her hull is still there, as are 6-inch shells from Glasgow— the latter embedded in the cliffs behind her final anchorage. Dresden was illegally salvaged several times, likely by “treasure” hunters. Legal expeditions in 1965 and 2006 recovered numerous relics including her binnacle, flags, and her 340-pound ship’s bell. After display in Chile, the latter was sent “home” to a place of honor at the Militärhistorische Museum der Bundeswehr (MHM) in Dresden, unveiled in 2008 on the ship’s 100th birthday.
Schiffsglocke des Kleinen Kreuzers SMS Dresden, Leihgabe der Republik Chile, Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr, Dresden, via Wiki commons
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
***
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
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.
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, March 5, 2025: Poster Child for the Donald Duck Navy
USN 479855
Above we see the PC-461-class 173-foot subchaser USS Chardon (PC-564) underway during fleet exercises on 9 May 1951. The humble gunboat survived an excruciating convoy across the Atlantic during WWII to serve on the beaches at Normandy only to take part in what was the last surface naval action in Europe during the conflict– some 80 years ago this week.
Along the way, she saved hundreds of Joes from perishing on the sea in a bit of a Christmas miracle.
The PC-461 Class
Designed to provide a beefy little sub-buster– similar to Britain’s corvettes and sloops– that could float in shallow enough water (10-foot draft) to perform coastal operations but still have enough sea-keeping abilities and range (4,800 nm at 12 knots) to escort cross-ocean convoys without needing the same anti-ship capabilities as found on patrol frigates and destroyer escorts, the Navy ordered some 400 small submarine chasers based on a modified design of one of the pre-war Experimental Small Craft program’s “X-boats” the diesel-powered USS PC-451.
USS PC-451 was designed in 1938 and commissioned on 12 August 1940. Some 173 feet long, the 270-ton steel hulled diesel-powered subchaser could carry two 3″/50 DP guns, six 20mm guns, two Mk 20 Mousetrap projectors, two depth charge racks, and two K-gun depth charge throwers, all while making nearly 19 knots and just requiring a 65-man crew.
The follow-on PC-461 went a bit heavier and, carrying twin 1,440 bhp diesel engines, could break 22 knots (when clean) and tote essentially the same armament, and ship out with QHA sonar (as well as small set SF or SO or SCR-517A radars after 1942).
PC-461 was laid down in July 1941– just five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor– and eventually, some 343 of her class would be constructed by March 1945 across 13 small shipyards, all non-traditional to the Navy.
Camouflage Measure 32, Design 12P drawing prepared by the Bureau of Ships for a camouflage scheme intended for application to 173-foot submarine chasers (labeled on the drawing as PC-578 class). This plan, approved by Captain Torvald A. Solberg, USN, is dated 19 July 1944. It shows the ship’s starboard side, exposed decks, and the superstructure ends. 19-N-73643
USS PC-483 is underway in a Navy Kodachrome. Note the ship’s camouflage pattern. 80-GK-00428_001
USS PC-546 underway off the U.S. East Coast, circa 1942. Interestingly, these ships carried a false stack, as the diesel exhaust was routed through the hull sides. 80-G-K-13278
USS PC-546 from the stern.
Another stern shot of the 546 boat, note her thin 23-foot beam, welded hull, and already thinning hull black applied in a rush, sloppy fashion.
USS PC-472 underway near Hampton Roads, Virginia, 31 August 1942. Note her armament layout including a 3″/50 forward, another aft, two 20mm Oerlikons on the bridge wings, two stern DC racks, and two K guns. NH 96481
The PC-461s were some of the smallest U.S. Navy ships to carry a legit sonar listening set.
Undergoing a course of instruction with Naval sonar equipment aboard the USS PC 592 are two Naval Reservists, Seaman First Class F.C. Semkin and Apprentice Seaman G.S. Jackson, Naval Base, SC. Accession #: L55-03
Depth Charges (probably Mk. 6 type) mounted on a “K-gun” projector, and on ready service holders, on the stern of a 173-foot submarine chaser (pc). Taken at the sub-chaser training center, Miami, Florida, 11 May 1942. Note depth charge racks in the background. 80-G-16048
Depth Charge explodes in the wake of a U.S. Navy submarine chaser (PC) during World War II. The photo was taken before April 1944. The 173s could carry as many as 30 depth charges, with a cumulative “throw” of some 5 tons of high explosives. 80-G-K-13753
Submarine chasers and crew. (PC-483, 461, 466), Key West. As the number of AAA guns expanded, crews would grow to as many as 80 officers and enlisted, against a planned complement of 65. 80-GK-00427_001
A motor whaleboat was carried amidships along with a small crane to launch and recover it.
USS PC-620 is seen in Key West in this LIFE Kodachrome. Note her whaleboat, crane, after 3″/50, and depth charges galore.
“Easy Does It!” Crewmen of A 173-foot submarine Chaser (PC) stowing their craft’s dory, after hoisting it from the water, circa 1942. Note Camouflage paint on the boat. The photo was received from the Third Naval District on 17 May 1943. 80-G-K-16426
The PC-461sranged far and wide, seeing service in every theatre. Four (PC 566, PC 565, PC 624, and PC 619) claimed kills on German U-boats, two (PC 487 and PC 1135) with sinking Japanese fleet boats, three (PC 558, PC 626, and PC 477) with scratching German and Japanese midget subs, two (PC 545 and PC 627) with killing Italian torpedo boats, and two (PC 1129 and PC 1123) with stopping Japanese suicide boats.
“USS PC 565 shown a short time after sinking German U-boat, U-521, with a depth charge, only the Commanding Officer escaped. The vessel fell away from his feet as he climbed out of the conning tower, June 2, 1943.” 80-G-78408
When it comes to the butcher’s bill, six PC-461 class sisters were lost to a combination of enemy action and accidents during WWII while another 24 were seriously damaged.
Meet PC-564
Laid down on 25 January 1942 by the Consolidated Shipbuilding Co. in the Bronx (Morris Heights) PC-564 launched on 12 April and was commissioned on 2 July. In all, her construction spanned just 158 days, including the commissioning ceremony.
The Donald Duck Navy
Assigned to the Atlantic, our little subchaser spent the bulk of the next two years on unsung routine coastal patrol and escort duty, typically out of New York.
That is, after she passed out of shakedown and skills training at the U.S. Navy Subchaser School in Miami. It was there that her crew left a lasting impact on the school, with one of her crew, Signalman Jim Dickie, doodled a sort of fighting version of Donald Duck, complete with a depth charge Y-gun strapped to his back, a flag on his stern, listening gear, a “PC” brassard, and binos.
The combat duck insignia made it to PC-564′s crow’s-nest and the school personnel liked it so much it became the unofficial emblem of the SCTC.
The Donald Duck Navy insignia Mary Mclssac Collection. HistoryMiami. 2001-421-33N
In addition to dodging U-boats along the eastern sea frontier, the sea proved dangerous to our little patrol craft, with three men swept from her decks in the mountainous seas of Tropical Storm Seven off Cape Hatteras on 29/30 September 1943 while escorting a coastal convoy. SA Richard Tull (06508483) was never seen again while CBM John Black was amazingly tossed back on deck by a subsequent wave. The third man, RM Daniel Riley, was pulled from the cold embrace of the Atlantic by EM3 Norman Scaffe who wrapped a line around his waist and went after him, earning a well-deserved Navy and Marine Corps Medal.
PC-564′s first skipper was Lt. Roland H. Cramer, USNR, who left the ship eight months later to commission a new sister, USS PC-1079, then left that ship six months later to command the destroyer escort USS Riddle (DE 185).
Her second skipper, Harvard-educated lawyer Lt. Alban “Stormy” Weber, USNR, likewise rotated out by June 1943 to command a tin can in the Pacific, leaving her to a third commander, NYC-born Lt. Seabury Marsh, USNR.
The Goofiest convoy
It was Marsh that pulled the short straw to join TF-67 in Convoy NY‑78, perhaps the most unusual Atlantic convoy of the war. As detailed in a past Warship Wednesday (Slow Going), NY-78 included 34 large (250 feet on average) NYC railway car barges specially modified into “Pickabacks” to make the voyage, which would be desperately needed to move ammo to the beaches on D-Day. Also, part of the convoy was two dozen tugs that would remain in Europe for Overlord and 11 other subchasers which were needed to work as control and support boats just off the surf line during the landings.
The pickaback convoy, Aug 1945 Popular Science
TF-67 wallowed 25 days from late March to mid-April on the 3,400nm trek from New York to Plymouth that averaged just under six knots! PC-564’s war diary for the period has her primarily chasing down loose barges, running ASW sonar lookouts, and acting as the convoy’s mail ship.
D-Day
The dozen 173-foot subchasers brought over in the convoy formed PC Squadron One and served as shepherds to 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. Often while sidestepping German E-boats, midget subs, fire from shore batteries, mines, and aircraft, their war was one of up-close and sudden death.
Marsh would command PC-564during the operation, leaving Portland Harbor, England at 0300 on 5 June, D-1, to function as the guide for Convoy Group 2 (O-2A), “riding herd” over the LCT flotillas in the convoy in the rough weather to the assembly area. On D-Day the next morning, she was assigned to function as a control vessel at Easy Red Sector, Omaha Beach, for Assault Group O-3, riding in with the 20th wave to the line of departure.
‘Easy Red Sector’, Omaha Beach – approx. 0700 on the 6th of June 1944. Men of Easy Company, the 2nd battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, US Army 1st Division hide under Czech Hedgehogs while under fire during fighting during the Landing at Normandy.
The afternoon of 6 June saw PC-564 standing as part of the ASW/anti-E-boat screen off Omaha Beach, a role she maintained until 1800 on the 7th. Over that night, 12 enemy planes were reportedly shot down near her line.
Normandy Invasion, June 1944, USS Ancon (AGC-4), command ship for the Omaha Beach landings, stands offshore on 7 June 1944. USS PC-564 is in the foreground. 80-G-257287
On the evening of 7 June, she was ordered by USS Ancon (AGC-4), the command ship for Omaha Beach, to proceed to Easy White Beach to serve as a control vessel there, closing to the two-fathom curve where she experienced several enemy shells landing close-by. She would maintain her position off Easy White, directing incoming and outgoing vessel traffic, until dark on 12 June when she was dispatched to ASW/E-boat screen duties to T.G. 122.4 just offshore through the 17th.
Leopoldville
Marsh left PC-564 in late 1944, his place taken by Lt. James E Spencer, USNR.
When the troop transport HMTS Leopoldville, packed with men of the U.S. 66th (“Panther”) Infantry Division, was torpedoed just five miles short of her destination on Christmas Eve 1944, PC-564 was one of the ships that went to her immediate assistance. Spencer ordered her to close with the much larger ship in the darkness, and, throwing lines over, tied up as Leopoldville settled slowly into the water, taking men aboard until the dying troopship threatened to drag the subchaser to the bottom with her.
HMS Brilliant came alongside and rescued about 500 soldiers, while the other escorts pursued the submarine. The U.S. tug ATR-3 reached SS Leopoldville from Cherbourg in time to rescue 69 soldiers, and PC-564 and PT-461 also contributed to the rescue of a further 1,400 U.S. soldiers.
As recalled by Thomas Kay, a British DEMS gun layer on one of Leopoldville’s 3-inch HA gun that found himself in the frigid water unexpectedly:
When I hit the water the red light on my life jacket lit up and I kept on swimming as hard as I could go. I stopped once to look back, there was a crowd of men near and behind me. I saw the bows of the Leopoldville sticking up in the air and men dropping off her like flies. I turned away and kept on swimming hard for a while, then as I looked around me, I seemed to be quite alone.
I must have been in the water about 15 minutes or so, I really couldn’t tell, when a PT boat came alongside me. I later learnt it was the PC 564. It had a scrambling net hanging over the side and I grabbed hold of part of the net, but I could neither climb up or let go of the net I was so exhausted. I was rising and falling with the swell on the sea and the rise and fall of the ship. Two American sailors came down the net and somehow dragged me up it. I was so exhausted I collapsed in a heap on a canvas on the deck and one of the sailors said to me “don’t’ lie there buddy” and lifted the corner of the sheet up and I could see two or three dead bodies underneath in army gear.
They half carried me to a short steel ladder, took me down and put me in a bunk. I thought it was a sick bay at the time but later learned it was an officer’s cabin and I had been put in the bunk of Lt. Wesley Johnson, an officer on the ship.
The Granville Raid
With the war in Europe in its last act, just eight weeks before VE-Day, VADM Fredrich Huffmeier, late of the battleship Scharnhorst, was in charge of the isolated German garrison in the occupied Channel Islands, a command that would not capitulate until after the war. Looking to keep Allied forces tied down, he ordered Kpltn. Carl-Friedrich Mohr to sea with a motley force of 600 troops crammed into six minesweepers, three AAA barges (Artilleriefährprahms), three motor launches, and a tugboat with an aim to raid the French coast for sorely needed coal. With escapees from the POW camp at Granville providing intel, that harbor was chosen as the easy target.
Lt. Percy Sandel Jr, USNR, the 30-year-old son of Judge Percy Sandel of Monroe, Louisiana, was in command of PC-564 at the time. Our subchaser was the only American warship in Granville harbor crowded with Allied merchant ships other than the Royal Navy anti-submarine trawler HMT Pearl (T 22), which was armed with just a single old 4-inch gun and was set to escort British colliers back to Plymouth in the morning.
Asdic trawler HMT Pearl (ex-Dervish). She did not make contact with the German forces other than to fire star shells. IWM FL 17276
Things got squirrely just before midnight on 8/9 March 1945.
At 2315 hours, the radioman on PC-564, which was on patrol off Granville, picked up an alert for his ship. The radio station blurted out the positions of three radar contacts between the islands of Chausey and Jersey. After they tracked and identified them as German, they sent orders to the PC to intercept them. Percy Sandel, USNR, the Skipper of PC 564, rang General Quarters. The PC charged toward the contacts. After a series of radar and navigational plots to intercept the largest, the captain commanded, “All ahead two-thirds.”
At a range of 4,500 yards, Sandel ordered the crew on the three-inch gun to illuminate the targets. The night sky flashed to brilliance as PC 564 fired three star shells over the enemy ships. Fear raced through the men on the bridge as they stared at the sight of three German gunboats knowing that even one gunboat had them outgunned.
Seconds later, a star shell from the German ships burst over the PC.
The PC opened fire and after one round from the main gun it jammed. The German ships opened up with their larger guns, and their shells pounded the PC. A few minutes later a German 8.8 cm shell bored through the bridge of the PC and exploded. The blast, heat, and flying metal struck down all hands on the bridge, killing all but one person. As sailors raced to fight the fire another shell tore through the chart house. A third round splintered the ship’s boat. Then, German shells riddled the 40mm gun tub and crew. Motor Machinist’s Mate 2/C Elmer “Scrappie” Hoover tumbled from his post as pointer. Shrapnel had riddled his body and splintered many of his bones. His buddies lashed him to a bomb rack as the ship rolled in the heavy sea. Bodies sprawled about the deck and the bridge.
Because of the severe damage to the engine room, the steady roar of the PC’s diesel engines faded to silence. The Skipper ordered the men to standby to abandon ship. Sailors scurried about the deck twisting tourniquets, wrapping bandages, and shooting morphine into shivering men with legs and arms bloodied and dangling or blown away. Below decks, the engineers lit off the engines again. Under the direction of Lt Sandel and Lt. Russell Klinger, the ship plowed ahead for the shore. It ground onto the rocks of La Baie du Verger near Cancale. Larry Jordan, Seaman Ist Class, wrote, “‘I never knew that land could look so good in all my life, but boy! That was the most beautiful land that ever looked at!”
The shells of the German gunboats killed fourteen men. wounded eleven and left fourteen missing. Dazed survivors who heard only the last words of the captain, “abandon ship,” jumped into the frigid water. From there they watched as Sandel, steering by hand, beached the heavily damaged ship. German sailors on the E-boat scooped up some of the men, who had gone overboard, before the ship ran aground. Those PC sailors ended the war in a German prison camp. A small group of men swam or went hand over hand along a line from the beached PC to shore. Though unable to speak French, they raised help from a French doctor and fishermen who went to rescue and care for the men still on the grounded ship.
Sandel’s damage report:
Shell through the Pilothouse exploded inside causing extensive fire damage.
Mast Damaged by shrapnel
Hull and deck have extensive damage due to shell holes and shrapnel.
Shell through deck at base of Pilothouse
Minor damage to 40mm gun, tub full of holes
Depth Charge release gear inoperative
Steam lines broken, electric cables cut.
Shell exploded in small boat, boat cut in half
Starboard rudder missing
Port rudder badly damaged
Both props badly damaged
Starboard strut shaft missing
Casualties: 2 Officers and 12 men dead, 11 men wounded, 12 men missing out of a crew of 5 officers and 60 men. At least five of those lost are buried at the Brittany American Cemetery, Montjoie Saint Martin, France.
The Germans lost one ship during the raid, the 224-foot M1940-class large minesweeper M-412, which had run aground in shallow waters and evacuated, was scuttled in place.
Commander, U. S. Naval Forces, France, endorsed the fight of PC-564 against hopeless odds at Granville as “The PC 564 closed the enemy rapidly, engaged vigorously, and did her best to break up the attack. The resultant loss of life and injuries to personnel is to be regretted, but the courage of the Captain and his crew was of a high order.”
VADM Laurence DuBose, chief of staff and aide to the commander, Naval Forces Europe under ADM Harold Stark, in May 1945 further endorsed Sandel’s report from Granville by saying, “The Commanding Officer displayed courage in fortitude in bringing superior enemy force to action. This action delayed and shortened the enemy’s subsequent activities in Granville.”
Beached on the French coast at the Pierre de Herpin Lighthouse, PC-564 was later salvaged and towed to Amphibious Base Plymouth, England, where she was repaired by late April and returned under her own power to the states. After more extensive overhaul on the East Coast, in June 1945 she was assigned to the Commander, Submarine Force in New London, Connecticut to serve as an ASW asset for new boats.
Cold War
Postwar, PC-564 was dispatched to Pearl Harbor where she was placed in service as a Naval Reserve Training vessel and general district craft assigned to the 14th Naval District. While stationed there, she was named Chadron on 15 February 1956, one of 102 sisters who lasted long enough to earn a name.
She is likely named for the small maple syrup-rich Ohio town established in 1812, with a slim runner-up being Anthony Chardon, a French exile and American patriot in Philadelphia who hobnobbed with Thomas Jefferson– he provided the wallpaper for Monticello– and whose image is in the Navy’s collection.
Her time at Pearl was spent in a series of training evolutions for reservists and as a guard and exercise asset for COMSUBPAC’s boats, as detailed in this log entry from January 1957:
She was decommissioned and stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 1 November 1962 at Honolulu, as directed by the CNO in 1561P43 and placed in the reserve fleet.
Picking up a Taegeukgi
Ex-Chadron was transferred to the Republic of Korea on 22 January 1964 at Guam as Seoraksan (PC 709), seen in Janes at the time as Sol Ak.
Ultimately, the U.S. Navy transferred another five PC-461s to the ROKN during the Korean War– no cash required!
Three were lost to assorted causes and the three remaining of these PCs were retired in the 1960s and replaced by Chadron and two sisters– ex-USS Winnemucca (PC 1145), and ex-USS Grosse Pointe (PC 1546)– again giving the South Koreans a three-pack of PC-461s on patrol into 1975, by which time they were replaced by a six-pack of larger (1500-ton, 306-foot) Rudderow-class destroyer escorts.
Notably while in ROKN service, Chadron/Seoraksan on 10 November 1964, she rescued the South Korean trawler Changseong-ho, which had been captured by a North Korean patrol boat. Then, on 12 April 1965, while patrolling the East Sea, rescued and towed the fishing boat Songjin-ho, which was drifting due to engine failure, a feat she repeated on 22 July 1968 with the drifting trawler Choi Chang-ho.
ROK 173-foot class via Jane’s 1974.
Epilogue
Little remains of our subject.
Of her skippers, Alban “Stormy” Weber retired as a rear admiral and passed in 2007. He joined with other PC-564 crewmembers including Lt. Wesley Johnson, whose bunk the rescued British gunner from Leopoldville used, to form the Patrol Craft Sailors Association in 1987. Once some 3,000 strong in 1998, it is increasingly sunsetting with the end of the Greatest Generation.
Weber was preceded by Seabury Marsh, PC-564‘s skipper on the slow-going NY-78 Convoy, and during Overlord, who passed in New York in 1973, aged 63. Likewise, Percy Sandel Jr., who commanded her during the one-sided battle at Granville, passed in Louisiana in 1994, aged 80. James Spencer, who commanded her for the Leopoldville rescue, faded into history. I cannot find where he was even decorated for his role in the debacle, one that was classified for decades.
The “disposable” PC-461 class, besides the U.S. and ROK navies, served under the flags of more than 20 other countries. They remained in service around the globe until the late 1980s when the last two in active, ex-USS Susanville (PC 1149) and ex-USS Hanford (PC 1142), were retired by Taiwan.
Some 40,000 bluejackets sailed on the PCs during the “Big Show” and immediately after. The chronicle of their war is the out-of-print 400-page PC Patrol Craft of World War II: A History of the Ships and Their Crews by William J. Veigele, a former PC sailor, first published in 1998.
It’s a good read if you can find it
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
***
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 like this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International
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.
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, Feb. 26, 2025: Walking the Beat
National Museum of Denmark photo THM-6216
Above we see the Danish inspektionsskibet— classed as a “fishery cruiser” at the time in Jane’s— Fyllain rough seas on her patrol route, likely off Iceland, in the late 1920s.
Armed with a pair of 4.7-inch guns and another set of 6-pounders, she replaced Denmark’s only proper cruiser just after the Great War but started her life under service to a different king.
The “Cabbage” Class
When the British slammed into the largest naval war in history up to that time, the Royal Navy found themselves in urgent need of small purpose-built fleet escorts and minesweepers and a class of ultimately 112 vessels in five distinct groups ordered under the Emergency War Programme would prove suitable to both needs.
British Flower (Arabis) class minesweeping sloop HMS Wisteria IWM SP 827
The so-called Flower or Cabbage-class minesweeping sloops were triple hulled forward to allow them survivability when working minefields or dodging torpedoes but still constructed to merchant rather than naval standards, allowing them to be produced quickly (typically in just five months from keel laying to delivery) by commercial yards while Royal Dockyards and the like could be left to the business of building “proper” warships for the Grand Fleet.
All were 250 feet long at the waterline (267 oal), with a simple two-boiler/one engine-screw-funnel power plant good for at least 15 knots. Designed to carry two medium-sized (3, 4, or 4.7-inch) and two light (3-pounder/47mm or 6-pounder/57mm) guns, there was much variation through the builds. Allowance was made for mechanical minesweeping gear, although not all were fitted with it.
The Flowers were built in five sub-classes spanning three in the original “slooper” format: 36 Arabis (sloop-sweepers with 2×4.7″/40 QF, 2×3-pdr/47mm), 12 Azalea (sloop-sweepers with 2×4″/40 QF, 2×3-pdr/47mm), 12 Acacia (sloop-sweepers with 2×12-pdr/3″ QF, 2×3-pdr/47mm) and two as “Warship Q” vessels: 12 Aubrietia (Q-ships with 2x 4″ guns, 1×3-pdr/47mm, depth charge throwers), and 28 Anchusa (Q-ships with 2x 4″ guns, 2x 12-pdr/3″ guns, depth charge throwers).
Arabis-class sloops of the Flower typeNo less than 15 yards built the Cabbages including Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson, Wallsend; Earle’s Shipbuilding & Engineering Co, Kingston upon Hull; Scotts Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, Greenock; Barclay Curle & Company, Whiteinch; Lobnitz & Company, Renfrew; Charles Connell and Company, Scotstoun; Napier & Miller, Old Kilpatrick; Archibald McMillan & Son, Dumbarton; Greenock & Grangemouth Dockyard Company, Greenock; Bow, McLachlan and Company, Paisley; William Simons & Company, Renfrew; D. & W. Henderson & Company, Glasgow; Workman, Clark and Company, Belfast; Richardson, Duck and Company, Thornaby-on-Tees; and Dunlop Bremner & Company, Port Glasgow.
Meet Asphodel
Named for the lily connected via Greek legend to the dead and the underworld, our sloop, HMS Asphodel, was one of six Cabbages (five Arabis type) built by D. & W. Henderson in Glasgow alongside the yard’s bread and butter– War Standard “A” tramp ships.
Asphodel was D&W Hull No. 498, completed with a T3Cy 22½”36½”60″x27″ 180psi 2,000ihp engine, launched 21 December 1915 and commissioned 28 January 1916, with CDR Reginald Gay Copleston, R.N., Retired List, as her first skipper. Copleston, who had voluntarily moved to the Retired List in 1911 after 15 years of service, was the Librarian at the Royal Naval War College when the War started. Asphodel was his first seagoing command since the old Apollo-class second-class protected cruiser HMS Sirius in 1909.
Ordered to the Mediterranean, Asphodel sailed into Alexandria on 19 March to join the East Indies and Egypt force under VADM John Michael de Robeck, First Baronet. There, she joined several other sloops including several sisters (HMS Amaryllis, Cornflower, Nigella, Verbena, and Valerian) supporting the old Majestic-class pre-dreadnoughts HMS Hannibal and Jupiter along with five monitors and seven cruisers.
A grey-painted HMS Jupiter in Grand Harbour, Valletta, Malta, March 1915. Jupiter, which joined the fleet in 1897, left the Med in November 1916 and paid off at Devonport to provide crews for antisubmarine vessels. Hannibal, who had given up her main battery of four BL 12-inch Mark VIII guns to arm the monitors HMS Prince Eugene and HMS Sir John Moore, would endure until 1919. Photo by Surgeon Oscar Parkes. IWM SP 77.
Asphodel had a quiet life, as she was typically used as a fleet messenger on the 1,000-mile run between Alexandria and Malta, leaving once a week for a round-trip back and forth, with Hannibal listing her arriving and departing in her logs over 200 times across the next 42 months.
Fleet Messengers at Malta: HMS Asphodel and HMS Ivy. By Frank Mason. IWM ART 3109
Copleston commanded Asphodel until being appointed Commander of Patrols, Malta on 18 August 1917, replaced by the younger CDR James Charles Wauhope, formerly of the unsuccessful Q-ship HMS Carrigan Head (Q4) out of Queenstown. Wauhope would command her for the remainder of her RN career.
Asphodel was assigned to the newly-formed Twelfth Sloop Flotilla in June 1918, a force that grew to as large as 19 such vessels.
She outlasted her consort Hannibal, which was paid off for disposal in Malta on 25 October 1919, and left Malta with her own paying off pennant in December 1919, bound for decommissioning on 27 April 1920 and storage in the Home Isles pending disposal.
Asphodel, as far as I can, tell never saw combat during WWI but she did lose three men at once– all outbound to the Devonport Naval Dockyard– drowned in Malta on 2 April 1918. They are among the 351 Commonwealth Great War burials in Malta’s Capuccini/Kalkara Naval Cemetery.
ADAMS, Charles W, Able Seaman, J 17911
CARROLL, John, Petty Officer 1c, 190285
GREEN, Cyril G, Armourer’s Mate, M 5081
A fourth Asphodel man, Able Seaman John Browning Smale, 21, died in an accident on 5 October 1918 and is buried with his shipmates at Capuccini.
The war was not otherwise kind to the Cabbages, with eight lost while on Q-ship duty and four on more traditional naval work, with Asphodel’s direct sisters HMS Arabis sunk by German torpedo boats off the Dogger Bank in 1916, HMS Primula sent to the bottom in the Med by SM U-35, and HMS Genista sunk by SM U-57 in the Atlantic the same year.
Post-war, most were paid off, sold either to the breakers or for mercantile use in the early 1920s and the few kept around were hulked as drill ships for the RNVR or tasked with ancillary uses such as fisheries patrol.
A few went on to be sold or donated to other governments, as military aid. This included HMS Zinnia heading to the Belgian Navy as a fishery protection vessel, HMS Pentstemon becoming the Chinese gunboat Hai Chow, HMS Gladiolus and HMS Jonquil becoming the Portuguese “cruisers” NRP República and NRP Carvalho Araújo, and HMS Geranium heading down south to become HMAS Geranium.
HMAS Geranium, 1930s. SLV 9916498703607636
This brings us to Asphodel’s second career.
Danish Service
For some 30 years, the Danes made steady use of the British-built 3,000-ton krydserkorvetten (cruiser corvette) Valkyrien, a close cousin of the Armstrong-built Chilean protected cruiser Esmeralda. She cruised the world and waved the Dannebrog as far away as Siam and Hong Kong and is most notable for overseeing the Danish West Indies (Virgin Islands) to the U.S. in 1917.
The white-hulled Valkyrien in the harbor at St. Thomas as the Danish flag comes down in the Virgin Islands, 31 March 1917. Behind her is the Danish-flag-flying grey-hulled transport USS Hancock (AP-5), which carried American Marines to the islands for the transfer. DH009717
Denmark’s only true cruiser, by the early 1920s, the ram-bowed Valkyrien was hopelessly obsolete and needed replacement.
However, after a wartime mobilization that saw the Danish military swell to over 75,000 and construct the 23 km-long Tunestillingen line of defenses near Copenhagen, the Danish fishing and merchant marine fleets had to absorb the losses of more than 324 ships to both sides during the conflict, and the economic burden of the reunification of economically depressed Southern Jutland (Northern Schleswig) from Weimar Germany in 1920, the Danes were flat broke and had little appetite for more military spending.
This led the government to the bargain basement deal that was HMS Asphodel.
A good deal lighter than the Valkyrien (1,250 tons vs 3,000) as our sloop had zero armor plating other than the shields of her main guns, she was nonetheless the same length (267 feet oal) while a lighter draft (11 feet vs 18 feet) allowed her to enter more colonial ports and harbors. While Asphodel only carried two 4.7-inch guns and another pair of 6-pounders, Valkyrien by 1915 only carried two aging 5.86″/32s and six 3″/55s. But the substantial savings was in crew, with Valkyrien requiring a minimum of 200 men even in light peacetime service (albeit allowing space for another 100 cadets), while Asphodel could be placed in full service with only 75 men in her complement.
As a no-brainer, the surplus ex-Asphodel was acquired for her value in scrap metal from the Admiralty in June 1920 and then sent for an overhaul at Orlogsværftets in Copenhagen.
Following her last summer cruise to Greenland and Iceland in 1921, Valkyrien was laid up in 1923 and sold for scrap the next year. Her spot was taken by the newly dubbed Fylla— the fourth Danish warship to carry the name, with the first two being sail-powered frigates (fregaten) completed in 1802 and 1812, respectively.
The name had previously been carried by an Orlogsværftets-built 8-gunned steam-powered armored schooner that joined the Danish fleet in 1863– just in time to fight the Germans– but spent her career cruising as a station ship in the Danish West Indies and around the Faroes, Greenland, and Iceland.
The third Danish warship Fylla, a 157-foot armored schooner launched in 1862 and decommissioned in 1894, accomplished several polar mapping and exploration cruises, leaving at least one geographic feature named after her in Greenland. She was kept as a pier side trainer and barracks ship for another decade, scrapped in 1903. The name comes from an old Norse verb which means roughly to fill or complete. THM-18183
She was rearmed at least thrice in her career, shifting from 60- and 30-pounder muzzle-loading smoothbore cannons to 3-inch rifled breechloaders in her final form. THM-18182
Our Fylla’s first Danish skipper was CDR Prince Axel, a swashbuckling 32-year-old grandson of King Christian IX of Denmark and at the time the fourth in line to the throne. Axel, who nursed a love of sports, flying, and fast cars his whole life, was a career naval officer, having joined the service in 1909 and cut his teeth on numerous Danish coastal battleships including tense Great War neutrality patrols threading the needle between the British and the Germans, later becoming one of the Danish Navy’s first aviators. In 1918, he led the Danish Naval Mission to America and returned to Europe in company with the dynamic Assistant SECNAV, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Axel had married a popular Swedish princess in 1919 and had only narrowly avoided an effort to draft him to fill a nascent throne in newly independent Finland.
Her inaugural cruise in late 1920 was captured in photos.
Fylla riding light with signal flags, THM-3927
Fylla off Godthab, Greenland, 27 September 1920 ES-167772
Fylla at anchor off Iceland THM-13968
Inspection ship Fylla returning around 1920 from her first patrol THM-41465
Fylla typically was employed as the station ship in Iceland and would patrol the Faeroes to the southeast and Greenland to the northwest as well, with the occasional visits to Holland, England, and Norway.
At the time, the Danes only had two smaller inspection ships on the same beat and they were significantly older and less well-armed: Island Falk (entered fleet 1906, 730 tons, 183 feet oal, 13 knots, 2×3″ guns) and Besytteren (entered fleet 1900, 450 tons, 142 feet oal, 11 knots, 2x57mm guns), so Fylla was the queen of the overseas fleet.
Postcard Reykjavik, harbor area with, among others, the inspection ship Fylla, circa 1926
English trawler Lord Ernle who had lost its propeller, was taken in tow by Fylla in the Denmark Strait and towed to Reykjavik, in the summer of 1931. THM-6220
Fylla raising ensign circa 1933. Note her stern 4.7″ gun THM-18491
Fylla, THM-18471
Fylla, THM-18477
Fylla, with a 20mm Madsen AAA gun fitted late in her career THM-18849
Fylla in Icelandic waters 1920s via Sapur, Icelandic National Museum
Fylla in Icelandic waters 1920s via Sapur, Icelandic National Museum
She would carry King Christian X to the Faeroe Islands and Iceland in June 1930, one of the first visits by a sitting Danish monarch to the far-flung Atlantic colonies. On the return leg, escorting the coastal battleship ship Niels Juel, the ships visited Oslo and saluted King Haakon VII.
Niels Juel and Fylla in Oslo, Norway July 7, 1930. The paintings show the Danish coastal defense ship Niels Juel (left) and the gunboat Fylla saluting the Norwegian King in Olso. The two vessels carried the Danish king Christian X to the Faeroe Islands and Iceland from June 1930, so this visit must have been on their way home to Copenhagen. Benjamin Olsen seems to have been part of the entourage. By Benjamin Olsen 1930 via the Forsvarsgalleriet.
She was graceful enough in Danish service that she caught the eye of maritime artist Christian Benjamin Olsen who captured her in at least three of his period works, several of which are in the Royal Danish Naval Museum in Copenhagen. Of note, Olsen visited the Faroe Islands and Iceland in 1921, 1926, and 1930, having frequent chances to see Fylla in action.
Inspektionsskibet Fylla at sea by Christian Benjamin Olsen
Inspektionsskibet Fylla off Iceland by Christian Benjamin Olsen
However, all good things come to an end. When the two large new aircraft-equipped inspection ships, Hvidbjornen (1,050 t, 196 feet oal, 2x87mm, 1 floatplane, 14 knots, circa 1928) and Ingolf (1,180 t, 213 feet oal, 2×4.7″/45, 1 floatplane, 16.5 knots, circa 1932), were ordered in the late 1920s/early 1930s, the need to retain the aging Fylla was removed.
At that, Fylla was withdrawn from service in 1933, disarmed, and sold for scrap.
Epilogue
Little remains of our subject.
Of her RN skippers, Copleston returned to England after the war and reverted to the Retired List in December 1918. A cricketer from a family of cricketers, he died in Devon in 1960, aged 85.
Meanwhile, the younger CDR James Charles Wauhope would post-Armistice volunteer for transfer to the Royal Australian Navy from which he would retire in 1929. Returning to England pre-war after working a claim in the Wewak goldfield in New Guinea for years, he rejoined the RN in WWII, ultimately serving as Naval Officer in Charge, Stornoway. Capt. Wauhope died a pauper in General Hospital Paddington, London in 1960, aged 76.
The Royal Navy commissioned a second HMS Asphodel, appropriately a Flower-class corvette (K56) in September 1940. She was sunk on 10 March 1944 off Cape Finisterre by U-575, with only five survivors.
Flower class Corvette HMS Asphodel K56 under tow on the Tyne, circa 1943, IWM FL 1109
Fylla’s first Danish skipper, Prince Axel, continued his military service albeit from a desk and was appointed a rear admiral on the naval staff in 1939. He was also simultaneously the director of the Danish East Asiatic Company shipping concern from 1934 to 1953 and had previously commanded the 8,100-ton SS Alsia under the EAC flag. During the war, although under surveillance by the Gestapo, he reportedly endorsed the scuttling of the Danish fleet in 1943 to keep it out of German hands, and quietly blessed the work of EAC’s fleet-at-large in Allied service– with the company losing at least six ships during the conflict. He also cultivated contacts with several of the Danish resistance groups. Promoted to a perfunctory full admiral in 1958, his youngest son, Prince Fleming, a naval cadet in 1945, served on active duty with the Danish Navy for several years as a submariner. Axel passed in 1964, aged 75, and was buried in his naval uniform.
Prince Flemming Valdemar (L), son of Prince Axel, cousin of King Christian X of Denmark, with members of the Danish Resistance in Copenhagen Denmark – 7-9 May 1945. Note Flemming is armed with a Swedish M37/39 Suomi SMG, the resistance member behind him has a Sten Mk II SMG. IWM – Pelman, L (Lt) Photographer. IWM A 28475
The Danes commissioned a fourth Fylla, a 1,700-ton Aalborg-built inspection ship (F351) that entered the fleet in 1963. She served until 1991.
Inspection ship F351 Fylla, 1986, in Greenland’s Prins Christians Sund med Ministerflag
Of Asphodel/Fylla‘s 111 sister Cabbages, a dozen had been lost in the Great War, one (HMS Valerian) was lost at sea in a hurricane off Cuba in 1926, one sunk by the Japanese in 1937 (ex-HMS Pentstemon/Hai Chow), at least three (ex-HMS Buttercup/Teseo, HMS Laburnum, and HMS Cornflower) were sunk in WWII. The last in RN service– and the last active coal-burner on the Admiralty List– HMS Rosemary, had been a fishery protection ship interbellum then was pressed into service as an escort during WWII, was only sent to the breakers in 1947.
Just one Cabbage is believed to remain, the Anchusa group Q-ship HMS Saxifrage, which continued to serve as RNVR President from 1922 through 1982 as a moored drillship sans guns or engines. Sold to private interests, she has changed hands several times in the past few decades and, carrying a wild dazzle paint scheme, is currently owned by a charitable trust that is seeking to preserve her. Laid up at Chatham Dock with much of her topside razed, she may not be around much longer.
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
***
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 like this column, please consider joining the International Naval Research Organization (INRO), Publishers of Warship International
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.
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, Feb. 19, 2025: Scary Freddy
U.S. Army Signal Corps image 111-SC-41480-ac by Enrique Muller, National Archives Identifier 55242086.
Above we see the 16,000-ton Norddeutscher Lloyd liner SS Prinz Eitel Friedrich, in her 1918 dazzle camouflage warpaint as USS DeKalb (ID-3010), steaming with a bone in her teeth with what appears to be the New York City skyline behind her. At this time in her career, she carried a decent armament worthy of a cruiser.
Just three years earlier, she actually was a German (Hilfs) cruiser and had just claimed the first American ship lost during the Great War.
Meet the Prinz
Our subject is the second liner named for Prince Wilhelm Eitel Friedrich Christian Karl of Prussia, the second son of Emperor Wilhelm II, a generally unhappy and unsuccessful man whose career is beyond the scope of this post.
Of note, HAPAG had already named a smaller (4650 GRT) single-funnel steamer after him in 1902.
Ours was much more grand.
Ordered in 1901 from the fine Teutonic shipbuilding firm of Aktien-Gesellschaft Vulcan, Stettin, the NDL-owned and operated Reich postal steamer (Reichspostdampfer) Prinz Eitel Friedrich was completed in September 1904. She was constructed alongside the Deutschland-class battleship SMS Pommern and Bremen-class cruisers SMS Hamburg and SMS Lübeck.
A larger version of the preceding Feldherren class of liners– eleven 469-foot/9,000 GRT ships built between 1903 and 1908 for NDL, each with 107 1st class, 103 2nd class, 130 3rd class, and 2,040 steerage spaces– our Freddy had space for 158 1st, 156 2nd, 48 3rd, and 706 steerage in a hull some 35 feet longer and an engineering suite with about 1,500 extra shp.
Capable of maintaining a steady 15 knots on a pair of quadruple-expansion steam engines generating 7,500 shp, Eitel Friedrich’s route was to be from Germany to Shanghai and the recently-acquired Imperial treaty port of Tsingtao, hence the focus on more luxurious cabins rather than steerage passengers.
Likewise, Eitel Friedrich was slower and smaller than the 660-foot NDL express steamers SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie and Kronprinz Wilhelm, which were capable of making 23 knots on a 33,000shp plant and carried no steerage accommodations at all, offering cabins to just 1,761 passengers in the 1st-3rd classes.
Nonetheless, Eitel Friedrich was finely appointed.
But she also was bred to fight.
Following the government subsidy provided by the Imperial Postal Steamer agreement (Reichspostdampfervertrages), the Reich could use these steamers in the event of mobilization, and ships built for the service had to pass a Kaiserliche Marine inspection, to include weight and space for deck guns and magazines.
Eitel Friedrich could accommodate as many as 10 deck guns of up to 17 cm/40 (6.75-inch) in size.
The agreement further stipulated that the ships’ officers and deck and engine crews had to either be Imperial Navy reservists or had signed contracts to volunteer for the service in the event of mobilization.
The SS Prinz Eitel Friedrich left on her maiden voyage to Tsingtao on 13 October 1904 and would continue this peaceful trade for a decade.
It was the stuff of postcards.
War!
When the lamps went out across Europe in August 1914, the Germans had several potential auxiliary cruisers at sea including Kronprinz Wilhelm, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, Cap Trafalgar, and our Freddie.
It didn’t go well for most.
The 18,000-ton, 613-foot-long Cap Trafalgar was disguised to look like a similar British Cunard line passenger liner called the 19,524-ton, 650-foot-long RMS Carmania-– then had the bad luck to meet the likewise armed actual Carmania and was promptly sunk in a 90-minute gun fight off the coast of Brazil just six weeks into the war.
Other potential raiders were bagged by the Royal Navy early in the war before they could be armed including Tabora, Zieten, Kleist, Derfflinger, and Sudmark in the Med and Red Seas; while Princess Alice was interned in the Philippines.
Lucky enough to be at German-held Tsingtao in early August 1914 was our Freddie, along with the steamer Yorck. Realizing that the gig was shortly to be up for the colony as Japan moved to enter the war, German East Asian Squadron commander VADM von Spee made an effort to grab his five cruisers and leave that doomed port.
With that, the decision was made to convert Freddie as best possible for service as a commerce raider.
She received four 10.5 cm/40 (4.1″) SK L/40 rapid-fire guns and 12 revolving 37mm Hotckiss from the Iltis-class gunboats (kanonenboot) SMS Tiger and Luchs, which were to be scuttled and left behind at Tsingtao. She would also take aboard six 88mm L/40 guns that could be used to equip other raiders.
Just 213 feet overall, the 750-ton Iltis-class gunboats, such as SMS Luchs and Tiger, above, were constructed at the turn of the century largely for overseas colonial service and were both slow and lightly armed, with two SK 10.5 cm L/40s and six revolving 37mm Hotchkiss guns each. The bulk of these gunboats’ crews and guns were rushed aboard Prinz Eitel Friedrich.
A view of her just after conversion, with her starboard side still carrying much of her prewar livery. Note the 4-inch gun on her bow under a tarp. LC-DIG-hec-03478
She also fleshed out her 222-member crew with men from the two gunboats as well as their sister SMS Jaguar and the station ship SMS Titania until she had a total of 34 officers, and 368 ratings under 40-year-old Berlin-born Korvettenkapitän Max Friedrich Euard Thierichens, late of the Luchs. Only 54 of the retained crew were reservists or new volunteers, and many of the NDL mariners were released– often to fill slots on German steamers in the port and at Shanghai. The previous captain of the Prinz Eitel in her life as a liner, NDL Capt. Karl Mundt, remained on board as the navigation and executive officer.
In command of the Imperial German Navy Raider Prinz Eitel Friederich Left to right: Captain Karl Mundt, XO; Korvettenkapitän Max Therichens, skipper, and LT Brunner, aide to Captain Thierichens. Thierichens, who joined the German Navy in 1893, was a regular with over 20 years of service under his belt although his largest command had only been a 700-ton gunboat.
A breakdown of Eitel Friedrich’s wartime officers via a Tsingtao history site shows that just 15 officers out of 34 came from the liner’s commercial crew, with the rest coming from Tiger (8), Luchs (9), and Titania (2):
Ready for war, she slipped out of Tsingtao on 6 August, just after Von Spee left with his cruiser force and, meeting up with the cruiser SMS Emden and her tender SS Markomannia, arrived at Pagan Island in the Marianas on the 12th where she would remain with a growing set of colliers until the 30th.
Setting out for Majuro in the Marshall Islands via Eniwetok to drop off Von Spee’s collier train (eight ships including the steamers Seydlitz, Baden, Santa Maria, and Santa Isabel) she then joined up with the hilfkruezer Cormoran (manned by the crew of the old SMS Cormoran about the captured 3,400-ton Russian freighter SS Ryazan) for two weeks to raid Australian waters with the object, so the crews were told, of misleading the British Admirals and facilitating Von Spee’s main squadron’s escape to South American waters.
Without much luck, the two vessels parted on 15 September, with Eitel Friedrich headed for the west coast of the Americas, and Cormoran for the Western Carolines, with Cormoran eventually putting into Guam for internment after her bunkers ran out.
Freddie crossed the Southern Pacific on an uneventful patrol for the next five weeks, not taking any prizes.
Eventually, she rejoined Von Spee’s squadron at Mas a Tierra by the end of October as a collier escort, and, chasing contacts off Chile, she ran the British steamer SS Colusa, so close into Valparaiso that a Chilean gunboat had to come out to intervene.
Serving as an over-the-horizon escort to Von Spee’s collier train, she adjacent to the Battle of Coronel in November.
With Von Spee electing to take the fight to the Atlantic, he left Freddie behind once again on 29 November, with the auxiliary cruiser sent out to hunt alone. As Von Spee sailed to his death and his squadron’s defeat at the Falklands, Eitel Friedrich set off up the Chilean coast and captured the British steamer SS Charcas (5067 GRT) off the coast of Corral on 5 December, landing her crew at Papudo.
On 11 December, she captured the French barque Jean (2207 GRT) with 3,500 tons of badly needed coal, steaming with her as a prize to Easter Island. On the way, she sank the British barque Kidalton (1784 GRT) the next day.
Unloading Jean and sinking her near Easter Island on the 23rd, while at the same time sending a landing party ashore to slaughter a herd of oxen for meat, Freddie left the captured French and British crews voluntarily behind and made for the Atlantic on New Year’s Eve via Cape Horn.
Once in the South Atlantic, she found more victims.
On 26 January 1915 she captured the Russian barque Isabela Browne (1315 BRT) with a cargo of saltpeter the spotted a pair of windjammers that she trailed overnight until she could try for the capture. Once stopped, the two clippers, French barque PierreLoti (2196 BRT) and the American-flagged four-masted steel barque William P. Frye (3605 BRT) turned out to be carrying wheat to Britain.
William P. Frye
While Frye was flying the flag of what was then a neutral country, her Plymouth-bound grain was seen as contraband, and Thierichens, sinking the Pierre Boti, ordered Frye’s crew to toss her 186,950 bushels of wheat over the side before allowing them to continue. Still finding the American ship partially laden the next morning, he removed the ship’s crew and passengers and scuttled the ship on January 28, 1915.
Newspaper coverage helped sway public opinion in the States.
Three ships were sunk by Imperial German Naval raider SMS Prinz Eitel: French Friedrich Jacobsen (Top) – British Mary Ada Scott (Middle) – American William P Frye (Bottom).
Chasing down further Allied merchantmen in the remoteness of the South Atlantic, Thierichens kept stacking captured crews in the converted liner’s old passenger cabins– sorting by class, with officers and passengers getting 1st class cabins, while mates got 2nd, crews 3rd.
She bagged the Europe-bound French barque Jacobsen (2195 BRT) on 28 January and the British barque Invercoe (1421 BRT) on 12 February– 80 years ago this week, both sunk with their grain cargos.
Over three days from 18 to 20 February, she took three additional ships out of trade: the British steamer SS Mary Ada Short (3605 BRT) with a cargo of corn, the French steamer SS Floride (6629 BRT) with 86 passengers and a cargo of mail, and the British steamer SS Willerby (3630 BRT), the latter sailing in ballast to La Plata. The skipper of the Willerby, one Capt. Wedgewood, having no guns to fight back, attempted to use his steamer as a ram, ordering “full speed astern” as the German closed.
With this, the game was done.
Low on food, low on coal, and high on mouths to feed between his 403 crew and more than 350 “guests,” Thierichens made for Hampton Roads where he sought sanctuary on humanitarian grounds.
The Hilfkruezer Prinz Eitel Friederich was placed under the eyes of the U.S. Navy at Newport News on 11 March, near but not alongside the interned German tanker Jupiter. She reportedly exchanged salutes with the fleet, whose “bands played the German national anthem.”
Even though she had captured and sunk 11 ships across her 218-day/30,000-nm war cruise, she had never fired a “war shot” round in anger, lost a member of her crew, nor taken a life. She arrived in the U.S. with every soul she had found on the sea.
The gentlemanly early days of WWI indeed.
German Ambassador Johann Heinrich Graf von Bernstorff negotiated for Eitel Friederich to land her Allied prisoners– including over 30 Americans– while provisions and enough coal (1,000 tons) were sold to the embassy allowing the possibility that Freddie could somehow sail the Atlantic to Bremen. This was as French, Russian, and British diplomats bombarded Washington with calls to arrest or expel the pirate ship into their waiting arms.
The ship, her discharged 350 guests, her grinning skipper, and her crew were the subject of much media attention.
Hilfkruezer Prinz Eitel Friedrich riding high with nearly empty bunkers and no stores left, at Newport News, March 1915. Note she has been partially repainted. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LC-DIG-hec-05587
Her stern, note the quickly applied paint to her white areas and her name has been painted over. Also, note the two bow guns. 165-WW-272C-33
Survivors of crews and passengers of ships captured by Eitel Friedrich, March 1915. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LOC LC-H261- 5002-B
Survivors being offloaded onto the waiting Chesapeake and Ohio RR lines tug Alice. March 1915. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LOC LC-DIG-hec-06346
Smiling gangway guards to Eitel Friedrich, snapped by a Harris & Ewing, photographer. March 1915. Note the curious women and children on the promenade deck. LC-DIG-hec-05593
Crew of Eitel Friedrich, March 1915. These guys were just happy not to be at the bottom of the ocean or in an English or Japanese prison camp. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LC-DIG-hec-05584
Crew of Eitel Friedrich, March 1915. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LC-H261- 5000-B
Mascots are being shown off by the crew of Eitel Freidrich while a rating plays the harmonica, in March 1915. Harris & Ewing, photographer, LC-DIG-hec-05589
With the cruiser watched by the battleship USS Alabama and the big 12-inch guns at Fort Monroe, a detachment sent from the Fort set up camp at the end of her dock, watched by a sandbagged machine gun emplacement.
The stalemate endured for nearly a month as deadlines were set, and then passed. The cruisers HMS Cumberland and HMCS Niobe were just outside American waters at the tip of the Virginia Capes. While old, each was an easy overmatch for Eitel Freidrich.
Painted into a corner, Thierichens agreed in writing to pass his ship peacefully into internment at Norfolk at 3:00 p.m., on 9 April 1915.
The next day, she was joined by her old NDL fleet member Kronprinz Wilhelm, who had amazingly been armed at sea with two 3.4-inch guns and 50 rifles hoisted on board the liner, from the old cruiser SMS Karlsruhe. With the scant armament and sailing under Karlsruhe’s skipper, Kvtlnt Wolfgang Thierfelder, Kronprinz Wilhelm chalked up 14 prizes– some 58,201 tons of British, French, and Norwegian shipping— in the North Atlantic.
Officers and crew of German cruiser Kronprinz Wilhelm. This boat arrived at Newport News, on April 11, 1915. 165-WW-274A-7
The two would spend the next two years side by side, in the weird limbo of never really being fully in, nor fully out of, the war. Neither free to leave nor directly under custody.
Of the nearly 20 German commerce raiders made from converted steamers and windjammers (see Seeadler), Eitel Fredrich was in the “top scorers” club, only surpassed by her aforementioned cousin Kronprinz Wilhelm and the much more famous late-war hilfskreuzers SMS Wolf (14 captured/sunk directly plus another 14 enemy ships claimed by her mines), Seeadler (15), and Mowe (40 ships).
German surface raiders– both actual cruisers and hilfkreuzers– captured or sunk an amazing 623,406 tons of Allied shipping in the Great War.
Interned
Eitel Friederich’s propelling machinery, radio, and armament were immobilized with components removed to shore.
With provisions paid for by the German embassy, her crew was to live aboard, with a party of as many as 50 of her sailors allowed shore liberties at a time while officers could freely travel to nearby cities.
With such liberal parole, naturally, several of Freddie’s crew released themselves under their own recognizance. Her third surgeon, Dr. Richard A. Nolte, who was the ship’s doctor when she was a liner back in 1914, vanished after buying “civilian clothing and a big trunk” in June 1915. Other men just wandered off with less fanfare.
The crew was further reduced in size, as she suffered her first loss of the war, one Seaman Prei, killed on 8 April 1915 when he fell down a companionway. Another sailor, one W.S. Wisneweki, was jailed in Norfolk in July 1915 for assorted “rowdyism” while ashore and, receiving a year sentence from the local magistrate, was drummed out of the crew and surrendered to the authorities for punishment.
Meanwhile, a two-acre overgrown plot, cleared for port expansion years prior but never used for that purpose, was turned over to the care of her crew, which included several men from farming families. Soon, it was filled with cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, potatoes, beets and turnips.
Those handy enough to craft toys and curios did so and soon a market was open. With no shortage of cabins, the crew spread out and made themselves at home, and could entertain visitors. Some of the sailors married local American girls and later became citizens themselves.
With paint purchased from the Navy, her crew restored her topside appearance to something approaching her pre-war livery.
Biergartens were set up aboard– with some of the men having been Braumeisters at Tsingtao— and locals were soon able to avail themselves of a nice stein of authentic German beer for 2 cents, a bargain! That was until controversy hit.
As reported in the June 27 1915 NYT:
At first, these ship beer gardens were open to all. But a local clergyman and an ex-chaplain of the navy, with several friends, one Sunday went aboard one of the ships, enjoyed the hospitality of the Germans, and drank beer. Then the clergyman fired a bombshell at his congregation. It was the story of how the law was being violated each Sunday on the German cruisers by the sale of intoxicants. It was the sensation of a day, but local police officials found themselves helpless, inasmuch as the alleged violations were committed on a Federal reservation and on a foreign warship.
The Navy Department ruled that it had no jurisdiction, further than a request to the German commanders not to permit the indiscriminate sale of intoxicants on Sunday. Such a request was made, and as a result, the sale of beer and other drinks to Americans was discontinued.
Besides homebrew, there was a brisk underground trade in selling uniform items such as caps and medals along with pocketable souvenirs from the elegant ocean liner-turned-pirate to locals. I’m sure there are likely forgotten trinkets from Eitel Friedrich and her crew in dozens of heirloom boxes across Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Why Pennsylvania?
By September 1916 the combined crews of the two commerce raiders had shrunk from slightly over 800 to just 744 officers and men and it was thought that they could be better isolated at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Plus, with the ongoing expansion by the Navy, the space they were taking up at Norfolk was needed for the construction of new maintenance shops.
On, 1 October, Kronprinz Wilhelm and Prinz Eitel Friedrich arrived at PNSY, towed at 8 knots by a task force of 12 U.S. warships led by the Great White Fleet battlewagons USS Minnesota (BB-22) and Vermont (BB-20) just in case either German raider attempted to make for the open ocean– or a British force aimed to bushwhack them. The force sailed in a tight box that was kept as much inside the three-mile limit as possible. Certainly one of the more curious convoys of 1916.
Original caption: transferring the S. S. Kronprinz Wilhelm from the Norfolk Navy Yard to Philadelphia. This boat was one of several interned German sea raiders similarly transferred from Norfolk to Philadelphia. Photographer: Western Newspaper Union. 165-WW-272C-38
Once at League Island, moored some 150 yards from the foot of Broad Street with the ships’ stern pointed at the city, the German sailors had their movements curtailed, only allowed monitored shore leave twice a week in small groups, with regular daily roll calls taken. Even this was revoked at the end of January 1917, with the men confined to their ships.
A portion of the crew of the Eitel Frederich photographed after the arrival of their vessel at the League Island Navy Yard, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the lattice masts of battleships seen in the distance. Also, note the Asian man with the bowler hat who no doubt has an amazing backstory that has been lost to history. Underwood Press photo. LOC 165-WW-163E-18
On 3 February 1917, still some two months before Congress would vote for War, SECNAV Josephus Daniels, acting on orders from the White House, sent in Navy, Marine, and Coast Guardsmen to remove the crews from the German and Austrian ships interned in American ports.
This included the German-seized British steamship SS Appam in Newport News– impounded by the USCGC Yamacraw with a U.S. Marshal aboard– the massive four-funneled NDL liner SS Kronprinzessin Cecilie in Boston (seized with the help of 120 Boston policemen), two German and three Austrian steamers in New Orleans, and four Hamburg-American Line ships in Cristobal in the Canal Zone (Prinz Sigismund, Fazoia, Sachenwald, and Grunewald). SS Vaterland, the largest German liner, was seized at Hoboken.
Naturally, Eitel Frederich and Kronprinz Wilhelm were also visited.
With the NYTs noting that “The local navy yard virtually has been placed upon a war basis,” the two auxiliary cruisers were seized and their crews moved ashore to barracks which were placed in isolation with a strict “no visitors” policy enforced for the first time since they came to America. A wire stockade, watched by billy club-armed sailors, was built around the barracks. Armed Marines suddenly appeared on patrol of the landside boundary to the Government preserve while “Motorboats and other light craft with machineguns aboard patrolled the river and prevented vessels from entering a prescribed area.”
The scout cruiser USS Salem (CL-3) was moored to where her main guns could rake the vessels if needed.
German Passenger Liners Kronprinz Wilhelm and Prinz Eitel Friedrich (left) Interned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, on 26 March 1917, shortly before they were seized by the United States. They are still flying the German flag, and German guns are visible on Prinz Eitel Friedrich’s stern. NH 42416
German Passenger Liners Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm (left) Interned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, on 26 March 1917, shortly before they were seized by the United States. Photographed from onboard USS Salem. NH 42417
Prinz Eitel Friedrich interned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, on 28 March 1917. Behind her is the liner Kronprinz Wilhelm. NH 54659
On 10 March 1917, Eitel Frederich’s skipper, Max Thierichens, was charged in U.S. federal court along with his wife and a naturalized U.S. citizen, Henry K. Rohner, with various conspiracy charges, primarily that of moving 19 ship’s valuable chronometers from the raider to shore. These charges later beefed up to include violating the Mann Act for “bringing a woman from Ithaca New York to Philadelphia for immoral purposes.” These allegations reported salaciously on both sides of the Atlantic, would follow him to Germany.
In early April, John Sickel, a former Eitel Friedrich sailor who had previously escaped the interned cruiser, was arrested by federal officials, suspected of being involved in an explosion at the Eddystone munitions plant in Chester, Pennsylvania that blew 133 workers “to bits.”
Once the U.S. entered the war on April 6, 1917, U.S. Customs officials seized the Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm on paper, then, in the same motion, swiftly transferred them to the U.S. Navy. A Government tug was sent to pull and noticed a cork float in the water behind the vessels about 50 feet from the stern.
Inspecting divers found mines.
Explosive “torpedoes” were found under the interned German ships Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm after they were seized by the United States in April 1917. Photographed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 12 April 1919. These devices, shown here disassembled with components labeled, were placed by the ships’ German crewmembers in anticipation of the seizure, in hopes of disabling the ships and thus rendering them useless to the U.S. NH 42252
Meanwhile, with their status changed from merely “interned” to that of full-on POWs, the crews of Prinz Eitel Friedrich and Kronprinz Wilhelm were moved by the Army under guard by train from their isolation barracks at Philadelphia Naval Yard to newly established POW camps at Forts Oglethorpe and McPherson in Georgia for the next 30 months.
There, they continued their arts and crafts work, helped plant and harvest crops, and fielded some pretty mean baseball teams.
German crews Fort McPherson, Georgia 165-ww-161AA-063 and 57
165-ww-161AA-026 and 28
American Service
Prinz Eitel Friedrich was swiftly refitted for U.S. Navy service as a troop transport at the Philadelphia Navy Yard renamed USS DeKalb— after Maj. Gen. Johann von Robais, Baron de Kalb, the Bavarian-born Revolutionary War hero, who was killed in battle in South Carolina in 1780– and commissioned on 12 May 1917. A Civil War-era casemate gunboat had previously carried the name.
Similarly, Kronprinz Wilhelm became the USS Von Steuben, Vaterland became the USS Leviathan, and Kronprinzessin Cecilie became the USS Mount Vernon.
Immediate modifications were the removal of the German armament and the detritus of their two-year inhabitation, including a mountain of beer barrels and wine bottles.
“Putting off the Dutch junk” Prinz Eitel Friedrich (ex-German Passenger Liner, 1904) Sailors pose with empty beer barrels removed from the ship’s hold, 20 April 1917, soon after she was seized by the United States. NH 54657
Prinz Eitel Friedrich (ex-German Passenger Liner, 1904) Sailors on the pier at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, with items removed from the ship’s hold, 20 April 1917, soon after she was seized by the United States. Empty wine bottles are specifically identified, in the left center. NH 54658
She received a thick coat of haze grey paint, minesweeping paravanes, and a bow skeg to help control them, as well as her most heavy armament yet: eight 5″/51 mounts, four 3″/50 low-angle mounts, two 3″/50 high-angle AA mounts, four 1-pounders, and two machine guns. She also received several tall “bandstand” searchlight platforms.
USS DeKalb (later ID # 3010) moored at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, on 11 June 1917, the day before she sailed to transport U.S. troops to the European war zone. NH 54654
USS DeKalb taking U.S. Marines on board for transportation to Europe, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 6:00 A.M., 12 June 1917. Note the 5″/51 swung out by the gangway and another two as stingers over her bow. NH 54652
USS DeKalb’s paravane skeg fitted to the ship’s forefoot, photographed in drydock at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 26 September 1918. NH 54656
USS DeKalb (ID # 3010) Scene on the ship’s fire control bridge, 18 May 1918. Note the officer and Sailor with binoculars, a telescope at right, and the officer’s holstered M1911 pistol. NH 54661
USS DeKalb (ID # 3010) Officer “firing” a saluting gun while a Sailor observes, 18 May 1918. The gun appears to be a 1-pounder Hotchkiss. NH 41702
Freddie/DeKalb was described by the NHHC as being one of only three commissioned Navy vessels ready to carry troops to England in June 1917, with the other two being the transports USS Hancock and Henderson, the first very old and the second very new– still with workmen from the yard on board when she sailed for France.
These transports were tasked with joining the first convoy carrying 14,000 soldiers and Marines and their weapons. of Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to France.
Specifically, DeKalb carried 816 men of the 2nd Bn/5th Marines to St. Nazaire, France in a 12-day run.
USS DeKalb leaving the pier at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 6:09 A.M., 12 June 1917, en route to the European war zone with U.S. troops on board. NH 54653
A haze grey USS DeKalb tied up at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, after returning from France, in 1917. Note the sign on the lamp post in the foreground, marking the intersection of 2nd Street West and Preble Avenue. NH 54655
Sometime in early 1918, she picked up a striking dazzle camouflage scheme.
USS DeKalb (later ID # 3010). Tied up at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, Pennsylvania, 18 February 1918. Note her camouflage scheme, ice in the Delaware River, and battleships in the left background. NH 54662
Note this inset of the above, showing off two 5″/51s and a 3″/50 as well as her extensive searchlight platforms.
She continued her trips across the Atlantic to France including:
821 Army Troops from New York to St. Nazaire in September 1917.
588 Marines of the 73rd Machine Gun Company and the Headquarters & Supply Companies, 6th Marine Regiment along with 230 sailors from Philadelphia to St. Nazaire in October 1917.
750 Marines of the 1st Machine Gun Battalion– including Capt. Allen Melancthon Sumner (MoH)– along with the 12th and 26th Replacement Units from Philadelphia to St. Nazaire in December 1917.
480 Army troops and 300 Sailors from Philadelphia to France in February 1918.
803 Army troops from Newport News to France in April 1918.
769 Army troops from Hoboken to Brest in June 1918.
Headquarters Company and Squadrons A, B, and C of the First Marine Aviation Force from Hoboken to Brest in July 1918.
1,559 Army troops from Hoboken to Brest in August 1918.
1,593 Army troops from Philadelphia to Brest in October 1918.
US Naval Air Station, crew assembling an H-16, 1917-19. US Naval Air Station, Brest, France: Of note, the Headquarters Company and Squadrons A, B, and C of the First Marine Aviation Force arrived at Brest, France, on board DeKalb and upon disembarking proceeded to airdromes between Calais and Dunkirk for operations as the Day Wing, Northern Bombing Group. With the arrival, the squadrons were re-designated 7, 8, and 9 respectively.
In all, she would transport no less than 11,334 men to France in 11 voyages, more than wiping out the stain of the bloodless sinking of the William P. Frye three years prior.
Once the Armistice was signed, DeKalb carried 20,332 troops back home from “Over There,” making 8 ecstatic voyages back to East Coast ports from France by 5 September 1919.
Wounded and sick boarding USS DeKalb for return home. Army Transport Service. American Docks, Bassens, Bordeaux, Gironde, France. DeKalb carried troops from 23rd Ordnance Company, 311th Field Hospital (78th Division), Bordo Special Casual Cos #363, #563 and #564.” 111-SC-158664
10 May 1919. “USS DeKalb with troops for return home. Army Transport Service. American Docks, Bassens, Bordeaux, Gironde, France. DeKalb carried troops from 23rd Ordnance Company, 311th Field Hospital (78th Division), Bordo Special Casual Cos #363, #563 and #564.” 111-SC-158665
Decommissioned on 22 September 1919, DeKalb was transferred to the U.S. Shipping Board for disposal the following day.
The Navy mulled turning her into an aviation tender– a role that eventually went to the collier USS Jupiter (AC-3), only narrowly missing the German from being converted into the U.S. Navy’s first aircraft carrier, USS Langley.
Post-war
Freddie/DeKalb, having been an ocean liner, commerce raider, and troop transport, was still thought to have some life in her, so long as her aging coal-fired boilers could be converted to more economical oilers. It was during this conversion that she suffered a serious fire.
SS DeKalb in the Hudson River near Sputtan Duyvill Creek, on 16 December 1919, after she had been damaged by fire. The fire broke out while the ship was lying ready to be converted to an oil burner for the South American trade. Her skeleton crew of 35 men was removed safely and the vessel beached. NH 54663
Bought by W. Averell Harriman, she was converted and rebuilt by the United American Line of New York over a 15-month stint at the Morse Dry Dock & Repair Co in Brooklyn. In this, all of her cabin space was homogenized to 1,452 third-class steerage passengers for transport on the emigree trade.
Renamed SS Mount Clay, she sailed directly between Hamburg and New York until October 1925.
SS Mount Clay
On her return trips from Germany, she was also used as a reparations ship, loading silver and gold from the Reichbank representatives for delivery to the U.S. Treasury Dept and banking officials in New York. On one such run back in July 1921, she brought 205 cases of silver Reichsmarks, worth some $800,000 at the time.
During this period, Mount Clay also inaugurated a new system of hybrid express mail delivery to Germany, in which special packages picked up in New York were handed over to aircraft in Cuxhaven for delivery by air within the Weimar Republic.
On 11 February 1921, while about 400 miles southeast of Halifax, the liner rescued the 37 crewmembers and ship’s cat from the sinking Belgian-flagged Lloyd Royal Belge cargo ship SS Bombardier. As Bombardier was bound from New York to Antwerp, they had their transit reversed as the New York-bound Mount Clay, loaded with 829 souls from Hamburg, put into the Big Apple a day late and landed her mid-ocean guests.
She was then laid up and acquired by the American Ship and Commerce Navigation Corp in 1926, who didn’t place her into service, then was passed on to the Pacific Motorship Company of San Francisco, who similarly left her in port pending a $1.5 million overhaul that never happened.
She was sold to the breakers in September 1934.
Epilogue
Little remains of our subject.
The National Archives holds a collection including the ship’s Tagebuch (logbook) starting in May 1913, press clippings of the vessel’s wartime operations, correspondence about the ship’s internment and leave/passes granted to her crew, correspondence and reports relating to the vessel’s transfer to Philadelphia Naval Yard and mechanical repairs, reports and copies of Executive Orders relating to the U.S. seizure of the ship, and general information concerning the ship’s operations in German service. Also in the archives is the documentation of these vessels’ subsequent service in the U.S. Navy. Little of it is digitized, with most of what is relating to the conversation to DeKalb.
One of her 10.5 cm/40 SK L/40s, originally transferred to the cruiser from either the gunboat Luchs or Tiger at Tsingtao in August 1914, has been preserved at Memorial Park in Cambridge, New York for some time.
The preserved 10.5 cm/40 SK L/40 from Hilfskreuzer Prinz Eitel Friedrich, at Cambridge, New York. Photographs copyrighted by Michael Costello via Navweps.
The ship’s German crew was released from POW camps in 1919 and allowed to return home on the NDL steamer SS Princess Irene (which had served as USS Pocahontas during the war) via Rotterdam that October.
Her skipper, Max Thierichens, released in November 1919 despite a weird cloud of federal convictions, returned to a post-Imperial Germany and was promoted to Kapitän zur See in December 1919. Retained in the interbellum Reichsmarine, he retired in 1925, capping 29 years of service at age 51. Taking over his father’s furniture store in Berlin (Charlottenburg 4, Leibnizstr. 25), he passed in 1930 amid a very tough era in German history.
While Burggraf, von Luckner, and Nerger, skippers of Mowe, Seeadler, and Wolf, were holders of the Blue Max, Thierichens was not. I cannot find where he earned an EAK1 or EAK2 either. Curious.
Of her four American skippers during her 28-month spell as DeKalb, all four earned the Navy Cross during the Great War, and two– SpanAm War vets CDR Walter Rockwell Gherardi (USNA 1895) and Capt. Luther Martin Overstreet (USNA 1897)– both retired as admirals.
Neither the German nor the U.S. Navies have fielded another vessel of the same name.
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
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
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.
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, Feb. 5, 2025: Gallant Gussi
U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation photo No. 1996.253.7161.010
Above we see a Vought F4U-1D Corsair of Marine Fighting Squadron (Carrier Squadron) (VMF(CVS)) 512 as it prepares to catapult on deck qualifications from the brand new Commencement Bay-class escort carrier USS Gilbert Islands (CVE-107)during the flattop’s shakedown cruise off San Diego, on or about 6 March 1945.
Commissioned 80 years ago today, she was one of just six carriers earmarked to carry embarked dedicated all-Marine air groups during WWII, then would go on to continue to serve in a much different role into the Vietnam era.
The Commencement Bays
Of the 130 U.S./RN escort carriers– merchant ships hulls given a hangar, magazine, and flight deck– built during WWII, the late-war Commencement Bay class was by far the Cadillac of the design slope. Using lessons learned from the earlier Long Island, Avenger, Sangamon, Bogue, and Casablanca-class ships.
Like the hard-hitting Sangamon class, they were based on Maritime Commission T3 class tanker hulls (which they shared with the roomy replenishment oilers of the Chiwawa, Cimarron, and Ashtabula classes). From the keel up, these were made into flattops.
Pushing some 25,000 tons at full load, they could make 19 knots, which was faster than a lot of submarines looking to plug them. A decent suite of about 60 AAA guns spread across 5-inch, 40mm, and 20mm fittings could put as much flying lead in the air as a light cruiser of the day when enemy aircraft came calling.
Finally, they could carry a 30-40 aircraft airwing of single-engine fighter bombers and torpedo planes ready for a fight, or about twice that many planes if being used as a delivery ship.
Sounds good, right?
Of course, had the war run into 1946-47, the 33 planned vessels of the Commencement Bay class would have no doubt fought kamikazes, midget subs, and suicide boats tooth and nail just off the coast of the Japanese Home Islands.
However, the war ended in Sept. 1945 with only nine of the class barely in commission– most of those still on shake-down cruises. Just two, Block Island and Gilbert Islands, saw significant combat at Okinawa and Balikpapan, winning two and three battle stars, respectively. Kula Gulf and Cape Gloucester picked up a single battle star.
With the war over, some of the class, such as USS Rabaul and USS Tinian, though complete, were never commissioned and simply laid up in mothballs, never being brought to life. Four other ships were canceled before launching, just after the bomb on Nagasaki was dropped. In all, just 19 of the planned 33 were commissioned.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Meet Gilbert Islands
Our subject is the only American warship named for the sprawling August 1942-December 1943 Gilbert Islands campaign– Operations Galvanic and Kourbash– that included the seizures of Tarawa and Makin and the hard-fought Battle of Tarawa.
The Battle of Tarawa (US code name Operation Galvanic) was one of the bloodiest of the Pacific T/O during WWII. Nearly 6,400 Japanese, Koreans, and Americans died in the fighting, mostly on and around the small island of Betio. Many have never been recovered.
Laid down on 29 November 1943 at Tacoma, by Todd-Pacific Shipyards, CVE-107 was initially to be named USS St. Andrews Bay-– for a bay on the Gulf Coast of Florida and a sound on the southern coast of Georgia– but this changed when she was set to be renamed Gilbert Islands on 26 April 1944. She launched on 20 July 1944 under the latter name, sponsored by Mrs. Edwin D. McCorries, wife of a surgeon captain at Puget Sound Navy Hospital. The carrier was the 57th Navy ship launched at Todd, and the third of her class of carriers christened there.
She was commissioned on 5 February 1945, her company numbering 66 officers and 755 enlisted, about half of which (27 officers, 350 men) had sailed for two weeks on USS Casablanca (CVE-55) in the Puget Sound area as part of a CVE Pre-Commissioning School, with the command and senior petty officers spent another five days at sea on sister USS Block Island.
USS Gilbert Islands from her commissioning booklet Feb 1945. Via Navsource
Her first skipper was Capt. Lester Kimme Rice, a regular Navy aviator (USNA ’24) with 20 years under his belt that included operations officer of PATWING7 (1941-42) and commanding the Barnegat-class seaplane tender USS Matagorda (AVP 22) during the worst days (1942-43) of the Battle of the Atlantic.
After commissioning, our new carrier spent a week in Tacoma fitting out, then another week steaming around assorted Naval bases in the Puget Sound area, taking on supplies, ammunition, aviation ordnance, and getting depermed and degaussed. Setting out of San Diego on 20 February– with a stop at San Francisco– she arrived there on the 27th.
Now we need an air group.
WWII Marine Carrier Groups
Without getting too far into the weeds here, Gen. Alexander Vandegrift, Commandant of the Marine Corps, successfully campaigned during discussions with the CNO during an August 1944 conference at Pearl Harbor, to get Marine aircraft squadrons on carriers– ideally on ships dedicated to air support over Marine beachheads.
On 21 October 1944, under Order No. 89-44, Marine Carrier Groups, Aircraft, Fleet Marine Force, Pacific (FMFPac) was established as a tactical command at MCAS Santa Barbara under Col. Albert D. Cooley.
Originally formed as Marine Base Defense Aircraft Group 48 (MBDAG-48) at Santa Barbara and Marine Aircraft Group 51 (MAG-51) at Mojave, by early November, they had 406 officers and 2,743 enlisted assigned, along with a motley collection of 63 aircraft in nine types.
Of note, the four new Corsair squadrons of MAG-51 (VMF-511, 512, 513, and 514) had previously been training on the East Coast as part of Project Danny for Crossbow strikes on German V-1/V-2 rocket launching sites in Europe using massive underwing 10.5-foot “Tiny Tim” rockets, a mission scrubbed before the Devils got a chance to clock in.
While about 15 percent of the Marine aviators in the command had combat experience in the Pacific, few had ever landed on a carrier, so the ramp-up had to be fast.
This led to four initial Marine Air Groups (eight planned), each ideally with an 18-plane fighter squadron and a 12-aircraft torpedo bomber squadron, designed for operation from escort carriers:
By the end of December– just 75 days after founding– the Marine Carrier Groups had tallied 17,218 hours across 13,257 flights in the desert, rising and landing in approximated carrier flight deck outlines, and the number of aircraft on hand rose over 150, concentrating on Corsairs and Avengers while personnel climbed over 3,700.
The first flattop to pick up a Marine Air Group (MCVG-1) was Block Island on 3 February 1945, which shipped out with a mix of 12 TBMs, 10 F4Us, 8 F6F Hellcat night fighters, and 2 F6F planes.
The second group would go tothe Gilbert Islands. Accordingly, Lt.Col. William R. Campbell’s MCVG-2 — made up of VMF(CVS)-512 with 13 FG-1Ds and five F4U-1Ds, VMTB(CVS)-143 with 10 TBM-3s and two TBM-3Es, and CASD-2 with two F6F-5P photo recon Hellcats– would embark on our carrier on 6 March at San Diego. The group would remain aboard through the end of the war except for brief periods ashore while the carrier was in shipyard maintenance.
The Rocket Raiders of VMTB(CVS)-143, had been formed in September 1942 and logged five major combat tours, primarily from Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, before stateside carrier conversion training. VMF(CVS)-512, meanwhile, was newer, only formed in February 1944, and had never been overseas.
Four other “Marine” carriers that made it into service would be:
USS Vella Gulf (CVE-111), MCVG-3: VMF(CVS)-513, VMTB(CVS)-234, and CASD-3
USS Cape Gloucester (CVE-109), MCVG-4: VMF(CVS)-351, VMTB(CVS)-132, and CASD-4
USS Salerno Bay (CVE-110) MCVG-5: VMF(CVS)-514, VMTB(CVS)-144, and CASD-5
USS Puget Sound (CVE-113), MCVG-6: VMF(CVS)-321, VMTB(CVS)-454, and CASD-6
Compare this to the 16 Navy Escort Carrier Air Groups (CVEGs) and 90 Escort Scouting Squadrons (VGS)/Composite Squadrons (VCs) that served on the Navy’s 70 other “baby flat-tops.”
War!
Following workups off California and Hawaii, on 25 May, the Gilbert Islands arrived off Okinawa as part of the Fifth Fleet and, joining Task Unit (TU) 52.1.1, sent up her first CAP and close air support strikes against Japanese targets.
Take a look at this hectic one-day air report, with MCVG-2 just going ham on targets of opportunity:
It was during these operations that VMF-512’s Capt. Thomas Liggett bagged a twin-engine Mitsubishi Ki. 46 Dinah reconnaissance plane– the only aerial victory for MAG Two and Gilbert Islands during the war.
The carrier also lost her first pilot around this time.
On 1 June, Gilbert Islands joined her sister Marine carrier Block Island in TU 32.1.3 under Third Fleet control, then got busy neutralizing enemy installations in the Sakishima Gunto area via liberal application of rockets, bombs, and .50 caliber rounds.
Goodyear FG 1D Corsair VMF-512 TBM Avengers FM Wildcats aboard 2nd Jun 1945
As detailed by her War History, just take a look at this 10-day period (including a three-day gap to run to Kerama Retto for more ordnance), keeping in mind that this was carried out by a group of just ~30 aircraft:
Sent to San Pedro Bay, Leyte, on 16 June for 10 days of rest, replenishment, and repairs, Gilbert Islands was then dispatched south as part of TG 78.4 along with Block Island to cover the landings of Australian and Free Dutch forces during Operation Oboe II at Balikpapan.
With the path cleared by UDT-18, 7th Division Australian troops come ashore from landing craft during a landing near Balikpapan oil fields in Borneo. Some 33,000-strong combined Australian and Royal Netherlands Indies amphibious forces (the largest ever amphibious assault by Australian forces)
It ended up being somewhat anti-climactic, although she did lose one of her F6F drivers, 1LT James Benjamin Crawford, to Japanese AAA fire.
Sent back to San Pedro Bay after the 4th of July– making sure to dip her pollywogs along the way– she spent the rest of the month there, briefly serving as the flag of Carrier Division 27.
During operations in the PI, her plane guard, the “Green Dragon” USS Lee Fox (APD-45),suffered a bow bender while transferring the ditched Capt. Leggett was back aboard on the morning of 25 July 1945.
Fox on Gilbert Islands. The crack-up carried away the carrier’s starboard boat boom and caused superficial damage, with no injuries on either ship.
Sailing to Ulithi Atoll at the end of July in company with the escort carrier USS Chenango, she attached to TG. 30.8, a third fleet service squadron, to provide them with air cover. It is with this group that on 10-15 August, Capt. Rice, as senior officer afloat, was given command of half the group, TU 30.8.2– the oilers USS Kankakee, Cahaba, Neosho, and Cache; the destroyer USS Wilkes and the escorts USS Willmart, Leray Wilson, Lyman, and William C. Miller; and four tugs, to get on the run from an approaching typhoon.
F4U-1D Corsair VMF-512 White 24 behind typhoon barrier, USS Gilbert Islands
USS Gilbert Islands (CVE-107) in rough seas, circa 1945 NNAM 1996.488.253.1578
Vectoring in a big box, heading north at first, then southeasterly, then south and west, “The maneuver was successful, no heavy weather was encountered, and no damage was sustained by any of the vessels.”
By the time the storm was gone, the war was over, and the message that Japan had surrendered unconditionally was received at 0850 on 15 August 1945.
She then performed occupational duty. Sent to Okinawa with Carrier Division 27, she once again had to go to sea to dodge an incoming typhoon.
Carrier Division 27 successfully weathering China Sea Typhoon. Taken by USS Salerno Bay (CVE 110). Ships shown are: USS Block Island (CVE 106); USS Siboney (CVE 112) and USS Gilbert Island (CVE 107). 80-G-354604
Carrier Division 27 successfully weathering China Sea Typhoon. Taken by USS Salerno Bay (CVE 110). The ships shown are: the USS Block Island (CVE 106) and USS Gilbert Island (CVE 107). Photographed October 1945. 80-G-354600
CarDiv27, Gilbert Islands included, then appeared off Japanese-occupied Formosa on 15 October to have their planes as a “show of force” over the island and covering the landings of the Chinese KMT 70th Army at Kiirun on 16-17 October. “Observation over Formosa indicated enemy activity was non-existent.” She nonetheless spent a week off the island until the 20th, firing over 18,000 rounds of 20mm and 40mm ammunition in AAA drills while her planes expended 16 bombs and 32 5-inch rockets.
Dispatched to Saipan, she arrived there on the 23rd, then, with stops at Pearl Harbor and San Diego along the way, arrived at Norfolk on 7 February 1946. Her war was over, and the Marine Carrier Groups disbanded. She would decommission on 21 May and then would be mothballed, first in Norfolk and then in Philadelphia.
Of her sisters, all survived the war, and 15 of 18 (excepting Block Island, Sicily, and Mindoro) were all laid up following the conflict.
In the course of her career during World War II, Gilbert Islands received three battle stars.
Cold War recall
With the Korean War kicking off in June 1950, following a round of inspection among the mothballed CVEs, Gilbert Islands were selected and recommissioned on 7 September 1951 at Philadelphia. She was not alone, as nine of her sisters were also reactivated.
Following six months of overhaul at Boston Naval Yard while her new crew was pieced together, her first assignment was to head back to the Pacific and, carrying a jam-packed load of USAF F-86E Sabre fighters to Yokoyama from 8 August to 22 October 1952, she arrived back with the Atlantic Fleet, based at NS Quonset Point, and would operate the big AF-2 Guardian ASW aircraft.
AF Guardian on the deck of USS Gilbert Island (CVE-107) during ASW near Rhode Island, 1953-1954
Tasked with ASW carrier training duties, she carried VS-24’s AF-2Ws and AF-2Ss along with a flight of HRS-3s from HS-3 in January 1953, followed by four other short cruises with VS-31 (April-May 1953), VS-22 (June-July 1953), VS-39 (August 1953), and VS-36 (October-November 1953).
USS Gilbert Islands (CVE-107) moored off New York City on 10 November 1953, NH 106714
She would then get operational with VS-36 on orders for a short (10-week) Sixth Fleet deployment to the Med that ran from 5 January to 12 March 1954.
USS Gilbert Islands (CVE-107) and USS Hailey (DD-556) were underway at sea in 1954, likely during Sixth Fleet operations
USS Gilbert Islands (CVE-107) is underway at sea. Gilbert Islands, with assigned Air Anti-Submarine Squadron 36 (VS-36) and Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 3 (HS-3), was deployed to the Mediterranean Sea from 5 January to 11 March 1954.
Then, as noted by DANFS, “She became the first of her class to have jets make touch-and-go landings on the flight deck while she had no way on, a dangerous experiment successfully conducted on 9 June 1954.”
Her service as a carrier was completed after two wars. Gilbert Islands left Rhode Island on 25 June for Boston and decommissioned there on 15 January 1955. At the time, just five of her sisters were still on active duty, and all would join her in mothballs by May 1957.
While laid up a second time, she was reclassified as Cargo Ship and Aircraft Ferry (AKV)-39 on 7 May 1959, and her name was struck from the Naval Vessel Register in June 1961. She would surely have been scrapped, the fate all 18 of her sisters met between 1960 and 1971.
But the Navy had one more mission for the old girl.
Conversion
Ex-Gibert Islands was towed to Brooklyn Navy Yard in August 1962 down the river from her berth with Reserve Group Bayonne for conversion, reclassified as a Major Communications Relay Ship (AGMR-1) on 1 June 1963.
This saw all her old aircraft handling gear removed, as was the rest of her WWII-era armament, replaced by four 3″/50 twin Mk 33s on sponsons. Her flight deck saw a hurricane bow added.
Then came the real changes– turning her topside into a floating antenna farm.
The flight deck was converted to an antenna array with two directional and two omnidirectional antennas. The aircraft hangar bay was converted into communication spaces although one aircraft elevator was retained to allow servicing of equipment and boat storage. In the communication spaces were installed 24 radio transmitters with low through ultra-high frequencies. To provide the necessary cooling of equipment in the communications spaces, three 120-ton air conditioning units were installed with 130 tons dedicated for the communications spaces. The remaining air conditioning tonnage was routed to the other interior spaces of the ship.
She was renamed USS Annapolis, the third warship on the NVR to carry the name after a SpanAm-era gunboat (PG-10) that remained in service until 1940 and a Tacoma-class frigate (PF-15) that remained in service until 1946. Fittingly, her new motto became “Vox Maris” (Voice of the Sea).
Commissioned at Brooklyn Navy Yard on 7 March 1964– capping 19 months of conversion– her skipper would be Capt. John Joseph Rowan (USNA 1942).
Annapolis commissioning, March 7, 1964, Brooklyn Navy Yard from her cruise book
Those attending the commissioning service included RADM Bernard Roeder, Director of Naval Communications, and the Mayor of Annapolis, Maryland, Joseph H. Griscom. The latter presented the ship with an ornate silver service.
AGMR-1 Annapolis Inclining Experiment. Note she has four twin 3″/50 radar-guided rapid-fire mounts installed in place of her old 40mm/20mm fittings. NARA 19nn-b1543-0004
USS Annapolis (AGMR-1) Underway at slow speed in New York Harbor, 12 June 1964, soon after completing conversion from USS Gilbert Islands (AKV-39, originally CVE-107). Staten Island ferryboats are in the left and center backgrounds. NH 106715
Following Operation Steel Pike, an 80-ship U.S.-Spanish exercise held in October 1964, Annapolis soon transferred to (officially) Long Beach the long way, via the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, and by September 1965 was off Vietnam.
She would spend the lion’s share of the next 48 months there, conducting relay operations on 19 communications patrols, averaging 270 days at sea per year. By December 1968, she had sent more than 1.5 million messages and steamed 150,000 miles as Annapolis.
She would typically intersperse her ~55-day patrols with short port calls around the West Pac, with individual crewmembers rotating out for home every 12-14 months.
As described by AGMR-1.com:
Annapolis, while on station off the coast of Vietnam did drop anchor every 10–15 days for a few hours outside Cam Ranh Bay to receive mail and transfer priority crew. During those brief stops, Navy swift boats would come alongside to receive much appreciated ice cream in 3-gallon containers that were prepared by the ships cooks the night before.
In a key event in Naval history, on 18 August 1966, while in Subic Bay, she used Syncom 3, the first geostationary communication satellite, to transmit the first documented ship-to-shore satellite radio message, a dispatch from Yankee Station off Vietnam back to Pacific Fleet Headquarters at Pearl.
The USS Annapolis
The USS Annapolis at Subic Bay, September 5, 1967, the former Gilbert Islands
Returning to Philadelphia on 1 October 1969 via Portuguese Angola, the Cape of Good Hope, Dakar, and Lisbon– including two months of operations with Sixth Fleet out of Naples, Annapolis decommissioned for a third and final time on 20 December 1969.
She was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 15 October 1976 and sold for scrap to the Union Minerals & Alloys Corp. on 19 December 1979.
Annapolis received a Meritorious Unit Commendation and eight battle stars for her service in the Vietnam War.
She was the last of her class in operation, and her relay role was key in the development of the Blue Ridge class LCC command ships (which entered service in 1970-71, effectively replacing her) and the later big deck LHA and LHD phibs.
Epilogue
Little remains of our subject. I cannot find where her bell endures, or a monument or marker exists to her.
The jeep carrier’s only WWII skipper, Les Rice, would continue to serve into the 1950s– earning the Legion of Merit as commander of the Essex-class fleet carrier USS Valley Forge (CV-45) during Korea– and lecture on the role of aircraft in ASW warfare, retiring from the Navy in 1958 as a rear admiral in the post of Commander Naval Air Bases First Naval District.
Rice as skipper of the Gilbert Islands, 1944. His first tour of duty was on the battleship USS Idaho in 1924. He capped a 34-year career following Korea.
Meanwhile, Gilbert Islands has Adam’s Planes, which have been dedicated to the ship and hersquadrons.
The Navy hasn’t reused the name “Gilbert Islands” for a second warship, although two USS Tarawas (CV-40 and LHA-1) and a USS Makin Island (LHD-8) were named after battles that occurred during the Gilberts campaign.
However, there has been a fourth USS Annapolis (SSN-760), a Los Angeles-class submarine commissioned in 1992 and currently part of the Guam-based SubRon15, although she is slated to decommission in FY27.
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
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.
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.
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, Jan. 29, 2025: Saigon Beauty
Above we see the Dugay Trouin-class light cruiser Lamotte-Picquet (also seen as La Motte Picquet) steaming sedately atop the Saigon River in French Indochina on 31 January 1939. Note the GL-810 series floatplane on her stern.
Twin masted with twin funnels, all with a slight rake, she was lovely and would win France’s last sea battle and go on to suffer a tragic ending at the hands of an ally, some 80 years ago this month.
The Trouins
The first large French warships designed after the Great War, the three sisters of the Dugay Trouin class were fairly big for naval treaty-era “light” cruisers, hitting the scales at 7,360 tons standard (9,350 full). Some 575 feet long at the waterline (604 feet overall), they would be considered destroyers by today’s standards.
Their draft was 17.25 feet (20 at full load) and they had a stiletto-like 1:10 beam-to-length ratio.
Powered by an eight-pack of Guyot high-pressure oil-fired boilers trunked through two funnels and feeding four Parsons geared turbines, they had 100,000 shp on tap– also about the same as today’s destroyers. This allowed all three sisters to sustain over 33 knots on trials while hitting 115,100-116,849 shp with top speeds over 34 knots. Further, they could steam at speed over distance– able to make 30 knots sustained for 24 hours straight– an important requirement for screening the battlefleet or chasing German or Italian surface raiders.
When dialed down to a more economical 15 knots, they could make 4,500nm, an unrefueled range that allowed them to span the Atlantic if needed or, with a pitstop in any of France’s numerous African or Caribbean colonies, to make the Indian and Pacific Oceans with ease.
The main armament was eight 6.1″/55 Modele 20 guns in four twin mounts. With this main battery able to fire 32 125-pound shells out to 23,000m in the first minute of operation, these guns were considered to be superior to the 7.6-inch breechloaders on older French cruisers and battlewagons and equal to contemporary designs afloat anywhere on the globe, the guns were also used on the training cruiser Jeanne d’ Arc and the carrier Bearn.
Bow Turrets on Lamotte-Picquet. Note the director and large searchlight above it. ECPA(D) Photograph. Besides the Duguay Trouin class, the French only used the 6.1″/50 Model 1920 on the training cruiser Jeanne D ‘Arc and the carrier Bearn.
Look at those hull lines. Here, Lamotte-Picquet seen in drydock.
French Duguay-Trouin-class light cruiser Primauguet on 28 Juli 1939. Note her twin forward 6-inch gun turrets, the gunnery clock on her tower, and the tropical dress of her crew
Secondary armament for period cruisers was considered their torpedo battery and the Trouins carried 24 heavyweight models able to be fired in any one of a dozen 21.7-inch topside torpedo tubes, arranged in four triple mounts on turnstiles.
Lamotte Picquet torpedo drill, Haiphong, 1939. Note the tropical service pith helmets.
Unusually for vessels of this type, there was also allowance for depth charges and mechanical minesweeping gear (paravanes).
Their anti-aircraft batteries– four 3″/60 Mod 22 AA singles clustered around the funnels amidship and another quartet of 13.2mm Hotchkiss heavy machine guns– were felt adequate for the 1920s but would be woefully underwhelming by 1939. Auxiliary armament included a pair of older 3-pounder 57mm guns for use in saluting and a 37mm landing gun on a wheeled mount along with enough small arms to send a 180-man landing force ashore if needed.
They were designed from the outset to carry two single-engine floatplanes for scouting use and had a centerline stern-mounted Penhoët-type air-powered catapult capable of handling them. It seemed the French used or evaluated at least a dozen distinct types of aircraft across the mid-1920s through 1942 on these cruisers with mixed results. The country fielded no less than 50 assorted “Hydravion de reconnaissance” types (!) in the first half of the 20th Century and I’ve seen or read of the Duguay-Trouin class with CAMS 37, Donnet-Denhaut, Loire 130 and 210, Gourdou-Leseurre GL-810/812/820 HY and GL-832, FBA 17 HL 2, Latecoere 298, and Potez 452 types aboard.
Visitors aboard the French light cruiser Lamotte-Picquet in East Asia. Note the tropical helmets on her crew and the single-engine flying boat (she carried a couple Potez 452 in 1936-39) on her catapult. The marching band is dressed in outlandish tropical grass skirts and seems to be leading a parade, which may be the start of a crossing-the-line ceremony.
Fast and with a decent armament, something had to be sacrificed and it was protection. These cruisers had an arrangement of 21 watertight bulkheads and used only double skin plating abreast of their machinery– hardly what could be described as a torpedo blister.
A scant 0.75 inches of armor protected their main deck and box citadel which covered the magazines and steering gear while the vital main turrets and conning tower only had one inch of armor, a plan capable of defeating splinters only. In all these cruisers only carried 166 tons of armor plate, which is something like 1.9 percent of its standard tonnage. By comparison, the American Omaha class light cruisers which were being built at the same time and were roughly the same size/armament (7,100 tons, 12×6″/53 guns) carried 572 tons of armor in a 3-inch belt.
Little wonder why Jane’s described the Dugay Trouin class’s armor at the time as “practically nil.”
Nonetheless, these ships were generally considered successful and seaworthy in peacetime service, with sisters Dugay Trouin and Primaguett constructed at Arsenal de Brest while middle sister Lamotte-Picquet would be built at Arsenal de Lorient. The first ship was laid down in August 1922 and all three were completed within a few weeks of each other in September-October 1926.
Jane’s 1931 listing on the class.
The Duguay Trouins proved the basis for French cruiser design throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.
As mentioned above, the type was shrunk down to create the training cruiser Jeanne D ‘Arc, and it was also upsized to make the first French heavy cruisers (croiseur de 1ere classes), the Duquesne and Tourville (10,000t std, 627 oal, 62 ft beam, 8×8″/50, 118,358.4 shp to make 34 knots). These Duquesne and Tourville used almost the same engineering suite (8 guyot boilers, 4 turbines, trunked through two funnels), the same thin bikini-style light armor plan that only covered gun magazines, deck, and the CT; arrangements for two scout planes on a single rear catapult, and the same 4×2 main gun arrangement for the main battery with torpedo tube clusters amidship.
Then came the later heavy cruisers Suffern, Colbert, Foch, and Dupleix which were basically just the Duquesne class with slightly better armor arrangement in exchange for a lower speed.
A French Navy recruiting poster, featuring the country’s modern style of light and heavy cruisers. Beautiful, fast, modern, but very lightly armored.
Meet Lamotte-Picquet
Our subject is the third French warship named in honor of the 18th century Admiral Comte Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte who famously took part in 34 naval campaigns and sea battles across a half-century of service to his king. In addition to several single-ship commands and sea duels, this included commanding the French squadron at the Battles of Martinique and Cape Spartel and capturing a massive 22-ship British convoy in the Caribbean in 1781.
All in all, the good Comte de Lamotte-Picquet had a very successful career.
Importantly to Americans, on Valentine’s Day 1778, he ordered his flagship, the mighty Bucentaure-class 80-gun ship of the line Robuste, to fire a 9-gun salute to the incoming 18-gunned Continental Navy sloop of war Ranger under John Paul Jones, as the latter warship entered at Quiberon Bay, France. This was the first salute to the American flag given by a foreign ship and has made sure he is remembered as a hero of the American War of Independence only just behind the Comte de Grasse.
“First Recognition of the American Flag by a Foreign Government” 14 February 1778, French ship Robuste salutes Ranger. Painted in 1898 by Edward Moran. NHHC 80-G-K-21225
The first Lamotte-Picquet in French service was a 179-foot steam aviso that served in the 1860s-80s, followed by a 167-foot Jacques Cœur-class colonial gunboat/seaplane tender that served in the early 1920s before being renamed so that her moniker could go on to be used by our subject cruiser.
Before the Great War, a 10-ship class of 6,000-ton light cruisers– the first of the type in French service– was to have been led by a La Motte-Picquet, but these vessels never got further than design plans.
Our La Motte-Picquet was completed on 1 February 1926 and was able to begin its first test runs under the command of Capitaine de Vaisseau Jean Émile Paul Cras. A career officer born in Brest to a family of naval officers, Cras graduated fourth in his class from the Ecole Navale in 1898 and was a bit of a polymath. He designed several navigational instruments that are still in use today, developed electronic signaling gear earned a Legion of Honour in combat during the Great War as commander of the destroyer Commandant Bory on the Adriatic Campaign, served as a professor at the naval academy, and composed more than 60 symphonic and chamber music works– some of which were quite popular.
Capitaine de Vaisseau Jean Émile Paul Cras, Lamotte-Picquet’s very metropolitan plank owner skipper.
Peacetime service
Assigned to the 3e division légère at Brest after she joined the fleet, Lamotte-Picquet spent just over six years on a series of squadron maneuvers and summer cruises to the Mediterranean.
French cruiser Lamotte-Picquet at Brest 3 May 1927 BnF Btv1b53179908r
Le Havre 3/7/1928, Lamotte-Picquet et Revue_navale Agence_Rol_btv1b53201896j
Lamotte-Picquet lit up at night.
Crew of Lamotte-Picquet sur le cours Dajot Brest Bastille Day
Manoeuvres navales la_vedette Duquesne Provence and Lamotte Piquet BNF 1b532305530_1
County Class Cruiser HMS London Duguay-Trouin Class Lamotte Picquet Worlds Fair Barcelona May 14 1929
French cruiser Lamotte-Picquiet Cherbourg 30 July 1933 BnF btv1b9027179r
Far East Service
Then came an overseas deployment when, on 8 January 1936, La Motte-Picquet became the flagship of the French Far East Squadron (Forces Navales d’Extreme Orient), based in Indochina.
Crossing the line:
Marine Française, Croiseur Lamotte Picquet. Baptême de la Ligne plein Océan
She was easily the largest ship and most powerful member of the squadron.
The rest of the assets amounted to a pair of newer Bougainville class aviso (gunboats), Amiral Charnier and the Dumont d’Urville (1,969 tons, 15.5 kts, 3x138mm guns, 4x37mm guns, 50 mines, 1 Gourdou 832 seaplane) and two old colonial gunboats, Marne (601 tons, 21 kts, 4x100mm, 2x65mm) and Tahure (644 tons, 19 kts,2x138mm, 1x75mm guns).
Two large (302-foot) Redoutable-class deep-sea patrol submarines deployed to Indochina were deleted from the squadron before 1941, with L’Espoir recalled to Toulon in December 1940, while the second, Phenix (Q157), was lost with all hands during an accident in June 1939 off Saigon while in ASW exercises with Lamotte Picquet.
A force of 10 shallow draft river gunboats (Mytho, Tourane, Vigilante, Avalanche, Paul-Bert, Commander Bourdais, Lapérouse, Capitaine-Coulon, Frézouls, and Crayssac) was busy on constabulary duties along the brown waters of Indochina.
There was also a naval aviation squadron with eight lumbering Loire 130 flying boats, unwieldy beasts that were slow (89-knot cruising speed) and lightly armed but could at least stay aloft for almost eight hours.
This left our cruiser as a big fish in a little pond.
Duguay-Trouin class light cruiser LAMOTTE-PICQUET in Ha Long Bay Vietnam, 22-26 February 1937
French cruiser Lamotte-Picquiet, Indochina
French cruiser Lamotte-Picquiet, Indochina
Lamotte Picquet pre-war in the Far East.
Lamotte-Picquet in Saigon, note the extensive awnings.
Arriving at the station in early 1936, La Motte-Picquet spent much of her time showing the flag around the tense Western Pacific, ranging from Japan to China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, leaving the smaller gunboats to police the waters of Indochina. The French fleet had two gunboats/station ships in China, the Rigault de Genouilly in Shanghai and the Argus in Canton, to which regular visits by the much more impressive cruiser were no doubt welcome.
Hong Kong Harbor circa November 1936 with ships of the British, French,h and U.S. Navies present. Ships are (in the most distant offshore row, left to right): French light cruiser Lamotte-Picquet, British submarine tender HMS Medway with several submarines alongside, and British aircraft carrier HMS Hermes. (in the nearest offshore row, left to right): two destroyers (unidentified nationality), a French colonial sloop, USS Augusta (CA-3,1), and USS Black Hawk (AD-9) with two destroyers alongside. Alongside dockyard wharves (left to right): British heavy cruiser Berwick with two or three destroyers outboard, and British heavy cruiser Cumberland. Inside the dockyard basin (clockwise from entrance): Two destroyers, three submarines, and an Insect class gunboat. Offshore of, and to the right of, the dockyard (left to right): USS Isabel (PY-10) alongside a U.S. destroyer, two British destroyers, three U.S. destroyers, and three U.S. destroyers. Courtesy of Lieutenant Gustave Freret, USN (Retired), 1972. NH 80422
Shanghai November 11 1938 heavy cruiser USS Augusta, HMS Dorsetshire, Lamotte-Picquet in background.
Lamotte-Picquet at Shanghai, 1930s. University of Bristol – Historical Photographs of China reference number: Ro-n1005.
“Man of War Row” in the Whangpoo (Huangpu) River, Shanghai, China, in late May or early June 1939. The U.S. Navy heavy cruiser USS Augusta (CA-31) is moored to the left. The Siccawei Observatory signal tower is in the foreground. The old Japanese cruiser Izumo is in the distance, beyond Augusta’s bow. Next is the British Royal Navy light cruiser HMS Birmingham (C19), which has large Union Jacks painted atop her awnings and turrets to assist identification from the air, and carries a Supermarine Walrus aircraft amidships. What appears to be a British Insect-class gunboat is near shore in the center background. The French light cruiser Lamotte-Picquet is moored astern of Birmingham. The U.S. Navy troop transport USS Chaumont (AP-5) is moored in the most distant row, ahead of the Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni and astern of Lamotte-Picquet. The merchantman moored in the nearer offshore row including the British Shantung (left) and the Italian Enderia (center). The British merchantman Yingchow is moored in the distance, beyond Chaumont’s bow. U.S. Navy photos NH 81985, NH 81986, NH 81987, and NH 81988.
War!
Going into 1939, Lamotte-Picquet’s new skipper, Capt. Marie Daniel Régis Berenger– a Knight of the Legion of Honor who served on the battleship Patrie on the Dardanelles gunline in 1915 and commanded the landing craft Polypheme in 1916 during the Serbian landings on Corfu– was celebrating 33 years in the service.
Once WWII erupted in Europe, our cruiser spent eight months on regular patrols around the Tonkin Gulf on the lookout for German merchant vessels at large. Her only brush with such contraband-carrying vessels was to take over the seized Soviet steamer Vladimir Makovsky (3972grt) on 26 March 1940 near Hong Kong, which had been taken into custody in the Sea of Japan by the Australian armed merchant cruiser HMAS Kanimbla (C78), because the freighter was carrying a cargo of copper from the U.S. to Germany. Lamotte Picquet escorted the Soviet merchantman into Saigon, arriving on 1 April.
Mayakovsky and her 40-man crew sweated it out at Saigon under French guns for six months then were allowed to leave after the local administration relieved its cargo of coffee and ore. The ship somehow survived WWII and was only removed from Soviet service in 1967.
When France entered into an Armistice with the Germans and Italians in June 1940, the situation changed in Indochina. While the French colonies of Polynesia and New Caledonia had declared for De Gaulle’s Free France movement, Indochina remained aligned to the Vichy regime of Marshal Petain, with our cruiser and its squadron along with it.
While French colonial officials in Saigon were concerned about an increasingly aggressive Japan and their allies in Siam– which started pushing militarily on Indochina’s borders before the end of the year– they made efforts to remain on watch against the British in nearby Burma and Malaysia, especially after the shameful attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir, Algeria by the Royal Navy (Operation Catapult) in July 1940.
Nonetheless, some members of her crew released themselves on their own recognizance to make it back to the fight in Europe.
In November 1940, three of her junior officers, led by LV Andre Jubelin, eager to get back in the war, managed to join a local civilian aviation club and, packed into a single-engine Caudron Pélican– which required sitting on spare gas cans in place of the seats to refuel in flight– flew 600 miles across the Gulf of Siam from Saigon to Singapore. They managed to make it from there in an epic 10-hour flight and then to England where they joined the Free French forces.
Lts. Andre Jubelin, Jean Arnoux, and Louis Ducorps dramatically deserted their post in Indochina for Singapore and, subsequently, London.
When the Siamese were eventually enticed into making a move against the French in Indochina over territorial aspirations along the Mekong frontier led to a mutual exchange of air raids, a ground campaign launched in early January 1941 that saw a 60,000-man Thai army sweep into French Laos. As the French colonial forces mobilized for a counter-attack, Berenger’s cruiser-gunboat squadron, sailing as Groupe de travail 7 (TF 7), was ordered to the Gulf of Siam, sailing from Saigon late on 14 January, with the slow sloops scouting ahead and Lamotte-Picquet following.
By dawn of the 17th, with the positions of the Thai fleet pinpointed the previous evening by French flying boats, the combat was soon joined at the anchorage of the former Thai fleet near Ko Chang. The French force squared off against the Japanese-built Thai armored coast defense vessels Thonburi and Sri Ayudhya (2,540 tons, 4×8″/50, 4x75mm guns), two British-built Thai gunboats (1,000 tons, 2×6″/50), a dozen assorted torpedo boats, and a small submarine.
On paper, you would say the odds were on the Thais.
However, luck flew with the French.
In the short 40-minute battle, Thonburi was severely damaged by 6-inch shells from Lamotte-Picquet to the point that fires spread out of control and, towed to Laem Ngop to be beached, she would instead capsize a few hours after the order to abandon ship was given, her captain, Luang Phrom Viraphan, killed in the engagement.
The French cruiser also landed hits on the torpedo boats Chonburi and Soughkla which sent them to the bottom, and shelled the base at Ko Chang, destroying its telephone exchange.
Responding land-based Thai air force Vought O2U Corsairs and Curtiss Hawks bracketed Lamotte-Picquet with small bombs, which lightly damaged her with shrapnel.
Lamotte-Picquet fired 454 6-inch and 280 3-inch shells, including 117 anti-aircraft shells, during the battle.
Casualty figures vary widely between French and Thai sources, but all agree that the French losses were negligible (11 killed) while Thai losses ran as high as 300 killed, wounded, captured, and missing with the latter including several Japanese officers serving as advisers.
Berenger reported his victory and praised his crew, saying “Under the bombs of airplanes, amid the roar of shells of an adversary who fought valiantly, you have all given an example of courage worthy of our ancestors,” withdrawing in good order back to Cam Ran Bay.
Shortly after, between the naval action at Ko Chang and the responding French colonial forces in Cambodia, the Japanese sponsored a ceasefire that took effect by the end of January which ended the conflict– with some territorial concessions to Bangkok.
Ko Chang is remembered as the last French naval ship-to-ship clash and, along with the even more forgotten Battle of Dakar (Operation Menace) in September 1940 against the Royal Navy, as the only French naval victory in WWII.
Berenger was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor and promoted to rear admiral shortly after the battle.
Ignoble End
Cut off from the possibility of dry docking in Hong Kong, Australia, Surabaya, or Singapore due to the bad blood between the Vichy regime and the Allies, the French negotiated a shipyard maintenance period in Osaka in August 1941 to clean the cruiser’s hull. At the same time, the Japanese had come to an agreement with Vichy to allow the basing and transshipment of troops and aircraft in Indochina, a factor that led to the birth of the Việt Minh.
Returning to Saigon in October 1941, the cruiser’s boilers were in a sad state of affairs and, although two new boilers were available, other parts and components were not and by 1942, suffering additional damage from typhoons that had come ashore, the mighty Lamotte-Picquet found herself laid up, with most of her officers and crew reassigned. The ship was turned into a floating school for colonial naval cadets (Ecole des marins Annamites), men who would go on to found the Vietnamese Navy.
Her turrets and superstructure were largely removed, and many of her guns were planned to be re-established ashore as coastal artillery.
In January 1945, as part of Operation Gratitude, the fast carriers of VADM “Slim” McCain’s Task Force 38 paid Indochina a visit to destroy Japanese ships and aircraft sheltering there.
Formation of TBF Avenger Aircraft of Carrier Air Group Four, USS Essex (CV-9), Task Group 38.3, approaching the coast of French Indochina on their way to bomb and torpedo airfields and shipping in the Saigon area, 12 January 1945 80-G-300673
Japanese Ships burning and sinking in Saigon River, Saigon Town, French Indochina after an aerial strike by planes of Carrier Air Group Four, USS Essex (CV-9), Task Group 38.3 on 12 January 1945. 80-G-300660
Lamotte-Picquet, her tricolor still flying, was caught in the melee and took several bombs through her decks, leaving her at the bottom of Saigon Harbor at Thanh-Tuy-Ha. She suffered 10 of her French cadre and 60 of her colonial cadets killed. The hydrographic survey vessel Octant was sunk alongside.
USS Essex strike photo of the former French cruiser La Motte-Picquet capsized in Saigon Harbor, French Indochina (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), 12 Jan 1945. The cruiser’s turrets and superstructure were previously removed, NNAM.
TBF Avenger Aircraft of Carrier Air Group Four, USS Essex (CV-9), Task Group 38.3, leaving the coast of French Indochina as they return to their carrier after strikes on the Saigon area, 12 January 1945 80-G-300666
To add insult to injury, in March 1945 the Japanese revoked French colonial rule in Indochina in a coup executed by the Japanese 38th Army, termed Operation Bright Moon, that left over 4,000 French troops dead and 15,000 interned, including Berenger and most of the former crew of Lamotte-Picquet.
Japanese troops entering Saigon
Most of the French sailors were housed in the notoriously bad Martin-des-Pallières camp in Saigon.
One petty officer who served there, Maurice Amant, formerly a signalman aboard the Lamotte-Picquet, recounted after the war that in July 1945, inside a courtyard surrounded by a wall, he was made to dig a series of holes 25×25-inches wide, three feet deep, and spaced six feet apart. It was only after liberation that he learned the purpose: the Japanese had placed electrically wired anti-tank mines and wheelbarrows of scrap metal in each of these holes, and in the event of a resisted Allied landing, they would have gathered all the prisoners in the courtyard to send them collectively on their “final journey” with the clack of a firing switch.
C’est la vie.
Epilogue
Our lost cruiser was slowly salvaged between 1947 and 1959, by which time the management in Saigon had changed a few times.
An online record of her travels, in particular her period in the Far East in the late 1930s, is maintained by the grandson of Claude Berruyer, a sailor who served aboard her and had a proclivity for photography.
French light cruiser Primauguet beached off Casablanca, Morocco in November 1942. She had been badly damaged during the Battle of Casablanca on 8 November and is largely burned out forward. What appears to be shell damage is visible at her main deck line amidships, just aft of her second smokestack. In the left distance are the French destroyers Milan (partially visible at far left) and Albatros, both irreparably damaged and beached closer to shore. The latter is flying a large French flag from her foremast. 80-G-31607
Class leader Duguay-Trouin was interned with the British in June 1940 in Alexandria, and sat out the war until early 1943 when she was turned over to the Free French following the fall of the Vichy regime. Refitted by the Allies in time for the Dragoon Landings along the French Riveria in August 1944, she was ordered to Indochina after the war and participated in NGFS operations there against the Viet Minh insurgents until 1952– the ghost of Lamotte-Picquet returned to exact vengeance.
French cruiser Duguay-Trouin 1946 Janes
One of the few pre-Revolutionary military heroes still honored in the Republic, ADM Picquet de la Motte has a street named after him in Paris (Avenue de La Motte-Picquet) as well as a rail station and a slew of buildings.
The French Navy has dutifully issued the name for a fourth warship, a Georges Leygues class ASW frigate (D645) commissioned in 1987. Her 100mm main gun bore the name “Ko Chang.”
The French Georges Leygues class ASW frigate La Motte-Picquet (D645) is seen in her prime. She served until 2020, including seeing a bit of action in the Bay of Kotor during the Kosovo affair, numerous deployments to the Persian Gulf, and counter-piracy operations off Somalia, capping a 33-year career.
As for Lamotte-Picquet’s skippers, her plank owner composer Jean Cras, went on to command the battleship Provence and died an untimely death from cancer at age 53 as a rear admiral in 1932. His Trio de Cordes (String Trio) No.3, one of the pieces he composed while on the cruiser, remains.
Her most famous captain, Berenger, the victor of Ko Chang, survived a Japanese POW camp and was released in September 1945. Placed on the retirement list post-war as a vice admiral after 39 years in uniform, he passed in 1971, aged 82. Ko Chang is still regarded by many as near-flawless surface action. In his memoirs, De Gaulle describes it as a “brilliant naval victory.” The battle is commemorated in numerous square and street names in France, for example in Brittany and Vendée.
Marie Daniel Régis Berenger passed in 1971, aged 84.
The young aviator from the cruiser who borrowed a single-engine aircraft to fly from Saigon to Malaysia with two passengers, Andre Jubelin, went on to fly Spitfires with No. 118 Squadron RAF and in 72 combat sorties downed two German aircraft. Returning to naval service, he commanded a destroyer on convoy duty in the Atlantic then the French carrier Arromanches off Indochina against the Viet Mien in 1948, and retired as a rear admiral in 1967, head of the French Navy’s air arm.
He made sure the borrowed Pelican made it back to the Saigon Flying Club, packed as cargo on a steamer, at his own expense.
RADM André Marius Joseph Jubelin passed in 1986, aged 80. He penned a memoir, The Flying Sailor, which is very entertaining, as well as the more mauldin J’étais aviateur de la France libre, which covers his war years, among other works.
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
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.
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.
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, Jan. 22, 2025: The 80 Eightballs
U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph. Catalog #: NH 50755
Above we see the Lapwing-class “Old Bird” USS Penguin (Minesweeper # 33) underway off Shanghai, China, circa the late 1920s, following conversion for river gunboat service. Note the sampan in the foreground. She rescued 24 shipwrecked Japanese sailors some 85 years ago this week.
The favor would not be repaid a year later.
The Lapwings
When a young upstart by the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt came to the Navy Department in 1913 as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, he helped engineer one of the largest naval build-ups in world history. By the time the U.S. entered World War I officially in 1917, it may have been Mr. Wilson’s name in the role of Commander in Chief, but it was Mr. Roosevelt’s fleet.
One of his passions was the concept of the Great North Sea Mine Barrage, a string of as many as 400,000 (planned) sea mines that would shut down the Kaiser’s access once and for all to the Atlantic and save Western Europe (and its overseas Allies) from the scourge of German U-boats. A British idea dating from late 1916, the U.S. Navy’s Admiral Sims thought it was a bullshit waste of time but it was FDR’s insistence to President Wilson in the scheme that ultimately won the day.
While a fleet of converted steamships (and two old cruisers- USS San Francisco and USS Baltimore) started dropping mines in June 1918, they only managed to sow 70,177 by Armistice Day and accounted for a paltry two U-boats gesunken (although some estimates range as high as 8 counting unaccounted-for boats).
And the thing is, you don’t throw that many mines in international shipping lanes without having a plan to clean them up after the war (while having the bonus of using those mine countermeasures ships to sweep enemy-laid fields as well).
That’s where the 54 vessels of the Lapwing-class came in.
Review of the Atlantic Fleet Minesweeping Squadron, November 1919. USS Lapwing (AM-1) and other ships of the squadron anchored in the Hudson River, off New York City, while being reviewed by Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels on 24 November 1919, following their return to the United States after taking part in clearing the North Sea mine barrage. The other ships visible are USS Lark (Minesweeper No. 21), with USS SC-208 alongside (at left); and USS Swan (Minesweeper No. 34) with USS SC-356 alongside (at right). Heron was there but is not seen in the photo. U.S. Navy photo NH 44903. Note the crow’s nest for sighting floating mines.
Inspired by large seagoing New England fishing trawlers, these 187-foot-long ships were large enough, at 965 tons full, to carry a pair of economical reciprocating diesel engines (or two Scotch boilers and one VTE engine) with a decent enough range to make it across the Atlantic on their own (though with a blisteringly slow speed of just 14 knots when wide open on trials.)
Lapwing class 1944 profile USS Kingfisher AM-25 ATO-135
They could also use a sail rig to poke along at low speed with no engines, a useful trait for working in a minefield. Their two masts stood 73 feet high above the LWL.
Lapwing-class sister USS Falcon AM-28 in Pensacola Bay 1924 with the Atlantic submarine fleet. Note her rig
While primarily built to sweep mines, their battery amounted to a pair of 3″/50 singles with 20 ready rounds in the chest on her superstructure deck and 200 below deck. Capable of landing a squad ashore as needed, the standard small arms locker for a Lapwing class sweeper included a single Lewis light machine gun, 10 rifles (M1903s), and five revolvers (likely M1917s).
Their electrical system included two 25 kW generators as well as a smaller oscillator and radio generator which powered two 24-inch searchlights, a submarine signal apparatus, a radio outfit as well as her lights. Deck machinery included three stern hoisting winches for sweeping gear, an anchor hoist, and towing engine, and a capstan engine. Small boats amounted to a 30-foot motor launch, a 28-foot whaleboat, and a 16-foot dingy, allowing a total capacity of carrying 82 persons. Their onboard workshop included a lathe, a shaper, and a drill press along with assorted hand tools.
Crew amounted to four officers, six CPOs, and 40 ratings.
The class leader, Lapwing, designated Auxiliary Minesweeper #1 (AM-1), was laid down at Todd in New York in October 1917 and another 53 soon followed. While five were canceled in November 1918, the other 48 were eventually finished– even if they came to the war a little late.
This leads us to the hero of our tale, the humble Penguin.
Meet Penguin
Our subject is the second U.S. Navy ship to carry the name of the Antarctic flightless bird.
The first was a 155-foot screw steamer armed with a quartet of 32-pounders and a single 12-pounder that served with distinction on the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron and along the Gulf of Mexico during the Civil War.
Bombardment and Capture of Port Royal, South Carolina, 7 November 1861 Engraving published in “Harper’s Weekly”, July-December 1861. It depicts Federal warships, under Flag Officer Samuel F. DuPont, USN, bombarding Fort Beauregard (at right) and Fort Walker (at left). The Confederate squadron commanded by Commodore Josiah Tattnall is in the left-center distance. Subjects identified below the image bottom are (from left): tug Mercury, Fort Walker, USS Wabash (DuPont’s flagship), USS Susquehanna, CSS Huntsville, Commo. Tattnall, USS Bienville, USS Pembina, USS Seneca, USS Ottawa, USS Unadilla, USS Pawnee, USS Mohican, USS Isaac Smith, USS Curlew, USS Vandalia, USS Penguin, USS Pocahontas, USS Seminole, Fort Beauregard, USS R.B. Forbes and “Rebel Camp”.NH 59256
The second Penguin (Minesweeper No. 33) was laid down on 17 November 1917 at Elizabethport by the New Jersey Dry Dock & Transportation Co.; launched on 12 June 1918 and commissioned on 21 November 1918– just 10 days after the Armistice.
Sent to New York, she spent the next six months in minesweeping and salvage work for the Third Naval District.
USS Penguin (Minesweeper # 33) liberty party gathered on the ship’s stern, preparing to go ashore after reviewing the Fleet in New York Harbor, on 26 December 1918. NH 59647
Working the Barrage
Outfitted with “electrical protective devices,” Penguin set out for Scotland in late March 1919 to join the North Sea Minesweeping Detachment.
USS Penguin (Minesweeper # 33) underway near USS Scranton (ID # 3511), probably circa 28 March 1919. Photograph from the USS Scranton photo album kept by J.D. Bartar, one of her crew members. NH 99458
USS Penguin close astern of USS Scranton (ID # 3511), as a Chief Petty Officer, is putting the heaving line 60 ft. between the two ships, circa 28 March 1919. Note the line’s weight in the air above Penguin’s bow. Photograph from the USS Scranton photo album kept by J.D. Bartar, one of her crew members. NH 99450
Beginning operations in June 1919, Penguin was on hand near Scapa Flow when the 72 ships of RADM Ludwig von Reuter’s interned former German High Seas Fleet elected to scuttle rather than have their ships turned over to the Allies. She raced to the scene to help save what could be kept above the waves.
USS Penguin steaming at full speed for Scapa Flow, on 21 June 1919, during an unsuccessful effort to arrive in time to save some of the German warships, scuttled there on that day. Note the identification letters PD on her bow. Halftone reproduction of a photograph taken by DeLong, of USS Black Hawk, published in the cruise book Sweeping the North Sea Mine Barrage, 1919, page 38. Donation of Chief Storekeeper Charles A. Free. NH 99472
In all, Penguin would spend four months plumbing the depths of the North Sea for mines. This included picking up damage in two different explosions. One of these, a mine going off in her kite, resulted in three days in the yard for repair. The second caused more extensive destruction that required her to be repaired at Chatham for a month.
Three explosions between Lapwing and Penguin
USS Penguin (Minesweeper # 33), at left, and USS Lapwing (Minesweeper # 1) coming up to repass sweep gear, after exploding a mine during the sweeping of the North Sea Mine Barrage in 1919. Note the identification letters on the ships’ bows: PD on Penguin and W on Lapwing. Halftone reproduction of a photograph taken by DeLong, of USS Black Hawk, published in the cruise book Sweeping the North Sea Mine Barrage, 1919, page 59. Donation of Chief Storekeeper Charles A. Free. NH 99473
The Buoy Laying Division in Kirkwall Harbor From left to right, in the center: USS Osprey (Minesweeper # 29), USS Penguin (Minesweeper # 33), and USS Lapwing (Minesweeper # 1) moored together in Kirkwall Harbor, Orkney Islands, during the sweeping of the North Sea Mine Barrage, 1919. Note the identification letters on the ships’ bows: A on Osprey, PD on Penguin, and W on Lapwing. Halftone reproduction of a photograph taken by Kitress, of USS Swan, published in the cruise book Sweeping the North Sea Mine Barrage, 1919, page 63. Donation of Chief Storekeeper Charles A. Free. NH 99474
Her repairs at Chatham were completed, and she set off back across the Atlantic with the tug USS Concord on October 31, sailing via the Azores.
For her dangerous service in the Barrage between 5 June and 30 September 1919, Penguin earned a Great War Victory Medal
Peacetime service
Once returning stateside, Penguin was transferred to the Pacific and laid up at Pearl Harbor on 1 June 1922.
With a need for shallow draft gunboats in the Asiatic Fleet to work China’s civil war-torn inland waterways during the country’s Warlord Era, Penguin landed her sweeping gear and, recommissioned 13 October 1923 along with sister USS Pigeon (AM-47), would spend the next seven years on China station ala “The Sand Pebbles.”
We spent the next two years steaming up and down the Yangtze, protecting missionaries when they had a rough time and looking after American rights. We could only go as far as Ichang, the foot of the gorges, where we began to strike the rapids. We had two little gunboats, the USS Palos (PG-16) and Monocacy (PG-20), which did the run further up from Ichang to Chungking. Some bandits and Chinese were beginning to take cracks at us. We put an armed guard, eight enlisted men, and one officer, on each American merchant ship running the 200–300 miles to Chungking. I’ve made the run many times,the first time I was ever fired on.
Another anecdote from Johnson:
This was the time of the Chinese warlords, and we were always afraid that Chiang So Lin, the warlord of the north, was going to come down and knock everything off the river. Wo Pei Fu was the other warlord. As long as they were suspicious of each other they did not bother us much. One time, the American Consul got word that a group was going to try to take over the consulate. Our Herman Barker took about 40 men, marched from the Standard Oil dock up to the consulate, and spent the night. Just a few shots were fired, but the next day Barker had to march backward all the way, a mile and one half to the dock, because the Chinese were following. The captain fired off a couple of the ship’s 3-inch guns, just up in the air. We never had anybody killed. The objective of the bandits was plunder.
For her tense China service, between June and July 1925, Penguin, along with the destroyers and gunboats Edsall, Elcano, Hart, Isbel, MacLeish, McCormack, Noa, Parrott, Peary, Pillsbury, Pope, Preble, Sacramento, Stewart, and Truxtun earned the (Shanghai) Expeditionary Medal.
She was stationed at Kluklang (near Hankow, now Wuhan) starting in February 1927 for several months, as the sole foreign naval presence in the city during the conflict between the Guomindang army and warlord Sun Chuanfan.
For her 13-month period patrolling along the broad and often very wild banks of the Yangtze River, between 26 September 1926 and 21 October 1927, Penguin’s officers and men aboard during that frame earned the Yangtze Service Medal.
Lapwing class, 1929 janes
The “Old Duck” Lifesaver
Her China service was taken over by newer and more purpose-built gunboats, and Penguin was reassigned to work out of Guam as the territory’s guard ship around 1930. Nicknamed the “Old Duck,” the reports of the Asiatic Fleet from the 1930s frequently note minor problems and mechanical issues with the aging gunboat.
As the Navy had opened mess attendant and steward positions to CHamoru volunteers– with some 700 authorized by 1941 (12 were killed at Pearl Harbor) it made sense for four of Penguin’s crew to be drawn from the local population.
Penguin proved a godsend to many on the sea around Guam during this quiet decade, patrolling the new transpacific air routes and shipping lanes.
Among those plucked from the waves were the 24 mariners of the 91-foot wooden hulled Japanese fishing schooner Daichs Saiho Maru (Seiho Maru No. 1) which wrecked– in a restricted area– on a reef off Guam’s southeast tip on 15 January 1940. Not sure if a fishing schooner needs a 24-member crew, but hey…
A week later, after negotiations by the Navy governor of Guam, Penguin transferred these survivors to the passing Japanese Nippon Yusen Kaisha (NYK) liner Suwa Maru after the Imperial Navy refused access to land them on nearby Saipan itself. Not weird.
Drums of War
With the march towards open combat in the Pacific, the forces on Guam, under Navy Capt. George Johnson McMillin (USNA 1911) as military governor, was sparse.
In the summer of 1940, two .50 caliber water-cooled machine guns were fitted to each AM (Penguin included) and DM in the Pacific Fleet, and Admiral Kimmel, in his 1941 report, recommended additional guns. He also noted that portable depth charge racks- that didn’t interfere with sweeping– each carrying eight ash cans, were being provided to the Mine Divisions.
To help out Penguin, the Navy in October 1941 shipped two “Yippee” yard boats, USS YP-16 and YP-17 to the island as deck cargo aboard the oiler USS Ramapo (AO-12). These were recycled Prohibition-era USCG “six-bitters,” 75-foot wooden hulled patrol boats (ex-CG-267 and ex-CG-275, respectively), each armed with light machine guns and crewed by eight men commanded by a CBM, augmented by four Chamorros. Both of these craft, along with the rest of the island, were seriously damaged in a typhoon in November.
The territory’s station ship, the 4,800-ton freighter USS Gold Star (AK-12), with much of her crew made up of Chamorros, natives of Guam, was in the Philippines in December 1941 on a regular inter-islands cargo run. A small 5,380-ton tanker, USS Robert L. Barnes (SP-3088), had been a fixture in Apra Harbor since 1920 where she had been used as a stationary oil storage vessel, towed every few years to Cavite for maintenance.
That’s it for afloat assets.
Still, the Navy, in June 1941, ordered Penguin to patrol off the Harbor entrance each night, a responsibility only occasionally alternated with the YP boats after October. This order came with a new skipper, the Old Duck’s 16th and final, LT James William Haviland (USNA 1925).
Ashore, a coastal defense battery of 6-inch guns that had been installed in 1909 to defend the station had been withdrawn due to budget cuts in the 1930s along with a Marine aviation unit.
This left 274 Navy personnel (including Penguin’s crew) between the Naval Yard at Piti, the Hospital (which had 70 Medical Corps personnel including five female nurses), and the radio stations at Agana and Libugon. A force of 150 Marines, barracked at Sumay under Lt. Col. William K. McNulty, which was not a combat unit. The Marines had the primary mission to train the recently formed 240-member territorial militia (the Guam Insular Force Guard) which had only been established in April 1941 and the local civilian police force (the Guam Insular Patrol).
Besides the revolver-equipped Insular Patrol, the Insular Guard was armed with just three Lewis guns, four Thompson submachine guns, six BARs, and 85 Springfield M1903 rifles which may have been just for drill purposes (perhaps early low-number ’03s that had been withdrawn by the War Department as unsafe) as several reportedly bore labels that said “Do not shoot. For training only.” There were no mortars, artillery pieces, or heavy machine guns available to the ashore forces. Nothing in a larger caliber than .30-06.
Guam Insular Force Guard parade, displaying of Guam Flag, 1941. Note the Navy whites and turned down “Donald Ducks.” Guam Public Library System Collection
The improvements in the outlying U.S. Navy outposts around the Hawaiian islands from ADM Kimmel’s summer 1941 report, covering Palmyra Reef, Johnston Island, Wake, American Samoa, and Guam, painted a hopeful picture so long as the war could be put off until after 1943:
With war warnings ramping up, the base evacuated its 104 civilian dependents aboard the steamer SS Henderson to San Francisco in October.
On 5 December 1941, the Navy signaled Capt. McMillin to begin burning his classified materials. At the same time, ADM Thomas C. Hart, the commander of the Asiatic Fleet, ordered Guam’s station ship, Gold Star, to delay sailing back to her homeport and instead remain in the Philippines.
It was clear no one expected Guam to hold if things went hot, and no one was coming in the short term to help them.
War!
As detailed post-war by Capt. McMillin:
0545, 8 December [local] 1941, a message was received which had been originated by the Commander in Chief, Asiatic fleet, to the effect that Japan had commenced hostilities by attacking Pearl Harbor, prior to a declaration of war.
This kickstarted the local plans which included standing up the Insular Guard, arresting known Japanese nationals (including three of eight infiltrators who recently arrived from Saipan), shutting down the navigational lights and beacons, and evacuating local civilians away from potential military targets.
Immediately post-Pearl Harbor, a group of 24 local American civilians on Guam, 17 of which were retired military, mustered into their own group and volunteered to help defend their home. Fighting with the Insular Guard, at least two would go on to perish in Japanese POW camps.
As Penguin, which was out on her regular nightly patrol, had a broken radio (!), one of the Yippie boats was sent out to warn them that a war was on but the minesweeper was already heading back in, with a third of the crew already departed the Old Duck on their way to Recreation Beach to make initial preparations for an afternoon beach party.
The beach had been frantically trying to radio us since early morning, but naturally, they couldn’t reach us, as we had no means of communication. We were still without it and would be until the end because our one and only radioman was in that first boatload of men already ashore. He had gone after spare parts.
Well, you can imagine our consternation. There we were, moored to a buoy right in the middle of the harbor with our boilers dead, as we had doused them upon arrival as we could see the repair barge on the way out from the little Navy Yard in Piti.
Raising steam and getting underway with a reduced crew and no radio, the scratch-and-dent Penguin broke out the ammo for her two water-cooled .50 cals and her two 3-inchers and was as ready as she could be when the first wave of Japanese bombers from Saipan arrived overhead at 0827.
At least one Japanese plane would turn back from Penguin, smoking, while Ensign Robert White, head of one of the gun crews, was killed. A trio of bombs landed so close as to open her seams. Soon, LT Haviland, her skipper, wounded, ordered the men to take to the boats and pull the plug on the Old Duck in 200 fathoms of water so that she couldn’t be salvaged.
“The ship was gallantly fought, but was soon in a sinking condition,” reported McMillian. “The ship was abandoned in a sinking condition and sank in deep water off Orote Point. There several men were injured, but all of the crew succeeded in getting ashore on life rafts, bringing Ensign White’s body with them.”
Then came the fight ashore. Penguin’s men– most of which had lost their shoes in the swim ashore– joined with the under-armed Marines, Insular Guards, and self-mobilized civilians to resist a force of Japanese that, unknown to them, would amount to nearly 6,000 infantry and Naval Special Landing Force members.
A Japanese illustration of the main landing on Guam by the 144th Infantry Regiment, South Seas Detachment. Painting by Kohei Ezaki.
Weapons were scarce.
“I shared a .45 with seven other men,” said Chief O’Brian, who had caught shrapnel in the sinking of Penguin. “If I got it, number two took the gun; if he got it, number three took the gun, and so on.”
The ground combat, which began on the morning of the 10th, was sharp but soon over. Seven further Navy men– six from Penguin— were killed, with the men lost from the minesweeper executed on the beach they were defending.
From Chief O’Brien:
We were waiting for them when they approached Agana, and they had to give themselves away for a group of our Penguin men, six in all, had been established at the power plant. The power plant was on the beach and when they saw the Japanese moving up on the beach, instead of falling back to the Plaza a half mile inland, as had been their orders, they decided to attack the Japanese. They did, and the initial surprise worked well for a few minutes. They had one BAR with them and they moved down a good number. However…in moments they recovered from their surprise and killed all six of our boys quickly.
The Japanese showed their later-to-be-learned attitude by butchering these six so they were beyond recognition. Later one of the Fathers was permitted to take some CHamorus and bury them, and none could be identified, they were so badly mutilated.
The six Minemen killed on the beach:
Ernst, Robert Walter, SM3c, 3812969, USN, USS Penguin
Fraser, Rollin George, BM1c, 3110965, USN, USS Penguin
Hurd, Seba Guarland, SM3c, 3371486, USN, USS Penguin
O’Neill, Frank James, BM1c, 3282372, USN, USS Penguin
Pineault, Leo Joseph, Cox, 2044461, USN, USS Penguin
Schweighhart, John, GM1c, 2282954, USN, USS Penguin
Penguin altogether had 22 of her crew wounded in action– almost half her complement– between the attacks on their ship on the 8th, Japanese air attacks on Guam on the 9th, and the ground combat on the 10th.
Seven Navy bluejackets evaded initial capture and escaped into the jungle: four from the Agana Radio station– RM1c Albert Joseph Tyson and George Ray Tweed, YM1c Adolphe Yablonsky, and Chief Aerographer Luther Wilbur Jones; one from the Piti Naval Yard– CMM Malvern Hill Smoot; and two from Penguin, Chief Motor Machinist’s Mate Michael L. Krump and MM1c Clarence Bruce Johnston. All but Tweed were found during the Japanese occupation and beheaded, with Krump and Johnston holding out until October 1942, an amazing 10 months behind enemy lines.
The Insular Guard lost four killed and 22 wounded, almost all in the short 10 December ground battle.
MacNulty, the 49-year-old Marine barracks commander, was a fighter, having earned a Silver Sar in the Argonne in 1918 and the Navy Cross in Nicaragua in 1926. He lost a full one-third of his men (13 dead and 37 wounded) as casualties and probably would have gone down swinging an empty rifle if Capt. McMillin hadn’t ordered the surrender.
“I was captured in the Reception Room of my quarters about twenty minutes after the cease-firing signal. The leader of the squad of Japanese who entered my quarters required me to remove my jacket and trousers before marching me into the Plaza, where officers and men were being assembled, covered by machine guns,” said McMillin.
Forced to run a gauntlet of rifle butts, the surrendered Americans were forced to strip and lay face up in the sun until noon when they were herded indoors.
They had a whole new war ahead of them.
The POW chapter
Penguin, sunk in deep waters, escaped the Japanese as did Gold Star, which would survive the war carrying precious cargo throughout the South Pacific.
The old tanker Barnes, left strafed and abandoned, was pressed into Japanese service and, recovered at war’s end, was taken into British merchant service until 1949.
The Yippies, YP-16, and YP-17 were strafed by the Japanese and set to the torch by their crews.
In all, 487 people were taken prisoner of war on Guam in December 1941, according to research by Roger Mansell. They were shipped to Japan on 10 January 1942 aboard the transport Argentina Maru. This included not only the legitimate American military POWs but also 13 local Catholic clergy (two of whom were Spanish citizens), 11 Pan-American Airways employees, and six civilian sea cable employees.
At least 19 of the Guam POWs would perish over the next 3.5 years in captivity.
A handful (the nurses, Spanish clergy, a military wife, and her newborn baby) were repatriated in 1942.
The officers, medical corps POWs, and senior NCOs were largely sent at first to the Zentsuji “model camp” which was shown off to the International Red Cross.
Group portrait of POWs from Zentsuji Camp at Shikoku, Osaka, Japan. Identified are Ensign Walter Senchuk, United States (US) Navy Reserve, and USS Penguin (extreme right), the other men are unidentified. Most of the men in the camp were Allied officers captured in the early battles of 1941. The camp was a ‘show camp’ used by the Japanese for propaganda purposes, but after 1942 conditions worsened.
Group portrait of prisoners of war (POWs) from Zentsuji Camp at Shikoku, Osaka, Japan. Identified, left to right: Lieutenant (Lt) James W Haviland, United States Navy, USS Penguin; Lt John L Nestor, US Navy, USS R L Barnes; Major G V Porter, US Army; Mr H P Havenor, US Bureau of the Budget; and Lt Arnold J Carlson, US Navy, Supply. Most of the men in the camp were Allied officers captured in the early battles of 1941. The camp was a ‘show camp’ used by the Japanese for propaganda purposes, but after 1942 conditions worsened.
Group portrait of prisoners of war (POWs) from Zentsuji Camp at Shikoku, Osaka, Japan. Identified, left to right: unidentified; Ensign Edwin Wood, United States (US) Navy, USS Penguin; Ensign Hugh Mellon, US Navy Reserve (USNR); Ensign Joseph Martin Jnr, USNR; and Warrant Officer Robert C Haun, US Navy, Supply. Most of the men in the camp were Allied officers captured in the early battles of 1941. The camp was a ‘show camp’ used by the Japanese for propaganda purposes, but after 1942 conditions worsened.
A group of about 80 prisoners (at least 65 of which had been captured on Guam), considered by the Japanese to be hard cases, were made to work as stevedores on the docks at Osaka Camp No.1 “until they gave the guards so much trouble that they shipped them to a new camp at Hirohata in August 1943 where they acquired the nickname ‘The 80 Eightballs.”
These Eightballs included several men from Penguin.
Of the 55 men from Penguin that Mansell noted as surviving the Battle of Guam and becoming POWs, Capt. Sidney E. Seid, the captured U.S. Army Medical Corps officer at Hirohata, treated at least 10 of Penguin’s crew while at Hirohata for various ailments and injuries. One member of her crew, SK3c Robert Brown MacLean, died of pneumonia in 1944 while a POW.
In total, of the four officers and 60 enlisted among Penguin’s pre-war crew, including regulars, reservists, and Chamorro, 10 were killed in action, died in prison camps, or were executed by the Japanese. Those who survived– 22 of them wounded in action– earned every grain of their POW medals, spending even longer under the Empire’s locks than even the “Battling Bastards of Bataan.” At least one of the ship’s POWs, a young seaman, would suffer a complete mental breakdown and spend the rest of his long life in VA hospitals.
Chief O’Brien, who weighed 175 pounds going into the war, was down to 120 at the end of it.
During the last summer there, the ill effects of living on dried sweet potato vines and dock sweepings finally commenced showing up in a big way. Everyone seemed to be sick at once. The Japanese felt the same way about human beings as they did about their work animals; if sick, cut down the food. If they died… oh, well.
Penguin’s skipper, LT Haviland, was held at the Rokuroshi camp outside of Osaka. Liberated post-war, he was advanced to Captain and presented with a Silver Star. He retired as a rear admiral and passed in 1960 aged 55.
Both Capt. McMillin, the Naval Governor of Guam, and Marine Lt. Col MacNulty would survive the war in the camps as well. McMillin, liberated in August 1945 by Soviet paratroopers at Mukden in Manchuria, would go on to retire as a rear admiral in 1949, then go on to work as a postmaster before passing in 1983, aged 93. MacNulty, also held at the Rokuroshi, retired as a brigadier general in 1946 and passed in 1964, aged 72.
Epilogue
The Marines, with help from the Navy and Coast Guard, returned to liberate Guam in July 1944. RM1c George Tweed emerged from his cave, having evaded capture for 31 months.
The Navy recycled the name “Penguin” during WWII for the lead ship (ASR-12) of a class of submarine rescue and salvage vessels. Commissioned 29 May 1944. She spent a lengthy career working out of New London with the Second Fleet and Rota with the Sixth and, while she conducted hundreds of drills and dozens of tows, she gratefully was never called on to conduct rescue operations for an actual submarine disaster. She decommissioned in 1970.
USS Penguin (ASR-12) photographed on 21 June 1953. NH 105502
Sadly, the Navy has been without a “Penguin” on the Navy List for the past half-century, and neither Haviland, McMillin, nor MacNulty have had a ship named in their honor. That should change.
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
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
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.
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, Jan. 15, 2025: Go Long
Naval History and Heritage Command photo NH 51351
Above we see the Clemson-class “flush decker” USS Long (Destroyer No. 209), taking water over the bow, during her squadron’s experimental Alaska cruise, in 1937.
Don’t let her Great War-era good looks fool you, Long would go on to earn nine battle stars in the Pacific in WWII and be lost some 80 years ago this month.
The Clemsons
One of the massive fleets of 156 Clemson-class flush-decker destroyers, like most of her sisters, Long came too late to help lick the Kaiser. An expansion of the almost identical Wickes-class destroyers with a third more fuel capacity to enable them to escort a convoy across the Atlantic without refueling, the Clemsons were sorely needed to combat the pressing German submarine threat of the Great War.
At 1,200 tons and with a top speed of 35 knots, they were brisk vessels ready for the task.
Inboard and outboard profiles for a U.S. Navy Clemson-class destroyer, in this case, USS Doyen (DD-280)
Meet Long
Our subject is the only warship named for the Secretary of the Navy during the Spanish-American War, John Davis Long, one of the fathers of the “New American Navy.”
Laid down by William Cramp & Sons at Philadelphia on 23 September 1918– just Pershing’s Doughboys came out on top in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel– Long was just too late for the Great War. Launched on 26 April 1919, she was commissioned on 20 October 1919.
Of note, Long was a bit different from the rest of her Clemson-class sisters. While they were mostly completed with four single 4″/50s as a main battery, Long and her sister USS Hovey (DD 208)were completed with four twin 4″/50 mounts, doubling their guns.
Besides Long and Hovey, only the old (Caldwell-class) destroyer USS Stockton (DD 73) carried this Mk 14 mount, and she only did as a single experimental model mounted forward.
Stockton with her twin 4″/50 Mk 14
Hovey and Long carried four of these mounts, one forward and aft and two amidships.
USS Hovey (DD-208) view looking down from the foremast, showing the twin 4/50 gun mounts atop her midships deckhouse, along with a loading practice machine (in the lower left), ready service ammunition stowage, and three of the ship’s smokestacks. Taken during the mid-1930s. Collection of Rear Admiral Elmer E. Duval, Sr., who was Hovey’s Commanding Officer at the time. NH 99573
Postbellum service and a decade-long nap
While she didn’t get a chance to fire her guns in anger during the war itself, Long was nonetheless sent “Over There” following her East Coast shakedown cruise, assigned to DesDiv 26, she was assigned to the war-torn Adriatic and Mediterranean in the tense post-war era and served in the region as a station ship.
USS Long (DD-209) dressed in her glad rags next to one of her sisters in the Mediterranean, and two other dressed warships to the rear, circa 1919-1920. Courtesy of Jack Howland, 1982. NH 93979
Remaining overseas, she was sent to the exotic climes of the Asiatic Fleet in late 1920, based at Cavite.
USS Long (DD-209) and another destroyer of the Asiatic Fleet, c 1920s. Note the local vessel traffic– junks etc.– and extensive awning fits, common in the Pacific inter-war. Courtesy of Capt. G. F. Swainson, USN, 1969 NH 67244
Ordered back home after her globetrotting overseas service, Long was mothballed due to peacetime budget cuts– the Navy shrank from 752 ships in 1919 to just 379 by the end of 1922.
With that, Long decommissioned at San Diego on 30 December 1922, but she was kept on emergency standby if needed.
The 62 mothballed Clemsons at San Diego in the 1920s were, under Special Plan Orange (a Pacific war against the Empire of Japan), considered able to reactivate within 30 days as Category B assets after receiving an officer and 13 men from as a “nucleus” crew from an active duty sister– Long would get hers from USS Henshaw (DD 278) while Hovey would get her baker’s dozen from USS Moody (DD 277).
Another 21 rates would come from the Fleet Reserve pool. The balance of the recommissioning crew, 3 officers and 80 men, would be recalled reservists in the Third Naval District (New York). In all, this would give these tin cans an authorized 4 officers and 114 men, a force that could be fleshed out by a truckload of new recruits right from the depot if it fell short.
The rates drawn for the nucleus crew and Fleet Reserve:
Thirty-four mothballed destroyers of the U.S. Navy decommissioned in 1921 and tied up at the San Diego Naval Base, being hauled from their berths by tugs to replace ships of the 11th and 12th squadrons that were being laid up. USS Long (DD-209) can be seen as tugs prepare to move her out, on 21 September 1929. Courtesy of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, San Francisco, California, 1969. NH 69123
Salad days
Between 1930-31, 60 Navy high mileage active duty flush-deckers with worn-out Yarrow boilers were decommissioned and disposed of– it was cheaper to scrap them than rebuild them. This required a dip into the reserve fleet to reactivate 60 of the low-mileage tin cans that had been growing algae on their hulls to take their place.
That meant Long, which recommissioned at San Diego on 29 March 1930, had her hull cleaned and was brought back to life, this time assigned to the Pacific Fleet.
A circa 1930s photo of USS Long, note her giant hull numbers, which were typical of the period. NARA 80-G-1025957
She maintained the standard peacetime operational tempo common to the fleet in the 1930s, alternating between training cruises and large fleet problems.
Battleship USS Maryland (BB-46) and escorting destroyers USS Hovey (DD-208), and USS Long (DD-209) (ships listed left to right) In the Miraflores Locks, while transiting the Panama Canal during the annual inter-ocean movement of the U.S. Fleet, 24 April 1931. Note the distinctive twin 4″/50 Mk 14 gun mountings carried by Hovey and Long. 80-G-455918
Part of the combined U.S. fleet moored in Balboa harbor on 25 October 1934. Ships present include two battleships at dock, three cruisers, while the leviathan destroyer tenders USS Whitney (AD-4) and Dobbin (AD-3) nurse more than 40 destroyers. Among the latter are McFarland (DD-237), Goff (DD-247), and Long (DD-209). 80-G-455966
In the summers of 1936 and 1937, the Navy sent destroyer squadrons (along with the carrier USS Ranger) into Alaskan waters to get a feel for fleet operations in that increasingly valuable territory. As Alaska was far removed from the CONUS, and its Aleutians chain rather close to Northern Japan– with Attu island just 1,300 miles from Hokkaido while some 2,800 miles from Seattle– the writing was on the wall that the territory could find itself a difficult battleground should war come between the U.S. and the Empire.
Following these deployments, at the urging of a report by RADM Arthur J. Hepburn’s board, the Navy in 1938 recommended the construction of a naval base on sprawling Amaknak Island, at Dutch Harbor, with the first troops arriving there in June 1941.
Long and her direct sister Hovey, accompanied by half-sisters USS Dallas (DD-199), Wasmuth (DD-338), Zane (DD-337), and Trever (DD-339), made the 1937 sortie.
The photos from the cruise show an idyllic window into what would be an interbellum period.
Talk about a recruiting poster! USS Long (DD-209) underway during an Alaskan cruise, circa 1937. Note her twin 4/50 gun mountings. She was one of two ships of her class to carry these weapons and would trade them in during WWII for a quartet of 3″/50s. NH 63243
Destroyers USS Long (DD-209) and USS Wasmuth (DD-338) in Chelkate Inlet with the Kakuhau Range Mountains in the background during an Alaska cruise, 1937. NH 109579
USS Long (DD-209) leading USS Wasmuth (DD338), during the Alaskan cruise of 1937. NH 51845
Clemson class destroyers maneuvering at sea during an Alaska cruise. Left to right: USS Wasmuth (DD-338), Long (DD-209), USS Zane (DD-337), and USS Trever (DD-339), 1937. NH 109560
Destroyers in Wrangell Narrows, after view of USS Dallas (DD-199), USS Wasmuth (DD-338), and USS Long (DD-209) following North Flat South end lights in Wrangell Narrows during an Alaska cruise, 1937. NH 109578
Destroyers USS Long (DD-209) in front with USS Trever (DD339) and USS Zane (DD-337) in the rear during an Alaska cruise, 1937. NH 109581
Destroyers USS Wasmuth (DD-338) and USS Long (DD-209) maneuvering while flying their flag signals during an Alaska cruise, 1937. NH 109582
During the 1937 Alaska cruise, destroyer USS Dallas (DD-199) noses her bow toward the city of Juneau, the capital of the Alaska Territory, situated on the Gastineau Channel with a population of about 4,500 people. USS Long (DD-209) and USS Wasmuth (DD-338) are already docked in the foreground, with a 250-foot Lake class Coast Guard cutter of the Bering Sea Patrol to the right. NH 109568
Now that is MWR! Sailors from USS Dallas, Long, and Wasmuth fishing in Auan Creep Hump Back Bay, Alaska NH 118928
Destroyers docked at Skagway, Alaska: USS Dallas (DD-199), USS Long (DD-209), and USS Wasmuth (DD-338) as they dock side by side at Skagway, Alaska, with snow-covered mountains in the background, 1937. NH 109565
The cruise would also see some dramatic images captured, with Long leading the pack of greyhounds.
USS Long (DD-209) leading other destroyers in a change of course, during the Alaska cruise, in 1937. NH 51353
USS Long (DD-209) leading sister USS Wasmuth (DD 338) through Fitzhugh Sound, British Columbia, during the Alaskan cruise of 1937. NH 51847
Long rolling, during the Alaska cruise, in 1937. NH 51350
Destroyer tender USS Dixie (AD-14), was photographed in early 1940 with USS Long (DD-209) alongside. NH 89401
DMS Conversion
With the class having so many hulls, and the Navy steadily building more advanced classes of destroyers, the Clemsons saw many of these aging greyhounds converted to other uses including as “green dragon” fast troop transports (ADP) able to put a battalion ashore via davit-carried LCVPs, fast minelayers (DMs) carrying 80 mines, small seaplane tenders (AVD) capable of supporting a squadron of flying boats such as PBYs, and fast minesweepers (DMS).
In late 1940, nine of the class– Chandler, Southard, Hovey, Hopkins, Zane, Wasmuth, Trever, Perry, and Long, became ersatz minesweepers. Long became DMS-12 on 19 November 1940.
The DMS conversion meant the installation of mechanical sweep gear, primarily a pair of paravane cranes on the stern (port and starboard), along with large deck-mounted cable winches, and space for four vanes and kites.
They still had their depth charge racks (repositioned forward and angled outboard), guns (which were downgraded), and two Y-gun depth charge throwers to continue to work as escorts, as well as (eventually) an SC radar. Gone were the torpedo tubes and, as they didn’t need to be too fast, they landed the No.4 boiler and had their exhaust vented into three shortened funnels, with the fourth removed. Generator sets were upgraded to provide 120kw vs the original 75kw. This still allowed a 25-knot speed.
From Long’s 29 October 1943 plans at Mare Island, detailing her crew at the time as well as her battery (four 3″50 Mk 20 DPs, five 20mm Oerlikons) and powerplant:
Her profile, 29 October 1943, as DMS-12, note the shadow of her original four tall stacks now replaced by three smaller ones:
Compare the difference between her 1930s four-piper profile and the one seen during WWII:
NH 67630 compared to NH 81358
It was in this configuration that Long found herself when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
War!
Based at Pearl Harbor with several of her sisters as part of Mine Squadron 2, Long escaped the Japanese attack on 7 December 1941 due to the fact she and four DMS sisters were at sea as escort for the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA‑35) at the time some 800 miles southwest conducting a simulated naval bombardment of remote Johnson Island.
From Indy’s War Diary:
Returning to Pearl with the cruiser-DMS force on 9 December, Long steamed into the still-smoking harbor, then soon after began a series of antisubmarine patrols around the islands.
Long alternated this duty over the past six months with running coastal escorts among the Hawaiian Islands and with runs to Midway, Palmyra, and far-off Canton, where the Navy was building an airstrip.
Then came a stint in Alaskan waters following the Japanese attack on Dutch Harbor and the occupation of Attu and Kiska. Serving in the familiar old territory for the next 15 months, she narrowly avoided destruction in a collision with the destroyer USS Monaghan (DD‑354) in heavy fog, and fired her first shots in anger, on 31 January 1943 against Japanese air attacks on Amchitka’s Constantine Harbor with three fellow Clemsons.
In May 1943, she was assigned to TG 51.3 of RADM Francis Rockwell’s TF 51, the Attu Assault Force. Standing out of Cold Harbor as part of the screen for Rockwell’s flag on the battlewagon USS Pennsylvania on 4 May, seven days later she and the fellow fast minesweepers USS Elliot (DMS-4) and USS Chandler (DMS 9) broke off from the main force and swept the lanes to the landing beaches on Japanese-held Attu.
The 12th saw a repeat, this time in Massacre Bay.
The rest of the month saw Long revert back to her destroyer DNA and provide escort and ASW patrol around the island, including the spirited pursuit of a sonar contact on the 15th.
While there were known Japanese midget submarines based in the Aleutians, and larger subs passing through, post-war records didn’t support a “kill” claim for this incident.
Then came the Kiska and Adak operations until, finally, Long was dispatched back to Pearl Harbor in September 1943 for some warmer service.
USS Long (DMS-12) photographed during World War II. Courtesy of D. M. McPherson, 1974. NH 81358
Following a refit and escort and patrol operations in Hawaiian waters, Long was dispatched to the Southwest Pacific to join in the New Guinea operations in February 1944. Operating as part of TF 76, she supported the landings there and in the Admiralties and Hollandia, (Operations Reckless and Persecution) both sweeping mines and escorting.
It was at Humboldt Bay on 22 April 1944 that she was able to both run her paravanes and get hits on shore targets, firing 253 rounds of 3″/50 and 660 of 20mm on the landing beaches of Cape Tjeweri, Cape Djar, and Cape Kassoe, just prior to the LVTs and LSTs carrying the 162nd and 186th Regiments of the 41st “Jungleers” Division hitting the beach.
Switching gears and sailing north to the Marianas, Long was on hand for the occupation of Saipan in June and the liberation of Guam in July, in each cases conducting preinvasion mine sweeps to clear lanes, then providing radar picket and guard ship duties, followed by convoy work.
Similar operations in the Palaus in September and October included a very hectic week during the landings during which Long, Hovey, and fellow DMS vessels were zapping mines left and right. In all, Long destroyed at least 45 Japanese mines during the Palau operation, all via 3-inch gunfire– some as close as 100 yards– following sweeping.
A sample day:
This brought Long into the drive to liberate the Philippines after nearly three years of Japanese occupation.
Sailing under orders with Minesweeping Unit 1 in early October, she spearheaded the invasion of the PI at Leyte Gulf, successfully clearing Japanese mines off Dinagat and Hibuson, as well as in the Dulag‑Tacloban approach channel and the soon-to-be-infamous Surigao Strait, all while fighting off Japanese air attacks.
A sample of these operations, that of 19 October 1944:
She spent the Battle of the Surigao Strait guarding empty transports bound in convoy for Manus, narrowly avoiding contact with the Japanese surface.
Late December saw her return to the PI to sweep for the landings at Lingayen Gulf. Just after the New Year, while in the Mindanao Sea, she survived a series of furious Japanese air attacks, continuing her yeoman job of sweeping.
Long’s luck ran out on 6 January.
Two Japanese Zeke 52s approached from low over the beach, dropping down to just 25 feet of the deck, with one strafing and crashing into (DD-232/APD-10) and the other coming fast at Long broadside on her port side. Although LT Stanley David Caplan, Long’s 16th and final skipper, rang up 25 knots and ordered everything on board to fire on the incoming planes. Despite three 3″/50s and three 20mm Oerlikons opening up and hits being observed, it was already over.
Her old twin, Hovey, was on hand and immediately stood by to help, as did her sister Chandler, and the fleet tug USS Apache (AT-67).
Caplan observed a five-foot hole in Long’s side, penetrating to the officer’s wardroom and the forward living compartment, with fire observed just over the No. 1. magazine. Nonetheless, 26 men responded to Caplan’s call for volunteers to attempt to reboard and save their faithful old tin can.
While organizing the return from Apache’s deck, disaster struck.
Waiting overnight, by the next morning, Long’s main deck, just after the forecastle about midships, was underwater, while her screws were showing on the stern. Her back was broken. There was nothing left to save. Landing on the sinking ship with 12 volunteers to make sure the ship’s sensitive gear was wrecked, Caplan and party soon departed after just five minutes, leaving just “30 seconds to a minute to the good” before the destroyer capsized then went down in two pieces at 1115 on 7 January.
Six men were killed in the attack on Long, with two others later passing from their injuries.
Sadly, Hovey would perish a few hours before her sister took her final dive, hit by a Japanese Kate torpedo bomber, carrying a fish, around 0455 on the 7th. By dawn, she was lost, and the men she had taken off Long, some 120 survivors, went back into the water. The Chandler and Apache moved in to make their second extended rescue in 24 hours.
Some 35 bluejackets injured in Long’s initial kamikaze strike and another 28 from her that picked up wounds while on Hovey were transferred to the large sick bay on the battleships USS California and USS West Virginia. Two dozen men from Brooks and Long who were aboard Hovey when she sank were never found.
Both Hovey and Long earned Navy Unit Commendations for their service, both for action at Palau.
Besides the NUC, Long earned at least night battle stars during her WWII service including:
11 May 43 – 31 May 43 Attu occupation
2 Feb 44 – 8 Feb 44 Western New Guinea operations
29 Feb 44 – 4 Mar 44 and 7 Mar 44 – 11 Mar 44 Admiralty Island landings
18 Apr 44 – 25 Apr 44 and 2 May 44 Hollandia operation (Aitape Humbolt Bay-Tanahmerah Bay)
13 Jun 44 – 18 Jul 44 Capture and Occupation of Saipan
12 Jul 44 – 25 Jul 44 Capture and Occupation of Guam
6 Sep 44 – 14 Oct 44 Capture and occupation of southern Palau Islands
12 Oct 44 – 20 Oct 44 Leyte landings (as well as 4 Jan 45 – 18 Jan 45), and Battle of Surigao Strait
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.
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, Jan. 8, 2025: Frozen Comanche
USCG image.
Above we see the 165-foot (A) Algonquin-class U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Comanche (WPG 76) with her warpaint on, circa 1942, while part of the oft-forgotten Greenland Patrol during WWII. With Greenland and its defense in the news right now, it is worth revisiting the ship that started the whole discussion, so to speak.
The Algonquins
In 1934, the Coast Guard moved to construct a half dozen new ice-strengthened patrol gunboats (by Navy standards). These were based on the successful circa 1915 165-foot ice-breaking cutter Ossipee (WPG 50) but constructed with a reinforced belt at the waterline and a cutaway forefoot, features that, combined with their geared turbine drives– the first for the USCG– were thought capable of breaking up to two feet of sea ice.
USCGC Ossipee, view taken circa 1916, shortly after her completion. NH 89751
Coast Guard 165-foot cutter Ossipee, Boston Navy Yard, April 1932. Note her 3-inch guns forward. Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection
The plating doubled around the bow, the cutaway forefoot, short length, and medium draft made these cutters good ice boats. They had a heavy steel belt around the vessel at the waterline and relatively short bilge keels, so in a seaway they had a tendency to roll considerably.
Built for a total of just under $3 million in Public Works Administration construction allotments, three of these new cutters– Algonquin (WPG-75), Comanche, and Mohawk (WPG-78) — were awarded on 14 October 1934 with Pusey & Jones Company of Wilmington, Delaware while a week later on 23 October a second trio– USCGC Escanaba (WPG-77), Onondaga (WPG-79) and Tahoma (WPG-80)-– were contracted with Defoe on the Great Lakes at Bay City, Michigan.
Using a pair of side-by-side Foster-Wheeler high-pressure boilers to feed a centerline 1,500shp Westinghouse double-reduction geared turbine mated to a single screw, the Algonquins could make a paint-peeling 12.8 knots at full RPMs or a more economical 9.4 knots, with the latter allowing a 5,000nm range– long enough legs to wallow across the Atlantic if need be or pull far-off Bering Sea and International Ice Patrols.
Algonquin on trials in the Delaware River, 1934
A peacetime crew of six officers and 56 men could handle the cutter and a main battery of two 3″/50 guns, curiously arranged abreast of each other on the foc’sle, backed up by a pair of two quaint old 6-pounders off the bridge wings, provided a top-side armament. Typical of Coast Guard cutters for the time, the 3-inchers were almost always well greased up and covered, only fired on annual gunnery exercises, while the 6-pounders were used more liberally for law enforcement, saluting, line-throwing, and signaling. Typical peacetime allowances per cutter included 55 service rounds and 110 “Navy” blanks per 6-pounder and 60 service rounds per each 3-incher.
There were also enough small arms to send a light platoon-sized (30-man) landing force ashore, arranged in a six-man HQ team, two eight-man rifle squads, and an eight-man machine gun detachment. The 1938 small arms allowance for cutters of this size was for 40 M1903 Springfield rifles with bayonets and slings, 15 M1911 pistols with two magazines apiece, two M1917 Lewis guns, and at least one Thompson sub gun, all fed by 2,400 rounds of .30 caliber ball for the Lewis guns and rifles and a whopping 6,000 of .45 ACP for the pistols and Tommy guns. A full 38 sets of “landing force gear” including a FAK, mess kit, canteen, web belt with pouches, haversack, and pack carrier was stored for such use.
Coast Guard cutter crew made up in landing force kit. Note the M1903 Springfield rifles. USCG Historian’s Office, CG-09231220211-G-G0000-025
These cutters also had magazines for legacy 238-pound guncotton or smaller new 150-pound TNT electrically detonated “wrecking mines” used in destroying derelicts– or in reducing hazardous icebergs and blasting paths in the ice sheet.
Coast Guard destroying a derelict with TNT mines. March 1927. An explosion on the water throws lumber through the air. In the foreground is the railing of a Coast Guard ship with the American flag flying. The caption reads, “Destroying a derelict with TNT mines. The Coast Guard destroys or removes from the path of navigation hundreds of such derelicts each year.” NARA 26-G-03-21-27(1)
As detailed by a 1935 Yachtsman article, these cutters typically carried a 36-foot motor launch with a 20hp engine, two 26-foot Monomoy type surf boats, and a 19-foot surf boat, the latter three vessels oar-powered.
Electrified, these cutters had an extensive radio suite (three transmitters and four receivers) with the vessel’s radio call letters prominently displayed for overhead aircraft, interior and topside lighting, refrigerators and reefers sufficient for length patrols, and a pair of remote-controlled 12-inch incandescent searchlights on the flying bridge overhead.
Meet Comanche
Our cutter is the second to carry the name of the fierce Native American tribe in the USCG.
The first, a 170-foot vessel which was the service’s first attempt at a “modern” steam cutter in 1897, originally commissioned as the USRC Windom and, after serving during the Spanish-American War and the Great War, policed against rumrunners in the Gulf of Mexico during Prohibition before she was disposed of in 1930.
The original USCGC Comanche, formerly USRC Windom, seen in 1920. CG Historian’s Photo.
Our Comanche, laid down at Pusey & Jones in late 1933, was launched in September 1934 and commissioned in December.
Comanche seen on 26 November 1934, post-delivery but before commissioning in a rare period color photo. Note she does not have her Navy-owned main and secondary batteries fitted yet but does have her gleaming white hull, buff stack and masts, and black cap.
The Coast Guard has never been overstaffed and the plankowners of her first crew were transferred hot from the old cutter Gresham, which was being decommissioned for the first time and was co-located at Wilmington. As Gresham still had stores aboard while Comanche did not, her crew had to walk back to their old cutter for meals for the first several days.
Her 1934 deck log for commissioning, detailing her initial five officers and four men transferred from the USCG inspector office at the builder’s yard while 43 other men came from Gresham:
One of her enlisted inherited from Gresham, 44-year-old S1c Maurice D. Jester, listed above, had volunteered for the service in 1917 as a surfman. A chief boatswain mate by 1941, Jester was given a temporary lieutenant’s commission post-Pearl Harbor and, in command of the 165-foot USCGC Icarus (WPC-110), would sink one of the first U-boats (U-352) by an American ship in WWII, earning a Navy Cross in the process.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Comanche was stationed at Stapleton, New York on Staten Island, and carried out the typical varied missions of the Coast Guard, often deploying to Florida for patrols and naval training exercises in the summer.
CGC Comanche in service, 1930s, note she has her armament installed
A page covering a typical day while on one such stint deployed to the Sunshine State:
Having an ice-cruncher bow, she also pulled down the additional task of light ice-breaking on the Hudson River in winter.
Comanche Hudson River ice patrol, Saugerties, 1938
Comanche Hudson River Ice Patrol, 1939
March 1936. “This image depicts the Coast Guard cutter Comanche, which found the pictured vessels stuck fast in the ice off Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and broke the ice to free them.” NARA 26-G-04-27-36(8)
War! (In Denmark)
Despite being neutral, Denmark was invaded by Germany on 9 April 1940.
German Linienschiff Schleswig-Holstein off Denmark on April 9, 1940, sending landing forces ashore
This led to a tense occupation that, for the first three years or so, still “allowed” the Danes to keep their military, so long as it remained in skeletal format hiding in its garrisons and ports.
The majority of the ships of the Royal Danish Navy would be immolated or drowned by their faithful crews in August 1943 when the Germans moved to capture them once the veil of civility was removed from the occupation. Despite being almost totally disarmed and de-fueled to comply with German armistice requirements, a handful of vessels managed to make it across the Oresund to neutral Sweden or were lost trying.
A few vessels outside of metropolitan Denmark- such as the two armed Icelandic Coast Guard cutters Aegir and Odinn and two smaller vessels in Greenland waters which we will get to- escaped German custody or destruction to prevent such custody. A beautiful 212-foot three-masted schoolship, the Danmark, filled with Danish merchant marine and naval cadets, was on an extended visit to America in 1940 and would end up clocking in after Pearl Harbor, crew included, to train over 5,000 USCG and USMM officer cadets during the war as USCGC Danmark (WIX-283).
Meanwhile, in giant colonial Greenland, the world’s largest island, the entire armed Danish military presence in April 1940 amounted to the Royal Danish Navy inspektionsskip Maagen and opmålingsskib (survey ship) Ternen. Small shallow draft sailing cutters with auxiliary diesels had an 11-member crew, a single ancient low-angle 3-pounder (37mm) M/84 cannon, and some small arms. Four larger corvette/frigate-sized inspection ships existed– Besytteren, Islands Falk, Hvidbjornen, and Ingolf— but were in Denmark getting ready for their summer patrols and thus were trapped there under German occupation.
The Royal Danish Navy’s opmålingsskib (survey ship) Ternen, left, and inspektionsskip Maagen, right, wintered in Greenland waters and thus were there in April 1940, escaping German capture. They were small cutters, at about 70 feet oal and 100 tons displacement, good for about 8 knots on their single diesel engine.
Other than the two cutters, the only other armed body in Greenland were the police under their inspector (Politiinspektør for Østkysten), the multi-hatted Danish polar explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen– who was back in Denmark at the time. The force had two stations (politistationer), at Eskimonæs (to cover the Norddistriktet) and Ella Ø (to cover the Syddistriktet), with just two officers at each location. This was to enforce the law over a territory about three times larger than Texas. Even this token group was only created in 1933 to answer the dispute with Norway over what was called Erik Raudes Land in north-east Greenland, with the League of Nations arbitrating that if Denmark wanted to continue to claim all Greenland as its territory, it had to maintain a permeant presence.
Although Norse settlements went back to the 9th Century, the island’s population in 1940 was still just hovering around 18,000, and the four police officers and 22 navy personnel described above were all that was needed for its constabulary purposes.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military had long bumped along the Greenland coast, including the Navy visiting it during the Polaris expedition of 1871–1873, the Juniata and Jeannette expeditions in 1873 and 1879-81, the Greely Relief Expedition in 1884, and the well-known Peary Arctic Expedition in 1898-1901.
In 1928, the 125-foot USCGC Marion carried out two full months of extensive oceanographic and iceberg studies of the region, fleshing out charts and adding to the general knowledge of the 450,000 sq. miles of the Davis Strait, with copies forwarded to the Danish Hydrographic Office. Her skipper was LT Edward Hanson “Iceberg” Smith, a polar ice nerd who had attended MIT before joining the Revenue Cutter Service in 1910, loved working the International Ice Patrol and went on to attain a Ph.D. in oceanography from Harvard.
USCGC Marion alongside a glacier in Baffin Bay, Canada. August 1928. The Active-class patrol boat, built for the Rum War, would go on to serve through WWII and was only disposed of in 1962. NH 46401
In 1933, the American Geographical Society wrapped up a trip to nearly all the fjords in Greenland between 72°30’ and 74°North latitude including photogrammetric mapping of the valleys, glaciers, and mountains and depth charting the fjords with echo-sounding equipment. Five years later, American meteorologist Clifford MacGregor conducted a groundbreaking study on the formation of polar air masses over Greenland.
To complicate things, the chief industry in Greenland in 1940 was an immense and strategically important cryolite mine at Ivittuut (Invigtut, also seen as Ivigtut)– a vital mineral used at the time to smelt aluminum. The largest known natural deposit of cryolite in the world was at Ivittuut, where about 150 mostly Canadian and Scandinavian miners toiled in the pits for the rare substance under the employ of the Kryolith Mine-og Handelsselskabet A/S.
Kryolitminen, Ivigtut, Greenland, 1937. The ships are the Danish patrol gunboat Hvidbjørnen (right) and the mine’s tender, the 1,200-ton coaster SS Julius Thomsen. Hvidbjørnen, trapped in Denmark in 1940, was scuttled by her crew during the war while Thomsen, taken over by the British, survived and kept up a regular transit between Canada and America and the mine during the war. THM-18645
With all this in mind, the two Danish Landsfogeder (governors) of Greenland, Eske Brun and Aksel Svane, invoked a 1925 emergency clause that allowed the colony to govern itself in the event of war. Moving forward, the Landsfogeder coordinated with the Danish ambassador in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, to act as a sovereign nation per the Monroe Doctrine for the U.S. to protect Greenland and keep it neutral.
Kauffmann met with his American counterparts in D.C. on 10 April 1940, the day after the Germans rolled into Denmark. The response was warm.
But first, there needed to be a U.S. presence in Greenland.
Comanche to the rescue!
With the State Department in high gear to recognize the new (if temporary) independent government in Greenland and with the blessing of the island’s local administrative councils, Comanche, then in New York City’s Pier 18, made ready to sail in early May 1940. This shortcutted the planned British “Force X” being organized in Canada to seize the island.
Comanche took aboard Consul James K. Penfield and Vice-consul George L. West, on State Department orders. Also sailing on the cutter would be Maurice R. Reddy, the assistant director of the American Red Cross, tasked with assessing Greenland’s need for supplies as the last ship from Denmark had arrived the previous October. She also carried a detachment of five spare Coast Guard radiomen which would be landed to operate the infant consulate’s radio station and provide security.
Every nook and cranny of the 165-foot cutter was packed with extra provisions, heavy on canned goods, salted meats, and tinned fish. The crew was issued heavy sheepskin coats and purchased commercial in the city’s garment district. Also included as cargo, as detailed by the New York Times, was a “complete outfit of office furniture for the consulate,” and a “fairly large quantity of lumber fastened down on the forward deck. It was supplied to the Red Cross and will be used to build sheds to shelter supplies sent later.”
The poor little 165-foot Comanche was so loaded down (thanks largely to the superhuman efforts of the Despatch Agent, Mr. Fyfe) that even the Captain’s shower was stuffed with boxes of books, skis, snowshoes, rubber boots and duffle bags full of parkas, woolen underwear and heavy socks. But in spite of its load it pitched and rolled its way to St. Johns with such gusto that we thought we’d never know the meaning of the word horizontal again, except in the very unsatisfactory relative sense of a body in a bunk (when it wasn’t pitched out onto the deck).
Leaving NYC on the 10 May 1940– the same day Germany invaded neutral Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland on his sweep through the Lowlands while the British preemptively occupied Iceland for the Allies– the little overseas mission arrived at Godthab (now Nuuk), on Greenland’s west coast, on 20 May.
A thrilled-looking U.S. Consul James K. Penfield (right) and Vice Consul George L. West Jr. (left) arrive in Greenland aboard Cutter Comanche. (Acme News Pictures Inc. 1940).
Discharging her cargo and passengers, Comanche proceeded 200nm down the coast to become a station ship at Arsuk Fjord, directly adjacent to the cryolite mining concern.
Soon, 14 Coastguardsmen recently “discharged” from the service took up newly established positions as uniformed security guards on the staff of the Invigtut cryolite mine, paid a hefty $125 per month (the average non-rate in the USCG made about $50 a month) for the next 12 months with a $225 bonus for completing the contract, all paid by the local Greenland government. The funds to pay these guards, as well as to buy a “surplus” 3″/50 gun, eight Lewis guns, and 55 M1903 rifles landed via USCG cutter, along with shells and bullets for said ordnance, came from a $1 million cash deal from Uncle Sam for local goods negotiated by Brun in a delegation carried back to America by the USCGC Campbell.
This original detachment was soon joined by a 15th man, late from the interned training ship Danmark. A replacement shift of 20 similarly recruited “newly civilianized” USCG men would arrive in July 1941 and guard the mine until May 1942 when the U.S. Army took over the watch.
Comanche at Shipshaven, Ivigtut Greenland 1941
Besides Comanche, two larger cutters soon followed: the 327-foot Treasury class cutters Campbell (June 1940) and Duane (August) with both of the 5-inch gunned twin-screwed cutters suffering issues in the ice. By 10 September both the 327s were sent back to the U.S. The icebreaking USCG Northland also arrived in August and would operate on the wild east coast of Greenland where a plan was made with local officials to clear the remote Northeast coastline of its 20-odd inhabitants with the assistance of the Free Norwegian Navy gunboat Fridtjof Nansen.
Comanche was relieved at Ivittuut on 4 September 1940 by the 250-foot Lake class cutter Cayuga. By January 1941, Northland and Cayuga had returned to the U.S. for the worst of the winter, leaving behind the 15 guards at the mine and five radiomen at the consulate to hold down the island until April 1941 when Cayuga and Northland would return.
Meet the Greenland Patrol
On the first anniversary of Germany’s occupation of Denmark, 9 April 1941, the U.S. and Greenland entered into a formal defense agreement.
With a special U.S. survey team, carried by Cayuga to Greenland, working from Ternen and the local Greenland administration’s motorboat JP Koch, coupled with Northland’s J2F Duck, efforts were made to map the coast. The 240-foot USCGC Modoc (WPG-46) arrived in May and joined the efforts– coming uncomfortably close to the running fight against the German battleship Bismarck and the Royal Navy in the process.
On 1 June 1941, the South Greenland Patrol, under USCG LCDR H.G. Beford, was established around Modoc (flag) Comanche, the 110-foot icebreaking harbor tug USCGC Raritan (WYT-93), and the famed polar schooner Bowdoin (commissioned in the Navy on 16 June as IX-50).
A week later the sister organization, the Northeast Greenland Patrol, was formed in Boston around Northland, USCGC North Star, and the 70-year-old retired cutter Bear, the latter recommissioned in naval service as USS Bear (AG-29). The force would be led by now-LCDR Iceberg Smith, USCG.
With the two patrols consolidating in Greenland waters by mid-July, by early August the first PBY flying boats were arriving, the first maritime aircraft based year-round on the island. The PBYs would eventually be operated by a dedicated unit, Patrol Squadron Six (VP-6 CG) as an all-Coast Guard outfit home based at Narsarssuak (Narsarsuaq), Greenland, a base soon coded as Bluie West One (BW-1).
By early September, Comanche, with an Army survey team aboard, was back in local waters making reconnaissance patrols of the Southeast Greenland fjords. She would later go on to establish the lce Cap Station at Igtip Kangertiva, a bay on Greenland’s southeast coast that went on to be dubbed “Comanche Bay” for obvious reasons as well as Weather Station Able (later Bluie West 7) at Gronne Dal (Grønnedal).
The survey work by these cutters and aircraft resulted in the 178-page volume “Greenland Pilot & Sailing Directions” by 1941.
Quietly, the entire Coast Guard was transferred to the Department of the Navy on 1 November 1941, by Executive Order 8929, although it should be noted that, under E.O. 8767 of June 1941 the USCG was authorized to operate as a part of the Navy.
USN ONI 56 Escanaba class 165As including Comanche and Onondaga
Eventually, there were upwards of 25 Allied– primarily American– bases in Greenland during WWII.
At its height, some 5,500 military personnel were based on the island.
(Note Comanche Bay)
In 1942 alone, 86,000 tons of cryolite were shipped to the U.S. and Canada for use in aluminum production.
Meanwhile, on 26 June 1942, the first large-scale trans-Atlantic ferry flights of Allied military aircraft to Britain using Greenland and Iceland began. Comanche was there, as noted by her XO in a post-war interview, serving as the visual aide and radio beacon at the fjord entrance to the main airbase, Narsarsuak, for the first USAAF trans-Atlantic flight of B-17s. The ship logged the arrival of 26 B-17s on that first day, from 2:40 am to 10:30 pm.
The so-called North Atlantic Route, saw three fields in Greenland– Narsarssuak (BW-1), Angmagssalik (Bluie East 2), and Sondrestrom (BW-8)– used as a stopover between Maine/Newfoundland and Iceland, trans-shipping as many as 300-400 aircraft per month, primarily B-17, B-24 and B-25 bombers, to Europe.
B-17s ferry flight through Greenland Jan 1945 U.S. Air Force Number 122001AC 342-FH_000017
War comes to the Greenland Patrol.
Comanche was tied up at Ivigtut on 7 December 1941, a dry Sunday that saw local temperatures hovering around 34 degrees. By that point, she had spent most of the previous 19 months in the Danish colony’s waters.
While I can’t find that the Germans ever attempted a serious move against the cryolite mine at Invigtut, they did come to Greenland in search of something else.
As early as 11 September 1941, the cutter North Star, visiting Eskimonaes, had a report from local hunters of a flagless two-masted steamer poking around Young Sound. Chased down the next day, the steamer was the 105-foot Norwegian sealer Buskoe who had delivered a German agent– Jacob R. Bradley– and meteorological personnel ashore.
With a need to help forecast the weather in Europe and the Atlantic, and being cut off from meteorological reports from Canada in 1939 and America in 1941, the Germans needed weather stations in the Arctic. This led to somewhat disjointed efforts by the German Army, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine weather services to establish their own. Even the Abwehr got involved with their own hybrid weather/listening stations.
The Kriegsmarine sowed the icy Barents and Greenland Seas with at least 15 unmanned Wetterfunkgerät See (WFS) radio-transmitting weather buoys. While their employment would seem ideal, these 33-foot tall buoys were not well-liked by the U-boat crews tasked with deploying them as they took nearly two hours of assembly on the surface in calm seas with the boat’s torpedo crane as muscle– and that’s if everything went right. Plus they had a planned lifespan of 10 weeks once deployed but most of them went dark well short of that.
Most of the 15 assorted manned stations were established in Svalbard (Spitzbergen) while one (Schatzgräber) was set up off Russia’s arctic coast on Franz Josef Land. An unmanned station was even set up (and only found decades later) on the coast of Labrador!
As part of this, the Kriegsmarine moved to establish no less than four fixed (Edelweiss I and II, Holzauge, and Bassgeiger) as well as one migratory (Zugvogel, on sea ice) weather station in Greenland during the war.
The counter to this was Greenland’s first and only army, the locally-recruited Nordøstgrønlands Slædepatrulje (Northeast Greenland Sledge Patrol), which blended Danish police officers and Danish, Greenlandic and Norwegian fur trappers into an irregular force, almost devoid of military training, that would get into at least two firefights with German weather troops along the 700-mile stretch of Greenland’s most rugged coastline.
The Northeast Greenland Sledge Patrol would grow to 27 members during WWII. Armed with their own hunting rifles and a few short M1889 Danish Krag engineer carbines (ingeniørkarabin) and uniformed only with an armband, one member of the patrol would perish in a fight with weather station Holzauge personnel.
The Germans, for their part, sometimes went on the offensive, with their own patrols burning down half of Greenland’s police stations, when they attacked the Eskimonæs station (BE-5) in March 1943, driving off the two Danes in residence at the time. While destroying radio and weather equipment, they were good enough to leave a storage shed with food largely untouched and the post’s Danish flag unceremoniously stuffed into a box
The station was attacked by a German force on the night of March 23-24, 1943. The Germans burned the main building but first took down the flag and left it in a box. Note the kennels of the sled patrol.
It was in this atmosphere that the Greenland Patrol carried on their war.
Original caption: White Phantoms of the Northern Seas. The breathless beauty of an iceberg floating from the Arctic holds the gaze of Coast Guardsmen, lining the rail of a combat cutter. Frequently, the sturdy Coast Guard Cutters on the Greenland Patrol encounter these floating islands of glistening ice – dazzling to look upon but hazardous to the ships that pass over the northern lanes.
Coast Guard in Greenland: USCG crew on a water-cooled .50 caliber Browning mans their gun on patrol. 17 October 1942. NARA 26-G-10-17-42(2) 205580166
Kungnat Bay, Greenland. Coast Guard sentry keeps watch as the armed trawler USCGC Arundel (WYT-90) lends assistance to a freighter in the middle distance, 1 February 1943. 26-G-3491
The ensuing so-called “Weather War” saw well-armed and J2F-4 amphibian-equipped USCG combat icebreakers round up 60 German POWs, smashing two weather stations in the process while capturing a third that was recently evacuated, and chasing down three armed Kriegsmarine trawlers– Kehdingen, Coburg, and Externsteine, taking the last as a prize.
This image depicts a Coast Guardsman on watch aboard a vessel in Greenland, painted by Coast Guard Combat Artist Norman Millet Thomas, in February 1943. NARA 26-G-02-06-43(1)
This image depicts a USCG landing party from the cutter Northland (WPG-49) gathering captured German remote radio-weather station equipment that had been parachuted in on Northeast Greenland, in September 1943. Note the M1903 Springfields, shaggy dog, and the mixture of blue, grey, and OD Navy and Army gear. NARA 26-G-3501
German POWs on deck of the USCGC Northland (WPG-49) in 1944 as part of the Weather War off Greenland. These may be from the Cape Sussie weather station (Unternehmen Bassgeige), taken down in late July 1944, and landed by the German trawler Coburg.
Comanche at times also served as a floating kennel, running sled dogs from location to location in addition to her work clearing paths through the ice, standing guard at the cryolite mine, and escorting convoys.
From her July 1943 deck log:
Fighting Arctic Wolves
Besides the defense of the cryolite mine and the skirmishes of the Weather War already mentioned, it should be pointed out that the fight against German U-boats, even in these frozen waters off Greenland, was very real.
On 4 September 1941– three full months before Pearl Harbor, the destroyer USS Greer (DD-145) narrowly missed a torpedo fired by U-652 in Greenlandic waters while en route to Iceland.
Comanche served on numerous convoys (SG-19, SG-29, SG-30, SG-37, SG-52, SG-74, GS-27, GS-34, GS-39 et.al.) running ships from Newfoundland to Greenland and back, often tossing ash cans and Mousetrap rockets on suspect underwater contacts.
Comanche, still in her peacetime scheme, escorting SS Munago, 1941, South Greenland, Peary Museum
Comanche in her wartime outfit. She carried a QCL-2 sonar, SF radar, had her 6-pounders replaced with 20mm Orelikons, mounted two depth charge racks, carried four “Y” gun projectors (with allowance for 14 depth charges) had two 7.2-inch Moustrap ASW rocket devices installed.
The report from one such brush with a sonar contact incident:
She also had to pick up the pieces.
Such as in the rescue of freighter USAT Nevada in December 1943. The 950-ton cargo ship, part of Convoy 5G-36, en route from St. John’s to Narsarssuak, became separated in 20-foot high seas and 60-mile-per-hour winds snow squalls that ended with her holds flooded.
Comanche was the closest to her and went to work, catching up to her while still about 200 miles south of Greenland.
From her deck log :
Steamship Nevada (American Freighter, built 1915) photographed from the deck of the USCGC Comanche (WPG-76) as Nevada was foundering in the North Atlantic, circa 15-18 December 1943. Comanche was able to rescue twenty-nine of those on board Nevada, but thirty-four lost their lives during the abandonment of the storm-crippled ship. In 1918-1919 Nevada had briefly served as USS Rogday (ID # 3583). NH 66258
Her most famous rescue came during the sinking of the 5,649-ton USAT Dorchester, a pre-war M&MT cruise ship built for 314 passengers that had been turned into a 750-space troopship. On Dorchester’s fifth convoy run (third to Greenland), leaving outbound on 29 January 1943, she was assigned to SG-19 out of St. Johns bound for Narsarssuak with a complement of seven officers, 123 crewmen, 23 Navy armed guards, 16 USCG, 597 Army personnel and 155 civilian passengers.
M&MT passenger steamer S.S. Dorchester (1926-1943) photographed during 1942 as a USAT SC-290583
Riding shotgun on SG-19 was Comanche and her sister USCGC Escanaba (WPG 77) as well as the larger 240-foot cutter USCGC Tampa (WPG-48). Also in the convoy were the Norwegian steam merchants Biscaya and Lutz, whose holds were full of cargo and building materials to construct bases.
Six days out, in heavy seas and rough weather while 150 miles southwest of Greenland’s Cape Farewell, U-223 (Kptnlt Karl-Jürg Wächter) crept in close enough at 0102 in the predawn of 3 February to fire five torpedoes at the largest vessel in the little arctic convoy– Dorchester— and the transport soon went down. While Tampa moved to shepherd Biscaya and Lutz to nearby Skovfjord (Tunulliarfik) on Greenland’s southern tip, Comanche and Escanaba stood by in the dark and frigid waters to pick up survivors.
Using the “rescue retriever” technique for the first time– which amounted to a rubber-suited volunteer on a line dropping overboard and coming back up with a person– Escabana scooped up 81 survivors from the water and rafts and 51 from one lifeboat. Lacking the same protective suits as used on her sister, nonetheless, three officers and nine enlisted men of Comanche personally picked up 41 survivors from another lifeboat and 57 from rafts and the freezing water.
After the Dorchester slipped beneath the waves on 3 February 1943, the USCGC Comanche and Escanaba rescued dozens of survivors from the doomed Army troopship. (Painting by Robert Lavin, via U.S. Coast Guard History Office)
Dorchester Torpedoed by Perry Stirling, showing Escanaba and Comanche picking up survivors (USCG painting)
Of the more than 900 souls aboard Dorchester, the sea claimed 674, largely due to hyperthermia, with men succumbing to the cold within minutes of hitting the water. The sinking of Dorchester is regarded by the Navy as the “heaviest loss of personnel suffered in any U.S. convoy during the war.”
Among those lost to Poseidon were four Army clergy members, all lieutenants– Methodist minister George L. Fox, Reformed Church in America minister Clark V. Poling, Catholic Church priest John P. Washington, and Rabbi Alexander B. Goode– who voluntarily gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out then reportedly joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the transport. They are well-remembered as the “Immortal Chaplains” and were posthumously granted the Chaplain’s Medal for Heroism in 1961.
Speaking of heroism, one of Comanche’s fearless retrievers, STM 1c Charles Walter David, Jr., 25, suffering from hypothermia and pneumonia, died in a hospital ashore in Greenland after the rescue operation and he was interred in the permafrost. In addition to saving Dorchester survivors, he is also credited with bringing Comanche’s XO, a fellow retriever, back after the officer was suffering exposure.
His widow Kathleen W. David, and newborn son, a young son, Neil Adrian David, were presented with his Navy and Marine Corps Medal, posthumously.
Further illustrating the danger of the waters around Greenland during the war, Escanaba was lost on the early morning of 13 June 1943 in an explosion off Ivigtut, with the official conclusion that she was struck by either a torpedo or a mine. Only two of her crew survived. Another smaller cutter, the converted trawler Natsek (WYP-170) would vanish without a trace in December 1942 while out of Narsarssuak bound for Boston. Meanwhile, Northland sighted and attacked a U-boat in the Davis Strait on 18 June 1942 reportedly almost catching a German torpedo for her trouble.
All in all, nearly 50 American warships served on the Greenland Patrol during the conflict, almost all of these Coast Guard assets. Of those cutters, four of Comanche’s five Algonquin class sisters clocked in, with the only exception being USCGC Onondaga (WPG-79) who spent the war fighting the Japanese in Alaskan waters.
Upwards of 300,000 U.S. military aircraft were produced during the war, with the rare mineral harvested from the Greenland shale a big part in making that happen.
Post War service
VE Day found Comanche at the USCG Yard at Curtis Bay, Maryland undergoing a much-needed 30-day overhaul that she entered on 17 March 1945. Once she emerged, she caught orders to proceed to Iceland for air-sea rescue duties from June through September 1945.
Once the Coast Guard transferred back to the Treasury Department from the Navy on New Year’s Day 1946, Comanche had her war-time armament removed, and her homeport shifted to Norfolk. However, the service, flush with very new ships (13 255-foot Owasco class cutters were commissioned in 1945-46) shoehorned into a peacetime budget, soon put all the remaining Algonquins into storage in an “in commission, in reserve” status, with reduced crews.
Comanche decommissioned 29 July 1947. Cleared for disposal, she was sold on 10 November 1948 to the Virginia Pilots Association who used her as a floating office and barracks boat until 1984 when the 50-year-old historical cutter was donated to the Patriot’s Point Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, for use as a floating museum.
The nuclear-powered freighter NS Savannah, the retired 327-foot Treasury-class cutter USCGC Ingham (WPG 35), and the former USCGC Comanche, all the way to the right, almost unrecognizable after 35 years as a pilot boat, at Charleston’s Patriots Point Naval Museum in the late 1980s. Savannah has been in Baltimore since 2008 and Ingham is now at Key West.
Comanche’s career as a museum ship was short-lived, being seriously damaged by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and closed.
This led to her donation to the South Carolina DNR for use as a reef in 1992.
She is located 22.5 miles North of Charleston Harbor at a depth of 110-120 feet and is a popular wreck dive.
A few stirring interviews with her wartime crew remain. One of these is with EM 2c Richard N. Swanson, one of the volunteer retrievers on the Dorchester rescue who earned his Navy and Marine Corps Medal the hard way.
Patriot’s Park saved some of the relics still aboard Comanche in 1992 and has them at the park. They also donated one of her wartime 2,100-pound anchors to the Florence Veterans Park ashore in SC.
The cutter’s 1934-marked bell has been at the Arlington, Virginia barracks of the Coast Guard Ceremonial Honor Guard since at least 1999, where it is used in annual remembrances and individual “ringing out” ceremonies.
The Honor Guard was established in 1962 and performs an average of 1,200 ceremonies each year across the United States. It is housed in the Coast Guard’s old Washington Radio Station in Alexandria and Comanche’s well-polished bell is on its quarterdeck.
The service recycled the name for a third Comanche.
The Coast Guard acquired the former Navy 142-foot Sotoyomo-class auxiliary ocean tug USS Wampanoag (ATA-202) and placed her in commission as the medium endurance cutter Comanche (WMEC-202) in February 1959. Based in California except for a two-year stint in Corpus Christi, Texas, she was involved in several high-profile blue water rescues across a 21-year second career.
The third Comanche (ex-Wampanoag) is preserved as a floating museum in the Seattle area.
On 16 November 2013, the Coast Guard officially commissioned the USCGC Charles David Jr (WPC 1107) in honor of Comanche’s lost Dorchester retriever. His body had been reinterred at Long Island National Cemetery post-war.
His granddaughter was the ship’s sponsor.
Rear Adm. Jake Korn, Coast Guard Seventh District commander; Sharon David, granddaughter of the cutter’s namesake and sponsor of the Coast Guard Cutter Charles David Jr; and Chris Bollinger, president of Bollinger Shipyards; look at information about Charles W. David Jr. before the commissioning ceremony. Steward’s Mate 1st Class Charles David Jr. was posthumously awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his part in saving the lives of nearly 100 U.S. Army soldiers and members of his own crew during World War II. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Mark Barney.
Likewise, former Comanche plank owner, the sub-busting LCDR Maurice Jester, has his name on a sistership of David, USCGC Maurice Jester (WPC-1152).
In 1951, the Danish Naval Station Grønnedal was established as a year-round home for Greenland Command, since 2012 the Arktisk Kommando, which has a permanent staff of 36 civilians and military personnel in a big blue building in Nuuk.
Arktisk Kommandos hovedkvarter in Nuuk
In the summer, a force of three modern 1,700-ton Knud Rasmussen class OPVs, augmented by another four 3,500 Thetis-class OPFs, roam the Greenlandic littoral.
Danish patrol vessel HDMS Knud Rasmussen (P570) ice-breaking in Greenland waters, December 2022, around Narsaq, Narsarsuaq, and Qassiarsuk
The Greenland Police is still seen as a district of the Danish state police, numbering 300 members. There is no local territorial defense force.
The Danish Home Guard (Hjemmeværnet), which numbers some 44,000 volunteers in Denmark, has activated small groups to support operations in exercises in Greenland in recent years, but doesn’t have HJV units among Greenland’s cities and towns.
The six-month Arktisk Basisuddannelse course, open to only to Greenlanders, mimics the Danish military basic training course and blends field and classroom instruction
The program has been recruiting youth from among 13 towns and settlements across Greenland and graduated its first 19 students in November 2024.
Arktisk basisuddannelse (Arctic Basic Education) students, Greenland’s first “home guard” style class. While many may go on to join the Arktisk Kommando or Greenland police and fire agencies, it isn’t a requirement.
When it comes to U.S. bases, the Americans pulled out of most of the BW/BE stations by 1947 with a few exceptions: BW-1 (Narsarsuaq) closed in 1958 and Stromfjord (BW-8) in 1992, while Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule AB, formerly BW-8) is still very much a thing, supported by the USCG, MSC, and Canadian Coast Guard and operated by the Space Force. The Army had Camp Century (including a novel underground nuclear reactor) there in the 1960s. The USAF also had four unmanned DEW stations in Greenland between 1960 and 1990.
The Coast Guard, meanwhile, still frequently gets to Greenland waters where they continue to work with local and Danish forces.
USCGC Campbell transited south along the west coast of Greenland overnight with the Royal Danish Navy vessel HDMS Knud Rasmussen and rendezvoused in a position just offshore of Evighedsfjorden (Eternity Fjord). CGC Campbell received HDMS Knud Rasmussen’s Executive Officer, Commander Bo Ougaard, on board to serve as an ice pilot and provide local knowledge to assist CGC Campbell in safely entering and transiting Evighedsfjorden. Once inside Eternity Fjord, CGC Campbell launched their MH-65 Dolphin aircraft and proceeded up the fjord to the head where the glacier begins. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Seaman Kate Kilroy DVIDS 200907-G-NJ244-002
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
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.
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.
