RUM WAR

Rum Runner Mary (top) Rum Patrol cutters Tucker CG-23 and Cassin CG-1 (below)

Editor's Note: On Jan. 19, 1919, Congress ratified the 18th Amendment, banning the manufacture, sale and transport of alcoholic beverages. On Oct. 28, 1919, Congress passed the Volstead Act, delegating responsibility for policing Prohibition to the Treasury Department, effective Jan. 16, 1920. The U.S. Coast Guard operated under the auspices of the Treasury at the time, as did the Prohibition Bureau.

By Vinny Del Giudice

In 1920, the U.S. government imposed a prohibition on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. To enforce the law on the seas, the Coast Guard was tapped to intercept "rum runners." So began the Rum War.

For 80 years the temperance movement gained momentum, culminating in the Volstead Act and the Coast Guard's risky assignment. The service's leadership disliked the danger as much as most Americans scowled at the ban on beer, wine and booze. No doubt individual Coasties were disappointed too - on both counts.

The Navy gladly transferred 25 aging, wheezy destroyers to the Coast Guard to bolster its Rum Patrol of more modest vessels. Congress boosted the roster to 149 commissioned officers, 418 Warrant Officers, and 3,789 enlisted men. 

By 1924, the service consisted of 31 destroyers, 203 cabin cruisers and 100 smaller boats, according to the Coast Guard Historian's Office, in addition to its regular fleet of search-and-rescue cutters.

Bootleggers could be sophisticated. There was big money. A pirate's bounty. Clandestine social clubs - the speakeasy - blossomed. It was going to take brains and brawn and the Office of Coast Guard Intelligence was established. Cutters and land-based intelligence agents were equipped with gear capable of radio direction finding. Float planes joined the hunt. Code breakers, too.

There were countless brushes - some benign, some blood-soaked.

The patrol's first major seizure was the schooner Henry L. Marshall off New Jersey by the Cutter Seneca in 1921. In 1923, the Seneca intercepted the rum runner Tomoka off Florida. The outlaw vessel fired on a boarding party. Seneca answered with a shell. Tomoka's captain surrendered ship, crew and cargo.

In 1927, a Coast Guard patrol boarded a rum runner off Florida piloted by bootleggers James Horace Alderman and Robert Weech. Alderman shot dead a Coast Guardsman and a Treasury agent and mortally wounded another Coast Guardsman. Alderman  went to the gallows at a Coast Guard base in Florida - the only execution carried out by the service. Weech went to prison.

In 1929, a nighttime mission turned deadly when a Coast Guard vessel sprayed gunfire on the rum runner "Black Duck" off Rhode Island, killing three - an incident that led to a shift in public opinion and efforts toward repeal, according to The History Channel.

There were accidents too. In 1927, U.S. Navy submarine S-4 was accidentally rammed by the Coast Guard destroyer Paulding on Rum Patrol off Cape Cod with the loss of all 40 submariners.

Was it all worth it? No. The laws couldn't be enforced on the seas or on shore. Prohibition was a failure. The ban was lifted in 1933, the destroyers were returned to the Navy and sold for scrap - and America lifted its cup.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard
U.S. Coast Guardsmen unload burlap bags of bootleg liquor in 1922. Rum runners wrapped liquor in burlap so it could be tossed overboard and retrieved later.