Photo: Petty Officer 3rd Class Gabriel Wisdom, USCG
Flight crew from Coast Guard Aviation Training Center Mobile, accompanied by Marine Safety Center salvage engineers, observe and assess Hurricane Ida damage in southeastern Louisiana on Sept. 7, 2021. Ida, a Category 4 Atlantic storm, was the second worst to strike the state.
Photo: U.S. Coast Guard
Coast Guard Cutter Hatchet transits Houma Navigation Canal in Louisiana on Sept. 7, 2021, tending to aids to navigation displaced by Hurricane Ida.
Photo: Petty Officer 2nd Class Ryan Dickinson, USCG
Coast Guard MH-65 Dolphin helicopter lands at Air Station New Orleans after surveying Hurricane Ida damage on Sept. 1, 2021 in Belle Chasse, Louisiana.
Photo: Petty Officer 3rd Class Vincent Moreno
U.S. Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Tariq Hill assesses wreck of St. Vincent I at Fourchon, Louisiana, on Sept. 14, 2021.
Photo: U.S. Coast Guard “The Jaws of Death” is a D-Day photo by CPHOM Robert F. Sargent, USCG. It shows a Coast Guard landing craft from the attack transport USS Samuel Chase APA-26 disembarking troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division on the morning of June 6, 1944, at Omaha Beach. One Coast Guardsman, Frank DeVita, made 14 round trips aboard one of the Chase's landing craft, including the initial assault.
On Feb. 25, 1858, the U.S. Revenue Marine, a forerunner of the Coast Guard, commissioned the Harriet Lane, the service's first successful steam side wheeler. The 180-foot cutter had a 30-foot beam, 700-ton displacement, maximum speed of 12 knots and consumed 1,500 pounds of coal per hour. It was named for Harriet Lane, President James Buchanan's niece and official White House hostess. Buchanan was a bachelor.
Photo: Lt. Andrew Sinclair Coast Guard Cutters Kukui, Elm, and Anthony Petit moored at Coast Guard Station Juneau to participate in the 2021 Buoy Tender Round-up. The first buoy tenders operated under the auspices of the U.S. Lighthouse Service in the 1800s, a predecessor to the Coast Guard, and were originally called lighthouse tenders.
Radio room aboard U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Chelan in 1930s. On March 22, 1937, Chelan answered a distress call from the Norwegian steamer Bjerkli and rescued 16 officers and crew from the stricken vessel a day later. Use of radio in the service dates back to experimental equipment installed on the Nantucket lightship in 1901.
Photo: Wikipedia The end of a legend. The Cunard steamship RMS Carpathia navigated Atlantic ice fields to rescue 705 Titanic survivors in April 1912. Carpathia met a sad end five years later. A German U-boat torpedoed the ship off the Irish coast in July 1918 with the loss of five lives.
Photo: Wikipedia
The U.S. Coast Guard's first loss of World War Two was the cutter Alexander Hamilton (WPG-34), named for the first U.S. Treasury secretary and founder of the Revenue Marine, predecessor of the Coast Guard. A German U-boat torpedoed the Hamilton off the coast of Iceland on Jan. 29, 1942 with the loss of 26 men. The Coast Guard lost 14 ships in World War Two, the largest being the cutters Hamilton and Escanaba.
Image: Painting by Charles Dixon, R.I. (In public domain) "Before firing on a smuggler the cruiser was bound to hoist his Revenue colours—both pennant and ensign—no matter whether day or night" - Excerpt from "King's Cutters and Smugglers 1700-1855" by E. Keble Chatterton.
