USS TURNER

Photo: Wikipedia

 USS Turner

Photo: U.S. Navy

Listing to starboard after explosions as Coast Guard cutter stands by 

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

Lieutenant Commander Frank Erickson piloting

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

Erickson in cockpit

The U.S. Coast Guard went to the aid of the crew of the USS Turner by sea and by air after explosions ripped through the destroyer off Sandy Hook, New Jersey during War Two.

The blasts claimed 138 lives on Jan. 3, 1944 and were thought have been caused by the accidental explosion of ammunition - or a U-boat attack. No one knows for sure. Most of the casualties were on the mess deck. It was breakfast time.

Almost immediately, the Coast Guard sent a cutter and a boat from Sandy Hook to the stricken ship. Later, in a first in the world of aviation, the Coast Guard assigned a helicopter to rescue duty - airlifting blood plasma for victims of the disaster.

Here's how it played out:

The Coast Guard lookout at Sandy Hook witnessed the first blast, according to the website ussturner.org, and sounded general quarters, dispatching an 83-foot cutter and a 77-foot launch to the Turner, which was listing to starboard at anchor near Ambrose Light.

"Immediately upon arrival the cutter rescued a man bobbing about on a torn mattress while another clung desperately to the ship's mascot, a little mongrel terrier called `Turn To,'" the website said.  The cutter, meantime, "pushed her bow athwart the burning destroyer and lashed in to receive the stranded seamen." Other ships joined the rescue before the destroyer foundered.

BKR2/c John MacDonald suffered burns in the blast. "The steel inside the ship was red hot and the hatch I tried to get out of was buckled from the explosion," he said in a post on the Turner website. "I kept feeling around for ways to get out and finally felt cold air from the snow outside. "

Once Turner survivors were brought to shore, the medical community turned to Coast Guard aviation for more help.

Lieutenant Commander Frank Erickson, the Coast Guard's very first helicopter pilot, lifted off in a Sikorsky HNS-1 to deliver blood plasma to a New Jersey hospital treating Turner sailors. Departing  from New York's Floyd Bennett Field in high winds, sleet and snow, Erickson flew to Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan where cases of plasma were lashed to the chopper and then pressed onto the hospital.

USS Turner, DD-648, was commissioned less than a year before its loss.