CUTTER WHITE ALDER

By Vinny Del Giudice

On Dec. 7, 1968, a Taiwanese freighter sliced into Coast Guard buoy tender White Alder on a mile-wide section of the Mississippi River near White Castle, Louisiana, killing 17 of 20 Coast Guardsmen aboard. 

White Alder, part of the Coast Guard's "Black Hull" fleet of workhorse tenders, barges and tugs, was proceeding down-bound after retrieving buoys. Freighter Helena was upbound and under pilot. The 133-foot cutter sank in about a minute and was swallowed by the Mississippi's muddy bottom. There it remains.

The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause of the wreck was the White Adler's "abrupt change of course across the bow of the Helena for unknown reasons." Neither vessel sounded a danger signal, the board said.

At the scene of the disaster, Sheriff Bo Williams of Iberville Parish said survivors were clinging to a buoy and picked up by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers boat, the Associated Press reported. "They were freezing," Williams said, with temperatures in the low 40s and a sharp wind.

For hours, a Coast Guard helicopter hovered about 10 feet over the river surface, its searchlight trained on the muddy water, AP said.

"Divers recovered the bodies of three of the dead but river sediment buried the cutter so quickly that continued recovery and salvage operations proved impractical," according to the website of the U.S. Coast Guard Enlisted Memorial.

White Alder's designation was WLM/WAGL-541. It was a built as a Navy lighter, according to Wikipedia, with the Coast Guard acquiring a total of eight in 1947 and 1948. The hull design incorporated a shallow draft. Each was named with the prefix “White” for a plant, shrub or tree. An alder is a type of birch tree.

LIGHTSHIPS

Frying Pans Shoals, North Carolina

Ambrose Channel, off Sandy Hook, New Jersey

Entrance to Boston Harbor

By Vinny Del Giudice

The U.S. Lighthouse Service, which merged with the Coast Guard in 1939, guided mariners along reefs and through channels with a fleet of rugged little floating lighthouses - the lightship fleet.

With handles like "Frying Pan," "Hen and Chicken," "Nantucket" and "Ambrose," the stout vessels were considered "essential partners with America's lighthouses," according to the National Park Service, and posted in the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico.

Their lamps atop masts burned bright and their horns blared loudly and continuously in fog. Their hulls were painted red with their names - signifying shoals etc. that they marked - emblazoned in giant white letters. Radio beacons transmitted positions.

``Moored over treacherous reefs, or marking the narrow approaches to a channel or harbor entrance where lighthouses could not be built or placed in areas too far offshore for a shore-side lighthouse's lens to reach, lightships were fewer in number than the estimated 1,500 lighthouses built in the United States," the park service said.

Records show 179 lightships were built between 1820 and the 1952. In the early 20th Century, the Lighthouse Service operated 51 lightships - 46 on the eastern seaboard and five on the Pacific Coast. Eleven guided ships plying the Great Lakes over the decades. A small force was also posted in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to Port Huron Museums in Michigan, where the retired Huron Lightship is moored: "The fog signals used over the years consisted of bells, whistles, trumpets, sirens, and horns. Early fog horns were powered by steam and later by air compressors." 

Danger was part of the job though watches were, by and large, uneventful and lonely. 

A November 1913 storm on the Great Lakes sank 19 vessels including the Buffalo Lightship with all hand. During World War I, a German U-boat attacked the Diamond Shoal Lightship off North Carolina. In 1944, a hurricane sank the Vineyard Lightship with all hands off Massachusetts. 

The great liner RMS Olympic, sister of Titanic, hit the Nantucket Lightship in heavy fog in May 1934. Seven of the lightship crew perished. There were close calls earlier in the day. "Fog warnings were sounded continuously and still blew their ominous warning even as the lightship plunged to the ocean depths," according to a dispatch published in a Canadian newspaper.

Off New Jersey, the Ambrose Lightship (LV-111, WAL-533)  was rammed by the Grace Liner Santa Barbara in September 1935, brushed in heavy fog by an unidentified vessel in January 1950 and rammed by the Grace Line's in March 1950, according to Wikipedia.

America's lightships kept the watch for another 40 years. As automation increased and navigational technology matured, the lightships were withdrawn from duty with the final lightship - Nantucket I - going dark in March 1985.

PHOTO GALLERY No. 2

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

A U.S. Coast Guard boat patrols Main Street in Melville, Louisiana, during 1927 Mississippi River flood.

Image: U.S. Coast Guard
On April 24, 1943, the freighter SS El Estero caught fire after loading a cargo of ammunition at Bayonne, New Jersey, threatening a catastrophic explosion in New York Harbor. Two Coast Guard fireboats responded along with New York City fireboats and shore-based firefighters. As the fire raged out of control, the Coast Guard decided to scuttle the ship but the seacocks were inaccessible. Tugs then towed the burning freighter to deeper water where it listed to starboard and sank. The fire was ruled as accidental.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard
On March 17, 1902, seven members of the Monomoy Life-Saving Station on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, drowned trying to reach the wrecked coal barge Wadena in a gale. "Capt. Marshall N. Eldredge, one of the oldest lifesavers on the coast, went down with his men," The New York Times reported at the time. "There is no Government pension for those whose husbands and fathers are lost in the lifesaving service. so that the lot of the families who are left is a hard one." Five men on the Wadena also died, the Times said.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

It was a World War Two mystery. The Coast Guard-manned weather ship USS Muskeget vanished in the North Atlantic with a crew of 120 in September 1942. It later emerged that the ship had been torpedoed by U-boat  U-755.

Photos: Wikipedia, NOAA
U.S. Revenue Cutter Hugh McCulloch participated in the 1898 Spanish-American War, joining the naval fleet at the Battle of Manila in the Philippines. It moved onto other assignments in the Pacific Ocean and Alaska. McCulloch met a tragic end, sinking June 13, 1917 near Point Conception, California, after a collision with the steamer Governor in fog. The wreck of the McCulloch was located in 2016, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The crew evacuated but one man later succumbed to injuries. 

PEA ISLAND STATION

Richard Etheridge at far left

In the 1880s, Pea Island in North Carolina was home of the first U.S. Life Saving Service station staffed exclusively by African Americans and commanded by a black officer, Richard Etheridge.

The station earned the reputation of "one of the tautest on the Carolina Coast" under Ethridge.

Belonging to the Life Saving Service "took extensive training and continual practice to be able to successfully launch a lifeboat or surfboat in heavy seas and shoot the Lyle Gun to a ship offshore to set up the breeches buoy," according to the U.S. Life-Saving Heritage Association.

In clear daylight, men kept watch from a station's tower. At night and during periods of daytime fog, they paced beaches, lighting flares to warn off ships too close to shore.

On Oct. 11, 1896, Etheridge and his men staged a daring rescue of nine people from the schooner E.S. Newman - which was blown off course and beached nearby - by braving the pounding surf 10 times. 

On the 100th anniversary of that rescue, the crew was posthumously awarded a Gold Lifesaving Medal, according to the National Park Service.  

Additionally, a Sentinel-class cutter named for Ethridge was launched in 2011.

ICE PATROL

The U.S. Coast Guard leads the International Ice Patrol. It was established in the aftermath of the 1912 Titanic disaster to track ice hazards in the North Atlantic in the area of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The patrol initially fell under the auspices of the Revenue Cutter Service, the Coast Guard's predecessor. The North Atlantic ice season runs from Feb. 1 to July 31. Thirteen countries fund the patrol.

Photos: U.S. Coast Guard

In the 21st century, the International Ice Patrol relies primarily on aircraft. The "mainstay" has been the C-130 family since 1962, according to the Coast Guard. Today, the patrol's HC-130Js operate out of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Flights last five to seven hours and cover 30,000 square miles. Air crews go out an average of five days every other week during ice season. Data are gathered to predict iceberg drift.

Seneca and Miami were the first revenue cutters to chart the North Atlantic icefields. This is a photo of Seneca on the prowl in 1914. The cutters sent ice reports by radio. The patrol stood down during both World Wars when German U-boats hunted Allied shipping. To be considered an iceberg, a free-floating, frozen chunk of glacial freshwater must measure at least 15 meters (or 16.4 yards) in length. Smaller chunks are called growlers - and they too can punch a hole in a hull.

In March 1957, the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Eastwind (WAGB-279) photographed the tallest known iceberg in the North Atlantic at that time. It extended 500 feet above surface - almost the height of the Washington Monument. It was located in Melville Bay, Greenland, position 75N, 67-30W.

View of cutter Eastwind through "eye" of an iceberg in Baffin Bay in September 1952 during an Arctic trek. Here's a knowledge nugget from Science Daily: "Since the density of pure water ice is ca. 920 kg/m3, and that of sea water ca. 1025 kg/m3, typically, around 90% of the volume of an iceberg is under water, and that portion's shape can be difficult to surmise from looking at what is visible above the surface."

This is believed to be the iceberg that sank the Titanic - pockmarked by a patch of paint that may have rubbed off the doomed liner's ruptured hull. It was photographed hours after the Titanic foundered on April 15, 1912 from the German ocean liner SS Prinz Adalbert. The actual collision occurred late on April 14. On the anniversary of the Titanic disaster, the Ice Patrol drops flowers over the presumed site.

On ice patrol duty in 1951, U.S. Coast Guard cutter Evergreen (WAGL-295 / WLB-295 / WAGO-295 / WMEC-295), rides the waves. The seagoing buoy tender featured a reinforced hull for light ice-breaking duty.

- Vinny Del Giudice, U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary

PHOTO GALLERY No. 1

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Morrill was moored off Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Dec. 6, 1917, when an explosives-laden freighter exploded in a narrows, leveling much of the city and taking more than a 1,700 lives. The cutter survived the blast and a landing party helped provide aid to the stricken Canadian city.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard
In January and February 1937, the U.S. Coast Guard assisted in relief efforts when the Ohio River flooded from Cairo, Illinois, to Pittsburgh. More than 300 people died.

The Nauset Coast Guard Station, one of nine such facilities that once served Cape Cod, Massachusetts, opened under the auspices of the U.S. Life-Saving Service in 1873. It went out of service in 1958. Cape Cod extends from the southeast corner of mainland Massachusetts into the Atlantic Ocean.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard

In Keokuk, Iowa, a U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary boat crew assisted the Missouri Water Patrol and local firefighters with radio communications and perimeter control at a vessel fire on Sept. 17, 2005.

Post card view of U.S. Coast Guard Air Station on Mississippi Gulf Coast, circa 1930s. The Coast Guard built up its aviation fleet to combat smuggling during the Prohibition-era.  It has expanded every since for search and rescue, law enforcement, etc.

Photo: U.S. Coast Guard
In the late 1800s, the Revenue Cutter Fessenden - propelled by a paddle wheel - would patrol the Great Lakes. The cutter went into serve in 1869. Its first home port was Cleveland. 

Photo: Inland Marine Radio History Archive
Vintage radio console at U.S. Coast Guard station "NOG" at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, serving shipping on the Great Lakes. This is the CW - continuous wave or Morse Code - operating position.

On April 4, 1933, the Navy airship USS Akron crashed off the Barnegat Lightship in New Jersey. The search employed Coast Guard vessels and aircraft. The Coast Guard cutter Tucker CG-23 was the first American vessel on the scene. The airship crashed tail first in high winds. The final death toll was 73. Three aboard the Akron survived. The crew hadn't been issued life vests.

SERPENS AK-79

USS Serpens AK-97

Retired Coast Guard officer Richard Stoud plays taps at the Serpens Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in November 2013. (Coast Guard photo)

On Jan. 29, 1945, the munitions-laden transport USS Serpens AK-79 exploded at Guadalcanal - the deadliest Coast Guard accident of the 20th Century.

The blast killed 197 Coast Guardsmen, 51 Army stevedores, a Public Health Service surgeon and a soldier ashore hit by debris, according to the Coast Guard Compass.

``I felt and saw two flashes after which only the bow of the ship was visible. The rest had disintegrated and the bow sank soon afterwards.,'' said Guard Lt. Cmdr. Perry Stinson, the ship's commanding officer, who was ashore at the time.

The official investigation determined the accident was ``intrinsic to the loading process.''

The Serpens, launched in 1943, was 442 feet in length, displaced 14,250 tons and had a top speed of 11 knots. For defense it carried one 5-inch gun, one 3-inch gun, two 40mm and six 20mm anti-aircraft cannons.

USS BAYFIELD APA-33

By Vinny Del Giudice

The U.S. Coast Guard played an active role in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters in World War Two – and my father’s service as a war-time Coastie illustrates this. Semper Paratus and then some aboard the USS Bayfield APA-33.

Vincent J. Del Giudice (1921-2003) was a pharmacist mate - a "medic" if you will - on the Coast Guard-manned attack transport, which landed troops and evacuated casualties at Normandy and Iwo Jima and participated in the amphibious operation at Okinawa as a decoy. We can toss in an anvil, too, as in "Operation Anvil" in southern France. Bayfield also made a variety of port calls. Oran, Algeria, for one.

My father was a 20-something college student from the gritty mill town of Paterson, New Jersey, when he enlisted in 1942. It was that or be drafted into the Army. His draft number was up. He studied chemistry at New York University, labored as a soda jerk and assistant chemist in a Paterson pharmacy, was single and lived with his Italian immigrant parents. The son of a barber from Naples attained the rank of Coast Guard petty officer once the war was almost over - but at a steep cost.

In America's rush to war post-Pearl Harbor, early attack transports were converted from existing cargo or transport ships for the Coast Guard and the Navy. The drab, battle gray Bayfield was originally laid down as SS Sea Bass on Nov. 14 1942 in San Francisco and  converted to an attack transport in Brooklyn, New York. There was nothing sleek about it. Bayfield was all bulk. Sturdy and tough.

The completed ship was commissioned on Nov. 20, 1943 with Captain Lyndon Spenser, U.S. Coast Guard, in command. Bayfield was declared ready for sea on Feb. 3, 1944, equipped with motorized "Higgins Boat" landing craft strapped to the decks and ready to send off the infantry and Marines and evacuate and treat their casualties. You've probably seen photos of those boats in action. The ramp crashing down. Soldiers charging into the surf. 

At D-Day, Bayfield served as the flagship at Utah Beach for Navy Rear Admiral Don Pardee Moon, and landed the 8th Infantry Regiment and 87th Chemical Battalion. At Iwo Jima, Bayfield landed the 4th Marines and served as a hospital and prisoner-of-war ship. At Okinawa, the Bayfield, along with other vessels in Demonstration Group Charlie, simulated a landing away from the actual assault at the Hagushi beaches to throw off the Japanese. The ruse failed.

...

My father recounted his time at Normandy in the book D-Day by Stephen Ambrose and in an oral history. Ernest Hemingway said “never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” Wartime CBS Radio correspondent Edward R. Murrow called it "organized killing." My father would concur.

In the cramped Bayfield operating room, it was blood, bone and goo. My father helped a ship’s surgeon amputate “one leg below the knee, the other above and both arms’’ of an American soldier who stepped on pair S-mines simultaneously. A quadruple amputee. Stop and think about that. Another suffered a traumatic brain injury - and my father said he naively tried to repair the gruesome damage with his fingers.

Medics painted the letter "M" in iodine on the foreheads of the casualties administered  morphine - with the pain killer flowing that day almost as freely as the ammunition raking the beach. They used morphine for comfort and to hasten death in those too ruined to repair. For surgery, drops of ether over gauze served as anesthesia, administered and monitored by medics just a few years out of high school.    

In another instance my father – armed with a pair of scissors and sulfa powder - amputated fingers “dangling” from the hand of a wounded German corporal. He thanked my father for the snip, the makeshift surgery, with a smile and a “danke schon!” For that German the war was over and he still had a few knuckles to be grateful for.

...

My father spoke of heartbreak. Medics sewing the deceased into weighted canvas body bags for "burial" at sea. The medics also patrolled scarred beaches retrieving the dead - "graves registration" they called it. Clipping dog tags of the dead. He saw the worst in men. He recounted battle-weary Marines beating a prisoner of war on Bayfield's deck somewhere in the Pacific.
 
My father also spoke of the depths of despair. Rear Admiral Moon committing suicide with a gun in his Bayfield cabin a few weeks after Utah Beach. My father the medic mopped up the scene. Battle fatigue was considered the cause of death. There were flashes of dark humor, too. Port calls. The ship's chaplain handing out condoms. Few takers. Sick bay calls up after Bayfield was underway again.

The ship's loudspeakers often rasped the alert "general quarters." But Bayfield, itself, was unscathed considering the violence encountered along the way - practically circumnavigating the planet. There was a near miss with a crashing, burning, screaming Japanese Zero, and a Bayfield sailor died on the beach of black, volcanic sand at Iwo Jima. "Souvenir hunting," my father said.

...

After the war, my father told me he didn't speak about his experiences in the Atlantic and Pacific for 20 years. It had a profound effect. He survived and valued peace and diplomacy. He didn't want his kids enlisting. He said he had seen enough for all of us after I expressed an interest in the service in high school.

After receiving his discharge papers in Oakland, California, he went onto Creighton University in Omaha on the GI Bill, a brief stint in law school and dropped out to attend medical school in Italy. He spent more than 40 years as a physician and surgeon in the North Jersey communities of Paterson, Haledon and Wayne - truly beloved by his patients.

Let me be perfectly frank. We revered his service. Revered it. But, like oh so many veterans, "The Big One - Dubya Dubya Two" never ended for my father. It contributed to emotional problems. He suffered war's pain to his dying day in 2003. Volcanic anger. Too many Manhattans. More than I wish to write. To those who glorify war, please reconsider.

___________

If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Hotline at 1-800-273 TALK (1-800-273-8255).

OCEAN STATION RESCUES

UPDATED DECEMBER 2021

Photos: U.S. Coast Guard

It was a miracle on the high seas and the U.S. Coast Guard was there. On Oct. 16, 1956, Pan American World Airways Flight 6, bound for San Francisco from Honolulu, was forced to ditch in the Pacific Ocean, after two of its propeller engines failed.

Though the fuselage broke apart on impact, all 31 souls were taken aboard the cutter Pontchartrain WHEC-70, which was on routine "Ocean Station" patrol. 

The cutter was posted at Ocean Station November - a fixed spot between Hawaii and California - for weather observation and search and rescue assignments, such as downed aircraft. The Coast Guard posted ocean station cutters in the Atlantic Ocean, too.

Flight 6 ran into trouble after midnight. The crew contacted Pontchartrain by radio, arranged a rendezvous and ditched after first light with the cutter's lifeboats crews at the ready. It's been said the Coast Guard gets no respect. Legend has it one of the rescued passengers exclaimed "Thank God for the Navy!" once aboard the cutter.

Forty-four cases of canaries trapped in the cargo hold of the aircraft weren't as fortunate.

The Ocean Station program was established in 1940 under orders from President Franklin Roosevelt. It initially focused on the Atlantic Ocean under the name Atlantic Weather Observation Service. 

BERMUDA SKY QUEEN

Photos: National Archives, U.S. Coast Guard 

In an earlier close call, cutter George M. Bibb WPG-31 - assigned to Ocean Station Charlie in the North Atlantic - went to the aid of a Boeing 314 "flying boat" that landed intact on Oct. 13, 1947 - and bobbed about with nowhere to proceed.

The "Bermuda Sky Queen" operated by American International Airways was bound for Gander, New Foundland, from Ireland with 62 passengers - many of them children - when it ran out of fuel. It also carried a crew of seven.

There were no serious injuries, however, transferring passengers to the Bibb proved extraordinarily dangerous due to sea conditions and stretched into a second day.

Bibb landed the passengers in Boston. The Queen was scuttled. The flying boat's crew was found at fault for miscalculating its ability to reach Gander with ample fuel in Atlantic headwinds. It was also determined that the aircraft was overweight.

Ocean Weather Station Dog, about 380 miles off Newfoundland, was the scene of another aircraft rescue. It happened April 27, 1948, when a C-47 - Military Air Transport Service Flight 6396 - ditched near the cutter Sebago WHEC-42. The C-47's crew of four survived, according to Coast Guard archives.

Ocean station patrols ceased in the 1970s.

Image: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

DOUGLAS A. MUNRO

Signalman First Class Douglas A. Munro, 22, was posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service at the Battle of Guadalcanal in World War Two - the first member of the U.S. Coast Guard to receive the nation's highest military honor.

His citation reads:

"For extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry in action above and beyond the call of duty as petty officer in charge of a group of 24 Higgins boats, engaged in the evacuation of a battalion of marines trapped by enemy Japanese forces at Point Cruz, Guadalcanal on 27 September 1942.

"After making preliminary plans for the evacuation of nearly 500 beleaguered marines, Munro, under constant strafing by enemy machine guns on the island, and at great risk of his life, daringly led five of his small craft toward the shore.

"As he closed the beach, he signaled the others to land, and then in order to draw the enemy's fire and protect the heavily loaded boats, he valiantly placed his craft with its two small guns as a shield between the beachhead and the Japanese.

"When the perilous task of evacuation was nearly completed, Munro was instantly killed by enemy fire, but his crew, two of whom were wounded, carried on until the last boat had loaded and cleared the beach.

"By his outstanding leadership, expert planning, and dauntless devotion to duty, he and his courageous comrades undoubtedly saved the lives of many who otherwise would have perished. He gallantly gave his life for his country."

- Congressional Medal of Honor Society