Section I of the Act to Create the Coast Guard, 28 January 1915, made it clear that the new service was an armed force: “. . . The Coast Guard . . . shall constitute a part of the military forces of the United States and . . . shall operate under the Treasury Department in lime of peace and operate as a part of the Navy, subject to the orders of the Secretary of the Navy, in time of war or when the President shall so direct.”1
To be sure, some 2,000 officers and men of the Revenue Cutter Service, which had been merged with the Life- Saving Service to form the Coast Guard, had long been subject to military discipline, and revenue cutters had served with the Navy in most of the nation’s 19th century wars. They had done so on an ad hoc basis, however; there had been no transfer of their service from Treasury Department to Navy Department control. And some 2,300 surfmen heretofore composing the Life-Saving Service had all been civilians. Indeed, only those manning lifesaving stations on the Pacific coast served the year round; their fellows on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and the Great Lakes had to seek other employment in June and July of each year. Thus, more than half of the Coast Guard personnel had no military background.
Nor did the organic act make any mention of the Coast Guard’s role when transferred to the Navy. At Secretary of the Treasury William G. McAdoo’s suggestion. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels appointed Captain William H. G. Bullard to confer with Captain Commandant Ellsworth P. Bertholf to determine this. After considering the Coast Guard’s craft and facilities, the two officers reported to their respective superiors on 20 March 1915 that lack of speed and endurance would relegate most of the 21 seagoing vessels to patrol or minelaying and sweeping in coastal waters. A few of the larger cutters they thought capable of serving as radio relay ships or “as convoy vessels to merchantmen or transports”—an interesting idea since the use of convoys in World War I was not generally accepted until more than two years later.
Similarly, their statement that some surfmen “could be profitably employed on small gunboats to take charge of landing boats through the surf” was somewhat prophetic, although surfmen would not be important in amphibious operations until 1942. For the most part, Bertholf and Bullard anticipated that the personnel of the lifesaving stations would serve as coast watchers and armed guards at coastal radio stations, which would necessitate small arms practice and infantry drill for the surfmen.2
It seems unlikely that the Navy Department gave much thought thereafter to the employment of the Coast Guard, having its own problems of inadequate personnel and rapid expansion to cope with. Some of the smaller service’s units did participate in Navy preparedness exercises, but these were of short duration and limited value. When, on 6 April 1917, the United States declared war on the German Empire, Coast Guard cutters and activities reported to the naval districts in which they were located. Initially, they were assigned to port security and coastal patrol, although such traditional Coast Guard duties as Bering Sea patrol continued to require the services of some cutters.
The decision to adopt a system of convoys to counter German submarines in the summer of 1917 led to orders to prepare six of the larger cutters for distant service. These ranged in size and age from the 205-foot Manning (1897) and Algonquin (1898) to the 165-foot Ossipee, commissioned in 1915. The oldest vessels were also the fastest, being capable of about 16 knots, and the 204-foot Seneca of 1908 was the slowest at 11 knots. The 191-foot Yamacraw (1909) was rated at 13 knots, while the 190- foot Tampa (1912) and the Ossipee could steam at 12 knots. All had batteries of three-inch guns and depth charges. Presumably the Tampa's sister Unalga was excluded because she was on Bering Sea patrol, while the shortage of oil fuel in Britain made it impractical to include the Tallapoosa, which had oil-fired boilers. The 205-foot Onondaga was in poor condition, and the same reason may explain the exclusion of some of the other cutters.
Captain Commandant Bertholf had hoped that his service’s ships would continue to be manned entirely by Coast Guard personnel, but within a short time cutters in home waters found themselves performing an unanticipated function, that of training naval personnel. At first, these were officers of the Naval Reserve Force; later some enlisted men were assigned, as well. In August 1917, the Navy’s Bureau of Navigation asked that Coast Guard officers be ordered to yachts being converted for antisubmarine duty, and by the war’s end, many were serving in a number of small combatants, transports, and auxiliary craft of the Navy, both abroad and in home waters.
Whether in cutters or in naval vessels, the Coast Guardsmen ordered to the war zone experienced relatively little action. The six cutters, which composed the Second Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet Patrol Force’s Sixth Division, were based at Gibraltar, from which they escorted slow convoys to the United Kingdom, usually putting in at Milford Haven, South Wales, at the termination of the passage. Officially, these were 7.5-knot convoys; in fact, many of the cargo ships—long since due for overhauls— could make no more than six knots, limiting the convoys in which they were included to that speed.
Except in the “danger zone” at either end of the passage, a cutter was the sole escort, providing a radio link with the British Admiralty and responsible for keeping stragglers closed up and would-be attackers at a distance. It was monotonous, arduous duty, with the threat of submarine attack ever present in clear weather—all of the cutters except the Algonquin reported evading torpedoes at least once, while the men of the Ossipee and the Seneca thought that they had been torpedo targets on five occasions each—and in poor visibility the danger of collision was equally threatening.
None of the cutters sank a submarine, which is hardly surprising because the U-58, fatally damaged by the destroyers Fanning and Nicholson, was the only confirmed kill by American warships. The Seneca, however, gained notice by rescuing the 81 survivors of the British sloop Cowslip off Gibraltar in April 1918 and 27 from the freighter Queen two months later. The cutter’s attempted salvage of the torpedo-damaged British collier Wellington in September 1918 ended in failure, with the loss of 11 Coast Guardsmen and five British seamen. The Tampa, torpedoed and sunk with all hands in the Bristol Channel on 26 September 1918, was the Coast Guard’s only war loss, although the larger cutters McCulloch and Mohawk were sunk in separate collisions in home waters in 1917.
Coast Guardsmen were also employed in port security and captain of the port activities, perhaps not strictly military in nature but nonetheless very important to the war effort. Their success in these fields is indicated by the absence of serious mishaps, such as the Imo-Mont Blanc collision which resulted in an explosion that caused thousands of casualties and major damage to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in December 1917.
The Coast Guard’s first experience as a part of the Navy undoubtedly went a long way toward making it truly a military force. Its system of courts was revised to improve discipline, and the importance of recruit training before men were assigned to ships or stations was recognized, although the shortage of personnel kept it from being provided regularly in the immediate postwar years. As a result of wartime requirements, surfmen at all of the lifesaving stations henceforth served regular enlistments. They were still probably the least military of Coast Guardsmen, for the lifesaving branch continued for some years to exist virtually as a separate service under Oliver M. Maxam. the civilian chief of the operations division at Headquarters, and its own district superintendents who, like most of their subordinates, were veterans of the old Life-Savin? Service.
Return of the Coast Guard to Treasury Department control after the war did not follow as a matter of course, fora large number of the Coast Guard’s officers wished to stay with the Navy and Secretary of the Navy Daniels was reluctant to relinquish the smaller service. Nonetheless, the transfer was effected by executive order on 28 August 1919, and subsequent efforts to make the Coast Guard permanently a part of the Navy by legislative means failed.
But the Coast Guard remained a military force. Both officers and men wore naval uniforms, the former with a distinctive cap badge and with gold shields replacing the stars on line officers’ uniforms. Enlisted men’s jumpers had a white or blue shield on the right forearm, and their flat hat bands bore such names as “U.S.S. HAIDA, C.G.” An Act of Congress, dated 18 May 1920, authorized the same pay and allowances for Coast Guard personnel as for their equivalents in the Navy, and little more than two weeks later the smaller service adopted the Navy’s officer rank terminology, with senior captains becoming commanders, captain to lieutenant commanders, on down to third lieutenants, who would henceforth be ensigns. The captain-commandant alone ranked with naval captains until 1923, when Congress authorized the rank of rear admiral of the lower half, and the future promotion of commanders to captain by seniority and attainments.
The loss of three first-class cutters during World War I exacerbated an already existing shortage of vessels, and the five ships authorized in 1916 and 1917 had not been built because the nation’s shipbuilding capacity was fully occupied with wartime programs.
The commandant hoped that the Navy might make 12 of its Bird-class minesweepers available after the war, but the Coast Guard had to make do with submarine-chasers— five steel 180-foot Eagle-boats and 21 wooden 110-footers, none of which proved adequate to its needs. Four of the 1916-17 cutters, finally completed in 1921 and 1922, had been designed with use as gunboats in mind—they were steel 240-footers capable of 15 knots and mounting five-inch and three-inch guns. The fifth was a smaller, slower seagoing tug, but subsequent cutters designed during the interwar period satisfied the Navy’s criteria for gunboats.
The armament for Coast Guard vessels was provided by the Navy and was usually installed at Navy yards. The Navy also furnished the original allowance of ammunition, but projectiles and powder expended thereafter had to be replaced at the Coast Guard’s expense. Each cutter was required to fire her guns in short-range battle practice annually; in the absence of fire control equipment the results were not likely to be impressive. And the value of the battle practice drills supposed to be held on occasion may be doubted—their frequency and nature seem to have been left to the senior officers of the various divisions, not all of whom took them very seriously.
Expansion of the Coast Guard for prohibition enforcement brought closer cooperation with the Navy—for a time at least. The Navy’s recruiting service helped to acquire recruits for the Coast Guard during the summer of 1924, after which the Coast Guard’s own recruiters assumed the task, and the newly enlisted men were sent to the Newport, Rhode Island, and Hampton Roads, Virginia, naval stations for their basic training—until August 1925, when the comptroller general ruled that the use of naval stations for this purpose was illegal without congressional authorization.
In lieu of the 20 additional cutters requested by the commandant, Congress decided that the Coast Guard should take over 20 of the old destroyers laid up at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. While Coast Guard crews, assisted by yard personnel, were refurbishing these ships, prospective commanding and executive officers attended seminars on destroyer handling. Engineer officers, water tenders, and machinist’s mates took the Navy’s four-week course in the operation of oil-fueled boilers and steam turbines. Requiring relatively large crews—usually 89 officers and men— rather unmaneuverable, and uneconomical in terms of fuel consumption, the destroyers were less than ideal craft for prohibition enforcement. Nonetheless, five more were acquired in 1925-26 for want of anything better. And when seven of the oldest ships were returned to the Navy in 1930, they were replaced by five of the larger flush- deck destroyers, all completed after World War I, while a sixth was added in 1932. The repeal of the 18th Amendment in 1933 found the Coast Guard still operating 15 destroyers; all had been decommissioned by the spring of 1934.
Operating a destroyer force for a decade was clearly invaluable experience for the Coast Guard, even if all of the ships had their torpedo tubes removed and most were obsolete. In the autumn of 1933, while the remaining eight destroyers were at Hampton Roads, Virginia, for their annual gunnery practice, a crisis in Cuba and resulting violence led to the dispatch of the Navy’s Special Service Squadron—a light cruiser and two destroyers—to Cuban ports to protect foreigners.
More warships were needed, so the Coast Guard destroyers and four cutters, all stationed at southern ports, were ordered to join the naval vessels. When the unrest subsided two months later. Rear Admiral Charles S. Freeman, commanding the Special Service Squadron, detached them, noting that the Coast Guard destroyers and cutters had “operated with the associated vessels of the Navy smoothly and efficiently” and commenting favorably on the “high order of administrative and professional ability among the officers in command and a commendable state of training among all of the personnel.”3
This is not to imply, however, that relations between the two services were uniformly amicable during this period. In December 1927, for example, the Coast Guard destroyer Paulding, conducting a prohibition reconnaissance off Provincetown, Massachusetts, rammed the surfacing submarine S-4 (SS-109), which sank with all hands. A Navy court of inquiry held the submarine commanding officer and Lieutenant Commander John S. Baylis of the Paulding jointly responsible; a Coast Guard board of investigation disagreed, pointing out that submarines were supposed to avoid surface ships, and if the S-4 was considered to have been on the surface, she, would have been the burdened vessel under the rules of the road. Baylis was exonerated, but some believed that his failure to be promoted to rear admiral during World War II was the Navy’s belated revenge for the S-4 sinking.
Two years later, the notorious rum-runner Black Duck, heading into Narragansett Bay, ignored the CG-290's order to stop, and three men were killed by the patrol boat’s gunfire. Feelings ran high in New England, though a special Rhode Island grand jury found the Coast Guardsmen innocent. Secretary of the Navy Charles F. Adams sought to avert possible attacks on Navy sailors by a public statement condemning the conduct of the Coast Guardsmen. Congressional supporters of the Coast Guard quickly came to its defense, criticizing Adams for his ill- judged remarks.
A more serious potential threat loomed with the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. As Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1913-20, he had supported Josephus Daniels in the effort to retain control of the Coast Guard after World War I. When the Navy took over the operation of Coast Guard radio facilities between Maine and Cape May, New Jersey, in 1934, some Coast Guard officers thought it the beginning of the end. Their alarm was groundless, however, for the radio stations were returned to their service at the end of a two-year trial period, and nothing further developed. While the efforts of many members of Congress and the shipping community may have helped to deter Roosevelt, it is possible that the Navy itself actually had no expansionist aims at the time.
Incidents such as these seem to have had little effect on the generally amicable relationship between the two services. A Coast Guard commander was regularly assigned to duty in the Navy Department as liaison officer, and Coast Guardsmen continued to be trained in Navy schools, including the Naval War College. Coast Guard officers have received aviation instruction at Pensacola since 1916.
But there is evidence suggesting that some in the Navy did not accept their Coast Guard counterparts as equals. Almost a half-century later, a retired Navy admiral remembered that Coast Guard Academy cadets had been transferred to the midshipmen’s training ship Wyoming (AG-17) in 1936 while their cutter, the Cayuga, evacuated American citizens during the Spanish Civil War: “They seemed like lower class people, the cadets of the Coast Guard. Now, whether that’s just an assumption on our part, I don’t know. Their basic manners and their deportment, they had excellent discipline and all that, but they were more like enlisted men than our midshipmen were.”4
However haughty it may seem, this observation was correct to the extent that the Coast Guard’s officer corps was more representative of American society as a whole than that of the Navy, for appointment to the Coast Guard Academy was by nationwide merit examination; there were no congressional appointments. Cadet training, on the other hand, had become more similar to that of midshipmen. The course of instruction at the Coast Guard Academy had been increased to four years in 1930, and two years later, after the school was moved to its present location in New London, Connecticut, the curriculum was revised considerably. Whatever their social origins, most cadets became competent officers who would not suffer by comparison with those wearing the Navy’s uniform.
The Coast Guard was authorized to build 20-knot cutters in 1933. Its constructors duly produced a typical cutter design, featuring deep draft and a single screw. The Navy was building two gunboats at the time, and when it became apparent that money could be saved were the new cutters built in Navy yards with the same underwater lines and propelling machinery as those of the Charleston (PG- 51) and the Erie (PG-50), the Coast Guard constructors were directed to make the necessary modifications to the gunboat design. The resulting Treasury (or Secretary) class vessels came to be the most famous Coast Guard cutters ever built, with the last, the Ingham, decommissioned in 1988 after more than a half-century of service.
The Coast Guard experienced its first major expansion since Prohibition on 1 July 1939, when it took over the Lighthouse Service in accordance with President Roosevelt’s Reorganization Plan II. The addition of more than 5,000 civilians to an armed force numbering 10,164 officers and men might have been expected to dilute the latter’s military status. Instead, it had the opposite effect. Only 665 Lighthouse Service personnel became Coast Guard officers or petty officers; their fellows were permitted to remain as civilian employees until they retired, when they were replaced by Coast Guardsmen. And the continued existence of Coast Guard divisions and lifesaving districts had been an anomaly for years—to add lighthouse districts would lead to serious overlapping and jurisdictional problems. The commandant, Rear Admiral Russell R. Waesche, took advantage of this situation by abolishing all previous jurisdictions, establishing 13 districts in their places. A captain was to command each, and all of the Coast Guard activities within its boundaries— cutters, lifeboat stations, and aids to navigation. Former lifesaving district commanders, who became personnel officers at the new district headquarters, were still able to look after the interests of lifesaving station personnel to a degree, but this reorganization was a major step toward the complete consolidation of the lifesaving branch with the more military part of the Coast Guard.
Even as this was developing, World War II began in Europe, with consequent additional burdens for the Coast Guard. New tasks included inspecting merchantmen of belligerent ownership to ascertain if they mounted offensive armament, preventing their sending radio messages while in U. S. ports, and recording the movements of all merchant vessels in American territorial waters. Cutters, aircraft, and coastal stations began systematic patrols to prevent violations of neutrality by American-flag or other vessels. When belligerents were permitted to buy munitions in the United States, effective control of explosive- cargo handling and ship movements required the establishment of captain of the port facilities in major harbors. The German conquest of Denmark in April 1940 caused Danes in Greenland to request American assistance to guard against German or British attempts to occupy the island- Since the dispatch of Army or Navy forces might be provocative, the Coast Guard received this responsibility as well, which led ultimately to Greenland becoming a principal Coast Guard theater of operations in World War II.
Following the defeat of France in June 1940, Admiral Harold R. Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, decided that more detailed plans for the Coast Guard’s use and transfer to the Navy should be drawn. Planners from the two services concluded that naval district commandants should assume command of all Coast Guard units and personnel within their areas. To this end, Coast Guard district boundaries were adjusted slightly to accord more closely to those of naval districts, and a closer relationship between district commanders and commandants was urged. Coast Guard Headquarters would remain an administrative unit under the Chief of Naval Operations. Provision was made also for the transfer of individual vessels and activities to Navy control. To allay any suspicions, the planners included assurances that “the identity of Coast Guard personnel will be maintained” and “upon receipt of the order to demobilize, the entire Coast Guard will resume its former status under the Treasury Department.”5
During 1940 and 1941, cutters received their wartime armaments—additional guns, and Y-guns and tracks for dropping depth charges—as well as sonar gear and degaussing “girdles” as protection against magnetic mines. Increased armament and detection equipment required additional personnel, even beyond the 4,262 who had entered the service on “special temporary” three-year enlistments authorized in 1939. Another 2,500 were recruited in 1941, even as the Coast Guard’s large cutter force was reduced almost by half when the ten 250-footers of the Lake class were transferred to Great Britain under lend- lease in April and May. Earlier, their crews and some of the recruits would have manned a number of the old flush- deck destroyers laid up in “red lead row,” but 50 of these had gone to Britain in the autumn of 1940 and the Navy had recommissioned most of their sisters for neutrality patrol and other duties. Meanwhile, the War Department had turned several large troop transports over to the Navy after trouble with their civilian crews, and on 3 June 1941 President Roosevelt signed an executive order making some 2,100 Coast Guard officers and men available to man three 535-foot transports and the 705-foot Wakefield— the largest vessel ever manned by Coast Guardsmen—and to serve in 22 ships with Navy crews. Most of those assigned to Navy-manned ships were surfmen who would serve as landing craft crews—as Captains Bertholf and Bullard had anticipated more than 25 years earlier.
These were not the first Coast Guardsmen ordered to serve with the Navy. Four of the 165-foot Class B cutters had steamed to Key West late in March for duty as training vessels at the Atlantic Fleet Sound School, and ten more cutters were put under the Navy’s operational control during the next two months, five of them serving with the Greenland patrol forces.
Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox insisted that more were needed—indeed, he had tried earlier to have the entire Coast Guard transferred to his department. Failing in this, he urged the secretary of the treasury to augment the Coast Guard’s training programs: “Particularly, the Coast Guard must be in a position to furnish thousands of enlisted men fully trained in the specialties peculiar to the Coast Guard . . .the operation and handling of small boats, including the operation, maintenance, and repair of diesel engines, propelling plants, radiomen, radio and telephone maintenance men, machinist’s mates, and enlisted men in any other technical ratings.”6
Knox apparently regarded the Coast Guard principally as a service or auxiliary force, but the Navy found uses for the larger cutters as well. Most of these were serving under its operational control well before 1 November 1941, when President Roosevelt transferred the entire Coast Guard to the Navy Department by executive order. Other than painting the cutters war color, perhaps the most noticeable changes were the adoption of 24-hour military time and the display of American colors night and day when under way—heretofore cutters at sea had hoisted their national ensigns at sunrise and hauled them down at sunset, presumably for reasons of economy. The Coast Guard ensign and pennant would have been replaced by a Navy commission pennant at this time as well, but some commanding officers preferred to put this off as long as possible.
In contrast to World War I, during which Coast Guard personnel never numbered more than 5,000, World War II brought a gargantuan increase in the service’s size. By 1945, more than 180,000 men and women had worn the uniforms of regulars and reservists, and some 51,000 more were or had been members of the Coast Guard Temporary Reserve. The former were full-time military personnel, the latter civilians who wished to contribute at least 12 hours of service each week. In time, the Temporary Reserve came to include harbor pilots, port and factory security officers, and a variety of other categories, all of whom had full military status while on duty.
The women were members of the Coast Guard’s SPARs. Their commanding officer, Captain Dorothy C. Stratton, chose the acronym as the name for the Coast Guard women’s reserve from the Latin and English versions of the Coast Guard motto—Semper Paratus— Always Ready. Like women in the larger services, SPARs were employed mainly in administrative and clerical duties ashore.
The Coast Guard’s wartime responsibilities came to include those that had been anticipated although on an unexpected scale: antisubmarine and amphibious warfare, captain of the port activities—port security, explosive-cargo supervision, and control of merchant ship movements and anchorages—and search and rescue. A number of other duties had not been foreseen, especially the licensing and inspecting duties of the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation, which were assumed in 1942, and the patrol of the nation’s coastline by mounted Coast Guardsmen and the coastal picket patrol—small craft seeking to detect enemy submarines in inshore waters and to rescue the crews of their victims.
Coast Guardsmen manned numerous naval vessels: 30 destroyer-escorts, 75 frigates, nine attack transports, five attack cargo ships, 31 transports, 76 LSTs, 28 LCI(L)s, and a variety of other ships, most auxiliaries. While the major naval battles—Coral Sea, Midway, Philippine Sea, and Leyte Gulf—were fought by the Navy without Coast Guard assistance, every important amphibious operation, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, had a significant Coast Guard participation, not only by Coast Guard-manned transports, cargo ships, and landing craft, but by escort vessels, and at Normandy, by the 83-foot rescue craft that were credited with saving 1,438 men from sinking or burning vessels.
The fact that the Coast Guard was under the Navy Department did not limit its officers and men to service in its own or naval ships. Beginning in 1944, Coast Guardsmen were assigned to Army Transportation Corps vessels— repair ships, tankers, cargo boats and ships, and tugs. Ultimately, 288 of these had Coast Guard crews. Their service, mostly in the southwest Pacific, attracted little notice—they were not combat vessels—but they fulfilled a vital function.
Even as an unprecedented number of Coast Guardsmen were serving as a part of much larger military forces, their commandant was giving thought to the service’s postwar role. A committee of officers appointed to consider this provided a first draft that included the recommendation “that by every possible means the Service be brought to appreciate the scope and effect of its non-military functions and the need for excelling therein, at a sacrifice, if necessary, of a purely naval efficiency. In a subsequent war the Coast Guard should accept the corollary that it will enter the naval jurisdiction as a body of experts in its special field, rather than a body of expert naval officers.” Indeed, the committee suggested that the Coast Guard’s military organization was deleterious to the execution of some of its duties. 7
As rewritten, this section of the report emphasized the advantages of military organization to the service’s performance of its non-military duties, and the formal statement of the “Mission of the Coast Guard” concluded: “and to maintain a military readiness to function as a specialized service with the Navy in time of war.”8 Navy and Coast Guard agreed that henceforth “wartime functions and duties assigned [to the Coast Guard] should be those which are an extension of normal peacetime tasks,” and “Coast Guard personnel, ships, aircraft, and facilities should be utilized as organized Coast Guard units rather than by in- discriminate^ integrating them into the naval establishment.”9 Thus, the World War II experience was not to be repeated.
Personnel shortages and expanded peacetime responsibilities left Coast Guardsmen little time for military training in the immediate postwar years. By mid-1947 the service had only 18,277 officers and men, little more than half the number that Admiral Waesche’s planners had anticipated would be needed to carry out the functions they envisioned. That was the nadir; by 1950, there were 22,894 Coast Guardsmen, and within a few months the Korean War brought further expansion, to 34,491 by 30 June 1953.
The Coast Guard remained under the Treasury Department during this conflict, for in the absence of a declaration of war, its transfer would have required an executive order, which President Harry S. Truman chose not to issue. It did not matter, however, because the Navy wished the smaller service only to assume responsibility for port security and for additional ocean stations and search-and-rescue capability in the Pacific, the latter two necessitated by the increased air traffic to and from the Orient. These could hardly be classified as military, although Coast Guardsmen were trained for supervision of explosive-cargo loading at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine of San Francisco Bay, and others were prepared for waterfront security duties at the Army’s military police school at Camp Gordon, Georgia.
The Korean War was the second of the nation’s wars in which no cutters took part as combat vessels, the first being the Tripolitan War of 1801-6. The big cutters were sent to naval shipyards or to the Coast Guard Yard to have their antisubmarine armaments reinstalled, but there was no need to escort convoys, so none went to the war zone. But the Korean War did help to make the Coast Guard a more effective military force. Henceforth, its ships and aircraft carried out regularly scheduled exercises to prepare them for wartime service, the larger cutters reporting to the Navy’s fleet training commands for this purpose. And the Coast Guard Reserve, almost nonexistent since World War II because of the lack of funds to pay reservists for drill periods, was revitalized when Congress voted money specifically for that purpose.
If, however, the Coast Guard was to be limited to a noncombat support role in future conflicts, questions were bound to be raised regarding the necessity of retaining it as one of the nation’s armed forces. Thus, when the United States became involved in the war in Vietnam, Admiral Edwin J. Roland, the commandant, was determined that there be some Coast Guard participation.
Operation Market Time, begun in March 1965 to interdict seaborne supplies intended for Viet Cong forces ashore, provided the opportunity, for the Navy had few vessels capable of operating in shallow water close inshore. It requested Coast Guard assistance in April, and three months later 17 82-foot patrol boats joined the Market Time patrols off the coasts of Vietnam. When the interdiction operation was extended to the southeast coast of Vietnam, nine more 82-footers were sent from the United States, and when the Navy requested relief for some of its Market Time destroyer escorts early in 1967, five 311 -foot cutters—former Navy seaplane tenders—were assigned to this duty. They were relieved in turn by five other large cutters, and similar deployments took place at regular intervals. By mid-1971, when the last of the big cutters headed home, 30 of them had taken part in the war.
Cutters and patrol boats made a significant contribution to Operation Market Time, claiming credit for destroying almost 2,000 vessels and inflicting 1,827 casualties on Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. Their own cost was small: seven Coast Guardsmen were killed and 53 were wounded.
Cutter and patrol boat sailors, of course, were not the only Coast Guardsmen serving in the war zone. Indeed, their service’s most valuable contribution may well have been made by the lieutenants and senior petty officers of the explosives-loading details who in one year supervised the off-loading of some four million tons of explosives from more than 50 ships. These men—there were never more than 50 at any one time—often worked 12-hour shifts seven days a week for a month or more, a record probably unsurpassed by any American forces engaged in the Vietnam War.
Having demonstrated anew its competence as a military force, the Coast Guard spent the next decade and more engaged mainly in peacetime activities that became increasingly complex as the nation’s dependence on oil imported from Alaska and abroad grew, as the “war” against drug smugglers intensified, and as such distractions as the Cuban “boatlift” required the diversion of cutters and aircraft from their normal duties. In addition, the Coast Guard seemed determined to emphasize that it was not a part of the Navy. A board appointed by the commandant, Admiral Chester R. Bender, in 1970 proposed an officer uniform of “Coast Guard blue” with a single-breasted coat, and a somewhat similar uniform, with appropriate insignia, for enlisted men. Although the reaction from service personnel was mixed, the commandant ordered Coast Guardsmen into “Bender blues.” Not long before. Coast Guard ships and aircraft had been further distinguished from those of the Navy—they were already painted in distinctive colors—by the adoption of orange and blue hull stripes followed by COAST GUARD in block letters on their bows. Cutters built during this time—the two Polar-class icebreakers, 13 Famous-class 270-foot cutters, and nine Bay-class tugs—had unimpressive military capability as compared with the 12 378-foot multi-mission cutters designed in the early 1960s.
Yet another difference between the two services was their employment of women. Unlike the Navy, which limited its female personnel to duty in auxiliary vessels and noncombat assignments, the Coast Guard sent women to sea in the 378-foot cutters Gallatin and Morgenthau in 1977, and a year later it removed all restrictions based solely on sex in training, duty assignments, and career opportunities. By 1979, women were commanding some 95-foot patrol cutters. This would seem to pose a problem were the Coast Guard transferred to the Navy, but Admiral Paul A. Yost, Jr., the present commandant, is committed to retaining his service’s policy with regard to the assignment of women, whether officers or enlisted personnel.
Admiral Yost, who became commandant in 1986, assumed command of an armed force whose military responsibilities had been deemphasized for some time. Given the Reagan administration’s preoccupation with national defense, it is hardly surprising that he should have made a recommitment to the Coast Guard’s military functions one of his highest priorities. Perhaps it was time—articles in the U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings and the Coast Guard Academy Alumni Association Bulletin indicated that k many officers were dissatisfied with their service’s apparent disregard of the fact that it was one of the nation’s armed forces. Some of their fellows, on the other hand, feared that the Coast Guard might become simply a “junior” navy, which would lead ultimately to its absorption by the larger service.
If the “cold war” has indeed ended. Admiral Yost’s successors may find it advisable to deemphasize their service’s military role yet again. Even should they do so, however, the Coast Guard’s record in the country’s 20th century wars leaves little doubt that the fifth armed force will have an important part in any future conflict.
1. U. S. Statues at Large, Volume XXXVIII, p. 800.
2. Bertholf to Secretary of the Treasury, 20 March 1915, Subject Classification 631. Cooperation with the Navy: Plans and Orders, etc. Record Group 26, Records of the U. S. Coast Guard, National Archives.
3. Freeman to Chief of Naval Operations, 1 November 1933, copy in Subject Classification 63, Cooperation with the Navy, ibid.
4. Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley, U. S. Navy (Retired), U. S. Naval Institute Oral History Collection, Volume I, p. 354.
5. Mobilization Plan, General, Military Readiness Division, World War II, Record Group 26.
6. Knox to Secretary of the Treasury, 18 June 1941, Subject Classification 63, ibid.
7. Report of committee on postwar planning, Military Readiness Division, World War 11, ibid.
8. Mission of the Coast Guard, ibid.
9. Policy as to Employment of the Coast Guard under the Navy in Time of War, Appendix A, 8 October 1946, secret, copy in ibid.