USS Alligator Search Delayed
A joint expedition to search for the wreckage of the U.S. Navy’s first submarine, the USS Alligator, was stymied in early September by the approach of Hurricane Ophelia. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) team with support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) was only able to search the area off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina where the Civil War-era vessel was believed lost for a day before being forced back to port. Researchers hope to return in early 2006.
Working out of Ocracoke, North Carolina, the survey is part of an effort to solve the mystery of the Alligator’s fate, while promoting scientific and historical research, education, and ocean literacy. Researchers were using a robot sub and metal detector and other remote sensing equipment from ONR’s 108-foot YP-679 Afloat Lab to investigate targets identified during surveys in August 2004 and May 2005.
Arguably, the U.S. submarine force began with a contract for an “Iron Submarine Propeller” signed on 1 November 1861 by Martin Thomas, acting on behalf of the ship’s inventor, Brutus de Villeroi, and Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy. Launched on 1 May 1862, the 47-foot- long, dark-green Submarine Propeller was a significant leap forward in naval technology despite being powered by 16 oars (they were replaced by a screw propeller in November 1862). She featured a diver lock-out chamber and an air compressor to support diving operations, an air purification system, tanks of compressed air for adjusting the attitude of the boat, and electric detonation of underwater mines.
At some point before heading south to Hampton Roads she acquired the name Alligator, most likely because of her long green shape and oar movement. In April 1863, while being towed south to Port Royal, South Carolina, to participate in a Union attack on Charleston, the Alligator was lost in a storm off Cape Hatteras after she was cut loose from her tow ship, USS Sumpter.
Despite the disappointment of curtailing the search, retired Navy Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator noted that “Through the hunt for the Alligator, we are expanding our knowledge of both the nation’s marine resources and rich maritime history.” Daniel J. Basta, director of NOAA’s National Marine Sanctuary Program, elaborated on the point stating, “The hunt for the Alligator combines history, mystery and technology. . . . We are working not only to unlock the secrets of the deep and the past, but also to inspire the next generation of explorers.”
The status of the Alligator search can be monitored at: http://sanctuaries.noaa.gov/alligator.
Armed Guard Veterans Seek Recognition
Many Americans know little about the role of the Merchant Marine in winning World War II and far fewer know anything about the Navy men assigned to protect cargo ships from enemy attack.
But now the Navy Armed Guard is getting some recognition through a new book, No Surrender—True Stories of the U.S. Navy Armed Guard in World War II (The Glencannon Press), written by Gerald Reminick of Huntington, Long Island, a professor of library services at Suffolk Community College’s Brentwood campus.
Reminick previously had written four books about the Merchant Marine and in the process learned about the Navy Armed Guard. He spent a year collecting the stories of 55 guard veterans and another year putting together the compilation.
He said he was fascinated by the interaction and interdependence of the Merchant Mariners and Armed Guard sailors. “There was a special symbiotic relationship between the two groups,” Reminick said. “They really counted on each other.”
The Armed Guard was created in World War I as an all-volunteer effort. As war grew more likely, Congress recognized the need for more merchant ships and the ability to defend them by placing armament on board.
“There were about 30,000 Naval Armed Guard in World War I who served on about 384 ships; 58 of them died,” Reminick said. “They were disbanded after the war and when the Second World War came, it was put together again. There were almost 145,000 Navy Armed Guard who served in WWII, 2,085 perished. They served on over 6,000 ships.” The casualty rate was not as high as the Merchant Marine, because there were more merchant sailors than Navy personnel on the cargo ships.
“Most of [the guards] were volunteers, and they really didn’t know what they were volunteering for,” Reminick said. “They were young—18, 19— but not as young as the Merchant Mariners, because they were taking 16-year-olds.”
With the Navy men onboard, he said, there were two separate command structures. “You had the Navy commander who had his little contingent of Navy Armed Guard men. Then you had the captain running the rest of the ship. At times, especially in an attack situation, the Navy Armed Guard commander, who was usually very young, could overrule the captain. Early in the war, you had Merchant Mariners, who were older, objecting to the Navy Armed Guard coming on the ship. But it didn’t take long out there on a ship to realize that you'll have to pull together to survive.”
After the war, the Merchant Marine men got little recognition and no veterans benefits. “With the Merchant Mariners at last being recognized as WWII veterans in 1988, they started to get a lot more play in the press, but you really don’t hear anything about the Navy Armed Guard,” Reminick said. “But it was the Navy Armed Guard’s responsibility to get those goods delivered. There have been attempts in various places to get recognition on monuments for the Armed Guard, but it seems to me the Navy should have done more for the Armed Guard.”
An advantage the Armed Guard sailors had over the Merchant Mariners was that they received veterans benefits immediately like everyone else in the Navy.
Among the Armed Guard veterans profiled in the book is Joseph McKenna Jr., who was a sailor standing watch on the bridge of a Panamanian tanker off the North Carolina coast in 1943 when he glimpsed what he thought was a porpoise.
“All of a sudden,” the Melville, Long Island, resident recalled, “I’m looking at a torpedo coming right at our ship. It got us back aft in the engine room.”
The explosion killed two crewmen. While the 35 remaining civilians clambered aboard lifeboats, a dozen other men aboard ran for the deck guns. They were the Armed Guard sailors. The S.S. PanAm sank in 15 minutes.
McKenna, 82, who is chairman of the Long Island Chapter of the U.S. Navy Armed Guard Veterans of World War II, was born in Jersey City and lived in Brooklyn as a child. He moved to Long Island when he got married following the war. He said that after he enlisted in the Navy and completed boot camp, a chief petty officer approached him and said: “Have I got a deal for you! Your base will be in Brooklyn and you will be a gunner.” “I said, ‘I'll take it.’”
“It was with the Armed Guard,” McKenna said. “We didn’t even know what it was. We went to Little Creek, Virginia, for a couple of weeks of gunnery school and then we went back to the Armed Guard center in Brooklyn.”
After he shipped out on the PanAm, he said: “We slept in our clothes. But I’d be a liar if I said I was nervous. If you worried about being torpedoed, it would drive you crazy. We played checkers, we read and we used to fire our guns and make ashtrays out of the shells. We kept busy.”
When the torpedo struck the PanAm 80 miles offshore, the Armed Guard men ran aft to the guns. The Navy lieutenant in charge asked McKenna where his friend Earl Mayle from boot camp was, and the seaman first class ran back to their cabin to check. “He could sleep on a picket fence,” McKenna recalled.
But his friend was not asleep; he was trapped. “I had to kick the bottom door panel open and walk on my hands and knees through the water in the dark. I had to lift the bunk off him. I took him outside and that’s when I got hit by an exploding shell in the knee and leg. Then we went to the lifeboat and pulled away.”
Getting in a lifeboat was not so easy. “When we got torpedoed, the captain and his crew were the first ones off,” McKenna said. “They didn’t wait around for us.” The Armed Guard personnel had orders to stay on board and keep firing as long as the ship floated and the guns worked. “That’s why a lot of us went down with the ships,” he said.
McKenna said he didn’t worry about being trapped and going down with the sinking ship when he helped his friend. “Truthfully, I didn’t think about that.”
McKenna’s ordeal continued after he escaped the tanker. A Navy subchaser rescued the survivors. One of the injured Armed Guard men, Fred Perantoni, was being hauled aboard. The seaman on the rescue ship could not hold him, so McKenna grabbed Perantoni’s legs just as a wave smashed the lifeboat into the side of the ship. Perantoni’s legs were crushed, as was McKenna’s left hand. The other sailor was hospitalized for 18 months; McKenna was treated and went back to sea after a seven-day leave.
McKenna was in the service for three years and three months, all on merchant ships. His second ship was almost torpedoed under him. “After three days out on the way to Casablanca, I was on the bow watch and I saw a torpedo coming towards us and I called the bridge. We made an emergency turn. It just missed us by about 20 feet and got the ship next to us. I still remember guys hanging on the bow as the ship was going down.”
Unlike McKenna, Joseph Benedetto, 80, of North Merrick, Long Island, did not volunteer for the Armed Guard. He went into the Navy at 18, the day after his high school graduation. “I went up to Newport, Rhode Island, to the naval training station and after boot camp they posted a list and my name was on it to go to the Armed Guard Center in Brooklyn.” He had “not the foggiest” idea of what the Armed Guard was. When someone told him, he figured “well, if you don’t get torpedoed, you may not be in too bad shape.” He lived in New York and liked the idea of being based close to home.
Another benefit was that he got to see more of the world than he would have on a regular Navy ship. He sailed to England, Russia, North Africa, the Pacific, and Italy where he met relatives who lived near Bari.
It was the voyage to Russia that made the biggest impression. “Murmansk was the crazy one,” said Benedetto, who began as an apprentice seaman and was promoted eventually to gunner’s mate. In January 1943, his Liberty ship, the Ezra Cornell, sailed for Murmansk carrying among other things bombs and explosives.
“Two days out of Scotland we had our first general quarters alarm,” Benedetto, who was assigned to man a gun on the bow, wrote in his submission to Reminick. “A German bomber appeared out of the clouds. He was so low that we could have waved at the pilot. . . . The plane proceeded down the center of the convoy dropping several bombs. No ships were hit during that first encounter. For the next ten days, it was air attacks during the three hours of daylight and submarines attacks at night. . . . Sleep was in short supply.”
But the convoy, which had lost three merchant ships while sinking two submarines and shooting down three planes, made it to Murmansk, where the Russian government gave him a medal, which he still has, and a glass of a vodka.
“For an 18-year-old fresh out of high school, this was quite an experience,” Benedetto wrote.
Asked if he was nervous, Benedetto replied: “Hell, yeah. There was very little sleep because [the] general quarters [alarm] was always going off. You look back on it and it’s an experience.”
McKenna said he was not surprised that the Armed Guard has been such a secret because during the war the Navy wanted it that way. “We were told that when we went ashore in a place like Casablanca you were not to discuss that you were a Navy gunner on a merchant ship because nobody knew that,” he said. The Navy did not want its enemies to know that trained military crews defended merchant ships. So while the Armed Guard wore regular Navy uniforms: “we didn’t have any [special] insignias. . . To this day, a lot of Navy men don’t know what we did.”
“It’s very disheartening," McKenna said of the lack of recognition the Armed Guard sailors have received. Initially, the Huntington Town Veterans Advisory Board rejected his request for a memorial plaque for the Armed Guard veterans to be placed at the town hall veterans’ memorial plaza. After a meeting with Hunting- ton Supervisor Frank Petrone the Town of Huntington agreed to put up a plaque for the Armed Guard vets near the harbor in the future. It had already put up a plaque honoring Merchant Mariners on Memorial Day.
Even without the recognition, McKenna said: “I loved being in the Navy Armed Guard. I served with a great bunch of guys.”
Bill Bleyer
Status Check: Brewster Buffalo
Among warbird buffs who know a really rare bird when they see one, there is perhaps no more discussed individual aircraft than the Brewster F2A Buffalo that was acquired in August 2004 by the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Florida. It is the only known survivor of the aircraft type that arguably moved the U.S. Navy from biplane to monoplane fighters.
The aircraft is in a storage facility, waiting its place in the line for attention. It was slated for restoration and on jigs in the museum’s restoration hangar, when Hurricane Ivan intervened, damaging more than 40 aircraft on the museum’s flight line and closing the facility for most of a month. Qoug Kirby, the museum’s restoration coordinator said that no aircraft within the museum were damaged, but that work was suspended as recovery took labor away from the aircraft.
When work on the Buffalo is completed, it will be a very unique exhibit. Unlike the typical museum aircraft that appear even better than they did when new, this one will not be restored in the traditional sense.
On the museum’s website (http://naval.aviation.museum/home.html), director Robert Rasmussen defined the fate of the naval fighter: “The Buffalo possesses a unique historical significance that calls for some unique handling. . . .[It] both demands and lends itself to preservation of its configuration without restoration.” Further, “The aircraft now at the Museum was flown by one of Finland’s top aces, Lieutenant Lauri Pekuri, who had over 18.5 kills, 8 of them in this machine. Thus, the intrinsic historic value of the aircraft lies mostly with its service in the Finnish Air Force. And that is well worth preserving. In addition, another strong influence in this decision is the condition of the aircraft, which is excellent despite the fact that the aircraft spent more than a half century underwater. This fact allows preservation as is, or almost so.”
The museum’s Buffalo was found in a Russian lake in 1998 by former Marine Corps flight engineer Gary Villiard after a five-year search. Pekuri had ditched it during a combat mission on 25 June 1942. The fighter is actually a B-239 export model based on the F2A-1. While the type had less than a stellar reputation among Navy and Marine Corps pilots— the Marines lost 13 of 21 F2As at the Battle of Midway and never again used them in combat—it was the premier fighter of the Finnish Air Force during the early years of the Continuation War—the Finnish-Soviet conflict during World War II. The Finns’ B-239s claimed 496 kills against the Soviets to a loss of only 19 planes.
In 1935 the Navy laid out specifications for a Grumman F3F replacement. The Buffalo was first flown two years later, accepted by the Navy the following year, and ordered into series production. In December 1939, Finland bought 44 B-239s, which were given designations from BW-351 to BW-394. The museum’s B-239 is BW-372.
When discovered, the fighter was in remarkable condition because of its immersion in cold, freshwater. Its camouflage and insignia are largely intact, including kill markings painted on its vertical tail.
While it is disappointing that museum- goers will not be able to view this remarkable aircraft in the foreseeable future, the museum’s associate director, Robert Macon, said that “Ivan put everything in perspective. We had to get back to where we were before the storm.” Restoration of the 66-year-old aircraft will have to wait a little longer. It promises to be worth the delay.
Saving the Sphinx
A group of veterans’ hard work, long hours, and vision are helping a small New York town move ever closer to getting its own little pearl on the shores of Lake Erie. The USS Sphinx (ARL-24) was transferred to Dunkirk Historical Lighthouse and Veterans Park Museum at Dunkirk, New York, on 2 December 2002, and project managers hope to have the ship in place by September 2006.
Originally built as LST-963 and commissioned in May 1945, the Sphinx missed World War II, but participated in nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, repaired ships off Japan during the Korean War, and earned the Presidential Unit Citation, two Navy Unit Commendations, and eight battle stars in the Vietnam War. She was decommissioned in 1989 and is moored among the ships of Virginia’s James River “Ghost Fleet.”
The museum is based around the Dunkirk lighthouse, a working facility leased by the Coast Guard to the museum association for 25 years in exchange for restoring it and developing it into a national museum. The association was founded by a small group of Navy veterans for the purpose of creating a museum and park to honor veterans of all wars and branches of service. In 2000, an act of Congress declared the lighthouse and its ten-acre plot surplus federal property so that it could be deeded into private ownership of the association. The group has since transformed the lighthouse into a small armed forces museum.
The retired sailors sought a retired Navy ship for the museum’s centerpiece. The 328-foot-long Sphinx was transferred to them. Over the past three years, the veterans have been working to obtain funding, complete surveys, and prepare a crew to move the ship from the James River off Williamsburg to the westernmost city of New York state.
In late September, a three-day meeting was held in Dunkirk with the mayor, city officials, members of the New York State Amphibious Forces Association, and the Save the USS Sphinx committee to discuss the project’s progress.
George R. Sharrow, a committee member from Dauphin, Pennsylvania, stated that an inspection and evaluation report found that the ship was sound and ready to be towed. A 280-page site and business plan was delivered to the Maritime Administration for their final approval. With that, the ship should be ready to be moved. This work cost $37,000. The move itself is expected to be in excess of $60,000. The New York State Amphibious Association plans to petition New York Governor George E. Pataki for a grant of $1 million to aid in transforming the USS Sphinx into an Armed Forces Museum.
The meeting concluded that the project is on track and the area once known at the turn of the last century as the “train wreck capital of the world” should be known for its little museum that could. The museum’s web site is: http://www.dunkirklight-house.com/uss_sphinx.htm.