MyCG has a story about the experience of personnel manning USCGC Bear’s CIC during Operation Nanook. There were some statements that surprised me.
“There were a lot of ways we were pushed as a team within the operations department,” he explained. “For me, I think it was getting acclimated with being on a cutter after being an ‘OS’ at a sector for most of my career. Being underway was really uncharted territory for me, no pun intended. Communications, especially the use of tactical signals to pass important information from ship-to-ship, was completely new to me with nearly 17 years of experience. But I would gladly do it again if I had the chance.”
How is it that we have an OS1, 17 years in the service, and he has never been afloat before?
Learning tactical signals, or TACSIGS, Gordon refers to was no small feat either. TACSIGS are a lost form of communication the Coast Guard no longer teaches. Only as a result of CIC’s collective brain power was Bear able to engage in close-quarter maneuvering with other ships in the convoy— often times, only at moment’s notice.
I know cutters seldom work with other warships, but it is a basic skill required of a CIC. Screwing up tactical signal will at least embarrass the ship, at worse the ship may be run over by an aircraft carrier–it has happened more than once.
And then there was this,
The unreliable internet capabilities to carry out critical tasking also challenged the crew.
You are depending on internet to coordinate operations? You can’t expect that to work when you need it most, and where is EMCON?
Sounds like the OS rating has proven so useful, and so many of the OS billets are now ashore, that the rating’s skill set has drifted away from those required afloat. Sounds like we have a problem. Maybe we need to split the rating? Create an OS like rating for those that serve exclusively ashore? Or else a special school to bring OSs going afloat up to speed?
An Allied convoy heads eastward across the Atlantic, bound for Casablanca, in November 1942. U.S. Navy (photo 80-G-474788), Post-Work: User:W.wolny – This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 520948.
Since it has been a Coast Guard mission and may be again, it might be of interest.
Contrary to the impression you may get, most of the North Atlantic convoy work during WWII was done by Great Britain’s Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy. The US Navy played a relatively minor role until mid 1943.
During my recent vacation I had time to read a bit of Coast Guard history, the book “Bloodstained Sea, The U. S. Coast Guard in the Battle of the Atlantic, 1941-1944,” by Michael G. Walling. copyright 2004.
It may not capture everything the Coast Guard did in the Battle of the Atlantic, in that there is relatively little mention of the 30 Destroyer Escorts and 75 Patrol Frigates manned by the Coast Guard, but it follows the exploits of the seven 327 foot cutters in great detail. It also talks a bit about the two U-boats sunk by 165 foot cutters early in the war. So the emphasis is on the desperate early days, before US industry supplied a glut of escort vessels.
When I was XO on Duane, one of those seven 327s, I had access to here War Diaries written 40 years earlier. (Hopefully they found a home somewhere safe.) They seemed to prove the adage that “war is months of boredom punctuated by intense terror.” Most of her convoys were uneventful, the exceptions are of course the story here.
There is an almost mind numbing recitation of ships sunk, lives lost, and lives saved. Attacks on U-boats were numerous, but sinkings were few. The cutters’ achievements in this respect were quite remarkable, but what caught my attention was the number of rescues in extremely adverse conditions. In almost every case there were attempts to rescue the crews of torpedoed ships even when it put the escorts in danger.
I recently saw some figures for the loss rate for US merchant seamen compared to that of the military. One in 26 merchant seamen were lost compared with something like one in 45 for the US military. Those rescue attempts, particularly in the early years before the U-boat threat was tamed, must have been essential to maintain the morale of merchant seamen and their willingness to undertake another voyage.
OK, its bad enough that there may be no escorts defending your ship, but that also means if your ship sinks, there is no one to rescue you. We can’t afford to loose the few mariners we have and we can’t put them in a situation where they have no hope of rescue if their ship is sunk. A cutter with helicopter might be a viable rescue vessel.
As noted before, I think convoy escort would be a good wartime role for upgraded National Security Cutters and Offshore Patrol Cutters.
Fortunately it does seem the Navy has at least begun to think about escorting convoys again, but all the corporate knowledge is buried somewhere in dusty vaults. They need to pull up lessons learned from the Cold War “Reforger” exercise series. The new exercise is under 2nd Fleet in the Atlantic, but frankly I think we need to worry more about the Pacific. Chinese nuclear submarines, that are at a disadvantage relative to their American counterparts, could do a lot of damage to the sea lanes in the mid-Pacific and even operate off the US coast, tying up fleet assets needed in the Western Pacific. .
USCGC Spencer (WPG-36) in 1942 or 1943. Spencer sank U-175 with assistance of USCGC Duane, on April 17, 1943.
A word about the upcoming movie Greyhound:
I look forward to the movie “Greyhound” staring Tom Hanks, who also wrote the screen play. It is based on one of my favorite books, “The Good Shepherd,” by C. S. Forrester, also author of the Horatio Hornblower series.
Remember, if you see it, that in 1942, the flagship for a US led mid-ocean escort group in the North Atlantic would have been a Coast Guard 327 foot cutter, usually USCGC Spencer, not a well armed US Navy destroyer, and its captain would have been a Coast Guard Officer. Early in 1942 he would also have been in charge of the escort group, but in May 1942 a Navy Captain was placed in charge of the escort group. Except for short periods, this was Capt. Paul R. Heineman. That split the responsibility, allowing the CO to concentrate on fighting his own ship.
USCG Cmdr Harold S. Berdine of cutter Spencer talking with US Navy Capt Paul Heineman of the Escort Group A-3 after sinking German submarine U-175, North Atlantic, 500 nautical miles WSW of Ireland, 17 Apr 1943. US Coast Guard photo by Jack January
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