Based on the Coast Guard Historian’s timeline, https://www.history.uscg.mil/research/chronology/
With inspiration from Mike Kelso

1846  USRC McLane ran aground while attempting to tow three ships across the bar of the River Alvarado during the Mexican War in support of U.S. operations there. (McLane was refloated. This was part of the First Battle of Tabasco. Also involved was USRC Forward. McLane and Forward subsequently blockaded the port. Eleven cutters were assigned to cooperate with Army and Navy in the Mexican War. Cutters McLane, Legare, Woodbury, Ewing, Forward, and Van Buren were assigned to the Army. Cutters Wolcott, Bibb, Morris, and Polk were assigned to the Navy.)

1966  Coast Guard Port Security & Waterways Detail arrived for service in Vietnam.

2001  President George W. Bush announced that a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with anthrax.  This followed a number of other anthrax attacks in Florida and New York.  The EPA requested Coast Guard assistance.  Members of the Atlantic Strike Team (AST) deployed to Washington, D.C., while Gulf Strike Team (GST) members were deployed to Florida.  Strike team members conducted entries into the affected areas, collected samples, and assisted in the cleanup of those areas.  The AST members in Washington coordinated entries into the U.S. Capitol, Hart Senate Building, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Government Printing Office, among others.  The GST members took samples and provided decontamination stations at the American Media Inc. headquarters building and post offices in Boca Raton, Florida, the site of the first reported anthrax attack. (History of the National Strike Force)

Based on the Coast Guard Historian’s timeline, https://www.history.uscg.mil/research/chronology/
With inspiration from Mike Kelso

October 14

1801  Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin announced his decision to reduce the “Revenue Cutter Establishment…as near as circumstances will permit within its original limits” after the Quasi-War with France.  During that conflict the service had acquired larger cutters with more numerous crews.

Photo of EM DOW’s sister cutter EM ROWE

1943  CGC E.M. Dow grounded and was abandoned (in a category 2 hurricane) near Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. All hands were saved.

Callao (IX-205) as the armed German Naval Auxiliary vessel Externsteine off Greenland after being captured by the Coast Guard in October 1944. US Coast photo

1944  CGCs Eastwind and Southwind captured the Nazi weather and supply vessel Externsteine off the coast of Greenland after a brief fire-fight (three salvos from its 5″/38 guns one short, one over and one across the bow–no return fire from Externsteine).  There were no casualties.  The Coast Guardsmen christened their prize-of-war USS Eastbreeze and placed a prize crew on board.  The prize crew was commanded by LT Curtiss Howard and consisted of 36 men, including some from Southwind.  After sailing with the Greenland Patrol for three weeks, Eastbreeze sailed on to Boston where the Navy renamed it as USS Callao. The Externsteine/Eastbreeze/Callao was the only enemy surface vessel captured at sea by U.S. naval forces during the war. (USCGC Northland also seized the German-controlled Norwegian sealer SS Buskø on 12 September 1941.) Eastwind and Southwind had gone farther north and returned under their own power than any vessel ever before. (An interesting sidelight from the Wikipedia report of the capture, “On 2 October, a Grumman J2F Duck aircraft from USCGC Eastwind spotted a trawler camouflaged in a field of unconsolidated pack ice off North Little Koldewey Island, where the Germans had set up a weather station. The camouflaged ship was visible on the aircraft’s radar”–surprising the little float plane had radar!)

1947  CGC Bibb rescued all 62 passengers and seven crew members of the transatlantic flying boat Bermuda Sky Queen in the mid-Atlantic after the flying boat made an emergency landing near the cutter.  The rescue was of the most dramatic rescues ever undertaken by the Coast Guard on the open ocean.

1961  After an Air Force B-52G [serial number 58-196??] with eight persons on board was reported overdue and possibly down in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere off Newfoundland, the Coast Guard commander, Eastern Area, coordinated the extensive search that resulted.  Participating in it were 79 U.S. Coast Guard, Navy, Air Force, and Canadian aircraft, five U.S. Coast Guard cutters, and two merchant ships.  Despite this search that lasted through October 18 and covered 286,225 square miles, no trace of the missing B-52 or its crew was found.

Based on the Coast Guard Historian’s timeline, https://www.history.uscg.mil/research/chronology/
With inspiration from Mike Kelso

The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Eagle (WIX 327) passes USS Constitution, one of the six frigates ordered in 1794, in Boston Harbor during the ship’s July Fourth turnaround cruise as part of Boston Navy Week. Boston Navy Week is one of 15 signature events planned across America in 2012. The eight-day event commemorates the bicentennial of the War of 1812, hosting service members from the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard and coalition ships from around the world. (U.S. Navy photo by Sonar Technician (Submarine) 2nd Class Thomas Rooney/Released)

1775  This is the date that the Navy recognizes as it’s official birthday.  The United States Navy traces its origins to the Continental Navy, which the Continental Congress established on October 13, 1775, by authorizing the procurement, fitting out, manning, and dispatch of two armed vessels to cruise in search of munitions ships supplying the British Army in North America.  The legislation also established a Naval Committee to supervise the work.  Altogether, the Continental Navy numbered some fifty ships over the course of the war, with approximately twenty warships active at its maximum strength.  After the American War for Independence, Congress sold the surviving ships of the Continental Navy and released the seamen and officers.  The Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1789, empowered Congress “to provide and maintain a navy.” Acting on this authority, Congress ordered the construction and manning of six frigates in 1794, and the War Department administered naval affairs from that year until Congress established the Department of the Navy on April 30, 1798.  In 1972, however, Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt authorized recognition of October 13, 1775 as the Navy’s official birthday.  There is no official motto for the U.S. Navy.  However “Non sibi sed patriae” (Not Self But Country) is often cited as the Navy’s unofficial motto.

USCGC Southwind near port of USCG Base Berkley, after returning from a 27,000 mile tour of the Arctic.

1968  CGC Southwind departed Baltimore, Maryland for a seven-month deployment to Antarctica and other world-wide destinations.  By the time she returned to Baltimore on May 7, 1969 she had become only the second cutter in Coast Guard history to circumnavigate the globe.

Southwind had a varied carrier. From Wikipedia,

USCGC Southwind (WAGB-280) was a Wind-class icebreaker that served in the United States Coast Guard as USCGC Southwind (WAG-280), the Soviet Navy as the Admiral Makarov, the United States Navy as USS Atka (AGB-3) and again in the U.S. Coast Guard as USCGC Southwind (WAGB-280).

1988  The first U.S. merchant marine World War II veterans received their Coast Guard-issued discharge certificates.  Congress gave the merchant mariners veterans’ status and tasked the Coast Guard with administering the discharges.

USCGC IDA LEWIS

1995  CGC Ida Lewis was launched, the first of the new 175-foot Keeper class buoy tenders.

Based on the Coast Guard Historian’s timeline, https://www.history.uscg.mil/research/chronology/
With inspiration from Mike Kelso

1897  Near Corson Inlet, New Jersey, a man and two women were endangered by the sea sweeping around their house 1/2 mile from the station.  Life-savers answered their signal of distress and rescued them in the surfboat.

Based on the Coast Guard Historian’s timeline, https://www.history.uscg.mil/research/chronology/
With inspiration from Mike Kelso

Keeper Richard Etheridge (on left) and the Pea Island Life-Saving crew in front of their station, circa 1896.

1896  The crew of the Pea Island (North Carolina) Life-Saving Station, under the command of Keeper Richard Etheridge, performed one of their finest rescues when they saved the passengers and crew of the schooner E.S. Newman, after that ship ran aground during a hurricane.  Pushed before the storm, the ship lost all sails and drifted almost 100 miles before it ran aground about two miles south of the Pea Island Lifesaving Station.  Etheridge, a veteran of nearly twenty years, readied his crew.  They hitched mules to the beach cart and hurried toward the vessel. Arriving on the scene, they found Captain S. A. Gardiner and eight others clinging to the wreckage.  Unable to fire a line because the high water prevented the Lyle Gun’s deployment, Etheridge directed two surfmen to bind themselves together with a line.  Grasping another line, the pair moved into the breakers while the remaining surfmen secured the shore end. The two surfmen reached the wreck and tied a line around one of the crewmen. All three were then pulled back through the surf by the crew on the beach.  The remaining eight persons were carried to shore in this fashion. After each trip two different surfmen replaced those who had just returned.  For their efforts the crew of the Pea Island Life-Saving Station were awarded the Gold Lifesaving Medal in 1996.  (From Wikipedia: Five months after Etheridge had taken charge of Pea Island Station, arsonists burnt the station to the ground…“In the following days, the Newman’s captain searched for and found the piece of the side that held the vessel’s name and donated it to the crew as an offering of his thanks. For a century, this would be the only award the Pea Island crew received for their efforts. The 1896 Pea Island crew voted to give the wooden sideboard of the Newman to Theodore Meekins, the young surfman who first spotted the distress signal and who swam out to the wreck several times during the rescue. (Fifth from left in photo.)”)

The first three fast response cutters—the USCGC Richard Etheridge (WPC-1102), Bernard C. Webber (WPC-1101), and William Flores (WPC-1103).
U.S. COAST GUARD

1897  Property saved at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.  During a severe storm the surf threatened to wash away a fish house, with valuable nets and other gear.  Surfmen saved the property and took it to a place of safety.  They also assisted the Cape Hatteras lighthouse keeper to remove the lighthouse’s Fresnel lens to a secure place as the lighthouse was in danger of being knocked down by the sea.

141219-N-DX365-258
BAHRAIN (Dec. 19, 2014) Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron (HSC) 26, Det. 1, conducts a vertical onboard delivery with the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Maui (WPB 1304). HSC-26 is a forward deployed naval force asset attached to Commander, Task Force 53 to provide combat logistics and search and rescue capability throughout the U.S. 5th Fleet area of responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Joan E. Jennings/Released)

2013  CGC Maui, operating in the Persian Gulf as part of Patrol Forces Southwest Asia and assigned to Combined Task Force 152, rescued five Iranian mariners after they were fount adrift in a life raft in the northern waters of the Persian Gulf.  Maui’s crew later transferred the survivors to an Iranian Coast Guard vessel.

Based on the Coast Guard Historian’s timeline, https://www.history.uscg.mil/research/chronology/
With inspiration from Mike Kelso

1798  Secretary Benjamin Stoddert, first Secretary of the Navy, sent the first instructions to cutters acting in cooperation with the Navy in support of the Quasi-War with France, via the various collectors of customs.

Original St Joseph boathouse, 1874 – station keepers like Napier were expected to sleep in their boathouses. Public Domain.

1877  Captain Joseph Napier, Keeper of Life-Boat Station No. 6 (St. Joseph, Michigan), commanded a rescue mission for which he was awarded a Gold Lifesaving Medal.  His citation reads: “for the daring gallantry he displayed in rescuing the crew of the schooner D. G. Williams, near the harbor of Saint Joseph, Michigan on the October 10, 1877.  The schooner lay stranded during a heavy gale on the outer bar, with the sea breaking over her, and her unfortunate crew of six men up in the rigging for safety. Captain Napier got together three volunteers, commandeered a boat, and pushed out for the wreck.  At the first attempt the boat was capsized in the breakers.  On the second try he reached the wreck and returned with two of the sailors.  The third trip the boat was completely filled with water, but was bailed and again reached the vessel, bearing off two men.  At the fourth attempt Captain Napier and his three assistants were thrown out of the boat by a furious surge and one of his legs was badly hurt.  One of the men swam ashore.  Another got a line flung to him from the wreck and was taken aboard.  Captain Napier and the other man, clinging to the boat, succeeded in righting and bringing it alongside the schooner.  They then took off the two remaining men of her crew, together with the man taken on board, and regained the shore in safety.  On other occasions Captain Napier was known to have shown equal heroism on desperate seas.  Most notable instance was his rescue of the crew of the schooner Merchant during a tempest in 1854.  For this feat he was presented with a gold watch suitably inscribed by citizens of Chicago.”  He was the first recorded Life-Saving Serviceman to be awarded the Gold Lifesaving Medal.

USCGC Joseph Napier (WPC 1115)

1929  Clarence Samuels, commanding CG Patrol Boat AB-15, was promoted to Chief Quartermaster, thereby becoming the Coast Guard’s first African-American chief petty officer.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Clarence Samuels
First Hispanic of African descent commanding officer of a Coast Guard vessel during wartime