Honoring the Merchant Marine

by Stan Lowe, Chairman (retired), Wyoming Veterans’ Commission
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 1:15 PM MDT

The month of May has three important military and military related days: Memorial, Armed Forces and National Maritime.

Memorial Day (held on May’s last Monday) was founded after the Civil War and is well known.

Armed Forces Day (third Saturday) was established Sept. 18, 1947, after President Harry S. Truman unified the services. So, it is relatively new. It is, however, gaining recognition through military and veterans’ programs.

Natrona County United Veterans’ Council, for example, observed it this year on May 19 at Veterans’ Park, which was reported in this column in the May 23 issue.

National Maritime Day (always May 22) honors the U.S. Merchant Marine and those who served in it during America’s wars. People living in coastal states are probably more aware of it than those living in interior states, with the possible exception of Wyoming.

After all, the man who commanded the Merchant Marine during World War II, the late Vice Admiral Emory S. Land, USN, lived as a boy in Laramie, attended and got his first degree at the university before getting a Wyoming congressional appointment to Annapolis.

He also was a football star at UW. Later, he established two highly coveted football sports awards, bearing his internationally famous name, given out annually at UW’s homecoming games.

During the war, he headed all aspects of the Merchant Marine, building thousands of new ships, training more than 200,000 new mariners and sending them to sea under Navy orders.

Mariners supplied not only our own military forces, but those of our allies too, while suffering the highest per capita deaths compared to the other services.

The U.S. Merchant Marine has a unique place in our country’s defense structure. In peacetime, it is a non-military commercial carrier.

In wartime, it arms its ships with congressional approval, and it serves as “a naval or military auxiliary” while supplying our military forces anywhere in the world (Merchant Marine Act, 1936).

Though never before acknowledged by law, this is traditionally what it has done in other wars, beginning with the Revolutionary War, when its privateers preyed on England’s merchant navy ships, selling their cargoes to help finance Washington’s army.

Fortunately, the 1936 act was in place when America entered WWII. It made the government’s connection with the Merchant Marine more than that of just a regulator. The U.S. literally took over the Merchant Marine, acquiring privately owned vessels by charter, or otherwise, and it built thousands more of its own.

Thus, Admiral Land was able to turn the U.S. flagged Merchant Marine into the greatest maritime fleet in history.

Thanks to Col. Oliver North, the Military Channel and History Channel, the heroism of WWII’s mariners has become better known in recent years.

An authoritative book, “A Careless Word … A Needless Sinking,” is now available in libraries. Retired Capt. Arthur R. Moore, who sailed as a U.S. Merchant Marine Academy cadet and officer during the war, spent years laboriously researching and writing it.

A Web site, www.usmm.org, privately maintained by dedicated maritime researchers Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Horodysky of Berkeley, Calif., is another excellent information source.

Here are two examples of many instances of mariner heroism their Web site records.

On Sept. 27, 1942, two heavily armed German warships, built to look like merchant ships and called raiders, attacked the Liberty Ship SS Stephen Hopkins in the South Atlantic. In that battle, the Hopkins’ four-inch stern gun sank one of them, the Stier, before going down itself.

It became the only U.S. flagged vessel, Navy or U.S. Merchant Marine, to sink a German capital ship in the Atlantic.

The cost, however, was high: of its 40 mariners and 15 Navy gunners, only 15 lived.

During the invasion of Mindoro in the Philippines, more mariners were killed than all other armed services’ members combined. Among them were entire crews of two Merchant Marine ammunition-loaded ships vaporized by kamikaze suicide planes.

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