Yank Sailors ON FOREIGN FLAG SHIPS

Sea Classics, May 2006 by Grover, David

Serving in the Naval Armed Guard was hazardous enough but, when Amencan sailors and seamen were assigned to foreign-flag Allied vessels, a whole new host of dangers and intrigues were encountered

Histories of World War Two at sea have often overlooked the fate of those American seaman who, for various reasons, served aboard the merchant ships of foreign nations. Although the total number of these men may never be known, it is possible to identify at least three groups of mariners who sailed aboard these ships. Two of these groups did so because they were ordered to; the men in the third group sometimes had a choice and sometimes did not.

The most recognizable of these three groups was made up of those young Americans who were assigned to foreign-flag ships as members of the Armed Guard detachment furnished by the US Navy. A surprising number of American sailors were utilized this way, sometimes with tragic results.

The second group, also young, were the Merchant Marine cadets placed aboard Allied ships by the US Merchant Marine Cadet Corps for a minimum of six months of sea duty as part of their training toward becoming licensed officers. Normally, two such cadets, one deck and one engine, were on each ship which had such an operating arrangement. There were probably only a relatively few such placements on foreign ships during the first year of the war when this practice was in use. However, the US Merchant Marine Academy, successor to the Merchant Marine Cadet Corps, has indicated that it is virtually impossible to readily retrieve any useful information concerning cadets serving on foreign ships, because the early files of the Maritime Commission are stored in various warehouses some distance from Washington, DC.

The third group was made up of those Americans, often older men who were veteran seafarers, who chose to sail aboard ships of other flags. Why seamen would want to do this is not immediately apparent because American ships generally paid better and had better living conditions than the ships of almost every other nation. This third scenario occurred largely under two sets of circumstances: 1) when American corporations such as Standard oil of New Jersey (known as Esso in those days) operated ships under flags of convenience, largely Panamanian, but paid wages comparable to those of American ships, and 2) when some temporary problem existed, such as a seaman being stranded in an out-of-the-way port from which the only way to get home was to sign on whatever ship came along, regardless of her nationality. Seamen also sometimes opted to sail foreign if they lacked proper Coast Guard certificates to sail under the American flag, or if they were significantly under-age, a circumstance that was less of a barrier to sailing on a foreign-flag merchant ship than on an American ship.

A reasonably good paper trail exists for the first group of American mariners because of the Navy's personnel records, but even those records were incomplete at times. The second group, the Merchant Marine cadets, in spite of the small numbers involved, presented special problems in tracking because they sometimes were the only Americans aboard a ship, making it easy for them to slip through the cracks of any reporting and tracking system in the United States. The third group of seamen depended on their multinational corporate employers to keep track of their location and well-being. These firms, of course, often had no better access to information about the events of the war than did the general public, so they had little knowledge of what went on aboard their own ships. Furthermore, their record-keeping often left much to be desired, particularly among the companies operating freighters.

One of the best efforts to establish the existence of all these merchant seamen and Armed Guard sailors on foreign-flag ships is that of Capt. Arthur Moore, who wrote the definitive book on American merchant ship losses. In later editions of that book, A Careless Word... A Needless Sinking, Capt. Moore made a special effort to tally the American personnel losses from foreign flag ships, something that the official records of the US Coast Guard and War Shipping Administration had not provided.

Captain Moore has been able to identify a number of American merchant seamen and Navy Armed Guard crewmen who were lost on ships of other nations, but he acknowledges that he has not located all such cases. In fact, he has made the chilling observation that there were losses of unknown foreign-flags ships which had Armed Guard crews aboard - groups of American sailors of whose presence we were not even aware. This is a disturbing loose end to WWII which must concern the Navy and certainly the families of sailors who were reported missing.

Data supplied by the Armed Guard Veterans of WWII provide a clue to how widespread the practice of placing US Navy men sailors on foreign ships had been. The Navy armed a total of 6236 ships during the war, only 4870 of which were American-flag vessels. Another 244 were US-owned but under foreignflag, such as the tankers owned by American firms but registered in Panama. The remainder, 1122 ships, presumably were foreign owned and flagged. Put another way, 21.9-percent of the ships which had US Navy Armed Guard crews were under a foreign flag. These figures reinforce what Capt. Moore has said, that we may never know what happened to some of those crews and men.