Content provided in partnership with

Yank Sailors ON FOREIGN FLAG SHIPS

Sea Classics, May 2006 by Grover, David

<< Page 1 Continued from page 5. Previous | Next

The Merchant Marine cadets were somewhat harder to count. Five were lost on a total of eight Panamanian ships which were known to have casualties among American crewmen and also had cadets aboard during their final days. Working from this known number of cadet deaths by ship, it is possible to extrapolate backwards to estimate total number assigned to foreign ships. If 3-percent of all merchant seamen were lost during the entire 3.5-year war, most of whom can be assumed to have been lost during the first two years, that would suggest that over 150 American cadets served aboard foreign-flag merchant ships during that time period.

Most Popular Articles in Reference: The importance of understanding organizational culture; Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students; What factors attract foreign direct investment?; Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...; How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques; More »

No attempt is being made here to infer that placing Americans aboard foreign ships greatly increased the personal risk to such men. Indeed, American ships in war zones were about as likely to be sunk as were foreign-flag ships. What is intended is a protest that it was unfair that such small detachments of Americans, two in the case of the cadets and as small a group as two in the case of the Navy men, were placed aboard ships of foreign nations for extended periods without any contact with other Americans or with any American chain-of-command.

Administratively, that arrangement must have been fraught with difficulty for the Armed Guard commander, in handling the alwaysawkward relationship with the ship's master. Generally, with such a crew numbering more than ten, a junior Naval officer was in charge but, with smaller groups, a very junior petty officer, often a coxswain (which was the name used then for a third-class bossun's mate) or a third-class gunner's mate, was the senior Navy enlisted man in charge.

There was also a problem in the long-standing concept that American fighting men were to be commanded only by Americans, and how this concept could fit into these arrangements. Obviously, a handful of American sailors aboard a foreign ship, even though they might have had a petty officer in their midst, were being commanded de facto by the captain of that ship, whatever his nationality.

The staffing arrangements for the Armed Guard were as strange as they were varied. Aboard the tanker C. O. Stillman, the coxswain in charge of the Armed Guard had seven apprentice seamen to assist him. On the freighter Tambour, a seaman 1C headed up a 3-man Navy detachment, while on another freighter, the TeIa, a coxswain was in charge of two nonrated men. Aboard the tanker Arriaga, a seaman 1C outranked a seaman 2C in the 2-man Navy crew. Although the courage of these men cannot be questioned, their ability to contribute much expertise to the defense of the ship can be.

One of the Armed Guard sailors, in abandoning the Arriaga, was briefly taken aboard the German submarine responsible for sinking her, and was treated by a doctor for a back injury sustained in the sinking as well as for vision problems resulting from being in the oil-covered water. This humane treatment characterized most of the contact that American seaman and Navy sailors aboard foreign-flag ships had with German U-boats, particularly early in the war.

Yank Sailors ON FOREIGN FLAG SHIPS

Sea Classics, May 2006 by Grover, David

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Reference

Most Popular Publications in Reference