Sitting Ducks

 

Sitting Ducks

Ready, Aim, Abandon Ship

 

Ed had a choice, the Naval Armed Guard, or the Submarine Service. “Subs, Sir!” That is how my Uncle Ed became a submariner during WW II. “Those guys served on floating coffins. They were sitting ducks,” he told me. In the end, both branches of the Navy suffered heavy losses..

Assigned to protect merchant sailors, and ships, these members of the U.S. Naval Armed Guard were unsung heroes of World War II. Often mistaken for members of the Merchant Marine, the Armed Guard was a special branch of the U.S. Navy assigned to defend merchant ships and troop carriers against enemy attack. The men fought with little fanfare. They were the Navy’s stepchildren. The men in the Armed Guard knew the odds were against them, and many believed theirs was indeed a suicide mission. Representing this were two signs posted at a training center. The first declared, “Ready—Aim—Abandon ship!” The other, playing on the signal “Sub sighted, sank same,” read, “Sub sighted, glub, glub.”

To make things worse (Yes, it was possible.) Sometimes the first ship assigned to a new Armed Guardsman was a rusty old freighter or tanker. The men wondered if their antiquated ships were even seaworthy. The ships  were at times filthy dirty … the decks caked with rust and  so was most of the gear. (Other ships were in good repair.) Then we have the matter of weapons.

In the beginning, the armament for merchant vessels was a hodgepodge of small-caliber machine guns and antiquated relics from previous wars. Some deck guns even dated back to the Spanish-American War. Most ships at least carried machine guns, and for some that was the only defensive weaponry aboard. Early in the war many had only .30-caliber machine guns, weapons suited more for the battlefield than for combating aircraft and submarines. Sometimes they came with tripods for field use.

 

Some ships, however, sailed without weapons. They went to war with large telephone poles protruding over the railings that were painted to look like guns. Ships lowered booms along the deck to give the impression of possessing enormous cannons. As the war progressed and American industry gained a solid war footing, newer and better weapons including 4- and 5-inch deck guns.    Regardless of the weapons aboard, AG personnel were trained to engage the enemy until “the decks are awash, and the guns are going under.” Only after taking every opportunity to destroy the enemy could  the Guard  abandon ship  and the men  knew that another convoy ship would not stop to pick them up. Stopping a ship dead in the water made it an easy mark for a U-boat attack.

 

The AG had a better chance of fighting off aircraft than submarines. Oftentimes the only sign a sub was pursuing a merchant vessel  was the torpedo wake in the water. U-Boat skippers would try and sink vessels with deck guns when possible to save their torpedoes. Should an ambitions Kriegsmarine Kaptain decide to surface and take on an armed merchant vessel, however, that evened the odds so-to-speak much to the sub captain’s surprise.

My father was a passenger aboard a Liberty ship traveling across the Atlantic to Liverpool, England. From there he would board a troop transport destined for Omaha Beach for the D-Day invasion.

 

Aboard a Liberty ship, the merchant and Armed Guard Navy Crews had separate sleeping and eating quarters. Part of the Navy crew had their quarters amidships, divided between port and starboard or in the stern. Those in the aft quarters had to contend with the constant vibration and noise from the ship’s engine and propeller shaft. In heavy seas, the bow went down, and the stern would come out of the water and vibrate violently as the exposed prop chopped up at the air. My father’s anti-tank training got him a berth amidships when crossing the ocean; they were short a man on the deck gun crew and the AG were very happy to have him fill the gap. Dad was happy too.

 “That was a hell of a lot better than F- deck,” was his comment to me as a kid.

 

 Even with this extraordinary record, when the war ended, so did the need to arm merchant ships. The Navy deactivated this branch of the service at war’s end.

They carried our flag into hell and back and not a single American troopship protected by the AG was lost to a U-boat.  The least we can do is carry their memory forward.

God Bless America and all those who served.