This is the story, in outline, of Crew One of the LST ferrying organization, which functioned in the Ninth Naval District during World War II under the immediate command of the District Coast Guard Officer at St. Louis, Missouri.
That crew was a group of U.S. Navy personnel which consisted, on the average, of two officers and from twenty to twenty-five enlisted men, most of them petty officers. For the purpose of the delivery trip to New Orleans, during which the ferry crew was in charge, the ships were in reduced commission only.
The inland shipbuilding and ferrying program was a novel part of America’s war effort. The combined work of a handful of industrial companies and of four or five hundred men in uniform relieved our coastal shipyards of a considerable burden. The construction of LST’s, moreover, was of primary importance.
The companies were as follows:
Name |
Location1 |
Miles from New |
The Dravo Corp. |
Neville Island, Pa. |
Orleans 1,845 |
American Bridge Co. |
Ambridge, Pa. |
1,837 |
Jeffersonville Boat & |
||
Machine Co., Incorp. |
Jeffersonville, Ind. |
1,250 |
Missouri Valley Bridge |
||
& Iron Co. |
Evansville, Ind. |
1,058 |
Chicago Bridge & Iron |
||
Co. |
Seneca, 111. |
1,342 |
Inasmuch as LST-1 was the first vessel of the inland building program to be completed, that ship aroused considerable interest. When it reached Evansville, Indiana, and
Trip No. |
Year Trip Began |
Ship2 |
From |
|
1. |
Dec., |
1942 |
LST-1 |
Neville Island |
2. |
Jan., |
1943 |
LST-197 |
Seneca |
3. |
Feb., |
1943 |
LST-198 |
same |
4. |
Mar., |
1943 |
LST-200 |
same |
5. |
Apr., |
1943 |
Phaon |
Neville Island |
6. |
May, |
1943 |
LST-261 |
Ambridge |
7. |
June, |
1943 |
LST-262 |
same |
8. |
same |
|
LST-263 |
same |
9. |
July, |
1943 |
LST-265 |
same |
10. |
Aug., |
1943 |
LST-268 |
same |
11. |
same |
|
LST-270 |
same |
12. |
Sept., 1943 |
LST-275 |
same |
|
13. |
Oct., |
1943 |
LST-280 |
same |
14. |
Nov., |
1943 |
LST-285 |
same |
15. |
Dec., |
1943 |
LST-292 |
same |
16. |
Jan., |
1944 |
LST-137 |
same |
17. |
Feb., |
1944 |
LST-141 |
same |
18. |
Mar., |
1944 |
LST-654 |
same |
19. |
Apr., |
1944 |
LST-734 |
Neville Island |
20. |
same |
|
LST-5S7 |
Evansville |
21. |
May, |
1944 |
LST-666 |
Ambridge |
22. |
same |
|
LST-670 |
same |
23. |
June, |
1944 |
LST-747 |
Neville Island |
24. |
same |
|
LST-677 |
Ambridge |
25. |
July, |
1944 |
LST-708 |
Jeffersonville |
26. |
same |
|
LST-711 |
same |
27. |
Aug., |
1944 |
LST-75 7 |
Ambridge |
28. |
same |
|
LST-784 |
Neville Island |
29. |
Sept., 1944 |
LST-722 |
Jeffersonville |
|
30. |
same |
|
LST-767 |
Ambridge |
31. |
Oct., |
1944 |
LST-794 |
Neville Island |
32. |
same |
|
LST-831 |
Ambridge |
33. |
Nov., |
1944 |
LST-821 |
Evansville |
34. |
same |
|
LST-839 |
Ambridge |
35. |
Dec., |
1944 |
LST-843 |
same |
36. |
Jan., |
1945 |
LST-901 |
Neville Island |
37. |
same |
|
LST-1081 |
Ambridge |
38. |
Feb., |
1945 |
LST-1101 |
Evansville |
39. |
Mar., |
1945 |
LST-1050 |
Neville Island |
40. |
Apr., |
1945 |
LST-1055 |
same |
41. |
May, |
1945 |
Fabius |
Ambridge |
42. |
June, |
1945 |
Vanderburgh |
Evansville |
anchored there on a sleety afternoon, what seemed like the entire yard force of the Missouri Valley Bridge & Iron Company, who were engaged in building their first LST, boarded a barge and had themselves towed alongside. A few minutes later our ship was swarming with workmen. “So that’s where it’s supposed to go” and “So that’s what it looks like!” were typical comments. Many of these men had never been onboard a ship before, and yet they were building one and would build many. In some ways we ourselves had little advantage over these workmen, for until a short time before leaving the yard we had not had the faintest idea of what an LST was.
Our trips down the Ohio River involved a maximum of forty-three lockages.3 Some of the locks had individual peculiarities, and the high bows, generally high freeboard, and enforced light draft of the ships made almost any lockage a problem on windy days. More than once when the wind was offshore we avoided damage in entering a lock only by walking a bow spring from one bollard to the next on the guidewall, checking it each time, as the ship crept forward, the wind doing its best to blow us into the stream. With an onshore wind it was usually possible to heave to off the guidewall, turn into the wind, and drift down onto the wall while using the engines and rudders to keep control. A windsock up forward was an essential bit of equipment, and we carried one with us from ship to ship along with our heaving lines, leadline, light list, notebooks, and other paraphernalia. When the wind was exceptionally strong, it was better not to attempt to progress through Jocks. At Louisville one stormy night it required over an hour and more than 100 orders to the engines even to tie our ship up outside the lock.
Shoal water was a difficulty often met in the ferrying trips, since the Western Rivers exhibit great fluctuations in level. The minimum depth theoretically maintained in the channel by the system of locks and dams is only 9 feet, yet our ships would not back or steer well unless the draft aft was at least 8'6". Consequently, there were many times when we rubbed bottom, but happily the bottom was seldom rocky. In shoal water, also, excessive vibration resulted. One day in the Ohio we vibrated so hard and long that the stern anchor was shaken loose and dropped, and it was only because there was hardly any current in the river that the ship could be stopped while some wire remained on the winch. An LST would drag water after her mechanically even when the water was only moderately shoal. Unless speed were temporarily reduced in such circumstances, considerable swell damage might ensue along the banks or among river tows, whose barges are secured to one another with chains and ratchet turnbuckles.
One might run aground at any season by leaving the channel at the wrong place, and the pilots’ knowledge of the rivers was required to be very good indeed. Most river piloting is done by sight, rather than by chart, and as the pilots found the view from the wheelhouse of an LST to be rather poor, most of them preferred'to take their station above, in the open. Thus the ferrying equipment came to include a wooden roof, with glass windows, for the conning station. The all-electric steering gear of the later ships made it possible for those vessels to be steered from above, also. Such an arrangement for steering seemed to mystify people who visited the wheelhouse for a look-see during the trip; for all the evidence apparent to them, the ship was not being steered at all. They did not often notice the wires running up to the conning station through a voicetube.
There is considerable fog on the Western Rivers, sometimes extensive but often in patches just large enough to be troublesome. (We anchored, once, in a fog just large enough to cover our ship—other vessels passed us by.) One often tried, therefore, to penetrate the fog, and that practice could easily lead into trouble. In the Mississippi one morning, while drifting down a buoyed channel with engines stopped, feeling our way along, we hesitated a few fatal moments after fog hid the buoy ahead of us before dropping the stern anchor. Although there was a strong current, the anchor wire remained perfectly slack; we had run hard and fast aground without feeling it happen. A great deal of powerful tugging was required to free us. The Mississippi will quickly build sand up around a grounded vessel, and if a tow is not very soon available, a dredging operation may be necessary instead.
Except for a collision involving LST-285 and a river tow, in which our ship suffered a horizontal gash in her port side about 107 feet long;4 our adventures had no serious results. Indeed, they were not without their amusing side.
Some of the earlier ships were highly subject to steering gear failure. For a time, we had a special detail of seamen whose duty it was to clear the fo’c’sle of underbrush after a steering casualty. In the narrow river waters, there was usually little that could be done to keep the ship from nosing into the bank when the gear failed to operate. Once our captain, growing a bit over-confident, did not anchor when we lost steering control but allowed the ship to drift on, as she was not heading for the bank at all, but was pursuing a satisfactory course down a straight reach of the river, and as the current was negligible. For some minutes all went well, but then we came upon a venerable old tree with stout limbs overhanging the river more than was desirable from our point of view. In the ensuing collision with the woodland monarch we damaged the 40 mm. rifle on the bow.
After the first half-dozen steering gear failures, such mishaps were guarded against by a watch involving a system of continuous rudder angle reports to the bridge, by telephone. (Later, the ships were equipped with electric rudder angle indicators.) One ship entered a lock with the gear operating properly until the moment when, steerageway having been lost, the pilot ordered the rudders amidship; at that juncture the gear failed to operate, and it was clear that the vessel would have departed from the lock without steering control, but for the watch being kept.
Our strangest mishap occurred well down the Mississippi, in the region where tall, slender willows, growing in loose soil along the banks, often fall into the river. We anchored close to the bank one night, in order to be well out of the channel. The bow anchor was dropped first, and then the stern was worked in. Nothing had seemed to be happening at the time, but when we endeavored to get underway next morning word soon came from below that the propeller shafts were seizing up, first one, then the other. We therefore anchored again. Investigation disclosed that there was a tree thrust athwart- ships through the small spaces between the port and starboard propellers and the respective rudders. Apparently we had swung our stern inshore in just the right spot to effect this most improbable result. One of our LCVP’s succeeded in dragging the tree out.
For dramatic interest, however, our night invasion of a cornfield was superior. The pilot we had was rather inexperienced (an unusual situation), and in the darkness mistook a levee for the natural bank of the Mississippi. Because the river was high, the natural bank was in fact under water at that place, although not submerged very deep. Trying to round a bend in these circumstances, he ran over the natural bank. From the bow to a point under the wing of the bridge, the starboard side of our ship was driven up onto someone’s farm. It was a gloomy experience to look down at withered cornstalks protruding from the floodwaters immediately alongside to starboard, and to realize that the ship’s head was buried in a clump of willows, with saplings on either bow. Both engines had been going ahead at standard speed, with a swift current to help, when it happened. Nevertheless, the stern and the port side except for the bow were in deep water. Shifting all ballast to port tanks, and then using our twin screws persistently and vigorously, we slid off. We observed that the river was falling. Had it been a bit higher, we should certainly have sailed the entire ship onto the farm, there to stay until the river became even higher another time. When we were free, our captain understandably anchored for what was left of the night. The pilot, having sensed that we would not make further progress before sunup, had already turned in and was sound asleep.
Once we took an LST to sea, for U.S.S. Phaon was deliverable at Tampa, Florida. To reach the Gulf of Mexico we continued down river from New Orleans through the desolate Delta country. Evidently there was still some enemy submarine activity in the Gulf, for we and the other LST travelling in our company were taken under the protection of an escort, a 136 foot patrol craft. Greatly to our surprise, the moderate sea which was running from the northeast seemed to impede that vessel more than it did us, and after some time we noticed that it was hull down on the horizon astern. We did not see it again.
We spent about thirty-six hours in the Gulf. In theory, one of the extra officers carried that trip was navigator, but the captain we then had (a merchant mariner by profession) retained sole access to all instruments, charts, and publications meant for celestial navigation. In clearly intentional privacy, he made one observation of the sun. We never changed the gyro heading adopted at the sea buoy near South Pass, and in due time we sighted the sea buoy outside Tampa Bay dead ahead.
That trip to Tampa was the one occasion when our ferry crew escaped from its land-locked environment, but the rivers themselves afforded much variety. We found the Mississippi dreary and muddy, while the Ohio, particularly that part of it between Wheeling and Cincinnati, was usually clear and inviting, with pleasant scenes along its shores. The main impression given by the Illinois was that of being too small; at times one had the definite feeling that the Navy had invaded the old swimming hole.
It was in the Illinois that winter presented the worst problem. When LST-197 left Seneca after a protracted spell of zero weather, the river was frozen to the extent of making navigation impossible under ordinary circumstances. The Coast Guard undertook to make it feasible and assigned two icebreakers to the task. Many times they themselves made headway only with great difficulty; one day we logged only 12 miles. Our maneuvering around locks was hampered, and we damaged our rudders in backing through the floes. Within a reasonable time, however, we reached the open water of the Mississippi.
The village of Seneca, where the 197 was built, is so small that a shipyard is the last thing one would expect to find there, in peace or war. As we tramped back and forth between the ship and the settlement, we could see clear evidence that corn used to grow where ships were now being produced. In the bitter cold of the prairie winter, some assembly operations were still being carried on in the open. Passing a group of workmen who were huddled about a bonfire one afternoon, we were greeted by a welder. He had been a bartender at the Sherman, in Chicago, and remembered some of us who had visited that place not long before, while ferrying an LCT to New York via the Great Lakes. The bonfire and the ex-bartender, as well as the cornstalks still standing in the yard, were indicative of certain qualities prevalent in the vast endeavors of the day.
By the fall of 1944 it was felt by higher authority that a vessel could be spared to help celebrate Navy Day in Pittsburgh, showing the people of the area one of the ships which had been built there. On October 27 and 28 our crew and the permanent Coast Guard complement of LST-831 exhibited the ship to all who cared to come. Since both the Ambridge and the Neville Island yards were well outside the city proper, this was the only time when an LST actually entered Pittsburgh. The presence of any naval vessel in the Monongahela, indeed, must be a rarity. The great interest which the ship aroused was apparent from the fact that visitors came aboard at an average rate exceeding 2,000 per hour. Actually, they could not see a great deal of the ship, as only the tank deck and main deck were open to them. Nevertheless, there were 11,548 visitors counted the first day, and on the second day there were 13,315.
Before closing, a well-merited word should be said about the pilots, assistant pilots, and radiomen who were indispensable adjuncts to the ferry crew. The pilots and assistant pilots were officers or enlisted men of the Coast Guard Reserve, recruited from the personnel of various barge line companies, while the radiomen were enlisted men belonging to the regular establishment of the Coast Guard. They were all assigned to one vessel after another, for a particular portion of its trip, and were not permanent members of any ferry crew. If there were two qualified pilots, and if river conditions permitted, the ship would run continuously; if not, it would run as long as practicable. The amount of knowledge a pilot needed to have was nothing short of amazing, and it was very clear why, on river craft, the pilot’s standing is superior to the captain’s. Our radiomen saw that locks were kept clear for our arrival, ascertained river conditions ahead, reported our daily progress to St. Louis, arranged for the exchange of pilots, and so on. Once when we were unavoidably without a radioman of our own, the captain anchored, put a boat over, and sent his message by Western Union from a nearby town, after the obliging but inexperienced youths who held the equivalent jobs in the permanent crew had succeeded only in burning out the transmitters.
At their best, the ferrying operations were carried on with a discipline that was genuine but somewhat unmilitary when superficially viewed, and with an easy efficiency similar to that of commercial navigation on the rivers, though always more formal. Often the freshly indoctrinated officers of the ship’s permanent crew felt that some of our practices, such as sleeping in the daytime, were subversive. It remained true, however, that Ferry Crew One could be depended upon. When fog descended suddenly in the night, a signal on the tank deck alarm would call away the bow and stern anchor details while the ship turned into the current, and then, while the captain manned a searchlight and gave his orders for the management of the helm, the engines, and the anchors, one man in the wheelhouse would relay them, receive reports from the leadsman and the anchor stations, handle the telegraphs, and, if necessary, steer. Under some more orthodox system the ship might well have gone aground. More than once the pilots commented on the smart work of our deck force at the locks, and when the vessel was coming alongside a wharf one might have mistaken the engine room telegraphs for throttles, so prompt were responses to engine orders. The skills of LST Ferry Crew One were not many, but were self-taught. Their duty was not arduous, but they did what was asked of them as well as it could be done.
1. All locations are on the Ohio River except the last, which is on the Illinois River.
2. LST-1 was the first vessel completed at any of the yards mentioned, and LST-197 was the first completed at Seneca. U.S.S. Phaon was a conversion of LST-15, U.S.S. Fabius of LST-1093, and U.S.S. Vanderburgh of LST-1114.
3. The majority of the Ohio River dams are collapsible, and may be laid down flat on the river bottom section by section. Collapsing a dam obviates the lockage otherwise necessary. Dams are collapsed when not needed to maintain 9 feet in the channel. Certain dams, larger than the others, are permanently fixed.
4. “We hit a board with a nail in it,” was the explanation given by our executive officer to locktenders who asked what had happened to us.