Southwest Pacific:
A Brief History
of
U.S. Coast Guard Operations
by
Dennis L. Noble
By the end of the Mexican War in 1848,
the
The story of the U.S. Coast Guard in the
Southwest, begins with the U.S. Lighthouse Service. Congress, realizing that
aids to navigation were essential to maritime trade and the development of
the West, authorized in 1848 the establishment of lighthouses along the
coast. The primary problem at that time was that most of the Pacific
coastline was unexplored, making it virtually impossible to locate sites and
build lighthouses. The federal government mandated that an exploration
survey be conducted to insure that the most advantageous lighthouse sites
were located. The U.S. Coast Survey, later U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey,
was given the task. It was not until 1849, however, that a ship was able to
conduct the survey. Eventually, Congress authorized the first group of
lights in
The Treasury Department awarded the
contract to build the lights to the Baltimore-based firm of Francis X. Kelly
and Francis A. Gibbons. The ship Oriole was dispatched, with men and
supplies, to
The construction firm’s workers that
arrived at the
The life of a nineteenth century
lighthouse keeper, manning a lighthouse away from the pressures of life may
seem idyllic to most modern Americans. However, the words most used by
keepers in their diaries and letters to describe their existence are
"loneliness" and "monotony". A great deal of a
keeper’s life centered on the mundane duties of keeping the station and
its equipment clean.
Lighthouses were by necessity placed in
areas of danger and were in isolated regions. Before the advent of
electricity, the lighting device was a lamp. Fuel for illumination ranged
from whale oil, lard oil, rapeseed oil, and petroleum products. The wick of
the lamp had to be carefully trimmed to produce a strong light and watched
constantly throughout the night. This constant attention to wicks led to
lighthouse keepers earning the nickname "wickies.’
Unbeknownst to most people today, many
light keepers were women. F Ross Holland, one of this country’s foremost
authorities on lights, noted that lighthouses going back to the 1800’s
"at one time or another had female assistant keepers; and a surprising
number had women as principal keepers." This was not, however, because
of an enlightened view on the part of the service. Rather, it was a means of
saving money. It was not unusual to have a husband and wife team at a
station. Both wives and children helped in running the light. For example,
Mary Israel raised four children while assisting her husband at the Old
Point Loma Light, near
In addition to lighthouses along the
Crews of lighthouses and lightships were
also instrumental in saving lives of those in distress near their locations.
The annual reports of the U.S. Lighthouse Service are filled with accounts
of rescues. ln 1916, for example, the small Blunt’s Reef Lightship
somehow managed to squeeze on board 150 survivors of the liner Bear. The
The Lighthouse Service also operated
their own fleet of ships, called Lighthouse Tenders. The tenders provided
supplies and work parties to the scattered and isolated lighthouses, in
addition to maintaining other lesser aids to navigation. The work was
dangerous, as lighthouses were located in hazardous areas. The tenders and
their crew were expected to go where no other vessel could get to and work
through storm, darkness and sunshine. The first tender along the
Southwest coast was also the first steam powered tender, Shubrick. She
arrived in
The next predecessor agency of the modern
day U.S. Coast Guard to be stationed along the Southwest coast was the U.S.
Revenue Cutter Service. Established in 1790 by Alexander Hamilton, the first
Secretary of the Treasury, the service was formed to stop the loss of badly
needed revenue by sea-going smugglers. The first ten small cutters were
deployed from
When the first ship of the U. S. Revenue
Cutter Service, Lawrence, arrived in
The duties of the early cuttermen was as
varied then as they are today. A good example of life on board a cutter in
the 1800’s is the crew of Argus. LT. William C. Pease, the
cutter’s commanding officer patrolled between
Not all craft in the Service were
sea-going. Customs duties also entailed the use of small harbor craft. One
of the more venerable ships to serve in the Southwest was the Golden
Gate. The 110-foot cutter was built in Seattle in 1896 and arrived in
San Francisco on May 13, 1897. Golden Gate performed law enforcement
boardings, towing, helped fumigate vessels, and patrolled regattas in the
Bay area. One of her most unusual duties came during the great San Francisco
earthquake of 1906. The ensuing fires caused a great deal of the city’s
destruction. The cuttermen of Golden Gate served as firefighters and
transporting officials and refugees. Then, in the midst of their work, the
commanding officer of the cutter was given the added responsibility of
taking on board the gold reserve from the Federal Bank in San Francisco. The
cutter remained a floating bank until the fire danger was over. The skipper
of Golden Gate breathed a great sigh of relief when the gold was
carefully counted and removed from his ship. The small cutter, after serving
forty-eight years in San Francisco was decommissioned in 1945.
By 1914, the cutters of the Revenue
Cutter Service were a regular sight in the Southwest, especially in the San
Francisco Bay area. San Francisco served as the primary winter port along
the Pacific coast. Many of the cutters would spend the winters patrolling
California’s coastal waters and in the summer sail for several months of
sea duty on the Bering Sea Patrol. Some of the legendary cutters, such as Bear
and Thetis, well known for their dramatic rescues of whalers and
explorers trapped in the Arctic ice, dropped their anchors in San
Francisco’s harbor. To seamen, the gambling halls and bars of San
Francisco’s infamous Barbary Coast were paradise. The monotony of weeks
and months at sea magnified the pleasures of shore leave, and San Francisco
more than any other port in the world was the zenith of debauchery at the
turn of the century. The crews of the Revenue Cutters, although they often
stuck together when in port, were not immune to San Francisco’s
attractions.
The next predecessor agency of the U.S.
Coast Guard in the Southwest is the one that probably most shaped the
general public’s perception of the Service as a lifesaver - the U.S.
Life-Saving Service. The mission of this service was to launch small boats
in an effort to rescue people shipwrecked close to shore. The Service began
as a series of volunteer shore-based rescue stations along the Eastern
Seaboard. In 1848, the federal government came on board. It was not,
however, until 1871, when Sumner Increase Kimball took command, that the
Service became highly respected. Under Kimball’s strong and efficient
leadership, more stations of the organization began to be established along
the eastern seaboard, on the Great Lakes, Gulf Coast and, finally, on the
West Coast. Stations at Golden Gate, in the present Golden Gate Park in San
Francisco, Bolinas Bay and Humboldt Bay were authorized on June 20, 1874.
Other stations at Southside, Fort Point, Point Bonita, Point Reyes, and
Arena Cove, soon followed.
The duties of the men, called surfmen,
who were assigned to these stations were deceptively simple: using lookouts
and beach patrols to detect ships in trouble, they were to put out to sea in
small oar-propelled boats anytime a ship was in distress in their area of
operations. If the seas were too rough for boats, the lifesavers used a
line-throwing device, called a Lyle gun, to establish a strong hawser
between the ship and shore. The amount of muscle power to ram a 700 to 1,000
pound surfboat, or a lifeboat that weighed between two and four tons, into
towering surf is difficult to imagine. The men who served at the life saving
stations, however, led lives consisting of hours of boredom, interspersed
with seconds of sheer terror. The dramatic rescues performed by the surfmen
caught the imagination of the public and the press. Reporters of the day
gushed forth with praised for these mighty men, dubbing the surf-men
"soldiers of the surf" and "storm warriors".
One example of a "storm
warrior" was John Regnis, a surfman from the Humboldt Bay Station. On
December 22, 1888, while working with his fellow surfmen in assisting the
collier Mendocino, he saw the body of a small child that the
station’s surfboat could not reach. Surfman Regnis fearlessly plunged into
the cold, pounding surf and recovered the body. For his courageous actions
he was awarded the Gold Life Saving Medal.
The last of the four predecessor agencies
to form the modern day U.S. Coast Guard is also the least documented and
studied. The Steamboat Inspection Service came about due to the large growth
of steam-powered ships and the resultant explosions of faulty boilers, with
a great loss of life. After a number of terrible disasters, Congress
hesitantly took action. On July 7, 1838, the first legislation was enacted
to promote safety on board steam ships. thereafter, in fits and starts,
other acts followed, usually after some accident pointed out safety
weaknesses. In 1903, the Steamboat Inspection Service was transferred to the
Department of Commerce and Labor. By 1911, the duties of the organization
included the inspection of vessel construction and equipment; the
examination and licensing of marine officers; the examination of seamen and
investigations of marine casualties and violations of inspection laws;
establishing regulations to prevent collisions; and establishing regulations
for the transporting of passengers and merchandise.
The year 1914 marks a major change in the
affairs of the predecessor agencies of the modern day U.S. Coast Guard. The
Life-Saving Service was no longer attracting young men to its ranks. This
was due in part to the low pay and the lack of a retirement plan. It was not
unusual to have men in their sixties and seventies manning the surfboats. In
a move to streamline and improve government operations, the U.S. Life-Saving
Service and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service were combined on January 20,
1915, to form the U.S. Coast Guard.
One of the first major tasks of the new
Service came in 1920 with passage of the Volstead Act, the social experiment
to outlaw liquor in the United States. For the next 14 years, the U. S.
Coast Guard waged a war against smugglers of illegal spirits. The Service
soon found that it did not have the men or the equipment to successfully
wage this battle. Station crews were doubled, patrols were increased and a
75-foot picket boat class was added to the U.S. Coast Guard’s inventory,
compliments of the U.S. Navy. Although these efforts helped, the flow of
liquor was never completely cut off and only the passage of the 21st
Amendment, the repeal of Prohibition, brought the rum war to a close.
The rum war on the Pacific Coast never
reached the intensity that was encountered by Coast Guardsmen on the East
Coast, mainly because of the lack of large population centers. The larger
areas of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, provided the Coast Guard
with enough action, however, to keep them busy. Usually, liquor would be
loaded on ships at Vancouver, British Columbia, for the long trip to the
Southwestern Region.
Most seizures in the California area were
simple affairs of boarding a suspected craft and making an arrest, but there
was always the chance of the unforeseen happening. The six-bitter, CG-811,
was patrolling near Sunset Beach, in the vicinity of Los Angeles, and, at
1:15 am, sighted a suspicious 38-foot speedboat, A-2193. The cutter
sounded her siren, flashed her spotlight on the boat, and illuminated her
Coast Guard ensign. The boat tried to escape. The cuttermen fired warning
shots with a rifle, but when the boat still refused to heave to, the skipper
of the CG-811 ordered the crew to open fire with the machine gun. The A-2193
immediately headed towards the beach, where her crew went over the side as
the boat broke into flames.
The effort to keep America dry was not a
popular one and placed the new U.S. Coast Guard in an awkward position. The
"drys," those that wanted the prohibition of spirits, were angry
that the flow could not be stemmed, while the "wets" were equally
angered over the supply of spirits that were interrupted. As one historian
noted, "It was a cross which the
Coast Guardsman had to bear, and he bore it well." Out of the long rum
war, however, some good did emerge. The U.S. Coast Guard had, in general,
been known only locally. But their work during the years of battle gave the
Coast Guard national and international notice. Most importantly, the service
"remained larger and more important than previously."
The need to locate smugglers far out at
sea also brought about a "renaissance" in Coast Guard aviation.
The first Coast Guard aviator, Lt. Elmer Stone, had pointed out the need for
aircraft as early as 1916, but the air arm had languished. Prohibition
proved Stone correct and from 1926, when the Loening OL-5 amphibious plane
became the first aircraft built to Coast Guard order, aviation grew in
importance.
The first Coast Guard Air Station in
California was established at Lindbergh Field, San Diego, on July 1, 1934,
with one plane and a "handful of men" under the command of LT.
Luke Christopher. It was moved a "short distance" from this
location in 1937. On November 15, 1940, another Air Station was established
at San Francisco.
Even during the most pressing days of the
rum war, the role of saving lives never changed. In fact, commanding
officers of cutters that were actively engaged in stopping rumrunners were
told that the saving of lives remained their most important mission, even
above stopping the flow of liquor. The role of the small boat stations in
the Coast Guard differed very little from that of the old Life-Saving
Service. To be sure, there were improvements, such as motorized lifeboats.
One of the best examples of how little things had changed is at the Humboldt
Bay Station.
On June 23, 1939, Surfman Karl L. Carios
(the title of surfman had remained into the early Coast Guard years) on
lookout duty spotted Rena near the Humboldt bar and saw she was in
difficulty. He immediately alerted the officer in charge, Chief
Boatswain’s mate Gardner J. Churchill. Churchill, with a crew of four,
headed the 36-foot lifeboat toward the yacht, which by 7:20 pm was swamped.
As Chief Churchill brought his boat through the pounding surf, the lifeboat
completely vanished beneath the breaking seas. The closer Churchill
approached Rena, the more he was hampered by the debris breaking off
the vessel and by the fact that he had to reduce his speed below steerage.
In a feat of great seamanship, the Chief and his crew managed to safely
remove the four people from Rena. Churchill was offered the Gold Life
Saving Medal and his crew the Silver, but the Chief refused to accept any
higher medal than his crew received and thus all received the Silver Medal,
the second highest award for lifesaving.
By the late thirties, as war clouds
thickened, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made another major change to the
U.S. Coast Guard. On July 7, 1939, again in the interest of
streamlining the federal government, the Lighthouse Service was transferred
to the Coast Guard. Shortly thereafter, the service itself became part of
the U.S. Navy as the nation entered World War II. Later, as a wartime
measure, the Steamboat Inspection Service, now called the Bureau of Marine
Navigation, was temporarily transferred into the Coast Guard in 1942. The
move was made permanent in1946.
At the beginning of hostilities residents
of California’s coastal areas were extremely fearful of an imminent
Japanese invasion. Thirteen days after the attack on Pearl Harbor an
incident occurred near Humboldt Bay that fueled these fears. The tanker Emidjo
radioed she had just been hit by a torpedo near Blunt’s Reef
Lightship and was sinking. Fifty-two men were in the water, with one man
killed and one badly wounded. The cutter Shawnee, at Humboldt Bay,
was ordered to get underway, but heavy seas were running at the bar and all
aids to navigation were darkened due to the invasion fears. The senior Navy
officer in the area, who was in charge of a nearby radio station, felt the
risk to the cutter was too great and ordered the Shawnee to remain in
port. Gardner J. Churchill, now a Warrant Boatswain, wanted to take the
Coast Guard Station’s 36-foot lifeboat to assist. The Navy officer again
refused. Churchill, however, elected to disregard his orders and proceeded
to the scene, south of the station near the Eel River.
Two hours after getting underway, the
lifeboat was traveling slowly through the dark in heavy seas when suddenly
the lookout noticed a low, dark shape in the distance. Churchill flashed a
signal, but received no reply. The officer began to become a little uneasy
about the mysterious shape and then noticed that whatever was out there had
begun to close on the lifeboat. Churchill then turned and set a course away
from the area, only to be followed by what the Coast Guardsmen now felt was
a Japanese submarine. The craft started to over-take the small boat. The
dark shape’s bow came near the boat’s stern at the crest of a wave,
while the lifeboat was in the trough. The Boatswain put the boat’s wheel
over hard and advanced the throttle to full speed. The combination of
following the seas’ motion, rudder action, and speed, caused the small
boat to whip completely around, and as the craft slid by, the Coast
Guardsmen identified their pursuer as, indeed, a submarine.
Undeterred, Churchill continued his
search for the tanker’s crew. At 8:30 in the morning, the Coast Guardsmen
gave up the search and started the long, rough trip back to Humboldt Bay.
Nearing their station, the crew spotted a periscope heading towards them.
Churchill began to take evasive maneuvers and the periscope vanished as
suddenly as it had appeared. Fifteen minutes later it was spotted again,
still tracking the boat. Then, for some unknown reason, the scope
disappeared and the boat proceeded unharmed into Humboldt Bay.
The fear of an invasion led the Coast
Guard to strengthen its beach patrol force, a traditional duty of the old
Life-Saving Service. In 1942, for example, eighty men were assigned to the
Humboldt Bay area for patrol duties. The Coast Guardsmen traveled by
horseback, jeep, and on foot with dogs to detect enemy landings.
The U. S. Coast Guard that emerged from
World War II is basically the service that still operates its multifaceted
missions today. There have, of course, been changes. Technology has played a
large role in bringing about a new look to the Coast Guard. When the Service
obtained the Lighthouse Service, in 1939, it immediately began to seek ways
to automate many of the isolated stations. Large navigation buoys, solar
power, and better navigational equipment have all spelled the end of the
wickies. The Lighthouse Service, during its heyday in the Southwest had
thirty-eight lighthouses and two lightships. By 1988 there were no Coast
Guard manned lighthouses or lightships within the waters of the State of
California. It is estimated that by the year of the Coast Guard’s
bicentennial, in 1990, the Service will have automated all of its lights,
thus ending an era in our maritime history.
Technology has also caused changes in the
small boat stations within the Southwest. New high-powered lifeboats are
incredibly fast and have longer ranges. The greatest change in search
and rescue work was the development of the helicopter. Prior to World War
II, most small boat rescue stations were grouped in the area from San
Francisco northward. In 1929, for example, there were eight stations
scattered along this stretch of the Northern Calfornia coast.
Fifty-eight years later, in 1987, there were ten stations spread from San
Diego, in the south, to Humboldt Bay, in the north. Even though the
stations now cover a larger area, the combination of better boats and
helicopters allows rescues to be accomplished much faster than in the early
days of shore based rescue operations.
The U.S. Coast Guard continues to perform
some amazing rescue feats within the Southwest. During the Northern
California floods of 1955, for example, Coast Guard airmen undertook work
that the Commandant of the Coast Guard noted was truly an "outstanding
performance," even for a service noted for rescues.
An H045 helicopter piloted by LT Henry J.
Pfeiffer, with Petty Officer Joseph Accamo, as hoist operator, flew for
nearly twelve hours, beginning at 4:35 in the morning. Pfeiffer and
Accamo were relieved alternately by LCDR George F. Thometz, Jr., and Petty
Officer Victor Rouland. An unbelievable 138 people were rescued by the
Coast Guardsmen. The first fifty-five were picked up in darkness, with the
"chopper" hovering above "trees, chimneys, and television
antennae, the only illumination being provided by an Aldis lamp held by the
hoist operator." At one time three women and eleven children were
somehow squeezed into the helicopter, which one historian noted must
"be a record for an H045." Another helicopter rescue, on
December 4, 1985, took place about twelve miles northwest of the Golden Gate
Bridge. An HH-3F from San Francisco Air Station, piloted by LT Don
Rigney, hoisted three Vietnamese immigrants from a fishing boat that had
gone aground on a reef. The rescue was completed despite rough seas,
darkness, and a language barrier.
The traditional duties of law enforcement
have changed very little for the Service in the Southwest. Some
fifty-five years after Coast Guardsmen finished the Rum War, the men and
women of the Service found themselves once again engaged in a war against
smugglers, this time the contraband is drugs. On May 23, 1988, the
Two administrative changes took place for
the Service in the Southwest Region in 1967 and 1988. The Coast Guard, in
1967, was transferred from its traditional home in the Treasury Department
to the Department of Transportation. In 1988, the Eleventh Coast Guard
District and the Twelfth Coast Guard District were combined to form the
Eleventh Coast Guard District, which now covers the States of California,
In 1990, the U. S. Coast Guard will mark
two hundred years of service to the nation. Since the 1840s, the Service has
provided assistance to the maritime community, and others, in the Southwest.
Even though technology has caused the establishment of new stations, the
shifting of others, and the decommissioning of still others, this small
Service continues to enforce federal maritime laws and provide a rescue
organization for those in distress. In fact, with the increase in
recreational boating, the Coast Guard now handles more rescues than ever
before. The men and women of today’s U.S. Coast Guard, who responded to
emergencies along the West Coast, are carrying on, and surpassing the strong
foundations of service to others established by the deeds of their renowned
predecessors.