On Memorial Day, don’t forget the U.S. Merchant Marine

By Cantor Sheldon Foster Merel

ENCINITAS, California — The U.S. Merchant Marine were the men and their ships who brought soldiers, food, airplanes, oil and every essential item to our troops all over the world during World War II.

Merchant ships and crews were on the front lines and suffered staggering losses from Nazi submarines waiting to torpedo them when their ships left Eastern ports. The silhouetted ships against the lighted coast were easy targets for the submarines. Once on the open seas in the North Atlantic and especially on the especially hazardous run to Murmansk in Russia they faced sinkings by mines, armed raiders, destroyers, aircraft, “kamikaze,” and high seas. The casualty rate of Merchant Marine crews during World War II was the highest percentage wise, second only to the U.S. Marines.

News of all these casualties was kept secret from the American public so as not to discourage much needed recruits to man the ships, or scare the hell out of officers and seamen already at sea. We also did not want the Germans to know how successful their submarine warfare was.

U.S.Merchant ships and crews participated in landing operations in the Pacific, from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima, and more than 2,700 merchant ships landed troops and munitions on beaches for the D-day invasion of Normandy.

The total loss of life during the war was about 9,300 mariners killed at sea: 2,000 wounded (at least 1,100 died from their wounds) and 663 men and women taken prisoner. Sixty six died in prison camps or aboard Japanese ships while being transported to other camps.

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill both publicly acknowledged that the U.S. Merchant Marine was an essential part of our war effort, and their contributions and sacrifices shortened the war by at least two years.

Crew members signed on for a round trip, but if they became prisoners of war, took sick and remained overseas , their pay stopped when their ships returned to home port. Nor was there life insurance for the families of those killed in action.

I was left overseas on my last voyage to Bizerte, North Africa where I had emergency appendix surgery in a French Naval Hospital.  I went to Tunis in Tunisia to recover and wait for a ship home. While I was still in Tunis, the moment my ship hit its home port my pay stopped. I returned home a s a passenger aboard another Liberty ship.

Hold on to your hats! In spite of the incredible contributions of the men of the Merchant Marine with the highest mortality rate of any other service, they were technically civilians, employees of shipping companies chartered by the United States. We did not get paid during voyages nor have any health care insurance.

Although merchant seamen sailed side by side with U.S. Navy gun crews and faced the same dangerous attacks , Navy sailors received the G.I. Bill of Rights after the war for free college tuition and low cost mortgages. Merchant Marine crews did not.

After the war , President Roosevelt called the Merchant Marine veterans,” The Fourth Arm of  Defense “and proposed they be granted the G.I. Bill of Rights. . Unfortunately, he died before it could reach Congress and the proposal went nowhere for more than a half century

Finally in 1998 Congress granted veteran status and the G..I Bill of Rights to Merchant Mariners who had served during war times. Fifty years too late, it was  a Pyrrhic victory but welcomed nevertheless!

BACKGROUND HISTORY
In 1941, when England was on the verge of being invaded by Germany, President Roosevelt convinced an isolationist U.S. Congress to pass the Lend Lease Bill to send food, oil and munitions to England to stave off an invasion. The U.S. Navy did not have cargo ships so the Maritime Commission was created to charter ships from commercial Shipping Companies to deliver the essential material in time to save England. The Lend Lease Bill was also deemed vital to the defense of our country..

After Pearl Harbor, every conceivable type of transport was put into action. Some were former luxury liners that even round-the-world travelers would no longer recognize. Others were good-sized barges or sea going tugs. But most were the new internationally known Liberty ships hastily built to deliver troops, planes, food , ammunition and fuel oil. During the early years of the war, Nazi submarines waited along the Eastern seaboard to sink these ships to cut off the necessary supplies for our troops and Allies.

Thanks to Henry Kaiser who set the pattern for building Liberty cargo ships quickly , some 2700 ships were sent to sea. Training officers and seamen was done by long established State Merchant Marine Academies and new schools.

I graduated from the New York State Maritime Academy in 1944 with an Officer Commission in the U.S. Navy and Maritime Service. At that time, I did not know about the recently passed G.I. Bill of Rights and chose to serve with the Merchant Marine as an engineering officer. I sailed on Liberty ships to Italy, Southern France , North Africa and an oil tanker to England. After the war, having missed out on the G.I. Bill of Rights my dream of attending an out of town college were squashed and I returned to the College of the City of New York.

The New York Times reported from London on  Saturday, June 9 , 1944: “- D-day at the Normandy Beach head would not have been possible without the U.S. Merchant Marine. Now landed in France, it is permitted to indicate the part played by these intrepid civilians, whose deeds for the most part have gone unsung. It is not generally known that the Merchant Marine suffered the largest ratio of casualties of any branch of the services, and many of the names on the list are not classified “wounded” or “missing”  in March 1941 gecause their graves are at the bottom of the oceans.”
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Merel is cantor emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel.