My long-awaited book of heroic and hilarious stories about the Coast Guard’s greatest ships is finally here ! These are the biggest reasons you need to grab a copy. In the First World War, six Coast Guard cutters went to war in Europe. Their mission: take convoys all alone on the treacherous, 1,500-mile route from Gibraltar to Wales, evading German submarines all the way. They were given one rule: if a ship in your convoy is sunk, don’t stop to help, it will only make you the next target. But try telling a Coast Guard cutter to leave someone behind. This is the story of the cutter that didn’t listen. In April 1861, a Revenue Cutter sailed with a fleet of Navy ships on a desperate mission: resupply besieged Fort Sumpter so it wouldn’t surrender to the South. On the way, though, a storm blew the rest of her convoy off course, leaving her to arrive alone outside Charleston Harbor at around midnight. Picket ships spotted her and sent up flares; rumors spread in town that the North had come...
Three things. There was never a U. S. Revenue Marine Service. This is a fiction. The Revenue Marine was a bureau within the Treasury Department. The name Revenue Marine came about to differentiate it from 1) U. S. Marine Corps, and 2) the commercial marine. It no longer existed as a bureau after 1849. Sumner I. Kimball brought the name back in 1871 because he did not like the officers of the U. S. Revenue Cutter Service -- the official name of the service.
ReplyDeleteThe Coast Guard has not been part of the War Department. It was either Treasury or Navy Department for war service. The Coast Justice League is a new one for me. Got a reference?
The "literal" one million lives saved is another fiction created several years ago but there is no numerical or other basis in fact. Even Sumner I. Kimball in his annual reports about the U. S. Life Saving Service (not part of the USRCS or Coast Guard) admitted to creating numbers. It is the fine print in of the tabulations.
I know they don't teach these thinks at the CGA because no one there studies Coast Guard history.