The Third Voyage: A World War Ii Voyage of the Libertyship Albert Gallatio & Crew

By Wilbur Lawson

A busy little Navy tug officiously pulled the Noumea anti-submarine nets to one side and the Albert Gallatin, with her barge in tow, moved through the gap. A mile or so away on our port side were the U.S.S. South Dakota and an assortment of cruisers and destroyers. Ship after ship could be seen in a seemingly endless anchorage that reached to the horizon. We maneuvered through these ships until both the Gallatin and her tow were clear of the net and the opening could be safely closed.
Once inside, the barge cast off our cables and they were pulled up onto the Gallatins stern. We had been told that the big heavy lift crane we had towed up from Auckland was to be used to clean debris from this harbor, to make it safer for the Naval vessels using it and increase its usable space.
As soon as we were clear of the barge, we headed toward another set of nets and through them. Inside this net we began to pass more Naval vessels, all of a different type. Here were all kinds of ships crucial to operating a naval fleet far from the stateside Naval Bases. We glided past several ships encircled with small boats; with more coming and going in every direction. Their names were called out by crew members as we passed. I could only see numbers on the gray hulls. Their fleet functions became the subject of heated discussions and arguments among the onlooking experts. Here were the Navys supply, ammunition, and repair ships.
Next we glided past the Solace, a gleaming white hospital ship with bright red crosses painted on her sides, her rails lined with men, bandages gleaming whitely behind the shadowed rails. A few nurses were visible near the upper railings.
Still we continued on, past all of these invaluable vessels. When the pilot called for the anchor, we were far closer to Noumea than any other of the ships in sight. We had been placed where we would have the best possible protection if a Japanese attack came. We were carrying a cargo which the military brass believed to be of unmatched value. The Gallatin had loaded that valuable cargo in Auckland, New Zealand.
Along with the cargo, we carried twelve passengers. The first six passengers had kept to themselves and talked only when they had to during the trip from Auckland. Those who did hear a word or two from them found those words almost invariably hasty and nasty. This six were all older men, lean and sunburned Aussies and New Zealanders. Eccentric loners, they were coming here so they could be furtively returned to their bleak stations as coast watchers. There they would again report movements of Japanese ships to the Allied Pacific Command. Most of them had yellow faces and eyeballs from the atabrine pills they took, given to everyone chronically exposed to malaria.
The other six passengers were young and friendly American Army Air Force weathermen. They were bound somewhere far to the west of Noumea to establish weather stations on islands closer to the Japanese. From there they would send weather reports back to military intelligence. Both groups left the Gallatin immediately that we were anchored.
The boat which took them, first discharged a group of voluble, angry, and arguing Navy and Army Officers. These were the men charged with unloading our ship. Our cargo was so eagerly awaited that as these men climbed on board the Gallatin they were already arguing about who was to be in charge of the process. Whoever became the winner in this unloading operation would have a strong hand in any following negotiations.
These men had been waiting rather impatiently for us since we had left Auckland, New Zealand; for the holds of the S.S. Albert Gallatin were overflowing with twenty-four bottle cases of morale building New Zealand Waitemata beer!






CHAPTER SEVEN
The Beer Ship

Until the arrival of The Gallatins shipload of beer, the policy of the South Pacific Military Commands had prohibited alcoholic beverages for enlisted men of the Army

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 8, 2002
• ISBN: 9781469118611

Wilbur Lawson

Wilbur Lawson is a retired Quality Assurance Manager who lives on the Mendocino Coast of Northern California. Lawson started his working life in the lumber mill town where he now lives. He has been at various times a Research Technician and Pilot Plant Operator for two oil companies, a dubber and an extra in Italian movies, and worked in the electronics industry building silicon chip production equipment. His interest in history has led him to relate this story of his time as a cadet on a merchant ship during World War II.

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Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER ONE  Cadet Corps Preliminary School

CHAPTER TWO  The SS Albert Gallatin

CHAPTER THREE  To the Fijis, Late November 1942

CHAPTER FOUR  Learning Skills & Diplomacy

CHAPTER FIVE  New Zealand, Land of Butter

CHAPTER SIX  Noumea, New Caledonia

CHAPTER SEVEN  The Beer Ship

CHAPTER EIGHT  Esperitu Santo, New Hebrides, May 1943

CHAPTER NINE  Trouble in the Galley?

CHAPTER TEN  Esperitu Santo—Still Waiting

CHAPTER ELEVEN  The Sea Project

CHAPTER TWELVE  Back to The States

CHAPTER THIRTEEN  A Salad and a Hurricane

CHAPTER FOURTEEN  Nuevitas, Cuba, July 1943

CHAPTER FIFTEEN  Pensacola, Florida and Mobile, Alabama, July 1943

CHAPTER SIXTEEN  Kings Point, New York, August 1943

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN  Final Information

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN  In Retirement, 1990’s

This book was started nearly ten years ago as a series of casual reminiscences about WWII for the Yakdung Gang, a writing support group. With helpful critiques and support from them, I have finally expanded and finished the manuscript you read here. I received much help from fellow ex-Cadet Jim McFaul, who assisted me by refreshing my memories of events and of many names I had forgotten. Thanks to those who convinced me that what I was writing would be of interest to all those who have never been aboard a

Liberty Ship.

FOREWORD

The vast majority of books written about the second world war are about the military: the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. This one is about the civilians who moved the goods from America’s humming factories to the world wide battlegrounds. Once there, the military used them to fight the war. Looking back at the twentieth century, some occurrences written of in this book may be puzzling to the general American public. I hope what I have written will dispel some of that mystery.

My story is about a merchant ship, the SS (meaning Steam Ship) Albert Gallatin, and its crew. The Gallatin was launched in April of 1942, and during this story was on her third voyage. She was a Liberty Ship, a type of ship first referred to as such by President Roosevelt when he quoted Patrick Henry’s, Give me liberty or give me death as the first one, the Patrick Henry, was launched.

Merchant Marine crews were civilian, as much so as the men and women working in the humming factories and busy shipyards. They were as civilian as the truckers that drove supplies from the factories to the rail yards or the train crews there who moved the goods to the docks.

Once the goods were on these merchant ships, Axis submarines tried to prevent delivery of the goods by these civilians, using violent military means. If a merchant ship was sunk, the voyage officially ended at that point, and the wages of all surviving crew members stopped, according to traditional usage. At the end of WWII, American merchant seamen who had been imprisoned by the Japanese after their ships were captured or sunk, sometimes found it difficult to get passage back to the U.S. and had to make do with the discarded clothing they could find on returning troopships. Military personnel from the same prison camps were given months or years of back pay and new uniforms. In WWII Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, they called the Merchant Marine the Merchant Navy, which helped to define to the people of those countries how merchant ships differed from military ships.

In the united States it has become common recently for many writers to call these men Merchant Marines. Since they were and are NOT Marines, this has created a great deal of confusion. Properly speaking, these men should be called merchant seamen, merchant mariners, or just seamen; unless a specific term like Chief Mate, Ordinary Seaman, Fireman, Second Engineer, or able-bodied Seaman, etc., is used.

There were Naval personnel aboard all Allied wartime merchant ships. An American Navy Armed Guard, crew was placed aboard all American owned merchant vessels, not just those flying the American flag. This Armed Guard was usually in the charge of one Commissioned Officer. They maintained and fired the guns placed on merchant ships for the bitter battle against subs or planes.

Merchant ships were THE TARGETS of the German Submarine fleet. Merchant shipping was the reason the German Navy built and manned their submarine fleet. They did not build that sub fleet to challenge the British or Allied Navies. They built it to prevent war cargo from being delivered to their enemies by merchant ships. This was the longest lasting and most widespread battle of World War II. The German navy nearly won this battle in the Atlantic, sinking more ships than were being built early in the war, coming very close to cutting off vital food and military supplies to Britain, to China, and to Russia. Russian supplies were being delivered through Murmansk in far northern Russia and Karachi in what is now Pakistan. Chinese supplies traveled a long distance to India and then over land from India, over the Burma Road. The Liberty ship building program was a major factor in turning the tide of the sea battle.

The Japanese Navy operated under a different philosophy than the German Navy because of differing military situations in the Pacific and the Atlantic. Early in the war at least, the Japanese Navy confined submarine operations to Naval engagements, except for merchant ships directly supplying military operations, such as troop ships and tankers. Only 43 American merchant ships, of the total of more than 800 sunk and damaged during the war, were sunk by the Japanese.

We Americans built 2,710 Liberty ships; the largest group of identical ships ever built. They were the Model T’s of shipping. The vast majority, 95%, were nearly identical. The other 5% were modified. These modifications made them into tankers, special cargo carriers, troop ships, hospital ships, fitted them with diesel engines, or gave them other alterations.

The Liberty ship was developed from a successful old British design, changed to follow American shipyard practices and reasoning. It was a quickly built ship, light on machinery that the military might need, but still sturdy and economical to use.

The original British hull design was riveted. American shipyards had long ago changed to welded ships and had few riveters, so the design was changed to welded.

The British design burned coal. Fuel for the American Liberties was changed to oil. Oil leaves more space for cargo, for fuel oil may be carried in double bottom tanks along the curving bottom of the hull. Oil can also be pumped from tank to tank with little human effort, and takes up less space per heat unit.

Boilers were changed from scotch to water tube boilers. American shipyards had not built scotch marine boilers in forty years.

The British design had crews quarters in the ancient and traditional places on the bow and/or the stern, away from the central deck house. This was changed so that crew quarters were in the central deck house. All quarters were now in one section. This gave all crewmen heated cabins and much safer working conditions during stormy crossings, also speeding assembly in the shipyard.

The decks were changed from teak to steel, freeing many craftsmen and saving scarce teak.

Hull design was simplified so that the hull plates had few compound curves, which made forming them much simpler and quicker.

Most of these changes were made to allow mass production in the building of them. Some changes were to save precious steel for other aspects of the war. The anchor chain was shortened from 300 fathoms to 240 fathoms to save steel. Some ships had one chain measuring 130 fathoms while the other was eighty fathoms. Some went to sea with only one anchor.

Liberties were built as a five year vessel; a ship designed to last only five years. During World War II, it was often stated that if a Liberty ship made one successful voyage, it had paid for itself.

The SS ALBERT GALLATIN, the subject of this book, was built by California Shipbuilding Corporation at Terminal Island in Los Angeles, and launched in April of 1942. California Shipbuilding built 306 Liberties at an average cost of $1,858,000 each.

For readers who are near the coasts, two Liberty Ships have been restored to full operation as museum-memorials to those days, by men who had sailed on them.

One, the SS JEREMIAH O’BRIEN, may be seen and visited at Fort Mason in San Francisco, Ca. , The other, the SS JOHN W. BROWN, is on the east coast and may be visited at Baltimore, Maryland.

These ships are hauntingly like the wartime ship I remember in this book. The restored JEREMIAH O’BRIEN steamed to Normandy from San Francisco for the 50th anniversary of D-day in 1994, and was the only ship from all of the ships in the 1944 landings still able to return there under power.

When this third voyage begins in November of 1942, the SS ALBERT GALLATIN had already carried war supplies in two other voyages to the South Pacific; shuttling between San Francisco and Bora Bora, Tongatabu; Melbourne, Sydney and Darwin in Australia; Hobart in Tasmania, Antofagasta in Chile and Port Moresby in New Guinea.

CHAPTER ONE

Cadet Corps Preliminary School

There it was! Our first ship! Right in front of us, looming above the pier, with rust stains running untidily down over the gray paint on her flat sided hull. Noise from her rattling steam winches joined the clamor of scores of fork lifts rushing in all directions.

Jim and I dodged through the street traffic toward her. The wooden dock vibrated under our feet as we walked toward the gangplank leading up to her deck. Darting forklifts raced, braked, and dropped loads of cargo at all five holds in a smoky, crashing, banging, squeaking bedlam.

Since early August of 1942 Jim McFaul and I and our section mates had focused on this moment, studying day and night. Now Jim and I were boarding this ship to be part of her crew. The first phase of our training was over and the second was beginning. It was the wartime month of November 1942. I had just celebrated my 21st birthday, barely missing the upper age limit for beginning cadets.

* * *

Our training had begun three months earlier. Forty of us had arrived, as our orders instructed us, at the downtown San Francisco office of the united States Merchant Marine Cadet Corps.

We came together there to begin wartime training as Officers for Merchant Ships. Some of us would become Licensed Deck Officers and some of us would become Licensed Engineering Officers. Some of us would not finish the course.

We were a vital part of the program for operating the thousands of ships built for the wartime American Merchant Marine. Our group had assembled that morning in the office on San Francisco’s Market Street. We came from all over the western United States. We came from Washington, Oregon, Northern and Southern California, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho.

After a few terse questions, the Officer in charge grudgingly admitted that I really was future Cadet-Midshipman Wilbur J. Lawson. Even more grudgingly he conceded that I had legitimate orders to report to this office on this date and time. Back out in the crowded outer office, others like me