Naval History Blog

Heroism is not confined to the battlefield, and opportunities to demonstrate it occur as naval aviators train to be ready for war in time of peace.

On 31 August 1939, the day before war would begin in Europe that would eventually become a global conflict, it was business as usual for naval aviators at Hampton Roads, Virginia.

That morning, 27-year old ENS James H. Eoff, A-V(N), USNR, of Bombing Squadron Four, attached to the Ranger (CV-4) Air Group, took off in a Vought SB2U-1 [Vindicator] from NAS Hampton Roads, on what was slated to be a routine navigation and radio training flight.  Radioman 3d Class Joseph T. George rode in the after cockpit as his passenger.

At about 1022, a witness on the ground heard the sound of an engine cutting out. Eoff, apparently realizing that the plane was in extremis and the terrain below would not permit a forced landing, ordered his passenger to bail out.

Tragically, Radioman 3d Class George’s parachute became fouled on a part of the plane, for he seemed to be dangling some 15 feet behind and below it. Eyewitnesses then saw the SB2U-1 sway from side to side, as if Eoff was trying to dislodge his trapped passenger. In staying at the controls, however, the young pilot sacrificed his own chance to jump clear of the plane in its terminal dive as it plunged to earth in a near-vertical attitude near Stony Creek, Virginia, and crashed, killing both men instantly.

For his courageously remaining with his doomed plane in an attempt to save his passenger’s life, ENS Eoff was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, posthumously.

On 28 August 1917, the Navy commissioned a long-distance radio station at Otter Cliffs, on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. The station was the project of Alessandro Fabbri, a sportsman and inventor who was an early devotee of the then-new field of long distance radio communications. After World War I began, Fabbri cleared the site, built the station, and offered it to the Navy on the condition that he be commissioned and placed in charge. The Navy agreed, and the station’s first officer in charge was Ensign Fabbri, United States Naval Reserve Force.

The station’s isolation from radio noise and location far up the East Coast made it the best site in the Navy for trans-Atlantic communications. After the war the station continued in service, and then-Lieutenant Fabbri was awarded the Navy Cross for his service. Tragically, Fabbri died of pneumonia in 1922 at age 44.

The station continued in use into the 1930s, but the buildings were not maintained and eventually became an eyesore. A number of interested citizens, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr. asked the Navy to have the buildings removed, but the station was too important to consider closing it. The Navy did agree, however, that if Rockefeller could identify and outfit a similarly useful site somewhere within fifty miles of Otter Cliffs, the Navy would turn over the Otter Cliffs facility to him. He would then donate the site to Acadia National Park once the buildings were removed.

Rockefeller agreed, and built a new station to the tip of Schoodic Peninsula about five miles away. The buildings at Otter Cliffs were demolished and the property donated to Acadia National Park. A plaque commemorating the service of Alessandro Fabbri can still be seen there.

The new radio station was commissioned in 1935. After several name changes it ended up as Naval Security Group Activity Winter Harbor. NSGA Winter Harbor was disestablished in 2002, and the Schoodic Peninsula property was turned over to the National Park Service.

Charles Ellet, Jr.

Charles Ellet, Jr. gained early fame as a civil engineer and designer of suspension bridges in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Navy Department initially mocked the frail engineer for his design of an unarmed steam vessel used for breaking blockades in the 1850s. Determined, Ellet went so far as to submit plans to Imperial Russia during the Crimean War. Seeing the success of the CSS Virginia’s ramming blows at Hampton Roads, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton grew convinced and offered Ellet a commission as an Army Colonel and money to construct the United States Ram Fleet for operations on the Mississippi River in coordination with the Western Gunboat Flotilla. Each steam-powered ram was braced with iron bars along the bow, creating a powerful and centralized force utilizing the weight of the vessel and flow of the fast-moving Mississippi River. His design quickly proved adequate at the June 1862 Battle of Memphis, where Ellet’s Ram Fleet decimated the Confederate River Defense Fleet. Fortune did not smile for Ellet, however, as he died two weeks later from a leg wound received during the melee.

James Eads

Indiana native James Eads made a name for himself in St. Louis, Missouri as a civil engineer, boat builder, and salvager. At the beginning of the war, the government contracted him to quickly construct seven shallow-draft gunboats for riverine warfare. These ships, with flat-bottoms, wide-beams, and 2.5 inch armor plating, became known as the “City” class ironclads. City class ships were a revolution in design, as the casemates constructed by naval constructor Samuel Pook helped earn their nickname “Pook’s Turtles.” These ships became some of the more famous Union ships during the war, including the St. Louis, Carondelet, and Cairo, which was sunk by a naval mine during the first attempt to take Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1862. Eads would earn greater fame after the war for his construction of the Mississippi River bridge, also known as the Eads Bridge, in St. Louis. Eads held more than fifty patents at the time of his death in 1887.

For more information on Charles Ellet, Jr. and his rams, please go here.

For more information on James Eads, please go here.

The submarine USS Stingray (SS 186) landed fifteen Philippine personnel and six tons of supplies on the island of Luzon on 27 August 1944. This operation was in support of guerilla operations in advance of the U.S. landings in the Philippines. This mission was one of dozens of “special transport” missions carried out by submarines to land, support, or evacuate people ashore on Japanese-held islands throughout the war.

A historical marker near the landing site was dedicated in 2007. Two Stingray sailors and one Blackfin (SS 322) sailor—all in their eighties—attended the ceremony at which the marker was dedicated not only to the Stingray landing, but to all the submarine landings in the Philippines. One Stingray sailor, Basil Wentworth, said that he had been told after the mission that the landing party had been killed soon after arriving, and he did not find out until the year 2000 that the landing had been successful.

This landing mission occurred on the twelfth of Stingray’s sixteen war patrols. Stingray was at Manila on 7 December 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and began her first war patrol immediately. After a wartime record that included numerous special missions and four confirmed sinkings of Japanese merchant vessels, Stingray was decommissioned in late 1945 and sold for scrapping two years later.

The U.S. brig Washington was one of a number of vessels employed by the Navy to survey and map the coasts and harbors of the United States for the Coast Survey. The Coast Survey (predecessor to today’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) was part of the Treasury Department, but employed officers of the U.S. Navy. A number of young, scientifically minded naval officers were assigned to survey duty when their services were not needed for naval operations.

The brig Washington, under the command of Lieutenant Thomas R. Gedney, was employed in summer 1839 in surveying and sounding operations off the eastern end of Long Island, New York. While working between Gardiner’s Island and Montauk Point on 26 August, the ship’s crew spotted and captured a suspicious vessel lying at anchor off Culloden Point. They found her to be the Spanish schooner Amistad, which had set sail from the coast of Africa a few months previously carrying two white passengers and 54 slaves, bound for Guanaja, Cuba. Four days out of port the slaves rose and murdered the captain and his crew, saving the two Spanish passengers to navigate the ship back to Africa. Instead the Spaniards sailed the vessel northward and westward by night in hopes that Amistad  would be intercepted. During two months of aimless sailing the ship ran low on food and water, and nine slaves died. Lieutenant Gedney took possession of Amistad, taking her first to New London, Connecticut, and then turning her over to authorities in New Haven, the closest port with a U.S. District Marshal.

The brig Washington was transferred to the Coast Survey on 23 April 1840, but was called back to naval service during the Mexican War. The vessel was stationed at New Orleans at the outbreak of the Civil War and was taken over by Louisiana authorities soon after that state seceded from the Union on 31 January 1861. Little is known of the ship thereafter. In June 1861, Commander David Dixon Porter reported that the ship was being fitted out at New Orleans and was almost ready for sea, but no clues to the ship’s subsequent career thereafter have been found.

On the morning of 25 August 1949, during a training cruise north of the Arctic Circle, the submarine Cochino (SS-345), in company with Tusk (SS-426), attempted to submerge to snorkel depth in the Barents Sea, but the crashing waves played havoc with these efforts.  At 1048, a muffled thud rocked Cochino and news of a fire in the after battery compartment quickly passed through the boat.  A second explosion soon followed and CDR Rafael Benitez, the commanding officer, ordered all of the crew not on watch or fighting fires topside.  During this orderly evacuation, however, Seaman J. E. Morgan fell overboard.  The 48° water and the swells created by the 20 to 25 mph winds rapidly exhausted the sailor, so Chief Torpedoman’s Mate Hubert H. Rauch dove into the chilly sea to keep him afloat before Culinary Specialist Clarence Balthrop pulled him to safety.

At 1123, another explosion badly burned LCDR Richard M. Wright, the executive officer, and left him temporarily in a state of shock, as he moved to sever the connection between the after and forward batteries on board Cochino to stem the generation of dangerous hydrogen gas.  Thanks in part to a safety line run by LT (j.g.) Charles Cushman, Jr., by 1208, 60 men huddled, cold and wet, on the bridge and deck of the submarine.  Almost all of them had not had time to dress properly for the stormy weather.  It was no better for those who remained below, as men began to pass out from the gas and toxic smoke.  At 1230, Tusk attempted to come alongside, but the swells and wind made this nearly impossible, but she did manage to send needed medical supplies to Cochino by raft.

CDR Benitez decided that he needed get word of the dire conditions on board to Tusk and the Commander, Submarine Development Group Two.  Aware of the perils that awaited him, ENS John Shelton agreed to make the attempt as did a civilian engineer on board, Mr. Robert Philo.  After receiving confirmation of Philo’s desire to make the journey, CDR Benitez ordered the men lowered into the angry sea, but their raft immediately overturned.  Sailors from Tusk pulled Shelton and Philo alongside as they desperately clung to the raft, but the waves that swept across the submarine prevented them being brought on board.  Seaman Norman Walker jumped into water to help both men onto Tusk, but not before the waves slammed Philo’s head against the hull.  By this time, fifteen men from that submarine stood on the deck handling lines and attempting to resuscitate Philo, when an unusually large wave broke one of the lifelines and swept eleven members of the Tusk crew and the still unconscious Philo overboard.  In addition to Philo, the sea claimed the lives of six of Tusk’s crew including Electrician’s Mate John Guttermuth whose inflatable life jacket had burst upon hitting the water which left only his boots inflated as he attempted to save the unconscious Fireman Robert F. Brunner, Jr.  He fought desperately to keep his head above water, but eventually drowned in the frigid sea with his boots still visible above the water.  A kinder fate awaited LT (j.g.) Philip Pennington when LCDR George Cook dove over the side to pluck him from the unruly waves.  Of two life rafts thrown to those who been swept overboard, one was recovered empty, but the other contained Torpedoman’s Mate Raymond Reardon who suffered gravely from exposure to the elements.  Engineman Henry McFarland entered the water but could not reach the raft then Seaman Raymond Shugar overcame the raging waters long enough to attach a line to Reardon who was subsequently rescued.

By 1800, Cochino had regained power and signaled Tusk that she could make ten knots but had no steering.  It appeared the crippled boat might make it back to Norway.  However, at 2306 she suffered a fatal blow in the form of yet another battery explosion.  Tusk loosed her ready torpedoes then transferred the 76 officers and men from the stricken submarine.  CDR Benitez, the last to leave Cochino, departed only minutes before the boat slipped beneath the waves.  These selfless acts of heroism provide an example of the dedication and comraderie that animates our submariners.  Only their bravery and professionalism kept the tragic toll from being far higher.

Rare footage shot by a crewmember with his own movie camera aboard USS Seadragon (SSN-584) during her historic transit of the Northwest Passage in 1973. It was the Seadragon’s third, and last, voyage under the ice. Watch it on Navy TV.

USS Seadragon crosses the Northwest Passage in 1973.