Cadet-Midshipmen Enemy Action Reports
War or not, Kings Pointers sail where their ships take them: they sailed convoy routes during the Second World War and were hunted by submarines, surface raiders, and long-range bombers, a generation later, they were involved in military sealift to South Vietnam, and today they can be found in pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa and in the war zones declared in the War on Terror. The United States Merchant Marine Academy was and continues to be the only Federal service academy to send its students into active war zones. This policy is not a conscious choice on the part of the Academy administration, rather an unintentional facet of the hands-on training required of midshipmen for them to earn their Coast Guard licenses. A ship sails where a ship sails.
The Second World War reports of cadet-midshipmen are not encouraging. Their words relay the naked face of war and the struggle of young men to comprehend the horrors around them. The ribbons they were awarded after the fact acted as mementos for those harrowing days. Mr. Thomas F. McCaffery’s speech delivered at the United States Merchant Marine Academy Battle Standard Dinner on April 7, 2014 spoke about the courage of all those cadet-midshipmen who shipped out:
Please find all extant “Enemy Action Reports” below. Not to be skipped is the “Preliminary Note” from Volume 1 A-B, and which I have provided in full.
Preliminary Note
From early 1942 to early 1946, every cadet-midshipman in what was then the U. S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps was required, under standing orders of Corps Supervisor Richard R. McNulty (later Vice Admiral, USMS), to submit a letter reporting each casualty, whether by enemy action or marine peril, befalling any ship to which he was assigned for sea training in preparation for his advanced course at the then newly established U. S. Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point, N. Y. His letter was to describe the casualty as he experienced it, detailing times and places, fatalities (especially to other cadet-midshipmen), damage to the writer’s ship or its attacker, acts of bravery or incompetence, and even personal observations on how the emergency arose and was handled.
In the war’s early months, the letters tended to be informal, often in longhand; but, as their volume increased and processing was systematized, they came generally to take one or both of two forms: (a) the typewritten letter to Corps Headquarters prepared at the district or other office to which the cadet-midshipman reported on coming ashore; (b) a blue-ink multiple copy, usually slightly edited to conform to security or style regulations, for circulation to an official distribution list. Little outright censorship is apparent, since the letters were classified “Confidential,” and so remained until the blanket postwar declassification. Each man was required to make his own report on any casualty in which he was involved, and any copying or textual collaboration was forbidden and punishable — at least to the extent of complete rewriting.
The collection here presented cannot be certified complete — in fact, is very probably incomplete. It comprises the contents of six thick, somewhat dilapidated file folders which came to light in the basement of Wiley Hall, the Academy Headquarters, in the mid-seventies, during preparation of the book We’ll Deliver, the early history of Kings Point. It is evidently a set of copies formerly maintained in some office on campus. The master set of originals which must have been maintained at Corps Headquarters in Washington has not been found, and may well have ceased to exist during the Rothschild cutbacks of the early fifties. No other duplicate files are known.
As found, the Wiley basement files were almost completely without organization, aside from a very loose chronological sequence between entire folders. While made up chiefly of cadet-midshipman casualty letters, they also included official correspondence pertaining to the shipboard phase of individuals’ training, all seemingly inserted with no other order or sequence than that in which they dropped into the basket after circulation. As a result, the “a” and “b” versions of the same cadet-midshipman letter might be widely separated — even appearing in different folders. In addition, such collateral matter as official commendations, background reports on special achievements , news correspondents’ dispatches, masters’ and chief engineers’ performance reports, and cadet-midshipmen’s requests for ribbons and “stars” were consigned to the same file, evidently at random.
The bulk of the collection, and of course that which gives it its principal historic value, consists of the letters written by shipboard students to report the destruction or damaging of their ships, and the deaths of fellow Cadet Corpsmen. However, it is believed that, rather than attempt to draw a line between more important and less important, the contents of these exhumed files should be presented in their entirety, but sorted and rearranged in alphabetical order of the cadet-midshipman names involved.
Thus, under each man’s name will be found the casualty letters he submitted (both “a” and “b” versions, plus the relatively small number of longhand “first drafts” that were preserved) as well as any other official correspondence concerning his service, or death, at sea. In cases where, for such reasons, an individual cadet-midshipman is mentioned in another individual ‘s letter, a facsimile of that letter is inserted in his own alphabetical position, to obviate cross- referencing.
As a further aid in using the collection, it has been supplied with two indexes: one of cadet-midshipmen and one of the ships to which they were assigned for training. The first shows, for each man, a serial number (having no significance outside the collection), his name, whether he was lost in action, the types of correspondence pertaining to him, and the ship in which he served at the time of that correspondence. The second is an alphabetical listing of such ships, in which the serial numbers from the first are used to show which cadet-midshipmen were assigned to each.
The first impact of these almost-lost records of an already distant era of American hazard and heroism at sea is to impart new emphasis and illumination to the Academy motto Acta non Verba. But they also testify how clearly the men who planned Kings Point and molded its first student generations perceived the indispensability of the Verba in building and perpetuating its tradition.
Enemy Action Reports 1942-1946, Vol. 1 – Vol. 9
- Volume 1 A-B
- Volume 2 C-D
- Volume 3 E-F-G
- Volume 4 H-I-J
- Volume 5 K-L
- Volume 6 M-N
- Volume 7 O-P-Q-R
- Volume 8 S-T
- Volume 9 U THRU Z
Enemy Action Reports Charts & Analysis
This (very busy) scatter-plot graph of Enemy Action Reports (note: I have normalized the data by including only one report per vessel) by month and year is quite telling – even though the data are incomplete – as it shows the devastation of United States fleets by the Axis during the initial years of the war, and how the tide was turned by 1944. Although correlation does not translate into causation, the additional layers of the dates of Merchant Marine Distinguished Service Medal & Meritorious Service Medal awards to cadet-midshipmen along with “the 142” casualties, suggests awards came during periods of low Cadet Corps morale; by the same token, Cadet-Midshipman Edwin O’Hara’s posthumous award came at the height of cadet-midshipmen engagement with the enemy.
Above is a cleaner chart only showing “the 142” (casualties of the Cadet Corps) and the months of Merchant Marine Distinguished Service and Meritorious Service Medal award to cadet-midshipmen. Award of all gallantry medals to the Cadet Corps ended in December 1946.
Larger charts and all data points are here.
The spreadsheet below provides the raw data for the charts. It is a complete and corrected list of all cadet-midshipmen post-action reports; these actions include enemy engagement and collisions. Where the reports note a fellow cadet-midshipman was lost or became a casualty, these individuals are noted in the “Casualties” column; their respective pages on the Kings Pointers in World War II site may be reached by clicking on their entry. Transcribed reports done by midshipmen on the behalf of the American Merchant Marine Museum are linked off select vessels.
Special thanks are owed to Dr. Joshua Smith at the American Merchant Marine Museum for granting me access to the reports.