the ghost fleet

Introduction

“Ghost Fleet,” is an apt metaphor for the United States Army’s defunct fleet of transports and auxiliaries. Many “forgotten” fleets are not given due credit, yet none being so termed are quite large and have such an extensive history. What glimpses remain of the Army’s Second World War fleet are flickers, not quite solid – ghostly. The writing on it does exist; only it does not find its way into extensive circulation and is not the subject of popular writing about the Second World War – although the scholarship on the subject is excellent.

The idea of a large oceanic fleet under the control of the U.S. Army is often met with surprise and incredulity. It is interesting that such a vital and large logistical operation is so obscure today, especially since the Army once operated more ships than the U.S. Navy in the Second World War. Nevertheless, the Army’s maritime history reaches back to the nation’s early days. It involves many branches of the service with a wide range of functions.

Present-day, the only comparatively well-known maritime activity run by the Army is that of the Corps of Engineers. Its most visible fleet is that which does waterway dredging. Perhaps the second-best known is the combat functions of the Corps of Engineers in amphibious operations in which they operate landing craft and various special function small vessels in immediate support of landings and the follow-on combat engineering required for building supply lines and operational support.

The Army’s fleet came in a wide variety. First under the Quartermaster Corps and, in 1942 and after, the Transportation Corps acquired, maintained, and operated the large transport vessels and generally did so for the Signal Corps, Air Corps, and Coast Artillery Corps. Although the latter two Corps provided crews, vessel acquisition and maintenance functions lay with the same organization operating the transports. Yard craft were acquired, maintained, and generally operated by the Harbor Boat Service. The Army Mine Planter Service maintained vessels under the Coast Artillery Corps. The Signal Corps operated several large transport type-ships. And, the Corps of Engineers had waterway work vessels; it was the operator of the transport fleet that acquired and maintained these vessels.

Much less well known is the Army Air Corps (AAC) – later, the Army Air Forces (AAF) – operation of small, fast vessels resembling the more famous PT Boat. These were originally intended to be rescue craft for downed aviators, usually termed “crash boats.” Their function tended to expand in combat areas where they often became fast gunboats and, as is typical of gunboat groups, acquired weapons entirely outside the “normal” complement. The AAC also operated vessels to recover the aircraft that were – in fact – small salvage craft. The situation is complicated by the fact that even during the Second World War the air arm was beginning to exercise independence – sometimes with considerable friction with the War Department in general – and showing signs of duplicating functions found elsewhere in the Army’s own fleet. One contentious area was the air arm’s push to create its own supply system; it did operate small freight vessels to that end.

Background

Without adequate transport and logistics, military grand strategy and tactics are non-starters. It has been said that amateurs talk of strategy and tactics, and professionals of logistics. The concentration of forces is worthless if they have no supply, no ammunition, no food – if they can even be concentrated in the first place. The Army had to rely on its own maritime resources until fairly recently in its history. It has been said:

Logisticians are a sad and embittered race of men who are very much in demand in war, and who sink resentfully into obscurity in peace. They deal only in facts, but must work for men who merchant in theories. They emerge during war because war is very much a fact. They disappear in peace because peace is mostly theory. The people who merchant in theories, and who employ logisticians in war and ignore them in peace, are generals.
Author Unknown

Between each war – from the Civil War to today – the fleets of the Army and Navy tended to shrink to levels that could not support operations of the next conflict. The outcome of each conflict tended to teach the same lesson again. And in turn, each lesson was quickly forgotten by the public, the politicians in particular, and the military planners in specific.

Even for a continental war such as the Civil War, logistics without ships was entirely impossible. The Army operated a large support fleet and an odd combatant – the Army ram. With Reconstruction, the Army’s fleet was disbanded.

The war between the United States and Spain found the nation lacking military transport. As a result, an Army fleet was reborn and became the root of a very large fleet spreading worldwide up until 1949. It maintained a substantial foothold in military planning and, in some ways, reached its zenith after the Spanish-American War. The Army’s fleet was the means of transporting troops, dependents, and civilians on government business to the newly acquired territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Philippines – the service to the latter became somewhat legendary. In becoming a necessity doing so, it proved itself as an indispensable tool.

The First World War found transport lacking again, and ships were rushed into Army service. The fleet grew, and a foretaste of the allocations between the Army and the Naval Transport Service of the next war appeared. Ships moved between the two services and sailed together in convoy. The Army’s decision to form its own fleet during the war with Spain was informed in part by experiences with charter vessels refusing risks during landings. In the First World War, it began having problems with its own civilian-manned ships and began a transfer of function to the Navy’s Naval Oceanic Transport Service (NOTS), which was manned by naval personnel. The Army ships themselves appear to be manned by naval personnel during the First World War.

At the end of the “War to End Wars,” the fleet fell to a level just adequate to maintain the remote outposts gained largely during the war with Spain. The runs to the remote and exotic islands resumed routine and somewhat romantic (at least for those with better accommodations) operations. Young women dependents met young officers on the transports, and weddings sometimes followed. In the unrealistic peaceful glow of those postwar years, there was a certain romantic ambiance in the passage to far-off islands aboard these Army vessels.

The maritime transport situation was nearly completely lacking as a true worldwide war hit the United States in 1940-1941. Lack of ocean-going transport was a dire emergency that crippled the potential for immediate military responses after Pearl Harbor had plunged the nation into an already well-established war. Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton in United States Army In World War II, The War Department, Global Logistics and Strategy 1940-1943; Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington, D.C. outline the state of affairs in regard to transport when global war caught up with the United States:

The Army was operating about this time some fifteen ocean-going vessels – eight combination troop transports, which carried some cargo, and seven freighters, some of the latter under long-term charter. Two of its transports were over thirty years old, former German internees from World War I; all were more or less makeshift converts to military use; some were so nearly unseaworthy that the Department of Commerce had raised objections to their continued operation. The small and shoddy fleet was fully occupied in late 1940 in supporting the existing overseas garrisons.

To make matters worse, there was not enough transport to support an invasion of Vichy French Martinique, where the Axis appeared to be building as a base in the Caribbean to attack American and Allied targets. Instead, the U.S. Navy blockaded the island. Shipping worldwide was in critically short supply since the major carriers of U.S. trade – the British, Belgian, and Norwegian – were involved in their own battles or had capitulated; meanwhile, the U-boats were taking their toll. The tide turned with the crash-building programs of Liberty and Victory hulls. Still, shipping shortage is a constant theme during the war that never quite went away and was compounded by organizational disputes and inefficiencies; the major bottleneck in fielding a minimal force overseas was lack of marine transport.

Discussion

A lingering question on the “Ghost Fleet” is why is it so obscure. Perhaps much of the current blame can be placed on the fact that the Army and Navy before 1949-1950 were entirely separate Cabinet-level Departments with sometimes shocking lack of joint planning. It does not explain the fact that even during the days of the huge Army fleet supporting worldwide operations, the fleet was treated as “surprising” in some news stories.

During the height of the Army’s fleet’s size during the Second World War, it suffered from obscurity. News outlets often treated it as a “surprise, the Army has a fleet” story as detailed in articles from Yachting in March 1943, “The Army’s Navy,” and May 1944, “The Army’s Fleet Comes of Age.” Troops boarding transports were often surprised to discover the ship was not Navy with a United States Ship (USS) designation; rather, they were sailing aboard an Army ship, a United States Army Transport (U.S.A.T.). To complicate matters, some of the ships did switch, with some being SS (commercial), U.S.A.T., USS and even cycling back through the latter two during the war (post-war, many of these ships became U.S.N.S. – operated by the MSTS/MSC). The ships also looked somewhat alike; the Army’s distinctive stack colors went drab for the war.

The Army’s fleet was always considerably below “secondary” to Infantry, Armor, and Artillery. Support services simply do not get attention. It could be argued that the Army considered its ships as floating trucks. The Army’s peculiar indifference to its seagoing past might also be a somewhat spiteful reaction to losing these assets to the Navy in the consolidation into a Department of Defense (DoD) in 1949-1950. Despite its meticulous attention to its history, the Army involved itself in the large-scale destruction of its fleet’s records – particularly ship logs – during the period of losing its function during the creation of the DoD and the demise of the separate cabinet-level War and Navy Departments. Reports on microfilm relate to infighting, with the Army losing many of its past innovations. The War Department was Army, but in the DoD, the Army shed its Air Corps, a combat arm, to become the U. S. Air Force. Compared to that, the loss of major components of its maritime arm, largely populated by civilian mariners, was of minor importance. Any time an agency moves or gets reorganized, it sheds history, but a near purge of its maritime history is odd, indeed.

In 1949 the Military Sea Transportation Service (MSTS), under the Navy, took control of what had been a fleet of Army transports. According to an Army “Facilities – Equipment” inventory dated 31 December 1946, there were 417 transports in service with a total tonnage of 3,590,900 (DWT) with a capacity for 269,285 troops. At this point, only 110 vessels were Army-owned. The remaining 304 were chartered under various schemes, with three still allocated by War Shipping Administration. Apparently, the Army-owned ships were concentrated in troop transport. The Army owned only 26.4% of the ships and 20.5% of the deadweight tonnage, but those ships had 57.7% of the troop-carrying capacity. This 1946 fleet was aging and showing the effect of the end of the war and drawdowns. The fleet continued to change composition as ships moved from Army to Navy during continued postwar drawdown and readjustments until the final drastic change of the Army handing its oceanic transport function to the Navy’s MSTS.

MSTS was created to correct perceived weaknesses and duplication of resources at the time of Armed Service reorganization into the DoD. The experience in the war showed the Army operating its own ships to be an inefficiency, although ad hoc joint operations with the Navy had been common. Under the DoD, the Navy would operate oceanic transport, and Army would give up all its oceanic transport functions. The Army doubted the efficacy of the Navy in handling a task it had traditionally eschewed. The test of the new organization came with the MSTS’ sudden call to support the Korean War. MSTS performed admirable service, and the decision to cleave the fleet from Army control remained – the Navy congratulated itself, but it was mariners originally recruited by the Army that ran the show.

Sources

There is precious little published material on the Army’s fleet. The best single source for ship identification is David H. Grover, U.S. Army Ships and Watercraft of World War II (1987). Mr. Grover’s dedication is heartening:

To the mariners of the Army – civilians as well as soldiers – who manned the vessels of this huge but little-known fleet, this book is respectfully dedicated as a token of long-overdue recognition.

The merchant mariners, in general, have lacked recognition. It is little known by many that on a percentage casualty rate, it was the Merchant Marine that had the highest casualty rate. There are somewhat amusing stories of these men deciding after being torpedoed several times deciding to enlist in the Army was a safer line of work – only to find themselves on a truck to an Army vessel shortly thereafter and right back in the sub’s sights. The transport crews were often civilian merchant mariners but also included Army and even Coast Guard and Navy personnel. Some of the Army ships were entirely crewed by Coast Guard. These civilian mariners sailing the Army vessels are even more forgotten than the general merchant mariners. The fact that British subjects from “down under” served aboard U.S. Army vessels is even less known, though remembered in Australia and New Zealand to some extent.

Mr. Grover noted that his intent was largely to recover and consolidate an inventory of the ships. This was a scope that did not include a great deal of discussion of the exploits of the fleet or individual ships. His count of vessels is 111,006 Army to 74,708 Navy, including all the Navy’s combatants and auxiliaries. Both figures include the Army’s 88,366 and the Navy’s 60,974 assault/landing craft. The Army’s fleet included 1,665 oceangoing vessels of over 1,000 tons. The Army’s fleet was almost entirely transport or maintenance; the Navy’s was largely combatant.

Mr. Grover detailed that often the difficulty in researching Army ships is the lack of consolidated references to the ships. He states the problem thus:

Unlike the records of Navy and Coast Guard ships that were centralized in responsible bureaus, Army vessel records are scattered throughout a military establishment that today has little awareness of and, indeed, little interest in, its maritime heritage. […] A third challenge is to piece together the fragmentary records in a way that leads to reasonable conclusions while still accounting for significant discrepancies, omissions, and even mysteries within the information available for specific ships and groups of ships.

Two major sources for Mr. Grover’s ship listings were a compilation of wartime construction contracts for the Army’s lesser vessels with many details of those vessels. The other was a Transportation Corps Register of Harbor Boat Designation Numbers with similar information that is “full of pen-and-ink corrections, some of which are undecipherable” and not in agreement with the same information in the other document. In closing, he notes:

Accepting the awareness that it is all virtually gone should make the Army no less proud of the fact that the vessel fleet existed on the scale it did. But the Army does not seem proud; indeed it does not care. Research efforts in behalf of this book were repeatedly greeted with disinterest by the higher echelons of Army history and public affairs offices.

Let us hope that military historians eventually will rediscover the reality that the largest armada of World War II vessels belonged to the United States Army. While the surviving vessels and crew members are still with us, much more needs to be done to preserve the outstanding record of that fleet of vessels and the men who sailed in them.

In the decade following, Charles Dana Gibson partially answered Mr. Grover’s challenge. He was a prolific author and concentrated his writing on the history of the “Army’s Navy” from the Civil War through the United States’ entry into the Second World War. His most well-known work, Over Seas: U.S. Army Maritime Operations, 1898 Through the Fall of the Philippines, details the Army Transport Service’s operations in detail from the war with Spain, the Philippine Insurrection, the Boxer Rebellion, the Moro War, U.S. adventures in Mexico, the First World War, actions during the Interwar Period, and the Philippines up until May 1942. The appendices contain a trove of information; it is approachable and thoroughly annotated. But, Mr. Gibson’s output did not cross past 1942. Salvatore R. Mercogliano took up the mantle of writing the history of the MSTS, but those crucial seven years remain in limbo.

The story of Mac Arthur’s Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) “X fleet” or “permanent fleet” was also mentioned in Mr. Grover’s work: “Because of its remote location and its low priority status in the allocation of Allied shipping, the Southwest Pacific Area of the Pacific Theater of Operations was forced to create its own system of procuring ships. This system was pragmatic and not overly concerned with the exact details of charters and the legal status of vessels that were acquired.” This fleet approached the numbers in the regular Army fleet at times and was quite varied “19 Baltic Coaster or N3 types, 15 concrete ships, 20 Liberty ships, and 33 of the coastal C1 or ‘Knot’ type. Many of these ships had been assigned to the command; others had simply been ‘retained’ or kept in the area after delivering cargoes there, a practice resented by their merchant crews and logistic planners stateside.

This SWPA fleet included “Lakers” from the Great Lakes and more or less included (at least used extensively) a side-wheel steamer built in 1910. It also included ships from nations under occupation, China, and even Italy. Australians and New Zealanders were contracted to crew many of the vessels. Forgotten Fleet by Bill Lunney and Frank Finch is the defining work on the Small Ships section of the U.S. Army Transportation Corps – Water Division in the Southwest Pacific Area (SWPA) during the Second World War. The Small Ships were Australian vessels, crewed almost entirely by Australians wearing U.S. uniforms and flying the U.S. flag.

It would be remiss not to mention: the 1949 monograph by Dr. James R. Masterson, U. S. Army Transportation In The Southwest Pacific Area 1941-1947, is a basic reference used in many of the official histories. It is freely available from the Army’s History Command.

Introduction

Background

Discussion

Sources

Further Reading