usmsts alameda historic sketch
When the United States entered the Second World War, it found itself woefully unprepared to operate ocean-borne supply routes despite recent legislation to provide for a well-equipped and crewed merchant fleet. As German and Japanese forces sank American ships, not an insignificant number of veteran mariners met their death. The United States acted fast to build replacement ships and stepped-up training activities to replace the dead. By the war’s end, there were close to a dozen training stations. Some facilities were built with the view that they were “for the duration,” such as the training activity that supplanted the resort at Catalina Island off Los Angeles or the cadet school at Coyote Point, San Mateo. One of the jewels of the training establishment was the United States Maritime Service Officer School, Alameda, or USMOTS Alameda for short. At the end of its life, it had the name United States Maritime Service Training Station, Alameda since it combined training for the licensed and unlicensed crew – thus, I use the democratic USMSTS Alameda. It was a component of the U.S. government-sponsored mass-training program of unlicensed Merchant Mariners during the Second World War.
Introduction
Alameda was a finishing school for future “hawsepipers” or Merchant Mariners who started their careers as Ordinary Seamen – men who did the grunt work of chipping paint on deck, carrying buckets of water in engineering spaces, or washing dishes in the galley – and rose through the ranks to become officers who managed ships. The shipping industry traditionally ran along class lines: men from the middle class or those who could afford a technical education joined the ranks of officers, and those who could not become unlicensed seamen. Often bridging the two groups aboard were hawsepipers, but they were few and far between. Never before had the Federal government taken such an active role in educating future hawsepipers. Government planners understood that these men had direct experience and knew the profession from the keel up; for the first time, to run the new ships off the ways, class barriers needed to be broken, and outmoded means of education discarded. Just as the middle class comprised most management roles in American industry, so too was true in the American Merchant Marine – traditionally, free movement between the classes was possible, but usually only attained through luck and hard work. The same was true for moving from unlicensed to licensed positions on a ship – the hard work involved book learning and mastery of subjects such as trigonometry as used in navigation or mechanical engineering for work below decks. Before, the onus of breaking out of the ranks was solely the responsibility of a future hawsepiper. By bringing more hawsepipers into the fleet, Alameda turned the industry on its head and brought about a more egalitarian atmosphere aboard American ships. Thus, Alameda was a social experiment that paid off. From it graduated many future ship captains and chief engineers; statistics are lacking, but if they survived the war, many graduates stayed on in their careers postwar if there was a billet.
Riot
Soon after its opening, the United States Maritime Officers Training Station at Neptune Beach, Alameda, erupted into a riot: three hundred officer candidates refused to muster for class, and a contingent of instructors resigned their positions. All involved flooded Congress with letters and telegrams speaking of abuse and the pointlessness of the strict military-style discipline at USMOTS Alameda. This campaign culminated in the sacking of Captain Haakon Norby – the school’s executive officer – the day afterward, on 25 April 1943.
Such actions as the students’ riot could be painted as treasonous during a war or worse if done on a military installation. However, USMOTS Alameda was not a military base but an officer upgrade school run by the United States Maritime Service. The riot was telling of the nature of the men who attended the school: they were not young and impressional seamen, but rather veterans of unrestricted submarine warfare – roughly half had been on ships under fire, survivors of torpedoed and shelled vessels, with many adrift at sea for days and weeks. A union representative commented on the affair, “Some of us have been to sea for 20 years. We are here to learn to run ships, to attend a merchant marine school, and not military institute.” These men did not need military discipline to prepare them for battle – they had already experienced it. In fact, just before the riot, the school’s commandant addressed a group of graduates, outlining the ethos of the school and their training:
“It is not our purpose to call you to sea service in the Nation’s hour of peril and then, in calmer days, to let you rust and gather barnacles like the old Hog Islanders. The Government means to see this thing through with you through to victory and then full steam ahead to the realization of America’s possibilities as a leading shipping Nation for all time to come.”
In this context, the school was not merely a wartime instrument. Congress legislated the training program before the war as a waystation in the overall careers of a generation of Merchant Mariners for the country lacked trained maritime professionals for modern ships. Alameda’s training program came of age under war-time duress. When the school opened, there were not enough mariners with licenses to operate ships in positions of technical authority since many were dying at sea, and the volume of ships was too great for America’s small labor pool. The government’s training was primarily to allow the school’s enrollees to become ship’s officers – which the Nation sorely needed – and in turn for their vacated billets to be filled with less-skilled labor, which was also needed. After the war, the trainees were expected to go on as before to civilian careers.
Just as history is nuanced and often flawed, importance ought not to be ascribed to the firsts, but rather to the spirit of perseverance. USMOTS Alameda is not the first training station dedicated to officer upgrades – it was one of two. And as one of two, the courses were standardized for a standardized fleet. In the spirit of mass production of human capital for the war effort, Alameda appeared regimented; however, as noted in the narrative of the riot, merchant seamen were far from being militarized.
References
Page & Turnbull Architects, HISTORIC BUILDING PRESERVATION PLAN: Alameda Federal Center February 23, 1996
Page & Turnbull Architects, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, February 1996