Here at LSOZI, we take off every Wednesday to look at the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period and will profile a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger
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Warship Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025: Frozen Comanche
USCG image.
Above we see the 165-foot (A) Algonquin-class U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Comanche (WPG 76) with her warpaint on, circa 1942, while part of the oft-forgotten Greenland Patrol during WWII. With Greenland and its defense in the news right now, it is worth revisiting the ship that started the whole discussion, so to speak.
The Algonquins
In 1934, the Coast Guard moved to construct a half dozen new ice-strengthened patrol gunboats (by Navy standards). These were based on the successful circa 1915 165-foot ice-breaking cutter Ossipee (WPG 50) but constructed with a reinforced belt at the waterline and a cutaway forefoot, features that, combined with their geared turbine drives– the first for the USCG– were thought capable of breaking up to two feet of sea ice.
USCGC Ossipee, view taken circa 1916, shortly after her completion. NH 89751
Coast Guard 165-foot cutter Ossipee, Boston Navy Yard, April 1932. Note her 3-inch guns forward. Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection
As noted by Scheina:
The plating doubled around the bow, the cutaway forefoot, short length, and medium draft made these cutters good ice boats. They had a heavy steel belt around the vessel at the waterline and relatively short bilge keels, so in a seaway they had a tendency to roll considerably.
Built for a total of just under $3 million in Public Works Administration construction allotments, three of these new cutters– Algonquin (WPG-75), Comanche, and Mohawk (WPG-78) — were awarded on 14 October 1934 with Pusey & Jones Company of Wilmington, Delaware while a week later on 23 October a second trio– USCGC Escanaba (WPG-77), Onondaga (WPG-79) and Tahoma (WPG-80)-– were contracted with Defoe on the Great Lakes at Bay City, Michigan.
Using a pair of side-by-side Foster-Wheeler high-pressure boilers to feed a centerline 1,500shp Westinghouse double-reduction geared turbine mated to a single screw, the Algonquins could make a paint-peeling 12.8 knots at full RPMs or a more economical 9.4 knots, with the latter allowing a 5,000nm range– long enough legs to wallow across the Atlantic if need be or pull far-off Bering Sea and International Ice Patrols.
Algonquin on trials in the Delaware River, 1934
A peacetime crew of six officers and 56 men could handle the cutter and a main battery of two 3″/50 guns, curiously arranged abreast of each other on the foc’sle, backed up by a pair of two quaint old 6-pounders off the bridge wings, provided a top-side armament. Typical of Coast Guard cutters for the time, the 3-inchers were almost always well greased up and covered, only fired on annual gunnery exercises, while the 6-pounders were used more liberally for law enforcement, saluting, line-throwing, and signaling. Typical peacetime allowances per cutter included 55 service rounds and 110 “Navy” blanks per 6-pounder and 60 service rounds per each 3-incher.
There were also enough small arms to send a light platoon-sized (30-man) landing force ashore, arranged in a six-man HQ team, two eight-man rifle squads, and an eight-man machine gun detachment. The 1938 small arms allowance for cutters of this size was for 40 M1903 Springfield rifles with bayonets and slings, 15 M1911 pistols with two magazines apiece, two M1917 Lewis guns, and at least one Thompson sub gun, all fed by 2,400 rounds of .30 caliber ball for the Lewis guns and rifles and a whopping 6,000 of .45 ACP for the pistols and Tommy guns. A full 38 sets of “landing force gear” including a FAK, mess kit, canteen, web belt with pouches, haversack, and pack carrier was stored for such use.
Coast Guard cutter crew made up in landing force kit. Note the M1903 Springfield rifles. USCG Historian’s Office, CG-09231220211-G-G0000-025
These cutters also had magazines for legacy 238-pound guncotton or smaller new 150-pound TNT electrically detonated “wrecking mines” used in destroying derelicts– or in reducing hazardous icebergs and blasting paths in the ice sheet.
Coast Guard destroying a derelict with TNT mines. March 1927. An explosion on the water throws lumber through the air. In the foreground is the railing of a Coast Guard ship with the American flag flying. The caption reads, “Destroying a derelict with TNT mines. The Coast Guard destroys or removes from the path of navigation hundreds of such derelicts each year.” NARA 26-G-03-21-27(1)
As detailed by a 1935 Yachtsman article, these cutters typically carried a 36-foot motor launch with a 20hp engine, two 26-foot Monomoy type surf boats, and a 19-foot surf boat, the latter three vessels oar-powered.
Electrified, these cutters had an extensive radio suite (three transmitters and four receivers) with the vessel’s radio call letters prominently displayed for overhead aircraft, interior and topside lighting, refrigerators and reefers sufficient for length patrols, and a pair of remote-controlled 12-inch incandescent searchlights on the flying bridge overhead.
Meet Comanche
Our cutter is the second to carry the name of the fierce Native American tribe in the USCG.
The first, a 170-foot vessel which was the service’s first attempt at a “modern” steam cutter in 1897, originally commissioned as the USRC Windom and, after serving during the Spanish-American War and the Great War, policed against rumrunners in the Gulf of Mexico during Prohibition before she was disposed of in 1930.
The original USCGC Comanche, formerly USRC Windom, seen in 1920. CG Historian’s Photo.
Our Comanche, laid down at Pusey & Jones in late 1933, was launched in September 1934 and commissioned in December.
Comanche seen on 26 November 1934, post-delivery but before commissioning in a rare period color photo. Note she does not have her Navy-owned main and secondary batteries fitted yet but does have her gleaming white hull, buff stack and masts, and black cap.
The Coast Guard has never been overstaffed and the plankowners of her first crew were transferred hot from the old cutter Gresham, which was being decommissioned for the first time and was co-located at Wilmington. As Gresham still had stores aboard while Comanche did not, her crew had to walk back to their old cutter for meals for the first several days.
Her 1934 deck log for commissioning, detailing her initial five officers and four men transferred from the USCG inspector office at the builder’s yard while 43 other men came from Gresham:
One of her enlisted inherited from Gresham, 44-year-old S1c Maurice D. Jester, listed above, had volunteered for the service in 1917 as a surfman. A chief boatswain mate by 1941, Jester was given a temporary lieutenant’s commission post-Pearl Harbor and, in command of the 165-foot USCGC Icarus (WPC-110), would sink one of the first U-boats (U-352) by an American ship in WWII, earning a Navy Cross in the process.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Comanche was stationed at Stapleton, New York on Staten Island, and carried out the typical varied missions of the Coast Guard, often deploying to Florida for patrols and naval training exercises in the summer.
CGC Comanche in service, 1930s, note she has her armament installed
A page covering a typical day while on one such stint deployed to the Sunshine State:
Having an ice-cruncher bow, she also pulled down the additional task of light ice-breaking on the Hudson River in winter.
Comanche Hudson River ice patrol, Saugerties, 1938
Comanche Hudson River Ice Patrol, 1939
March 1936. “This image depicts the Coast Guard cutter Comanche, which found the pictured vessels stuck fast in the ice off Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and broke the ice to free them.” NARA 26-G-04-27-36(8)
War! (In Denmark)
Despite being neutral, Denmark was invaded by Germany on 9 April 1940.
German Linienschiff Schleswig-Holstein off Denmark on April 9, 1940, sending landing forces ashore
This led to a tense occupation that, for the first three years or so, still “allowed” the Danes to keep their military, so long as it remained in skeletal format hiding in its garrisons and ports.
The majority of the ships of the Royal Danish Navy would be immolated or drowned by their faithful crews in August 1943 when the Germans moved to capture them once the veil of civility was removed from the occupation. Despite being almost totally disarmed and de-fueled to comply with German armistice requirements, a handful of vessels managed to make it across the Oresund to neutral Sweden or were lost trying.
A few vessels outside of metropolitan Denmark- such as the two armed Icelandic Coast Guard cutters Aegir and Odinn and two smaller vessels in Greenland waters which we will get to- escaped German custody or destruction to prevent such custody. A beautiful 212-foot three-masted schoolship, the Danmark, filled with Danish merchant marine and naval cadets, was on an extended visit to America in 1940 and would end up clocking in after Pearl Harbor, crew included, to train over 5,000 USCG and USMM officer cadets during the war as USCGC Danmark (WIX-283).
Meanwhile, in giant colonial Greenland, the world’s largest island, the entire armed Danish military presence in April 1940 amounted to the Royal Danish Navy inspektionsskip Maagen and opmålingsskib (survey ship) Ternen. Small shallow draft sailing cutters with auxiliary diesels had an 11-member crew, a single ancient low-angle 3-pounder (37mm) M/84 cannon, and some small arms. Four larger corvette/frigate-sized inspection ships existed– Besytteren, Islands Falk, Hvidbjornen, and Ingolf— but were in Denmark getting ready for their summer patrols and thus were trapped there under German occupation.
The Royal Danish Navy’s opmålingsskib (survey ship) Ternen, left, and inspektionsskip Maagen, right, wintered in Greenland waters and thus were there in April 1940, escaping German capture. They were small cutters, at about 70 feet oal and 100 tons displacement, good for about 8 knots on their single diesel engine.
Other than the two cutters, the only other armed body in Greenland were the police under their inspector (Politiinspektør for Østkysten), the multi-hatted Danish polar explorer Ejnar Mikkelsen– who was back in Denmark at the time. The force had two stations (politistationer), at Eskimonæs (to cover the Norddistriktet) and Ella Ø (to cover the Syddistriktet), with just two officers at each location. This was to enforce the law over a territory about three times larger than Texas. Even this token group was only created in 1933 to answer the dispute with Norway over what was called Erik Raudes Land in north-east Greenland, with the League of Nations arbitrating that if Denmark wanted to continue to claim all Greenland as its territory, it had to maintain a permeant presence.
Although Norse settlements went back to the 9th Century, the island’s population in 1940 was still just hovering around 18,000, and the four police officers and 22 navy personnel described above were all that was needed for its constabulary purposes.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military had long bumped along the Greenland coast, including the Navy visiting it during the Polaris expedition of 1871–1873, the Juniata and Jeannette expeditions in 1873 and 1879-81, the Greely Relief Expedition in 1884, and the well-known Peary Arctic Expedition in 1898-1901.
This continued into the 20th Century.
The U.S. Army Air Corps, who embarked on a record circumnavigation of the globe via floatplane in 1924, made sure to photograph elements of Greenland’s southern coastline on the pass.
In 1928, the 125-foot USCGC Marion carried out two full months of extensive oceanographic and iceberg studies of the region, fleshing out charts and adding to the general knowledge of the 450,000 sq. miles of the Davis Strait, with copies forwarded to the Danish Hydrographic Office. Her skipper was LT Edward Hanson “Iceberg” Smith, a polar ice nerd who had attended MIT before joining the Revenue Cutter Service in 1910, loved working the International Ice Patrol and went on to attain a Ph.D. in oceanography from Harvard.
USCGC Marion alongside a glacier in Baffin Bay, Canada. August 1928. The Active-class patrol boat, built for the Rum War, would go on to serve through WWII and was only disposed of in 1962. NH 46401
In 1933, the American Geographical Society wrapped up a trip to nearly all the fjords in Greenland between 72°30’ and 74°North latitude including photogrammetric mapping of the valleys, glaciers, and mountains and depth charting the fjords with echo-sounding equipment. Five years later, American meteorologist Clifford MacGregor conducted a groundbreaking study on the formation of polar air masses over Greenland.
To complicate things, the chief industry in Greenland in 1940 was an immense and strategically important cryolite mine at Ivittuut (Invigtut, also seen as Ivigtut)– a vital mineral used at the time to smelt aluminum. The largest known natural deposit of cryolite in the world was at Ivittuut, where about 150 mostly Canadian and Scandinavian miners toiled in the pits for the rare substance under the employ of the Kryolith Mine-og Handelsselskabet A/S.
Kryolitminen, Ivigtut, Greenland, 1937. The ships are the Danish patrol gunboat Hvidbjørnen (right) and the mine’s tender, the 1,200-ton coaster SS Julius Thomsen. Hvidbjørnen, trapped in Denmark in 1940, was scuttled by her crew during the war while Thomsen, taken over by the British, survived and kept up a regular transit between Canada and America and the mine during the war. THM-18645
With all this in mind, the two Danish Landsfogeder (governors) of Greenland, Eske Brun and Aksel Svane, invoked a 1925 emergency clause that allowed the colony to govern itself in the event of war. Moving forward, the Landsfogeder coordinated with the Danish ambassador in Washington, Henrik Kauffmann, to act as a sovereign nation per the Monroe Doctrine for the U.S. to protect Greenland and keep it neutral.
Kauffmann met with his American counterparts in D.C. on 10 April 1940, the day after the Germans rolled into Denmark. The response was warm.
But first, there needed to be a U.S. presence in Greenland.
Comanche to the rescue!
With the State Department in high gear to recognize the new (if temporary) independent government in Greenland and with the blessing of the island’s local administrative councils, Comanche, then in New York City’s Pier 18, made ready to sail in early May 1940. This shortcutted the planned British “Force X” being organized in Canada to seize the island.
Comanche took aboard Consul James K. Penfield and Vice-consul George L. West, on State Department orders. Also sailing on the cutter would be Maurice R. Reddy, the assistant director of the American Red Cross, tasked with assessing Greenland’s need for supplies as the last ship from Denmark had arrived the previous October. She also carried a detachment of five spare Coast Guard radiomen which would be landed to operate the infant consulate’s radio station and provide security.
Every nook and cranny of the 165-foot cutter was packed with extra provisions, heavy on canned goods, salted meats, and tinned fish. The crew was issued heavy sheepskin coats and purchased commercial in the city’s garment district. Also included as cargo, as detailed by the New York Times, was a “complete outfit of office furniture for the consulate,” and a “fairly large quantity of lumber fastened down on the forward deck. It was supplied to the Red Cross and will be used to build sheds to shelter supplies sent later.”
As detailed by Penfield in the American Foreign Service Journal:
The poor little 165-foot Comanche was so loaded down (thanks largely to the superhuman efforts of the Despatch Agent, Mr. Fyfe) that even the Captain’s shower was stuffed with boxes of books, skis, snowshoes, rubber boots and duffle bags full of parkas, woolen underwear and heavy socks. But in spite of its load it pitched and rolled its way to St. Johns with such gusto that we thought we’d never know the meaning of the word horizontal again, except in the very unsatisfactory relative sense of a body in a bunk (when it wasn’t pitched out onto the deck).
Leaving NYC on the 10 May 1940– the same day Germany invaded neutral Luxembourg, Belgium, and Holland on his sweep through the Lowlands while the British preemptively occupied Iceland for the Allies– the little overseas mission arrived at Godthab (now Nuuk), on Greenland’s west coast, on 20 May.
A thrilled-looking U.S. Consul James K. Penfield (right) and Vice Consul George L. West Jr. (left) arrive in Greenland aboard Cutter Comanche. (Acme News Pictures Inc. 1940).
Discharging her cargo and passengers, Comanche proceeded 200nm down the coast to become a station ship at Arsuk Fjord, directly adjacent to the cryolite mining concern.
Soon, 14 Coastguardsmen recently “discharged” from the service took up newly established positions as uniformed security guards on the staff of the Invigtut cryolite mine, paid a hefty $125 per month (the average non-rate in the USCG made about $50 a month) for the next 12 months with a $225 bonus for completing the contract, all paid by the local Greenland government. The funds to pay these guards, as well as to buy a “surplus” 3″/50 gun, eight Lewis guns, and 55 M1903 rifles landed via USCG cutter, along with shells and bullets for said ordnance, came from a $1 million cash deal from Uncle Sam for local goods negotiated by Brun in a delegation carried back to America by the USCGC Campbell.
This original detachment was soon joined by a 15th man, late from the interned training ship Danmark. A replacement shift of 20 similarly recruited “newly civilianized” USCG men would arrive in July 1941 and guard the mine until May 1942 when the U.S. Army took over the watch.
Comanche at Shipshaven, Ivigtut Greenland 1941
Besides Comanche, two larger cutters soon followed: the 327-foot Treasury class cutters Campbell (June 1940) and Duane (August) with both of the 5-inch gunned twin-screwed cutters suffering issues in the ice. By 10 September both the 327s were sent back to the U.S. The icebreaking USCG Northland also arrived in August and would operate on the wild east coast of Greenland where a plan was made with local officials to clear the remote Northeast coastline of its 20-odd inhabitants with the assistance of the Free Norwegian Navy gunboat Fridtjof Nansen.
Comanche was relieved at Ivittuut on 4 September 1940 by the 250-foot Lake class cutter Cayuga. By January 1941, Northland and Cayuga had returned to the U.S. for the worst of the winter, leaving behind the 15 guards at the mine and five radiomen at the consulate to hold down the island until April 1941 when Cayuga and Northland would return.
Meet the Greenland Patrol
On the first anniversary of Germany’s occupation of Denmark, 9 April 1941, the U.S. and Greenland entered into a formal defense agreement.
With a special U.S. survey team, carried by Cayuga to Greenland, working from Ternen and the local Greenland administration’s motorboat JP Koch, coupled with Northland’s J2F Duck, efforts were made to map the coast. The 240-foot USCGC Modoc (WPG-46) arrived in May and joined the efforts– coming uncomfortably close to the running fight against the German battleship Bismarck and the Royal Navy in the process.
On 1 June 1941, the South Greenland Patrol, under USCG LCDR H.G. Beford, was established around Modoc (flag) Comanche, the 110-foot icebreaking harbor tug USCGC Raritan (WYT-93), and the famed polar schooner Bowdoin (commissioned in the Navy on 16 June as IX-50).
A week later the sister organization, the Northeast Greenland Patrol, was formed in Boston around Northland, USCGC North Star, and the 70-year-old retired cutter Bear, the latter recommissioned in naval service as USS Bear (AG-29). The force would be led by now-LCDR Iceberg Smith, USCG.
With the two patrols consolidating in Greenland waters by mid-July, by early August the first PBY flying boats were arriving, the first maritime aircraft based year-round on the island. The PBYs would eventually be operated by a dedicated unit, Patrol Squadron Six (VP-6 CG) as an all-Coast Guard outfit home based at Narsarssuak (Narsarsuaq), Greenland, a base soon coded as Bluie West One (BW-1).
By early September, Comanche, with an Army survey team aboard, was back in local waters making reconnaissance patrols of the Southeast Greenland fjords. She would later go on to establish the lce Cap Station at Igtip Kangertiva, a bay on Greenland’s southeast coast that went on to be dubbed “Comanche Bay” for obvious reasons as well as Weather Station Able (later Bluie West 7) at Gronne Dal (Grønnedal).
The survey work by these cutters and aircraft resulted in the 178-page volume “Greenland Pilot & Sailing Directions” by 1941.
Quietly, the entire Coast Guard was transferred to the Department of the Navy on 1 November 1941, by Executive Order 8929, although it should be noted that, under E.O. 8767 of June 1941 the USCG was authorized to operate as a part of the Navy.
USN ONI 56 Escanaba class 165As including Comanche and Onondaga
Eventually, there were upwards of 25 Allied– primarily American– bases in Greenland during WWII.
At its height, some 5,500 military personnel were based on the island.
(Note Comanche Bay)
In 1942 alone, 86,000 tons of cryolite were shipped to the U.S. and Canada for use in aluminum production.
Meanwhile, on 26 June 1942, the first large-scale trans-Atlantic ferry flights of Allied military aircraft to Britain using Greenland and Iceland began. Comanche was there, as noted by her XO in a post-war interview, serving as the visual aide and radio beacon at the fjord entrance to the main airbase, Narsarsuak, for the first USAAF trans-Atlantic flight of B-17s. The ship logged the arrival of 26 B-17s on that first day, from 2:40 am to 10:30 pm.
The so-called North Atlantic Route, saw three fields in Greenland– Narsarssuak (BW-1), Angmagssalik (Bluie East 2), and Sondrestrom (BW-8)– used as a stopover between Maine/Newfoundland and Iceland, trans-shipping as many as 300-400 aircraft per month, primarily B-17, B-24 and B-25 bombers, to Europe.
B-17s ferry flight through Greenland Jan 1945 U.S. Air Force Number 122001AC 342-FH_000017
War comes to the Greenland Patrol.
Comanche was tied up at Ivigtut on 7 December 1941, a dry Sunday that saw local temperatures hovering around 34 degrees. By that point, she had spent most of the previous 19 months in the Danish colony’s waters.
While I can’t find that the Germans ever attempted a serious move against the cryolite mine at Invigtut, they did come to Greenland in search of something else.
As early as 11 September 1941, the cutter North Star, visiting Eskimonaes, had a report from local hunters of a flagless two-masted steamer poking around Young Sound. Chased down the next day, the steamer was the 105-foot Norwegian sealer Buskoe who had delivered a German agent– Jacob R. Bradley– and meteorological personnel ashore.
With a need to help forecast the weather in Europe and the Atlantic, and being cut off from meteorological reports from Canada in 1939 and America in 1941, the Germans needed weather stations in the Arctic. This led to somewhat disjointed efforts by the German Army, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine weather services to establish their own. Even the Abwehr got involved with their own hybrid weather/listening stations.
Most of the 15 assorted manned stations were established in Svalbard (Spitzbergen) while one (Schatzgräber) was set up off Russia’s arctic coast on Franz Josef Land. An unmanned station was even set up (and only found decades later) on the coast of Labrador!
As part of this, the Kriegsmarine moved to establish no less than four fixed (Edelweiss I and II, Holzauge, and Bassgeiger) as well as one migratory (Zugvogel, on sea ice) weather station in Greenland during the war.
The counter to this was Greenland’s first and only army, the locally-recruited Nordøstgrønlands Slædepatrulje (Northeast Greenland Sledge Patrol), which blended Danish police officers and Danish, Greenlandic and Norwegian fur trappers into an irregular force, almost devoid of military training, that would get into at least two firefights with German weather troops along the 700-mile stretch of Greenland’s most rugged coastline.
The Northeast Greenland Sledge Patrol would grow to 27 members during WWII. Armed with their own hunting rifles and a few short M1889 Danish Krag engineer carbines (ingeniørkarabin) and uniformed only with an armband, one member of the patrol would perish in a fight with weather station Holzauge personnel.
The Germans, for their part, sometimes went on the offensive, with their own patrols burning down half of Greenland’s police stations, when they attacked the Eskimonæs station (BE-5) in March 1943, driving off the two Danes in residence at the time. While destroying radio and weather equipment, they were good enough to leave a storage shed with food largely untouched and the post’s Danish flag unceremoniously stuffed into a box
The station was attacked by a German force on the night of March 23-24, 1943. The Germans burned the main building but first took down the flag and left it in a box. Note the kennels of the sled patrol.
It was in this atmosphere that the Greenland Patrol carried on their war.
Original caption: White Phantoms of the Northern Seas. The breathless beauty of an iceberg floating from the Arctic holds the gaze of Coast Guardsmen, lining the rail of a combat cutter. Frequently, the sturdy Coast Guard Cutters on the Greenland Patrol encounter these floating islands of glistening ice – dazzling to look upon but hazardous to the ships that pass over the northern lanes.
Coast Guard in Greenland: USCG crew on a water-cooled .50 caliber Browning mans their gun on patrol. 17 October 1942. NARA 26-G-10-17-42(2) 205580166
Kungnat Bay, Greenland. Coast Guard sentry keeps watch as the armed trawler USCGC Arundel (WYT-90) lends assistance to a freighter in the middle distance, 1 February 1943. 26-G-3491
The ensuing so-called “Weather War” saw well-armed and J2F-4 amphibian-equipped USCG combat icebreakers round up 60 German POWs, smashing two weather stations in the process while capturing a third that was recently evacuated, and chasing down three armed Kriegsmarine trawlers– Kehdingen, Coburg, and Externsteine, taking the last as a prize.
This image depicts a Coast Guardsman on watch aboard a vessel in Greenland, painted by Coast Guard Combat Artist Norman Millet Thomas, in February 1943. NARA 26-G-02-06-43(1)
This image depicts a USCG landing party from the cutter Northland (WPG-49) gathering captured German remote radio-weather station equipment that had been parachuted in on Northeast Greenland, in September 1943. Note the M1903 Springfields, shaggy dog, and the mixture of blue, grey, and OD Navy and Army gear. NARA 26-G-3501
German POWs on deck of the USCGC Northland (WPG-49) in 1944 as part of the Weather War off Greenland. These may be from the Cape Sussie weather station (Unternehmen Bassgeige), taken down in late July 1944, and landed by the German trawler Coburg.
Comanche at times also served as a floating kennel, running sled dogs from location to location in addition to her work clearing paths through the ice, standing guard at the cryolite mine, and escorting convoys.
From her July 1943 deck log:
Fighting Arctic Wolves
Besides the defense of the cryolite mine and the skirmishes of the Weather War already mentioned, it should be pointed out that the fight against German U-boats, even in these frozen waters off Greenland, was very real.
On 4 September 1941– three full months before Pearl Harbor, the destroyer USS Greer (DD-145) narrowly missed a torpedo fired by U-652 in Greenlandic waters while en route to Iceland.
Comanche served on numerous convoys (SG-19, SG-29, SG-30, SG-37, SG-52, SG-74, GS-27, GS-34, GS-39 et.al.) running ships from Newfoundland to Greenland and back, often tossing ash cans and Mousetrap rockets on suspect underwater contacts.
Comanche, still in her peacetime scheme, escorting SS Munago, 1941, South Greenland, Peary Museum
Comanche in her wartime outfit. She carried a QCL-2 sonar, SF radar, had her 6-pounders replaced with 20mm Orelikons, mounted two depth charge racks, carried four “Y” gun projectors (with allowance for 14 depth charges) had two 7.2-inch Moustrap ASW rocket devices installed.
The report from one such brush with a sonar contact incident:
She also had to pick up the pieces.
Such as in the rescue of freighter USAT Nevada in December 1943. The 950-ton cargo ship, part of Convoy 5G-36, en route from St. John’s to Narsarssuak, became separated in 20-foot high seas and 60-mile-per-hour winds snow squalls that ended with her holds flooded.
Comanche was the closest to her and went to work, catching up to her while still about 200 miles south of Greenland.
From her deck log :
Steamship Nevada (American Freighter, built 1915) photographed from the deck of the USCGC Comanche (WPG-76) as Nevada was foundering in the North Atlantic, circa 15-18 December 1943. Comanche was able to rescue twenty-nine of those on board Nevada, but thirty-four lost their lives during the abandonment of the storm-crippled ship. In 1918-1919 Nevada had briefly served as USS Rogday (ID # 3583). NH 66258
Her most famous rescue came during the sinking of the 5,649-ton USAT Dorchester, a pre-war M&MT cruise ship built for 314 passengers that had been turned into a 750-space troopship. On Dorchester’s fifth convoy run (third to Greenland), leaving outbound on 29 January 1943, she was assigned to SG-19 out of St. Johns bound for Narsarssuak with a complement of seven officers, 123 crewmen, 23 Navy armed guards, 16 USCG, 597 Army personnel and 155 civilian passengers.
M&MT passenger steamer S.S. Dorchester (1926-1943) photographed during 1942 as a USAT SC-290583
Riding shotgun on SG-19 was Comanche and her sister USCGC Escanaba (WPG 77) as well as the larger 240-foot cutter USCGC Tampa (WPG-48). Also in the convoy were the Norwegian steam merchants Biscaya and Lutz, whose holds were full of cargo and building materials to construct bases.
Six days out, in heavy seas and rough weather while 150 miles southwest of Greenland’s Cape Farewell, U-223 (Kptnlt Karl-Jürg Wächter) crept in close enough at 0102 in the predawn of 3 February to fire five torpedoes at the largest vessel in the little arctic convoy– Dorchester— and the transport soon went down. While Tampa moved to shepherd Biscaya and Lutz to nearby Skovfjord (Tunulliarfik) on Greenland’s southern tip, Comanche and Escanaba stood by in the dark and frigid waters to pick up survivors.
Using the “rescue retriever” technique for the first time– which amounted to a rubber-suited volunteer on a line dropping overboard and coming back up with a person– Escabana scooped up 81 survivors from the water and rafts and 51 from one lifeboat. Lacking the same protective suits as used on her sister, nonetheless, three officers and nine enlisted men of Comanche personally picked up 41 survivors from another lifeboat and 57 from rafts and the freezing water.
After the Dorchester slipped beneath the waves on 3 February 1943, the USCGC Comanche and Escanaba rescued dozens of survivors from the doomed Army troopship. (Painting by Robert Lavin, via U.S. Coast Guard History Office)
Dorchester Torpedoed by Perry Stirling, showing Escanaba and Comanche picking up survivors (USCG painting)
Of the more than 900 souls aboard Dorchester, the sea claimed 674, largely due to hyperthermia, with men succumbing to the cold within minutes of hitting the water. The sinking of Dorchester is regarded by the Navy as the “heaviest loss of personnel suffered in any U.S. convoy during the war.”
Among those lost to Poseidon were four Army clergy members, all lieutenants– Methodist minister George L. Fox, Reformed Church in America minister Clark V. Poling, Catholic Church priest John P. Washington, and Rabbi Alexander B. Goode– who voluntarily gave up their own life jackets when the supply ran out then reportedly joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the transport. They are well-remembered as the “Immortal Chaplains” and were posthumously granted the Chaplain’s Medal for Heroism in 1961.
Speaking of heroism, one of Comanche’s fearless retrievers, STM 1c Charles Walter David, Jr., 25, suffering from hypothermia and pneumonia, died in a hospital ashore in Greenland after the rescue operation and he was interred in the permafrost. In addition to saving Dorchester survivors, he is also credited with bringing Comanche’s XO, a fellow retriever, back after the officer was suffering exposure.
His widow Kathleen W. David, and newborn son, a young son, Neil Adrian David, were presented with his Navy and Marine Corps Medal, posthumously.
Further illustrating the danger of the waters around Greenland during the war, Escanaba was lost on the early morning of 13 June 1943 in an explosion off Ivigtut, with the official conclusion that she was struck by either a torpedo or a mine. Only two of her crew survived. Another smaller cutter, the converted trawler Natsek (WYP-170) would vanish without a trace in December 1942 while out of Narsarssuak bound for Boston. Meanwhile, Northland sighted and attacked a U-boat in the Davis Strait on 18 June 1942 reportedly almost catching a German torpedo for her trouble.
All in all, nearly 50 American warships served on the Greenland Patrol during the conflict, almost all of these Coast Guard assets. Of those cutters, four of Comanche’s five Algonquin class sisters clocked in, with the only exception being USCGC Onondaga (WPG-79) who spent the war fighting the Japanese in Alaskan waters.
Upwards of 300,000 U.S. military aircraft were produced during the war, with the rare mineral harvested from the Greenland shale a big part in making that happen.
Post War service
VE Day found Comanche at the USCG Yard at Curtis Bay, Maryland undergoing a much-needed 30-day overhaul that she entered on 17 March 1945. Once she emerged, she caught orders to proceed to Iceland for air-sea rescue duties from June through September 1945.
Once the Coast Guard transferred back to the Treasury Department from the Navy on New Year’s Day 1946, Comanche had her war-time armament removed, and her homeport shifted to Norfolk. However, the service, flush with very new ships (13 255-foot Owasco class cutters were commissioned in 1945-46) shoehorned into a peacetime budget, soon put all the remaining Algonquins into storage in an “in commission, in reserve” status, with reduced crews.
Comanche decommissioned 29 July 1947. Cleared for disposal, she was sold on 10 November 1948 to the Virginia Pilots Association who used her as a floating office and barracks boat until 1984 when the 50-year-old historical cutter was donated to the Patriot’s Point Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, for use as a floating museum.
The nuclear-powered freighter NS Savannah, the retired 327-foot Treasury-class cutter USCGC Ingham (WPG 35), and the former USCGC Comanche, all the way to the right, almost unrecognizable after 35 years as a pilot boat, at Charleston’s Patriots Point Naval Museum in the late 1980s. Savannah has been in Baltimore since 2008 and Ingham is now at Key West.
Comanche’s career as a museum ship was short-lived, being seriously damaged by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and closed.
This led to her donation to the South Carolina DNR for use as a reef in 1992.
She is located 22.5 miles North of Charleston Harbor at a depth of 110-120 feet and is a popular wreck dive.
Epilogue
Comanche’s war diaries are digitized in the National Archives although she is sometimes listed incorrectly as USS Comanche.
A few stirring interviews with her wartime crew remain. One of these is with EM 2c Richard N. Swanson, one of the volunteer retrievers on the Dorchester rescue who earned his Navy and Marine Corps Medal the hard way.
Patriot’s Park saved some of the relics still aboard Comanche in 1992 and has them at the park. They also donated one of her wartime 2,100-pound anchors to the Florence Veterans Park ashore in SC.
The cutter’s 1934-marked bell has been at the Arlington, Virginia barracks of the Coast Guard Ceremonial Honor Guard since at least 1999, where it is used in annual remembrances and individual “ringing out” ceremonies.
The Honor Guard was established in 1962 and performs an average of 1,200 ceremonies each year across the United States. It is housed in the Coast Guard’s old Washington Radio Station in Alexandria and Comanche’s well-polished bell is on its quarterdeck.
The service recycled the name for a third Comanche.
The Coast Guard acquired the former Navy 142-foot Sotoyomo-class auxiliary ocean tug USS Wampanoag (ATA-202) and placed her in commission as the medium endurance cutter Comanche (WMEC-202) in February 1959. Based in California except for a two-year stint in Corpus Christi, Texas, she was involved in several high-profile blue water rescues across a 21-year second career.
The third Comanche (ex-Wampanoag) is preserved as a floating museum in the Seattle area.
On 16 November 2013, the Coast Guard officially commissioned the USCGC Charles David Jr (WPC 1107) in honor of Comanche’s lost Dorchester retriever. His body had been reinterred at Long Island National Cemetery post-war.
His granddaughter was the ship’s sponsor.
Rear Adm. Jake Korn, Coast Guard Seventh District commander; Sharon David, granddaughter of the cutter’s namesake and sponsor of the Coast Guard Cutter Charles David Jr; and Chris Bollinger, president of Bollinger Shipyards; look at information about Charles W. David Jr. before the commissioning ceremony. Steward’s Mate 1st Class Charles David Jr. was posthumously awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his part in saving the lives of nearly 100 U.S. Army soldiers and members of his own crew during World War II. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Mark Barney.
Likewise, former Comanche plank owner, the sub-busting LCDR Maurice Jester, has his name on a sistership of David, USCGC Maurice Jester (WPC-1152).
As for Greenland, despite a short (1946-50) hiatus, the Danish Navy’s elite sled patrol is still a thing, dubbed Slædepatruljen SIRIUS, with two bases and 65 supply huts, and was recently promised to be bolstered by the government in Copenhagen.
In 1951, the Danish Naval Station Grønnedal was established as a year-round home for Greenland Command, since 2012 the Arktisk Kommando, which has a permanent staff of 36 civilians and military personnel in a big blue building in Nuuk.
Arktisk Kommandos hovedkvarter in Nuuk
In the summer, a force of three modern 1,700-ton Knud Rasmussen class OPVs, augmented by another four 3,500 Thetis-class OPFs, roam the Greenlandic littoral.
Danish patrol vessel HDMS Knud Rasmussen (P570) ice-breaking in Greenland waters, December 2022, around Narsaq, Narsarsuaq, and Qassiarsuk
The Greenland Police is still seen as a district of the Danish state police, numbering 300 members. There is no local territorial defense force.
The Danish Home Guard (Hjemmeværnet), which numbers some 44,000 volunteers in Denmark, has activated small groups to support operations in exercises in Greenland in recent years, but doesn’t have HJV units among Greenland’s cities and towns.
However, a new six-month Arktisk basisuddannelse (Arctic Basic Education) civil defense/auxiliary police style course, based in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, and staffed with a dozen instructors and support personnel, has been stood up.
The six-month Arktisk Basisuddannelse course, open to only to Greenlanders, mimics the Danish military basic training course and blends field and classroom instruction
The program has been recruiting youth from among 13 towns and settlements across Greenland and graduated its first 19 students in November 2024.
Arktisk basisuddannelse (Arctic Basic Education) students, Greenland’s first “home guard” style class. While many may go on to join the Arktisk Kommando or Greenland police and fire agencies, it isn’t a requirement.
When it comes to U.S. bases, the Americans pulled out of most of the BW/BE stations by 1947 with a few exceptions: BW-1 (Narsarsuaq) closed in 1958 and Stromfjord (BW-8) in 1992, while Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule AB, formerly BW-8) is still very much a thing, supported by the USCG, MSC, and Canadian Coast Guard and operated by the Space Force. The Army had Camp Century (including a novel underground nuclear reactor) there in the 1960s. The USAF also had four unmanned DEW stations in Greenland between 1960 and 1990.
The Coast Guard, meanwhile, still frequently gets to Greenland waters where they continue to work with local and Danish forces.
USCGC Campbell transited south along the west coast of Greenland overnight with the Royal Danish Navy vessel HDMS Knud Rasmussen and rendezvoused in a position just offshore of Evighedsfjorden (Eternity Fjord). CGC Campbell received HDMS Knud Rasmussen’s Executive Officer, Commander Bo Ougaard, on board to serve as an ice pilot and provide local knowledge to assist CGC Campbell in safely entering and transiting Evighedsfjorden. Once inside Eternity Fjord, CGC Campbell launched their MH-65 Dolphin aircraft and proceeded up the fjord to the head where the glacier begins. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Seaman Kate Kilroy DVIDS 200907-G-NJ244-002
Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive
Ships are more than steel
and wood
And heart of burning coal,
For those who sail upon
them know
That some ships have a
soul.
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