Coastal Pickets

Kyt · Oct 27, 2007

http://news.galvestondailynews.com/story.lasso?ewcd=ac12fa3eb03fcedb

It was sailboats against U-boats in WWII

By John Ira Petty
Correspondent

Published October 27, 2007
Sending sailboats out to fight U-boats sounds like an act of desperation. Maybe it was, but those early days of U.S. involvement in World War II were desperate times.

The late Rufus “Bud” Smith, a founder and the first commodore of the Galveston Bay Cruising Association and the first yacht broker in this area, commanded 25 U-boat-hunting yachts of the Third Naval District — Connecticut, New York and northern New Jersey.

Similar groups operated elsewhere, including the Galveston area. Perhaps 100 yachts were involved along the U.S coast.

In 1942, U-boats found fresh and lightly defended hunting grounds off the U.S. East and later Gulf coasts. The yachts were an early response. They went offshore summer and winter, in just about any conditions.

The yachts had been volunteered for military service by their owners. Their crews were temporary U.S. Coast Guard reservists. They saw red tape as a natural enemy and tended to regard regulations as optional advisories, especially when it came to getting equipment and supplies for the boats.

The yachts, painted Navy grey with large white numbers forward, didn’t sink any U-boats. They did serve as deterrents. They could approach U-boats stealthily and report their positions by radio.

Initially, the boats, called Coastal Pickets, carried only small arms. Later they got machine guns and depth charges, special 25-pounders dropped overboard by hand. They also got hydrophones to detect submerged U-boats.

Smith said he believed the boats were effective, reporting the U-Boat’s positions, causing them to submerge and rescuing crewmen from their victims.

“They knew we were there,” he said. “How much they knew about … what we could do was another thing. At the beginning, they certainly didn’t know much, because we didn’t know ourselves.”

A couple of cruises show some of the extremes. On Dec. 3, 1942, the 58-foot yawl Zelda was returning from a week offshore when she was knocked down and lost her mizzen and skylights. The boat was partially flooded, the engine and generator disabled and several crewmen hurt.

Northwesterly gales continued. On Dec. 20, a B-17 spotted Zelda 350 miles off the Carolina coast, headed west under just a headsail. Late Dec. 23, a blimp saw her 15 miles off Ocracoke Inlet, south of Cape Hatteras, N.C.

The blimp dropped food and called a cutter, which took the nine bearded and battered crewmen off and towed Zelda to port. She went back into service after a refit, with some of the same crew.

That same fall, a 55-foot yawl named Avanti was making her first cruise well offshore. The helmsman, 19, spotted a surfaced U-boat and shouted that he was going to ram.

Avanti’s captain, a chief boatswain’s mate, sprang to the helm just in time to prevent that ill-advised action, which probably would have sunk the wooden sailboat and hardly harmed the steel submarine. Avanti radioed the submerging U-boat’s position.

That was as close as any of the boats got to a German submarine, said Smith, who attained the rank of lieutenant commander.

The Coastal Pickets, transferred to the Navy and renamed the Picket Patrol, kept up the hunt until Germany’s surrender.

In thanking them after V.E. Day, Vice Adm. H.F. Leary, commander of the Eastern Sea Frontier, said, perhaps with a little license: “We kept you there because it was apparent you were doing just what we wanted. After you fellows got out there, we never lost a ship within 400 miles of the coast.”

Smith, a Princeton University graduate who had helped develop Seabrook Shipyard and a strong proponent of one-design racing on Galveston Bay, died in 1989 at age 81.

John Ira Petty, a sailing instructor and licensed captain, is the sailing columnist for The Daily News.
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Kyt · Oct 27, 2007

More on the Coastal Pickets and The Coast Guard Auxiliary:

http://www.cgauxinternational.org/AuxHx.pdf

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