Brooklyn Boat saved more than 400 lives on D-Day

While planning the D-Day landings in Normandy, the U.S. Coast Guard was tasked with providing search and rescue craft for the operation.  The Commander of the U.S. Fleet, Admiral Ernest King ordered the Coast Guard to deploy 60 83-foot cutters to the United Kingdom to be used during Operation Neptune/Overlord (Neptune was the code name for the maritime operation during the landings).

These 83-foot cutters were built by the Wheeler Shipyard here in Brooklyn. The Wheeler Shipbuilding Corporation was founded around 1900 by Howard E. Wheeler at the foot of Cropsey Avenue by Coney Island Creek as a shipyard for pleasure yachts and fabrication. A second shipyard was subsequently opened on the East River at Whitestone.

Wheeler was contracted by the U.S. Government in World War One to build wood-hulled sub chasers to patrol U.S. coastal waters and to serve as convoy escorts against the German submarine threat.  The government contract enabled expansion of the shipyard, and the years after World War One saw the Wheeler Shipyard constructing steel hulled merchant and government vessels alongside wooden yachts. The business prospered, and at one point Wheeler Shipyards sported a marching band and a Park Avenue showroom.

The Wheeler Shipyard was well-known for building exceptional hand-crafted wooden boats, and its most well-known customer was Ernest Hemingway, who bought a 38-foot yacht in 1934 for $7,500 that he christened the Pilar. This was both the name of the heroine in For Whom the Bells Toll and the nickname for his wife at that time, Pauline.

At the outbreak of World War Two, the Unite States Navy purchased land adjacent to the Wheeler Shipyard as an adjunct facility to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and this facility eventually melded with the Wheeler Shipyard. In 1942, Wheeler started building the wooden 83-foot cutters for use as minesweepers. Orders followed for steel-hulled small coastal freighters for the U.S. Army and yard tug orders for both the Army and the Navy. It should be noted that Hemingway added himself and his Wheeler to the forces patrolling the U.S. Coasts after 1941.

In all 230 83-foot cutters were built, twelve for the U.S. Navy and the remainder for the Coast Guard. The first 145 cutters were fitted with an Everdur bronze wheelhouse, but subsequent cutters were fitted with a plywood wheelhouse due to the scarcity of metal. The 83-footers were typically armed with 20mm/80 cannon on the quarterdeck, four depth charge tracks off the stern and a 'Mousetrap' anti-submarine rocket system. The displacement was 76 tons and the maximum draft was 5 feet 4 inches. The 83-footers could make 18 ½ knots at full power, although the cruising speed was around 12 knots.

The 60 83-footers that were earmarked for the Normandy invasion were given new hull numbers from 1 to 60 before being transported on freighters to England. They were formed into a “Rescue Flotilla One” based at Poole and nicknamed the “Matchbox Fleet” due to the potential explosive hazard of a wooden hull and gasoline engines. The cutters were split between the invasion beaches, with 30 serving off the American invasion sectors and the other 30 off the British and Canadian sectors. The cutters of Rescue Flotilla One saved more than 400 men from the frigid waters of the English Channel during D-Day alone, often operating under enemy fire from the German-held shore. Before being decommissioned in December, 1944, the 83-footers had saved 1,483 servicemen.

After the war, the Wheeler Shipyard returned to building yachts and small steel- and wooden hulled commercial vessels, although the Brooklyn facilities were shut down in 1948. Wheeler remained in business until 1965, and it completed more than 3,500 hulls before the company was dissolved.

An advertisement for the Wheeler "Playmate" series of yachts built between 1920 and 1939

"Crew of CG-16 pointing to the tally board of 126 rescued soldiers." Photo courtesy of Terry Hannigan (uscg.mil).

The USCG-1, formerly the 83300, escorted the first waves of landing craft into the Omaha assault area on D-Day morning.  Her crew pulled 28 survivors from a sunken landing craft out of the English Channel right off the beaches before 0700, 6 June 1944 (uscg.mil)

 Sources:

http://www.uscg.mil/history/webcutters/ResFlot1_Normandy_Photo_Index.asp

http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/historically-speaking-brooklyn-boats-hemingway

http://uscg83footers.org/the_83_footer.htm

Brooklyn, the Hoist and the Helicopter

Helicopters were carefully introduced to the U.S. Armed Forces during the latter half of the Second World War, and Brooklyn played an important part in the development of rotary-wing aircraft. Both the Navy as well as the Coast Guard and the Army realized that the helicopter might become a useful tool, and landing trials took place in Long Island Sound on board the merchant tanker Bunker Hill on May 7, 1943. This demonstration was sponsored by the Maritime Commission, and the trials were conducted by an Army Air Corps pilot, Colonel H. Frank Gregory. He made some 15 flights in a Sikorsky XR-4 (Navy designation HNS-1) and landed both on the water and the tanker during the course of the day. Five months later, in October 1943, Lieutenant Commander Frank A. Erickson, USCG, accepted the first Navy helicopter, a HNS-1. On November 19, 1943, the Chief of Naval Operations issued a directive that designated the Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn located at the Floyd Bennet Field as a helicopter training base. In all three HNS-1 helicopters were assigned to the base.

Several military units were located at the Floyd Bennet Field before and during the Second World War. The U.S. Navy dedicated part of the civilian facility to Naval Air Reserve Base New York in the 1930s, and the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn was established on April 23, 1938. The units based at Floyd Bennet Field did pioneer air-sea rescue using hydroplanes, and during the Second World War anti-submarine patrols were conducted from the field.

The Sikorsky HNS-4 "Hoverfly" or R-4 as it was called in the United States Army Air Corps was a humble but fully functional first helicopter to serve branches of the U.S. Armed Forces. Lieutenant Commander Erickson was the first helicopter pilot in the Coast Guard and he was the commander of the base between December 1943 and February 1945. As Lieutenant Commander Erickson got started at the Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn, his unit's first responsibilities were to learn how to fly and maintain the helicopters, but it was not long before the men at the Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn started to work on developing the rescue hoist and several pickup harnesses. Instrument and night flying capabilities as well as rescue techniques were developed while autopilots and loudspeakers were added to their helicopters. 

On December 20, 1943, Lieutenant Commander Erickson reported that his unit had experimented with a HNS-1 as a flying ambulance. A helicopter had made flights with a 200 lb load suspended on a stretcher approximately four feet beneath the floats of the helicopter in addition to the crew of a pilot and a mechanic. The stretcher was subsequently moved to the side of the helicopter and landings were made at the steps of the dispensary. The air sea rescue equipment was tested in earnest on October 2, 1944 off Manasquan, NJ, when four men were picked up from a rubber raft and landed on the cutter Cobb in less than ten minutes.

However, the first actual rescue was conducted by a civilian, Dimitry "Jimmy" Viner, who was Sikorsky's test pilot, on November 29, 1945. The helicopters conducted other rescue and relief missions as well: blood plasma was flown to Sandy Hook, NJ, in a storm to treat wounded from the wreckage of the U.S.S. Turner after she exploded in the New York harbor on January 3, 1944. Additionally, a youngster was rescued from a sandbar in Jamaica Bay and firefighting equipment was airdropped to firemen fighting a fire on a railway trestle when all other means to supply the firefighters with necessary equipment had failed. A more complicated rescue operation was conducted on April 21, 1945, when a Canadian PBY-5A Catalina had been forced to land in the wilderness 180 miles south of Goose Bay in Labrador. Two of the crewmen were badly burned after the crash, but bad weather conditions did not allow conventional aircraft to take off in the loose snow at the crash site. Fortunately the aircrew of the Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn could come to the rescue with one helicopter being disassembled and loaded in a C-54 cargo plane. The HNS-1 was reassembled at a base camp and Lieutenant August Kleitsch took nine hour-and-a-half trips to and from the crash site to rescue the stranded Canadians one by one.

In addition to U.S. personnel, the British Admiralty requested that the Coast Guard would train helicopter pilots and mechanics for the Royal Navy. Four British helicopters were added to the base, and a number of pilots were also trained for the USAAF and the Navy. Regular training commenced after initial organization was completed on June 1, 1944. After one year 102 pilots and 225 mechanics had been trained to fly and service rotary wing aircraft. Besides rescue operations, the helicopters were used for radar calibration of vessels being overhauled at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The Air Station at Floyd Bennet Field was eventually decommisioned in May of 1998, and the rescue hoist originally developed for use with the HNS-1A was donated to the Pensacola Aviation Museum to be inducted into the Coast Guard Wing of the museum.

 Original Caption: "U.S. Coast Guardsmen take a break during the first Arctic helicopter rescue in the history of aviation. Lieut. August Kleisch (center), Coast Guard pilot of the Sikorsky helicopter 'The Labrador Special,' chats with Lieut. Lawrence G. Pollard, Assistant Operations Officer of the Air Transport Command at Goose Bay. Pollard, flying supplies into the ATC radio-weather station which served as the base for helicopter operations, flew Sgt. G. J. Bunnell, the first man rescued, back to Goose Bay. On the right, facing the camera, is AMM1c Gus Jablonski of Brooklyn, Crew Chief on the Labrador Special. Jablonski worked very hard through the entire operation. Kleisch made all the rescue flights personally."; Date: 2 May 1945; no photo number; photographer unknown.