The Coast Guard placed under the Navy

On 1 November 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8929. Its key sentence was brief: the United States Coast Guard was, “from this date and until further order”, to operate as part of the Navy and be subject to the orders of the Secretary of the Navy, at that time Frank Knox. The second part of the document dealt with discipline: Coast Guard personnel were henceforth to be subject to the laws governing the Navy, and disciplinary cases were to be handled under the regulations of whichever department had authority over them at the time. Formally the Coast Guard still belonged to the Treasury Department, but its cutters, aircraft and men passed under the command of the US Navy.

Popular accounts say that the president “announced” the transfer of the Coast Guard to the Navy and that such a step was normally reserved for wartime. The second claim needs qualifying. The order rested on the Act of 28 January 1915, which had created the Coast Guard by merging the Revenue Cutter Service and the Life-Saving Service. The Act provided that the Coast Guard would operate as part of the Navy “in time of war or when the President shall so direct”. The law therefore did not require a declaration of war, and the order also invoked amendments made by an act of 11 July 1941. In practice, however, the only precedent came from wartime: on 6 April 1917, the moment war was declared on Germany, the Coast Guard came under the orders of the Navy, returning to the Treasury only in August 1919. In November 1941 the United States was still formally a neutral country. Roosevelt’s decision was thus something new, and it was rightly read as a sign that the country was preparing for war.

Service on the edge of war

The Coast Guard entered the war in Europe much earlier than the rest of the American armed forces. On 1 July 1939 it absorbed the Lighthouse Service, the oldest federal agency, and an act of June 1939 and another of 19 February 1941 created its reserve and a volunteer auxiliary. From the autumn of 1939 Coast Guard cutters and aircraft enforced the Neutrality Acts and took part in patrols in coastal waters. From 1936 it was headed by Rear Admiral Russell R. Waesche, who expanded it with war in mind.

Its most advanced front was Greenland. After Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940, the cutter Comanche carried the first American consul to the island, and fourteen Coast Guardsmen, formally discharged from the service, guarded the cryolite mine at Ivittuut as civilian guards; the mineral was essential for smelting aluminium. In the summer of 1940 the cutter Northland surveyed the island’s east coast, gathering data for charts and sailing directions. After the United States took Greenland under its protection in April 1941, the Coast Guard formed the South Greenland Patrol on 1 June and the Northeast Greenland Patrol on 1 July, the latter under Commander Edward H. Smith, nicknamed “Iceberg”. In October the two were merged into a single Greenland Patrol, which became part of the Atlantic Fleet. On 12 September 1941 Northland intercepted the Norwegian vessel Buskø off the island’s east coast; she was meant to support German weather stations. American histories regard this as the first capture of a foreign vessel by American naval forces in the Second World War, and a party from Northland then destroyed a radio station ashore and detained its crew.

The Coast Guard also supported Britain directly. Under the Lend-Lease Act, in the spring of 1941 ten Lake-class cutters, 250-foot vessels built around the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, were transferred to the Royal Navy. In April and May British sailors took them over in New York and, as Banff-class sloops (HMS Banff, Culver, Totland and others), sailed them across the Atlantic; they were then assigned to convoy escort, mainly on the route between Britain and Freetown in West Africa. Some Coast Guard vessels and crews had already been working under Navy orders, and the order of 1 November gave this arrangement general form.

Why then

The order came at the hottest moment of the undeclared war in the Atlantic. On 4 September a U-boat attacked the destroyer USS Greer, and on 11 September the president issued the shoot-on-sight order against Axis warships threatening shipping under American protection. A few days later American destroyers began escorting British convoys in the western Atlantic. On 17 October U-568 torpedoed USS Kearny, killing eleven sailors, and on 31 October, the day before the order was signed, U-552 sank USS Reuben James with the loss of about a hundred men. The Navy needed every ship capable of escort and patrol work, and the Coast Guard had several hundred vessels, an air arm and experienced crews used to working in the North Atlantic in foul weather and ice.

Placing the Coast Guard under a single command also tidied up legal and organisational matters. Cutters patrolling the waters off Greenland and Iceland or escorting merchant ships were already in effect operating alongside Atlantic Fleet warships. After 1 November they could be incorporated directly into naval formations, and their crews were subject to the same regulations as sailors. The Coast Guard nonetheless kept its peacetime tasks – search and rescue, port security and the supervision of shipping – which became even more important in wartime.

Place in the war

The new arrangement lasted for the whole war. Five weeks after the order was signed, Coast Guard units of the 14th Naval District, among them the cutter Taney and patrol boats based at Honolulu, fired on Japanese aircraft during the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1942–1945 the Coast Guard escorted convoys and hunted U-boats, manned some of the Navy’s ships, including destroyer escorts and transports, and its coxswains took landing craft onto the beaches of North Africa, Sicily, Normandy and the Pacific islands. Signalman Douglas Munro, killed on Guadalcanal in 1942, became the only Coast Guardsman ever to receive the Medal of Honor. The Greenland Patrol operated until the end of the war, hunting down German weather stations set up on the island’s east coast. Two of the sloops handed over to the British in the spring of 1941, Walney and Hartland, were sunk in the harbour of Oran in November 1942, while Culver was torpedoed by U-105 in January 1942.

The Coast Guard returned to the Treasury Department with effect from 1 January 1946, under Executive Order 9666, signed by President Harry Truman on 28 December 1945. In the chain of steps by which Roosevelt drew the United States into the war in the Atlantic, the decision of 1 November 1941 was an unspectacular but practical link. That same month Congress amended the Neutrality Act, allowing merchant ships to be armed and to sail to the ports of belligerent states. When in December the United States found itself at war with Japan and Germany, its maritime forces were already under a single command.