Merchant Seaman Fights Battle Long After War’s End

In the darkest days of World War II they were America’s heroes, braving torpedoes from German U-boats and attacks from Japanese planes to transport the cargoes that helped assure the Allied victory.

Hollywood celebrated their gallantry in movies such as “Action in the North Atlantic,” starring Humphrey Bogart. Winston Churchill said Britain owed them its survival.

But once the guns fell silent, the nation forgot the sacrifices of its merchant seamen, says maritime historian Charles Dana Gibson.

More than 40 years after the war ended, he is fighting what he calls a “bureaucratic battle” with the Pentagon as he tries to persuade a review board to make merchant mariners eligible for veterans’ benefits.

Setting Record Straight

“It’s a matter of principle,” insists Gibson, the grandson and namesake of the illustrator whose stylized drawings of turn-of-the-century young women became known as “Gibson girls.” More to the matter at hand, he claims authors Herman Melville and Richard Henry Dana as distant forebears.

“If you don’t set the record straight now, 50 years from now who’s going to do it?” added Gibson, who won the merchant marine combat bar for service aboard a ship involved in enemy action and who is also a full-fledged veteran because of service as an Army officer in the Korean War.

The Pentagon and veterans groups agree that the merchant seamen contributed greatly to the war effort but note that the mariners were free to resign, as military personnel were not, and were paid better for working in war zones.

But Gibson, who at 15 lied about his age so he could serve aboard Army transport barges ferrying wartime cargoes across the English Channel, contends that the men who served aboard the Liberty ships and tankers of World War II were civilians in name only.

Most seamen came under the control of the War Shipping Administration, which in effect nationalized America’s merchant fleet. Merchant mariners were dispatched to combat zones where they fired weapons and gathered intelligence.

Gibson says they were subjected to military justice and discipline, placed in situations where it was impossible to resign, and suffered heavy casualties.

About 6,700 U.S. merchant seamen died in the war, most as a result of attacks by submarines, surface raiders and enemy aircraft. Nearly 900 merchant vessels were lost.

Roughly 250,000 men served in the wartime merchant marine, with perhaps another 40,000 as seamen in the Army Transport Service. Gibson was among 115,000 decorated for service in encounters with the enemy.

“That’s what the Battle of the Atlantic was all about,” he argues. “Nobody was out to get the Navy. What they were trying to do was stop the supplies.”

A 1977 law authorized the Defense Department to determine whether civilian groups whose members had served the armed forces deserved to be granted veterans’ status.

Veterans’ Status

Proposed initially as a mechanism for extending benefits to the World War II organization known as the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPS, the law, as enacted, allowed other groups the same opportunity. The WASPS and a few other groups, including about 1,000 merchant seamen who helped in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, have received veterans’ status.

Gibson has twice submitted applications; a review board has turned both down.

The first was a two-page petition filed in 1979 on behalf of the civil service crews of Army transport ships. The second was a document of 1,000 pages, filed in 1984, which sought veterans’ rights for all merchant seamen who served in contested waters.

The review board acting on the 1984 petition agreed the service performed by the seamen was crucial to the war effort. But it concluded that being subjected to enemy fire was not sufficient to justify a ruling that a group’s contribution be recognized as active military service.

The board said the seamen received minimal military training and were not subject to strict military discipline. The board also said merchant crews had the option to resign after their contracts expired, whereas military personnel were in the war for the duration.

Gibson maintains that a combination of factors in the immediate post-war years, including maritime union strikes, led Congress to reject bills that would have provided benefits, which were granted by some other Allied nations.

Another factor, he added, was opposition from veterans’ organizations.

With war zone bonuses, merchant seamen received considerably higher pay than the average infantryman, says Robert Lyngh, the American Legion’s national director of rehabilitation, who also cites the mariners’ freedom to resign before the war ended.

“We have no problem with any benefits Congress might want to provide,” Lyngh said. “All we’re saying is don’t give it to them as veterans, which they are not; give it to them as merchant seamen, which they were.”

Gibson is now preparing a third application to the review board, this one on behalf of Army seamen. He admits frustration but adds, “If I wasn’t a born optimist, I wouldn’t be doing this.”