Local Vessels That Served in WWII

History Spotlight: MWA Vessels That Served in WWII 

Maine Windjammer Association-This Memorial Day, the Maine Windjammer Association salutes all veterans. As we pause to remember their service, we want to highlight the special connection that the Maine Windjammer Association has with the veterans of WWII: during the War, some of the Maine Windjammers were commissioned as home-based pilot boats, scouts, training vessels or cargo carriers. At that critical time in our nation’s history, people at home grew “victory gardens” and collected rubber and metal to donate to the war effort, and these windjammers also did their part here at home.

The three-masted schooner Victory Chimes worked as a merchant vessel delivering vital war materials up and down the coast. She conducted regular checks on mine fields off the Chesapeake Bay, a task for which she was perfectly suited, as her wooden hull wouldn’t trigger the magnetic mechanisms.

She was also charged with keeping a sharp lookout for German U-Boats. Especially at the very beginning of the US involvement in WWII, German U-Boat commanders would submerge just off the US coast, sit quietly on the bottom during the day and then surface at night to hunt. With US merchant ships silhouetted against the – as yet – non-blacked-out US coastline, German U-boat commanders began referring to a war cruise to the coastal US as an "instant Knights Cross run," because they were able to sink enough merchant ship tonnage to qualify for Germany's highest military award - the Knights Cross to the Iron Cross - for valor.
Captain Paul DeGaeta writes, “Captain Boyd Guild, former owner of theVictory Chimes, served in the US Navy on a schooner (not the Chimes) that they pressed into service specifically to patrol for U-boats. Unlike regular naval patrol vessels, the older sailing vessels didn't make a lot of noise underway – no engine rotations or screws turning – so U-Boats couldn't detect their approach. There were cases where U-boats surfaced right next to the schooners having been unable to predict their location. Of course, that usually meant the U-boat would then sink the schooner with its deck gun so as not to waste a torpedo.
“We had a passenger aboard Victory Chimes in the early 1990s whose father was in that exact situation: the German commander ordered the ship's crew into lifeboats then sank the ship with its deck gun.”

Similar to the Victory Chimes, in 1942, the Nathaniel Bowditch was commissioned by the US Coast Guard to search for submarines off New York Harbor. During this period, she received two citations by the Commander of the US Coast Guard, Eastern Sea Frontier, for seaworthiness. For her part, the schooner Timberwind was part of the US Coast Guard coastal patrol fleet during WWII, patrolling the coast of Maine.

Unlike the other vessels, Grace Bailey spent her war years as the first training vessel for the Maine Maritime Academy. Before the war, cadets would normally spend two years training, but as soon as the war hit, with the large number of ships sunk and a desperate need for sailors, cadets were now graduating in one year’s time–many of them aboard our very ownGrace Bailey!

For more information about Maine’s Windajmmers click here.