"Danmark's Contribution to Coast Guard Seamanship and Leadership"
Admiral
James M. Loy, Commandant, US Coast Guard
Remarks at the National Maritime Historical Society's Salute to the
Sail Training Ship SV Danmark
New York, November 3, 1999
Good evening. I am
delighted to join you tonight-doubly so in fact. First because I am indebted
to the National Maritime Historical Society for reviving an important
bit of Coast Guard history last year. I am very grateful that you reprinted
The Skipper and the Eagle, Gordon McGowan's tale of commissioning
Horst Wessel as the Eagle in 1946, training her first Coast Guard
crew, and sailing her to her new home as America's Tall Ship. Thank you
for putting this great story back in print. It means a lot to us.
And second, I am glad to be here to honor Danmark, a ship that
has made indelible marks on the Coast Guard's traditions of seamanship
and leadership.
Many of you are familiar with the thumbnail history of the Coast Guard's
temporary possession of the Danmark during World War II: Danmark
was in the United States for a training cruise when Nazi Germany occupied
Denmark in the spring of 1940, the crew offered the ship and its
services to the United States, and the Coast Guard chartered Danmark
as a training ship until after the war, when we returned the ship
to the restored Danish government
It all sounds pretty smooth and easy, but the business was actually fairly
complicated. You can well imagine, for example, that approaching the occupation
government in Denmark might have been a bit ticklish-the Nazi overseers
weren't real interested in helping the transaction along and our own State
Department was sensitive to a whole range of ramifications beyond the
deal itself. There were also significant legal obstacles that would take
an act of Congress and an executive order to overcome. Many thorny issues.
And then of course, there was the little matter of determining what price
we would pay.
Finally, in late January, 1942, 20 months after Germans occupied Denmark,
the price and terms were all set except for one minor sticking point:
the request that the Coast Guard make an additional payment at the end
of the charter period of twelve thousand dollars per year to cover depreciation
costs.
Admiral Russell Waesche, our Commandant at the time, drew the line right
there. He refused to authorize the depreciation payment. He pointed out
that the ship would sit unused if we didn't charter it and that its condition
would probably improve under our care. Besides, he noted, "although the
taking over of the Danmark will be of material benefit to both
the Danish and United States governments, it is being done largely for
the accommodation of the former."
Sixty years later, we can see that Admiral Waesche might have been a better
businessman than prophet. He thought we were doing a favor to the Danes,
but subsequent events have shown that it might have been the other way
around. In fact, the material benefits that the Coast Guard still enjoys
from its brief possession of Danmark so far outweigh the nominal
costs, that chartering Danmark would rank among the best deals
ever struck by Uncle Sam-just a notch below Seward's Folly and the Louisiana
Purchase-even if we had paid the depreciation charge!
As we honor Danmark tonight, my purpose is to highlight two principal
influences Danmark has had on the Coast Guard. The first of these
influences is on Coast Guard seamanship. Simply put, Danmark re-connected
the Coast Guard with its sailing heritage. .
Danmark's influence here is obvious. We were out of the sail training
business before we chartered Danmark, and we have been in it ever
since. Eagle's first Coast Guard skipper learned how to sail square-riggers
by spending three summers on Danmark. He observed all the intricacies
of working a ship, he admired the captain's skill at anchoring and even
passing through narrow bridges under sail, and he learned how to prepare
a tall ship for heavy weather.
Had Captain McGowan known he would one day command a square-rigger, he
wrote that he would have learned more diligently. But when it was time
to sail Eagle from Bremerhaven in 1946, he took one precaution
intended to make up for his lack of experience. He brought along a Danish
officer, Knud Langvard, the former first officer of Danmark, as
a consultant. Consultant? Even then? I don't think so; he brought him
along as an expertise insurance policy!
We may fairly credit Danmark also with motivating the Coast Guard
to obtain Eagle. After the war, the need to replace Danmark
was universally acknowledged, but there was considerable debate within
the Coast Guard as to what sort of training platform would be best for
our Academy cadets. There was broad support for acquiring a C-4 or C-5
cargo ship, converting its cargo spaces to classrooms and berthing areas,
and offering our cadets a modern seagoing experience.
Had the Coast Guard not chartered Danmark during World War II,
the benefits of sail training would not have been apparent to Coast Guard
leaders. It is altogether likely that we would never have applied for
possession of Horst Wessel. We would simply have moved on to a
steam-powered training platform and relegated our sail training to small
boats and history.
We would have been the poorer for it. The immediate past commanding officer
of Eagle explained one of the values of sail training in his afterword
to the new edition of The Skipper and the Eagle. "Eagle
and the sea present the cadets with real problems and challenges they
can't walk away from."
That character building-combined with the unequaled opportunity to understand
the forces affecting a ship, to learn a proper respect for the sea, to
grasp the necessity for continuous vigilance at sea-is an essential part
of Coast Guard seamanship. That so many Coast Guard officers grasp the
importance of sail training intuitively today-and that the Coast Guard
maintains its high standards of seamanship today-are due in no small way
to Danmark's influence.
The second positive contribution of Danmark on the Coast Guard
may be even greater. I refer now to personal leadership, especially the
devotion to duty exhibited by her commanding officer, Captain Knud Hansen.
Put yourself in the position, if you can imagine it, of Captain Hansen
in December of 1941. Knud Hansen had learned his craft the traditional
way, by running off to sea as a fourteen-year-old boy. The only circumstance
unusual about his situation was that when Knud Hansen was fourteen years
old, World War One had progressed just far enough to reveal the horror
of the U-Boat threat. Knud Hansen volunteered for service as a merchant
seaman shortly after unrestricted German submarine warfare had been declared.
Over the next quarter century, Knud Hansen rose in his profession, married,
had a daughter, and took command of Danmark in 1937.
Germany's invasion of his homeland in April, 1940, forced Captain Hansen
to seek refuge in Jacksonville, Florida, until his ship's status could
be resolved. Over the next year-and-a-half, a good part of Danmark's
crew left to sign on as merchant seamen in the effort to keep Great Britain
supplied. Fourteen of them died serving Allied forces. Meanwhile, Captain
Hansen and his dwindling crew waited as various tentative efforts to resolve
his situation fell through. During that time, Captain Hansen's wife and
daughter twice tried to leave Denmark to join him, but they were turned
back by Nazi border guards both times.
On December 7, 1941, everything changed. The Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor,
and the United States entered the war. Imagine Captain Hansen's situation.
Your government has fallen. Your family is trapped at home. The country
in which you have taken refuge has declared war on the country occupying
your homeland. What do you do? Captain Hansen chose immediately to stake
everything on his hopes for a free Denmark. On December 8, he sent the
following telegram to the United States government:
"In view of the latest days' developments, the cadets, officers, and captain of the Danish Government Training Vessel Danmark unanimously place themselves and the ship at the disposal of the United States Government, to serve in any capacity the United States Government sees fit in our joint fight for victory and liberty."
Given his concerns
about his wife and daughter back home, it could not have been an easy
telegram to send. Sending that telegram was functionally equivalent to
Cortez's burning his ships to keep his men from turning back.
Scripture contains a warning to the effect that, "No man having put his
hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the kingdom of God." Knud
Hansen was the sort of man who didn't look back. He hadn't looked back
when he first went to sea in World War One. And he didn't look back when
he heard the news of Pearl Harbor. He thought about his wife and daughter
back home and went to his cabin to write the telegram that guaranteed
he could not go home until after the war-and then only if the Allies won,
which was not by any means a foregone conclusion in December of 1941.
His wife was apparently made of the same stuff, for she became active
in the Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation.
Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea, the book that gets my vote
for the best World War II sea novel set in the Atlantic theater, presents
a minor scene in which the commanding officer of a convoy escort and his
first officer-two men who had served together for a long time and forged
a strong personal and professional regard for each other-discussed an
estrangement that had risen up between them. The captain explained that
the unfamiliar distance between them resulted not from any deficiency
on the part of his executive officer but from his own sense that the desperation
and intensity of the war effort required him to push aside any feeling
that might hinder his single minded focus on his duty.
Suzanne McMurray Ko's translation of Knud Anderson's monograph, The
Schoolship Danmark, contains abundant evidence that Captain Hansen
went about his training missions with the same seriousness of purpose.
He issued an exhortation to every cadet walking aboard to overcome their
fears. Why should they overcome their fears? "Because you must be seamen,
and seamen must be able to do the impossible, or else we cannot win the
war." Other anecdotes in that book make it clear that Captain Hansen evaluated
cadets by one criterion: Will the eventual commissioning of this cadet
help us win the war? If not, he suffered no remorse at the cadet's subsequent
disenrollment. To a man who would not look back, nothing mattered but
winning the war.
As important as it certainly was for cadets to learn the forces that affect
a ship and to test their own strength and courage in the rigging, it was
at least as important for them to see the steely resolve of a sea captain
whose every thought and every action were directed towards defeating the
Axis powers. For providing that example of devotion to duty to thousands
of cadets, including two future Commandants, the Coast Guard will always
be indebted to Danmark.
When we see the graceful beauty of this full rigged ship, we do well to
look past the billowing sails and to recall their purpose. Danmark's
service with the United States Coast Guard was not designed to provide
a picturesque setting for summer training. It was designed to win a war
we were not initially favored to win. At one point fairly early in that
war, Admiral Waesche declared that the Coast Guard was wholly committed
to the proposition that the convoys sending supplies to Great Britain
would not get there too late with too little. Danmark trained many
of the officers who fulfilled that proposition. Danmark's seamanship
and Captain Hansen's leadership made a huge difference in winning the
war.
Thank you for allowing me to join you in honoring this great ship.
Semper paratus.
[as delivered]
