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AT WAR IN ASTORIA
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
“Four years of war is forty of anything else “
-CYNTHIA BASS ('SHERMAN'S MARCH')
World War 2 began on September 1, 1939 and ended on
September 2, 1945 Between those two days lay six years of the
most tremendous and monstrous carnage ever experienced by
humanity Its most enduring tragedy and legacy to the future is
that it was self-inflicted
Military historian John Keegan wrote that World War 2
"was the largest event in the history of mankind," and that "no
populated continent was untouched." An estimated 50 million
human beings perished out of existence during the six years the
war spread over most of the world. Though soldiers, sailors and
airmen died by the millions, many more millions of civilians were
killed in massive bombing raids that destroyed cities or were
exterminated in deathcamps as a result of their politics, religion,
or race (as well as for 'sexual degeneracy'). The waris immensity
of death and broken lives, which can never be counted with
complete accuracy (nor truly comprehended), were approxi
mately 15 million battle dead, 40 million civilian dead or missing,
35 million military and civilian wounded, 28 million homeless,
35 million imprisoned, 5 million orphaned, and 11 million
executed (Wiich includes the infamous 'Holocaust' of 6 million
Jews exterminated in Nazi deathcamps whose names will
probably bnng a shudder far into the future: Auschwitz Treblinka.
Dachau.)
To be understood and reachable to the individual
sensibility, the war’s enormous scale must be scaled back,
focused on the microscopic but very personal involvement.
The Columbia River city of Astoria, Oregon, ten miles inland
from the Pacific Ocean, exemplified the war’s urgent claim of
total commitment of every nation swept into it, though its role
was minor and supplementary compared to the large shipbuilding
efforts 100 miles upnver in Portland (Oregon) and Vancouver
(Washington), and of course, like every other city in the USA,
it was untouched by actual combat Merchant Marine 'Liberty'
and 'Victory' ships and Navy warships such as the infamous
'Kaiser Koffins', small thinly armored escort aircraft carriers,
were commissioned, made sea-ready and filled up with crews
in Astoria and steamed out into the vast Pacific to fight in the
colossal oceanwide war of annihilation against the Empire of
Japan, many to never return.
Although fishing was a priority occupation in Astoria,
not to be interrupted by drafting local fishermen away from
their important war effort of supplying food to the armed forces,
hundreds of local mariners flocked to enlist after Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. tw years after the war
began with Nazi Germany's attack on Poland, and six months
after its massive invasion of Russia in June.
The initial effect of Pearl Harbor on Astoria was anxiety
that the Japanese would attack the West Coast of the USA, as
so many rumors claimed A severe blackout was imposed. Mines
were laid at the entrance to the Columbia River to stop enemy
ships and submarines, and incoming/outgoing friendly vessels
were escorted through the minefield by small Coast Guard patrol
boats. Tongue Point based Navy PBY seaplanes patrolled the
North Coast from San Francisco to the Straits of Juan de Fuca.
(The PBYs were later replaced by Navy blimps that operated
from Tillamook.) Astoria's young men and women enlisted or
were drafted in the armed forces (many joining the naval and
maritime services) and were sent to all theaters of the war:
Europe, Asia and the Pacific. A National Guard unit from Astoria
saw action in New Guinea and the Philippines The Navy built a
500-bed hospital for wounded servicemen and Fort Stevens and
Camp Clatsop (renamed Rilea) trained troops sent to Alaska and
the Aleutian Islands.
Among many personal accounts of those first months in
Astoria after Pearl Harbor is one by the late Paul Barkman, Wio
served on a Coast Guard patrol boat guarding the entrance to the
Columbia River * 'The river filled up with vessels of every kind,"
he wrote "Ships anchored below Desdemona Light that had
escaped Japanese submarines. A couple of ships were torpedoed
just off the coast but most managed to get across the bar and
safely into harbor. Everything was painted wartime gray The
Coast Guard vessels Fir, Manzanita and Rose took on a drab
appearance Seabags began to stack up at all naval and Coast
Guard stations as floods of new enlistees took berths among the
huge fleet of small craft that were taken over for the duration of
the war. Yachts from the Astoria and Young's Bay clubs, tugboats
and fishing boats of every sort were pressed into service and
painted gray Each received numencal designations based on
their length and most were mounted wth guns "
Like the rest of the country, the Oregon North Coast
settled into a war routine of rationing (food, gas, sugar and
shoes), war bond drives and blood banks; and very soon the War
Department began sending telegrams to local families reporting
the deaths of sons, brothers, husbands and lovers
"People volunteered for (the) Red Cross and for air raid
warden duties, worked on scrap drives, rationing and draft
boards." Robert S Lovell wrote in the Summer 1995 Cumtux,
Clatsop County Historical Society's quarterly magazine Women
filled most of the cannery jobs previously held by able-bodied
men and helped fit-out ships sent incomplete to Astoria from the
upper river shipyards. Also exempt from the draft with fishermen
were local ship and boatyard workers, marine electricians and
other skilled labor necessary to produce the local portion of the
stupendous war machine that America built during World War 2
Forest workers were not exempt, however, and while they warred
all over the world. Pacific Northwest forests were left to bum
untended
(A successful effort by local Chinese schoolchildren to
block shipment of scrap iron to Japan in 1940 "shouldn't be lost
to our memory," Lovell wote in Cumtux Japanese atrocities in
China angered the schoolchildren, who decided to picket a ship
that was being loaded in Astoria 'They suddenly appeared on
the docks carrying signs, and our patriotic Longshoremen decided
to honor their picketline," Lovell wrote The Port of Astoria
subsequently embargoed all further scrap shipments, which
angered Japan. 'They're going to be shooting that stuff back at
us anyway," Lovell quoted his mother as saying (a rather popular
opinion at the time) The Japanese sued the Port. Longshoremen
(* The title of this article is from Barkman's: NOTE,
Aug/Sept 95 After the war he taught high school history in
Northern California, and worked on a horse ranch He returned
to Astoria in 1985 and was employed at the Columbia River
Maritime Museum and developed jobs for Green Thumb He
died in California in the late 1990s)
HANS ALEXANDER MUELLER
Astoria, Oregon is the oldest city in the American West. Its history is rough and
stormy on both land and sea. Its mythlike 'Golden Age' is perceived to have been in
the late 19th Century when its riverfront ten miles inland from the Pacific Ocean was
crowded with ships from all over the world that exchanged the fineries of Victorian era
civilization for Columbia River salmon, timber from the bountiful forests and wheat
from farms along the lower river. Yet World War 2 might also be considered a period
of great prosperity for the city, though it refrains from acknowledging war profiteering
as part of its history.
Astoria was hot during World War 2. Thousands of sailors came from all over the
USA to fill the crews of ships built upriver in Portland and Vancouver. They were young
to war, aware they might be killed, their ships sunk, so they partied in Astoria like there
was no tomorrow, which for many there were few tomorrows left.
and Chinese children. Lovell wrote, "Fortunately, the suit dragged
on, and was settled when Pearl Harbor was bombed Of course, it
was only 27 months later that Japan did indeed shoot at Clatsop
County, with 17 shells aimed at Fort Stevens.")
Barkman wrote of the shelling of Fort Stevens, "On the
night of June 21. 1942, a Japanese submarine surfaced offshore
and slammed a few shells at Fort Stevens Everyone waited for
Battery Russell to reply but there was only silence. Afterward the
sub moved down the coast and shelled California."
A tour of the Columbia River Maritime Museum on
the Astoria riverfront provides a virtual (perhaps even visceral)
experience of World War 2's titanic seabattles in the Pacific
between the USA and Japan and the pitiless no-quarter
submarine wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45 in the North Atlantic.
The centerpiece of CRMM's Naval History gallery is
the steel bridge and pilothouse of a U.S. Navy destroyer that
experienced savage combat in the colossal battles of the Pacific
War and later in Korea The Museum was built around this 13-ton
metal skull of the USS Knapp, which, like a royal head, was
detached from its body and shipped downriver from a Portland
shipwrecking yard
One comer of the gallery is devoted to an exhibit of the
heavy cruiser USS Astoria, including a model by CRMM founder
Rolf Klep. Astoria was the first of two warships named after the
city of Astoria and was sunk by Japanese ships off Guadalcanal
one August night in 1942 with three other Allied cruisers
The Battle of the Savo Sea was a nighttime gunfire and
torpedo fight, at which the Japanese excelled Astoria (which had
conveyed home to Tokyo the body of a Japanese ambassador
a few years earlier) was riddled with shell hits. An all-metal,
electronically guided, mechanically powered warship engaged in
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the largest naval war in history, Astoria went down like an antique
sailing man-of-war gunned to death broadside to its enemy.
Two hundred and thirty-eight of Astoria's crew died with
their ship: 142 were wounded. Above Klep's model is a diagram
showing where each of approximately 200 Japanese shells struck
Astoria.
A 50th anniversary reunion of survivors was held at the
Museum in 1992, and a number have been held since. They
gather on August 9. the date of Astoria"s sinking (and also the
date of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945).
Exhibits change and rotate in the Naval Gallery, and
a convoy of World War 2 warships that used to fan out from
the Knapp' has been pared. Noticeably missing is the U.S. Navy
destroyer Reuben James, generally considered the first American
naval vessel lost in the war (though the gunboat Panay, sunk in
China by Japanese air attack in 1937, might also have a claim).
Reuben James was torpedoed by a Nazi U-boat while escorting
a convoy of cargo ships to England two months before Japan
attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Its loss characterized
the grim six-year battle to maintain English and Russian ocean
supply lines against attacking German submarines Thousands
of ships and lives were lost, and for a perilous time U-boats
sank more Allied cargo ships faster than they could be replaced
In response, Amencan shipyards revolutionized shipbuilding,
particularly the Henry J Kaiser yards on the Pacific Coast
By war’s end, the Kaiser yards in Portland and Vancouver were
producing their famous 'Liberty' and 'Victory' ships one a day
A classic example of a World War 2 Liberty ship is
the Star of Oregon, which was built in Portland and launched in
September 1941 It was the second Liberty launched, the first
on the West Coast. A year later, on August 30, 1942, a Nazi
submarine sent it to the bottom of the Caribbean on its return to
the USA from it maiden voyage to the Persian Gulf. A builder’s
model of Star of Oregon is in CRMM's Steamship Gallery, just
preceding the Naval Gallery
The Kaiser yards on the Columbia River also built
warships, one of which was the escort aircraft carrier Gambier
Bay. The model of Gambier Bay in the Naval History Gallery
was built from scratch by two Beaverton (Oregon) dentists. Nick
Marineau and Robert Norgren, who singly or together made most
of the ship models in the gallery, including a magnificent scale
model of the battleship Oregon (Marineau). The real Gambier
Bay was built upriver and was one of fifty small aircraft carriers
commissioned and crewed in Astona Escort carriers like
Gambier Bay were constructed to provide air support for amphib
ious operations in the Pacific or against U-boats in the Atlantic.
They carried a crew of 900 and their air squadrons were torpedo
planes and fighters They were the first all-welded carriers,
prefabricated to be built quickly — an average of of one every
seven days. A popular name for them was "Kaiser Koffins,"
Wiich five commissioned in Astona became, sunk by torpedoes,
Japanese Kamikazes and one by surface fire
Thomas Y'Blood, author of The Little Giants, wrote a
tribute to the crews of the escort carriers, which is displayed on
a plaque next to the Knapp's bridge (one of three recently put on
exhibit) 'They came from all comers of America — the grassy
plains, the mountain heights, the big cities, the wave swept
shores, from north and south, east and west, most came to the
escort carriers, not as seasoned sailors, but as individuals setting
out for the far oceans for the first time."
Paul Barkman wote that although Astoria was generally
a "pleasantly quiet liberty town," later in the war Wien the
(escort) carriers started coming downriver from the Kaiser ship
yards in Portland and Vancouver, large numbers of shore patrol
and local police were called out because too many of the crews
aboard the 'Kaiser Koffins' were not too optimistic about their