Sixty Five Years of Service
The USCGC Storis (WMEC -38) was the Last Surviving Veteran of WWII
Commissioned into the fleet September 1942 after fourteen months construction, the United States Coast Guard Cutter Storis was a unique ship. Built as a hybrid armed icebreaker/buoy tender for arctic operations and as such she was the only vessel of her class. She weighed 1715 tons and carried a J2F-5 Duck seaplane along with her 150 man crew. Her 230 foot long steel hull carried a rather stout armament of two 3"/50cal guns, four 20mm cannon, depth charges and mousetrap depth mortars. This made her much more heavily armed than contemporary cutters of the time.
Her World War Two service included escorting convoys off the Canadian coast, supplying isolated weather stations in Greenland, and supporting allied troops. In this she played a part in the so called "Weather War" looking for secret German met stations that were radioing weather updates to the high command back in Berlin. It was with this information that the Germans were able to launch the Battle of the Bulge under the screen of a winter storm that grounded Allied air support. In July 1944 The Storis along with the cutter Nothland and a crew of Army commandos found a secret German radio station near Shannon Island along with the German trawler, Coberg which had been trapped in the ice. At the close of the war the Storis was transferred to the Bering Sea Patrol because of her unique capabilities.
For the next sixty years the redoubtable icebreaker became known as the "Galloping Ghost of the Alaskan Coast". In 1957 she circumnavigated the continent as she led a three ship convoy through the first deepwater path through the fabled Northwest Passage to re-supply NATO DEW stations on the lookout for Soviet ICBMs coming over the polar icepack during the Cold War. She rescued lost and shipwrecked sailors, airmen and fishermen. She enforced fisheries patrols, detaining dozens of foreign trawlers poaching in Alaskan waters. This included the famous seizure of the Soviet trawler Kolyvan in 1972.
She underwent a modification in 1972 that removed most of her world war two armament, upgraded her machinery and electronics, removed her cargo hold, and reduced the size of her crew by half. The Storis was reclassified from being an icebreaker to being referred to as a medium endurance cutter with primarily a law enforcement role. She jumped right back into heavy use, escorting and providing assistance to the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline project and the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. The Storis was on the front line of the Cold War with reports constantly coming forward during the 1980's of Soviet Naval Spetsnaz commandoes scouting the Alaskan coast. This coupled with the ongoing crab poaching, catastrophic oil spills, grounded cruise ships and medical evacuations from isolated Aleut villages made the Storis one of the most active ships in the world. Although she had not left the Arctic since 1957 she detached crewmembers to fight in the Persian Gulf.
On February 8, 2007, after 65 years of service, the unsinkable Storis was decommissioned, her duties assumed by the cutter Munro and by the new cutter Alex Haley. In March the Storis was sent to San Francisco for storage until her fate can be decided. In 1941 the United States Coast Guard spent $2,072,889 to Toledo Shipbuilding in Ohio for the Storis's construction. It appears they got their monies worth.
Sources
Sources:
Cutter File, US Coast Guard
Coast Guard Cutters & Craft of World War II. Robert Scheina. Naval Institute Press, 1981.
*The Coast Guard Cutter Acushnet was originally commissioned as a Diver Class Fleet Rescue and Salvage Vessel, USS Shackle (ARS 9) for the U.S. Navy February 5, 1944. She won three battle stars in World War Two and is still in commission at 63 years of age. However the Storis was the last WWII veteran that served with the Coast Guard in the war.
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