To the commodore in command of Convoy NY-119, caught in a terrifying North Atlantic gale in fall 1944, Destroyer-Escort 529 was “the plucky USS Mason,” a vessel worthy of official commendation.
Only 289 feet long, the warship single-handedly led 20 ships from the convoy through 50-foot seas and winds gusting up to 70 knots to the safety of England’s Falmouth harbor while its own deck was splitting in two. The Mason then returned to aid the convoy’s widely scattered remaining vessels-though two British warships sent out to help it turned back because of the violent weather.
Commodore Alfred Lind was so impressed with the Mason’s “outstanding performance” during the ordeal he recommended that the Navy place a letter of commendation in the files of every man aboard.
But nothing happened-not for the rest of the war, and not for decades thereafter.
In fact, it wasn’t until eight days ago, at Washington’s Navy Memorial, that survivors of the Mason’s crew were finally accorded their letters of commendation, by Secretary of the Navy John Dalton.
Acknowledging their “meritorious service” with Convoy NY-119, the citation said, “By their unrelenting determination and steadfast devotion to duty, the officers and crew of USS Mason reflected credit upon themselves and upheld the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”
Why did it take so long for the men of Lind’s “plucky USS Mason” to get the recognition they had earned? It probably had something to do with the fact that elsewhere in the Navy 50 years ago, the Mason was known by a different description. As former radioman 2nd Class James Graham recalled at the Feb. 16 ceremonies, many white sailors referred to the Mason as “the nigger ship.”
The Mason was the first-and only-U.S. warship to sail with a black crew in World War II.
Long the most snobbish and discriminatory of the services, the Navy entered the war allowing blacks to serve only as stewards, cooks and laborers. Efforts led by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1942 began to open up seamen’s ratings to African-Americans, but two years later the overwhelming preponderance of black Navy personnel still were assigned to these and other menial jobs. The only ocean-going warship with black seamen was the Mason, and that was still the case at war’s end.
Of the Mason’s 13 wartime officers, only one, Lt. j.g. James Hair, was black. But of its 191 enlisted crew, 160 were black. They steered the ship, ran the engines, ran the radio room and did everything else imaginable.
`Always under a microscope’
The Mason was an experiment, a test pitting the exigencies of war against the prevailing racial attitudes of the time, to determine the truth or lie of such long-held Navy notions that black sailors would jump overboard in fright at the sound of naval guns being fired.
The experiment was a success. The crew, of course, didn’t jump overboard when the guns went off. They fired the guns themselves-and accurately. They served with distinction and compiled an admirable record.
“We had this pride,” said signalman 1st Class Lorenzo DuFau, formerly of New Orleans and now of New York, at the ceremonies. “The engines were kept very clean. Even the bilges were clean. When we’d hit a port after a convoy, a lot of times another ship would call and they’d come aboard with an inspection party. Now, after a convoy, a ship would usually be disrupted a little bit, but we were aware of the possibility, so we made a habit of keeping things clean. They would come aboard to inspect and they couldn’t get a spot on us.”
“We were always under a microscope,” said Quartermaster 2nd Class Charles W. Divers, formerly of Chicago and now of Maywood.
“Their experiment was part and parcel of what eventually came in 1948-the desegregation of the armed forces,” said Dr. Martin Davis, executive director of the Destroyer Escort Historical Association.
The black pilots of the famed Tuskeegee Airmen earned their due recognition, as did black infantry units. But for decades the Navy had not a public word to say about the Mason and its men.
It wasn’t until 1993 that their story was uncovered. Independent TV writer and producer Mary Pat Kelly, a former Chicagoan, was researching a public-broadcasting documentary on the Americans who served at military bases in Northern Ireland during World War II. She was given a wartime clipping from a black newspaper. The headline read: “Irish First to Treat USS Mason Crew Like Real Americans.”
In the story, one of the crewmen was quoted as saying, “Funny how I had to come all the way across the ocean to a foreign country before I got to enjoy the feeling of being an American.”
Said Kelly: “These black sailors were serving in a segregated Navy, defending a country where segregation was the law in many states. The importance of handing the Mason story to the next generation became concrete to me.”
Out of this came a second, yet-to-be-aired documentary on the Mason and its crew, and a just-published book, “Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS Mason” (Naval Institute Press).
And, finally, the ceremonies last week honoring the Mason’s officers and crew.
Breaking the color barrier
Nearly all these black crewmen had enlisted in the Navy, and all volunteered for the Mason.
“I had a job in the (Depression-era) Civilian Conservation Corps, and I had experience sleeping in a tent on the ground,” said Divers. “That wasn’t my idea of the way to spend the war. So I opted to join the Navy. We got clean sheets and three hot squares every day.”
DuFau was working in a General Motors defense plant for 75 cents an hour (“top wages in ’42”) but joined because it seemed the thing to do.
The segregation suffered by the Mason’s crew and their contemporaries was a 20th Century phenomenon: Blacks had served as seamen in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, and went down with the battleship Maine just before the Spanish-American War.
President Franklin Roosevelt-under pressure from his wife, civil rights leaders and several black newspapers, including the Chicago Daily Defender-issued an order in June 1942 allowing blacks in the Navy to apply for ratings and duties other than in the stewards service. Those who qualified were sent to Great Lakes Naval Training Center, where they were assigned to a segregated camp named after Robert Smalls, a black Union Navy captain famous for bringing a Confederate ship with him when he joined up.
After graduating from service school, the volunteers were shipped out to destinations all over the country-but not to ships.
“I was working on a pier at Cape May, N.J.,” said Graham. “They called me into the radio shack and said they wanted a radioman to go on a ship. I didn’t know a DD (destroyer) from a DE (destroyer escort). All I knew was a battleship from a destroyer. I qualified after a couple of weeks, and on Dec. 15, 1943, I was assigned to the Mason-even before the keel was laid.”
Fast and heavily armed, but lightly armored and highly vulnerable, the WW II destroyer escorts were built in a matter of weeks and intended to be short-lived and expendable.
The Mason, named for a naval aviator lost in the Battle of the Coral Sea, was commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard March 20. The white captain, Lt. Commander William Blackford, was told he could turn down his assignment, which he declined to do. He was asked to sign a form stating for the record that he didn’t mind serving with “colored” crew.
“That captain supported us all the way down the line,” said Graham.
In addition to other duties, the Mason was employed as escort for six convoys crossing the Atlantic to bring supplies to the Allied armies that had landed at Normandy and were moving across France toward Germany.
The Mason chased numerous U-boat contacts (like the Secret Service agents who guard the president, the DEs were required to “take a torpedo” for larger ships in the event of submarine attack) and had other adventures, but its diciest time came with Convoy NY-119 in October 1944.
Its most dangerous mission
The flotilla was made up of 14 American civilian merchant ships, four Navy vessels including the fleet oiler Maumee used by the convoy commodore as a flagship, and two British ships, as well as a vast fleet of tugboat-towed barges and New York Harbor railroad ferries that were being taken across the Atlantic to be used as temporary piers for the resupply of troops in France. The tow rigs were unwieldy and slow, moving no faster than an average of 4.7 miles an hour.
“The Queen Mary (then used as a troop ship) passed us four times on that trip-twice coming and twice going,” said DuFau.
When the gale hit, the tow-barge rigs were scattered all over the sea, and two went down with a loss of 19 men. The Mason was ordered to take the ships in the convoy on to England and return for the stray tugboats and barges. En route, the heavy seas caused the weld that held the main deck together to split. Welders had to make emergency repairs while the ship was being battered by the storm.
“I sat there and watched it make a 70-degree roll with my own eyes,” Divers said. “Ninety is flat over, and you don’t recover from a 90. Seventy, you’re right on the brink, water going right down the stack.”
The Mason survived and got its charges into port, then set back out for the Atlantic in the company of two British ships, HMS Rochester and HMS Saladin.
“We were supposed to recover whatever strays there were out of 119. We were supposed to round ’em up in those rough seas,” DuFau said. “And these two British corvettes come out to join us in the sweep to pick up those strays, and we spent at least half an hour exchanging who had what rate, how much time they had in service, trying to decide who would be the commanding officer of the group. It was so weird. They were worrying about who was in charge.
“After it was finally decided we were in charge, we headed out to sea, and they signaled they were returning to port because the seas were too rough. We couldn’t understand, because history says that these were the masters of the sea.”
“The weather was horrible,” Graham said. “It was the only place I ever got sick. Just terrible.”
Trouble with U.S. servicemen
But to their minds, the worst experiences these American sailors suffered during the war were provided by their fellow servicemen.
“I was returning from liberty one night,” said Graham. “A white sailor was walking toward the main entrance of the docks and I said, `What ship are you off, mate?’ He said, `I’m off the Bermingham, DE-530.’ I said, `Yeah? I’m off the USS Mason, DE-529.’ He said, `Oh, that’s that nigger ship.’ He and I had on white uniforms; he had the worst time of it.”
“We had a similar incident in North Africa,” said radioman 3rd Class Merwin Peters. “We were walking past these guys sitting up on top of this wall. They looked down at us and said, `What ship you guys off?’ and we said the Mason and they jumped down on us and we had one great fight right there.”
“The whites resented that we had rates on our arms,” said Graham. “A lot of the Marines at the main gates, they thought we were imposters. One guy said, `Rip ’em off and go around to the back gate,’ where the mess attendants and cooks entered. We had no hard feelings against them, but we were seamen and we won that distinction and we wanted the same privileges as the white guys.”
The high point of their service was a two-day stop in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where they mingled with the locals, drank in the pubs and attended a dance held for them, all without being called anything but “Yank.”
“The magic of the thing was that there was no rude greeting or bad looks or frowns or `What’re you doing here?’ ” said DuFau. “It was the first time in my life anyone ever apologized to me for the weather in the community. To be received that way, no barriers, that was fantastic. That stayed with us.”
“We were sitting in this dance hall,” said radioman 3rd Class Benjamin Garrison, formerly of Columbia, S.C., and now of Tampa. “I couldn’t dance at all, but there was a girl on this side and a girl on this side, and we were talking, and one of my shipmates who was white came up and asked the girl on my right if she would like to dance. And she turned to me and asked, `May I dance with him?’ I thought, now this was courtesy. I still remember her name, Sadie O’Neill.”
The bond is unbroken
The crewmen who made it to Washington to get their commendation from the Navy secretary spent several days in happy reunion, swapping stories-and arguments-about a certain submarine they may or may not have sunk (“I think we killed a lot of fish”), about how they used to eavesdrop on the captain’s speaking tube and sneak looks at sealed orders, and about the legendary ship’s dogs, Boston bull terriers named Horace and Morris.
“The relationship that started when we went aboard the Mason, it carried on until this day-the bonding that happened between the men, and the love of that ship,” said DuFau.
“It’s strange how you can fall in love with a big lump of steel. Only the persons who experienced it can understand it. We refused to allow anyone to say disparaging things about our ship. You can say whatever you want, but don’t put down our ship.”
