Will America Really Let Its Merchant Marine Disintegrate? A Plethora of Media Story Ideas 12/20/2019
Good Question? There is no doubt that the Jones Act fleet is surviving, however, America’s deep-water Ocean Fleet is in serious trouble. What can be done? As outlined in gCaptain’s prophetic article by John Conrad, “Top 10 Reasons Why The US Merchant Marine Is Failing”, “The public’s understanding of the Merchant Marine and allied Merchant Navies, has dwindled to historically low figures while current world events (e.g. Gulf Wars, China’s restrictions on freedom of navigation, Russia’s growing icebreaker fleet and even inland wars like Afghanistan) have shown the growing importance of US sealift capability to global defense.” The dwindling of our Merchant Marine has been obvious for decades. In 1979, in an effort to document the history of the merchant marine and preserve the living history of the men who sailed these ships, Harry Dring, Curator of the San Francisco National Maritime Historical Park provided, Producer Robert Ferrand, a ticket aboard the Liberty Ship SS Jeremiah Obrien, when the ship sailed out of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, under her own power. (This is a story in itself) From this footage, began a film production called “Last of the Liberties”. This rather innocent film focused on the Liberty Ship effort during World War II and the restoration of the last surviving Liberty Ship in original condition. However, while interviewing the Officers and Engineers, for the first film, the producer kept hearing, “Keep your eye on the ball, it is the Russians. The Russians are destroying our Merchant Fleet by shipping cargo below our operating costs”. At the time, the U.S. Ocean Fleet had 350 ships, today, there are less than 100 deep-water ships. So, the Producer, wrote another script, called “The Last Liberty” is an effort to bring this issue of the dwindling Merchant Marine to National Attention. However, in the 1980’s, documentary film distribution was controlled by PBS. While the BBC and the History Channel and other production companies used some of the footage, finding a mass market distribution channel for this film was challenging at best. Despite a handsome donation of $8,000 from Thomas B Crowley Jr., himself (a story in itself) who was Chairman of the National Liberty Ship Memorial, at the time, and letters of support from 3 Maritime Administrators as well as from Kings Point and a letter from the Reagan White House, the film had no cost effective mass distribution channel. Thus, for over four decades, over 5 hours of 16mm film and 50 hours of audio recording of the men who not only sailed these merchant ships, but the ones who actually saved the SS Jeremiah Obrien, herself, languished in a vault. Channeling the Wisdom of Ancestors.