The city was alive day and night with the constant to-and-fro of workers. In addition, there was a great influx of sailors and seamen ... out for a good time in the city. sample New York life. Two Catholic priests said Mass daily and soon attracted a regular congregation that included divers working on the burnt-out Normandie on a nearby pier. Two RAF pilots, who were passengers, had disappeared to take jobs driving explosives from a factory in upstate New York to the docks and were believed to have "earned a fortune." A number of the crew worked part-time jobs ashore, dishwashing at 50 cents an hour or snow clearing for 60 cents. For most who could get ashore in New York it was a good time remembered for the city's hospitality, but there were some unpleasantries recorded. Third Officer R. McRae on SS Coracero recalled: Five years before, New York was a city of hard times and depression. As a boy in 1936137 one could step on shore with one dollar, see a movie-cum-variety show and for supper have a hamburger and egg, sunny side up,followed by apple pie with ice cream and coffee, and return on board with change from your dollar. That afternoon in 1943 New York was all prosperity and go. I took a cab from Battery Park to 42nd Street and bang went $1.40. New York was having a good war. John McCabe, a sailor on the USS Bainbridge, recalls a dispute over a fare between a sailor and a cabbie that boiled over just outside the Brooklyn Navy Yard gates on Sands Street. It took only a moment's provocation before a huge crowd of sailors surrounded the taxi, began rocking it, and eventually rolled it over. The gang then proceeded to roll the battered vehicle along the street. The West Side launch operators who ran craft out to pick up crew and haul laundry and watch changes were also benefiting from the war. Jack Quimby remembers "the old river pirate" Capt. Lynch working from 155th Street and Gordie Smith from 200th Street, and vividly recalls the bitter lament of a merchant sailor charged $5 by a launch operator to come ashore for a church service on Christmas Eve. New York was indeed having a good war, but so was much of America. During the final two years of the war the average citizen was able to save a quarter of his income. Also adding to the great numbers of enlisted personnel posted in and around the Port of New York were those enrolled at New York' s dramatically expanded maritime training facilities. Maritime education, training, and welfare were major activities in the wartime Port of New York and represent the third factor contributing to the port's preeminence. Some institutions that existed before the war experienced exponential growth. In addition, new institutions and facilities were created out of whole cloth in order to meet wartime exigencies. Three programs produced licensed officers for the American merchant service. Deck and engineering officers for the vastly expanded merchant marine were graduated from the New York State Maritime College at Fort Schuy ler in the Bronx, founded in 1874. During the war, the college was able to train in its twoyear program as many as 2,000 naval reserve officer candidates and 500 merchant marine cadets at one time. Across from the state college, over on Long Island 's North Shore, the United States Merchant Marine Academy was founded by the US Maritime Commission in 1943. It was created to meet an anticipated wartime demand for licensed merchant marine officers beyond the capacity of the five state maritime academies (New York, Massachusetts, Maine, Pennyslvania and California) to fulfill. It occupied the former Walter Chrysler estate at Kings Point. SEA HISTORY 65, SPRING 1993
Perhaps the most ambitious enterprise in maritime education was the Maritime Commission Training Station at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, intended to fill the urgent need for merchant seamen to crew the new Liberty and Victory ships. Between December 1942andAugust 1945, the facility graduated 115,000 trained volunteer merchant seamen, including some 10,000 sixteen-year-olds accepted with their parents ' consent. More than half of the entire personnel of the American merchant service were Sheepshead Bay graduates. The expanded wartime Coast Guard filled its ranks through the Manhattan Beach Coast Guard Training Station, Brooklyn, after 1 February 1942, the largest Coast Guard Station in the country. Among the Coast Guard's first missions was to organize mounted and foot patrols covering the length of the nation 's coastlines. This coast watch was in place in time to detect the four German saboteurs who landed at Amagansett, Long Island , from the U-202 on the night of 13 June 1942. Startled by a lone beach patroller as they attempted to bury explosives in the sand, the would-be saboteurs tried to bribe the Coast Guardsman into not talking. The American wisely played the game but only for as long as it took to get back to his base and make a report to his superiors. The decision to assign sailors to man guns and communications equipment aboard merchant ships led to the creation of the US Naval Armed Guard. Three training facilities were established nationwide. The largest was located in New York at the huge Naval Militia Armory at the foot of 52nd Street in Brooklyn. As the Brooklyn Naval Armed Guard Center, it "served as a pool to supply navy gunners and communications men for convoys leaving Atlantic ports," say Navy records. The center provided "gunnery training and taught ... how to abandon ship, the two essentials in the lore of the merchant gunner." In addition to its educational and training institutions, the Port of New York was also home to Seamen 's Church Institute. SCI rendered yeoman service in ministering to the needs of seamen between their voyages on the dangerous ocean at the city's doostep. Their large, capacious and magnificently decorated building at the foot of South Street, affectionately known as the "Doghouse," did a land office business housing and assisting seamen. Other agencies with an interest in seamen 's welfare flourished in New York. These included various church-affiliated and temperance organizations, financial institutions like the Seamen's Bank for Savings, social and ethnic organizations like the Hunan Society for Chinese Seamen, and a kaleidoscope of labor organizations ranging from pink to scarlet on the ideological spectrum. The period 1941-1945 , was a period of apogee for the Port of New York. There was a phenomenal amount of human activity within its close dockland quarters, proof of what can be achieved when there is an intensity of purpose. New York had been, since the nineteenth century, a "world city." This appellation was never more appropriate for the city than during the Second World War when the streets of New York were crowded with Allied seamen. But they were only a part of an influx of exiled Poles and other survivors of the catastrophe that had overtaken Europe. A catastrophe that New York contributed more than any other US city to reverse. 1.
Joseph Meany, Senior Historian at the New York State Museum in Albany, has a longstanding interest in things maritime. 17