The Tale of the Aging Mariners
Some Merchant Seamen Still Lack Veteran StatusWashington Post, by Melissa B. Robinson, Associated Press
Tuesday, January 19, 1999Caught up in patriotic fervor but kept out of the Army and Navy for less-than-perfect eyesight, Francis Coughlin wanted to serve his country. So he became a merchant seaman, helping deliver coal to freezing Italians in the winter of 1945.
"We sailed up the Adriatic Sea to Venice," recalled Coughlin, 71, a doctor and lawyer in New Canaan, Conn. "We passed mines... that could have destroyed our ship."
Francis CoughlinSome mariners died at sea even after the Japanese surrendered on Aug. 14, 1945.
But the U.S. government does not regard Coughlin or the 3,000 other surviving seamen who worked on ships carrying cargo to war-ravaged Europe and the Pacific as full-fledged veterans.
That has changed, to a degree, because of legislation sponsored by Rep. Lane Evans (D-Ill.) and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), that became law late last year. It extends basic burial benefits to merchant seamen who sailed between Aug. 15, 1945, and Dec. 31, 1946, the date proclaimed as the official end of World War II by President Harry S. Truman.
The new law does not confer full veteran status on the men, who will not have access to the same health care or disability benefits available to the nation's 6.3 million surviving World War II veterans.
But by providing a flag, a grave marker and burial in a national cemetery, it conveys something that mariners want more than money or health care: recognition that they served their country with honor.
"These men want to be able to look at their grandchildren and say, 'I'm a veteran of World War II. I served my country in a different way,' " said Thomas Fraley of Cape Coral, Fla., secretary of American Merchant Marine Veterans.
The 1945-46 group was left out 10 years ago, when a federal court ruled that Merchant Marine veterans of World War II should be granted veterans' status.
The Air Force, in charge of implementing the rule, imposed a service cutoff date of Aug. 15, 1945--even though the December 1946 date is recognized by the Department of Veterans Affairs as the cutoff for veterans' status for the Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard. Merchant seamen were being recruited as late as May 1946 to bring supplies to occupation forces throughout the world, according to the mariners.
Mariners trace their history back to the Revolutionary War, when a party of Maine mariners, armed with pitchforks and axes and inspired by news of the colonists' victory at Lexington, used an unarmed schooner to capture a British warship off New England.
In 1936, the Merchant Marine was created to carry cargo and serve as a military auxiliary in time of war. Two years later, with war on the horizon, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the mass production of Liberty ships to carry war supplies and established the U.S. Maritime Service, now defunct, to train seamen.
Not everyone agrees that mariners -- classified as civilians even when their ships were under military control during war and they received gunnery training -- should be veterans.
"They were never led to believe, nor was it ever implied, that they would gain veterans' status in their contractual obligation to move cargo," said Bob Manhan, assistant legislative director for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a 2.1 million-member organization that opposed veterans' status for World War II mariners.
Manhan acknowledges the crucial role mariners played in the Allied victory by moving supplies. But they also were not subject to the draft, were sometimes better paid and could volunteer--or not--for risky missions.
"I'm not going to say they didn't run some horrible risks," Manhan said. "However, members of the military service never had the option not to volunteer for a hazardous assignment such as Iwo Jima or Normandy."
For mariners, the casualty figures provide grim evidence that many were in harm's way. About 6,800 of the 215,000 World War II mariners were killed.
Some mariners are pressing the Civilian Military Service Review Board for full veterans' status for the 1945-46 group.
After all, they say, other groups that fall outside the traditional armed services--such as World War I reconstruction aides--were granted such recognition.
"We carried aviation fuel from South America to Genoa, Italy, for the Air Force," said Daniel Horodysky, 70, of Berkeley, Calif., who sailed with the Merchant Marine in October 1945. "We went through mine fields. . . . We didn't consider ourselves civilians."
