"You Have to Go Out . . ."

On the 13th day out they knew they were in for trouble. High above, two enemy planes had circled time & again. That night, when the torpedo struck, the noise was like the slamming of a bulkhead door. The big ship rolled slowly over on her side, then plunged.

Last week the Navy released these new details of the worst convoy disaster in U.S. history. On that night, last February, more than 850 U.S. soldiers and sailors died in the North Atlantic when two merchantmen went down. Said Ship's Cook George Dunningham: "There were a lot of men yelling and blowing whistles. Many of them were in the water, and each had his red rescue light lit. It looked like a weird, strange dream."

Just after dawn a 327-ft. Coast Guard cutter hove into sight -- "the most beautiful ship in the world." The cutter's crew threw ropes to men on the rafts. Some were too weak to grasp the lines. Coast Guardsmen dived into the icy water, tied ropes around them. Repeatedly the big cutter had to break off rescue operations, dash away to drop depth charges. Each time she came back. Before she sailed on the cutter had saved 235.

"A Good Safe Place." A standing joke among Coast Guardsmen is that some recruits join up because "it's a good, safe place to fight the war." That the Coast Guard performs many wartime duties be sides guarding the shoreline was revealed this week in other exploits:

> Coast Guardsmen manned the U.S.S. Wakefield (formerly the Manhattan) when she rescued women & children from under Jap barrages at Singapore. Months later, in the Atlantic, they got off all the soldier and civilian passengers when she caught fire, then towed her blackened hulk to port for repairs.

> In one rescue of torpedoed seamen from the North Atlantic, Lieut. Henry Keene Jr. lost part of a tooth in an underwater fight with a drowning man, but hauled him in. Half-hour earlier he had gone overside to rescue a mongrel dog, got a Humane Society medal and the dog for his reward.

> Lieut. John A. Pritchard Jr. and Radioman Benjamin A. Bottoms rescued two Army airmen who had crashed on a Greenland icecap. Then they flew into a blinding snowstorm to bring back others. They were never seen again.

> The Coast Guard, which has some of the world's finest surfmen (a peacetime specialty), landed marines in the Solomons and soldiers in North Africa.

In peace, besides making an average of 15 rescues a day, the Coast Guard does everything from breaking ice and chasing smugglers to protecting seals in the Bering Sea. Some of its home-water patrol has now been taken over by the Coast Guard's Temporary Reserve, civilians who put in at least twelve hours weekly without pay. One crew in Boston consists of a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, an undertaker and a bartender.

Skipper. Chief of the sea's handy men is a quiet, 56-year-old Marylander, Vice Admiral Russell Randolph Waesche (rhymes with "may she"). He has headed his organization almost seven years, longer than Army's Marshall, Navy's King and the Marines' Holcomb have headed theirs. Jumped from commander to rear admiral over many senior officers, efficient Russell Waesche is the first Coast Guard chief to wear a vice admiral's three stars. From 17,000 men, the Coast Guard since Dec. 7, 1941 has grown to almost 150,000.

Admiral Waesche is proud that the Coast Guard, founded in 1790 by Alexander Hamilton, is older than the U.S. Navy (which took it over from the Treasury Department in June 1941). He takes pride in the Coast Guard motto (Semper Paratus--always ready). But the front cover of his new booklet, Deeds of Valor from the Annals of the Coast Guard, displays a more familiar Coast Guard maxim: "You have to go out but you don't have to come back."

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