Ingoldsby Legend

The report that a sign in Norfolk reads "Sailors and Dogs Keep Out" is not true. But until Norfolk had been brought back to the state of respectability it now enjoys, the story did indicate the pitch of civilian indignation over what war had done to the town.

To Norfolk, one of the largest naval bases in the world, the war brought a daily flood of 7,000 to 40,000 bluejackets fresh from the sea, well-heeled and full of beans. The town, already crowded, was a nightmare of uproar, ranging from innocent merriment to saloon and bawdy-house brawls where tars and civilians got hurt. Vice blossomed everywhere. The Navy, as alarmed as the civilians, got busy.

It organized the Fifth District Shore Patrol, first separate, permanent unit of its kind, gave the new outfit blanket orders to clean up--fast. That is what the Patrol did.

The Shore Patrol's efficiency is not Navy-bred. It was brought in with 300 tough, intelligent, hand-picked policemen, including four attorneys, Maryland's former hangman, New York patrolmen, detectives and constables, and highway cops from eastern and southern states. Fifteen of the 25 members of the Negro division are college graduates.

This experienced lot came in with an equally experienced leader, young (37), aggressive James Francis Ingoldsby, who left his job as chief of the Roanoke (Va.) police department to aid the Navy.

The Untamed. Ingoldsby, now a lieutenant commander, began his work as a lieutenant, ran smack into the stone wall of deep-sea tradition. Seafaring commanders balked at giving up their time-honored shore authority over their own crews. Enlisted sailors, used to the comradely patrols from their own ships, balked too. It took an order from Navy Secretary Frank Knox to give Ingoldsby and his crew real authority. Then Ingoldsby went to work, got his unit going in a matter of days.

"Those first couple of months were pretty tough," he says. "Everywhere our men went they had to fight. Sometimes we'd have a couple dozen in the hospital at the same time."

The Taming. Ingoldsby booked all offenders and he checked the meting-out of punishment aboard ship. With an undercover squad (in Navy uniforms) he surveyed the joints suspected of pandering, periodically raided the chronic troublemakers. He posted guards around shady hotels. He kept a confidential "black book" and used it with realistic diplomacy.

Hell-raising bluejackets grew to respect the Patrol, their officers to understand it. In its March 1943 report, the Izac subcommittee of the House Committee on Naval Affairs called the Patrol "one of the principal factors contributing to the improved vice conditions" in the area, recommended immediate expansion to its present size of 685 enlisted men and 18 commissioned officers. The Navy set up similar units in other congested posts.

Fifth District S.P.s now have a big program. One-eighth of them keep order on the main rail and ferry lines. Tougher than their Army counterparts, they take liquor away from traveling servicemen.

The main force concentrates on Norfolk. Armed with pistols and night sticks, they patrol on foot by twos, ride along in the city's prowl cars, or cover the county roads in trucks. They arrest all drunk and disorderly servicemen and all out-of-uniform sailors.

On big liberty nights the steadily decreasing number of arrests still runs over 400 and the S.P. pie-wagons keep shuttling until long after dawn. They have handled all kinds of violence, including murder.

Back to the Hills. The Patrol's success has earned Senior Patrol Officer Ingoldsby a bid for a postwar job in the Navy. To this he has emphatically turned two deaf ears. A self-made man who went through the National Police Academy after quitting high school to work, Ingoldsby thinks little of his postwar Navy prospects. When the war is over, he intends to make a beeline for his job in Virginia's peaceful Blue Ridge mountains, where there are no sailors.

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