The United States Coast Guard in World War II

The United States Coast Guard in World War II PDF

Author: Thomas P. Ostrom

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2009-08-11

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0786453710

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At home and overseas, the United States Coast Guard served a variety of vital functions in World War II, providing service that has been too little recognized in histories of the war. Teaming up with other international forces, the Coast Guard provided crewmembers for Navy and Army vessels as well as its own, carried troops, food, and military supplies overseas, and landed Marine and Army units on distant and dangerous shores. This thorough history details those and other important missions, which included combat engagement with submarines and kamikaze planes, and typhoons. On the home front, port security missions involving search and rescue, fire fighting, explosives, espionage and sabotage presented their own unique dangers and challenges.

Not Your Father's Coast Guard

Not Your Father's Coast Guard PDF

Author: Matthew Mitchell

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1449044395

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While the Coast Guard's many battles at sea in the War on Drugs are widely known, its participation in the ground offensive is not. Indeed, the Guard didn't just send its cutters to interdict narcotics-laden vessels attempting to bring their illicit cargo into Uncle Sam's territorial waters, it sent ground troops to foreign lands to train their forces and, when necessary, directly engage the enemy. But to create the type of force needed was no small task and would not be without tribulation, both from within and outside the organization. The road traveled to complete the mission was laden with obstacles. This is not a story about the Coast Guard you know, or think you know. Rather, this is a story about the other side, the side that history nearly forgot; not the standard, but the antithesis of standard. It is a story that will undoubtedly make even the most seasoned Coast Guardsmen question their understanding of the organization to which they belong. To be sure, "This is not your father's Coast Guard."

The Fighting Coast Guard

The Fighting Coast Guard PDF

Author: Mark A. Snell

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2022-12-09

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 0700633944

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This collection of essays, written by some of the foremost historians in the field of Coast Guard history, highlights the wartime roles played by the United States’ oldest federal maritime service, from its inception through the last decade of the twentieth century. The Fighting Coast Guard features three distinct sections: “Beginnings,” which includes a short overview of the US Revenue Cutter Service (the USCG’s primary forerunner, established in 1790) and two chapters on World War I; “Conflagration,” the role of the USCG during the World War II era; and “The Cold War and Beyond,” an assessment of the Coast Guard’s participation in the Korean Conflict, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The Fighting Coast Guard is a significant contribution to the limited historiography of the Coast Guard and a critical analysis of various wartime roles undertaken by the Coast Guard during America’s twentieth-century conflicts. Because the Coast Guard operated as part of the Department of the Navy during the two world wars, its service and history is often overlooked or envoloped by the larger service, while the USCG’s limited participation in cold and hot wars since 1945 is often ignored altogether. This anthology provides readers with a solid overview while highlighting some of the service’s most important contributions as a combatant force. This definitive study of the role of the US Coast Guard in wartime, from its modern inception in 1915 through the end of the twentieth century, is long overdue and will shed new light on America’s smallest military service.

The U.S. Coast Guard in World War II

The U.S. Coast Guard in World War II PDF

Author: Malcolm F. Willoughby

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 449

ISBN-13: 1612519938

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The intimate view of the U.S. Coast Guard's dramatic World War II record has long been considered a classic. First published in 1957 and out of print for years, the book is now available in paperback. Handsomely illustrated with more than two hundred photographs, the book serves as a unique memento of one of the most illustrious periods in the Coast Guard's two hundred year history. The author offers a story replete with incidents of devotion far beyond the call of duty--daring rescues, adventurous high-sea missions, heroic combat action--to clearly demonstrate the vital role the service played in the Allied war effort. A seasoned World War I veteran who joined the Coast Guard Temporary Reserve in 1942, Malcolm Willoughby has covered every aspect of the Coast Guard's involvement in the war at sea, in the air, and at home. From the invasion of Normandy, where Coast Guardsmen landed thousands of Americans and rescued some 1,500 stranded in the surf, to Guadalcanal, where they rescued three companies of Marines trapped on the beach, this chronicle vividly recounts these well-documented operations and little-known stories of individual triumphs and tragedies as well.

US Coast Guard in World War II

US Coast Guard in World War II PDF

Author: Alejandro de Quesada

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-12-20

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 1780962150

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Alex de Quesada reveals the full history of the US Coast Guard throughout World War II in this Elite title. In particular, the book draws attention to the little-known story of how the US Coast Guard ran a number of the landing craft throughout D-Day in 1944 as well as providing crucial anti-U-boat patrols throughout the war years. A number of Coast Guard servicemen were lost in these two campaigns, and their undeniable contribution to the US war effort deserves greater recognition. The Coast Guard also provided aviators and gunners to the Merchant Marine and manned Port Security Services. These roles are all fully explained and illustrated with rare photographs and specially commissioned artwork.

The United States Coast Guard and National Defense

The United States Coast Guard and National Defense PDF

Author: Thomas P. Ostrom

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2011-10-14

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0786488557

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In addition to port security, ship inspection and safety, law enforcement, and search and rescue, the U.S. Coast Guard assumes an important role in national defense at home and abroad. To that end, the Coast Guard has carried out separate and coordinated missions with other armed forces from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Mediterranean, Persian Gulf, and North Polar region. This chronicle of the Coast Guard's contributions to national defense examines participation in World War I, World War II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the War on Terror. Among the topics explored are defense threats, drug trafficking, and border security, as well as Coast Guard personnel, training, leadership, and assets.

Bloodstained Sea

Bloodstained Sea PDF

Author: Michael G. Walling

Publisher: Cutter Publishing

Published: 2009-04-10

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0578012901

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Through eyewitness accounts based on hundreds of interviews with crew members; personal diaries, notes, and letters; and each cutter's logbooks and patrol reports Walling plunges you into the thick of the battle, re-creating some of the most desperate encounters, heroic rescues, and harrowing missions of the Second World War. Told largely in the voices of the men who lived it, this unforgettable tale is peppered with humorous and ironic anecdotes about life aboard ship during wartime. You'll meet the liberty-craving crew members who painted their entire ship in less than an hour; the ship's mascot who became canine-non-grata in Greenland; and the crew whose vessel was mistaken for the German battleship Bismarck and attacked by the Royal Navy. Complete with dramatic photographs of the Coast Guard in action, Bloodstained Sea brings this epic drama to vibrant and pulsing life.

The Coast Guard at War

The Coast Guard at War PDF

Author: Alex Larzelere

Publisher: US Naval Institute Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13:

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Although many books have been published on the Vietnam War, this is the first to chronicle the significant contributions of America's smallest armed service in that conflict. The U.S. Coast Guard worked and fought alongside its sister services for ten years, conducting a wide range of operations that have remained until now largely unknown to the public. In May 1965 Coast Guard cutters engaged the Viet Cong in the service's first combat since World War II, and it was not until April 1975 that it shut down its last LORAN-C station in Vietnam. Alex Larzelere's vivid, fast-paced depictions of combat operations along Vietnam's coasts and in the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta benefit from his own service in Vietnam as a patrol boat skipper and from his interviews with seventy-five other Coast Guardsmen who were there. These on-the-scene descriptions together with the author's exhaustive research in official and private archives add up to a comprehensive picture of the Coast Guard's wartime operations - operations that included junk and trawler interdiction, downed-pilot search and rescue, naval gunfire support, port security, merchant marine and navigation assistance, and training and support for the South Vietnamese Navy. Also documented here for the first time are the high-level negotiations among leaders of the Navy, Army, Air Force, and Coast Guard that provided for the employment of unique Coast Guard capabilities. Illustrated with dozens of official and private photos, many never before published, this landmark history fills an important hole in the literature of both the Coast Guard and the Vietnam War and establishes a blueprint for future joint military cooperation. Scholarly in its approach yet written with verve and drama to appeal to a wider audience, the book sets the highest standard for military histories.