Tuesday, April 14, 2020

The Roughnecks of Sherwood Forest

U.S. oil tanker Pennsylvania Sun was torpedoed by U-571 on July, 15, 1942, about 125 miles west of Key West, Florida.
(Source)
The other day, Don asked the question -

Well, here at The Chant we certainly do civilian WWII stories. This might be the first and, to be quite honest, I have been remiss in not posting any "civilian" WWII stories. Why is "civilian" in quotes you might ask?

Well, the sailors who manned the merchant fleet, the guys like Lex's Dad who manned the freighters and tankers plying the convoy routes in World War II were not members of the armed forces. The folks in Britain who suffered under the Luftwaffe's onslaught and saw their homes and businesses destroyed, who saw their relatives and families die were, for the most part, civilians. The same can be said for the innocents in all of the countries invaded by the Nazis and the Empire of Japan. They suffered and died, yet wore no uniforms, carried no weapons.

Their stoicism and heroism under fire is perhaps more noteworthy as they could not fight back, at least not directly. Going to work at their normal, everyday jobs though, did support the fighting men and women who took the fight to the enemy.

The chap at the front, with his rifle and uniform, needs those folks behind the lines to do his job of destroying the enemy. Without the "civilians," the fellow at the pointy end wouldn't last long.

That being said, Don's comment led me to this story. A fascinating read. Lest you think that this small town in Nottinghamshire would be a safe gig, far behind the lines, not really subject to Luftwaffe bombing raids, well sure. But work in the oil fields is hazardous without a world war raging around you, ask any roughneck -
By January of 1944, the American oilmen were credited with 94 completions and 76 producing oil wells. But not without cost. While working Rig No. 148, derrickhand Herman Douthit was killed when he fell from a drilling mast. Douthit was buried with full military honors at the Cambridge American Cemetery. (From the article)
Oil drove the war machines of all the countries involved in the war. It's why Japan headed south, it's why we bombed Ploesti, it's why the Pennsylvania Sun was torpedoed. Without oil the planes don't fly, the ships don't steam, and the tanks don't move.

Oil, a big deal now, a big deal then.

As for those fellows on that torpedoed tanker in the opening photo -
Pennsylvania Sun was traveling from Port Arthur, Texas to Belfast, with 107,500 barrels of Navy fuel oil on 15 July 1942. At 7:49 am, the U-571 fired one torpedo at the unescorted Pennsylvania Sun while the ship was steaming on a zigzag course at 14 knots 125 miles West of Key West, Florida in the Gulf of Mexico (24°05′N 83°42′W). The torpedo struck amidships on the port side between tanks number 5 and 6. The torpedo also blew away the port wing of the bridge, killing quartermaster James B. Mortimer and able seaman John C. Riley. The ship's cargo ignited and the ship quickly became an inferno.
The master of Pennsylvania Sun, Frederick Lyall steered for five minutes southeast at full speed and then ordered the engines to be stopped while a distress signal was sent. The ship's remaining nine officers, 33 crewmen and 17 armed guards abandoned ship in three lifeboats, rowed away and put out sea anchors to wait for a rescue vessel. They were picked up by USS Dahlgren after three and one-half hours and taken to Key West the same day. There were 57 survivors of which several crew and Armed Guard were injured, two crew were lost.
The next evening, the ship's master, three officers and the crew of USS Willet returned to Pennsylvania Sun, when a patrol aircraft reported that the ship was still afloat and the fire had abated. They extinguished the remaining flames and towed her to Key West, where temporary repairs were made and the bodies of the 2 deceased crew members were removed from the ship and buried at their home towns. The tanker steamed under her own power with her crew to Chester, Pennsylvania and returned to service after the permanent repairs were completed in 1943. (Source)
Truly amazes me that she didn't sink, but was repaired and returned to service.

I'm thinking I need to do some reading up on the Murmansk convoys. Those guys put it all on the line to succor an ally who would probably never acknowledge the value of those efforts, those sacrifices. At least not while Communism held sway in that benighted land.

So yes Don, we do civilian stories of World War II. Most definitely.

A salute to the "Oil Patch Warriors" of Sherwood Forest!

Oklahoma sculptor Jay O’Meilia’s Oil Patch Warrior monument to Lloyd Noble’s Sherwood Forest roughnecks. Dedicated in 2001 at Ardmore’s Memorial Square. An identical statue stands in Nottinghamshire, England, near where the Oklahomans performed their historic service to the cause of freedom.
(Source)




Hat tip to Don McCollor!

54 comments:

  1. The logistics train in WWII stretched as far back from the front as the scrap metal drives involving women and children at home, Rosie the Riveter, et al.
    “The war has been variously termed a war of production and a war of machines. Whatever else it is, so far as the United States is concerned, it is a war of logistics.”
    – Fleet ADM Ernest J. King, in a 1946 report to the Secretary of the Navy

    "Logistics is the stuff that if you don't have enough of, the war will not be won as soon as."
    - General Nathaniel Green, Quartermaster, American Revolutionary Army

    "My logisticians are a humorless lot ... they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay."
    - Alexander

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    1. "Gentlemen, the officer who doesn't know his communications and supply as well as his tactics is totally useless."
      - Gen. George S. Patton, USA

      Yup, beans, bandages, bullets. Not much glamour there but without it, you lose.

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    2. The Log Train is why we won. After the semi-disaster at Tarawa, bloody Tarawa in the Gilberts, the US Army and US Marine Corps decided that having supplies land in the 4th and 5th wave was one of the many failures. So, afterwards, in the Pacific, ammo and critical supplies to be landed in the second wave, ammo and critical supplies and food and water and spare weapons in the third wave, succeeding waves will include more ammo and crit supplies and food and water and uniforms and shelters and and and and and. With engineering vehicles landed as soon as possible, to create bunkers and such.

      After that, if the front line was 100 yards away from the beach, the beach would become a supply and casualty processing center, with HQs and mini-triage units set up in shell holes, ammo stored in other shell holes and so forth.

      The Log Train, forward with new stuff, backward with broken people, forward with new stuff, backward with broken people.

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    3. Hard lessons learned at Tarawa.

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    4. I remember reading about the drive for aluminum, and much new pots, pans, and other things were donated to the cause. The only problem was that that aluminum was near useless for the advertised purpose of building aircraft. I can't remember why, exactly. Something to do with the grade and impurities, and it was cheaper to produce aircraft-grade aluminum straight from ore. However, those pots and pans did get remade into ... MILSPEC pots, pans, canteens, etc., so it wasn't a total bust.

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    5. Telling the people it was for aircraft made them more inclined to donate them. Building airplanes to bomb Nazis is far more glorious than producing pots, pans, canteens, etc. There's that logistics thing popping up again. Not very glorious, but oh so essential to victory!

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  2. No wonder it took the Brits five weeks to drill a well with changing the drill bit every thirty feet. How deep were those shallow wells and how deep did the Yanks drill? Interesting post Sarge, thanks for filling up a bit more of the space tween the ears. Kudos to Don.

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    1. Yeah, that surprised me.

      Great story, neh?

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    2. Really great story - I had no idea. I mean, British Petoleum, BP, is a big company, and I knew about a lot of North Sea oil, but no idea about oil in Sherwood Forest. Wonder if that's where the Sheriff got his money that Robin re-distributed?

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  3. Those Murmansk Convoys and flying the Burma "Hump" were a lot alike: Terrifying in their own right because of the elements even before enemy action came into play..

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  4. Good stuff. I knew about the "Big Inch", but I didn't know about the unsinkable tanker. Good reading for another 'mental health' day.

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    1. Now I have to read up on the "Big Inch" (and the "Little Big Inch" of course). I had no ideer!

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  5. If you do the Murmansk Run, please look up the survivors of PQ17 that forted up for a while in pack ice, painted their ships white, and pointed the M4 Shermans in deck cargo outwards, guns loaded. The Malta Run is also a rich vein...

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    1. I have written about PQ 17 before, but that aspect of the event is new to me.

      Must dig!

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  6. I knew a man, Orv Lavender, who’d been in the merchant marine in the North Atlantic during the war.
    He said he was scared [insert expletive the entire time.

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    1. With very good reason!

      Those U-Boats were dangerous as hell, in their Wolf Packs even more so.

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  7. Hah. Sherwood Forest.

    Not a WWII story, so hold on.

    I have a friend who was in the SCA for a long time. Theater major, and a renowned set designer. Man could take styrofoam and cheap paint and in half an hour make you believe that there was a rock wall in front of you. So he goes to England for to work with a theater production in Londinium, er, London, and does this and that and gets some free time. So his boyhood hero was Robin Hood (especially Errol Flynn's portrayal) and so off to Sherwood Forest and to buy some Lincoln Green cloth and get some yew and fasten himself a bow and all that.

    Wending his way to Nottinghamshire, he successfully survives driving in England. And so he tra-la-las hence to Sherwood Forest. Which by now is about as large as Central Park. And about as 'wild' as Central Park without all the gangs and thieves and homeless and zombies and New Yawkers would be. In other words, dull. Sanitized. Boring. A bit of a dump, actually.

    And he goes and buys some clothe of Lincolne Greene and... dude, it's basically Olive Drab, except drabbier. (I actually saw it. Take OD and make it even more boring and lifeless, and you have actual period Lincoln Green...) And he was much unimpressed.

    So he gets some good Spanish Yew as prized by Robin Hood and his merry men and... for making bows? Yeah, good old American Oak of most any variety, from Scrub to Live, makes a better bow. Or hickory, or...

    Ever have your childhood dreams totally destroyed by reality? Yeah...

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  8. I'd never heard the roughneck story before. That's pretty cool. So many small stories of people doing what they knew how to do and contributing to the war effort in their own way.

    The shot of the Pennsylvania Sun reminded me though, ever thought about doing a story or two on the Civil Air Patrol's work in WWII? The History Guy did a pretty good video on them a year or so ago: https://youtu.be/Nkzkcia-7lc

    Depth-charge armed Stinsons. (Sigh) Now the closest we can come is the lucky few air-crews who get to play stand-in for Reapers during some domestic training exercises and run simulated Hellfire deployment profiles in the Cessna 182s.

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  9. As to the Story of the Roughnecks of Sherwood Forest, I had no ideer. Weird world. I do remember Texas roughnecks going to the now Middle East to work there. And after the war US pipefitters and refinery workers heading to Europe and the Middle East to set up or repair refineries and pipelines.

    But drilling in Sherwood Forest? Weird. Whodathunk?

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  10. Hey AFSarge;

    Thanks for the story, didn't know that. As far as the Murmansk run went and us running supplies through Iran to help the Soviets on the southside, when his soldiers asked where did the studebakers, Shermans, aerocobra, ete,ete came from, the political commissars would say"We have secret factory other side of ural mountain, and when we linked up with the Soviets, they thought they supplied the Americans also, That's Uncle Joe for you.

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    1. Lying bastids, damned Commie rats!

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    2. And then there's this report from Foreign Policy dot Com. https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/

      Did you know all that we did to Japan, in taking away all their conquered territories, their pre-war territories in the Pacific, sinking most all of their navy, killing a good portion of their army, thrashing their air force, bombing their cities and introducing nuclear war upon them, that, in fact, it was Stalin and the USSR that forced Imperial Japan to surrender?

      Funny, I don't remember Stalin or any of his people on the deck of the USS Missouri. Must be all that fake retouched photos by our side that took all of the Ruskies out of the picture...

      I really don't have any response except complete and utter rage.

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    3. While there actually were Russian representatives at the surrender ceremony aboard USS Missouri (see this photo), that doesn't excuse the nitwits at that POS periodical from being, well, nitwits.

      Bastids.

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    4. While the entry of the Soviets into the war, and the swift collapse of what was left of the Kwantung Army (most of the good units had been rotated back to the Home Islands for the Last Stand by that time) certainly had an impact on Hirohito's decision to surrender, to believe the Soviets were the biggest factor takes a level of idiocy only intellectuals can conceive (as someone far smarter than me once wrote). The Japanese already knew they were quite inferior to the Soviets from Kalkhin Gol in 1938. Like the French in 1914, they discovered (or at least the ones whose minds weren't completely ossified, which Asian cultures tended to do -- hammer down the nail that sticks up, you know) that bravery and bayonets don't quite defeat firepower and armor.

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    5. takes a level of idiocy only intellectuals can conceive - now that right there is a keeper!

      On the other hand, the Soviets really didn't have the amphibious capability (or know-how) to invade the Japanese Home Islands. I really think Hirohito finally grew a pair and spoke up. The militarists wanted to fight to the bitter end, we should have given them their wish, transport them all to Manchuria and feed them to the bear.

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  11. As others said, I had no idea about oil wells in England.
    And it wasn't only Sherwood Forest.
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-england-oil-kemp/oil-wells-in-englands-green-and-pleasant-land-idUSKBN0N11UV20150411

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  12. One of my aunt's husband was a Navy gunner who served on armed merchant vessels on the Murmansk run. He rarely spoke of it,preferring to talk about his time in Peru where his ship underwent major repairs.

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    1. I'm guessing Peru was much nicer than the Norwegian and Barents Seas in winter! (Not to mention no U-Boats and Luftwaffe trying to kill you in Peru!)

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    2. I had a great-uncle who served in the Merchant Marine in WWII, after a rather interesting life (including gold-mining in Alaska). He was on a tanker that was sunk in early 1942, IIRC, survived, and 2-3 weeks later was on another tanker. Where he died 2-3 days out of Galveston after falling into a coma. Might've been diabetes, might've been a blood clot or stroke. No way to tell.

      It's hard to believe surviving a torpedoed tanker, though one carrying crude would be a lot more survivable than one carrying AVGAS. It's even harder to conceive the tanker itself surviving.

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    3. The Merchant Marine doesn't get enough recognition for the vital role they played in the war.

      I'm still amazed that the Pennsylvania Sun didn't go to the bottom. After her return to service in 1943, she actually stayed in service until she was scrapped in 1963!

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  13. (Don McCollor)...my humble thanks, Sarge...American oilmen were also in pre-WW2 Romania and the Romanians liked them...which figured prominently when a B24 crashed there after the Ploesti raid...

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    1. Good news for that downed crew!

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    2. ...the one crash landed with an engine on fire and wounded on board...almost before they stopped crashing, trucks were racing up, teenage boys jumping off with firefighting equipment, stretchers, and first aid equipment to fight the fire and treat the wounded. Then a late-pre WW2 car pulled up and a beautiful Princess got out (a real one, her daddy was the King). They had landed on her orphanage and trade farm. The boys had been trained to work in the oilfield, including fighting oil fires and extensive first aid. Then the Germans showed up. Romania was a (reluctant) ally of Germany. But they got their way. The Americans bombed a Romanian target. They landed here in Romania. Therefore they are Romanian prisoners...they had it a lot better...

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  14. Stateside Log train. Literally. 25 UP Big Boy locomotives were built. I just picked this video at random--

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdVD2M2xxsM

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  15. Maybe I should get my wife's grandfather's story about he and his own father being captured on Wake Island as contractors when the Japanese invaded. They were forced to work on Japanese ships, but through civil disobedience, they didn't do it very well.

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    1. You should, that would be a great post. Civilians in wartime, all too often we forget their stories.

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    2. Slaves seldom do a better a job than they are forced to do. If their masters aren't really familiar with the work, it's easier to play dumb and 'accidently' screw things up or go slow. But it's dangerous. Black slaves in the American South were able to play that game better in the 1800s because they had some intrinsic value, though it also got them a reputation as dumb, etc. By no means all, though.
      Some were able to become skilled tradesmen and advance that way, rather than simply not have much expected of them but brute labor. Different strokes for different folks. All kinds of strategies for survival in nature, and human cultures. Jews and others in WWII German concentration camp factories had to be a lot more surreptitious. The SS weren't shy of hanging a few prisoners a week as examples pour encourager les autres. They had far less intrinsic value than American slaves. Almost none, really. The Japanese were very nearly as bad as the SS when it came to Western POWs, and every bit as bad when it came to other Asians. Interestingly, when I was in the Philippines, I heard from more than one WWII-era elder that the Japanese were bad, but the Koreans were the worst. Considering how the Japanese treated the Koreans, and especially Korean conscripts (even worse than Japanese conscripts), it makes sense that sh*t rolls downhill...

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    3. (Don McCollor)...When the Germans overran France in WW2, the first and best Resistance were the trainmen. First thing they did was to dust off every regulation since the first train rolled in the 1800's and obeyed them to the letter (the Germans were sticklers for rules). That cut rail efficiency by about half...

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    4. Old style Germans love their rules, the modern generation likes rules, but breaking a few now and then doesn't bother them.

      It was against the rules to wash your car in your own driveway. Most of the Germans in my village ignored that rule.

      OTOH, I was going through a small city rather late at night, I was the only car on the street. At a crosswalk I saw a little old lady waiting for the light to change so she could cross the street. With no traffic other that me a couple of streets away. Old school.

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    5. on McCollor)...Then there was the black market...a German counterintelligence officer spent about a year trying to find out where goods were disappearing at an appalling rate, but with not so much as opened crate or pilfered boxcar...Turned out they were using forged movement orders and were stealing two trainloads at a time...

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    6. There is always a black market.

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  16. Man, what great stories! I never even imagined such a story as the Okie roughnecks in Sherwood even existed. Thanks so much for bringing it to my attention Sarge and company!

    Bad thing about history -- not enough time to study and learn it all. :-(

    Good thing about history -- the Chant and Chant Community! :-)

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