Today I had the honor of attending the funeral for Seaman 1/c Raymond F. O’Malley, USCG. He died last Thursday, at the age of 87, having lost his battle with lung cancer. I never had the privilege of meeting Mr. O’Malley, but I certainly knew of him. Everyone in the Coast Guard knew of Mr. O’Malley. If not his name, we knew of his story. We knew of his place in the history of our small service. He was one of our heroes. At his funeral today were Coast Guardsmen from all over the region. The Captain of a cutter home ported in Boston, Massachusetts, flew in to say a few words. Members of his crew joined him. The Admiral of the Ninth Coast Guard District was there, as were members of the local Auxiliary. The funeral procession was led by the Chicago Police, along with members of the Patriot Guard. On a beautiful Tuesday morning in Chicago, people came from everywhere to honor Ray O’Malley.
A native of Chicago, Illinois, Ray enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1938. He tried to enlist in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, but they all told him that their quotas were full. He happened across the Coast Guard office and, within a week, he was a Coastie. His first few assignments were at sea in the tumultuous North Atlantic. Before long, he was sailor fighting in World War II. Serving aboard a cutter in the North Atlantic during wartime was perilous duty. Convoy escort duty and fighting with German U-Boats were familiar assignments to the officers and sailors of the Coast Guard. They did it in World War I, and they were doing it again. The largest single loss of life aboard any U.S. naval unit in WWI occurred when a German submarine sank the CG Cutter Tampa. There were no survivors. 115 men lost their lives in the icy North Atlantic.
That bit of knowledge probably did not sit well with Coasties like Ray O’Malley. I would imagine that convoy duty in wartime was a bit like canary duty in a coalmine. The North Atlantic is notoriously cold and the constant heavy seas take their toll on men and ship alike. It was also full of U-Boats looking for targets - the types of targets that O’Malley and his cutter, the CGC Escanaba, were duty bound to protect.
The Escanaba was not built for war. She was built to break ice and conduct search & rescue on the Great Lakes. Home ported in Grand Haven, Michigan, she was only 165 feet in length, roughly the size of a large tugboat. When war broke out in Europe, the Coast Guard was quick to transfer ships to the Atlantic for convoy duty, anti-submarine warfare, and various support related missions. The Escanaba was one such cutter. Her time in theater was not without action. She tangled with U-boats, she picked up shipwreck survivors, and she escorted the ships that German sailors hunted.
In June of 1943, the Escanaba was part of convoy sailing from Greenland to Newfoundland. At 0500 on the morning of June 13, as the cutters were zigzagging their way through icebergs and growlers, Seaman First Class O’Malley assumed his watch on the helm. Not one moment later, an explosion ripped the small ship in half. O’Malley scrambled to the bridge wing with his life jacket as the Executive Officer yelled for the men to man their guns. Whatever their actions at that point, it was all in vain; the ship sank within three minutes.
Ray O’Malley, injured and bleeding, found himself in the freezing cold water. At first, he found himself under the water. He was being dragged down with the ship. As he struggled to reach the surface, a secondary explosion under the water shot O’Malley to the surface. He quickly met up with a few of his shipmates, which included the cutter’s captain, LCDR Carl Peterson, and fellow crewman, BM2 Melvin Baldwin. They started to swim for debris. O’Malley happened upon a sailor who was badly injured and barely alive. Without thinking, O’Malley gave the man his life jacket. The water temperature was just 39 degrees Fahrenheit. As they struggled to survive among the bodies and debris, the Cutter Storis sailed past them. The Storis was investigating a possible sighting of an enemy U-boat and had no time to stop. O’Malley and Baldwin reached some debris and got out of the water, and then they lost consciousness. They were hypothermic and most likely in shock.
While Storis searched for an enemy, the Cutter Raritan was tasked with picking up survivors. They found O’Malley and Baldwin. They recovered the body of a third man, a lieutenant. They found no one else alive. Of 103 men aboard the Escanaba that morning, only two survived. Two. The rest died from the explosion, from being trapped within the ship, or hypothermia, which set in almost immediately. In fact, O’Malley and Baldwin had been in the water for only a few minutes. It is believed that their clothes had frozen to the debris they were on, and that is what kept them from sliding off into a watery grave.
To this day, no one knows for sure what caused the explosion that sank the Escanaba.
Maybe that selfless act of giving a dying man his life jacket is what earned O’Malley an extra 64 years of life. Maybe he was just lucky. Whatever the cause, he came to symbolize all that the service stood for: So that others may live.
When he returned stateside he was put to work on a war-bonds selling campaign. On August 4, just over a month after the sinking, Ray went to Grand Haven, Michigan, to pay tribute to the Escanaba’s lost sailors and to take part in the Coast Guard’s birthday celebration. Grand Haven was cutter Escanaba’s home, her real home, and the local residents came out to mourn the loss of their cutter. Over 20,000 people showed up.
When Ray’s war-bond campaign was over, the Coast Guard’s Commandant told Ray that he could transfer to any unit in the Coast Guard. Ray asked to back to sea. Imagine that.
Ray left the Coast Guard when the war ended. He put those 64 years to good use. He continued to serve his community as a Chicago Police Officer, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant before his retirement. He married. He had a son. And from what I could see at the funeral, his son loved his father very much. Now a grown man, he wept like a child wishing he had just one more chance to hug his father. He took that opportunity to hug his own son, Ray’s grandson. Ray’s wife was still beautiful after more than 50 years of marriage. She beamed with pride as the Admiral presented her with the American flag ‘on behalf of a grateful nation’. Ray got a second chance at life and he made the best of it. He served, and loved, his family and his fellow man.
In 64 years, Ray never forgot those 101 shipmates. That number became 102 in 1964 with the passing of Melvin Baldwin. For every year that he lived since 1943, he returned to Grand Haven Michigan on August 4, to honor those he lost. Every year he helped to lay a wreath at the Escanaba Memorial. He was the event’s biggest VIP. Admirals and Master Chiefs will come and go, but Ray was always there. He was hoping to make ‘just one more’.
Ray served on the first of three cutters to bear the name Escanaba. The current Escanaba, a 270 foot medium endurance cutter, is home ported in Boston, Massachusetts. Her CO was there today. He spoke about the memorial service they hold every year on June 13. Following that ceremony, whether in port or underway, the captain would call Ray O’Malley, at his home, and report on the status of the ship.
Think about that for a moment.
Every commanding officer of that cutter called a former seaman 1/c, on the phone or by radio, to report on the material condition of the cutter and the health and well being of her crew. It’s a tradition of simple respect. These small gestures of respect are why I appreciate this service as much as I do. Ray knew all about respect.
Escanaba’s CO closed his remarks by reading a poem by Alfred Tennyson.
*Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.*
Rest easy, Ray, you are relieved. We have the next watch.
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