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25 October 1941
Navy's Pier 41, Seattle, Washington.
New to the Navy are the two gate vessels
shown in the foreground getting cloaks of
battle-gray paint, the barges will operate
the harbor-net gates.
Click image to enlarge.
Original gelatin silver print from the archives of
the Saltwater People Historical Society.© |
"The throb of dance music and the smell of corsages used to be in the air of Pier 41 on days when ships like the
President Grant and
President Jackson sailed out of Smith Cove for the Orient.
Miles of bright confetti draped like filmy mooring lines, linked travelers at the rail to the crowd below on the dock until the whistle's bellow drowned out the shouted, frantic farewells and started a transpacific liner backing ponderously from her berth.
There was something impressive about such scenes, with so many emotions checked or loosed by so many people. Tears, whispers, embraces, smiles, the dabbing of handkerchiefs were parts of the picture and so was the massive, solid expanse of the great pier itself.
All that is gone now. War has shrunk the Oriental trade, the
Grant and
Jackson have lain in quiet water across the bay at the Todd Dry Docks, stripped of their luxurious furnishings, refitted and today, ready for service as armed transports.
Until a few months ago Pier 41, too, was almost lifeless. A single watchman patrolled the $2,000,000 wharf which thousands of Seattle school children since 1919 had been told was the largest on earth.
Occasionally an American Mail Line sailing for the Phillippines would create a brief bustle, but most days the terminal that was built to handle 1,800,000 tons of cargo a year was all but empty, with its transit sheds littered, its paint peeling, its trackage rusty and its planking rotted.
Then, last May, the Navy moved in.
Straining to expand itself into a two-ocean fleet, preparing to meet any crisis in the Pacific, and rushing the development of its Alaskan sector, the Navy had need of a base in Seattle. Since 1920 its blueprints for national emergency had contemplated occupation of one or both Smith Cove piers, and last spring, it was busy translating such contingencies into fact.
The Navy opened conversations with the Port of Seattle Commission, and 1 May leased the east half of Pier 41 for a year. Three months later it leased the rest of the 2,560-foot long, 345-foot wide strip of piling, concrete, and ballast rock.
Things began happening the day the first lease was signed.
Lieut. Comdr. Arthur H. Middleton, USNR, a submarine-chaser captain in WWar I, moved in the next day to take command. With him arrived officers, yeomen, seamen, carpenters, signalmen, and others.
Pier 41, rechristened the 13th Naval District's Naval Operating Annex, once more is a place of hustle and bustle, playing a part in the maritime end of defense.
It is a dual and increasingly vital role. As the Naval Section Base, the annex is providing berthing space--a whole mile of it––for little boats and big ships, providing maintenance and operating facilities for forty Navy vessels.
As the Naval Supply Pier, the annex is keeping a large flotilla of ships supplied with the thousand and one things they need and is equipped to furnish supplies to 40 percent of the Navy's seagoing ships on the Pacific Coast.
Huge stocks of food and other supplies are being built up in the Naval Supply Pier's two transit sheds, to care for the Navy's flock of small craft operating as the 13th Naval District Inshore Patrol, for ships plying between Seattle and the Alaskan sector, and for Navy activities within that sector.
Piles of canned goods and staples are mounted around wooden posts still bearing the scrawled names of Kobe, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other Oriental ports for which commercial cargo once was assembled at Smith Cove.
One project is the signal tower at Pier 41's outboard tip. Part of an elaborate radio and communications center being installed at the base, it will be equipped with the latest visual-signal devices and will be able to signal to all points on Elliott Bay, acting partly as a traffic-control station for arriving and departing ships.
The vessels this ambitious program is designed to serve are so numerous and of so many types that Pier 41 really has a navy all its own.
The biggest and grimmest is the battle-gray gunboat
Charleston, not actually based in Seattle, but berthed at the annex whenever she is in port.
Built in 1936 with a sister ship, the
Erie (they are the only two of their kind in the Navy), the gunboat is the largest patrol craft––3,000 tons––authorized by the London Naval Treaty of 1922. Four destroyers, the
Kane, the
Gilmer, the
Brooke, and the
Fox, call Seattle Section Base their home.
Tied up near them when the Section Base "fleet" is in port are five auxiliary coastal minesweepers. Converted halibut boats, that bear the symbol "A.M." in white on their bows, and have been christened the
Nightingale, the
Pintail, the
Crow, the
Frigate Bird, and the
Phoebe.
There are mine-layers, nettenders, tankers, repair ships, patrol boats...Some, the "YP" type, are patrol vessels formerly with the salmon fleet, such as the
Catherine D. before she joined the Navy as a floating repair shop and tender, ending a long career as a cannery tender.
The locally famous "pickle boat," the
Eagle No. 57, is there, and so is John Barrymore's former yacht, the
Infanta, now as the U.S.S.
Amber, with the most glamorous, if not aristocratic, the background of them all. Racks of mines rest on her stern deck, where Barrymore and his profile and his guests used to relax. The Navy calls the
Amber a patrol yacht, and for some sentimental reason has left on the bridge her silver bell, inscribed as a gift to Barrymore from Delores Costello.
Some of the forty ships of the Seattle Section Base will take part in the navy and Total Defense Day parade from Seattle to Tacoma and back. As ships are considered these days they are not big ships, but they are just as important to the Navy as its Lexingtons and North Carolinas. Pier 41, a peninsula with 40-ft of water around three sides, can berth the longest and deepest ships in the world, and its staff can handle them.
Neat as a pin since the Navy men removed the equivalent of 127 railroad gondola carloads of trash and timbers, Pier 41 has come to life in a big way this year. As one of Seattle's most famous "world's biggest assets, it is ready to do a bigger and bigger bit for national defense."
Text from
the Seattle Times, October 1941.
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