U.S. NAVY/ MERCHANT MARINES

William E. Pitt

In the months before Pearl Harbor, as German submarines were sinking American ships in the North Atlantic, William E. Pitt of Gouldsboro was called to active duty in the U.S. Navy.

Pitt, now 84, was a student at a technical school in Bridgeport, Conn., being trained as an electrician when his naval reserve unit there was activated.  He was sent to Long Island, N.Y., for eight weeks of diesel school.

“From there they sent me to back to Connecticut, where there was a ship tied up at the State Pier in New London,” he said. “They were asking for volunteers, but nobody wanted to, so I did. I had just finished school and wanted to use some of my training.”

The ship was the USS Zircon, a 235-foot patrol vessel originally built in 1929 as the yacht Nakhoda. Acquired by the U.S. Navy in 1940, it was converted to a warship and used to patrol the Northeast coastline and to escort convoys in the western Atlantic and the Caribbean.

“We would frequently drop depth charges on submarines, and supposedly, from the oil slick spotted the next day, sunk one,” he said. “After Pearl Harbor, they sent us to Staten Island, where we patrolled the Jersey coast. We were dropping depth charges all the time, less than 100 miles offshore.”

In late February of 1942, the USS Zircon traded patrol areas with the USS Jacob Jones, a Wickes class destroyer. Within hours of the switch, while steaming off Delaware Bay, the destroyer was sunk after being struck by at least two torpedoes from the German submarine U-578. Only 11 sailors survived.

“That could have been us,” Pitt said.

After being assigned to convoys that ran between New York and Cuba, Pitt had enough time at sea to transfer from the U.S. Navy to the U.S. Merchant Marine. During eight weeks of training back in New London, he earned his 3rd engineer’s license while training on the turbo-electric engines that powered oilers and tankers.

“I was assigned to a T2 tanker that was loaded with airplane fuel headed for North Africa,” he said. “We had a dozen fighter planes loaded on the top deck.”

The ship never reached its destination.

“There were six ships, all tankers, with no escorts,” Pitt recalls. “It was almost midnight, and we were running without lights, zigzagging while doing 16 knots. Suddenly, I heard a lot of whistles, then a stop bell, then a full astern command before we plowed into one of the other ships.”

There was enough damage that Pitt’s tanker couldn’t continue to North Africa.

“They took the planes off at Aruba and loaded us up with oil and sent us back to New York,” he said. “I made two or three more trips between South America and Canada, running the engine between 8 and 12, morning and night.”

On one trip to Canada, as his tanker approached Halifax in a raging snowstorm, Pitt knew there was a problem when, after flushing a toilet, it filled up with oil, not seawater.

“We had split a tank, and oil was leaking into the seawater intake,” he said. “We slowed down, but we couldn’t get into port until the next morning because there were no pilots. It was such a bad storm that a pilot boat carrying 10 or 12 pilots capsized, all hands lost.”

Before leaving the Merchant Marine in 1946, Pitt returned to New London, where he taught classes in turbine operations. He later taught engineering at a school in Boston and classes in boilers and electricity at the Maine Maritime Academy.

Pitt left the U.S. Navy with the rank of 2nd class electrician’s mate and left the U.S. Merchant Marine as a full lieutenant. As a civilian, he worked as an engineer at three different hospitals in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

“It was just like a ship,” he says of the hospitals. “You had to keep everything running.”

Twenty years into retirement, Pitt now splits his time between his shorefront home on Jones Pond and Florida.

— Tom Walsh