Gunboat St. Augustine (PG-54), a steel hulled private yacht built in 1929, was purchased by the Navy and commissioned in 1941. In the Eastern Sea Frontier she escorted convoys between New York and Caribbean ports.
On the morning of January 6, 1944, convoy NK-588 steamed south out of New York harbor into a gale with nearly forty mile-per-hour winds and wave heights of nearly twenty feet. The convoy included Navy patrol gunboat USS St. Augustine (PG-54), a converted 300-foot yacht, serving as the convoy's escort command vessel.
That night at 10 pm, the St. Augustine encountered a strange vessel sixty miles southeast of Cape May. Unknown to the warship's crew, the unidentified vessel was the American tanker Camas Meadows, steaming unescorted out of Delaware Bay under blackout conditions.
The master of the tanker had taken ill, leaving the third mate to serve as officer-on-deck (OOD). The ship had a green crew and no one on the bridge knew how to send or receive blinker signals.
The St. Augustine had left her convoy station, steamed toward the mystery vessel and challenged the ship by blinker and by flashing running lights.
The dark silhouettes of the St. Augustine and the tanker appeared to meet miles in the distance, and unknown to Coast Guard Cutter Argo's bridge watch, the St. Augustine had altered course in front of the tanker, setting the two vessels on a collision course.
Within a few short minutes, Argo's OOD observed the bow of the St. Augustine rise out of the water at an odd angle, fall back and disappear. Given the state of the stormy seas, he and the others on the bridge thought the escort had ridden up a large wave and dropped back into the accompanying trough.
The tanker had rammed St. Augustine amidships, cutting deeply into the hull. The St. Augustine flooded and slipped below the waves, vanishing in less than five minutes. The darkened tanker came to a stop and turned on all her running lights, an act prohibited during wartime in waters known to harbor U-boats.
After repeated queries, the tanker blinked, "survivors to the left of you."
After pounding through heavy seas for nearly twenty minutes, Argo's crew began sighting groups of survivors on life rafts and floating in the frigid water, waving the red lights attached to their life jackets.
The navy and Coast Guard launched a massive search and rescue operation in an effort to locate more survivors. Argo had rescued twenty-three, sister ship Thetis accounted for another seven. The search and rescue effort located sixty-seven bodies out of the patrol gunboat's total losses of 106 crewmembers.
A board of inquiry found greatest fault in the fatal maneuver that put USS St. Augustine in the path of the Camas Meadows. The board also found the tanker's crew too inexperienced, with several having no previous sea time. In addition, the only crewmembers qualified in signaling had taken to their bunks, preventing the tanker from communicating with the St. Augustine.
Excerpts from William H. Thiesen, Ph.D., Atlantic Area Historian, U.S. Coast Guard.
The Cutter Argo is now a Circle Line Cruises vessel in New York
St. Augustine Bedtime Stories - Dramatic accounts of famous people and events. Details here.
