USARS Duluth - A Memoir of World War II Service

The Forgotten Voyage of the USARS Duluth: Recalling a Coast Guard-Manned Vessel That Fell Through the Cracks of World War II History; by Ed Flynn. The following memoir was provided to the Coast Guard Historian's Office by the author, Mr. Edward Flynn. He wrote it, with assistance from former crewmates Ken Archer, Arthur Marx, and Ernest Simpson, after he discovered that there was little official documentation kept about the vessel he served on during World War II and in fact little about any of the 288 Army vessels that were manned by Coast Guard crews. The primary Army vessels manned by Coast Guard crews were the "Freight Supply" or "FS" ships, but the Coast Guard manned many other types of vessels of the Army's fleet. Here we have a story about an Army repair ship, a vessel that began her life as the Great Lakes freighter Duluth soon after the turn of the century. The Army took her into service and converted her for war-time use, gave her a Coast Guard crew to sail her while an Army contingent was aboard to handle the repair work she was designed for, and then sent her to war in the Pacific.