The gunmetal-gray merchant ship manned by veteran—some would say ancient—mariners eases down the quay. Two crewmembers, 82-year-old Hans Philipsen and 75-year-old Floyd Hall, look seaward as the SS Lane Victory leaves San Pedro Harbor, Calif., and begins its journey toward Catalina Island.

Six times each summer, the Lane Victory takes as many as 800 passengers on a daylong cruise that gives them insight into the lives of the brave merchant mariners who ferried cargo through treacherous ocean waters during

World War II. Throughout the day, passengers eat, tour the decks, and pay homage to the mariners who lost their lives. The ship’s crewmembers, who decades earlier served aboard merchant ships, answer passengers’ questions and share their wartime memories.

The highlight of the cruise comes as the Lane Victory begins its journey back to the mainland. The sea battle will begin soon. Eerie silence sweeps over the ship’s decks like a wave. All eyes scan the heavens. One aircraft, then two are spotted. Pilots of the Condor Squadron, formed in 1962 for search-and-rescue, air show, and movie work, have flown from Van Nuys Airport near Los Angeles in 14 North American T-6 Texans to reenact the role of attackers at sea.

Suddenly, all hell breaks loose. The battle stations’ Klaxon horn sounds, and the ship’s armed guard opens up with 20 mm, 40 mm, and 5-inch/38 antiaircraft fire. Although blanks are used, the passengers aboard wouldn’t know it for the noise and smoke. Moments later, the good guys arrive in U.S.-marked aircraft and finish the job of driving away the attackers.

The battle reminds Philipsen of another cruise he took, this one aboard the SS George S. Simonds as it headed toward Utah Beach in France the day after D-Day—June 7, 1944. The SS Susan B. Anthony had struck a mine just ahead of his ship and gone down. Philipsen remembers looking overhead as American and British planes took on the Luftwaffe.

“I’d never seen so many planes,” he recalls.

Hall remembers his day in the crucible of war—April 2, 1945. An ordinary mariner serving aboard the SS James M. Goodhue off the coast of Okinawa, Japan, he was performing additional duty that day as a 20 mm antiaircraft gunner when the ship’s cannon splashed a kamikaze’s plane on the starboard quarter as another plane came at the ship from dead ahead. The suicide plane hit the mainmast but fell astern of the ship.

Exploding bombs from the aircraft killed 27 and wounded 117. The ship, though on fire, was able to continue. When the shooting ended, Hall noticed his leg was bleeding profusely from hot 20 mm shell cases that had ricocheted off the deck against his shin as his gun expelled spent cartridges.

“I was so pumped up, I didn’t feel a thing,” he recalls.

Hall required extensive medical attention, and his leg remained “swollen like Popeye’s arm for weeks.” He never received a Purple Heart for his injuries because merchant mariners didn’t obtain veterans’ status until 1988, and then only after a long court battle.

“Too late,” says Donald MacLean, a former merchant mariner, “for any of us to use the education benefits other veterans received.”

Birth of the fleet

During World War II, America’s merchant fleet primarily was comprised of Liberty ships, followed later by the faster, more capable Victory ships. The Lane Victory was built in Los Angeles in 1945 and was named after Isaac Lane, an African American who rose from slavery to become a Methodist bishop and in 1882 founded Lane College in Jackson, Tenn. The ship hauled general cargo and occasionally unusual cargo and served with distinction during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.

The Lane Victory is just one of the ships that has served in America’s merchant fleet. The fleet was formed in 1607, when the first American-built merchant ship, the Virginia, was laid down at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine. During the Revolutionary War, hundreds of such vessels went to the bottom, along with thousands of mariners.

It took World War II to demonstrate how important and dangerous the job of transporting men and materiel at sea had become. Of the 243,300 American merchant mariners who served during World War II, Federal Maritime Commission records show that 6,989 mariners died or went missing, and 581 became pows. The armed guard or deck gunners who were dead or missing totaled 1,810, and 27 became pows. Officially, a total of 866 U.S. merchant ships were sunk in combat from 1941 through 1945. Torpedoes, shelling, bombs, kamikazes, and mines damaged hundreds of other merchant ships.

One in 27 merchant crewmembers in World War II died in the line of duty; the mariners suffered a greater percentage of war-related deaths than all other U.S. services. Of the five service academies, only the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., is authorized to carry the battle standard flag, because 142 cadets were killed in action.

During the war, however, sinkings and casualty counts were kept secret to keep information about their success from the enemy and to attract and keep Allied crews at sea. German U-boats sank nearly 6 million tons of Allied shipping within the first six months of 1942, but newspapers carried essentially the same weekly story: “Two medium-sized Allied ships sunk in the Atlantic Ocean.” The true average for 1942 was a staggering 33 Allied ships sunk each week.

One of the most costly disasters of the war occurred in the Italian port of Bari, Dec. 2, 1943, during the invasion of Italy. The Luftwaffe sank 17 Allied merchant ships with a loss of more than 1,000 lives. One of the five American ships destroyed that day was the SS John Harvey, which carried a classified cargo of 100 tons of mustard gas bombs intended for use in retaliation if German forces initiated gas warfare. Much of the unreleased gas was maintained in an oil solution that ended up floating on the water. More than 800 casualties were hospitalized following the raid, and 628 suffered from mustard gas exposure.

Philipsen, now a gangway watchman on the Lane Victory, was aboard two ships that sank in the Atlantic. The most harrowing incident occurred off the coast of South Africa when the A/B Norton was torpedoed twice just before dawn. The ship went down in a minute and a half, says Philipsen, who survived by getting into a lifeboat.

As the sun rose, a U-boat surfaced beside the lifeboat. “Five guys manned the [submarine’s] machine gun and trained it on us,” Philipsen said. “We thought we were finished, but the German captain appeared and said, ‘Sorry, but there is a war on.’ He asked if we needed any medical assistance. No one asked for help, so the captain went below, and the U-boat submerged.” The survivors drifted under a small sail for four days before sighting land and being rescued.

It was the North Atlantic, however, that was the most dangerous of all shipping lanes, made infamous by the attack on the PQ-17 convoy that was traveling from Iceland to Murmansk, Russia, in early July 1942.

The Nazis used spies and intercepted radio messages during convoy departures to gain knowledge of ship movements. Submarines lined up in “wolf packs” about 15 miles apart across the expected route. The first to spot the convoy fell in a few miles behind and signaled for the rest of the pack to assemble for night attacks.

After the convoy’s escort ships had been lured away, the U-boats staged simultaneous torpedo runs on the 35 merchant ships of PQ-17 from several directions. One ship signaled, “I can see seven submarines approaching me on the surface.”

Alan Smith was onboard a ship acting as distant cover for the pq-17 convoy. He remembers the extreme cold and the way it affected the equipment as well as him and his shipmates.

“When I say it was cold, we had steam heat on all the guns,” he says. “Otherwise the guns would have frozen up. This was their summer, and we had every bit of clothing on that we could muster.”

Smith remembers his own struggles to keep warm and the many different layers he wore. “I had extra-thick Arctic long johns over pairs of long johns. I had a thick naval jersey, woolen vests underneath— pure wool. I had a naval blue greatcoat, over that a duffel coat. I had a balaclava and a hood attached to the duffel coat and two or three pairs of gloves, because if you had put your hand on the metal, you would have pulled the skin away,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that this was July.”

During the day, air attacks from long-range German bombers and torpedo planes swept down on the remaining merchant vessels. Overall, 24 ships were sunk, 190 mariners were killed, and 3,350 trucks, 210 bombers, 435 tanks, and 99,316 tons of war materiel were lost.

Distinguished service

The Lane Victory’s war record extended to Korea in December 1950, when it distinguished itself at Wonsan Harbor. While heavy artillery roared overhead from the cruiser USS St. Paul and destroyers USS Charles S. Perry and USS Zellars, the Lane Victory steamed into port to disembark 3,834 troops, 1,146 vehicles, and 10,013 bulk tons of cargo. Then it took on 7,009 Korean noncombatants and U.N. personnel.

“We were trying to get the refugees aboard, and we were being shelled from shore side,” Purser Ray Fullbright reported back then. “Landing craft were used to get refugees to the ship. With tens of thousands of people wanting to get on the few ships available, the situation was chaotic.”

The Koreans were loaded successfully. The ship had limited toilet facilities, however, so an inventive metal worker fashioned a temporary privy outboard on the port side.

During the Vietnam War, the Lane Victory was back in the thick of things. On one voyage, a deck load of napalm bombs began to leak in the hot weather. Messages to headquarters requested instructions. Later a message of compliance from the ship ended with the notation, “N.S.O.L.” When queried about it, the captain replied, “No strain on the Lane.”

The Lane Victory also successfully navigated the Saigon River while other ships struck mines or ran aground. At Qui Nhon, Vietnam, in 1968, crewmember Mark Owens wrote about one night when “some helicopter came overhead [shooting]. I was sleeping on the flying bridge, and all these [shell] casings came down on me.”

On April 29, 1970, the Lane Victory was placed in the Reserve Fleet — the boneyard. In 1988, through the perseverance of Joe Vernick, then-president of the U.S. Merchant Marine Veterans of World War II, Congress authorized the transfer of the Lane Victory to the mariner organization.

After 44 years of service eluding submarines, surface marauders, mines, and typhoons, the Lane Victory finally returned to its birthplace. In December 1990, the National Park Service designated the ship a national historic landmark—a somewhat ironic appellation considering the Lane Victory spent its entire productive life at sea. Following an extensive renovation, the Lane Victory took its inaugural cruise Oct. 3, 1992.

Today, with its interior, cargo hold, bridge, engine and radio rooms, gun placements, and lifeboats completely restored, the Lane Victory is shipshape and ready as ever to serve our nation. It still is subject to vigorous inspections and abides by U.S. Coast Guard rules and regulations, including carrying current documents for all crewmembers. Everything works, including the crystal radios, which are circa 1943.

Like its mariners who still serve without fanfare, the Lane Victory continues to be used by fire and police departments, naval cadets, and the Coast Guard for teaching seamanship, canine antidrug training, bomb detection, underwater instruction, boarding, and other activities. However, the ship’s days at sea are numbered.

Lane Victory Cruise Director Bill Taylor estimates the ship will be able to continue seagoing activities for only another four or five years because there are few mariners alive and in good health who have the experience needed to operate ships of this class. Those who are able keep the vessel afloat through a labor of love, which they garnered during both good times and hard times at sea.

The mariners pull shifts in hot, noisy engine rooms at an advanced age, enduring the same conditions that existed when they served in their teens, and they still sing the song of the merchant marine that intones, “Give us the goods, and we’ll deliver.”

The crewmembers of the Lane Victory are indeed living legends. They, along with the other men and women who built and served on merchant marine ships, delivered the goods or died trying. In their quiet, unheralded way, they have added another glowing chapter to our nation’s history.

For more information about the S.S. Lane Victory or to check the 2004 cruise schedule and ticket availability, go to www.lanevictory.org or call 310-519-9545.