few random facts on the USCG and icebreakers.
Before 1940 teh USCG didn’t have any icebreakers, although they did have some British built Arctic vessels these were not icebreakers.
As war became imminent, there was increased urgency in the study of icebreakers. In 1941, shortly after Hitler invaded Russia, arrangements were made for the Soviet icebreaker Krassin to be transferred temporarily to the U.S. The planned eight month loan was cut short at less than four, but long enough for the Coast Guard to study her thoroughly. She was about 10,000 tons and 10,000 horsepower, with reciprocating steam engines driving three screws (presumably one of them forward). Though she had been built in 1917 and had much wood in her construction, many of her features were later found in American icebreakers.
Wartime exigencies prevented the Coast Guard from extended use of three vessels: Northwind, Southwind, and Westwind. The first was immediately transferred to the Soviet Union under Lend Lease; the latter two served in the U.S. the winter of 1944 and then followed Northwind to the USSR. The three were returned to the U.S. in the early 1950s: the Westwind to the Coast Guard in 1951; the Northwind and Southwind to the Navy in in 1951 and 1950 respectively. The two navy ships were turned over to the Coast Guard in 1966.
Greenland waters provided the arena for the Coast Guard icebreakers’ most visible contribution to the war effort. On April 9, 1941, President Roosevelt pledged U.S. support to Denmark in resisting any Nazi attempt to take the island. The security of the Western Hemisphere depended in part on preventing it from falling into enemy hands, as both escort and emergency vessels for the Atlantic convoys were based there. Consequently the Coast Guard became a major part of the Greenland Patrol, operating some 24 vessels in her waters, about eleven of which were equipped for icebreaking. Among these were the veteran Northland, the 165 foot Modoc and Comanche (with their reinforced bows), the wooden icebreaker North Star, three 110 foot cutters, three 180 footers, the Storis, and finally, the old Bear (now part of the Navy, she was operated by Coast Guard personnel.) The new Eastwind and Southwind were also on duty in Greenland waters during the last winter of the war.
Under Commander Edward H. “Iceberg” Smith, the Greenland Patrol began in earnest in the summer of 1941, with orders from Chief of Naval Operations “to do a little of everything,” as Naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it. This included keep convoy routes open, break leads through ice when necessary, search and rescue, escort and patrol duty, run surveys, maintain communications among Greenland and U.S. bases on the island, and report weather and ice conditions. Above and beyond these, the Coast Guard was to search out and destroy German weather and radio stations and keep supplies coming to isolated Eskimo and Danish communities.
The first American naval capture of the war was carried out by the cutter Northland in September, 1941 - three months before Pearl Harbor. In a surprise night raid, a German radio camp was seized, with three operators, their codes, plans and the vessel on which they infiltrated the island. Again, in 1944, the Northland destroyed another enemy radio shack, and, after a chase through thickening ice packs, forced the surrender of a German trawler crew. The German commander’s sword became a decoration on the icebreaker’s wardroom wall.
In October of the same year, another radio station was discovered and eliminated by the crew of the Eastwind, after a night plowing through ice. The captured Germans had come from the freighter transport Externsteine, which had become frozen in the ice near where the cutter had begun her previous night’s sortie. In one of the most unusual captures of the war, both Eastwind and Southwind shelled the vessel and she surrendered.
A few heroics aside, most of the Coast Guard’s Greenland Patrol duties were monotonous, onerous, and accomplished without fanfare. However, their contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic was far from an insignificant one.
http://www.nightbeacon.com/zprofiles/Ice_Breakers_History.htm
More here too
http://www.uscg.mil/History/h_greenld.html
