Surviving D-Day: The Incredible Tale of SS Jeremiah O'Brien | Hero Ships (S1, E13) | Full Episode

S.S. Jeremiah O'Brien was a liberty ship, rush built to be part of a vital lifeline of supplies and troops for the Allied invasion of Europe. She was called an ugly duckling, and she was a sitting duck for prowling U-boats. Most of her crew had never seen the sea before, and still they did their duty, even when death could come at any second. How did she survive, and then 50 years later, resurrect herself to sail again as a testament to those who served? It takes a certain kind of ship and a certain kind of crew. On June 6, 1944, more than 5,000 Allied ships, the greatest armada that ever sailed, carry men and machines to Normandy. The headlines go to the giant warships firing support, but the lifeline to the beaches is a mob of liberty ships, plotting all but unarmed through the dangers of U-boats, torpedo boats, mines, and aircraft. The liberties must survive the deadly round trip from English ports time after time, bearing vital loads of ammunition, tanks, trucks, fuel, and food. In the middle of the massive operation is a single ship, Jeremiah O'Brien, that will do what thousands of others do not, survive into the next century as more than a museum. The only active ship that's still sailing from that armada is the Jeremiah O'Brien, and that's, to me, pretty amazing. Cargo winches, there's two. They work that hook out here that you see. They can move the hook any place along the deck or over the pier. So two people working these would take cargo out of the hold, move it to the side of the ship, and lower it to the pier, or vice versa if you were loading. Okay, we're gonna get up the main engine. How Jeremiah O'Brien's aging crew saves her from the shipbreakers and then sails her on an unlikely journey across the Atlantic is a great sea story, one that begins with her hurried building in the early days of World War II. The Jeremiah O'Brien's keel is laid at the shipyard at South Portland, Maine, on May 6, 1943. Her design has been rushed. World War II has caught the United States with its merchant fleet down. With 91% of all its shipping carried by foreign flags, American shipbuilding has dwindled to where there are just 46 launching slips and the 10 shipyards capable of handling 400-foot ships. Adding to the desperation is the danger to America's British ally, as Nazi Germany's powerful Air Force begins a relentless reign of terror on London. Massive fires turn night into day. The besieged island must bring in fully a quarter of its survival needs by cargo ships. But wolf packs of German U-boats sink those ships faster than the English can build them. So they came to the United States with the intent of asking the United States to build ships for them, in particular, supply ships. When shown the plans that will be the basis of all Liberty ships, President Roosevelt remarks, I think this ship will do us very well. She'll carry a good load. She isn't much to look at, though, is she? A real ugly duckling. He is right on all counts. Jeremiah O'Brien is born an ugly duckling. The Jeremiah O'Brien has only one engine, and it is a triple expansion steam engine. This was really old technology when the Liberty ships were built, but it was the engine of choice because it was easy to produce. The engines were simple to operate. You could train someone to operate a Liberty ship engine in a very short time. Although the engine's fuel is switched from coal to the more easily handled oil, there is no help for the O'Brien's plotting speed. It turns a four-bladed propeller at 76 RPMs to give it a design speed of 11 knots, far below the 18 knots produced by a turbine of the day. Like I tell everybody who comes aboard, it was obsolete when it was built. The only impressive speed associated with Liberty ships is the speed at which they can be built. Crucial to the mass building of Liberties that begins in 1940 is Henry J. Kaiser. He is a maverick, full of energy and new ideas. He adapted the idea of pre-construction of building parts of ships at different locations in a shipyard and then bringing them together to form the ship, which cut down a great deal on the amount of time that it took to produce the ships. But with the increase in speed comes an increase in accidents. At the beginning of the war, it took four or five, six months to produce a Liberty ship. But they quickly got to the point where they were producing Liberties on an average of about one every two months and then one every month. And the idea was to produce them faster than they could be sunk. If the ship made one voyage just across to Europe, she had paid for herself. The Jeremiah O'Brien is launched on June 19, 1943. As a typical Liberty, Jeremiah O'Brien has cost $1,750,000 to build. She stretches 441 feet 6 inches with a beam of 56 feet 10 inches. She draws 27 feet 9 inches of water at her dead weight tonnage of 10,920. With a full load of fuel, she can carry 9,146 tons of cargo. As a merchant ship sailing in wartime, she floats between two managements, military and commercial. The US Maritime Commission built the ships and then had a company, which was General Agent, which assigned these ships to the steamship companies and paid the merchant companies a per diem basis for each of the ships. The steamship companies were responsible for manning and sailing all of these ships. Since they were merchant ships carrying merchant cargos and cargo supplies for the military, the military were not quite set up to do this type of duty. Jeremiah O'Brien's crew had a split personality. With the armed guard that would man the ship's guns coming out of the young, hard-edged Navy and the merchant marine crew coming out of a wild mix of wartime volunteers, the crews are completely separate. And not many people know what the merchant marine is. These are individuals, private people, working for private steamship companies that make their living by putting cargo in ships and transporting it all over the world. We're here to get this stuff through for other goods. Keep these ships sailing. And individuals from all walks of life came aboard these ships. Some of them were farmers. Some of them were factory workers. It was actually so dangerous in the merchant marine that after a couple of trips or even one trip, they would quit and join the army because it was much safer. During World War II, the crew consisted of about 46 people in the merchant crew. And then there would also be an armed guard crew that varied anywhere from 16 to 26 people on board. The armed guard crew were actual sailors in the US Navy. They had joined the Navy and been assigned to the armed guard. And the armed guard's purpose was to go on merchant ships and operate the guns, the military equipment, on the merchant ships to protect the merchant ships. With the Jeremiah O'Brien, forward gun on the bow is a 3-inch .50. And it usually had about eight men manning it. Then there are 20-millimeter guns. And there were eight of those, four on each side. There was two up forward, four on the bridge area, and two back aft. And then the aft gun, in the case of the Jeremiah O'Brien, it was a 3-inch .50. Outside the armed guard, the merchant crew organizes into traditional ships' operating departments. The merchant crew would consist of a captain. There would be two main departments, the engine department and the deck department. And there would also be a radio operator who was kind of a department of his own. Command of the diverse group of civilian maritime specialists demands special training for Liberty ship officers. The Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, was established in the 1940s by the Maritime Commission. And its role was to produce officers, seagoing officers for the Merchant Marine during World War II. And it is the only academy that sends its students out in wartime. And there were 142 Kings Point students lost during World War II due to enemy action. And no other federal academy can make that claim. On July 20, 1943, one month after her launching, Jeremiah O'Brien sails out of Boston. Her captain has been given sealed orders not to be opened until the ship clears the harbor. Like all Liberty ships, Jeremiah O'Brien has been built to last five years. But the Navy will be satisfied if she pays for herself by living to deliver even just one cargo to Europe against the enemy that lurks in the Atlantic. Beginning in July of 1943, Jeremiah O'Brien moves into a series of perilous crossings of the Atlantic Ocean, where the Allied convoy system is locked in a duel with U-boats. Germany controlled most of the Atlantic during World War II from the beginning up until late in 1943 or early 1944 with her U-boat fleet. As the convoys became more prevalent and as they got more protection, the U-boats begin to operate in wolf packs. And they would congregate five, six, seven submarines together and wait for the convoy to come along. America's first 18 months of war have seen a field day for Hitler's submarine wolf packs. In July 1943 alone, 61 ships, totaling 350,000 tons, go to the bottom with heavy loss of life. Jeremiah O'Brien is just one ship and a growing Liberty ship armada sharing terrible dangers. The convoy system was developed by the British to protect The convoy system was developed by the British during World War I, and they found it successful. The concept behind it is that the more ships that you have in a group, the fewer total number of ships will be sunk because far fewer of them are accessible to the enemy. The convoys would consist of anywhere from 50 to 200 ships, 10 rows of ships, and then in each row there would be five, six, eight, 10 ships so that there was this large block of ships. Jeremiah O'Brien and her sisters in the convoy depend on sub hunting escort ships circling the convoy in a protective ring that you both seek relentlessly to penetrate. Often the subs break through the protective cordon, a nerve-wracking experience for the crew of the thin-skinned, slow-moving Jeremiah O'Brien. They would sleep with their shoes on and their clothes on and any type of emergency that came along, they had to get to the lifeboats. Some of the engineers on these ships had been torpedoed before, would stay up in the highest level of the engine room on the main deck and flip a coin and then run down to the engines and check them every 15 minutes. That's how afraid they were. Working far below the waterline, they face death by blast, tons of rushing seawater, or burns from ruptured steam lines. In the shaft alley, the shaft that goes right through the hull of the ship, you're completely underwater here. You're in convoy, and the destroyers came along. They had a submarine scare, and they start dropping depth charges. So being in here with the depth charges dropped outside of you, it's very scary. When a thin-skinned Liberty ship is hit by a torpedo meant to penetrate a warship's armor, the engine room crew is generally doomed. When you get a hit, you're dealing with superheated steam. It's extremely, it's almost a gas. It's so powerful. And it'll burn your lungs out in a hurry if you get a direct shot into your lungs on it. So you try to protect your lungs the best way you could. And I always carried a rag in my pocket, a clean rag. And I was able to put it in my mouth and try to get out of the engine room as quickly as I could. Normally, you didn't get out. You were stunned, and that was it. Beyond the terror of U-boats and planes, Jeremiah O'Brien faced deadly collisions with the close-packed ships while maneuvering in night, fog, and storms. Traveling in convoy could be very nerve-wracking because there was no radio communication. It was necessary to have radio silence, of course, so that the submarines would not pick up any radio transmissions from the ships in the convoy. All communication was done by either blinker light or flag signal, and most communications came directly from the convoy commodore, which was a single ship designated to be in charge of the convoy. If they gave the word to split up, the convoys were all on their own. Each merchant captain would have to take the ship wherever he wanted to. When bad weather set in and they thought they were proceeding in convoy, the next morning, they would find out that they were out there by themselves. And then have to try to find out what happened to the convoy and try to catch up to it. Of course, those that didn't catch up, we never heard about because they were sunk by the German U-boats. No voyage went by without somebody aboard Jeremiah O'Brien hearing new hair-raising tales from some veteran of the North Atlantic Liberty ships. He looked at me, he says, no. He says, I was sunk six times. Torpedoed six times, and once he was torpedoed twice on the same day, two different ships. He sailed out of New York Harbor early in the morning and was sunk off the coast of New Jersey on a tanker. They would give you 30 days survivor paid. But he had already been ashore for 30 days, and he didn't want to stay ashore again. And he caught a ship late that night, which was sunk off the coast of Long Island. He would tell of the ships icing up with so much ice on them, there was a chance of them capsizing and turning over. The crew would have to turn out and chop the ice off. This while they were dodging the U-boats. The North Atlantic winter cold can be as dangerous to Jeremiah O'Brien as the enemy. The shipbuilding process of welding instead of riveting locks new stiffness and stresses into her hull. When subjected to freezing temperatures, improper loading, and heavy seas, the hull can crack catastrophically. Some half dozen liberties are lost in their early days before various hull reinforcements solve the problem. The greatest danger of the cold comes from water temperatures that kill swimmers in minutes. But lifeboats are found in which even those who survive the sea have frozen to death in the frigid air. Moving farther across the Atlantic, within a few hundred miles of German air bases along northern European sea coasts, fresh hazards appear. Then they had to worry about the German Luftwaffe coming out with their Condor bombers and bombing them and strafing them. And as they got closer to shore, the Messerschmitt 110s would come out. Crews were to open fire on any unidentified plane approaching within 1,500 yards. These people, the heroic merchant mariners during World War II, it's just unbelievable what these people went through and got very little notice for it. Jeremiah O'Brien's first three crossings all conclude safely. But her fourth, beginning on March 25, 1944, takes her into the midst of the biggest gamble on a seaborne assault ever conceived. The cross-channel assault on Fortress Europe will put Jeremiah O'Brien off the Normandy beaches in the most crucial days of the D-Day invasion of World War II. On June 6, 1944, after the warship and troop ships have gone through the teeth of the German beach defenses in the invasion of Normandy, the German fleet The critical battle to supply the huge landed armies begins. Jeremiah O'Brien is in the thick of it. Sailing from England through waters alive with German mines, the crew knows the risk of hitting one. They were standing. Their legs would just be driven up into their body because of the concussion was so rapid and so forceful. To prevent that, people quite often To prevent that, people quite often did not stand. They sat or they adopted a loose posture. The Jeremiah O'Brien made 11 shuttle crossings to the beaches of Normandy and each time carried a couple of hundred soldiers on deck and delivered them to Normandy, as well as all of the cargo that she carried, which consisted of tanks and ambulances and uniforms and bullets and dynamite and food and you name it, and she carried it. Every Liberty sailor in the invasion shared the same dangers as any warship, as they exposed themselves very close offshore to deliver their cargoes of supplies and troops. Yeah, we were at the beach. Well, our first trip over there, we parked right by Texas. You could see it firing away. And every time it fired, the ship, their ship would rock and the waves would rock our ship. The troops, they had to go down rope nets. And some of them were just ready to fight. They were ready to go. Others were scared to death. I remember seeing a redheaded fellow, about 6'6", big husky guy, scared to death. He couldn't get down the net. They had to beat his hands to get him to go down. It was kind of sad. On June 11, 1944, enemy dive bombers attacked Jeremiah O'Brien. Captain A.A. DeSmet writes, the gun crew commanded by Lieutenant Memhart, U.S. Navy Reserve, put up a heavy AA barrage and drove the enemy away, preventing a second attack by the promptness and accuracy of their fire. In her 11 trips running to Normandy, Jeremiah O'Brien carried 3,492 troops, 1,746 vehicles, and 341 tons of dynamite. Only the Coast Guard had a complaint, claiming the crew had built a device to distill moonshine whiskey. We had a 32-gallon garbage can full of the mash that we used. And we made about a quart of alcohol a month. Or was it a week? But anyhow, we had good times. On November 1, 1944, a tired Jeremiah O'Brien returns to New York Harbor for a refitting at dry dock and the beginning of a whole new wartime career in a new ocean. She travels for a time between East Coast American ports and the West Coast of South America by way of the Panama Canal, traveling for the first time without escorts as the war begins to go the Allies' way. But the placid days end with an ominous cargo taken aboard at Galveston, Texas. 10,000 tons of bombs with their warheads go into Jeremiah O'Brien's holds. Even with careful stowing to prevent shifting and stored between spark-preventing wooden sheathing, the explosive load terrifies the crew. I remember when I first went aboard the ship, and they gave me my life jacket. And I says, what are you giving me this for? Why don't you give me a parachute? Carrying ammunition was probably the most dangerous thing that you could do during World War II. There were instances on record of ships full of ammunition were hit by a torpedo or German bombers. The ship simply vaporized. The people in the convoy that saw this happen were amazed that there was just a large flash and a big explosion, and then nothing was left, not even a spot on the water. I guess on the bright side, those on board didn't feel anything or didn't know what happened. After two nervous weeks of loading, Jeremiah O'Brien begins her trip to the Pacific war zone under the command of Captain Arthur Gunderson. To the crew's dismay, offloading the dangerous ammunition in the war zone is delayed repeatedly by abrupt changes of destination. To add to the tension, the Japanese have begun to launch kamikaze suicide attacks against American ships with direct hits obliterating ammo ships around Jeremiah O'Brien. Every Liberty ship has its moments of pure terror. My first morning, they rang the general quarter bell, and I ran to my gun station. All of a sudden, you could see the Ack Ack fire shooting at some of the planes that were coming over. On our port side was the cruiser Portland, and a kamikaze came from behind us and started heading towards us. And we were sure he was going to try to crash into us. And in the meantime, he must have seen the cruiser Portland, and he veered to the left to head for the Portland. And at that time, our guns were firing, and we hit him. And he landed, I'd say, probably about 50 yards from the Portland. Reporters, watch out. To relay the news to us. What has been a busy war for Jeremiah O'Brien ends officially with the Japanese surrender on September 2, 1945. Except for a few shrapnel hits, a lucky ship has come through her battles with crew and ship intact. Jeremiah O'Brien gets orders to dump her defensive ammunition over the side, say goodbye to her armed guard, and begin a long voyage home to an uncertain future. A happy final chore is to bring home a load of war brides from Australia. On the deck, someone paints a white line with USA lettered on one side and Australia on the other to establish off-limits boundaries. But friendships flourish anyway. I only hope my mother-in-law lives. You bet she will. Jeremiah O'Brien's next stop will be far less pleasing. On January 16, 1945, Jeremiah O'Brien returns home with thousands of her sister liberties. But there are none of the gala fireboat welcomes for the weathered, rusted war horses that did as much to win the war as the widely toasted warships. The United States government created the mothball fleet, or what they call the National Defense Reserve Fleet. And it was with the knowledge that there were so many ships left over from the war, and they had to do something with them. Some of the ships were deteriorating, and they decided to sell off many of the liberty ships to foreign steamship companies in particular. 10, 20 years later, they decided that the liberty ships were so old-fashioned that they weren't really practical and began selling them off for scrap. Jeremiah O'Brien's luck held as she caught the attention of dynamic former Navy Captain Tom Patterson, who in 1943 was assigned to convoy duty on a liberty ship. Nearly 20 years later, in 1962, as a member of the US Maritime Administration, he was assigned to survey the remaining 150 liberty ships in the mothball fleet. When he boarded the SS Jeremiah O'Brien, he could tell there was something very special and different about her. She had not been called out for any assignment after she was laid up in 1946 at the end of the World War II. And therefore, the ship was in completely original condition. Admiral Tom Patterson conceived the vision of Jeremiah O'Brien as she might be, not only rescued for history, but also returned to full operational glory. He had no illusions about how steep a hill he had to climb. The best we could do was to keep putting the ship on the bottom of the scrap list and selling other ships in the order of their condition. Over 2,700 liberty ships had been built in World War II. And it was unbelievable that we would scrap all of them, and you'd have to go to a library to see a picture of a liberty ship. And finally, Washington told him, well, you're going to have to do something with that liberty ship you're trying to save, because we just can't hold on to it anymore. There was no funding and no authority for funding to save a liberty ship or any ship from World War II. It had to be done on a volunteer basis. An inspired Patterson quickly forms the nonprofit National Liberty Ship Memorial Corporation and is pivotal in enlisting the volunteer help of engineers, deck officers, supply officers, and especially a crew from the maritime unions. Also, there is key help from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. We received a grant for over $400,000 that we then had to match. But we could match it with contributions of labor, materials, or cash, which we did. Three months later, a swarming crew of volunteers has restored steam power to a ship that had not been underway in 33 years. With 500 well-wishers crowded aboard, Jeremiah O'Brien escapes the graveyard of the mothball fleet and sets sail for San Francisco. And Jeremiah steamed out of the past, out of World War II, a ghost ship steaming along under its own power. And we had many, many salutes and ships dipping their colors to us as we came down to Bethlehem shipyard. At Bethlehem shipyard in San Francisco, Jeremiah O'Brien begins her new life. It would start with a complete overhaul that would last six months at a cost of $1,100,000, funded exclusively by private donations. With one miracle behind her, who could guess that Jeremiah O'Brien had her greatest strength? After her rescue from scrapping in 1980, Jeremiah O'Brien settles into retirement in San Francisco, conducting tours and crewing regular passenger sailings. But this gentle life is too tame for Jeremiah O'Brien. Her crew starts thinking of one more mission. By 1993, we were aware that the 50th anniversary of the Normandy invasion at D-Day was going to take place. Our crew, with our board of directors, all voted unanimously to take the mission to Normandy. And we were very, very happy. All voted unanimously to take the ship back to Normandy. Returning to Normandy would be a 25,000 mile round trip with an estimated cost of $2.5 million. So we knew what we were letting ourselves into, but that didn't faze us. We owned a lucky ship. We had an excellent crew, and we were going to get that ship over there. The funding effort is massive, with important sponsorships from major corporations and maritime industry organizations. Fees come in from passenger sailings and special cruises. The whole local community catches the spirit and contributes what it can. People start living on the ship and working like it was a regular job all the time to get that ship ready to go. The dollar value of some 30,000 round-the-clock volunteer hours is beyond calculation. Everybody said, including some of the people who had served on a ship before, said it couldn't be done and shouldn't be done. The Coast Guard in this district was a bit antsy about the idea of taking a ship out on the open ocean that had been laid up since 1946. They were kind of afraid that if the Coast Guard had signed off on this and this old ship fell apart in the middle of the ocean, it'd be bad for their career. I mean, you could see that. On the 18th of April, 1994, the refitting rushed to completion. 78-year-old Captain George John takes Jeremiah O'Brien out toward the Golden Gate to begin her unlikely voyage. The O'Brien luck holds up all across the ocean. On June 6, Jeremiah O'Brien is off the coast of Normandy at Pointe du Hoc, between Utah and Omaha beaches, the site of some of the bitterest D-Day fighting. And since it was spring, you could see fields of wildflowers, red ones, yellow ones. And I'm looking through the binoculars at a field that I thought was white flowers. And it turned out to be a field of tombstones of people who had been killed at Normandy in 1944. Well, it was just something that took your breath away, but just the thought of being there and knowing what had happened in that spot 50 years ago and how many people had sacrificed their life for freedom. And it makes me very teary just talking about it, actually. It was really, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I'm really glad I did it. In the following weeks, moving through the ports of France and England, Jeremiah O'Brien enjoys warm salutes. Another 140,000 visitors swarm aboard. Her D-Day odyssey fulfilled, Jeremiah O'Brien sails for home on July 22nd. San Francisco, the final day of the voyage, we were supposed to be under the Golden Gate Bridge at 8 o'clock and it was 8.04 when we went under there. So after 5 and 1 half months and 18,000 miles, we didn't quite make it on time. And in the gate, there must have been 200 vessels out there, yachts, ferry boats, steam tugs, tour boats, kayaks, all kinds of stuff. We were just astonished. We went under the bridge and people dropped flowers on the deck. We thought it was raining. What's that? The end of a great voyage was by no means the end of a great career for Jeremiah O'Brien. The Jeremiah O'Brien right now is based in San Francisco at Fisherman's Wharf. The ship goes regular cruises on the bay. The ship is maintained in the standards required of it by the United States Coast Guard and the American Bureau of Shipping. It's an active American flag merchant ship. It's now over 60 years old. It's staffed by a volunteer crew that's very proud of their ship and very proud of its history. Someone said to me recently, you know, once she gets in your blood, you can't walk away. And that's really the truth. She just becomes a part of you and she is living history. Sometimes the most important things to remember are the ordinary people who just do their duty and did what had to be done.