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by D. v. Nieuwenhuijzen » Sat Feb 06, 2016 3:45 pm
L:109,80m. B:15,60m. D:8,70m. engine by Builder:2800 ihp. 10 kn. Off.nr.219647, call sign LVRM.
Pan American Airways leased the S.S. NORTH HAVEN to establish flying boat bases on remote Pacific Atolls. The great flying boats did not have sufficient range to reach the distant Pacific destinations without places to refuel and refit.
Life aboard the NORTH HAVEN was Spartan. Before the ship was pressed into service by Pan Am, she was used to house fishermen off the coast of Alaska. One Pan Am employee complained that, "The entire ship smelled like an old can of tuna left too long in the sun."
Unloading the NORTH HAVEN on the open ocean was back breaking work and extremely dangerous. The man in charge of getting the cargo to the remote islands was Bill Grooch. His military discipline, and emphasis on safely, avoided many injuries and deaths.
It wasn't all bad. For the most part, the men believed in the job and they were treated well. The pay was excellent, as were the meals - at least on the ship. There were few amenities on the uninhabited desert islands. However, in the depths of the Great Depression, the men faired better than most and the eyes of the nation were upon them.
“On March 27, 1935, the S.S. NORTH HAVEN embarked from San Francisco for Honolulu, Midway, Wake, Guam, and Manila, to prepare bases for Pan Am’s flying boats to cross the Pacific. Wake was totally uninhabited; all we had on it were a hydrographic chart with no detail, and an article in National Geographic magazine…
We loaded into the ship 12 prefabricated buildings for Midway, and 12 for Wake. We loaded for each base two diesel engines to generate electricity, two windmills to pump water up and get water pressure, a Caterpillar tractor with interchangeable bulldozer blade and crane, and 4,000-gallon tanks for both aviation gas and water… On the deck we loaded two 38-foot power launches, one for Midway and one for Wake, and a 26-foot launch for Guam, intended for air-sea rescue…
Wake is made up of three islands. It’s true it was uninhabited except for birds; we had to wear hats. We’d planned to put the station on Wilkes Island, which is open to the sea, but the survey team found it was too low in the water. So was Wake Island. But Peale Island, on the far side of the lagoon, was okay. We unloaded the cargo into a storage yard on Wilkes Island, then built a 50-yard railroad (somebody by inspiration had brought light-gauge railroad track) to the lagoon. We put the small launch on a barge and, with the help of the tractor, we shoved it across the knee-deep channel between Wake and Wilkes. The launch towed the barges of cargo across the lagoon to Peale Island. Wake depended on rainfall for water, so we rigged canvases on the roofs, drained them into underground tanks, then pumped the water up to the windmills.
We had to clear the coral heads to provide a six-foot deep open landing area in the Wake lagoon for the M-130 to land. So we hung a length of a light-gauge railroad track six feet deep under a barge, and a launch towed the barge back and forth across the lagoon. When the track hit coral, it shook the barge, wakened the guy sleeping on it, and he threw a cork buoy with an anchor to mark the spot. Then Bill Mullahey and I, in a rowboat, rowed out to the buoys. Bill put on goggles he’d made out of bamboo, took a bamboo spear, and dove down and inspected the coral head… Bill surfaced and said, give me six, or eight, sticks of dynamite, dove back down and tied them to the coral. He resurfaced, I rowed us upwind as far as we could, and he pressed a magneto button and blew up the coral. We rowed back, picked up the fish the blast had killed, and brought them back for dinner. We did this until we cleared a pie-shaped landing area where we built a 400-foot dock.”
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