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Book chronicles history of Kings Point USMMA

BY BILL BLEYER | bill.bleyer@newsday.com

February 24, 2008

On a frigid day in January 1942, dozens of young men rowed large wooden boats across western Long Island Sound from the Bronx to Kings Point.

They were cadets moving - in a nautically fitting way - from a temporary home at New York State's maritime school to the former Walter Chrysler estate that was being transformed into the first permanent site of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy as America geared up to fight World War II.

The story of how the nation's somewhat obscure and underappreciated fifth service academy came to be and survived periodic challenges to its existence is chronicled in a new book, "In Peace and War: A History of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy," by Jeffrey Cruikshank and Chloë Kline. The 523-page volume was commissioned by the American Maritime History Project, a nonprofit organization based at the academy.

Cruikshank, who runs a Boston research company, was invited to Kings Point in 2002 to undertake the first academy history published since 1956. Until then, he said, "I had no idea there was a Merchant Marine Academy funded by the federal government."

After more than 50 interviews, reviewing archival materials and sailing on two merchant vessels manned by academy graduates, Cruikshank concluded in the book that "Kings Point has a daily and profound effect on the maritime, and by extension, on the national economy. ... But like the industry it serves, Kings Point has struggled against great odds. It has reinvented itself many times. It has worked hard to maintain the support of a public that sometimes forgets the 'fourth arm of defense' and sometimes overlooks the fact that almost all of what America imports and exports travels by ship."

An in-depth study

Officials at the academy say the final product shows Cruikshank and Kline did their homework.

"It wasn't just a superficial look," said the school's superintendent, Vice Adm. Joseph Stewart, a board member of the American Maritime History Project. He said the coverage of the academy's troubles was so complete that "it turned off some of our alumni."

For centuries, the only training for ships' officers was informal and on the job. But several states created training schools after Congress authorized it in 1874, beginning with New York the same year. In 1891, Congress established the first of several federal programs for on-the-job shipboard training. But the authors said they suffered from a lack of clear criteria for selection, inadequate pay and no standards.

So, by the late 1920s, there was a growing movement to create a federal academy. It was aided by a series of nautical disasters, such as the 1934 fire that destroyed the liner Morro Castle. The Merchant Marine Act of 1936 authorized an academy, something opposed by unions for ship officers who didn't want additional competition. Cadets trained initially at sea, with some onshore education in temporary facilities, including San Francisco, New London, Conn., Biloxi, Miss., and Fort Schuyler in the Bronx.

The search for a permanent academy site intensified as World War II threatened to engulf America. In early December 1941, the 12-acre Chrysler estate came on the market and was purchased for $100,000. In the mansion constructed in 1916 by New York merchant Henri Bendel, the book notes, "the dark-paneled dining room transformed itself into a mess hall. ... All of the upstairs rooms in the residence, and many of the spaces in the garages ... were strewn with mattresses. ... Preliminary attempts had been made to transform the billiard room and the playroom into makeshift classrooms."

Acquiring adjacent land

Congress approved $825,000 for alterations and additions to the campus, so the government purchased several adjoining estates. By October 1943, the campus had grown to 46 acres, with 53 permanent buildings supplemented by 12 wood shacks built by the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps.

After Pearl Harbor, the United States desperately needed Merchant Marine officers, so the course of instruction was truncated.

Periodically throughout its existence, the academy has had to fight for funding and occasionally even for survival. The first time came when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1942. It transferred responsibility for all federal maritime training to the Coast Guard, which soon halted construction at Kings Point, "evidently on the grounds that the academy was only a temporary wartime installation," Cruikshank writes. The academy successfully lobbied Roosevelt to order the Coast Guard to back off.

Lauren McCready, first head of the engineering program, gained renown for improvising equipment for training. He scavenged handouts from shipyards along the East Coast and snagged the emergency generators from the French luxury liner SS Normandie after it burned and capsized in February 1942 at a Manhattan pier.

The war really hit home the next month, when Cadet Howard Conway Jr. was killed on the SS Liberator when it was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the East Coast. By the end of the conflict, 142 cadets had been lost in action, along with 68 graduates.

"Kings Point was (and continues to be) the only federal academy to put its students in harm's way," Cruikshank writes.

The academy was not formally dedicated until Sept. 30, 1943, after six new barracks, a mess hall and several academic buildings had been built. The academy acquired the surplus 400-foot Devosa in 1946 and rechristened it Kings Pointer, the first in a series of training ships to carry that name. The Kings Point Mariners played their first intercollegiate football game in fall 1945 as a program of varsity athletics was initiated. Full academic accreditation came in 1949.

The demand for the academy and its officers ratcheted up again during the Korean War, which began in 1950, when the training schedule was again shortened. But later in that decade, the academy once more was subjected to financial constraints by the government, which proposed returning maritime training to state schools. The academy and its alumni mobilized, and in 1956 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation permanently declaring Kings Point the fifth federal service academy, joining the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in upstate New York, which trains Army officers; the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo.; the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.; and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn.