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Local Veteran Makes Push for Equal Benefits

By Beacon Staff

Robert Cavanaugh spent Christmas of 1944 at Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona was still bleeding oil after the infamous Dec. 7 attack three years earlier and the young merchant mariner watched as it oozed to the surface, polluting the tropical waters.

It was World War II, and 17-year-old Cavanaugh was headed across the Pacific and to the Middle East to shuttle oil for the Allied forces with Navy-gray United States Merchant Marine tankers.

He was trained to run the 20-millimeter guns protecting the ship, a duty he performed with two Navy guardsmen.

“I was there, one of the crew, with them,” the now 82-year-old Cavanaugh said last week.

Cavanaugh tried to join the U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy during WWII but he was rejected because he wore glasses.

“The Merchant Marines, they’d take you,” Cavanaugh said.

A bright, artistic storyteller and quick to joke about his age, Cavanaugh now lives in Kalispell after years of travel and work as a graphic designer all over the western U.S. But his experience in the “gun tubs” of WWII is unsettling for Cavanaugh, who is seeking equal compensation from the government over 60 years after the war.

The federal government formally recognized the Merchant Marines as WWII veterans in 1988. During the war, the mariners kept supply lines going by shipping war materials such as bombs, troops, tanks, planes, fuel and torpedoes to war zones.

Merchant mariners worked under the authority of the Merchant Marine Act of 1936 and the War Shipping Administration, created by executive order in February 1942. The ships used during the war were either built by the government or were contracted from private owners. At the war’s peak, there were 250,000 mariners in action.

At the end of the war, War Shipping Administrator Vice Admiral Emory S. Land prepared a report about the merchant marines for the president. In it, Land said the merchant ships and crews were vital to the Allies’ success.

“As was said of the small group of RAF flyers who fought off the Luftwaffe, we owe much to few – for the professional merchant seamen kept the tankers and other vessels sailing despite dialing torpedoings within sight of our own shores,” Land wrote.

The Merchant Marines have been fighting for veteran benefits and status since the war ended. Jim Koch, former University of Montana president and current WWII history professor at UM and Old Dominion University, said the mariners were critical in keeping Britain and the Soviet Union in the war.

“Without the Merchant Marines, Britain would have been driven out of the war,” Koch said. “About 10 percent of what the Soviet Union utilized as resources in bullets and guns and Jeeps came via the Merchant Marines.”

Currently, Congress has a bill that would officially recognize the efforts of the Merchant Marines by giving them $1,000 a month.

“Which is a joke – I’m 82,” Cavanaugh said. “They spill that every 15 minutes in D.C.”

This bill – Senate Bill 663 – passed the House and is in the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. Titled, “Belated Thank You to the Merchant Mariners of World War II Act of 2009,” the bill would only apply to the mariners who served between Dec. 7, 1941, and Dec. 31, 1946.

Montana U.S. Sen. Jon Tester is a member of that committee and a co-signer of the bill. “I support this bill because it’s important to recognize the hard work and service of America’s merchant mariners. Moving the bill forward is one of the many tasks on our ‘to do’ list,” Tester said.

Reports from Tester’s office said it is unclear if the committee will consider the legislation, a decision that rests with the committee’s chairman, Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-HI.

If they are awarded money, Cavanaugh said it would be an official recognition of service. One in 26 merchant mariners was killed during the war, but the surviving members were not given benefits, such as medical coverage or GI bill education, that members of the Army, Navy and Air Force enjoyed afterward. They weren’t even allowed in USO facilities during the war, Cavanaugh said.

“We never got a dime, we never got a GI bill,” Cavanaugh said. “We were in the same gun tubs as those guys.”

The three tankers he was aboard met the enemy three times that Cavanaugh can remember. While in the waters around Hawaii, their ship encountered a Japanese gunboat. The oil tanker, though armed with firepower, kicked out smoke to hide its movements.

“We zigged when they zagged,” Cavanaugh said. By the time the smoke cleared, the gunboat was nowhere in sight.

There was also the constant threat of submarine warfare, especially off the coast of Oregon, Cavanaugh said. No one on his ships was harmed, he added.

Ten years after WWII, Cavanaugh was drafted to the Army to fight in the end of the Korean War and the beginning of the Vietnam War. He went on to work as a graphic designer and eventually married his wife Peggy in 1962. They have lived in Kalispell for 35 years.

Koch said the mariners were shot at, frozen to death and drowned after their ships were sunk.

“They were really on the front line,” Koch said. “It was pretty brutal.”

The fight for veteran compensation has hinged on the definition of veteran, with some military groups asserting that the mariners had easier jobs or didn’t experience the high casualties that other branches did. But the same could be said for the U.S. Coast Guard or the Air Force, Koch said, because they didn’t have the high casualty rates of the infantry.

“Some people never left the country and are considered veterans,” he said.

Cavanaugh said education money from a GI bill would have been helpful after he was discharged from the Merchant Marines in 1946. He went to art school in California and his mother helped him shoulder the cost of tuition.

Koch said the bill’s passage would help aging merchant mariners cope with rising health care costs. But current budget deficit concerns may be a factor for voting down the legislation, he added.

“The real question is are these people going to be treated exactly like other veterans?” Koch said.