Rusted hulls decaying, boundless and bare, sunk deep into the mud.
I stumbled across eleven abandoned ships, their rusted hulls decaying, boundless and bare, sunk deep into the mud.
Hiking through the Musquash Estuary Nature Reserve, I stumbled across eleven abandoned ships, their rusted hulls decaying, boundless and bare, sunk deep into the mud. Two were United States Navy ships from the Second World Warwhich had fought in the Battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
At 62 meters (200 feet) long and two floors high, they are the biggest of the ships in Musquash. They rest close to one another, side by side. Seaweed grows on them from when the waters cover them at high tide.
They were landing craft built by the US Navy to carry soldiers and tanks beaches in the heat of battle on the opposite side of the world during the Second World War.
They are called “Landing Ship Medium Class One” (LSM) and their respective numbers were 46 and 56. Both were awarded battlestars for their involvement in major battles.
Iwo Jima was a key island controlled by the Imperial Japanese Navy. Due to its critical location, the Americans decided it must be taken.
For nine months before their planned invasion, American warplanes bombed the island so heavily they felt certain that few could have survived. They expected an easy landing on its beach.
The Americans were not aware of an extensive network of tunnels on the island in which the Japanese soldiers had been taking shelter.
The weather was perfect on the day of the invasion; the sea was calm, the sun was shining, and there was a nice light breeze.
LSM 46, under the command of Lt. F. R. Edwards, was loaded up with tanks it had carried halfway across the Pacific Ocean from Pearl Harbor.
If everything had gone according to plan, the beach would have been secured and LSM 46 would have had a relatively peaceful time offloading its tanks two hours after the initial landings began.
But everything did not go according to plan.
As LSM 46 made its approach, it lost radio communications with the beach. It began passing the charred remains of other American landing craft.
Lt. Edwards piloted to the beach by following the shouted instructions of American soldiers wading into the water, as bullets flew and shells exploded all around.
LSM 46 safely made it to the beach, offloaded the tanks, and darted back out to the safety of open water, incurring battle damage to its port side.
As the war was drawing to a bloody close, the second ship now found in Musquash fought at the Battle of Okinawa in April of 1945.
LSM 56 was the flagship for its group, piloted by Commander J. T. Bruggar. It was bringing tanks, trucks, ammunition, rations, and six flamethrowers to the battle.
At the crack of dawn on its second day at Okinawa, the ship’s 8 crew spotted a lone enemy aircraft, a feared Mitsubishi Zero.
They frantically set up a smoke screen to hide themselves, but the plane had already spotted them.
It flew in low and began shooting. LSM 56 returned fire with its powerful heavy machine gun. The Zero flew away.
Fifteen minutes later it returned, flying low and firing at LSM 56. The crew returned fire, hitting the aircraft.
It began flying erratically and it seemed to crash into the sea.
The crew later discovered that the wounded pilot had deliberately flown his aircraft into another transport ship.
Four days later LSM 56 caught sight of a Japanese torpedo bomber, a Nakajima B5N. The plane was substantially faster than many of its Allied counterparts.
The crew waited until the plane got close before opening fire. Despite it only being in their range for 30 seconds, they hit it. It burst into flames and crashed into the sea.
Seven minutes later a second plane appeared, and the crew again opened fire.
It turned out to be an American plane, and the crew were reprimanded for the mix up.
“Plane recognition very poor.” Wrote a clearly exasperated officer in the reports. “This ship has conducted extensive classes in aircraft recognition.”
Every single day for the next six weeks the crew of the LSM 56 had to take cover because of enemy attacks.
Only once were they in range to return fire on an enemy plane, but they missed. The crew watched in horror as the plane, filled with explosives, flew directly into the USS Birmingham.
The increasingly desperate Japanese had turned to kamikaze suicide attacks.
Eight days later the crew watched helplessly as two more kamikaze planes flew past them towards their flagship, the USS New Mexico. It was an old battleship built in the First World War that had carried President Woodrow Wilson to Europe to sign the Treaty of Versailles to end that war.
The first plane missed its target, crashing into the sea. The second plane flew into the battleship, engulfing it in flames. 59 American soldiers were killed and 119 were injured.
While rescuing the stricken battleship’s crew, LSM 56 struck a coral reef. It was badly damaged, requiring lengthy repairs. By the time it was fixed the war was over.
After the war’s end, what to do with war equipment was controversial.
Wealthy and powerful industrial interests in Central Canada argued that the government should scrap its military equipment rather than sell or reuse it. They argued that flooding the market with cheap disused war materials would harm the economy.
Meanwhile, average Maritimers tried to acquire cheap army surplus supplies for their own purposes. For example, a machine gun sling made a fine holder for cans of maple tree sap.
In the end the wealthy industrial interests mostly won and much of the Canadian war material was scrapped.
In a rare exception, Charles N. Wilson, who owned a dry dock in Saint John, managed to acquire two decommissioned American troop transports; LSM 46 and LSM 56.
He sold the powerful engines to NB Power, who sent them to Grand Falls to be part of a hydro dam.
The two ships went to Grand Manan, where they transported pulpwood across the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy.
By 1960 the two ships were quite damaged from hauling pulpwood.
Charles Wilson sold the ships to scrappers for metal, dropping them off in the Musquash Estuary.
The scrappers never came, and the two ships have laid there ever since.
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