A Hero Is Honored 60 Years Later
Braved frigid waters to rescue torpedo victims
(11/19/2009) On Tuesday, 66 years after jumping into Arctic waters as a young Coast Guard reservist to save soldiers whose troop ship had been torpedoed by a German U-boat, John Simmons of East Hampton was
 Simmons Family Photo
|
posthumously awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, the service’s highest non-combat citation for heroism.
The award ceremony took place at a private club in New York City with Coast Guard Capt. Gregory Hitchen officiating.
“There was an invocation, the Coast Guard prayer, a petty officer sang the national anthem a cappella,” Lorraine Tuohy, Mr. Simmons’s daughter, said yesterday.
“Captain Hitchen talked about the incident from the official records declassified 10 years ago. He apologized it had taken 66 years. He said it was a privilege. The grandchildren were mesmerized. It was great.”
Twenty-four family members attended Tuesday’s award ceremony, during which Captain Hitchen took them back to the night of Feb. 3, 1943.
The S.S. Dorchester, a former ocean liner serving as a U.S. Army troop ship with 900 men on board, was off Greenland en route to Europe escorted by three Coast Guard cutters, Tampa, Escanaba, and Comanche. Nearly 700 men died in what was to become the second largest loss of life at sea in World War II when the troop ship was torpedoed by U-223 just before midnight.
Beyond the terrible loss of life, the incident gained national attention because four military chaplains representing Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish faiths, who had led soldiers in prayer, gave up their life preservers, linked arms, and went down with the ship.
The crew of Comanche saw the flash of an explosion. The troop ship sank fast. Those who were not trapped below decks were cast into 39-degree water.
That night, three officers and nine enlisted men from the Comanche acted as “retrievers” — rescue swimmers wearing newly developed suits and attached to their cutter by ropes. The Dorchester’s men who were in the water were too weak to climb the cargo nets that had been hung over the side of the Comanche.
Many were dead or unconscious, so the retrievers concentrated on those threatened by exposure on overcrowded and capsizing lifeboats and rafts. The swimmers jumped over the side with a line attached and were hauled back with 93 of the U-boat’s victims.
The Comanche’s commanding officer, Lieut. Commander Ralph Curry, later named the men who had gone over the side again and again, Ensign John W. Simmons, U.S.C.G.R., among them.
“For heroic conduct while serving onboard U.S.S. Comanche in effecting the rescue of survivors from the torpedoed S.S. Dorchester on 3 February 1943,” Captain Hitchens said, reading from the medal citation signed by B.J. Penn, acting secretary of the Navy, on behalf of President Barack Obama.
“When the benumbed survivors of the Dorchester were unable, because of heavy seas and freezing wind, to make any effort to climb on board the rescuing ship, Ensign Simmons volunteered for the dangerous task of going over the side and working in the rough, freezing water in order to assist the exhausted and helpless survivors. . . .”
After the war, Mr. Simmons went to work for Becton and Dickinson, a pharmaceutical company, and in the early 1970s, he became president of Morton Salt. He and his wife, Paula Simmons, who was given her husband’s medal on Tuesday, moved to Highway Behind the Pond in East Hampton in 1968 with their family. Mr. Simmons died in 1980 and was buried in Most Holy Trinity Cemetery in East Hampton.
“It came from out of the blue two weeks ago on a Monday night,” said Ms. Tuohy, who lives in Brooklyn. “I almost didn’t pick up the phone until I heard the person mention the Comanche and Dorchester. She said they were looking for children of John Simmons. I knew a tiny bit about this, but my dad never talked about it.”
In addition to Mrs. Simmons and Lorraine Tuohy, the other attending family members included Mr. Simmons’s other daughters, Paula Butler and Carol Rathborne, his son, John Simmons, and their children.