The West Cressy was owned by the Matson line, but we were sailing under charter to the Navy in the summer of 1941, traveling from Pearl Harbor to Seattle. To save commercial radio charges my captain had orders to send all communications through Navy stations instead of commercial stations. As we approached Seattle I received messages through the commercial station from Matson asking our arrival time. Following his orders, my captain had me try to respond through a Navy station without success. In this case, after several attempts to reach a Navy ship or station without answer, we began to get nasty messages through the commercial station from Matson demanding to know why we did not respond. The commercial operator asked, “Sparks, why don’t you give them an answer?” I explained my dilemma and asked them to have Matson contact the Navy to have them listen for our signal without success. [Radio operators could talk back and forth freely, but sending a commercial message was charged to the shipping company.]
We arrived in Seattle harbor and anchored, waiting for instructions as to what dock to go to. We were in sight of the Matson building. If they had looked out the window we could have blinked a signal to them by blinker. Finally, a coast guard station in Oregon answered me and offered help. They couldn’t accept the message, but offered to contact the Navy for us. Finally, I got on short wave and talked to the Navy operator at Pearl Harbor that I had gotten acquainted with. He promised to send the message by teletype to Matson in Seattle. Finally we got docking instructions.
We arrived in Seattle harbor and anchored, waiting for instructions as to what dock to go to. We were in sight of the Matson building. If they had looked out the window we could have blinked a signal to them by blinker. Finally, a coast guard station in Oregon answered me and offered help. They couldn’t accept the message, but offered to contact the Navy for us. Finally, I got on short wave and talked to the Navy operator at Pearl Harbor that I had gotten acquainted with. He promised to send the message by teletype to Matson in Seattle. Finally we got docking instructions.
There was an international understanding that all ships are available to help any ship in distress. American ships, many of which only had one radio operator, were required to have an automatic receiver which sounded an alarm if an SOS came over the calling frequency whenever the operator was not on duty. The Navy apparently had no such policy. At that time, in my radiogram to my brother-in-law, I stated that it appeared to me that the Japanese could sink our whole merchant fleet and the Navy wouldn’t know about it until they read about it in the paper. Unfortunately, that is about the way it occurred at Pearl Harbor.
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