The keel of the unique World War II saga of the SS Stephen Hopkins was literally laid in the Bay Area: The ship was built in Richmond, its homeport was San Francisco and a crew member whose death in battle became a legend was trained on the Peninsula.
The lightly armed cargo ship battled two German warships in the South Atlantic in 1942, sinking one and damaging another before it went to the ocean bottom, taking with it Midshipman Cadet Edwin O’Hara who was fresh from the temporary merchant marine college at Coyote Point. A painting depicting O’Hara’s last moments is a treasured icon at the merchant marine academy at King’s Point New York where the athletic hall bears his name. The painting shows O’Hara loading the last shell in to the stern gun of the Hopkins. O’Hara, who was from Lindsay in Tulare County and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal posthumously, slams the shell while standing near the bodies of fallen sailors.
It wasn’t until 1996 that San Francisco honored the crew by declaring an SS Stephen Hopkins Day at the urging of a woman whose father went down with the ship. The first and last voyage of the liberty ship reads like a Hollywood script. The freighter faced two German ships, one the heavily-armed raider Stier, in the South Atlantic on Sept. 27, 1942. The Stier had captured or destroyed almost 50,000 tons of shipping. Disguised as a freighter, the Stier actually concealed six 5.9-inch guns, anti-aircraft guns and torpedoes, along with two seaplanes.The other German ship was a tender armed only with anti-aircraft guns. The Hopkins’ main weapon was a mere 4-inch gun mounted on the stern. According to the Merchant Marine, the Hopkins had a crew of 42, plus 15 Navy sailors to work its guns, aided by merchant marine sailors. Only 15 survived after a 31-day voyage in an open lifeboat that brought them to Brazil. The Merchant Marine said the battle marked the only time a freighter sank a raider.
The Merchant Marine officers training school at Coyote Point, then officially called San Mateo Point by the federal government, was needed because Merchant Marine officers were killed at an alarming rate. The school opened in 1942 and by November of 1944 there were 528 cadet-midshipmen enrolled at Coyote Point, where there is a monument to the sailors who passed through the classrooms. According to the Merchant Marine website, the school consisted of 14 barracks, classrooms, a gym and a machine shop. There also was a swimming pool and diving tower, really a jumping tower. Lifejacket-wearing cadets where taught to drop feet first from the tower to break any debris from an abandoned ship. The pool was also used to teach sailors how to survive a blazing oil fire, which many would soon face.
Those who jumped off the tower included John Cattermole who remembers “jumping in to a lot of mud at low tide.” He went on to sail in the Pacific, bringing supplies to Guadalcanal, Leyte and Makin Island where a Japanese torpedo plane attacked his ship.
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“The torpedo passed under the ship without hitting it,” he said. “Good thing because we were loaded with high octane fuel.”
“We learned important things at Coyote Point but most of our training was on the job aboard ship,” he said. “There was a lot of classroom time about seamanship, standard rules of the road, things like that. I ended up in the engine room.”
The cadets’ seamanship skills needed work, Cattermole said. “We hit the Dumbarton Bridge while learning how to row a lifeboat.”
The Rear View Mirror by history columnist Jim Clifford appears in the Daily Journal every other Monday. Objects in The Mirror are closer than they appear.
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