recognition for Coast Guard

[MrBern]

Coast Guard Commendation Medal for "oustanding achievement" for a WWII fire in New Jersey to Brooklyn-born Mr. Wittek, now 87, was Seaman Second Class Wittek of the United States Coast Guard, assigned to a munitions detail in Jersey City.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/nyregion/11nyc.html

On April 24, 1943, the Estero caught fire below deck. It is impossible to overstate how serious this was.

Roughly 5,000 tons of bombs, depth charges and small-arms ammunition were stored on the Estero and nearby ships and railroad cars. If the Estero exploded — and the possibility was fierce — a chain reaction could have engulfed all that ammunition and spread to fuel storage tanks in Bayonne, N.J., and on Staten Island. The blast would have been enormous. Later estimates of the potential death toll on both sides of the Hudson reached into the thousands, even the tens of thousands.

The fire was out of control. Soon, an order came to scuttle the ship. In a race against time, it was towed to deep waters in Upper New York Bay, where fireboats pumped water into the cargo holds. “Some flares and shells exploded,” The New York World-Telegram reported in an article that did not appear until two years later, a delay that reflected wartime secrecy. “It became a question of which got to the ship first — the fire to set off the rest of her explosives or water to sink her.”

The Coast Guard looked for others to honor, but “they couldn’t find anybody else but me,” Mr. Wittek said by phone. “That’s the tragedy.”

 

[MrBern]

Seymour Wittek

the Article in May, first mentioning Seymour Wittek's quest for acknowledgemnt from NYC.
With a bit mroe detail on the fire of the Estero.

Time Ebbs for the Heroes Who Saved the Harbor

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/nyregion/27nyc.html

“We were called ‘subway sailors,’ ” Mr. Wittek said. “We were called ‘bathtub sailors.’ We were called a lot of names that the Coast Guard didn’t deserve.”