War Wood 3

Here were post 1 and post 2 with this name, both focusing on WW2 torpedo boats.  PT-728 used to be based on the Rondout in Kingston and would make visits to NYC’s sixth boro, but now you’d have to go to Lake Huron for an outing.

The vessel below is PT-305 and “diminished” version of itself spent from 1947 until 1988 in the sixth boro as Captain David Jones.  Does anyone remember it?  Have photos of it?

I say “diminished” because to bypass certain crewing requirements, four yards plus was chopped off the stern.  Click here and scroll through to see a photo of this chopped hull and NYC paint scheme.

If you’ve never visited Nola, you have to;  and if you visit Nola, the World War II museum–easy to get to–is a must-do.  And in one of many buildings–the Kushner Restoration Pavilion–PT-309 is returning to its former glory.   Parts have been rebuilt or returned from scrap heaps and river bottoms–like these exhaust ports salvaged from a wreck in a river in Connecticut.

The plan is for a return to the water, a possible trip all the way to Boston with a stopover in the sixth boro.

PT-305–like many torpedo boats–is a Higgins product, made right in New Orleans.

And before you go, read Jerry E. Strahan’s biography of the Andrew Jackson Higgins.  Click here for a Richard Campanella Times Picayune article with photos on Higgins.  Here’s an excerpt, showing Higgins’ methods when he needed to get fifty small boats built and shipped to the Navy in two weeks:  ”

Low on steel, he “chartered a fleet of trucks and armed plant guards,” wrote Strahan, “to persuade [a Baton Rouge] consignee to release the metal to Higgins Industries.”

Requiring bronze shafting, he sent his men to raid a Texas depot and arranged for complicit Louisiana police to placate livid Texas law enforcement as his trucks crossed the state line heading back to New Orleans. Needing more steel, Higgins begged and borrowed from a Birmingham plant, then sweet-talked Southern Railway officials into bending the rules to deliver the metal to New Orleans. “Never before or since,” wrote Strahan, “has a Southern Railway passenger train pulled freight cars.”

All photos by Will Van Dorp.