They're in their 80s and 90s now, but veterans of the U.S. Merchant Marine who served in every theater of World War II are still waiting for what many of them say is their due: respect and money.

They say they've received little of the first and none of the second in the 65 years since the war ended.

But in Butler County on Friday, one local mariners group won at least a partial victory in a fight for recognition that has lasted twice as long as the war itself.

At an hour-long ceremony in downtown Butler, a marble and granite monument was dedicated to the mariners next to the county's World War II memorial in Diamond Park. The mariners had spent nine years lobbying the private group that raised the funds for the war memorial, asking for equal billing on the front with the five branches of the military.

The organizers refused because the mariners were civilians, not members of the armed forces. When the memorial was dedicated in 2004, it listed the mariners on the back along with two dozen other groups that aided the war effort.

So the Merchant Marine veterans campaigned for their own monument on adjacent land, then raised $10,000 to build it.

"We belong on the main monument, but they would not correct their mistake," said Nathan DiSantis, 89, chairman of the monument committee. "But I'm not thinking of that right now. I think what we've done is fabulous."

A certain feistiness is typical of elderly mariners -- civilians who transported troops and materiel across the oceans and suffered mightily from attacks by German U-boats and the Luftwaffe in the Atlantic and Mediterranean and from the Japanese Navy in the Pacific.

Adding to their sense of injustice is the fact that they did not receive the same financial benefits as members of the military. For seven years, various measures have been introduced in Congress to pay them, but they've all stalled. The newest one -- called The Belated Thank You to the Merchant Mariners of World War II Act of 2009 -- would pay them $1,000 a month. It passed the House last May and is now before the Senate's Veterans Affairs Committee.

The idea is to give the mariners some of what war veterans received decades ago through the G.I. Bill of Rights. Aging mariners say they feel it's high time they got something before they're all gone, especially because they say there would have been no victory without them.

"You can't have a war without the Merchant Marine," said Henry Kazmierski, 90, of Clairton, whose Liberty ship was torpedoed by a U-boat on Jan. 25, 1944, on the famous Murmansk run to Russia. "You can't drive tanks across water."

But some veterans groups, most notably the Veterans of Foreign Wars, have resisted the idea of payment for the mariners. In committee hearings, the VFW has argued that the bill singles out one group for special compensation. The organization also points out that World War II merchant mariners have been afforded veteran status since 1988, even though they retained civilian status, making them eligible for medical care and disability pensions.

Opponents also complain that the Merchant Marine of the 1940s is the same organization as the one serving now in Iraq and Afghanistan, so that paying the World War II veterans could set a precedent for all wartime mariners.

For their part, the mariners say the benefit would help make up for what they missed when they came home from the war. In addition, as they themselves point out, in a few years they'll all be dead, so the benefit would cost the government less each year as their numbers dwindle. About 9,000 are left of the roughly 225,000 who served.

This debate has progressed for years largely under the public radar; many Americans are almost entirely ignorant of the Merchant Marine.

"No one ever knows what the Merchant Marine is," said Sindy Raymond, administrator for the California-based American Merchant Marine Veterans organization.

It has nothing to do with the Marines, for one thing. Then and now, merchant mariners operate America's merchant fleet. In World War II, they were sailors who worked for companies that had military contracts to supply and move America's armed forces to the battlefields of Europe and Asia.

As the mariners like to point out, they suffered higher proportionate losses than any branch of the military. About 9,000 mariners died, so about one in 25 didn't come home.

Among Pennsylvania veterans, 62 were killed in action and 330 were listed as missing in action. Another 19 became prisoners of war.

While it's true that some mariners were never shot at, many were in constant danger, particularly in the early part of the war when German U-boats sank ships within view of the American coast. It's the men who were under fire -- in war zones from the North Atlantic to Normandy and the islands of the Pacific -- whom the mariners feel deserve as much respect as any combat veteran of the Army, Navy or Marines.

"Those men who were in direct enemy action, they've not been recognized," said William Joyce, 88, of Munhall, who manned a deck gun aboard a troop ship off Omaha beach in 1944 and later served aboard tankers in the Pacific in support of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

But the mariners have been honored in some ways.

During an interview, Mr. Joyce pulled out a blue dress jacket bedecked with medals, as well as a box of certificates honoring his service. And in 2006, he received a one-time World War II payment of $500 from the state through the efforts of state Rep. John Maher, R-Upper St. Clair, who sponsored a measure to give all Pennsylvania mariners the same bonus that military veterans received after the war.

Mr. Joyce, like most mariners, is proud of his service. After graduating from a Catholic school in Pittsburgh, he became a welder for Dravo Corp. As such, he was needed for the war effort and not drafted, but in 1943 decided to join the Merchant Marine as part of the Army Transportation Corps.

Aboard a converted liner used to transport troops, he shipped off to Ireland in preparation for Normandy. When the invasion started in June 1944, he helped troops disembark into landing craft for the assault on France.

In the months prior, the Navy Armed Guard aboard the ship had been training him to operate the deck guns.

"I didn't know why," he recalled, but he soon found out: He worked as a loader for the gun, which shelled German emplacements as U.S. forces stormed Omaha Beach.

His ship later transported German prisoners to camps in the United States, after which he volunteered to serve aboard tankers hauling aviation fuel for the Italian campaign. He remembers one captain saying the convoys would not stop for ships that were hit.

"There will be no survivors," the man said.

In the Caribbean, a U-boat sank a nearby tanker. Packed with fuel, the ship went up like a torch.

"It looked like a little atomic bomb," Mr. Joyce said.

He also remembers being attacked in Italy by German planes. Later in the war, he shipped off for the Pacific, where his tanker convoy supported American campaigns in New Guinea, the Philippines and Leyte.

"We followed MacArthur for 12 months," he said. "We lost a lot of tankers. A lot of men."

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