When the bow of the cruiser USS Pittsburgh broke away during Typhoon Viper and the crew nicknamed it "USS McKeesport," there was more truth in their joke than they realized. McKeesport has a long history of escaping Pittsburgh's embrace and sailing off in its own direction culturally, politically and governmentally.
Of course, there wasn't a real "USS McKeesport," because the U.S. Navy didn't have a warship named for Allegheny County's second city. But there was a privately owned merchant vessel named SS McKeesport that served honorably during World War II until being sunk by a Nazi torpedo 65 years ago this spring.
SS McKeesport was launched in 1919 in Kearney, N.J., and christened by Eleanor Cornelius, daughter of the general manager of McKeesport's National Tube Co. pipe mill. Operated by the American Hampton Roads Line through the 1920s and '30s, she was one of many freighters pressed into government service during World War II as part of the U.S. Merchant Marine.
Her finest hour came in 1940, when the Red Cross loaded SS McKeesport with $1 million in emergency food and supplies and sent her to Marseilles, France, to aid refugees who had fled the advancing German army. She was the first so-called "mercy ship" sent to Europe by the Red Cross and the American Friends Service Committee, and relief workers reported in August that the arrival of S.S. McKeesport "literally prevented starvation" for an estimated 1 million men, women and children in refugee camps.
In April 1943, while under the command of Capt. Oscar Lohr, she left Glasgow, Scotland, and joined a convoy of 43 ships headed to the United States and Canada for war materiel. On the way, they encountered what renowned naval historian Samuel Eliot Morrison later called an "unprecedented" number of Nazi submarines in the shipping lane. The crews of the British warships accompanying the merchant vessels did their best to protect the convoy, but at dawn on April 29, Nazi submarine U-258 fired on the SS McKeesport, inflicting a mortal wound.
In his epic history of U.S. naval operations, Morrison writes that McKeesport's crew, under the command of U.S. Naval Reserve Ensign Irving H. Smith, "stood by their guns until ordered to abandon ship" but were unable to spot the U-boat and return fire. The McKeesport's captain, Oscar Lohr, got 67 men safely into lifeboats before the ship sank. One crewman -- Seaman John A. Anderson of Baltimore -- died as a result of exposure to the icy waters. An anti-submarine trawler rescued the others.
SS McKeesport and Anderson were all but forgotten until several years ago, when local veterans organized an annual memorial service. Each April 29, veterans, naval reservists and others now gather at McKeesport's marina on the Youghiogheny River to honor her service and Anderson's sacrifice.
First Published: June 8, 2008, 4:00 a.m.
