Pride of the Inland Seas - Duluth Seaway Port Authority

Only three of the vessels were lost to combat action during World War I. Maski, the first of the Frederickstad ships built by McDougall-Duluth Company, was also the first of the locally-built vessels to fall prey to enemy action. Completed in early 1917, she was turned over to the U.S. Shipping Board, the operating arm of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, and renamed Lakemoor. On her first trans-Atlantic crossing in April 1918, Lakemoor was carrying a cargo of war materials when she was torpedoed by the German submarine U-73 off Corsewell Light in Scotland. [1] Less than two weeks later, the Poitiers, which had been built by Superior Shipbuilding Company in 1917 for the French, met her end at the hands of an unidentified German U-boat in the Bristol Channel off Great Britain. [2] The final victim during World War I was the Lake Portage, built by McDougall-Duluth and sunk by a German U-boat in the Bay of Biscay on August 3, 1918. [3]

Once the war was over, all of the ocean ships built in Duluth-Superior were sold to private interests, most in the early 1920s. All underwent numerous name changes during the 1920s and 1930s, and most saw long service carrying general cargo for the world’s merchant marine fleets. American, European, Chinese, Japanese and Soviet fleets sailed the Duluth- and Superior-built cargo ships on the seven seas in the years between the wars.

The outbreak of World War II in 1939 made the world’s merchant marine fleet fair game for the belligerents. The ocean ships built in the Twin Ports between 1917 and 1920 paid a fearsome price in the years between 1939 and 1945. Perhaps the greatest irony was that several ships built in Duluth and Superior during World War I ended up under the Japanese flag in World War II and were sunk by American naval forces. No fewer than four Japanese cargo ships originally built in the Twin Ports ended their days the victims of U.S. Navy torpedoes or mines. The steel in those torpedoes and mines likely started as rich red iron ore mined on the Mesabi Range.[4]

A total of eight of the Frederickstad-type ships fell to German submarines in the spring of 1942 off the East Coast of the United States. Following American entry into the war in December 1941, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz of the German “Kriegsmarine” shifted his submarine wolfpacks west from the blockade against England to menace the sea lanes between the United States and Great Britain. German U-Boat commanders were absolutely astounded by the easy pickings off the U.S. and Canadian East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and in the Caribbean. U-Boats sank hundreds of U.S. and allied cargo ships and tankers during the late winter and spring of 1942. They called it the “American hunting season” and the “American turkey shoot,” and the carnage got so bad that North Carolinians could sometimes read newspapers by the light of blazing ships just offshore.

The fate of Globe’s Lake Glaucus was typical of the carnage during the “American hunting season.” Renamed the Norlindo in 1941, she was proceeding from Pensacola to Mexico on the night of May 4, 1942, when her path crossed that of the U-507. Captain Harro Schacht ordered one torpedo fired, which hit its mark. The 2,700-ton Norlindo sank stern-first three minutes later. [5]

The Frances Salman met her end in the icy waters off St. John’s, Newfoundland, on January 18, 1942. Launched at McDougall-Duluth in the fall of 1919 as the Lake Flambeau, she spent 20 years sailing the East Coast for the Seaboard & Gulf Line and the Philadelphia & Norfolk Steamship Company before her 1939 sale to the Canadian Gulf Line. Captain Erich Topp of U-552 fired five torpedoes at the Salman before the last found its mark. The 2,700-ton vessel went down with all hands in eight minutes. [6]

Other World War I vessels built at Duluth-Superior were torpedoed or bombed flying the flag of combatants on both sides. The Else Marie was carrying a load of Norwegian iron ore to north Germany when she was attacked and sunk by Soviet aircraft off Norway in July 1942. Originally the Cleveland, she had been one of the first Frederickstad ships built by Superior Shipbuilding in the spring of 1917. [7] Superior Shipbuilding’s Toulouse, another of the 1917 Frederickstad hulls, came to grief in the Russo-German war six months later. Renamed the Ufa and flying Soviet colors, she departed Kola Inlet on the White Sea in January 1943 bound for Iceland. U-255 sent her to the bottom of the Barents Sea with all hands less than a week later. [8] McDougall-Duluth’s Chappell, launched in March 1919, eventually wound up flying the Italian flag. Renamed Elice, she succumbed to British bombs off Civitavecchia, Italy, on May 14, 1943. [9]

Some 20 percent of the more than 70 hulls built in Duluth-Superior during World War I became casualties of the second world war. It is a powerful reminder of the horrendous price that the world’s maritime commerce paid in the 1940s.

[4] Ibid., pp.2, 4. Globe Shipbuilding’s Lake Washburn was eventually renamed the Toyo Maru in 1925 and was torpedoed off Shingu, Japan by the U.S. Navy Submarine Plunger in February 1944. Superior Shipbuilding’s Lake Champlain met a similar fate. Sold to the Japanese in 1927 and renamed the Meisei Maru, she was torpedoed by the American submarine Flying Fish off Manchuria in June 1945. Two other Twin Ports-built ships flying the Japanese flag were lost to mines off Japan in the summer of 1945. Superior Shipbuilding’s Lake Farrar, renamed the Nissyo Maru, struck a mine and sank on July 16, and one week later, McDougall-Duluth’s Chamblee, renamed the Syoko Maru, tore her bottom out on a mine. McDougall-Duluth’s Lake Farmingdale sailed as Florence D for a lumber company in the Philippines for 17 years until she was bombed and sunk by Japanese aircraft off Mindanao in February 1942. The only one of the five ships built in the Twin Ports and flying a Japanese flag to survive World War II was the Soan Maru, which came down the ways at McDougall-Duluth as the Cerro Gardo in 1919.