FEATURES – MAY/ JUNE 2009

The Mighty Z

After facing years of waves and war, the Zuni/Tamaroa Navy tug may have found a home in Hampton Roads thanks to some dedicated volunteers.

By Phyllis Speidell; Photos by John H. Sheally II

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In the midst of a battle few survivors will talk about, Glenn Fox looked up and saw the U.S. flag raised on Mount Suribachi. With the roar of Marine cannons reverberating around him, he could spot Japanese solders scrambling among the boulders further down Iwo Jima's black sand beach. It was February 1945 and Fox was 18, a Navy machinist mate aboard the USS Zuni, and too busy to be scared—or aware, he says, of "how much history was being made up there."

The Zuni, an ocean-going tug just 205 feet long, was not one of the Navy's bigger or glitzier ships, but she had a knack for being where history was happening. Built for power, her job was to tow disabled ships to safety and to assist the LSTs or landing crafts in offloading troops and cargo. Thousands of US troops were lost in the Pacific Theatre during World War II but Fox and his shipmates aboard the Zuni, like other tugs attached to the Third Fleet, saved uncountable lives and several larger ships.

"We tagged along behind the big boys in the fleet and did almost all the invasions," says Fred Smith, the Zuni's radioman, remembering that they had already been through the Luzon, West Carolina Islands, and Palau Islands operations by the time the Zuni got to Iwo Jima.

"Tugs were kinda looked down on during the war," he says. "I remember we were in the Philippines doing a little bottomwelding when the Reno passed us going out of harbor and the guys called out to us to make sure our rubber band was wound up tight."

"But the worm turned when we rescued the Reno two or three days later."

The cruiser had been torpedoed in her port side by a Japanese submarine. "We spent two days patching up the cruiser while battle ships circled us to protect us from Japanese submarines," Fox says.

After earning four battle stars in World War II the Zuni transferred to the Coast Guard to be redesignated USCGC Tamaroa. Based in New York she served in law enforcement, drug interdiction, oceanography and weather patrols—as well as search and rescue, including a couple high-profile missions.

She was the first on the scene in July 1956, when the Italian liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish ship Stockholm collided in the fog off Nantucket and she escorted the crippled Stockholm to the New York harbor. When the Perfect Storm ravaged the East Coast in October 1991, she was the cutter that plunged through record-setting swells and winds to rescue a sailboat in distress and the crew of a downed Air National Guard helicopter.

But her guts and glory career ended when she was decommissioned in 1994. Like a homeless veteran, the Zuni spent the next decade wandering the East Coast seeking a safe refuge.

RESCUING THE RESCUER

Fortunately there is an almost umbilical tie between sailor and ship in the fleet tug family, a bond that inspired a small group of dedicated veterans and volunteers to rescue the ship that saved so many others.

After a series of temporary and makeshift berths, numerous rejections and failed plans, the Zuni Maritime Foundation, founded in 2001, has finally found a safe, secure, if still temporary, home for the Zuni/Tamaroa at the Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek in Norfolk.

Rust splotches her battleship gray hull and many of her fittings have disappeared, likely into the hands of souvenir hunters. She's the last of the fleet tugs at Iwo Jima and said to be the last operable of the 600 vessels in that battle. She has, more than once, been tagged "the little ship that could" and her would-be rescuers are hoping she still can.

Their goal is to restore the ship to full operating condition as a floating classroom and training ship to share the history of the working class cutters and tugs with youth groups, ROTC and Coast Guard Auxiliary programs as well as the public. The volunteer group is aiming toward a permanent berth, perhaps in the Richmond/Hampton Roads area.

"We're not talking about just a restoration of a ship but about a ship as a medium for all this history we're gathering," says Harry Jaeger, head of the Foundation. "There are a bazillion human interest stories about this ship."

Fox was 17 and working on B-17's at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio and Smith was an 18-year-old New Mexico bean farmer who had never seen an ocean when they enlisted in the Navy in 1942. They're plank owners of the Zuni, the first and only ship either one served on. Fox, who still lives in Ohio, and Smith, in New Mexico, have both visited the Zuni in the last few years and support her restoration.

"When I saw her in Baltimore three years ago, I could pick her out across the bay," Smith says. "It was emotional to see her after all those years and I've been talking about it ever since."

AT IWO JIMA

"The Mighty Z," as her crew nicknamed her, had already rescued the Reno and one other cruiser when she arrived at Iwo Jima late in February 1945. For 31 days after her arrival she laid submerged fuel pipelines to the island, pulled transports off sandbarsand assisted LSTs.

"We'd tie up next to LSTs and push them on the beach or if they were damaged and couldn't get off the beach, we'd pull them out to sea," Fox says. "If they were damaged too badly we'd shoot them full of holes and sink 'em."

For the rest of Mighty Z, pickup our May/June 2009 issue wherever magazines are sold.

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