The Long Blue Line: From Aztec shore to Arctic Zone—Coast Guard service to the world since 1790!

From Aztec shore to Arctic Zone; to Europe and Far East; the flag is carried by our ships; in times of war and peace.

Coast Guard Marching Song “Semper Paratus”

As the refrain of the Coast Guard marching song “Semper Paratus” indicates, the service has a global reach that has been shaped by national and world events in wartime and in peace for 236 years.

Within ten years of their founding, Coast Guard predecessor services would begin to grow geographically along the U.S. East Coast. In 1789, the U.S. Lighthouse Service was established and began its mission of overseeing lighthouses in the founding states of the Union. A year later, in 1790, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton established the U.S. Revenue Marine placing revenue cutters under direction of customs collectors in major seaports. These included homeports at ten East Coast seaports from Savannah, Georgia, up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In 1798, less than ten years after establishing the Revenue Marine, cutters deployed for the first time to international waters to serve in the Quasi War with France in the Caribbean.

As the U.S. expanded from East Coast to the Great Lakes and Gulf Coast, revenue cutters populated regional ports and lighthouses marked navigational hazards. In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase, including New Orleans, expanded Revenue Marine and Lighthouse Service operations to the Gulf for the first time. By the time of the War of 1812, the Revenue Marine had already operated afloat units (small sailing boats) from Great Lakes ports. Unfortunately, during the war, all were destroyed or captured by the British. In 1821, Spain ceded Florida Territory to the U.S., including St. Augustine, Key West and Pensacola, expanding cutter and lighthouse operations from the Canadian border down to the Gulf.

Beginning in the 1840s, revenue cutter and lighthouse operations expanded across the North American continent, into the Western Gulf and reached foreign shores. In 1845, the U.S. annexed Texas expanding revenue cutter patrols and lighthouse operations to the Western Gulf. In 1846, revenue cutters visited foreign waters in wartime for the first time since the Quasi War to participate in the War with Mexico.

The War with Mexico had the side-effect of expanding revenue cutter and lighthouse operations beyond the eastern U.S. for the first time. After the war, revenue cutter operations expanded to new territory on the West Coast. In 1849, revenue cutter C.W. Lawrence touched South American ports on its way to the Pacific, Hawaii and finally San Francisco, California Territory, inaugurating cutter operations on the West Coast. Lighthouse operations soon followed Lawrence’s arrival. Prior to the Civil War, it was common to send revenue cutters built on the East Coast around South America to the Pacific, visiting ports along the way.
 

In 1858, the U.S. government sent an expeditionary force to Paraguay, including Revenue Cutter Harriett Lane—the first time a revenue cutter visited internal South American waters. By 1860, the service stationed cutters under customs collectors in Gulf ports at Mobile, New Orleans (two cutters), and Galveston. By 1860, the service had revenue cutters operating under customs collectors in San Francisco, Oregon Territory (Astoria), and Washington Territory (Port Townsend). And in 1867, purchase of Alaska from Russia inaugurated West Coast cutter patrols along the Alaskan coast, Siberian coast, and Bering Sea, as well as a robust fisheries enforcement mission in Alaskan waters.

The late 19^th century saw important changes affecting service expansion beyond American shores. In 1876, the Revenue Cutter Service School of Instruction was established and after building the new training ship Salmon P. Chase, cadet cruises marked the first cutter visits to Europe. During the 1880s and 1890s, changes in technology, leadership and organizational structure unleashed the service from archaic practices, such as cutters serving local customs collectors, and transformed the new U.S. Revenue Cutter Service into a modern military organization headed by a senior officer. Personnel now served in a military chain of command with its head, the commandant, located in the Treasury Department. In addition, the official founding of the predecessor agency of the U.S. Life-Saving Service saw the growth of a network of hundreds boat stations populating North American shores.

When few foreign countries had a navy of their own, let alone a coast guard, the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service was sending cutters around the globe. In 1898, on its way to serve on the West Coast, Revenue Cutter McCulloch paid first-time visits to foreign ports in Europe, Mediterranean, Middle East, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In the 1898 Battle of Manila Bay, McCulloch became the first revenue cutter to serve in combat in the Pacific.
 

The 1898 Spanish American War had a dramatic effect on the service’s expansion into the Pacific and Caribbean. At the conclusion of the brief war, the U.S. annexed Guam, the Philippines and Hawaii, and, in 1900, American Samoa. Between 1903 and 1905, Lighthouse Service jurisdiction expanded to Hawaii, Midway Island, Guam and American Samoa. Meanwhile, revenue cutter patrols expanded to the Hawaiian Islands and Northern Pacific.

The Spanish-American War not only stretched cutter and lighthouse operations into the Pacific, but it also pushed them south into the Caribbean. With the postwar annexation of Puerto Rico came Lighthouse Service oversight of several former Spanish lighthouses. A revenue cutter base located at San Juan soon followed. In 1903, Cuba signed a lease in perpetuity for Guantanamo Bay providing a base of operations for naval warships and revenue cutters. Guantanamo Bay also came under Lighthouse Service jurisdiction. Much later, in 1917, the U.S. would purchase the U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark increasing the Coast Guard’s Caribbean patrol area and providing the location for a small base of operations.

The early 20^th century saw the Coast Guard continue to grow in scope and geographic reach. In April 1912, the horrific loss of life on board the passenger liner Titanic motivated the international community to establish the International Ice Patrol (IIP) to locate icebergs and warn commercial vessels away from them. In 1913, the Revenue Cutter Service adopted the IIP mission, operating cutters in waters surrounding southern Greenland and North Atlantic for the first time.

The 1915 merger of the Life-Saving Service and the Revenue Cutter Service into the modern Coast guard consolidated thousands of boat stations together with cutter bases throughout North America and the Caribbean. The U.S. entry in World War I in 1917, expanded the Coast Guard’s wartime area of responsibility well beyond territorial waters with cutters serving in European waters for the first time. In addition, Coast Guard aviators served in Europe and afloat personnel served on Navy ships escorting convoys across the North Atlantic.
 

World War II sent the service around the globe to lands never served by Coast Guard aids to navigation nor visited by a cutter. Just before the war, the service was tasked with overseeing operations in Greenland and its surrounding waters. The service’s global reach expanded with transfer to the Navy to support naval operations with shore installations, buoy tenders, cutters, patrol craft, aircraft, weather ships, amphibious vessels, and transports. By 1942, Coast Guard-manned transports were making first time visits to the South Pacific, North Africa, South Africa, and India to deliver troops and, in some cases, evacuate civilians.

By the middle of the war, the Coast Guard began building a network of Long-Range Aids to Navigation, or LORAN, stations in the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of operations. By war’s end, the LORAN network extended from Greenland across North America to the Western Pacific. Later in the war, the service began establishing Aviation Detachments, or AIRDETS, at various airfields. These included Annette Island, Alaska, and Kaneohe, Hawaii. Indeed, the service’s global reach during the war prompted one service member to write a song with the refrain:

I’d like to find the guy that named the Coast Guard,

And find that bit of coast he had in mind.

It wasn’t on the tanker we’d protect from submarines.

The coast at Casablanca wasn’t soft by any means,

I couldn’t find it on the beach at Attu.

I couldn’t find it at Guadalcanal.

If he thinks the name will rate it,

Where the hell can I locate it,

Oh, I’d like to find the guy that named the Coast Guard!

The Cold War years saw the Coast Guard visit new lands and cement its global footprint. In late December 1946, the Coast Guard visited Antarctica for the first time when the icebreaker Northwind inaugurated countless icebreaker missions to the “frozen continent.” Meanwhile, the service operated Ocean Station cutters stationed across the Atlantic and the Pacific as weather ships and SAR vessels for transoceanic air travel. For commercial navigation and U.S. defense purposes, the service operated numerous LORAN stations around the Pacific, Mediterranean, Baltic, and Caribbean as well as Greenland, North America, Alaska, and Far East. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the Coast Guard expanded its North American network of AIRDETs to cover the airspace from Italy across the globe to Guam and the Philippines. In 1950, the Korean War brought the Coast Guard to the Korean Peninsula to operate a LORAN station and help establish the South Korean Navy. And, in 1952, the service stationed Cutter Courier in Greek waters to transmit Voice of America broadcasts into the Soviet Union for the next 12 years. In addition to missions to Antarctica, Coast Guard units pushed farther than ever into the Arctic. Driven by supply needs of Distant Early Warning (DEW) installations along Canada’s northern shores, cutters Storis, Bramble and Spar made a first time ever U.S. transit of the Northwest Passage in 1957, demonstrating that the bases could be accessed by icebreaking ships. And, in 1965, the Vietnam War brought cutters, aids to navigation and shoreside Coast Guard units to Vietnam for the first time.

In the late 20^th century and early 21^st century the service’s global reach continued to expand to include the Middle East. During the Persian Gulf War, operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm deployed Coast Guard units to Kuwait. These included Port Security Units, Law Enforcement Detachments, National Strike Force, and fixed-wing aviation units. In 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom brought Coast Guard units to the Middle East a second time. These units include high-endurance cutters, 110-foot patrol boats, PSUs, the National Strike Force, and a buoy tender. In 2004, the service permanently commissioned the base Patrol Forces Southwest Asia or PATFORSWA in Bahrain. Meanwhile, RAID and Coast Guard Cyber teams deployed to Afghanistan to support safe cargo shipments and cyber security.
 

In 1790, Alexander Hamilton established a small fleet of coastal law enforcement vessels to patrol off East Coast seaports. Over the next 236 years, the service experienced rapid growth in its geographic area of responsibility. Today, USCG units and operations serve in the U.S., its territories and around the globe. The Coast Guard no longer guards just the coasts!
 

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