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Dear Doug Collins

The WWII Merchant Mariners: They Delivered the Goods, Then Waited 43 Years to Be Called Veterans

They were civilians, and they died like soldiers — at a higher rate, in fact, than any branch of the armed forces. Roughly a quarter of a million American merchant mariners crewed the cargo ships and tankers that carried the Second World War across every ocean, and one in twenty-six of them did not come home. Their president said, in so many words, that the country would do for them what it was doing for the men in uniform. The country did not — not in 1944, when the GI Bill passed them by; not in 1945 or 1947, when Congress let their own bill die; and not for forty-three years, until three mariners sued the government and a federal court made the Air Force reconsider. By then the education benefits were gone, and, by the House Veterans' Affairs Committee's count, more than 125,000 of the mariners were dead. This page is the documented record of the service, the promise, and the wait.

The service and the promise

The United States Merchant Marine of World War II was not a branch of the military. Its mariners were civilian volunteers — too young, too old, or turned away by the armed services in some cases, and ranging, as the markers and histories record, from boys of sixteen to men in their seventies — who signed articles aboard merchant ships operated for the War Shipping Administration and sailed them wherever the war required. The Department of Defense puts the number who served at nearly 250,000; counts in the record run from about 243,000 upward, and the difference is a matter of who is counted, not of what they did.

What they did was the logistics of the entire war. Merchant mariners delivered troops, tanks, aircraft, ammunition, fuel, and food to every theater — across the Atlantic to Britain and the Soviet Union on the Murmansk Run, across the Pacific in the island campaigns, into the Mediterranean and the Normandy invasion, where the 1944 New York Times judgment quoted in the later Congressional Gold Medal legislation held that the invasion would not have been possible without them. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the Merchant Marine the nation’s “fourth arm of defense,” and said of the mariners in September 1944, in words the Maritime Administration still quotes: they “have delivered the goods when and where needed in every theater of operations and across every ocean in the biggest, the most difficult and dangerous transportation job ever undertaken.”

They did it as the enemy’s first target. A cargo ship cannot fight a submarine, and the Axis knew that sinking the supply line was a way to starve the armies at the end of it. Merchant ships were torpedoed, bombed, mined, and shelled from the war’s first day to its last — American merchant seamen were dying on sunk ships before Pearl Harbor. Between 1939 and 1945, 9,521 merchant mariners lost their lives, the National World War II Museum figure carried by the Defense Department — a higher proportion of those who served than in any branch of the military. Another roughly 12,000 were wounded. The rate is the one every account agrees on: one in twenty-six. Among the dead were 142 cadet-midshipmen of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, students sent to sea as part of their training — which is why Kings Point is, to this day, the only federal service academy authorized to carry a battle standard.

The terms of service matched the risk in only one direction. A mariner was paid while his ship was under him; the record kept by maritime historians is that when his ship was sunk, his pay stopped, and getting home was his own problem. What he did not have was anything the uniformed services had: no disability system, no death benefits on military terms, no retirement, and — as it turned out — no place in the settlement the country made with its wartime generation.

That settlement was the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 — the GI Bill — signed by President Roosevelt on June 22, 1944. It gave the men and women of the armed forces education benefits, unemployment support, VA health care, and home and business loans. The merchant mariners, who were not members of the armed forces, were not in it. Roosevelt named the omission himself, at the signing, in the sentence this page exists to hold the country to: “I trust that Congress will soon provide similar opportunities to members of the merchant marine who have risked their lives time and time again during war for the welfare of their country.” That was the promise — presidential, public, and specific. What follows is what Congress did with it.

What happened

Congress did nothing, and it did not do it by accident.

In late 1945, the House Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries heard testimony on bills to give the mariners something comparable. The principal measure, H.R. 2346, would have provided benefits comparable to those of other World War II veterans. The Congressional Research Service’s account of those hearings is plain about both sides of the room: testimony in favor came from former merchant seamen and the Merchant Marine Veterans Association; testimony in opposition came from the War Department, the Veterans Administration, and the American Legion. The arguments against, as CRS summarizes them, were that a merchant mariner could choose whether to take a particular voyage or leave the service, and that merchant mariners were paid more than Navy men — a comparison the Schumacher court record later noted was contradicted by studies finding the total remuneration of merchant seamen about the same as that of Army and Navy men. H.R. 2346 died in committee. A 1947 bill, H.R. 476, which would have expanded health and disability benefits and added an education benefit, died as well. The House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, reviewing the history sixty years later, put the cause directly: the effort “failed in Committee, due mostly to pressure and opposition from the uniformed branches and the veterans service organizations.” Roosevelt was dead by then. His sentence at the signing was the whole of what the mariners got.

So they went home as civilians who had fought a war. The GI generation went to college on the government, bought houses on VA loans, and was treated in VA hospitals; the mariners who had carried that generation’s armies overseas did none of it on the government’s account. Men with service-connected injuries had no VA disability system to claim against. Men who had been prisoners had no veteran status to claim with. One of them was Stanley Willner, a plaintiff in the case that finally broke the logjam: Willner’s ship had been sunk by a German raider, and he spent years as a prisoner of war, including forced labor on the Burma–Siam railroad — the River Kwai — a story told in Gerald Reminick’s Death’s Railway. He came home from that to a country that did not count him a veteran.

The war generation aged. The mariners kept their own organizations — the American Merchant Marine Veterans among them — and kept asking, and the answer kept being no: not veterans, because not in uniform, whatever the casualty lists said.

What the institution did afterward

The door that finally opened was built for someone else, and the mariners were first refused at it.

In 1977, Congress passed the GI Bill Improvement Act, P.L. 95-202. Its Section 401 granted benefit eligibility to the Women Airforce Service Pilots and authorized the Secretary of Defense to extend “active duty” status, for veterans’ benefit purposes, to other civilian groups “similarly situated” — a determination administered through the Civilian Military Service Review Board, headed by the Secretary of the Air Force. Group after group of wartime civilians was recognized under that process. The merchant mariners applied — for the oceangoing service group, December 7, 1941 to December 31, 1946, and for the men who had taken part in the invasions — and in 1985 the Secretary of the Air Force denied them.

Three mariners — Ed Schumacher, Stanley Willner, and a third fellow plaintiff — together with the AFL-CIO, sued. In Schumacher v. Aldridge, 665 F. Supp. 41 (D.D.C. 1987), decided July 16, 1987, Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer reviewed the denials against the record of the groups the Secretary had approved. The plaintiffs’ case, as the opinion frames it, was that the mariners met the established criteria to a greater extent than many approved groups, and that the denials were inconsistent with the Secretary’s own prior decisions. The court ruled that the Secretary had erred in rejecting the applications, and remanded them for reconsideration. It is worth being exact about what the court did and did not do: it did not itself declare the mariners veterans — it held the denial process up against the government’s own P.L. 95-202 standards and found the denials could not stand as made.

On reconsideration, the government folded. On January 19, 1988 — the date now written into federal regulation, 38 C.F.R. § 3.7 — the Secretary of the Air Force determined that American merchant mariners in oceangoing service during the period of armed conflict, December 7, 1941 to August 15, 1945, had performed active military service, and were veterans for the purpose of VA benefits, with discharge certificates issued through the Coast Guard. Forty-three years after the war, the status was granted — by a lawsuit, not by the gratitude of the institution that had been asked for it, in Congress, since 1945.

What the status could no longer carry is the center of this account. The GI Bill education benefits — the college educations that remade the uniformed generation’s lives — had expired decades earlier; a man of college age in 1946 was in his sixties in 1988. CRS states the consequence without adornment: the passage of time “may have made it impossible for them to fully access these benefits,” and men with service-connected disabilities “may have lost out on nearly 40 years of VA disability compensation or medical benefits.” And the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee, in its report on the belated-thank-you legislation, recorded the arithmetic of the delay: when veteran status arrived in January 1988, “the education benefits had expired and over 125,000 merchant mariners had died.”

The 1988 determination also drew a line the uniformed services’ own dates did not draw. It stopped at August 15, 1945, although the official period of armed conflict ran to December 31, 1946 — cutting off the mariners who had sailed the dangerous post-surrender months, bringing the troops home. Ten years later, Congress addressed that group partway: Section 402 of the Veterans Programs Enhancement Act of 1998, P.L. 105-368, extended burial benefits and interment in national cemeteries to mariners in oceangoing service from August 16, 1945 to December 31, 1946. Burial only. In 1999, the Secretary of the Air Force determined that this later group’s service is not active duty under P.L. 95-202 for any other VA benefit. They could be buried as veterans. They could not be treated as veterans in life.

Where it stands now

The status, within its lines, stands. A qualifying mariner of the December 1941–August 1945 oceangoing group is a veteran, eligible for VA benefits as other veterans are; the 1945–46 group holds burial and national-cemetery rights. The recognition has continued in the ceremonial register: in March 2020, Congress enacted the Merchant Mariners of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act, and on May 18, 2022, in Statuary Hall at the Capitol, the medal was presented to ten mariners on behalf of all of them — by the American Merchant Marine Veterans’ account, on behalf of the roughly 1,500 mariners of the war still living. Dave Yoho, who had signed on at sixteen and worked the boiler room of a refueling tanker in the South Pacific, spoke for the rest: “I’m speaking for 248,500 guys that are already dead. One out of 26 of us died, but thousands of us came home deprived of a part of our life.” He asked the country to do the one thing still in its power: “say to them of what we did; urge them to read about us and find out about us… ‘we gave up our yesterdays for your better tomorrow.’” The medal itself is displayed at the American Merchant Marine Museum at Kings Point, and the Maritime Administration issues duplicates to eligible mariners and their next of kin.

The material account — the money for the benefits that expired while the status was refused — has never been settled. It has been introduced, in one form or another, in Congress after Congress. The best-known version is Representative Bob Filner’s “Belated Thank You to the Merchant Mariners of World War II” legislation — H.R. 23 in the 110th Congress — which would have paid $1,000 a month to qualifying living mariners and surviving spouses; it was heard, and reported by the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, and never enacted. CRS notes that similar compensation legislation has been introduced in every Congress since the 108th. The modern form of the proposal is a single payment: the Honoring Our WWII Merchant Mariners bills would pay $25,000 once, and the current version, H.R. 39, the Original Honoring Our WWII Merchant Mariners Act of 2025, introduced by Representative Al Green of Texas on January 3, 2025 and referred to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, would establish a Merchant Mariner Equity Compensation Fund for exactly that purpose. It has not been enacted. No version has.

And time is closing the question the way it closed the education benefit. The mariners who were sixteen in 1945 are in their late nineties now; the roughly 1,500 living at the Gold Medal ceremony in 2022 are fewer every month. A retrospective equity payment enacted in the next Congress would reach a small and shrinking company of very old men, and nothing at all for the quarter-million who were promised, in 1944, that Congress would soon provide. The promise is on the record. So is the wait. The wait is the larger part of the record.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

The mariners left no battle cameras of their own — they left oral histories, the ships that survived, and the wartime newsreels that used them and forgot them. Four films: a mariner in his own words, the Liberty ship he sailed explained, the last of those ships still sailing, and the war as the newsreels showed it.

In his own words. John Gregory Becker, who served in the U.S. Maritime Service from 1943 to 1946 as a junior officer in the Mediterranean and Adriatic, gives his full Veterans History Project interview — the training, the voyages, and the mines. (Library of Congress Veterans History Project collection, via the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library archive.)

The ship they sailed. The Liberty ship was plain, slow, and built by the thousands around the engine America could actually get — the documented procurement story of the vessel that carried the war, and the men who crewed it. (Debacle Desk.)

The last one sailing. The SS John W. Brown — sole survivor of the 384 Liberty ships built at Bethlehem Steel's Fairfield yard in Baltimore — kept under steam by a volunteer crew, and the story of the men who sailed her kind. (WickleinGroup.)

As the newsreels showed it. Wartime newsreel and archival footage of the U.S. Merchant Marine in World War II — the convoys and cargoes as the home front was shown them, while the men in the films had no veteran status at all. (Archival footage, via PublicDomainFootage; the same reel is carried by the Hudson River Maritime Museum.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.