Gabe: A Tribute to the U.S. Merchant Mariner Veterans of World War II

By Johnathan Thayer

The American Merchant Marine Veterans Association (AMMV) has worked on behalf of merchant mariner veterans of World War II since its founding in 1984. Representing a “Voice for the American Merchant Mariner” and advocating for just compensation and recognition for merchant mariner veterans of WWII and other wars, the the New York and New Jersey chapters of the AMMV have hosted countless meetings and celebrations for decades. Sadly, they have also lent their services to memorial remembrances for chapter members who have passed away. It is with a heavy heart that the New York City-based Edwin J. O’Hara chapter recently did so recently for Gabriel “Gabe” Frank, who passed away on January 29th.

Militarily, World War II was ultimately a contest of industrial production, and the merchant marine provided the crucial link between “factories for democracy” back home and warfronts overseas. The U.S. Merchant Marine Act of 1936 established mariner training stations at Kings Point, Fort Schuyler, and Sheepshead Bay in New York City, as well as a radio operator training station at Hoffman Island, making Gotham an epicenter of maritime preparedness leading up to war. The merchant marine, a civilian maritime fleet, made up of cargo-carrying vessels and mariners, “carried the sinews of war,” delivering 15 million tons of cargo to the United Kingdom and continental Europe, 13 million tons to the Pacific, 8 million tons to the Mediterranean, and 5 million tons to the Soviet Union by the end of 1944, all to support Allied operations. U.S. merchant ships also carried 7,129,906 army personnel and 141,537 civilians, ultimately returning 4,060,883 soldiers and 169,626 civilians to the U.S at the war’s end.[1]

The merchant marine also had a higher casualty rate than any branch of the armed forces during the war. Because of their essential role in supplying the Allied front abroad, they became primary targets for German and Japanese attacks by air, and from submarine torpedoes. In total 8,300 civilian mariners were killed, with some 12,000 wounded (1,100 of whom died from their wounds). Another 663 were taken prisoner, 66 of whom perished in POW camps. By the end of the war, one in twenty-six merchant mariners had died – meaning that you were more likely to die as a merchant mariner than if you had been drafted into the Army, Navy, or the Marine Corps. And yet, the federal government excluded merchant mariners from G.I. Bill benefits, eventually granting them nominal veteran status without financial compensation in 1988, some forty years after their service.

In 1944 a sixteen-year old orphaned Gabriel (Gabe) Frank heard a radio spot call for young men to join the merchant marine. He gathered what few possessions he had from his shelter home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and set out for the Sheepshead Bay Maritime Service Training Station in Brooklyn a few months after his seventeenth birthday. His description of the training makes it clear that these young men, while civilians, were joining the front lines:

I got there penniless, and I went to boot camp… marching, drills, obstacle course. We had to jump naked into a pool, climb over a ladder, drop in the water under a lifeboat in case we were attacked. We had machine guns, aircraft practice with machine guns, simulated guns. We were training for wartime, of course.

A scene cut from the final version of The Sea is My Brother, a short-form documentary directed by Avishai Mekonen, opens with a close-up of a large bronze plaque at the Sheepshead Bay station, with three columns of names, perhaps 100 deep of young men who died at sea. The camera then cuts to Gabe, then 87-years-old, hunched over and clinging to a walker. He has on his standard wardrobe: a polo shirt with stray collar, thick tie loose around his neck, and a navy blue blazer that is sagging with the weight of dozens of pins, mostly flags from all of the countries he sailed to while he was a merchant seaman. Dense rings of jangling bracelets cover his wrists. His hat reads “KOREA VETERAN,” a testament to his career at sea after WWII. He sharply addresses two passersby, young students at Kingsborough Community College, the City University of New York outpost that took over the campus where the Sheepshead Bay Maritime Service Training Station operated from 1943 to 1954. “Do you know what that means?” he asks, gesturing at the plaque. The students are bewildered. “I was here in World War II,” he goes on, undeterred. “These guys went on the ships, based – trained here. Never came home.” He reads part of the inscription to the students (“They sailed on to eternity!”), then describes his training. He ignores the students’ silence and starts to list the places he’s visited as a seaman (Norway, India, Africa, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Vietnam…). After learning that one of the students is from Puerto Rico, Gabe breaks into a smile and shifts into Spanish, listing Latin American ports (San Juan, Antigua, Colombia, Panama, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador…) He wishes the students luck (“Buena suerte!”), and smiles as he waves goodbye. One of the students salutes him.

Gabe gestures towards a plaque at Kingsborough Community College, formerly the Sheepshead Bay Maritime Training Station, honoring WWII mariners who died at sea during the war. Image by Avishai Mekonen.

The students having gone. “You see, Avish, they don’t know what that means!” “You told them. Now they know,” Avishai offers. But Gabe is angry now. “These guys, you know where they’re at now? They’re at the bottom of the ocean! They should tell them that in the classroom! They were at the bottom of the ocean! They were burned, swallowed oil, the ships exploded!” The scene ends with Gabe, in a hunch over his walker, shuffling away.

Gabe was part of a group of veteran mariners of WWII who persistently lobbied Congress for just compensation for survivors and recognition for victims of the war. Since 2008, multiple bills have been introduced that would provide compensatory payments to WWII veteran merchant mariners who were denied benefits between 1945 and 1988. H.R. 563: Honoring Our WWII Merchant Mariners Act of 2015, introduced by Rep. Janice Hahn (D-CA), proposed to establish a Merchant Mariner Equity Compensation Fund from which the Secretary of Veterans Affairs would make a single payment of $25,000. The bill mobilized the AMMV, who sent representatives (including Gabe) from chapters nationwide, aided by canes and walkers, on a “Storm the Hill” campaign, with marathon meetings in the halls of Congress in June 2016.[2] Despite these actions, the bill was immediately referred to the Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs where it was eventually scuttled.

Rep. Al Green (D-TX) introduced similar versions of Hahn’s bill in 2017 and 2019, and Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) introduced the Merchant Mariners of World War II Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2020 (H.R.5671), which passed Congress on March 3, 2020. Garamendi’s Act, co-sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans, will award a Congressional Gold Medal of Honor to merchant mariners who sailed during World War II—a bittersweet victory for advocates, many of whom did not live long enough to receive this hard-earned recognition.

Several years ago, Gabe took ill, walked out of his Upper West Side apartment, hailed a cab, and checked himself into a hospital. He had suffered a series of strokes, and lost feeling and movement on the right side of his body. Despite his condition, he managed to call me the following day, having memorized my phone number. (For years, he would call religiously, at all hours; just to check in, ask about my life, update me on the status of stagnant legislation, and air frustrations. Our conversations would always end with him asking about my family and with a promise to speak soon).

Twitter timeline referencing user’s encounter with Gabe.

After several weeks, he was transferred to a rehabilitation center. Shortly thereafter, I came across a surreptitious retweet from the AAMV account that let me know that he was officially on the mend. A Twitter user had apparently been walking in the park across from the rehab facility when he stumbled upon an impromptu video shoot in progress:

It was Gabe; survivor of sixteen years as an orphan on the Lower East Side, months at sea during World War II, a career of hard labor on ships and on land, and a series of strokes that took away his mobility and slurred his speech. But he was not finished yet. There was more story he wanted to tell, and people there to listen.

Gabe grants an interview to an unidentified film crew outside his rehab facility. Image: Twitter

Gabriel Frank died on January 29th, 2020. He was buried the next day at Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, NY, a town on the border of Queens and Long Island. He was a scrappy kid from the Lower East Side, a sailor in times of war and peace, an unstoppable advocate for merchant mariners, and my friend since the moment we met.

Thanks to the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and New Jersey’s support of the American Merchant Marine Oral History Project, his voice lives on.

You can listen to Gabe’s oral history interview, conducted in 2010, here.
And, you can watch The Sea is My Brother and more from filmmaker Avishai Mekonen here.

Johnathan Thayer, PhD, MLS is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College, CUNY, where he teaches courses in archival studies, public history, and digital history. He is working on a book tentatively titled Sailors Ashore: Citizenship, Subversion, and Surveillance that traces intersections of urban and maritime histories from the 19th century through the present. Thayer is also Senior Archivist at the Seamen’s Church Institute of New York and New Jersey and Director of the American Merchant Marine Oral History Project.

[1] Maritime Executive, “WWII Merchant Marine Veterans ‘Storm the Hill’,” June 23, 2015, from http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/wwii-merchant-marine-veterans-storm-the-hill, accessed May 7, 2017.

[2] Alex Roland, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Alexander Keyssar, The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reenvisoned, 1600-2000, (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.: 2008), 307 and 313.