The Last Liberty: The Biography of the Ss Jeremiah O'Brien

The Last Liberty; The Biography of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien

Hardcover. Zustand: Very good. Third Printing [stated]. [12], v, [1]. 490, [4] pages. Illustrations. Appendices A-L. Bibliography. Index. Cover is slightly scuffed. The SS Jeremiah O'Brien occupies a unique historical berth. She is the last active ship in the world that took part in the greatest sea assault in history--the invasion of Northern France and the liberation of Europe that began on D-Day, June 6, 19444. Of the more than 5,000 ships that supported that battle, only the Jeremiah remains. Capt. Jaffee is a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York. Author of eight maritime books, he was chief officer of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien on her epic return voyage to Normandy in 1994 for the 50th Anniversary of D-Day. SS Jeremiah O'Brien is a Liberty ship built during World War II and named after the American Revolutionary War ship captain Jeremiah O'Brien (1744-1818). Now based in San Francisco, she is a rare survivor of the 6,939-ship armada that stormed Normandy on D-Day, 1944. The SS Jeremiah O'Brien is a class EC2-S-CI ship, built in just 56 days at the New England Shipbuilding Corporation in South Portland, Maine and launched on 19 June 1943. Deployed in the European Theater of Operations, she made four round-trip convoy crossings of the Atlantic and was part of the Operation Neptune invasion fleet armada on D-Day. Following this she was sent to the Pacific Theater of Operations and saw 16 months of service in both the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean calling at ports in Chile, Peru, New Guinea, the Philippines, India, China, and Australia. The end of the war caused most of the Liberty ships to be removed from service in 1946 and many were subsequently sold to foreign and domestic buyers. Others were retained by the U.S. Maritime Commission for potential reactivation in the event of future military conflicts. Jeremiah O'Brien was mothballed and remained in the National Defense Reserve Fleet in Suisun Bay for 33 years. In the 1970s, however, the idea of preserving an unaltered Liberty Ship began to be developed and, under the sponsorship of Rear Admiral Thomas J. Patterson, USMS (then the Western Regional Director of the U.S. Maritime Administration), the ship was put aside for preservation instead of being sold for scrap. In a 1994 interview printed by the Vintage Preservation magazine Old Glory, Patterson claimed the ship was steamed to her anchorage in the mothball fleet (unlike the many that were secured as unserviceable and towed into storage), and frequently placed at the back of the list for disposal which undoubtedly contributed to her survival. An all-volunteer group, the National Liberty Ship Memorial (NLSM), acquired Jeremiah O'Brien in 1979 for restoration. In 1994 the Jeremiah O'Brien steamed through the Golden Gate bound for France. She went down the West Coast, through the Panama Canal, and crossed the Atlantic for the first time since World War II. Stopping first in London, England where she was berthed adjacent to HMS Belfast before she continued on to Normandy, where Jeremiah O'Brien and her crew (a volunteer crew of veteran World War II-era sailors and a few cadets from the California Maritime Academy) participated in the 50th Anniversary of Operation Overlord, the allied invasion of Western Europe. She was the only large ship from the original Normandy flotilla to return for the event. Artikel-Nr. 79374

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