79 years on, St. Lawrence and Lawn remember the 204 lost from the wrecks of the Truxtun and Pollux

This week the residents of St. Lawrence and Lawn, like they have done for decades, will pause in their daily routine and pay their respects to the 204 U.S.navy officers and men who lost their lives 79 years ago.

They were the crews of the destroyer USS Truxtunand the supply ship USS Pollux,whichrammed into the cliffs of the Burin Peninsuladuring a blinding snowstorm.

The two ships were part of a convoy of vessels bringing men and supplies to the American base at Argentia. Their route was to sail along the southwest coast of Newfoundland then skirt the tip of the Burin Peninsula and head for Argentia.

A blinding snowstorm was at its height during the early morning of Feb.18, 1942, when the Truxtun and Pollux, along with another destroyer, the Wilkes, went astray from the other ships in the convoy.

At 5 a.m. the Pollux struck Lawn Point and 30 minutes later the Truxtun rammed into the 400-feet high cliffs of Chamber Cove, 5 kilometres from St. Lawrence.

The captain of the Truxtun, thinking the cliffs were an iceberg, tried to manoeuvre the ship away from the pinnacle, only to have the destroyer catch on a reef about 200 feet from land.

Meanwhile, the Wilkes had struck between the Truxtun and Pollux, but its watertight compartments kept it afloat until it freeditself.

Commotion at the mine

On that fateful day, Rennie Slaney was in charge of a crew of miners working below ground at Iron Springs Mine, four kilometres from St. Lawrence. Around 9:15 a.m. he heard the watchman shout from the top of the shaft.

When I interviewed Rennie in 1965 he told me that shouting at the mine was uncommon, unless there had been an accident, so without wasting any time he was up and out of the mine.

He was told that minutes before, a man who was wet and covered with oilhad arrived at the mine, explaining that his ship and run aground andpleading for help. Four miners who were on the surfacefollowed the stranger back towardthe shore.It had been snowing for hours so Rennie Slaney and Rubert Turpin had no problem following the tracks of the others.

They had only been gonea few minutes when they met two American sailors helping another, who Slaney said wasvery weak.From the three of themthey pieced together the story of the Truxtun runningaground on a reef in Chamber Cove about a mile away.

The sailors told them after being thrown into the Atlantic, they'd managed to climb intoa life-raft and get to shore, dragging themselves to safety.

Close behind was a lone sailor, "trudging through the crusty snow in his bare feet, wearing only dungarees and a rayon windbreaker," Slaney later wrote.

"Turpin, the mechanic, took off his socks and we had to force the socks on the American as he was refusing to take them."

Slaney quickly began organizing rescue operations; he told the mechanic to accompany the sailor back to the mine and also instructed him to close down the mine and inform management and the town. He also instructed him to send all of the men out to Chamber Cove with ropes, wire stretcher and other equipment.

When Slaney reached the top of the cliff, the Truxtun was still intact but aground on a reef just off Chamber Point. At that moment there were three life-rafts in the water between the vessel and the cove.The four miners ahead of him had descended a crack in the north part of the cove and succeeded in lighting a fire and helping a few sailors who had reached shore.

While the men onshore watched, the heavy seas tumbled the rubber boats over and over but most of the sailors managed to hang on. More men managed to get down over the ice-covered cliffs with ropes and help drag the sailors to safety.

By this time dozens of other miners had arrived and fishermen shacks, just a few hundred yards away, were made ready for treating the survivors.

The wind soon shifted to easterly, blowing right in Chamber Cove, and the waters began to twist and heave even more.

Slaney decided to return to the Iron Springs mine around 10:30 a.m. but before he left the cliff the Truxtun broke in two with the aftsection sinking almost immediately. The other section stayed afloat.

"At that moment to see a hundred men clinging to that greasy overturned hull, with no life line and the seas breaking over them, was the most awful spectacle of the day," wrote Slaney.

On his way back to the mine Slaney met all the miners carrying ropes and other equipment.When he reached the mess hall at Iron Springs, blankets, socks and food were already beginning to arrive there. Clothing had been collected and the building had been turned into a first aid station, already manned by the women and girls of St. Lawrence. Horses and sleds were arriving and the men from the other two mine sites and mill were on their way to the wreck.

By this time the water in Chamber Cove was covered with bunker oil, and the men trying to swim towardshore were blinded by it.Some sailors were thrown up 50 feet by the now mountainous seas and smashed against the cliffs, while others, blinded by oil, were swept out around the point and into the raging Atlantic.

And so much as humanly possible, rescue operations continued. Oil-covered survivors and the bodies of dead sailorswere hauled up over the icy sleet-covered cliffs.

All attempts to get a line to the ship and from the ship to shore failed because of the gale-force winds and heavy seas. In mid-afternoon a U.S. rescue plane from Argentia tried to shoot a line across the Truxtun but that was also unsuccessful.

Then at 2:30 in the afternoon a dory was brought from St. Lawrence by horse and sled and lowered down over a 200-foot cliff. There were still four sailors clinging to what was left of the Truxtun.

Dangerous trip by dory

Adam Mullins, who was then 46, asked for two volunteers to go with him in the dory to try to get the four remaining sailors off the overturned hull.

Without a moment's hesitation Charles Pike of St. Lawrence and David Edwards of Lawn volunteered to go.

"There was a foot of bunker oil in the water, so much that you could hardly lift your paddle oar," said Mullins.

At that time the winds were estimated to be reaching more than a whistling 100 km/hand it was drifting snow. For minutes at a time, the people on shore couldn't see the men, or the dory.

Mullins couldn't understand how their boat didn't sink because for a solid hour the seas smashed over them.

Finally they reached the Truxtun and threw a line aboard. At that moment the four American sailors were swept overboard. One man grabbed the lifeline but the other two disappeared from sight. By a miracle the fourth sailor fell right into the dory.

The dory finally made it back to shore with the three Newfoundlanders still intact, although one of them had been swept into the sea and had to be hauled back on board. The sailor who had grabbed the lifeline had died but the young man who fell into the dory survived.

During this heroic feat of challenging the Atlantic in an open dory, neither Adam Mullins, David Edwards nor Charles Pike wore life-jackets.

From 3 p.m. until dark, the bodies of dead seamen were being hauled ashore.

The Iron Springs mess hallwas a busy place. Some of the survivors were in bad shape, suffering from frostbite and covered with crude oil. As soon as they were sufficiently revived to stand the trip they were transported in trucks to homes in St. Lawrence, where they were taken care of until the US naval authorities could transport them to Argentia.

While the Truxtun rescue was going on, oil slicks and wreckage were seenfloating down from the western side Chamber Cove. Lionel Saint on his horse and sled went to investigate; around 5 p.m. he returned with four sailors and the news of the Pollux ashore two miles away at Lawn Point.

The large supply ship wasn't too far off shore and was parallel with the shore line.Just after it struck, 50 crew members jumped into the raging sea trying to swim to a nearby ledge below a towering cliff; only one made it.

The rest of the sailors did make it to safety onto the ledge and nearby gulches after a lifeline was made fast from the grounded vessel to the rocks onshore; but their ordeal was far from over; wet, and many covered in crude oil in freezing temperatures, they were faced with the formidable task of climbing up a near perpendicular cliff face.

It took eight men from Lawn, with five horses and slides, several hours to trek the more than fifteen miles through the most rugged terrain and weather conditions to make it to Lawn Point.

One of the men, Joseph Manning, described the scene when they finally arrived.

"Everything was in a sheet of glitter and you had to watch your step. I am sure that the cliff was 120 feet or more, not counting the bank."

When a party of U.S. naval men and men from St. Lawrence reached the Pollux around 8 p.m. they found that the men from Lawn had rigged up a breeches buoy to pull the sailors up the near perpendicular cliff to safety.

The 187 men who survived the sinking of the two ships owed their lives to the heroic rescue operations carried out by the entire population of the mining town of St. Lawrence and to the people of Lawn, especially the determined band of eight men from that community who successfully hauled137 of them up a steep cliff from the rocky, icy perch of Little Lawn Point that the sailors managed to get to when they abandoned ship.

In 1953 the United States Memorial Hospital was passed over to the Newfoundland and Labrador government. This facility was built and furnished by the United States and given to the people of Lawn and St. Lawrence in appreciation of the part they played in rescuing the survivors of the Truxtun and Pollux.

Rennie Slaney died in 1969 at the age of 62, four years after my interview with him and Adam Mullins, who died in 1980 at the age of 84.

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