jack iddon/The standard-Times, file Among the cannons at Fort Phoenix are these large Civil War-era pieces. The town and the fort have played key military roles since the Revolution.
By WILLIAM A. MONIZ
May 20, 2012 12:00 AM
Long before its 1812 incorporation, and for the 200 years since, Fairhaven has generously given of its men and women to America’s wars.
In July of 1675, the territory known as Dartmouth, which included present day Fairhaven, New Bedford, and Acushnet, was attacked by Wampanoag warriors. Under the leadership of their Sachem, or leader, Metacomet, known to the English as King Phillip, the Native Americans destroyed all 30 homes in the settlement, killing William Palmer, Jacob and Susannah Mitchell and John Pope in the process.
The town would remain abandoned until King Phillip’s War ended with the signing of the Casco Bay, Maine treaty in April, 1678. The following June, Dartmouth would hold its first town meeting in three years.
Almost a century later, on April 21, 1775, only two days after “the shot heard round the world,” Dartmouth mustered three companies of militia to join the minutemen laying siege to the Redcoats in the town of Boston. Three weeks later, under the command of Captains Daniel Egery and Nathaniel Pope, the 40-ton sloop Success carrying 25 minutemen, set out from Fairhaven to recapture two Colonial merchantmen recently seized by the British Sloop of War HMS Falcon.
After shadowing the British prizes under light winds on the foggy night of May 13, the Success, with Pope at the helm, surprised one anchored sloop at sunrise, overwhelming the British watch before they could cut free from their mooring. Pope, one minuteman, and the ship’s drummer then sailed the recaptured vessel and its British prize crew off to anchor at Fairhaven.
Success, now under Egery’s command, soon spotted the second sloop raising sail off West Island and gave pursuit. Approaching within musket range, Egery ordered his sharpshooter to take aim on an officer in British livery. “The shot felled the officer, more shooting followed, and the Englishmen struck their colors.” (Logs of the Dead Pirates Society, R. S. Peffer, Sheridan House, 2000)
The action resulted in the recapture of both Yankee sloops and the detention of 15 British prisoners including HMS Falcon’s gunner and ship’s surgeon. The first naval battle of the Revolutionary War had ended in an American victory. The wounded British officer who had taken a buckshot pellet to the skull, survived. According to Peffer’s account, the officer was quoted as saying that his family had been called “a hard-headed lot.”
On June 18, 1812, only four months after Fairhaven’s incorporation, President James Madison would sign a declaration of war against Great Britain. According to “Old-Time Fairhaven”, by Charles A. Harris, “In 1812 [ Ft. Phoenix] was again made serviceable, in anticipation of war, being refurbished with a new barracks. During that war the garrison repulsed an attempt to land barges from the British Sloop of War, Nimrod.”
Records provided by Fairhaven Director of Veteran’s Services Jim Cochran show that 14 town men served in “Mr. Madison’s War,” six in the Army and eight in the Navy. At the war’s end in 1815, the Fairhaven contingent had recorded no casualties.
Some 50 years later, Fairhaven servicemen would not be so lucky. Of the town’s 274 soldiers and sailors fighting for the Union in the Civil War, 31 would die from various causes, including; 9 killed in action, 10 of disease, and 3 while imprisoned by the Confederacy.
William H. Bryant, who died at his Fort Street home in 1929 at the age of 80, was a Civil War survivor. Only 15 years old when he enlisted in 1864, he needed his mother’s written consent to join Company D of the 3rd Massachusetts Cavalry. Bryant served in the Red River Campaign in Louisiana, and later saw action with General William Tecumseh Sherman in the Shenandoah Valley.
Trooper Bryant’s service continued even after the surrender of the Confederacy. In May of 1865, as the country transitioned from the Civil War to the Indian Wars, the 3rd Massachusetts was shipped off to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Under General Patrick Connor, Bryant participated in the infamous Powder River Expedition into Wyoming aimed at punishing the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux for earlier raids on settlers.
Bryant was mustered out of the Army at Boston in September of 1865 and 15 years later the 1880 census listed his occupation as “sailor.” Bryant is buried in Riverside Cemetery.
In 1898, Fairhaven would provide 10 soldiers, 2 sailors and 1 marine, to help “Remember the Maine” in the Spanish American War. All would return home safely.
Twenty years later, World War I would be another story. Of the 328 Fairhaven boys sent “over there” in 1918, 10 would be killed in action and five would die of disease and other causes. In a typical pithy notice, the November 15, 1918 edition of the Fairhaven Star recorded the death of Joseph Perry’s stepson; “Joseph J. Perry of 146 Adams Street received a telegram on Wednesday announcing the death, Oct.8, from broncho pneumonia of Private A. E. Melanson of the 5th Machine Gun Co. Only three days before Mr. Perry received the bad news, Armistice Day had officially ended the war.”
Like William Bryant in the mid-19 Century, Fairhaven’s Luther Pierce would see service in two wars. Commissioned a second lieutenant after graduating the Army Air Corps flying school in Sacramento, Calif. in 1942, Pierce was assigned as a navigator on a B-17 Flying Fortress. During World War II, the 27 year-old Pierce would survive an astonishing 50 bombing missions over Germany.
In 1947, now Captain Pierce was recalled to active duty and in 1950 was back flying combat missions, this time in the skies over Korea. On Oct. 3 of that year Captain Pierce’s luck would run out when his B-26 Invader bomber went missing on a mission over Wonsan.
Captain Pierce was one of seven Fairhaven servicemen to die in the United Nations’ so-called “police action.” A total of 590 Fairhaven men and women served during the Korean Conflict.
The submarine USS Grayback, launched at Groton, Conn. in 1941, compiled an extraordinary record during her 10 separate World War II patrols. At 64,000 tons, the Grayback ranked 20th among all submarines in total tonnage sunk, and 24th in number of ships sunk with 14. The submarine and her crew received two unit commendations and eight battle stars for her extensive Pacific theater service.
Fairhaven’s Carleton Fielding enlisted in the U. S. Navy in February 1943. A three-sport star at Fairhaven High, Fielding, nicknamed “Swede,” was a tenacious two-way lineman in football. At commencement ceremonies, he was the recipient of the coveted Sparrow Cup as the school’s outstanding senior athlete.
After graduating from submarine school at New London, Conn., in the summer of 1943, the 21-year-old Fielding was assigned to the Grayback. The following Jan. 27, a notice in the Fairhaven Star announced, “The engagement of Miss Phyllis E. Jenney … of 726 Washington St. to Seaman Second Class Carleton F. Fielding”»” The brief paragraph ended matter of factly with, “Seaman Fielding is on submarine duty.”
The marriage would never take place. On Feb. 25, 1944, having expended all but two of her torpedoes in sinking three enemy ships and damaging two others, the Grayback was ordered back to base at Midway Island. She would never arrive.
Pieced together from captured Japanese records, the Navy believes it knows the fate of the Grayback. On Feb. 27, 1944, at about the position the Grayback would have been on her way back to base, a Japanese carrier-based aircraft spotted an American submarine running on the surface in the East China Sea. The plane attacked and reported that the submarine “exploded and sank immediately.”
On March 30, 1944, the Grayback was listed as missing and presumed sunk with all 80 of her crew. A full two years later, on May 8, 1946, the Navy Department reported that Carleton Fielding was officially presumed lost. In the 1941 Huttlestonian yearbook, a forever young “Swede” Fielding gazes out over his selected aphorism, “There is always safety in valor.”
Fairhaven’s “Greatest Generation” contributed 1,502 men and women to the Armed Forces during World War II, the most of any war. Including Carleton Fielding, 51 would not return.
In the mid-1950s another Asian war erupted in French Indo-China that, by the mid-1960s would lead to massive American involvement in Vietnam. Of a total of 823 Fairhaven men and women to serve during the Vietnam War, eight would die in service, including four killed in action.
Ironically, one of the town’s highest profile military deaths during the Vietnam Era would occur in Canada. In September 1966, former Fairhaven resident Lt. Commander Richard Oliver, a member of the Navy’s crack Blue Angels aerobatic team, was killed when his F-11 Tiger fighter crashed during a Toronto air show.
Oliver became a town celebrity in 1949 when he rescued a young boy from drowning in the Acushnet River. For his heroics, the 14 year-old Oliver was whisked to New York City where, as a guest of the Boys Clubs of America, he was treated to a Yankees’ baseball game and a private dinner with the team’s iconic star, Joe Dimaggio.
Interviewed a few weeks before his death, the 31 year-old Oliver said, “Vietnam is where I’d like to be next, the more I read about the air war there, the more I wish I were there with those boys helping out.”
In this, its Bicentennial year, the town’s contribution to the nation’s wars continues. According to Veteran’s Services Director Cochran, 182 service men and women have served in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. In 2006, Marine Lance Corporal and Fairhaven native Patrick Gallagher, was killed when the truck in which he was riding rolled over near Asad, Iraq.
The town has over a dozen monuments to its veterans ranging from Revolutionary War plaques at Fort Phoenix, to the Civil War memorial at Bridge Park, to the World War II, Lookout Tower at West Island. Cochran credits the town’s various veterans organizations for their help in maintaining these monuments.
“I couldn’t ask for Fairhaven to be more patriotic,” says Cochran, “veterans’ activities get great support from the town.”
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