Musings of Hagbard Celine

The Theory; The Privately Funded Warships of the U. S. Navy: Blowing Holes in Public Goods Theory Earlier work on privateering by Sechrest (2003) has already demonstrated that, at least insofar as naval warfare is concerned, there need be no government monopoly on defense services. For some seven centuries, privateers--- private ships of war---constituted an effective, reliable, and highly profitable means of crippling the maritime trade of an enemy nation. So effective were privateers’ techniques that they appear to have been emulated during both world wars by the commerce raiders---both surface ships and submarines---that the Germans sent to sea. Skeptics might grant the overwhelming evidence on the effectiveness of privateers, but still question their overall value on two grounds. First, one might insist that privateers would be of little worth unless the enemy depended to a significant extent on the transportation of goods by sea. This follows from the fact that the profitability of privateering was principally derived from selling the enemy ships and cargoes which the privateers captured. Second, one might claim that the deciding factor in a naval war is always the defeat of the enemy’s warships in formal battle, not the destruction or capture of commercial ships. Privateers were seldom designed to engage in combat with naval vessels. They were usually small, fast, highly maneuverable craft which could readily capture merchant ships, but which were often too lightly armed with cannon to engage powerful ships of war. Thus one could conclude that privateering does not obviate the need for a public navy.. 

The Reality: Merchant marine shares stories from the sea On LaCour’s first voyage in the South Pacific at Guadalcanal, his ship failed to stop in time and rammed into a Navy supply ship in port. On another occasion, his ship failed to stop in a timely manner and almost ran into a mountain. The crew managed to patch up their ship and made it back to the shipyard in Seattle, Wash. LaCour said with a grin that one civilian looked at the condition of the ship upon arrival to Washington and asked him if ‘they sank any ships.’ He made his way back home to Beaumont and joined up with a ship out of Houston. The ship caught up with 150 other ships on a convoy in the Atlantic. He said he’ll never forget how they all came to a dead stop for two hours while four Canadian corvettes dropped depth charges. LaCour and his shipmates could see debris surface where the depth charges were released. Toward the end of his maritime career, he was on a ship in which the pipes were so rusted that 6 inches of aviation fuel poured into his compartment while he and his other comrades used plastic buckets to pick up the fuel and pour it back into the tank. LaCour said his branch of service had the highest casualty rate in the war. In fact, according to statistics from the Apostleship of the Sea of the United States of America, one in 26 mariners was killed in action, 1,500 ships sunk, 9,300 mariners were killed and 12,000 wounded. In addition, 243 were killed in action prior to Pearl Harbor and were among the first prisoners of war. They were also among the last to return, with 54 ships damaged by mines after V-E and V-J Day.