Thank you for your inquiry. I join the earlier respondent to your message, J.P. Green, in noting your late husband’s brave World War II service in the U.S. Navy Armed Guard. You have just reason to be proud of him. He and his shipmates performed a vital service to our country during wartime at great personal and collective risk, unfortunately little known or understood at the time and even less known today.
J.P. Green kindly provided a good summary of the role of the U.S. Navy Armed Guard. For a more detailed explanation, see this page on the Armed Guard website: http://www.armed-guard.com/about-ag.html.
Please understand that the list of Armed Guard personnel found on the Armed Guard website (beginning at http://www.armed-guard.com/ag26.html) is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all Armed Guard sailors and officers. It is simply a membership list, now long outdated, of individuals who became members of the U.S.N. Armed Guard World War II Veterans’ Association in the decades distantly following the war. Some of those members voluntarily shared the names of the ship(s) in which they served and applicable dates. But the vast majority of former Armed Guard sailors were never aware of the existence of this organization or declined to join the organization if they knew of it.
I don’t know when the Armed Guard veterans’ association was formed but it was many decades after the end of the war. It was established by an Armed Guard veteran who made it his goal to track down as many Armed Guard sailors as he could find. But even at its greatest size, the Armed Guard veterans’ association comprised only a few thousand members, out of about 145,000 men who served in the Armed Guard during the war. So the reason your husband’s name is not found on the list on the Armed Guard website, and why J.P. Green’s father is not listed, and why thousands of other men are not listed is simple: they never knew there was a veterans association they could join.
The Armed Guard veterans’ association no longer exists. Its founder and longtime chairman died last year, and he had ceased operating the association even earlier. Arguably the only extensive remaining source of information easily available to the public about the U.S. Navy Armed Guard is the Armed Guard website, and I acknowledge that it is but a faint shadow of all the information that could have been included but is no longer available.
So far as I am aware, there is no comprehensive, online list of all Armed Guard sailors and officers. If such a list exists, it probably exists only deep in the paper records of the U.S. Navy. Those records are so old that the Navy itself no longer maintains them. Instead those records, existing only as vast amounts of paper, are likely held by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. And even so I doubt there is a single neat list but rather great numbers of lists, each a snapshot in time of the Naval Armed Guard service at various moments in its history.
I am saddened to know that Ponie Star Reese is no longer with us. Like so many others of the Armed Guard he has sailed over that far horizon. But please know that he was a brave man; they all were.
Sincerely,
Ron Carlson, Webmaster Armed Guard / Merchant Marine website www.armed-guard.com
Re: My husband What is an armed guard but he’s not on the list of men that I see on and other side
You are right to be proud of your late husband and of his service, and sincere condolences that he is no longer with us. The managers of this site can explain how to update the list you found. I’m impressed – never seen that list before on the website. But don’t be alarmed that Ponie Star’s name is not on that list. My grandfather served in the Armed Guard, and his name is not on there, either.
As for the Armed Guard itself, they served a less glamorous role than the flyboys and the leathernecks – but a role those guys depended upon for everything. People overlook the fact that every bullet, every gallon of fuel, every meal ration had to be shipped across the ocean in wartime. So to give those civilian cargo ships a fighting chance against submarines and shore-based aircraft, weapons were installed on board those ships (nicknamed “Liberty Ships”) and crewed by active duty Navy personnel: the Armed Guard. Your husband & his mates and the civilian crews of his ships all shared the same hazards on those voyages.
If you’d like to more about those voyages, Webmaster Ron Carlson posted a reply to me on this site last year:
“…go to this excellent website, http://www.convoyweb.org.uk/hague/index.html , and perform a Ship Search for the name of each ship. From this you will get a list of all the wartime convoys in which the ship sailed, the originating and destination port, the inclusive dates of the convoy from departure to arrival, and sometime a very little bit of information about the ship itself, such as the cargo carried or its position within the convoy. At the bottom of the results page for each ship there will be a phrase, "To continue the search for OTHER voyages of [name of ship], click here." When you click there you will get a complete listing of the ship's whereabouts during the war, in chronological order, including instances in which the ship sailed independently, i.e., not in convoy and without warship escort. That list is even more useful than the list by convoys.”
