USS Mason (DE-529)

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Sailors of the Mason beside her bow at Boston, 20 March 1944, the day she was commissioned. U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons.

A destroyer escort, commissioned at the Boston Navy Yard on March 20, 1944, with a crew of about two hundred and four men — roughly a hundred and sixty of them Black, at a time when the United States Navy would let Black sailors cook and serve and almost nothing else. The Mason was an experiment, and the men aboard her knew exactly what that meant. They understood that if the ship performed badly, the Navy would have its answer, and if the ship performed well, it might not change anything at all. They went to sea anyway. October 1944. Convoy NY-119, bound from New York to England, dragging car floats and oil barges — slow, low, awkward tows that could not run from weather. The convoy sailed into a North Atlantic storm that went on for days. Ships broke up. Tows parted. Men died. The Mason's deck cracked. A seam opened across the main deck, which on a ship that size is the beginning of the end of the ship. Her crew welded it shut in the middle of the storm. Then, still leaking, still working, the Mason brought her section of the convoy into Falmouth — and turned around and went back out into the same storm to find the rest of it, and brought them in too. The officer commanding the escort group recommended the crew of the Mason for a letter of commendation. It was not awarded. Fifty years later, in 1994, the surviving crew was formally commended. Most of them were gone by then. The ones who were left stood there and accepted it. The Mason was decommissioned on October 12, 1945, and scrapped. What she left behind is a record that could not be argued with, held by men who should never have had to prove it. If your father or grandfather served aboard her, or aboard any of the ships of Convoy NY-119, this page is here for his name. Source: Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, Naval History and Heritage Command, United States Navy. Public domain.