Missing Since 1918. Found At Last.
On September 26, 1918, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Tampa was torpedoed while sailing alone toward Wales and sank in under three minutes, killing all 131 people aboard — still the largest single American naval combat loss of life in World War I. For 107 years nobody knew where she lay. In 2
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On a dark, moonless night in September of 1918, a ship went down off the coast of Wales in under three minutes. There were a hundred and thirty-one people aboard. Not one survived. And for the next hundred and seven years, nobody on Earth could say where she was.
This past April, a group of British volunteers on their tenth dive trip finally found her.
Her name was Tampa. Launched in 1912 as the Miami, a revenue cutter, she spent four years stationed in Tampa, Florida, running hurricane patrols. Her crew became such fixtures at the city's Gasparilla festival that in 1915 they were named its top military marching unit. The city took them in, and in February of 1916 the ship was renamed in their honor.
Then the war came. Transferred to the Navy and based out of Gibraltar, she escorted merchant convoys through waters thick with submarines, helping protect more than four hundred ships.
On the twenty-sixth of September, 1918, she was traveling alone toward Wales, having separated from her convoy. At 8:45 that evening, sailors on other ships heard a loud explosion in the dark. They thought little of it. Only when they reached port did anyone realize the Tampa was missing.
The search that followed recovered a few pieces of wreckage and two bodies that could not be identified. That was all. A hundred and thirty-one people — Coast Guardsmen, American and British sailors, civilians — from Tampa, Key West, New York City, Denver, and as far away as Russia and Norway. It remains the largest single American naval combat loss of life in the First World War, and most Americans have never heard of it.
Here is the part I cannot stop thinking about. In 2023, a British technical diving team called the Gasperados contacted the U.S. Coast Guard's historians and said, essentially, we would like to go find your ship. They were volunteers. Nobody was paying them. The Coast Guard sent them everything it had — archival photographs of the deck fittings, the ship's wheel, the bell, the weaponry — and the divers went looking.
It took three years and ten separate trips. And more than three hundred feet down, about fifty miles off Newquay in Cornwall, they found her — matching what they saw to those hundred-year-old photographs.
Steve Mortimer, who led the team, said it as plainly as it can be said. Tampa matters enormously to the United States and to the relatives of everyone who died that day. Their final resting place is known at last.
The Purple Heart did not exist in 1918. In 1952 it was awarded retroactively to those killed in that war — thirty-four years after the Tampa went down. And now, a hundred and seven years on, a group of people who owed her nothing went and found her anyway.
Who is someone from your own family history that you wish you knew more about? Tell me in the comments. I read them.
I'll see you tomorrow with more good news.
Sources: news.uscg.mil · wusf.org
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