99 Fun Facts About Coast Guard

Which Founding Father persuaded Congress in 1790 to fund the ten cutters that grew into the Coast Guard?

Alexander Hamilton asked for ten armed cutters to make sure ships paid the import duties that funded the young government.

In 2022 the Coast Guard's Admiral Linda Fagan became the first woman to do what?

Lead a US armed service: Fagan took over as commandant in June 2022 and held the post until the incoming Trump administration removed her in January 2025.

The modern Coast Guard was created on 28 January 1915 by merging the revenue cutters with which agency?

The Life-Saving Service ordered its beach crews to keep trying until a rescue was proved impossible, which is where the surfmen's saying came from: 'You have to go out, but you don't have to come back.'

What is the Coast Guard's Latin motto?

Semper Paratus means 'Always Ready'; nobody knows exactly how the service came to choose it, but in the 1920s one of its own captains set the phrase to music as the Coast Guard's marching song.

Which federal department has the Coast Guard operated under in peacetime since 2003?

Homeland Security took in the Coast Guard when the department opened in 2003 after the September 11 attacks, leaving it the only armed service outside the Defense Department.

Which cabinet department was the Coast Guard's peacetime home for its first 177 years, until 1967?

Department of the Treasury: the first cutters existed to make ships pay customs duties, so the service answered to the department that collected the money.

As of 2025, which is the only US armed service with fewer members than the Coast Guard?

The Space Force, created in 2019, has far fewer uniformed members than the Coast Guard's 40,000 or so on active duty; until then the Coast Guard had been the smallest armed service.

Douglas Munro, the Coast Guard's only Medal of Honor recipient, died shielding Marines in which 1942 campaign?

Guadalcanal: Munro led the landing craft that pulled Chesty Puller's cut-off Marines off the beach, and a shipmate said his dying words were 'Did they get off?'

Douglas Munro, the Coast Guard's only Medal of Honor recipient, grew up in Washington state but was born in which country?

Canada: he was born in Vancouver to an American father, and after he was killed his mother Edith joined the Coast Guard herself and rose to lieutenant.

The Coast Guard training ship Eagle was originally built in 1936 for which navy?

Germany's navy trained cadets aboard her as the Horst Wessel; taken as a war prize, she was sailed to America in 1946 by a Coast Guard crew helped by her German sailors.

Sinbad, the mascot who sailed on the cutter Campbell through World War II, was what kind of animal?

A dog: the crew enlisted the mixed-breed puppy with his own paperwork and bunk, and he became famous enough for Life magazine stories and a published biography.

In which Connecticut city is the United States Coast Guard Academy?

New London: the academy began afloat, as a class of cadets aboard a schooner, moved to the city's Fort Trumbull in 1910, and in 1932 to its present campus up the river.

What sets Coast Guard Academy admission apart from the other US service academies?

It requires no congressional nomination: every place is won through a nationwide competition, so no senator or representative has to put a cadet's name forward.

The Coast Guard's only recruit training centre, its boot camp, is in which New Jersey town?

Cape May has trained every enlisted recruit since 1982, when the service stopped running a second boot camp on the West Coast at Alameda, California.

The Coast Guard's diagonal 'racing stripe' came from the firm of which designer, who also restyled Air Force One?

Raymond Loewy's firm proposed the slash to give the Coast Guard a look of its own, because the public it served kept failing to recognise its cutters and aircraft.

Which president, delighted with his new Air Force One livery, suggested the Coast Guard as the next agency to restyle?

John F. Kennedy made the suggestion to the jet's designer; the stripe that resulted, tilted at 64 degrees, was ordered onto every cutter and aircraft in 1967.

Coast Guard aviator Elmer Stone co-piloted the Navy seaplane NC-4, which in 1919 made the first flight across what?

The Atlantic Ocean: the NC-4 crossed in stages by way of the Azores in May 1919, weeks before Alcock and Brown made the first nonstop crossing that June.

Which Hollywood costume designer was hired in the 1970s to design the Coast Guard's uniform for women?

Edith Head, winner of eight Oscars for films such as The Sting, was brought in as the number of women in the service grew after they joined the regular Coast Guard in 1973.

Which 2016 Disney film starring Chris Pine dramatises the Coast Guard's 1952 rescue of the tanker Pendleton's crew?

The Finest Hours follows coxswain Bernie Webber, who took three men out in a small lifeboat after a storm snapped the tanker in two and trapped more than 30 sailors in its sinking stern.

In 1952 four Coast Guardsmen in a small lifeboat saved 32 tanker crewmen off which cape?

Cape Cod: coxswain Bernard Webber took the CG 36500 out from Chatham in a winter storm and squeezed aboard 32 of the 33 men on the tanker's stern, earning all four of the crew the Coast Guard's top rescue medal.

The International Ice Patrol, founded after the Titanic sank, tracks icebergs on the Grand Banks off which Canadian island?

Newfoundland: the Titanic struck its iceberg just south of the Grand Banks, and Coast Guard crews still track the bergs that drift into those shipping lanes.

Which Coast Guard arm was created in 1939 as the 'Reserve' and renamed two years later?

The Auxiliary: in 1941 Congress gave the Reserve name to a new military branch of the service, and the civilian volunteers who had carried it became the Auxiliary.

Which helicopter specialists did the Coast Guard introduce after 31 sailors died when the Marine Electric sank in 1983?

Rescue swimmers: that night a Navy helicopter had to bring a swimmer to reach men in the freezing sea, and an inquiry found the Coast Guard alone could not put anyone in the water from the air.

Which 2006 film starred Kevin Costner as a Coast Guard instructor and Ashton Kutcher as his trainee?

The Guardian was filmed partly at the Coast Guard's own air station in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, dressed with fake snow to pass for a far-northern base, with off-duty Coast Guard members as extras.

The Coast Guard icebreaker Healy became in 2015 the first unaccompanied US surface vessel to reach where?

The North Pole: Healy made the trip unescorted, arriving on 5 September 2015 with scientists who took thousands of water and ice samples; on her first visit she had sailed in company with another icebreaker.

The icebreaker Polar Star breaks a channel each year to resupply which Antarctic base?

McMurdo Station gets its year's food and fuel by freighter through the channel she cuts each summer; to open it Polar Star can back up and ram through ice 21 feet thick.

The Coast Guard's MH-65 Dolphin helicopter is a variant of an aircraft from which country?

France: the Dolphin is Aerospatiale's Dauphin with its name translated, though the Coast Guard's were assembled in Texas with American engines and avionics.

The Coast Guard's MH-60 rescue helicopter belongs to the same Sikorsky family as which Army helicopter?

The Black Hawk: the Coast Guard's Jayhawk descends from the Army machine by way of the Navy's Seahawk, and in 1990 it began taking over from the ageing HH-3F Pelican.

A Coast Guard vessel 65 feet or longer is a cutter; what is anything shorter officially called?

A boat: a cutter must also have a crew living aboard; the word was borrowed from a small single-masted English sailing vessel and stuck to the service's larger ships whatever their type.

The Coast Guard's Legend-class National Security Cutters were built at Pascagoula, in which Gulf Coast state?

Mississippi: the Ingalls yard at Pascagoula, which also builds Navy destroyers, turned out the Legend class to replace the service's twelve ageing high-endurance cutters.

After which hurricane did Coast Guard crews rescue or evacuate more than 33,000 people, six times their total in an average year?

Katrina: of some 60,000 people who needed rescuing from rooftops and flooded homes in 2005, Coast Guard crews drawn from every district saved more than half.

What nickname stuck to the volunteer yachts that watched for U-boats for the Coast Guard in World War II?

The Hooligan's Navy: its volunteers included Ernest Hemingway, who patrolled the Florida Straits aboard his Pilar, and Humphrey Bogart, who took out a yacht of his own.

What was the D-Day flotilla of 60 wooden 83-foot Coast Guard rescue cutters nicknamed?

They pulled 400 Allied airmen and sailors from the Channel on 6 June 1944.

Which lighthouse, first lit in 1716, kept a keeper until 2023?

Boston Light was the last American lighthouse to be automated, in 1998, yet kept a keeper anyway; Sally Snowman, the first woman in the job, retired in 2023 as the country's last official keeper.

What was the mission of Operation Market Time, in which Coast Guard cutters served under the Navy in Vietnam?

Intercepting enemy supply boats: 82-foot cutters joined the Navy's coastal picket line in 1965, and a year later the Point Grey drove a trawler loaded with arms for the Viet Cong aground.

Ida Lewis, America's most famous woman lighthouse keeper, was credited with saving 18 lives in the harbour of which Rhode Island city?

Newport: Lewis took over Lime Rock light after her father's stroke, and in 1881 won the government's gold medal for lifesaving after hauling two soldiers out of the harbour ice.

The revenue cutter Bear, the Coast Guard's most famous ship, was best known for patrols where?

The Arctic off Alaska: under 'Hell Roaring Mike' Healy the Bear ferried reindeer over from Siberia in the 1890s so that hungry Alaskan villages could raise herds of their own.

A Coast Guard cutter docked as a museum in Maryland is the last floating warship from which battle?

Pearl Harbor: berthed at nearby Honolulu that morning, the cutter Taney manned her guns and opened fire on the attacking planes.

Which Michigan town, home of the Coast Guard Festival, was named 'Coast Guard City, USA' by Congress in 1998?

Grand Haven was home port to the cutter Escanaba, lost off Greenland in 1943 with all but two of her crew; the festival each August still holds a memorial service for her.

The Coast Guard's only shipyard, founded in 1899, sits on Curtis Bay on the edge of which city?

Baltimore: the Coast Guard Academy spent its first decade ashore at the yard before moving north, and the yard has built and repaired the service's cutters and lifeboats ever since.

In 1980 helicopters hoisted hundreds of passengers from lifeboats after the cruise ship Prinsendam caught fire in which waters?

The Gulf of Alaska: with the ship ablaze far off Yakutat, a loaded supertanker steamed for hours to reach the lifeboats and took survivors aboard, and nobody died.

From which Cuban harbour did the 1980 flotilla bring about 125,000 Cubans to Florida?

Mariel: Fidel Castro opened the port to anyone who wanted to leave, and for six months the Coast Guard, with hundreds of reservists called up, shepherded overloaded boats across the Florida Straits.

Unlike its American counterpart, the Canadian Coast Guard, formed in 1962, is what kind of organisation?

A civilian, unarmed agency: its crews have no military or police powers, and it kept that civilian status even after Ottawa moved it into the Department of National Defence in 2025.

HM Coastguard was founded in Britain in 1822 with what primary objective?

Preventing smuggling was the job when the new force was placed under the Board of Customs; today it coordinates Britain's sea rescues while the volunteer RNLI crews the lifeboats.

Which country's coast guard began in 1948 as the Maritime Safety Agency, built from the remains of its disbanded navy?

Japan: American occupation authorities had the agency set up on the model of the US Coast Guard, and it took its present English name only in 2000.

The Coast Guard ensign of 1799 has 16 stripes, one for each what?

American state: there were 16 in the Union in 1799, and cutters needed a flag of their own to show their authority when ordering a merchant ship to stop.

Which golf legend served three years in the Coast Guard before turning professional?

Arnold Palmer quit college to enlist, came back in 1954, and within months had won the US Amateur and turned professional.

Myrtle Hazard, the first woman to enlist in the Coast Guard, served in World War I as what?

A radio operator: Hazard enlisted in January 1918 with the rating of electrician, and newspapers of the day wrote her up as the only woman electrician in the Coast Guard.

Which bestselling author spent 20 years in the Coast Guard, rising from mess attendant to its first chief journalist?

Alex Haley taught himself to write to fight the boredom of long wartime voyages, and left the service in 1959, 17 years before Roots made him famous.

The Coast Guard cutter Itasca waited off Howland Island in 1937 for which aviator, who never arrived?

Amelia Earhart was trying to find the tiny Pacific island on her round-the-world flight. Itasca heard her last radio calls, then began the search that found no trace of her.

To feed whalers icebound at Point Barrow in 1897, revenue cutter officers drove which animals 1,500 miles overland?

Reindeer, 382 of them, reached the stranded crews in March 1898 after a winter trek led by Lieutenant David Jarvis. Congress later voted him and two companions gold medals.

The Coast Guard's commandant said the 9/11 boatlift from Manhattan carried more people than which 1940 evacuation?

Dunkirk was the comparison Admiral James Loy reached for. The Coast Guard put out a radio call for all nearby vessels, and about 150 ferries, tugs and small craft answered.

During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Coast Guard helicopters saved 14 crew of which replica ship, built for a 1962 film?

Bounty was built in Nova Scotia for Mutiny on the Bounty, and Marlon Brando's protest saved her from being burned at the end of the shoot. She sank off North Carolina.

A Coast Guard marine board blamed faulty hatch closures for the 1975 loss of which Lake Superior freighter?

Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a November gale with all 29 crew. Gordon Lightfoot's ballad the following year made the wreck the best known in Great Lakes history.

Which star of The Big Lebowski spent eight years in the Coast Guard Reserve as a boatswain's mate?

Jeff Bridges served from 1967 to 1975, following his father Lloyd, the Sea Hunt star, who had left Hollywood to enlist in the Coast Guard during World War II.

The Coast Guard barque Eagle and which wooden frigate are the only commissioned sailing vessels in US military service?

USS Constitution, nicknamed Old Ironsides, was launched in 1797 and keeps a Navy crew. Eagle is a working ship that takes Coast Guard Academy cadets to sea under sail.

Which 2000 George Clooney film depicts the Coast Guard cutter Tamaroa's rescues in the Halloween nor'easter of 1991?

The Perfect Storm, from Sebastian Junger's book, shows Tamaroa's crew hauling the airmen of a ditched Air National Guard helicopter from the sea. The real cutter saved four of the five.

Which rum-runner, captured by the Coast Guard cutter Seneca in 1923, was famed for selling only undiluted liquor?

Bill McCoy never watered down his cargo, which earned him the nickname The Real McCoy. He pioneered anchoring just outside US waters and selling to small craft that ran the liquor ashore.

In World War II, Coast Guard cutters and sled teams patrolled which island to root out Axis weather stations?

Greenland's waters were familiar to the Coast Guard from decades of ice patrols. In 1944 four cutters hunted Axis weather stations along its northeast coast.

To chase rum-runners during Prohibition, the Coast Guard borrowed 25 of which warships from the Navy?

Destroyers were by far the largest ships the service had ever run, and it had to grow fast to man them, so inexperienced recruits made up most of their crews.

Which former heavyweight boxing champion ran physical training for Coast Guard recruits in Brooklyn during World War II?

Jack Dempsey, the Manassa Mauler, took a Coast Guard Reserve commission in 1942 and reported to the Manhattan Beach training station as its director of physical education.

Which actor, later the Skipper on Gilligan's Island, served in the Coast Guard during World War II?

Alan Hale Jr. followed his wartime service with decades of screen work. His Skipper had a real name the show almost never used: Jonas Grumby.

Which Hall of Fame Cleveland Browns quarterback coached the Coast Guard Academy to an unbeaten football season in 1963?

Otto Graham's cadets earned a trip to the Tangerine Bowl. He later came back to the academy as athletic director and stayed until the 1980s.

Which pioneering codebreaker cracked rum-runners' radio messages for the Coast Guard during Prohibition?

Elizebeth Friedman was first hired on a temporary basis to clear a backlog of intercepted messages. In World War II her Coast Guard unit exposed an Axis spy network in South America.

Which 1878 law, barring federal troops from civilian policing, does not restrict the Coast Guard?

Posse Comitatus Act rules bind the other armed forces, but the Coast Guard is exempt. That lets its crews board, search and arrest at sea, including from the decks of Navy warships.

Honor and Respect are two of the Coast Guard's three core values; which phrase completes the set?

Devotion to Duty rounds out the trio, which is drilled into every recruit and applies to active-duty members, reservists and civilian employees alike.

The Coast Guard's longest-serving active aviator holds an 'Ancient' title named after which seabird?

Albatross is the bird: the Ancient Albatross Award goes to whoever earned aviator's wings earliest among those in uniform. Vivien Crea became the first woman to hold it, in 2008.

Coast Guardsman John Cullen met Nazi saboteurs coming ashore from a U-boat in 1942 on a beach where?

Long Island's Amagansett beach was the landing place. The saboteurs offered Cullen a bribe, which he pretended to accept before reporting them, and he received the Legion of Merit.

The Coast Guard's Courier spent twelve years anchored off Rhodes as a floating transmitter for which US broadcaster?

Voice of America programs were relayed from the ship to listeners behind the Iron Curtain. Courier did not enter US waters once between July 1952 and August 1964.

In 1957 the Coast Guard cutters Storis, Spar and Bramble forced their way through which fabled northern sea route?

Northwest Passage ice behind them, the three cutters were credited as the first American ships to sail right around North America. They had been sent to find a deep-draft channel and chart it.

The Coast Guard's National Motor Lifeboat School trains on the bar of which river, called the Graveyard of the Pacific?

Columbia bar swells can reach 20 to 30 feet in winter, which is why surf crews have learned their trade at Cape Disappointment, Washington, since 1968.

Coast Guard HITRON helicopter gunners, who shoot out drug runners' engines, fly from which Florida city?

Jacksonville's Cecil Field is home to the unit. Its marksmen fire warning shots across the bow first, then disable a fleeing speedboat with a .50-caliber rifle.

The Coast Guard's Pacific Area is commanded from Coast Guard Island, in which California city on San Francisco Bay?

Alameda hosts the command, whose admiral also serves as Commander, Defense Forces West, with responsibility for Coast Guard operations across the Pacific.

Which Coast Guard admiral served as National Incident Commander for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill?

Thad Allen was succeeded as commandant a few weeks into the crisis, yet stayed in uniform another 36 days to keep directing the federal response.

Nathan Bruckenthal, the first Coast Guardsman killed in action since Vietnam, died in 2004 off which country?

Iraq's Khawr Al Amaya oil terminal was the target of a waterborne suicide attack, and Bruckenthal died alongside Navy sailors as they intercepted it.

Frank Erickson of the Coast Guard flew America's first helicopter rescue mission in 1944, carrying what?

Blood plasma was needed for the casualties after the warship USS Turner exploded and sank near New York in January 1944. Erickson delivered it in a Sikorsky R-4.

Which keeper, born into slavery, led the first all-Black lifesaving crew in the United States at Pea Island?

Richard Etheridge drilled his surfmen hard, knowing that any slip could see them dismissed and replaced. In 2012 the Coast Guard named one of its new cutters after him.

Which tanker's 1989 grounding in Prince William Sound led to the Oil Pollution Act, enforced by the Coast Guard?

Exxon Valdez spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude. The act that followed makes shipowners prove to the Coast Guard that they can pay for a cleanup before they sail in US waters.

Which four-engine Lockheed transport, in military use since the 1950s, flies the Coast Guard's long-range searches?

Hercules rescue variants carry the designation HC-130, and the Coast Guard was the first service to receive one. It began flying the H model in the late 1960s.

Coast Guard photographer Robert Sargent took the D-Day picture 'Into the Jaws of Death' at which Normandy landing site?

Omaha was where Sargent's landing craft, sent in from the Coast Guard-crewed USS Samuel Chase, dropped its ramp. He caught soldiers wading waist-deep toward the Easy Red sector.

Britain's lifeboats are crewed not by HM Coastguard but by which charity, founded in 1824?

The RNLI, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, lives on legacies and donations, and most of its crews are unpaid volunteers. HM Coastguard coordinates rescues and asks them to launch.

The Coast Guard cutter Harriet Lane is named for the niece and White House hostess of which bachelor president?

James Buchanan never married, so his orphaned niece acted as First Lady. Three cutters have carried her name, the first dating from 1857, her uncle's first year in office.

Boaters calling the Coast Guard in an emergency use which marine VHF frequency, set aside worldwide for distress?

Channel 16, at 156.8 MHz, is reserved for calling and distress. Vessels are expected to keep a listening watch on it whenever the set is not busy with another call.

Polar Star, the Coast Guard's heavy icebreaker, was built in and sails from which Washington city?

Seattle's Lockheed shipyard won the contract in 1971 to build what was billed as the world's most powerful icebreaker, and it delivered a sister ship, Polar Sea, as well.

The Coast Guard's Sentinel-class fast response cutters, in service since 2012, are all named after whom?

Enlisted heroes were chosen at the urging of the service's most senior enlisted member, and the first fourteen names were announced in 2010.

Which comedian, later the star of Your Show of Shows, got his break in the Coast Guard revue Tars and Spars?

Sid Caesar was a Coast Guardsman stationed in Brooklyn when he joined the cast. The touring revue became his first major job as a comic, and he repeated the role in a 1946 film.

Iceland's coast guard cut the nets of British trawlers in which string of twentieth-century fishing disputes?

The Cod Wars pitted small Icelandic patrol ships against Royal Navy escorts, with ramming on both sides. Each round ended in Iceland's favour as it pushed its fishing limits outward.

Coast Guard cutters pulled survivors from icy water in 1943 after which troopship sank, the ship of the Four Chaplains?

SS Dorchester's sinking saw the cutter Escanaba try a new retriever method: crewmen in rubber suits swam out and tied lines to men in the water, and 133 were hauled aboard.

The Coast Guard buoy tender Blackthorn capsized in 1980, killing 23 crew, after colliding with a tanker in which bay?

Tampa Bay's Sunshine Skyway Bridge was close by when Blackthorn, fresh from an overhaul, collided with the tanker Capricorn. The loss led to new training and safety equipment aboard cutters.

Which radio navigation system, born in World War II, did the Coast Guard operate until its 2010 shutdown?

LORAN, short for long range navigation, lost most of its users to civilian satellite navigation in the 1990s, and the US chain went dark in 2010.

Coast Guard helicopter pilots learn the MH-65 and MH-60 at the Aviation Training Center in which Gulf Coast city?

Mobile has hosted the center since 1966, on the north side of the Alabama city's regional airport. Pilots arrive already wearing naval aviator wings and convert to Coast Guard aircraft here.

The Coast Guard Academy's Latin motto declares that the sea yields to what?

Knowledge is the promise of Scientiae Cedit Mare, a fitting line for a school that began in 1876 as the Revenue Cutter Service's School of Instruction.

Which mariner received the Revenue-Marine's first officer's commission from George Washington in 1791?

Hopley Yeaton went on to command the cutter Scammel, where he fired three of his crew after their first few months of service.

Which painter of the Migration Series served in the Coast Guard aboard its first racially integrated ship, Sea Cloud?

Jacob Lawrence was drafted in 1943 and kept painting as a public affairs specialist. The Coast Guard sent eight of his wartime pictures on tour around the country.

Which admiral led the Coast Guard through World War II as its longest-tenured commandant?

Russell Waesche also became the first Coast Guard officer to wear the stars of a vice admiral, in 1942, and of a full admiral, in 1945.

Which New York Giants star, the first Black inductee in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, was a decorated Coast Guardsman?

Emlen Tunnell received the Silver Lifesaving Medal for pulling one shipmate from the flames of a torpedo attack in 1944 and another from the sea in 1946.

Which actor, later Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, served as a Coast Guard officer in World War II?

Buddy Ebsen was commissioned a lieutenant, junior grade, and rose to executive officer of USS Pocatello, a Coast Guard-crewed frigate that kept a weather station far out in the Pacific.

In 1985 the Coast Guard retired Nantucket I, the last American example of which kind of crewed, anchored vessel?

Lightship crews kept a beacon burning where no tower could be built. The Coast Guard inherited the fleet in 1939 and built six more of its own.

Which state gave its name to the revenue cutter held by tradition to be the first to enter service, in 1791?

Massachusetts lasted only about 15 months before she was sold, which made her the first of the original ten cutters to leave service as well.