Beach patrol guard recalls Fort Miles mission with Dr. Gary Wray

I am writing in response to the Cape Gazette’s Feb. 11, 2022 article by Ron MacArthur on Dr. Gary Wray and his great work as founder of the Fort Miles Historical Association.

My longtime Rehoboth Beach Patrol and Dewey Beach Patrol buddy Dr. Pete Hartsock, a U.S. Public Health Service captain and former Rehoboth Beach Patrol lieutenant, and I have been involved in a number of wonderful enterprises with Dr. Gary Wray, and one of them occurred exactly 10 years ago.

To begin, when serving on the RBP as lieutenant, I managed to produce, with close cooperation of the guys in my section, the largest number of Rookies of the Year in the history of the patrol. We take training seriously. That commitment has played out in ways we could never have guessed.

I’ve been asked about my hundreds of ocean rescues and which of them I thought were most memorable. One concerns a woman who was so completely exhausted as Pete and I carried her out of the surf that she could only sit on the sand for a long time as we cared for her before she was able to get up and leave the beach with our help. She had been sure she was going to drown. I probably remember this woman especially because days later, the city received a letter to me and one to Pete, each having a hand-done painting of a hand reaching for her hand in that drowning surf.

And then there was another rescue, 10 years ago and different from any I would ever have imagined.

In 2011, Dr. Wray, Pete and I, and the Fort Miles Historical Association got word that the U.S. Navy was torching for scrap metal the original main guns of four Iowa-class World War II battleships. Each gun cost $1 million to build during the war, and the equivalent cost of building one today would have been out of sight. But they were the most powerful guns the U.S. Navy ever built – each weighed 250,000 pounds and could fire a 2,700-pound, armor-piercing shell 25 miles with less than 50 seconds in transit! Unbelievable kinetic energy, and no cruise missile will ever come near that. In the attached photo of that day, look at the size of the turrets – each weighing more than a destroyer, and that’s without the huge guns in them.

The original 36 guns had been pulled out of the four battleships due to heavy wear during WWII and the Korean War, and replaced with new guns. The originals were left on the ground, and then the Navy decided to get rid of them. I believe that 33 had been destroyed when we found out what the Navy was doing and we felt it was sacrilege! The surrender document ending the war was signed under these last three guns Sept. 2, 1945, by the Japanese on board the USS Missouri, one of the four Iowa-class battleships; the last we ever built.

We tried to get the Navy to stand down and save these guns, but there was no interest. We then ran like hell with Dr. Wray and the Fort Miles Historical Association to raise about $100,000 to rescue the guns. Basically, we shamed the Navy into backing down, but just for a while. It took the rest of 2011 and the first half of 2012 to raise the money, and it was no easy job. Then – we had to move the guns. Two were brought by railroad barge from Norfolk, Va., to the Delmarva Peninsula. One was delivered to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay; another was sent out to Arizona to be mounted next to the salvaged mast of the USS Arizona.

The third was moved up Delmarva by a very slow extra-heavy-duty railroad flatcar. We worked to bring in the news media as well as help from our Delmarva ham radio friends, who mounted a radio transponder on the gun so people around the country and the world could track the movement of the gun up the Delmarva Peninsula to Fort Miles. Our Delaware National Guard friends recharged the transponder’s battery every day. And our buddies in the State Police Aviation Section provided us with aerial video and photography of the gun’s odyssey. I spent a lot of time with the gun on that trip. When we got to Georgetown, a celebration was held with a marching band and flyover by WWII fighter planes.

From Georgetown, the gun was hauled to Fort Miles, crossing over the Lewes-Rehoboth Canal via the hand-cranked swing bridge. We had to place a caboose between the engine and the gun, because together, they could have collapsed the bridge. I rode on the caboose to monitor that crossing, all the time wondering whether the bridge would collapse anyway. In my decades-long open-water lifesaving career, I never thought I would be in such a situation. The bridge, just removed from its longtime canal emplacement several days ago, was well over a century old, and while I have been in some real tight rescue situations, monitoring the engine, caboose and gun on that creaky old bridge is probably the creepiest situation I have ever been in. If the bridge had collapsed, not only the engine, caboose and gun would have been lost, but so would a number of peoples’ lives. I was as ready for action as possible to help save lives, but I’ve never had the apprehension before (and I’ve been clobbered many times in ocean rescues during the worst possible conditions) that I had then. It could easily have been a one-way trip by railroad and giant cannon to Davy Jones’ locker!

As it turned out, we crossed the canal and got the gun within striking range of an extra-heavy-duty, 98-wheel tractor-trailer which Dr. Wray had arranged to haul the cannon up to Fort Miles. 

An iconic photo was taken by Cape Gazette reporter/photographer Ron MacArthur of the gun train crossing the canal. I’m the guy on the back platform of the caboose. The best version of the photo is in the lobby of the Cape Gazette office building near Lewes. There is also one mounted at Nicola Pizza in Rehoboth and one in the Rehoboth post office. It also appeared on the cover the Rehoboth Lions Club phone book thanks to the late Jack and Guyla Brinckmeyer. Another appeared in the pages of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Journal with an article about the gun’s rescue.

Something we all felt was that, working together with the Fort Miles Historical Association and the other groups, and Dr. Wray’s encouragement, we helped each other to manifest the same spirit which won the war. Dr. Wray procured a breech and a mount for the big gun, giving Delaware a venue where all Americans can celebrate VJ Day and remember the sacrifices made by those who went before us right here in Cape Henlopen.

What I have described is certainly the rescue which remains first and forever in my mind, especially the spirit of cooperation and sacrifice, and Dr. Wray’s leadership. It also makes us think that it would be nice to celebrate the 10th anniversary of that remarkable feat, which will be this spring.

So aside from many lifesaving rescues of my own, thanks to Gary Wray, I was able to participate in my most notable rescue, 250,000 pounds’ worth. At the same time, all rescues are notable, and ocean lifeguards serve in one of the highest-risk occupations on earth.