ILEAD is an all Coast Guard Initiative, which was initiated by the Commandant. It stands for Inclusive Leadership, Excellence, and Diversity. It provides our members the opportunity to share concerns and best practices. The Auxiliary has a seat at the table.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Diversity, Inclusion, Leadership, and Excellence are priorities of the U.S. Coast Guard and our leadership at the highest levels.
WHAT IS AN LDAC?
LDAC stands for Leadership Diversity Advisory Council. It is the "local" unit. Its goal is to create and maintain a positive environment where everyone is encouraged to use their unique talents and skills.
HOW IS MY DISTRICT INVOLVED?
Auxiliary LDACs at the District level invite input from members, share with leadership and pass trends up to Auxiliary leadership and the National ILEAD Council for review and possible action. (Districts may take action to solve problems and implement best practices.)
WHAT IS THE BENEFIT TO MY DISTRICT, DIVISION, FLOTILLA?
Improved Recruiting; Member Retention; Re-engagement of members thinking of leaving, as well as Improved efficiency and morale.
These are not pie in the sky goals. They are statistically proven.
If you have any questions about the ILEAD Program direct them to COMO Michelle Thornton.
April Diversity Calendar Highlights:
April is Celebrate Diversity Month, National Autism Awareness Month, Poetry Month, and more! It is a time dedicated to recognizing and honoring the diversity surrounding us and the beauty of poetry that exists. It's an opportunity to embrace and learn from differences in gender, race, ethnicity, faith, sexual orientation, and more, enriching our understanding and acceptance of the vast tapestry of human experience. Celebrate Diversity Month encourages actions such as being considerate to everyone, listening to people from diverse cultures, and learning more about different cultures and lifestyles. This initiative highlights the importance of creating inclusive environments where every individual feels valued and respected, pushing us out of our comfort zones to explore new perspectives and celebrate the unique contributions of all.
Check out our Diversity Calendar for other April celebrations, such as World Health Day, National Library Week, Volunteer Recognition Day, World Creativity And Innovation Day, Earth Day, and more! Also, don’t forget to join us for the D204 Lions International Easter Story Time Literacy Partnership event to hear meaningful and relevant stories and a special message from Coastie!
William H. Thiesen, Historian, Coast Guard Atlantic Area
Of the thousands of women who have served with honor in the United States Coast Guard, one stands out for her bravery and devotion to duty.
Asian American Florence Smith Finch was born in the Philippines in Santiago City. The daughter of a U.S. Army veteran and Filipino mother, she went to work for General Douglas Macarthur’s army intelligence unit in Manila after graduating high school. She later married U.S. Navy PT boat man Charles Smith. In 1942, after the Japanese invaded the Philippines, her young husband died trying to re-supply American and Filipino troops trapped on Corregidor Island and the Bataan Peninsula.
Florence Smith Finch supplied food and medicine to American POWs in the Philippines then became a Coast Guard SPAR late in World War II. (Coast Guard Collection)
After the Japanese occupied Manila, Finch avoided internment by claiming her Philippine citizenship. She was given a job with the Japanese-controlled Philippine Liquid Fuel Distributing Union where she was responsible for writing vouchers for the distribution of fuel. Working closely with the Philippine underground, she diverted fuel supplies to the resistance and helped arrange acts of sabotage against Japanese occupation forces. Meanwhile, her former U.S. Army intelligence boss had been imprisoned by the Japanese. Through the grapevine, he let Finch know how badly Allied POWs were being treated by their captors. She joined an underground group in Manila smuggling food and medicine to the prisoners.
In October 1944, the Japanese arrested Finch. Her captors beat, tortured and interrogated her during her initial confinement and sentenced her to three years of hard labor. In February 1945, when American forces liberated Manila and her prison camp, Finch weighed only 80 pounds. Through it all, she never revealed information regarding her underground operations or fellow resisters.
Soon after liberation, Finch boarded a Coast Guard-manned transport returning to the United States. She moved to her late father’s hometown of Buffalo, New York, and enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard. She did so on July 13, 1945, on board the Navy’s LST-512 which was tied up in Buffalo Harbor. She joined the Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, or SPARs, eager to continue the fight against an enemy that had tortured her and killed her husband.
Photograph of Japanese tanks entering Manila in early January 1942. Japanese troops would occupy the city until 1945. (Photograph courtesy of U.S. Army)
Finch served through the end of World War II. After the war, she met U.S. Army veteran Robert Finch. They married and moved to Ithaca, New York, where she lived the remainder of her life. Of the thousands of SPARs serving in World War II, Finch was the only one honored with the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon. In November 1947, for aiding Allied POWs and Filipino resistance fighters, she was also awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor recognizing U.S. civilians. Her citation reads:
For meritorious service which had aided the United States in the prosecution of the war against the enemy in the Philippine Islands, from June 1942 to February 1945. Upon the Japanese occupation of the Philippine Islands, Mrs. Finch [then Mrs. Florence Ebersole Smith] believing she could be of more assistance outside the prison camp, refused to disclose her United States citizenship. She displayed outstanding courage and marked resourcefulness in providing vitally needed food, medicine, and supplies for American Prisoners of War and internees, and in sabotaging Japanese stocks of critical items . . . . She constantly risked her life in secretly furnishing money and clothing to American Prisoners of War, and in carrying communications for them. In consequence she was apprehended by the Japanese, tortured, and imprisoned until rescued by American troops. Thought her inspiring bravery, resourcefulness, and devotion to the cause of freedom, Mrs. Finch made a distinct contribution to the welfare and morale of American Prisoners of War on Luzon.
Florence Finch Smith was the first Asian-American woman to don a Coast Guard uniform. In 1995, the Coast Guard honored Finch’s service by naming the administration building for her at Coast Guard Base Honolulu. She passed away in 2016 at the age of 101. Of her wartime activities, she stated “I feel very humble because my activities in the war effort were trivial compared with those of people who gave their lives for their country.” She was a distinguished member of the Service’s long blue line and she will be honored as the namesake of a Fast Response Cutter.
William H. Thiesen, Historian, Coast Guard Atlantic Area
This day crew pulled with Surf-Boat to “Pelican Flats” and resumed the task of burying the bodies of drowned persons and animals; burning, and burying twelve persons; and ten animals. Crew returned to City at 5 p.m. -Keeper Edward Haines, Galveston Lifesaving Station, Sept. 17, 1900
Chart showing the track of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane. (Library of Congress)
In early September of 1900, a hurricane of massive force struck the Gulf Coast west of Galveston, Texas. The Great Galveston Hurricane would prove far deadlier than any man-made, environmental or weather-related disaster in U.S. history, with approximately 8,000 killed in Galveston and roughly 2,000 more lost in other parts of the Gulf Coast. This death toll is greater than the combined casualty figure for the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 terrorist attacks as well as Hurricane Ike, which struck Galveston in 2008.
In the afternoon of Saturday, September 8th, the storm closed in and floodwaters rushed into the Galveston with wind speeds reaching gale force. By 3:00 p.m., the storm surge had flooded lower portions of the city to a depth of five feet. For many in the city’s East Side there was nowhere to turn and, by 3:30 p.m., reports of death and destruction began to reach the Revenue Cutter Galveston moored in the harbor. The cutter already held 50 refugees and the captain decided to deploy a smallboat to assist the city’s storm victims.
At 4:00 p.m., a volunteer rescue party led by Galveston’s Assistant Engineer Charles Root set-off dragging Galveston’s whaleboat over railroad tracks and launching it into the city’s flooded streets. The high winds rendered oars useless, so the men warped the boat through city streets using a rope system. One man swam through the streets with a line, tied it to a fixed object and the crew hauled it in. Using this arduous process, Galveston’s boat crew rescued numerous victims out of the roiling waters in the city.
At nearby Bolivar Point, the storm surge flooded the low-lying peninsula and waves broke against the base of Bolivar Point Lighthouse. Approximately 125 locals sought refuge from the storm in the lighthouse tower while the water began rising around it. That afternoon, the floodwaters had halted a passenger train approaching the Bolivar Point Ferry Terminal to meet the ferry for Galveston. Of the nearly 100 riders and crew on board the train, only nine braved waist-deep water to seek the safety of Bolivar Light’s tower. Soon after, the rising water surrounded the train, trapped riders and crew in the passenger cars and drowned them all.
A rare photograph showing Charles Root later in his Coast Guard career. (U.S. Coast Guard Photo)
In the evening, the storm unleashed Category Four winds on the city. At around 6:15 p.m., the Galveston Weather Bureau anemometer registered over 100 miles per hour (mph) before a wind gust tore it off the building. Bureau officials estimated that by 8:00 p.m., sustained winds blew at 120 mph. By this time, Assistant Engineer Root and his crew returned to the Galvestonhaving filled their whaleboat with over a dozen survivors. Heavy winds were taking an awful toll on the ship, stripping off rigging and blowing away the launch, while wind-driven projectiles shattered windows and skylights.
At the nearby Fort Point Lifesaving Station, Keeper Edward Haines realized his situation was dire and told his crew they should find a way to save themselves. As the floodwaters crept up the station walls, the surfmen believed they could survive in the upper floor of the building, so three of them climbed to the top and passed down ropes for the others. Up to this time, Haines and his wife had remained in the station’s lifeboat, but the waters by now were breaking over them, with the boat tossing on its beam-ends. The keeper lifted Mrs. Haines to the upper story by tying rope around her body and hoisting her to the surfmen above.
A view of Fort Point Lighthouse, a screw-pile lighthouse that barely survived the Great Galveston Hurricane. (U.S. Coast Guard Photo)
After hoisting his wife to safety of the station top, the gallery under Haines collapsed and he was swept into the lifeboat. The storm blew the boat into open water and Haines shouted to the surfmen to protect his wife. Shortly thereafter, he realized two of his men were clinging to the lifeboat and pulled them into the boat.
That night, the storm’s wind and seas began to reach their climax. At 7:30 p.m., Weather Bureau officials recorded an instantaneous four-foot rise in water level while the wind speed reached 150 mph with gusts up to 200. The wind sent men sailing through the air and toppled horses to the ground while the flooding reached its peak at over 15 feet above sea level. The storm surge raised cutter Galvestonover its dock pilings, but the piling tops failed to puncture the cutter’s hull plates.
By 8:00 p.m., Assistant Engineer Root was ready to return to the dark flooded streets. He called for volunteers and the same men stepped forward that had served in the first mission. The hurricane still made use of oars impossible, so the crew waded and swam as water depth allowed, warping the boat from pillar to post. Meanwhile, buildings toppled over and the wind filled the air with shrapnel-like slate roof tiles. Root’s men managed to rescue 21 victims, housed them in a structurally sound building and found food for them in an abandoned store. The cuttermen then moored the boat in the lee of a building and sheltered from the flying debris.
Bolivar Point Lighthouse tower sheltered 125 victims during the hurricane and received relatively little damage. (U.S. Coast Guard Photo)
In Galveston Bay, lighthouses marked the waters for shipping. Located about seven miles north of Galveston, the Halfmoon Shoal Lighthouse sat over a shallow area in the middle of Galveston Bay. Unmoored by storm-driven ships in Galveston Harbor, the steamer Kendal Castle broke loose from its moorings and began drifting around the Bay. The ship mowed down the Halfmoon Shoal Light, obliterating the screw-pile lighthouse and Keeper Charles Bowen, whose body was never found. As one witness recounted, “we passed within a few hundred yards of where the Halfmoon Lighthouse once stood, but could see no evidence of the lighthouse, it being completely washed away.” If this were not bad enough, the hurricane wiped out three generations of Bowen’s family with his father, wife and daughter all perishing on shore.
Redfish Bar Cut Lighthouse managed to survive the storm, but just barely. Newly commissioned in March, the lighthouse marked a channel through a shallow bar bisecting Galveston Bay. It must have seemed surreal to the keeper when a darkened vessel barreled down on the lighthouse, pushed by Category Four winds. Just as it seemed the ghost ship would crush the beacon, the vessel veered slightly and passed silently a few feet from the lighthouse.
The Fort Point Life-Saving Station probably looked similar to this vintage photo before the storm. (U.S. Coast Guard Photo)
At Fort Point Lighthouse, Keeper Charles Anderson watched the storm surge carry off equipment on the screw-pile lighthouse’s lower deck, including a lifeboat and storage tanks for fresh water and kerosene fuel. The wind grew so intense that it peeled off the lighthouse’s heavy slate roof tiles. Some of the stone tiles shattered the lantern room glass and the winds blew out the light. With Fort Point Lighthouse’s lowest level flooded, the lamplight extinguished, no means of escape, and Keeper Anderson suffering from serious facial wounds, he and his faithful wife made their way to the parlor and to meet their fate.
Hurricanes had blown Galveston Lightship LV-28 off station many times before, but none compared to the 1900 Hurricane. The wooden lightship relied on sails for motive power and was at the mercy of the storm. The hurricane tore the vessel from its moorings and parted its anchor chain. The lightship’s windlass and whaleboat were ripped away and the winds collapsed one of the ship’s two masts. The storm drove the vessel several miles up Galveston Bay before the crew dropped the spare anchor, which held fast. Fortunately, no crewmembers were lost.
A rare photograph of LV-28 in 1895, five years before the 1900 storm struck Galveston. (U.S. Coast Guard Photo)
By 11:00 p.m., the wind began to moderate allowing Root and his men to return safe, but exhausted, to Cutter Galvestonby 12:30 a.m. on Sunday. At about 1:00 a.m., Fort Point Station keeper Edward Haines’s surfboat found bottom and the winds died down to only 20 miles per hour. The cloud cover cleared and the moon illuminated the surroundings for Haines and his two surfmen. They had washed ashore a mile-and-a-half beyond Galveston Bay’s normal shoreline about nine miles by water from the station.
At Bolivar Light, Keeper Harry Claiborne did his best to care for his flock. The hundreds of weary men, women and children rode out the stormy night seated on the spiraling steps leading up to the lantern room. The next morning, the survivors left the safety of the tower to find a scene resembling a massacre. As the floodwater subsided, it deposited the corpses of those who tried and failed to gain the safety of the lighthouse. Meanwhile, Keeper Claiborne’s storm victims had consumed all the provisions stockpiled in the tower and, when he returned to the keeper’s quarters, he found the storm surge had wiped out his worldly possessions.
At Fort Point Light, Keeper Anderson and his wife survived what seemed certain death to see another day. At daybreak, they climbed the stairs to the lighthouse gallery and emerged arm-in-arm to witness the carnage left in the wake of the storm. The receding floodwaters carried away dozens of human and animal carcasses in a silently watery funeral procession from Galveston Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.
Meanwhile, Life-Saving Service Keeper Haines and his two surfmen began searching the beach for survivors and found three more of his surfmen who were blown across Galveston Bay on flotsam. The three men recounted how the lifesaving station collapsed just after Haines’ lifeboat was swept away, throwing the surfmen and Haines’s wife into the roiling seas. Later, Haines located temporary graves containing Mrs. Haines and the missing surfman. Haines and the crew rowed out to the graves with a casket and retrieved her body for re-burial. It is not known whether the surfman’s remains were ever exhumed.
For the next two weeks, Keeper Haines and his crew worked for the Galveston Relief Committee locating hundreds of corpses. In the rush to clear away the dead, most of the bodies were never identified and either buried at sea, buried in hastily-dug graves, or just burned where they lay. Meanwhile, Cutter Galveston’s crew towed countless human and animal remains out to open water. The tide returned many of them to the harbor, so the crew had to tow them to the nearby mud flats and burn them. Galveston’s burial detail burned so many corpses that it finally ran out of fuel oil to set the bodies on fire.
In the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, members of the Coast Guard’s predecessor services performed heroically. Keeper Edward Haines and the Galveston Life-Saving Station crew struggled mightily against the forces of nature at Fort Point. The men of the Lighthouse Service and Revenue Cutter Service demonstrated the same devotion to duty by manning the lights and saving hundreds of lives. The Great Galveston Hurricane would be the first of countless hurricane response efforts performed by the Coast Guard and its ancestor agencies.
FC Rivera was able to attend the Flotilla 38 monthly June meeting via Zoom. Flotilla 38 from Plantation, Florida was actively engaged in their various reports and gave a warm welcome to FC Rivera during their meeting. As part of the networking, Flotilla 38 decided to feature Guam Flotilla 140-02-24 in their June newsletter. Si Yu'os Ma'ase', Flotilla 38!
