Lost in the Bristol Channel: The Black Sailors of the USCGC Tampa

A Cutter in the Night

On the evening of September 26, 1918, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Tampa was steaming alone toward Milford Haven, Wales, after escorting a convoy from Gibraltar. At about 8:45 p.m., the German submarine UB-91 fired a single torpedo. The cutter sank within minutes in the Bristol Channel. All 131 people aboard were killed: 111 Coast Guardsmen, four U.S. Navy sailors and 16 British sailors and dockworkers.

It was the largest loss of life in a single combat action suffered by U.S. naval forces in World War I. Six weeks later the war was over.

Who Served Aboard

The Tampa had escorted 18 convoys and hundreds of ships through submarine-infested waters, earning praise from British commanders. Like most American warships of the era, it was a segregated world. Black Americans who enlisted in the Coast Guard and Navy in 1917 and 1918 were steered into a narrow set of jobs, as cooks, stewards, mess attendants and firemen in the boiler rooms.

Recent research has identified at least eleven Black crewmen among the Tampa's dead. They died at sea in the same moment as their white shipmates, under the same flag, in a war fought, as President Woodrow Wilson said, to make the world "safe for democracy," while at home their families lived under Jim Crow.

Forgotten Twice

When the nation honored the Tampa's dead, the Black sailors were listed by name but rarely remembered as people. Their stories did not enter the memorial speeches or the histories. The forgetting matched a larger pattern. Black soldiers who returned from France in 1919 met the Red Summer, a wave of white mob violence in more than two dozen cities, and some were attacked while still in uniform.

The War Department and the press celebrated white heroism. The service of the 369th Infantry, the Harlem Hellfighters, broke through only because Black newspapers, Black veterans and the soldiers' own record forced it into view. Most Black service members, including those at sea, received no such hearing.

Found Again

In 2024, the U.S. Coast Guard announced that the wreck of the Tampa had been identified on the floor of the Bristol Channel, more than a century after it went down. The discovery renewed interest in the crew. A new book, Save a Seat for Me, takes up the lives of the Black sailors aboard, restoring names, families and hometowns to men who had been reduced to lines on a casualty list.

Why It Matters

Veterans Day began as Armistice Day, marking the end of the war the Tampa did not survive to see. Remembering its Black crewmen is not a matter of adding names to a plaque. It is a matter of telling the truth about who served, how the nation treated them, and how long it took for the military itself to desegregate, a step that came only with President Harry Truman's Executive Order 9981 in 1948.

Black Americans have fought in every American war, including wars for freedoms they were denied at home. The men of the Tampa belong in that story.