Guarding U.S. Coastline on Horseback

My husband, Ralph Barber, grew up on a farm near Onarga, Ill., where he rode the beautiful horses that his father raised.  So when the Coast Guard formed a new Mounted Beach Patrol in 1942 to protect U.S. shores from German saboteurs, Ralph was glad to participate. He had finished Coast Guard basic training and was waiting to ship out. One of the officers asked if anyone could ride a horse.

During the early years of American participation in the war, people were afraid that German submarines could easily surface and land agents along deserted stretches of the coast. The Coast Guard was in a hurry to get the mounted patrols going. They didn’t have time to train anyone to ride a horse! They wanted those who already could ride. Ralph trained for a while at Hilton Head, S.C., which was mostly a deserted beach at that time. Then he was stationed on the North Florida Atlantic coast at Fernandina.

He lived on the coast in a barracks back in the dunes with about 20 men, and each had a horse. There was a stable for the horses and each unit had a cook. Twenty-four hours a day there was someone on horseback guarding the beach. It was very hush-hush. I didn’t find out much about it until after the war. On stretches of beach where the water was shallow far out into the ocean, they stationed a unit every 20 miles or so. Their shifts lasted about four hours. Ralph said that at night, the sand gnats would cover you up. That’s why a lot of the guys smoked, although they had to light up behind a bush so the light of the match couldn’t be seen.

After we got married in 1944, I moved to Fernandina and lived in a rooming house about 3 or 4 miles from the beach where Ralph lived in the barracks. I was friendly with some of the other wives, and got to see Ralph when he could get away.
Near Fernandina was Big Cumberland Island where the Carnegies had a mansion called Dungeness. The beach patrol used the tower of the mansion to scan the shoreline. The beach patrol would ride out to the island on the Carnegies’ boat that ran every day.

One job of the shore patrol was to make sure people living in houses at the beach pulled their black-out curtains tightly closed every night. A hurricane hit the area when Ralph was stationed at Fernandina. He said many people flatly refused to leave their homes and he and the other men ended up literally picking them up and carrying them out in the middle of the hurricane. Ralph said the waves were crashing in to the houses and he couldn’t believe none of the shore patrol members were killed.

Ralph enjoyed serving on the beach and working with the horses, but he wasn’t upset when the war changed course and his beach patrol unit was dismantled in 1944. He moved on to other duties.