Monessen son lost when SS Dorchester torpedoed

This story is part of Mon Valley Sons of World War II, a series about our sons who lost their lives in service to our country during the war.

By JOHN J. TURANIN
For the MVI

The torpedo exploded into the side of the SS Dorchester. It was 12:55 a.m., 90 miles southwest of Greenland, and the sea was 34 degrees. A man could live no longer than 20 minutes in the icy waters.

On that cold February night in 1943, Monessen’s Pvt. Charles Stonage and most of the 900 passengers and crew were asleep in their bunks. Three minutes after the explosion the Dorchester’s captain ordered “Abandon ship!”

Within 30 minutes, the ship’s mast was leaning into the water as the Dorchester tilted nearly 85 degrees. Suddenly, the ship plunged bow-first below the water. Only two of the ship’s 14 lifeboats had been launched.

Pvt. Stonage and 674 others were gone. The sinking of the Dorchester was America’s single largest loss of life during a ship convoy in World War II.

The Stonage family

Charles Henry Stonage was born into a family that would experience more than its share of hardship and tragedies. He arrived Nov. 18, 1902, son of John and Agnes Stonage (née Cresbar or Crebar) in Monessen. John and Agnes had immigrated from eastern Europe in the 1890s. Because of the changing national borders during those years, conflicting records claim that they were born in Russia, Austria and Germany.

Charles was the seventh of eight children born to John and Agnes. Andrew was born in 1888 in Austria and immigrated to the United States with his mother as an infant. Joseph arrived next (1891), followed by Josephine (1897), Frank (1898), Mary (1901), John Matthew (1902), Charles, then Emma (1906).

Andrew was passionate about the emerging war (World War I) in Europe, and was arrested in 1915 for disrupting proceedings at the University of Pittsburgh in the name of the war. He enlisted with the U.S. Army and fought in France, only to return under the Army’s care for his mental health. By 1930, Andrew was remanded to a veterans home in Ohio, where he lived out the remaining years of his life.

Joseph had left for Gary, Indiana, for a job in tin mill. When World War I began, Joseph and several friends enlisted in the U.S. Army and went to France, where he was promoted to corporal. While serving in the 2nd Battalion of the 5th Infantry Division, Joseph was killed in action just a month before Germany surrendered.

Charles joined the U.S. Navy by 1921 at the rank of able seaman. In February that year, he found himself in the Navy Hospital at Hampton Roads, Va., with German measles. Sometime between 1920 and 1930, his father passed away. Charles decided against making a career in the U.S. Navy, and returned home to Pennsylvania. His brother John married in 1928, but would experience another Stonage family tragedy when his wife died in 1945 after falling from a window.

In 1924, Charles married Mary Lutes (Lutz) and they settled in Monessen. By 1930, they were renting an apartment at 17 East Schoonmaker Ave., and Charles was working in a steel mill. A son, Charles Lutes Stonage, was born Nov. 25, 1925.

U.S. enters World War II

Japanese forces launched a surprise attack on the U.S. military bases in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7, 1941. The U.S. declared war on Japan, and as an ally of the Japanese Empire, Germany declared war on the U.S. Military service was looming for any service-eligible American man, including 39-year-old Charles.

Charles registered for the draft on Feb. 16, 1942. He was unemployed and living with his sister Josephine and her husband Ferdinand Mankedick at 625 Rostraver Ave. in Monessen. By July, he was hired by a beverage company.

Five months later, on July 30, 1942, Charles was drafted into the U.S. Army. He entered active service at Fort George Meade, Md., on Aug. 15, and three days later he arrived at Camp Croft, S.C., for training. Camp Croft was one of four Replacement Training Centers in the U.S., to prepare Army infantrymen for deployment wherever they were needed.

By mid-November, he was sent to Fort Slocum, N.Y., where he staged with other units for deployment. Stonage was placed in the Overseas Service Army, Casual Section, awaiting permanent assignment while continuing his training.

Stonage remained at Fort Slocum until the third week in January, when he and 900 others boarded the transport ship SS Dorchester for a destination that would remain secret until they departed the port. They left New York on Jan. 22, 1943.

The Dorchester had been built in 1926 as a commercial passenger steamship. It was requisitioned by the War Shipping Administration in January 1942 as a troopship. It was nearly 400 feet long and more than 50 feet wide, weighing more than 5,600 tons.

The ship was loaded with 539 U.S. Army officers and enlisted men, a 23-man U.S. Navy gun crew, 35 Coast Guardsmen, 155 civilian employees of the War Department, 16 Danish citizens and a crew of 132. The planned route would take them to St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, and on to its final destination. The secret was now revealed — they were heading to Narsarsuaq, Greenland.

Greenland! Greenland?

Certainly, Stonage and the troops aboard the Dorchester wondered why they were heading to Greenland, a desolate Danish island possession at the top of the northwest Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Canada. Denmark was in the hands of the Germany army, so what was the purpose for going to this remote destination?

The U.S. couldn’t allow Greenland to fall into the hands of the German enemy. They signed an agreement with Denmark’s U.S. ambassador to protect the territory in exchange for placing strategic military installations on the island. The U.S. was sending aircraft and ships to Europe, and weather stations in Greenland would be critical for forecasting the weather moving across the North Atlantic.

Importantly, the air route for ferrying military aircraft from the U.S. to the United Kingdom required stops in Labrador, Greenland and Iceland. Labrador was securely located in Canada, Iceland had just been occupied by the British, so airfields

were necessary in Greenland to complete the ferry route.

The U.S. Navy had established code names for places around the world, and the code name for Greenland was “Bluie.” When the U.S. Army Air Corps decided to build air bases on Greenland to support their ferrying route, the base at Narsarsuaq was called Bluie West One, the first base on Greenland, located on its west coast. Eventually, 14 “Bluie” bases with different functions were planned, from airfields to weather stations. Blue West One was the primary airfield in Greenland on the ferrying route to the U.K.

The Dorchester departed New York as one of six ships in a lightly armed convoy SC-19, and traveled in its center. The others were two merchant ships (SS Lutz and SS Biscaya) and their three escorts (U.S. Coast Guard cutters Comanche, Escanaba and Tampa).

The captain of the Dorchester, fearing attack by German submarines, had ordered passengers and crew to their bunks fully dressed with their life vests. In the hot sleeping quarters of the ship, few followed the order.

Torpedo!

As the convoy approached its destination just before 1 a.m. Feb. 3, 1943, an explosion rocked the ship. U-Boat U-223 had spotted the convoy and fired five torpedoes. Only one hit a ship, the Dorchester.

The Dorchester was struck near the engine room. The explosion was muffled, but there was considerable concussion throughout the ship. The engine room immediately flooded, bringing the ship to a halt as she swung to starboard and stopped. Within seconds the lights went out. As the men roused from their sleep and scrambled toward the exits in the dark, they began to cascade down the steep decks as the ship severely listed to starboard. Many never donned their life vests.

During the 25 minutes after the explosion, men began to enter the frigid water. Four chaplains, George L. Fox, Clark V. Poling, John P. Washington and Alexander B. Goode, assisted the men. Seeing that several men lacked life vests, the chaplains removed theirs and handed them to those without. The chaplains would go down with the Dorchester and would soon be memorialized as American heroes.

At about 1:20 a.m., the Dorchester sank beneath the surface of the sea. The water temperature was 34 degrees and the air was 36 degrees. Survival in the water beyond 20 minutes was impossible. The escorting ships rushed to the scene to rescue survivors, but there were too few ships and too many men in the frigid water to collect them all quickly. The death toll was 675, including Pvt. George Henry Stonage.

Shortly after the disaster, his family was informed that he was missing. In late March, he was put on an official casualty list. Information regarding the loss of the Dorchester would remain unannounced until nearly 18 months later.

Charles H. Stonage, remembered

Pvt. Charles Henry Stonage was never recovered. His name is inscribed on the East Coast Memorial in Manhattan, N.Y., and on the World War II Veterans Memorial Tablet located at the intersection of Grand Boulevard and Euclid Drive in Monessen City Park. He was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart.

His son, Charles Lutes Stonage, joined the U.S. Navy in November 1944 and served with the Navy for 40 years, attaining the rank of commander. He passed away in 2013, and his obituary noted that “He had a million dollar smile.” No doubt his father would have been proud.

John J. Turanin is a retired Western Pennsylvanian and grandson of the Mon Valley. He is one of hundreds of volunteers with the nonprofit organization Stories Behind The Stars who are writing memorial stories for every one of the 421,000 U.S. service members and 31,000 Pennsylvanians who lost their lives during World War II. Those interested in joining the effort are encouraged to visit www.Stories-BehindTheStars.org.