--Mike Vogel, News Staff Reporter

Eugene Cullinan was just 14 when he went off to join World War II, signing up for the Royal Canadian Air Force before the United States got into what became a global conflict.

The decision nearly provoked war within his family. It's not that he was so young, although that did concern his mother a bitt--it was the fact that he showed up in his father's staunchly Irish household on leave, wearing an RCAF uniform.

"I was not permitted to stay in that house, wearing the King's uniform," the Kenmore resident recalled. "He said, 'Don't you know anything about our struggles?' and I said, 'But there's a war going on!'"

"Peace descended on the Grant Street household about half a century ago, when somebody blew the whistle on me when I was ready to go over," Cullinan said. So he was drummed out of the service, came home, tried school and then got his seaman's papers to sail the Great Lakes.

"Then the damned wanderlust took over again," Cullinan recalled. He lied again about his age and joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at the age of 15.

"My first trip was from New York, bound for Liverpool with a war cargo," he said.

It would be a trip that would be repeated by countless sailors, in hundreds of convoys and solo voyages through waters infested with submarines and covered at times with enemy aircraft.

In wartime service long ignored, merchant sailors fueled the engines of war--and paid a terrible price, as they moved millions of men, millions of tons of war materiel and millions of gallons of oil and gasoline into the war zones.

The bloodbath started a month after Pearl Harbor, when German U-boats started a little-publicized assault that left Eastern Seaboard nights lit by the fires of blazine coastal tankers and freighters--145 of them in one three-month period early in 1942.

By war's end, enemy action sent more than 700 U.S. merchant ships to the bottom--6,632 sailors had been killed and 609 taken prisoner. As a percentage of the quarter-million merchant seamen and 20,000 Army Transport Seamen, the casualty rate in the cargo-carrying branch of the war effort was exceed only by the losses in the Marine Corps.

"Most of 'em were misfits, like me," said Charles F. Giddings of Buffalo, who like many newcomesr to the Merchant Marine, joined after rejection as physically unfit for armed forces.

"Mostly old men and kids," said Cullinan.

They got the job done.

For Cullinan, that first trip as an engine room "wiper" on a Liberty Ship was rough. And after a stormy crossing, it got worse--the ship was sent from England to Murmansk, on the far northern Russian resupply route.

"That was one rough trip, morning noon and night," Cullinan said. "I think we lost half a dozen ships to torpedoes and dive bombers. A lifeboat would float past, and everybody in it would have frozen solid, in minutes."

In Russian ports they unloaded cargo "under constant air attack," with German forces just a few miles away, and just before Christmas the 16-year-old sailor watched the shoreline recede as the freighter headed out to a convoy rendez-vous point where "British and Russian escorts flashed a warning that the Scharnhorst was waiting for us."

The convoy steamed south, hoping to elude the dreaded German cruiser and avoid a one-sided battle that would have pitted its light guns against the raider's 16-inch shells.

"Luckily she was laying for the upcoming convoy, which was laden with cargo," Cullinan said.

The trip home wasn't easy. "The North Atlantic in late December is unbelievable," Cullinan noted. "We had several ships break up and sink."

Home at last, he signed off the ship to visit his family--where, after a month, his father eyed him and inquired, "What happened--the war over?"

After voyages as a fireman and water tender on tankers headed for Europe or South America, the now-veteran teen-ager headed for the Pacific in early 1945 on another Liberty Ship "sailing alone with no convoy."

The trip took him to the invasion of Okinawa. En route, a shipboard party at anchor in an island harbor led to mutiny charges--filed by a captain who almost had his sailors shot at dawn, until a Navy officer intervened.

After the ship got back to the States at war's end, the captain would be sent for psychiatric treatment. "Poor (guy) had war nerves," Cullinan shrugged. "You gotta have some sympathy."

Holds filled with 55-gallon drums of aviation gasoline and a lot of ammunition, the freighter spent two tense weeks unloading in Okinawa.

"It was just a continuous battle situation," Cullinan said. "Kamikazes morning, noon and night, they didn't let up."

David Morgan of Buffalo, another wiper and fireman who had worked the concession stands on the Canadiana excursion boat as a kid also found his way into the Merchant Marine from a career on the Great Lakes. Initially classified 4-F, he would successfully enlist in the Army near war's end and see duty in Italy.

On Christmas Day in 1943, though, he was a teen-ager aboard a World War I freighter entering a harbor in Scotland after a rough convoy crossing.

"We lost all the deck cargo, it was an aweful storm," he said. "The lifeboats and rafts, too, and the convoy was all scattered."

He was back again in Scotland on the first trans-Atlantic shuttle in February 1944, followed by a short but dangerous trip down the coast to England--with a shipload of 500-pound bombs. Twice, the convoy was attacked by planes.

"They came in right on top of the water, you couldn't see them until they were right on top of you," he said.

There was no letup in air raids at the docks in England, either. Even in the engine room, Morgan could hear dive bombers and the whistling of a falling bomb.

The freighter made it back to New York. Later in the spring of 1944, Morgan signed on the new SS Brandywine, an aviation gas tanker that could make the trans-Atlantic round trip in a month--mostly alone, or in small and fast convoys.

The worst trip involved a blown piston that left them drifting alone for three days while making repairs.

"It sure was a bad feeling, going up on deck and seeing everybody leaving, all blowing their whistles and waving," Morgan said. "The escort stayed for a few hours, but then had to leave, too."

The tanker was able to limp slowly into port 17 days later, through a storm. Morgan signed on a Liberty Ship carrying steam locomotives to Casablanca--and a few months later, found himself guarding the same or similar engines as an Army ammo-train guard in northern Italy.

Giddings tried to enlist at 17, then joined the Merchant Marine 1942. His first ship was a small coastal fuel tanker. On Valentine's Day in 1942, a German submarine surfaced nearby and ordered the 13-man crew to abandon ship.

"Our biggest gun was the captain's .45, and he hadn't fired that in years," said Giddings, now the commander of Buffalo's Troop I Post, American Legion.

The crew took to the lifeboats, and the U-boat commander gave them a course to the Nova Scotia shoreline before sinking the tanker with gunfire.

"We were out there a couple of days, before a corvette picked us up," Giddings said.

After a year in a civilian job, he signed on the SS San Juan Hill, a proto-type 542-foot tanker among the biggest of her time. It sailed alone from New York with a deck cargo of eighter fighter planes and then stopped in Galveston, Texas, to fill up wiht more than 300,000 gallons of extremely volitile aviation fuel concentrate.

They carried it all to Calcutta, for the Air Force's China-Burma-India bases.

"With all the troubles I had, I think I was the most scared then," he said. "This was considered a suicide run--and we had to go dead in the water for six hours, about off Madras, and that was a shooting gallery for the Japs."

"They sank one tanker ahead of us and one behind us, and I think the only reason we got through was because we stopped for that repair," added the man, who, as the smallest member of the engine room "black gang," spent the tense hours crammed inside a condenser trying to plug a leak that contaminated boiler water.

That suicide run was followed by another, through a German submarine gantlet to the Persian Gulf. They hauled fuel for the invasion of Leyte in the Philippines, acting as a floating gas station for landing craft and small warships, before ferrying more loads from the Persian Gulf to Africa and Australia.

Back in the States after seven months aboard the tanker, Giddings signed aboard a Liberty Ship and was two days from Leyte with a cargo of PT boats when the war ended.

In 1952, after 37 countries and innumerable sea miles, he found a land job in Buffalo. For years, he was part of the struggle to gain veterans recognition for those who had carried the cargoes, manning deck guns and braving bombs and torpedoes, to keep the armed forces supplied.

That recognition was slow in coming. The federal government awarded it late in 1988; New York State didn't follow suit until January 22, 1991.

For the surviving merchant mariners, the change brought some measure of reward for sacrifice--but too late for the advantages of GI Bill education, mortgages or other benefits.

"Had we got veterans status after the war, it would have affected so many lives," Cullinan lamented.