This article is from the spring 2025 edition of Mobile Baykeeper’s print quarterly, CURRENTS. The magazine is mailed to active members who have given more than $50 in the past year. To get on the magazine’s mailing list, donate here.
By Jody Kamins Harper | Illustration by Courtney Spencer
I was about eight years old when my granddad decided to take me on a discovery trip up into the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
It was not a usual sort of outing for our family. He worked each day surveying ships anchored at the State Docks at the foot of Water Street, while my mother worked every weekday at Turner Supply Company and later at a local office of Merrill Lynch. My grandmother and I were relegated to household life in Midtown, with cyclical visits to the hairdresser or the farmer’s market.
My grandad and my grandmother were fraught with a protective nature, so my childhood was an orderly and sheltered existence, though I realized if I listened closely, I might sometimes overhear of the fun and adventures my family had before I came along. My grandfather had plenty of adventures in the work he had done, but he was close-mouthed about it. Most of the intriguing moments he’d had I only heard about incidentally from my mother and grandmother.
My grandfather, Capt. Marion Chester Smith, had a diverse work history, serving in the Merchant Marines. He was called upon once, while serving as first mate on a merchant ship, to deal with a Nazi submarine commander who had surfaced and demanded to check their ship’s hold.
He later worked as a commercial airline navigator for, among other airlines, one owned by tycoon Howard Hughes. (I have guessed by his grin at the mention of it, that his favorite flight was one in which the beautiful Irish actress Maureen O’Hara was his passenger.) His captain’s license included certification for navigation of sections of the Mississippi River, and though he had never attended college, he had an astounding knowledge of mathematics, celestial navigation, and enough knowledge of science to warn me that there is no law of physics or logic to justify the flight mechanisms of helicopters. He was shrewd and careful, and kept an iron grip on our family, a chattering society of girls that barely let him get a word in edgewise. (He once complained with a rueful smile that even the wire-haired-terrier was a female.)
Our boat trip into the Mobile River and on up into the Tensaw that day in the mid-1970s was literally a once-in-a-lifetime event, so it still astounds me when I think of it. (Our family outings together were usually Saturday luncheons at various Greek-owned restaurants complete with a good gin martini, a demitasse coffee with dessert, and some scamp almondine in between.)
The odd part of our trip was my grandfather’s declared intention to go up by this little boat we rode on and set foot on historic Blakeley Island and look for arrowheads. As I recall, we never did find the right spot for arrowhead hunting.
But, as a sort of sidewise, offhand leg of the outing, we glided up underneath the huge, imposing shadow of the hulls of The Ghost Fleet, an armada of more than 300 World-War II supply ships that had been retired on the Tensaw. It was an awesome moment, being dwarfed by their vastness and the resounding stillness. The ships sat high in the water, the propeller blades just visible above that surface. They were empty of any cargo, light and unladen. My grandfather nodded up toward them and said to me, “You know, BigaDaddy was the one who mothballed them up here, after the war.” I was still young, and just starting to understand what this term “mothball” meant, but I did know we stored our coats in a cedar closet that still held the scent of old mothballs, which had been used to deter moths from eating holes in the wool.
At that age, I only knew that my great-grandfather, Capt. Charles Sumner Bodden, or “BigaDaddy,” as he was affectionately nicknamed, had been a sea captain who immigrated to Mobile from Grand Cayman, British West Indies with his wife, Nina, and their first child. He and his four brothers had formed Whitney-Bodden Shipping in the early 1900s and he sailed forth upon the mighty deep as the ship’s master on their three- and four-masted schooners, shipping lumber to ports like Bluefields, Nicaraugua and Havana, Cuba.
When my mother was a little girl, he would regale her with stories of his high-seas adventures while lathering his chin for his morning shave. But, by the time of the post-war scuttling of former World War II Liberty ships and tankers, he had retired from the second chapter of his life at sea, as a captain for Waterman Steamship Company, having voyaged to both Germany and Japan and other far-flung ports of call. He came home from one pre-war voyage and told his eldest son of the scrap-metal shipments the U.S. was sending overseas, noting, “We’re just shipping it over there so they can shoot it back at us.” A deft appraisal, he made this long before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
At the time we glided past these old ships, I had no understanding of life at sea or World War II or shipbuilding in Mobile. My only marine experience was in learning to say “over” and “over and out” when speaking with my grandad when he called us from a ship-to-shore radio from Vietnam, since in the late 1960s he was a navigator for merchant vessels and aircraft that brought supplies to our military stationed there. He had taken me with him to visit one of the ships at the Port of Mobile when I was very young, and the steep climb up the gangway alongside the giant hull gave me a real sense of the massive scale of a ship’s structure.
The Ghost Fleet, as it was called, was composed of merchant vessels built for transporting goods and supplies to the Allies during World War II. After the war, these Liberty ships and tanker ships were retained in case they were needed for any possible military action in the future.
By the mid-1970s, the hulking ships, still strung together like metal pieces daisy-chained in a giant rust-encrusted bracelet, were far removed from their captains, crew, and the stories they’d once held. Newspapermen wrote romantic paragraphs about the vigilant old ships awaiting their destruction by metal scrappers in Panama City, or of their imminent sinkings masterminded by Alabama politicians dreaming of ways to use them to create new fishing habitats in the Gulf. Local boaters and recreational fishermen ogled them wistfully from the river they had been placed in by salt-wearied captains, including my great-grandfather.
The victory ships, tankers and liberty ships embodied the American energy and toil that created them, with a ship being riveted or welded into existence at ADDSCO dry docks with startling speed. Every two weeks, another ship would be launched out into the water to steam down into the Mobile Ship Channel and onward to the theatre of the high seas, be it Atlantic, Pacific, or other distant oceans involved in the war.
“I remember going to the launches at the foot of Eslava Street,” recalls Will Haas, 93, who was just a boy when the war began. He watched as the ship would be sent sideways into the water when launched.
“The older ships were riveted when built, but later they started welding them … everyone was building the hell out of them.” He noted that many people moved to Mobile to work in the shipyards, and that the pay for their labor was definitely worth the relocation.
Haas, who joined the Navy in 1952, came back to Mobile and in the early 1960s got involved in the salvage business through his father-in-law’s marine surplus business. Eventually, he was active in salvaging various parts of these old ships of the ghost fleet when they were sent to the wrecking yards of Panama City, Florida. There, he harvested wire, turnbuckles, shackles, blocks and other parts from the ships. In his collection, he has other items, like a brass binnacle with its compass and lanterns that were once a part of these working vessels.
The sheer number of wartime ships built by the United States overwhelmed the enemy. Germany, known for its technical prowess, could not produce warheads fast enough to torpedo the Allies’ profusion of ships. The workforce of men and women that built these ships helped the Allies win the war. The men who served upon these ships and tankers to provide goods and fuel to the Armed Forces of the United States risked and often gave their lives to assure the Allied victory. For years, The Ghost Fleet silently stood in tribute to this accomplishment of a nation focused on the protection of our liberty.
