49 Fun Facts About Coast Guard

Which Founding Father persuaded Congress in 1790 to fund the ten cutters that grew into the Coast Guard?

Alexander Hamilton asked for ten armed cutters to make sure ships paid the import duties that funded the young government.

In 2022 the Coast Guard's Admiral Linda Fagan became the first woman to do what?

Lead a US armed service: Fagan took over as commandant in June 2022 and held the post until the incoming Trump administration removed her in January 2025.

The modern Coast Guard was created on 28 January 1915 by merging the revenue cutters with which agency?

The Life-Saving Service ordered its beach crews to keep trying until a rescue was proved impossible, which is where the surfmen's saying came from: 'You have to go out, but you don't have to come back.'

What is the Coast Guard's Latin motto?

Semper Paratus means 'Always Ready'; nobody knows exactly how the service came to choose it, but in the 1920s one of its own captains set the phrase to music as the Coast Guard's marching song.

Which federal department has the Coast Guard operated under in peacetime since 2003?

Homeland Security took in the Coast Guard when the department opened in 2003 after the September 11 attacks, leaving it the only armed service outside the Defense Department.

Which cabinet department was the Coast Guard's peacetime home for its first 177 years, until 1967?

Department of the Treasury: the first cutters existed to make ships pay customs duties, so the service answered to the department that collected the money.

As of 2025, which is the only US armed service with fewer members than the Coast Guard?

The Space Force, created in 2019, has far fewer uniformed members than the Coast Guard's 40,000 or so on active duty; until then the Coast Guard had been the smallest armed service.

Douglas Munro, the Coast Guard's only Medal of Honor recipient, died shielding Marines in which 1942 campaign?

Guadalcanal: Munro led the landing craft that pulled Chesty Puller's cut-off Marines off the beach, and a shipmate said his dying words were 'Did they get off?'

Douglas Munro, the Coast Guard's only Medal of Honor recipient, grew up in Washington state but was born in which country?

Canada: he was born in Vancouver to an American father, and after he was killed his mother Edith joined the Coast Guard herself and rose to lieutenant.

The Coast Guard training ship Eagle was originally built in 1936 for which navy?

Germany's navy trained cadets aboard her as the Horst Wessel; taken as a war prize, she was sailed to America in 1946 by a Coast Guard crew helped by her German sailors.

Sinbad, the mascot who sailed on the cutter Campbell through World War II, was what kind of animal?

A dog: the crew enlisted the mixed-breed puppy with his own paperwork and bunk, and he became famous enough for Life magazine stories and a published biography.

In which Connecticut city is the United States Coast Guard Academy?

New London: the academy began afloat, as a class of cadets aboard a schooner, moved to the city's Fort Trumbull in 1910, and in 1932 to its present campus up the river.

What sets Coast Guard Academy admission apart from the other US service academies?

It requires no congressional nomination: every place is won through a nationwide competition, so no senator or representative has to put a cadet's name forward.

The Coast Guard's only recruit training centre, its boot camp, is in which New Jersey town?

Cape May has trained every enlisted recruit since 1982, when the service stopped running a second boot camp on the West Coast at Alameda, California.

The Coast Guard's diagonal 'racing stripe' came from the firm of which designer, who also restyled Air Force One?

Raymond Loewy's firm proposed the slash to give the Coast Guard a look of its own, because the public it served kept failing to recognise its cutters and aircraft.

Which president, delighted with his new Air Force One livery, suggested the Coast Guard as the next agency to restyle?

John F. Kennedy made the suggestion to the jet's designer; the stripe that resulted, tilted at 64 degrees, was ordered onto every cutter and aircraft in 1967.

Coast Guard aviator Elmer Stone co-piloted the Navy seaplane NC-4, which in 1919 made the first flight across what?

The Atlantic Ocean: the NC-4 crossed in stages by way of the Azores in May 1919, weeks before Alcock and Brown made the first nonstop crossing that June.

Which Hollywood costume designer was hired in the 1970s to design the Coast Guard's uniform for women?

Edith Head, winner of eight Oscars for films such as The Sting, was brought in as the number of women in the service grew after they joined the regular Coast Guard in 1973.

Which 2016 Disney film starring Chris Pine dramatises the Coast Guard's 1952 rescue of the tanker Pendleton's crew?

The Finest Hours follows coxswain Bernie Webber, who took three men out in a small lifeboat after a storm snapped the tanker in two and trapped more than 30 sailors in its sinking stern.

In 1952 four Coast Guardsmen in a small lifeboat saved 32 tanker crewmen off which cape?

Cape Cod: coxswain Bernard Webber took the CG 36500 out from Chatham in a winter storm and squeezed aboard 32 of the 33 men on the tanker's stern, earning all four of the crew the Coast Guard's top rescue medal.

The International Ice Patrol, founded after the Titanic sank, tracks icebergs on the Grand Banks off which Canadian island?

Newfoundland: the Titanic struck its iceberg just south of the Grand Banks, and Coast Guard crews still track the bergs that drift into those shipping lanes.

Which Coast Guard arm was created in 1939 as the 'Reserve' and renamed two years later?

The Auxiliary: in 1941 Congress gave the Reserve name to a new military branch of the service, and the civilian volunteers who had carried it became the Auxiliary.

Which helicopter specialists did the Coast Guard introduce after 31 sailors died when the Marine Electric sank in 1983?

Rescue swimmers: that night a Navy helicopter had to bring a swimmer to reach men in the freezing sea, and an inquiry found the Coast Guard alone could not put anyone in the water from the air.

Which 2006 film starred Kevin Costner as a Coast Guard instructor and Ashton Kutcher as his trainee?

The Guardian was filmed partly at the Coast Guard's own air station in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, dressed with fake snow to pass for a far-northern base, with off-duty Coast Guard members as extras.

The Coast Guard icebreaker Healy became in 2015 the first unaccompanied US surface vessel to reach where?

The North Pole: Healy made the trip unescorted, arriving on 5 September 2015 with scientists who took thousands of water and ice samples; on her first visit she had sailed in company with another icebreaker.

The icebreaker Polar Star breaks a channel each year to resupply which Antarctic base?

McMurdo Station gets its year's food and fuel by freighter through the channel she cuts each summer; to open it Polar Star can back up and ram through ice 21 feet thick.

The Coast Guard's MH-65 Dolphin helicopter is a variant of an aircraft from which country?

France: the Dolphin is Aerospatiale's Dauphin with its name translated, though the Coast Guard's were assembled in Texas with American engines and avionics.

The Coast Guard's MH-60 rescue helicopter belongs to the same Sikorsky family as which Army helicopter?

The Black Hawk: the Coast Guard's Jayhawk descends from the Army machine by way of the Navy's Seahawk, and in 1990 it began taking over from the ageing HH-3F Pelican.

A Coast Guard vessel 65 feet or longer is a cutter; what is anything shorter officially called?

A boat: a cutter must also have a crew living aboard; the word was borrowed from a small single-masted English sailing vessel and stuck to the service's larger ships whatever their type.

The Coast Guard's Legend-class National Security Cutters were built at Pascagoula, in which Gulf Coast state?

Mississippi: the Ingalls yard at Pascagoula, which also builds Navy destroyers, turned out the Legend class to replace the service's twelve ageing high-endurance cutters.

After which hurricane did Coast Guard crews rescue or evacuate more than 33,000 people, six times their total in an average year?

Katrina: of some 60,000 people who needed rescuing from rooftops and flooded homes in 2005, Coast Guard crews drawn from every district saved more than half.

What nickname stuck to the volunteer yachts that watched for U-boats for the Coast Guard in World War II?

The Hooligan's Navy: its volunteers included Ernest Hemingway, who patrolled the Florida Straits aboard his Pilar, and Humphrey Bogart, who took out a yacht of his own.

What was the D-Day flotilla of 60 wooden 83-foot Coast Guard rescue cutters nicknamed?

They pulled 400 Allied airmen and sailors from the Channel on 6 June 1944.

Which lighthouse, first lit in 1716, kept a keeper until 2023?

Boston Light was the last American lighthouse to be automated, in 1998, yet kept a keeper anyway; Sally Snowman, the first woman in the job, retired in 2023 as the country's last official keeper.

What was the mission of Operation Market Time, in which Coast Guard cutters served under the Navy in Vietnam?

Intercepting enemy supply boats: 82-foot cutters joined the Navy's coastal picket line in 1965, and a year later the Point Grey drove a trawler loaded with arms for the Viet Cong aground.

Ida Lewis, America's most famous woman lighthouse keeper, was credited with saving 18 lives in the harbour of which Rhode Island city?

Newport: Lewis took over Lime Rock light after her father's stroke, and in 1881 won the government's gold medal for lifesaving after hauling two soldiers out of the harbour ice.

The revenue cutter Bear, the Coast Guard's most famous ship, was best known for patrols where?

The Arctic off Alaska: under 'Hell Roaring Mike' Healy the Bear ferried reindeer over from Siberia in the 1890s so that hungry Alaskan villages could raise herds of their own.

A Coast Guard cutter docked as a museum in Maryland is the last floating warship from which battle?

Pearl Harbor: berthed at nearby Honolulu that morning, the cutter Taney manned her guns and opened fire on the attacking planes.

Which Michigan town, home of the Coast Guard Festival, was named 'Coast Guard City, USA' by Congress in 1998?

Grand Haven was home port to the cutter Escanaba, lost off Greenland in 1943 with all but two of her crew; the festival each August still holds a memorial service for her.

The Coast Guard's only shipyard, founded in 1899, sits on Curtis Bay on the edge of which city?

Baltimore: the Coast Guard Academy spent its first decade ashore at the yard before moving north, and the yard has built and repaired the service's cutters and lifeboats ever since.

In 1980 helicopters hoisted hundreds of passengers from lifeboats after the cruise ship Prinsendam caught fire in which waters?

The Gulf of Alaska: with the ship ablaze far off Yakutat, a loaded supertanker steamed for hours to reach the lifeboats and took survivors aboard, and nobody died.

From which Cuban harbour did the 1980 flotilla bring about 125,000 Cubans to Florida?

Mariel: Fidel Castro opened the port to anyone who wanted to leave, and for six months the Coast Guard, with hundreds of reservists called up, shepherded overloaded boats across the Florida Straits.

Unlike its American counterpart, the Canadian Coast Guard, formed in 1962, is what kind of organisation?

A civilian, unarmed agency: its crews have no military or police powers, and it kept that civilian status even after Ottawa moved it into the Department of National Defence in 2025.

HM Coastguard was founded in Britain in 1822 with what primary objective?

Preventing smuggling was the job when the new force was placed under the Board of Customs; today it coordinates Britain's sea rescues while the volunteer RNLI crews the lifeboats.

Which country's coast guard began in 1948 as the Maritime Safety Agency, built from the remains of its disbanded navy?

Japan: American occupation authorities had the agency set up on the model of the US Coast Guard, and it took its present English name only in 2000.

The Coast Guard ensign of 1799 has 16 stripes, one for each what?

American state: there were 16 in the Union in 1799, and cutters needed a flag of their own to show their authority when ordering a merchant ship to stop.

Which golf legend served three years in the Coast Guard before turning professional?

Arnold Palmer quit college to enlist, came back in 1954, and within months had won the US Amateur and turned professional.

Myrtle Hazard, the first woman to enlist in the Coast Guard, served in World War I as what?

A radio operator: Hazard enlisted in January 1918 with the rating of electrician, and newspapers of the day wrote her up as the only woman electrician in the Coast Guard.

Which bestselling author spent 20 years in the Coast Guard, rising from mess attendant to its first chief journalist?

Alex Haley taught himself to write to fight the boredom of long wartime voyages, and left the service in 1959, 17 years before Roots made him famous.