Posthumous Purple Hearts For WW1 CG Crew

"Anna Bonaparte was 4 years old when her father James Wilkie died on board the USS Tampa on Sept. 26, 1918. Though she didn’t have many memories of her father, she constantly spoke about him and his service in the Coast Guard, said her son Wallace Bonaparte.
Next month, Bonaparte, a former Army captain, will travel from his home in Charleston, S.C., to Washington, D.C., to receive a Purple Heart in honor of his grandfather, as part of an initiative to recognize the 115 servicemembers who died more than 100 years ago on board the ship.
Anna Bonaparte died in 2012, and Wallace can only imagine how proud she would have been to see her father receive a medal for his service.
“Being ex-military, I do know that it is an honor to be a recipient and it is an exceptional honor,” said the 77-year-old Vietnam War veteran.
Wilkie was a 29-year-old cook on the Tampa, a Coast Guard cutter, when a
German submarine sank it off the coast of England during the final months of World War I. All 130 men on board died. The event was the single largest loss of life for the service branch during World War I, and accounted for more than half of all Coast Guard deaths during the war.
The Purple Heart was extended to the Coast Guard in 1942, and 10 years later, it became to be awarded retroactively for actions after April 5, 1917.
However, it wasn’t until 1999 that efforts began to have the medal awarded to the 111 Coast Guard members and four Navy sailors on board the Tampa, said Nora Chidlow, an archivist with the Coast Guard. Other people on the Tampa included British sailors and civilians."
Coast Guard looks to award Purple Hearts to USS Tampa crew killed during WWI

 

The Coast Guard lost a higher percentage of men than any other branch of the US military during WWI, almost entirely to submarines.

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