Coastguard telegram

[Don White]

Mental lapse -- I meant 1927, don't know why I said 1932.

[Arthur Rypinski]

The author of the "Rasmussen" cable was someone who had access to Coast Guard communications, and could sign his last name in confidence that the sender would be known, so---"Rasmussen" was most likely Lieutenant M.W. Rasmussen, Commandant of the Fifth Coast Guard District, which covered New Jersey.

How Lt. Rasmussen obtained to this information is unrecorded.  He may have been aboard or received a radio message from a cutter or a merchant ship, or from the master of a ship that docked in the Fifth District.

Decre writes that a coast guard patrol boat, CG-234, recovered one wing.  The most plausible hypothesis is that somebody looked at the wing and decided it wasn't interesting.  In any case, after three months, the wing could have come from most anywhere.  L'Oiseau Blanc probably lacked the fuel to get much farther south than Boston, and inshore currents south of Newfoundland would tend to carry debris into the Gulf of St Lawrence.

adr

[Don White]

Thanks for finding this -- it seems to answer any question of Rasmussen's identity. I went looking for officer rosters and hadn't found any, so, good work.

It says something about officer promotions in the inter-war USCG that the district commandant was only a lieutenant. In my father's time -- 1950s-60s-- it would have been a higher rank.

Notable too that Warner Thompson of the Itasca was a Commander in 1937, at would be a rather advanced age for that rank today.

Don W

[Ric Gillespie]

What do we make of this Coastguard telegram mentioned in the film The Oiseau Blanc Mystery? Doesn't it mean the aircraft ditched in the sea? Are there other telegrams? What happened to the wreckage?

If you read the previous postings on this thread, you'll see that there is no reasonable chance that the wreckage described in the telegram was from l'Oiseau Blanc.