Rail, Minesweeper No. 26, was a Lapwing-class minesweeper, the first Navy ship of the name, for the small wading bird. DANFS gives her 840 tons, a length of 187 feet 10 inches, a beam of 35 feet 6 inches, a draft of 10 feet 4 inches, 14 knots, a complement of 72, and two machine guns as the designed armament. The Puget Sound Navy Yard at Bremerton laid her down on 15 December 1917. She was launched on 25 April 1918, sponsored by Mrs. Robert Morgan, and commissioned on 5 June 1918 with Ensign R. E. Allen, USNRF, in command. She was designated AM-26 on 17 July 1920.
Assigned to the Atlantic Fleet, she left Bremerton on 25 June 1918, reached Key West on 11 August, and went on to Norfolk for minesweeping and training into 1919. In March she sailed to Boston and then to Inverness. On 20 April she joined the North Sea Minesweeping Detachment. Eight days later the detachment began the first of seven operations that cleared the barrage between the Orkneys and Norway. The first sweep ended on 2 May and the ships put into Kirkwall, the base for the other six. Mines that fouled her kite and exploded damaged her on 8 July and on 29 August. She stayed through the seventh operation, finished on 19 September. On 15 October she left Devonport with others of the class and reached Tompkinsville, New York, on 20 November 1919. The detachment was disbanded within the week. She went to Norfolk for overhaul, was sent back to the North Sea, and operated from Rosyth in April, May, and June 1920. She sailed for home on 17 June.
With Mine Force, Atlantic, and based at Norfolk, she swept off the east coast and in the Caribbean on the annual deployments until 1925. In mid-February 1925 she returned to the Pacific, took part in Fleet Problem V until 12 March, operated in Hawaiian waters into June, and on 8 June headed back to the Atlantic. She spent several months of each year in the Caribbean through the rest of the decade. In February 1932 she transited the Panama Canal, went north to San Francisco, and through 1934 trained and maneuvered off the west coast. On 9 April 1934 she left San Francisco for the east coast, then came back through the Canal late in the year for Fleet Problem XVI. After a short time at Pearl Harbor she shifted to San Diego in June 1935. She stayed there almost three years, deploying west only once, to Pearl Harbor for Fleet Problem XVIII in the spring of 1937. In late December 1938 she went to the Panama Canal Zone for four months and was back at San Diego in May 1939. DANFS says she was transferred to Pearl Harbor eleven months later.
On 7 December 1941 her commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Francis Willis Beard, was not on board. His report of 11 December says Rail was at the Coal Docks, nested in a group of four minesweepers, port side to. She opened with the 3-inch antiaircraft battery fifteen minutes after the first bomb, and with .30 caliber machine guns, rifles, and pistols twenty minutes after the attack. The ships at the Coal Docks got underway and moored to buoys in the target basin so they could use all their batteries and scatter. The inboard ship, which was under upkeep, stayed at the dock. From the buoys they had a clear field of fire at the planes over Hickam and over Pearl Harbor. Beard estimated 100 dive bombers and torpedo planes and 50 high-altitude bombers. A string of about twenty bombs from the high-altitude bombers fell in the channel astern of Rail, about sixty yards off. He estimated that two strings of twenty to twenty-five bombs each hit Hickam, and that about forty dive bombers concentrated there. The planes left toward Barbers Point. Rail had no material losses and no personnel losses. Shrapnel fell throughout the ship. The report says, as its own sentence, that one plane was shot down. It does not say Rail alone shot it down. Ensign R. W. Whalen, USNR, was the senior officer on board and had the duty. Machinist W. F. Fenske was on board to relieve him. Whalen suggested getting into the stream. Beard commended both of them, and wrote that their knowledge of aircraft kept the ship from firing on friendly planes.
DANFS says that within minutes of the start of the attack her crew had the planes under fire with .50 caliber machine guns, that rescue and salvage work began and was interrupted shortly after noon for sweeping in the North Channel, that salvage resumed on the 8th and continued until the 21st, and that from then until 19 January 1942 she underwent engine repairs. Three days later she left Pearl Harbor as escort for a ship bound for Johnston Island. The action report of 11 December does not describe a sweep or .50 caliber guns. It describes 3-inch and .30 caliber fire, rifles, and pistols. On 1 June 1942 she was reclassified as a tug, AT-139. She stayed in the Hawaiian area on antisubmarine patrol, experimental minesweeping, salvage, and towing.
On 26 January 1943 she left with two barges in tow for Samoa, arrived on 11 February, and went on to Noumea and the New Hebrides. In March she moved to the Solomons for the Russell Islands offensive. Through the New Georgia campaign she towed gasoline, oil, and ordnance barges, retrieved landing craft, helped with rescue and salvage, and brought damaged ships into Tulagi. In mid-September 1943 she returned to Noumea and towed in the New Caledonia area. In January 1944 she had a tow to the New Hebrides and spent the latter half of the month on a run to New Zealand and back. In February she towed out of Espiritu Santo. On 15 May 1944 she became ATO-139, an old ocean tug. On 1 June she left the Solomons and New Hebrides for New Guinea, reached Milne Bay on the 4th, and worked that coast from Milne Bay to Biak through the summer. In October she visited Cairns, then worked the New Guinea coast, the Admiralties, and in November the Halmaheras. In late November and early December she towed barges to Leyte. Toward the end of the year she left Manus with the Luzon attack force.
On 5 January 1945 she transited Surigao Strait. On the 7th she entered the South China Sea, where Japanese aircraft tried to turn the force. On the 9th the ships entered Lingayen Gulf and she stood by to help. Through the 14th she retrieved, salvaged, and towed. On the 18th, after an intelligence and salvage inspection of a sunken Japanese submarine, she went south to Leyte and then back to Luzon for the assaults on Zambales at the end of the month, operation Mike VII. With no opposition off San Antonio she moved to Grande Island, at the entrance to Subic Bay, assisted the damaged attack transport Cavalier (APA-37), and returned to Leyte on 4 February. Two weeks later she went back to New Guinea, was overhauled at Hollandia, and late in April brought more barges to the Philippines. She arrived at Leyte on 1 May and stayed in the Philippines, mostly around Samar, Leyte, and Luzon, through mid-December. On 26 December she left Guiuan and reached San Francisco on 5 February 1946. A material inspection finished on 25 February recommended that she be decommissioned, stricken, and turned over to the Maritime Commission for disposal as a usable vessel. She was decommissioned on 29 April 1946 and stricken on 15 August 1946. The Maritime Commission accepted her on 23 December 1946, and she was delivered the same day to the Crowley Launch and Tugboat Company. She earned six battle stars.
A note on sources. The career follows the DANFS entry for Rail, revised by Robert J. Cressman on 1 August 2017. The morning of 7 December follows Beard's report of 11 December 1941, from the Modern Military Branch at the National Archives in College Park. DANFS and that report disagree on the guns and on whether she swept the North Channel that afternoon. The report is followed for the guns, the ammunition is not given as a count, and the plane sentence is left as Beard wrote it. Turkey's report says no one of the four minesweepers could claim a smoking plane, because all were firing. Bobolink's report says a plane crashed near Hickam as the result of one of the minesweepers, and does not name which. Commanding officers are NavSource's list. Herbert Kincaid Smith's tour is dated to September 1944 with no day, and Theodore Paul Pierce's tour begins that same month with no day.