AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

The history of the Chief Warrant and Warrant Officers Association has not been well documented and, until now, has never been formally published

Complicating this effort, many official records concerning the early history of warrant officers in the Revenue Cutter Service were destroyed in two nineteenth-century fires at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. As noted by Dr. Robert Schiena, Coast Guard Historian in 1985, it is “difficult to trace the evolution of warrants in the service.”
Several Association committees have attempted to document our early years. In 1963, one committee drafted several pages summarizing early efforts to influence Congressional legislation. Another effort in 1969, led by then-President CWO4 Fay K. Thompson, gathered letters, recollections, and personal anecdotes from members.
Unfortunately, no warrant or chief warrant officers who participated in the formation of the National Association remain living at the time of this writing.
What survives today are fragments of history: old newsletters, mimeographed meeting minutes, magazine clippings, pamphlets, and personal correspondence between former members. Many of these materials offer conflicting accounts regarding the origins of the Association.
The most comprehensive collection of historical material resides in the Association office archives, formerly maintained aboard the houseboat moored near Coast Guard Headquarters at Buzzards Point in Washington, D.C.
One pamphlet prepared for the decommissioning of CGC AGASSIZ observed:
“The date of the first Association of Warrant Officers organization is somewhat nebulous today. The Association as we know it now began in the latter part of the 1920s, though there were earlier predecessors of a local nature.”
What follows is my effort to document the early years of the Association and to highlight the accomplishments of the CWOA through the decades leading to the present.
I extend my sincere thanks to Mr. Bob Lewis, past Association President, Distinguished Member, and Director of Member Services. Without his invaluable assistance in organizing and assembling the Association’s historical files, this work would not have been possible.
William H. Ball, CWO3 (INF)
Washington, D.C.
1994