US Merchant Marine Engineer Michael Joseph Byrnes Jr. was born in Pensacola, Florida on January 25, 1889, the son of Michael Joseph Byrnes Sr. (1851-1894) and Mary Frances Royalty (1855-1926). His father was born in Ireland and his mother in Bagdad, Florida. After immigrating to the US from Ireland, Michael Sr. made his way to Pensacola prior to 1885. Here, he met and married Mary Frances Royalty and took employment as a stevedore. Shortly thereafter he joined the Pensacola Police Department and served until he was forced to resign due to health reasons in January 1894. He would succumb to his illness that February and was buried in the St. Michael's Cemetery.
After her husband's death, Mary received a check for $2,000 from an insurance policy he had taken out through the US Railway Mail Service Mutual Benefit Association. It was delivered to her by her local agent Joseph Johnston Hooten. Her son Michael would continue to help support his mother through a variety of jobs. He was a cashier for the Fisher Real Estate Agency in 1908 and a collector for the Pensacola Loan Company the following year. In 1910, he was the manager of the New York Brokerage Company at 20 East Government Street. Here he stayed until he enlisted in the Florida National Guard where he served for six years as a corporal. In 1920, he was in New York at the Brooklyn Army Base as a chief engineer. Six years later when his mother passed away in 1926, he was still in Brooklyn. She would join her husband in St. Michael Cemetery.
After WWII began, Michael enlisted in the US Merchant Marines and became a Third Mate aboard the SS West Lashaway. The ship was launched in 1918 and during WWII was ushered into service in Africa. On August 30, 1942, she was sailing from the Port of Matadi in the Congo to the Port of Spain in Trinidad. They were carrying a cargo of tin, copper, cocoa beans, and palm oil with a crew of 56. About 375 miles east of Trinidad, she crossed paths with the German submarine U-66. The sub's Captain Gerhard Seehausen fired two torpedoes that struck the Lashaway midships and flooded her so rapidly that she rolled over and sank within one minute. Everyone that could jumped overboard and swam to rafts that floated free because there was no time to launch the lifeboats. A British Customs Official along with two missionary families were among the passengers of which many perished. In all, twenty-five merchant mariners, nine US navy gunners, and four of the passengers went down with the ship.
The U-66 would face her own karma when she was sunk on May 6, 1944, by the destroyer USS Buckley after the two vessels rammed each other.
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