by John Hersey
The first man to see the U-boat on the surface was Fire Controlman First Class Robert Maher. When the submarine popped up to port and astern, Maher forgot his formal naval vocabulary and screamed, “There it is—just to the right of the flare!” It was four hundred yards away, huge and almost white.
As if by reflex, with only a moment’s thought, Lieutenant Hutchins decided that he could swing his ship around faster than the gun crew could traverse their four-inch guns to bear on the target, so he put his head down, raised his right arm in his clubbing gesture, and roared to his helmsman, Seaman Third Class James M. Aikenhead, to put the wheel hard right—away from rather than toward the submarine. Hutchins ordered the searchlight turned on. This lit up the sleek gray target, but it also gave the Germans something to aim at.
The Borie got the first shot in, with the Number Four gun, astern, about halfway through the circling turn. It missed. Then all the Borie’s guns opened fire. Men on the Borie could see Germans scrambling out on the conning tower to man the machine guns there.
The Borie straightened out and went after the submarine, verging to the right so that as she caught up she would be broadside to the enemy. The submarine could make about twelve knots, and the Borie was now pounding out twenty-seven again.
The gun duel was one-sided. The Germans never attempted to man their big deck gun, for the U-boat’s deck was awash, and great waves were breaking over the gun. In any case, the second or third salvo from the Borie lifted that gun off the deck and threw it in the sea. Sailors of the Borie later said they saw the gun in mid-air.
Soon the destroyer began to put up alongside the submarine, and Americans could see Germans clearly and close to. The U-boat had apparently been surprised, because several Germans were obviously straight out of their bunks; they came out on the conning tower in the nearly freezing night in nothing but underwear pants. Some were dressed in sweaters and shorts, others in dungarees. Many wore bandannas of green, yellow, and red; those without bandannas had very long hair.
When the destroyer’s machine guns found the conning tower, the German guns fell silent and never fired again. As each German ran toward a machine gun he would be killed. There were times when no Germans were visible, and then, in response to long training to pick out some specific target, whether human or not, gun captains began shouting, “Bend up their guns! Get those——guns bent up.”
The U-boat commander, realizing that he was outgunned, tried to outmaneuver Lieutenant Hutchins. He swung left and aimed his stern, which carried the sting of torpedo tubes, at the destroyer. Hutchins swung left, too, at first gently, hoping to stay broadside to the U-boat on the outer of two parallel curves. But the German, circling tightly, kept his stem aimed at the Borie and fired a torpedo, which missed. At that Hutchins had Aikenhead turn full left rudder, which made the German think the Borie was going to cut across the U-boat’s stem and come up inside its curve. Therefore the German straightened out. Hutchins turned hard right again and the situation was just what it had been a few moments before—the two ships running on roughly parallel courses, with the destroyer a little behind the U-boat but overtaking it.
For the next few minutes the Borie’s guns drummed the submarine. The electric firing circuit of the forecastle gun stopped working. Gun Captain Kenneth J. Reynolds fired the gun once by pulling the lanyard, but it broke. Rather than taking the time to find a piece of string to make an new lanyard, he began to trip the firing pin with his hand. He could not get his hand out of the way in time to beat the swift recoil, so his forearm and wrist were severely pounded and later swelled up to three times normal size. All the time the heavy seas were breaking over the forecastle gun, and a Negro mess attendant, Steward’s Mate Second Class Ernest Gardner, twice grasped and saved a man from being washed overboard.
The Borie caught up with the German and began to pull ahead.
The men of the Borie had dreamed, as in wartime all destroyermen dream, of ramming the side of an enemy submarine and putting it down. Many times, at the wheel, Helmsman Aikenhead had talked of ramming. Just three days before, Lieutenant Hutchins had jokingly taken a piece of chalk and drawn on the center porthole, directly in front of the helmsman’s eyes, three concentric rings and two lines crossing at their center. He called it the Borie’s ramming sight. Now, therefore, Hutchins put his head down and lifted his clubbing arm and shouted, “All right, Aikenhead, line her up. Get the sight on.”
Aikenhead spun the wheel and in a few seconds quietly said, “All right, sir, I got her on.”
Hutchins shouted an order to be passed on to the crew: “All stations stand by for ram!”
The talkers bent their heads and said into their phones in the parroting, singsong voice of all talkers, “All stations stand by for ram.”
The German seemed to be holding his course, as if unaware of his danger. It appeared that there would be a collision.
Men on the destroyer braced themselves for the shock and the pleasure. Hutchins rushed out into the open on the left wing of the bridge and held tight to the windscreen there. Aikenhead embraced the wheel. Gunnery Officer Walter H. Dietz, Jr., topside on the director platform, fell in love with the range finder and hugged it tight. Everyone was set.
Then in the last few seconds the German swerved sharply left and a huge wave lifted the Borie.
These two things made the moment of impact a disappointment to all hands. There was no shock. No one could hear a crunching noise. The wave lifted the Borie’s bow high and put it gently on the deck of the submarine, just forward of the conning tower. Momentum and the thirty-degree angle imposed by the German made the Borie’s bow slide forward on the submarine’s. There was scarcely any damage to either craft. In the Borie’s forward engine room no one even knew the ships had met until the order came down to stop all engines.
And so the two ships came to rest, bow over bow, at an angle, locked in a mortal V.
DISAPPOINTMENT at the collision at once gave way to a crazy elation when the men on the destroyer saw how they had the German pinned down. Lieutenant Hutchins worked his clubbing arm, as if beating someone’s brains out, and roared, “Fire! Fire! Open fire!” Then he just yelled, “Yipee!”—over and over. Men on the bridge threw their arms around each other and danced, shouting. “We’ve got the——, we’ve got the——!”
The searchlight bathed the conning tower, and all guns that could bear opened up at a thirty-foot range. For their part the Germans did not lack a mad courage. They kept coming out of the conning-tower hatch and trying to get to their guns, even in death agonies trying to man their hopeless guns. The sight was a horrible one. Some shells took Germans and pitched them bodily overboard. One German was hit squarely in the chest by a twenty-millimeter shell; his head and shoulders flew one way, his trunk another.
The situation affected different men in different ways. Range Finder Operator Seaman First Class Carl Banks, ordinarily a shy, quiet, gentle boy, finding himself now with nothing to do since range had been reduced to zero, marched up and down the director platform shouting, “Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em!” Other men were elated and laughed loudly and cracked jokes. Seaman Second Class Edward N. Malaney walked to the left wing of the bridge and, amazed at the size of the submarine, said, “My God, what’s that? The Bremen?” Other men went quietly about their work. Chief Quartermaster William Shakerly kept taking thorough notes in his log, and in the chartroom Executive Officer Lieutenant Philip Brown meticulously completed his plot of the course of action.
Then in the middle of the bedlam Brown went out on the bridge and reported to the captain. He saluted and said, “I’ve secured the plot, sir. To hell with charting this battle. All the essential facts are right underneath us.” Brown went to the flag bags, where small arms were stowed, and picked himself out a Tommy gun. Gunnery Officer Dietz looked down on him from the director platform a few minutes later. He saw his quiet-spoken friend standing there, with his rimless glasses on, waiting coolly until a German torso lifted itself on deck acr
oss the way, then raising his Tommy gun like a professor raising a pointer at a blackboard, and pulling the trigger.
All through the ship, men acted now on their own. The phrase “people’s war” came into Hutchins’ mind as he watched his men. He gave very few orders. The men responded to the months of careful training that Executive Officer Brown had given them, and to their own initiative.
Everyone found something to do.
Standing on the galley deckhouse only about fifteen feet away from the conning tower, Fireman First Class David F. Southwick pulled a five-inch knife out of its sheath and threw it at a German who was running for a gun. Chief Boatswain’s Mate Walter G. Kurz picked up an empty four-inch shell case weighing nearly ten pounds, waited for a German to climb out of the tower hatch, and threw the shell case at him; his target, a young boy, fell into the sea. Chief Gunner’s Mate Richard W. Wenz, the strongest man on the ship, who could pick up huge depth charges alone and set them on their racks, now could not be bothered to find the key to the small-arms locker, so he broke the wooden door down with his fist. He distributed pistols, shotguns, rifles, and Tommy guns to all free hands. Seaman Malaney, unable to find any other weapon, fired a Very pistol, whose signal flares could not kill but could burn.
The gun crews worked as automatically as their weapons and with frantic urgency. Some machine guns should not have been fired, because they had steel splinter shields between them and the submarine, but the crews, at risk to their own lives, fired the guns through the shields, so as to tear them open, and the guns thereafter had fairly clear fields of fire. Loaders were injured by flying steel from the splinter shields. Officers’ Cook Christopher Columbus Shepard, first loader on Number Four gun, deciding that ammunition was not coming to him fast enough, ran to the afterdeckhouse racks, grabbed a heavy shell, thrust it home, climbed into the seat of the firing pointer, who had been temporarily blinded, fired, climbed out, ran for another shell—and kept his gun going that way.
Gunnery Officer Dietz—who at the drop of a hat will quote Nelson: “No captain can do very wrong if he lays his ship alongside that of an enemy”—had trained a boarding party, and he was eager to lead it onto the submarine. But Hutchins passed this word: “We will not board. We will not board.”
He had a reason for his order. The fight abovedecks was going very well. Something like thirty-five Germans had been killed, and nobody had been killed on the Borie. But serious reports were coming up to the bridge talkers from the bowels of the ship. The engine rooms were flooding.
THE German enemy had not done this to the Borie: the power of the sea had done it. The high waves had twisted the two ships, had reduced the V until the grappled hulls lay nearly parallel, and had pounded the shells together. The submarine, built to withstand tremendous underwater pressures, was better able to survive the grinding than the destroyer, whose skin was only three sixteenths of an inch thick. Water began pouring into both engine rooms. In the after one, a damage control party was able to stuff the leaks enough so that pumps could keep the water down, but the forward engine room became hopelessly flooded.
There the water crept up, first to the men’s ankles, then to their knees. Since the engines were steamtight from within, they were, of course, watertight from without, and they kept going even when partially submerged. As the ship rolled and pitched, the water tore every mobile thing free, and soon the men were being sloshed around the engine room along with floor plates, gratings, small casks, and other dangerous debris. Machinist’s Mate Second Class Ed M. Shockley and Fireman First Class Mario J. Pagnotta crawled and floated in behind some live steampipes dragging mattresses behind them, to try to plug the holes; but their efforts washed out. Chief Engineer Lieutenant Morrison R. Brown ordered everyone to leave. He stayed alone to do what he could.
Finally, ten minutes after the ramming, the two ships worked free of each other. The incredible contest of wit and maneuver began again.
THE submarine pulled ahead and out to the left, and Lieutenant Hutchins could see that the enemy intended to aim his stinger at the destroyer again, and to fire more torpedoes. That made Hutchins decide to fire torpedoes of his own. He ordered the tubes manned. Torpedo Officer Ensign Lawrence S. Quinn made the proper calculations and fired, but a heavy sea threw the aim off, and the torpedo missed.
The U-boat went into a tight left circle, and the Borie did, too. But the submarine’s turning radius was smaller than the destroyer’s, and the two ships traveled in concentric circles. Most of the time the U-boat had its threatening tail aimed straight at the destroyer. A four-inch hit on the submarine’s starboard diesel exhaust may have penetrated to the torpedo room and prevented the firing of any more torpedoes.
Hutchins felt frustrated by his ship’s inability to turn on a shorter radius than the enemy. He kept having the illusion that his ship was going in a straight line, while the submarine was turning away. He did not want to lose his victim at this late hour, and he kept beating the air with his right arm and shouting over and over, “All right, Aikenhead, bring her left, dammit, bring her left.”
Helmsman Aikenhead, who weighed only one hundred thirty pounds and was very tired from the stiffness of the Borie’s wheel, kept saying in a pleading voice, “But Captain, I am left, I am left.”
Hutchins would not believe Aikenhead until he looked at the compass, which was moving around fast. The captain did not know how many times the two ships made that dizzy circle. All the time he had in the back of his mind his planned rendezvous next morning with the Card and her other destroyers, the Goff and the Barry. He did not want to lose his position, so it was a relief, as the Borie turned in those merry-go-round circles, to catch glimpses of his original floating flare. The ships had made many convolutions but had not moved far.
The circling was of no advantage to the Borie, so Hutchins turned out his light, hoping that the U-boat would attempt to shake off the destroyer by sneaking out of the tight circle and away. The submarine tried to do just that. Hutchins snapped on the light again and soon found the glistening U-boat streaking off in a northeasterly direction. Range was four hundred yards. The Borie pursued.
All through the battle, so far, the Borie had been to the right of its adversary. Hutchins decided to break through to the other side, so while he chased the enemy he pulled left. He now gave a command that helped to win the battle: He ordered depth charges set shallow. Aikenhead was about to collapse at the wheel, so the captain ordered the helmsman relieved.
In spite of the failure of the first ramming, sinking the enemy by crashing into him was still an obsession of Hutchins and of others aboard the Borie. The destroyer pulled up to the left of the U-boat, and Hutchins ordered a collision course. The submarine again held its course until the last moment. This time, instead of turning sharply away as he had the first time, the German turned hard toward the Borie.
This brought up something entirely unexpected: The U-boat captain had decided to pull the temple pillars down and ram the destroyer. With her thin skin the Borie stood to lose everything by being rammed.
Hutchins had an instantaneous flash of combat inspiration. To everyone’s puzzlement on the bridge, he ordered the new helmsman to turn hard left, and he ordered the starboard engine stopped, the port engine backed full. This had the effect of throwing the ship into a skidding stop, with the stem end swinging to the right toward the oncoming submarine. At precisely the correct moment Lieutenant Hutchins lowered his head and raised his non-existent club and shouted to Depth Charge Officer Ensign Lawrence Quinn, “O.K., Larry, give ‘em the starboard battery.”
Ensign Quinn flicked three switches. Three round shapes arched in the wind and fell within a few feet of the submarine—two on one side and one on the other. They went off shallow. The submarine lurched out of the water like a hurt whale and came to a stop very close to the Borie’s flank. Men on deck said that if there had been another coat of paint on either vessel, there would have been a collision.
SOMEHOW the German submarin
e managed to start up again. It was like a wounded creature that refuses to die and in the very act of dying refuses to admit that it is dying. The U-boat slipped around astern of the Borie and drove off at an angle.
By this time the Americans, though for the most part unhurt, were dazed by the stubbornness of the enemy. The officers on the bridge were hazy about what happened next. There were various zigs and zags; apparently the Borie closed in to a convenient range.
Now at last the U-boat captain seemed to realize he was beaten. He sent up distress signals—white, green, and red flares. A moment later Lieutenant Hutchins saw an answering signal from the horizon. He went to the compass and checked the bearing of this other enemy—220 degrees.
The four-inch gunners gave the U-boat its final crippling blow. They hit the starboard diesel exhaust again. The submarine dropped to four knots. The Borie closed to point-blank range.
The Germans seemed to be trying to abandon ship. They huddled on the conning tower. With a compassion which he later did not quite understand, Hutchins ordered all guns to cease firing. But before the order reached all stations Gun Captain Kenneth Reynolds, who was still firing his gun painfully by hand, got off one last round. It blew the entire bridge structure, with all its occupants, right off the U-boat.
Water from the hole by the exhaust poured into the submarine. Its bow lifted dripping out of the rough sea. The ship slipped under the waves and exploded with a deep rumble under water. After one hour and four minutes of tenacious fighting the submarine sank.
At once Hutchins turned his ship away.
THE Borie was in serious trouble. Only one engine would run. Her maximum speed was now ten knots, which a surfaced submarine could easily exceed. The ship was still taking water forward. The generators were out. The water condensers were impaired, so the turbines were not getting the pure, saltless steam they needed. Hutchins reported by radio to the Card, “Just sank Number Two in combined depth-charge attack, gun battle, and ramming. May have to abandon ship.”