Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  He hadn’t a single ship, he reported, “that an enemy submarine could not outdistance when operating on the surface. In most cases the guns of these vessels would be outranged by those of the submarine.” Two weeks after Pearl Harbor he wrote, “It is submitted that should enemy submarines operate off this coast, this command has no forces available to take adequate action against them, either offensive or defensive.”

  Admiral Andrews was to learn the most extreme meanings of doing all you can with what you have.

  The effort drew on every kind of ingenuity, from the bait-shop owner’s to the theoretical physicist’s at MIT, and it reached far beyond the U.S. navy itself. In the beginning it put—for the first time since the War of 1812—untried American militia up against some of the world’s most competent professional warriors.

  The Hooligan Navy

  Yachts and cabin cruisers go to war, 1942

  A century and a half earlier Admiral Nelson had written, “Was I to die at this moment, ‘Want of Frigates’ would be found stamped on my heart.” There were never enough of them. A frigate was supple, light, but powerful, useful as scout, courier, and, perhaps most of all, escort.

  The East Coast had little that could serve as a plausible escort, and no convoy system whatever. This surprised and vexed the British, who had been running convoys along their coastlines from the earliest days of the war. The system was working across the breadth of the Atlantic, but it failed in the final few miles.

  The British, not happy to guard a freighter over two thousand miles of ocean only to see it incinerated within sight of Atlantic City, called for coastal convoys. Admiral King did not much like the British. He suspected them of trying to rig the war to suit their imperial purposes, and he bridled at their assumption, far from unjustified, that they knew more about fighting U-boats than America did. His reputation has suffered some at the hands of those who felt he wouldn’t institute convoys off our shores just because the British wanted him to. In fact, he had almost nothing to conduct them with.

  Why the lack of escort vessels? Blame began being doled out during the first offshore shipping crisis, and seventy years later it still is. Some held King responsible—too aloof, too resistant to British example, too skeptical of the abilities of escort vessels. President Roosevelt, a small-boat enthusiast, liked to grumble about the navy’s indifference to “anything under a thousand tons,” but he never pushed hard for smaller ships until the U-boats came. For once, that ever-convenient scapegoat Congress cannot be blamed: nobody had asked for escort funding.

  Now the money was there, and smaller ships were being laid down. But unfortunately, a small vessel can no more be willed into existence overnight than can an aircraft carrier.

  As early as the summer before, Alfred Stanford had been pointing out to the navy that a great many small ships were at hand. Stanford was a New York newspaperman who had moved profitably into advertising (“Good fun,” he said, “if it weren’t for the clients”) and taken up yachting. Now he was the commodore of the Cruising Club of America, and he believed its members could help. They owned pleasure boats, but they knew the sea and its ways, and they were willing. Not surprisingly, the navy had wanted nothing to do with these well-meaning amateurs.

  But things looked quite different in the alarming early months of 1942, when the Eastern Sea Frontier command was happy to accept the help of thirty yachts, fifty to ninety feet long, to go patrolling for U-boats. The Coast Guard Auxiliary Act followed, enlisting small-boat owners and their craft for spans as brief as thirty days.

  So the Corsair Fleet put to sea. That was the dashing name the Coast Guard gave the effort, but its members promptly and permanently called it the Hooligan Navy. Some of them were stockbrokers, many were sports fishermen, and some were rumrunners who had learned how to handle boats evading Coast Guard vigilance in Prohibition days. One of them was Ernest Hemingway, who talked his government out of $32,000 worth of radio direction-finding equipment for his thirty-eight-foot fishing boat Pilar, hot with a plan to run aboard a surfaced U-boat in Cuban waters and sink it through some alchemy of gallantry and exhibitionism.

  These volunteers took their work seriously. They couldn’t sink submarines, but they could spot them and radio for help. They were sentries, pickets, and they came to have the official title of the Coastal Picket Patrol. Sea Gypsy, Vema, Redhead, and a clutch of other Bermuda racers, seventy-foot-long ballerinas out of Greenport, Long Island, stood watch for a week at a time in the heaviest weather. The Coast Guard hadn’t expected real tenacity from the Picket Patrol, but Primrose IV, under the command of a Harvard professor, and a hundred like her, stuck it out when the fierce winter of 1942 came down.

  How much good they did remains a matter of debate. Even the fleet’s creator had his doubts. “I can’t honestly say that the patrol made a significant contribution,” Stanford said years later. “In theory, it made a lot of sense. It was probably worthwhile in preparing the younger men for other duties at sea.” That seems unquestionable: many of the sailors aboard these boats passed into regular navy service for the duration. But for every submarine they sighted, their dozens of false alarms further distracted and enervated what scant navy protection the United States had. The Picket Patrol rarely intimidated the Germans. One day the crew of a cabin cruiser off the Florida coast stood dumbfounded as the sea boiled beside them and the conning tower of a submarine rose, sheeting water, and rose and rose until, as high above as if he had been standing on the rooftree of a house, the U-boat’s skipper called down in what was reported to be “excellent Americanese,” “Get the hell out of here, you guys! Do you want to get hurt? Now, scram!”

  Captain Peter Cremer said he was delighted to have the civilians swarming around because their “value was precisely nil,” and they “created complete chaos by also seeing U-boats everywhere and sending the few destroyers to chase hither and thither and find nothing.”

  But those earnest volunteers served another function.

  A thirty-foot lapstrake boat lying at the modest end of the scale for anything that might be called a cabin cruiser, the Kitsis was a typical unit of the Hooligan Navy. She was christened not for an ancient Egyptian deity, but an amalgam of the nicknames of her owner and his wife, Kit and Sis Johnson. Her master, Clarence Johnson, a Vero Beach, Florida, businessman, had been out on nighttime patrols—“fishing” was his constant, unpersuasive explanation—for four months running without encountering anything unusual. But soon after May 5 turned to May 6, and Johnson’s friend Ottie Roach relieved him at the wheel, the men saw a fiery speck rising like a meteor drawn back from the earth to the heavens. It brightened in silent explosion and floated down the sky. Kit took over—it was his boat, after all—and headed toward the flare.

  After a while Roach yelled and pointed off the port bow. Johnson turned on his searchlight and lit up a lifeboat so full that it was barely afloat. They had found survivors from Captain Cremer’s first victim, the Java Arrow.

  The Kitsis didn’t have the power to tow the boat, so one by one the occupants struggled aboard, burned, bleeding, vomiting, twenty-two of them. This was far more people than the Kitsis had been designed to carry, and Ottie Roach was standing in the bilge handing up buckets of oily water to be emptied over the side when, at five twenty in the morning, Johnson put his boat alongside the Coast Guard pier at Fort Pierce.

  Kit Johnson came home full of febrile energy; Sis made him scrambled eggs and sent him up to bed. Then she took a bucket of rags, a can of Old Dutch Cleanser, and a mop, drove the family Studebaker to the pier at Fort Pierce, and found the Kitsis. After breathing in as much as she could of the morning breeze, she went below to scrub the blood out of the mattresses and hose the decks free of what she called “slime.”

  She was back home by the time her eight-year-old son, Rody, came in from school. “Is Dad going fishing tonight?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  All along the coast, from Maine to the Keys, boats like the Kitsis w
ere pulling from the water men and women who for the rest of their lives would be grateful the Hooligan Navy had been there.

  Panic Party

  The “mystery ship” fiasco, 1942

  While the yachts and powerboats sought the telltale white V of water that followed a periscope and often found it whether it was there or not, Admiral Andrews begged Admiral King to give him some destroyers. King did, but only in the small chinks of time between transatlantic convoy duty, often for just a few days. Even then, they were deployed on submarine-hunting patrols that were as irresistible to navy men as they were ineffectual.

  The British told us so. Only convoys worked. King said he agreed, but hadn’t enough ships for coastal convoys.

  Doing all you can with what you have meant backing long shots such as the Picket Patrol. None was longer than Project LQ, the “mystery ships,” a sort of Boys’ True Adventure fantasy that had to be paid for in the real world.

  The project came straight from FDR and appealed to his sense of panache. The British had tried the same thing in the last war with mixed success, and in this one with none. They’d abandoned it by the time—February 4, 1942—Kenneth M. Beyer, an ensign on the new battleship North Carolina, just back from gunnery practice and at anchor in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was summoned by his captain, who said, “I have a set of orders for you. I don’t know why the urgency, but you are to be in Washington today. It’s eleven o’clock, you don’t have much time. I know you must be as surprised as I am.”

  Beyer was, but of course he packed and left the “Carie” immediately. The next morning he and another ensign met Commander W. J. Carter, who was coordinating the project. Carter invited them to take a seat and offered them coffee. Beyer thought that if this was how ensigns were treated in Washington, things were going to be pretty good. Then Carter told them they had been selected for a highly secret project that was considered hazardous sea duty. It was all strictly volunteer, and if either of them wanted to turn it down, he must feel free to stop the commander at any point and leave. “There will be two heavily armed merchant-type ships,” Carter went on. “They will be freighter configuration and have sizable navy crews. All personnel will be specially selected. The ships will operate as disguised merchantmen, U-boat decoys, or Q-ships as the British called them.”

  Beyer did not stop the commander and leave. He took the train to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where his ship was being refitted. There he met his executive officer, Lawrence Neville, who had also just arrived. Over lunch Neville handed him a sheet of paper: “USS Asterion (AK100)—USS Atik (AK101): Tonnage Gross 3209, Length 318′6", Beam 46′. Cruising radius 9600 at 9.5 knots.” Small and slow, thought Beyer, but he was impressed by their armament: “Four—4"/50 cal. main battery; four—.50 cal machine guns; six—single depth charge throwers; five—Lewis .30 cal. machine guns.” Beyer and Neville walked through a freezing-cold afternoon to the drydock to see the ships. They were still wearing their old names, Evelyn and Carolyn. The volunteers stood in silence staring at the Evelyn. After a while Neville said, “Oh, my God!” Neither man knew, though neither man would have been surprised, that the navy expected the ships to last no more than a month.

  The two decrepit, thirty-year-old freighters had been bought from the A. H. Bull Steamship Company, paid for with cash carried in a suitcase by a doubtless uncomfortable Admiral Andrews, dressed in civilian clothes to transport the covertly assembled money. Everything about the project was like that. Beyer was to become the treasurer of a bogus company drawing on a revolving account at a Washington bank. He would use part of the funds to outfit his ship’s crew with merchant-sailor clothes. He was forbidden, of course, to tell his family why he had gone from being an ensign on a battleship to being an ensign on a freighter.

  The secrecy was complete, save that the ships were being converted by scores of navy-yard workers, and it was said to be the talk of the Portsmouth boardinghouses. The conversion involved getting the guns in place, then building an elaborate set of stage-set baffles to hide them, and stuffing the cargo holds with buoyant wood pulp.

  The plan was for the two ships to go loitering out to sea singly and dawdle around until they attracted the notice of a submarine. Once a torpedo hit, a “panic party” would take to the lifeboats and make a show of abandoning ship. Then the U-boat, not wishing to spend another torpedo, would surface and prepare to finish off the still-floating freighter with gunfire. At that moment the falsework would drop, and the rest of the crew would leap from hiding to open up with the four-inch guns and demolish the ambushed submarine.

  The two secret vessels went through strange, surreptitious commissioning ceremonies on March 5, a month and a day after Beyer had received his summons.

  The Carolyn/Atik and the Evelyn/Asterion sailed from Portsmouth on March 23. The next morning they went through some perfunctory combat drill—the Atik fired a single round from each of her four cannon—and shot off the .50-caliber machine guns. Beyer remembered that “the light red tracers” provided “a display of morbid celebration.”

  Then, after just thirty-six hours of such exercises, the ships went their separate ways, generating as much smoke as they could, hoping to hook a German submarine captain with their lure. It took the Atik only four days. The captain was Reinhard Hardegan, back in his 123 for a second swipe at the apparently helpless East Coast. Hardegan saw the freighter toward dusk, followed it through rising seas for several hours, and fired a torpedo. It hit just forward of the bridge, but the explosion seemed curiously weak and muffled to Hardegan. The freighter lost way and signaled “SS CAROLYN TORPEDO ATTACK BURNING FORWARD REQUIRD SSISTANCE.” Hardegan unknowingly played his proper role by moving in to sink the ship with his deck gun, while boat crews abandoned it with what seemed to him unusual haste.

  The steamer turned toward him and gathered speed. Its plywood bulkheads fell away, and a four-inch gun started firing. The shells fell wide, but two machine guns found their target, the .50-caliber bullets flashing and clattering against the conning tower. Midshipman Rudolf Holzer took a wound between hip and knee that left his right leg joined to his body by only a strip of skin.

  Hardegan backed away at flank speed—he had no trouble outdistancing the Atik—while his midshipman died and his men, furious at being tricked and at the trap itself, debated killing the Atik’s entire crew. This proved unnecessary. The sea was rough now. Hardegan fired a second torpedo that struck the engine room.

  Only the Asterion answered the Atik’s signal. It was picked up, but the sea was loud with distress calls that night, and those who heard thought it was just another tanker. The Asterion was 150 miles away; she came as quickly as she could, but a full gale was blowing, and her captain wrote that his ship “made good about two knots over the ground. No signs seen of Atik.”

  No signs were ever seen, and 139 officers and men disappeared. Their families didn’t find out how or why until 1946. The Asterion nearly thrashed herself to pieces in her haste to aid her sister, and after her fruitless search had to limp to Hampton Roads, Virginia, for repairs.

  There were three other Q-ships. The trawler Eagle never once sighted a submarine, and a three-masted schooner was well disguised but withdrawn from the service when she almost foundered in a gale. Largest of them all was the tanker Gulf Dawn, armed and given the fake trappings of a fleet oiler and renamed Big Horn. Joe Gainard, around whom storm clouds always seemed to gather, and who was back in the navy now, got command of her. The Big Horn went to the Caribbean, setting up as a convoy straggler. Unfortunately—but not for Gainard, given the odds—the wolf pack was having easy enough going with the convoy itself and didn’t need to go looking for singletons.

  A disgusted King called off Project LQ late in 1943. Before that Gainard had been ordered to the Pacific in command of an attack transport. The years had worn on him, though, and he fell ill and was sent to the navy hospital in San Diego. He died there on December 23, 1943. He had survived his former command the City of Flint by a little less
than a year; a U-boat had put an end to the sturdy old workhorse the previous January.

  Dan van der Vat, a British historian of the Atlantic campaign, wrote that Project LQ “was in its small way the most self-destructive operation undertaken by the US Navy in the war.” A quarter of the men who volunteered for it died. The Germans lost Midshipman Holzer.

  Cadet O’Hara’s Last Fight

  The Naval Armed Guard and the ordeal of the Stephen Hopkins, 1942

  “Do you want to go to sea immediately?” During the weeks following Pearl Harbor this question drew bold affirmatives in recruiting stations across the country. The recruiters were as good as their word; the eager respondents were often at sea in days. But not, to their dismay, on a destroyer or a cruiser. Rather, they shipped out aboard a freighter—or, worse yet, a tanker—as part of a service they had never heard of: the Naval Armed Guard.

  Plans to arm merchant ships had been going on for nearly a year before America entered the war. At first the training of the men who were to work the guns was scattered and haphazard, some of it taking place in a small, ramshackle camp in Little Creek, Virginia. In September 1941, Little Creek got orders to train two hundred officers and a thousand enlisted men by early January. The first class contained 207 men, 27 of them officers, and most of them leery of the assignment they had drawn. The officers established a club and painted the motto they’d worked up on a sign that went in the bar: READY!—AIM!—ABANDON SHIP!