by Richard Snow
A Virginian named Floyd Jones arrived at Little Creek a month later. “All we did was train on a .30-caliber machine gun, that was all we had at the time. We didn’t know what we were training for, but a few days later they called us to the flagpole and told us we were training for armed guard duty on merchant ships in case of war.”
The machine gun might have seemed a feeble tool for the job it had to do, but it was appropriate because in the beginning that was the best the navy could come up with. In the early days of the arming program, some merchant ships put to sea carrying on their main gun mount a creosote log, a promissory token of a cannon yet to be forged.
It was the same story with the men. Pushed through brief courses, they were token sailors. Some went to war with a single week’s training in “seamanship,” followed by another week learning gunnery, which culminated in watching a gun being fired. One recruit summed up his month of training, which included squeezing off a brief burst from one of the .30-calibers, saying, “We knew two things for sure when we got finished there: do not stand in front of the gun when it is being fired, and don’t salute doormen.”
Out of such scrabbled-together ingredients the navy made Armed Guard crews and put them aboard merchant ships, with the social effects one might imagine. The novelist Robert Ruark, who served in the Armed Guard, described the situation in a Saturday Evening Post article that ran under the vivid title “They Called ’Em Fish Food.” “The big bugaboo in our business has been, and always will be, the maintenance of cordial relationships with the merchant personnel. Although the master is boss of the ship, he has no jurisdiction over the Navy detachment, and in time of combat is actually ranked by the ensign or lieutenant. … During the early days of the war … we were resented, and with some justice.” Not only did the Armed Guard members have to adapt themselves to a wholly alien community; they were to take charge of it whenever action was possible. A ship captain’s job rarely inculcates a spirit of cooperative egalitarianism in its holder, and few merchant skippers liked the idea of handing over their command to adolescents fresh from a few courses in seafaring.
Nor did the weaponry entrusted to these neophytes inspire confidence. One newly fledged lieutenant came aboard his ship to find workers busy installing a Mark VII four-inch gun from the chromolithograph days of the Spanish-American War.
Surprisingly, the gun worked. Equally surprising, so did the Naval Armed Guard. Beverley Britten, who served in it, wrote after the war about having been one of what he called the “Navy’s stepchildren.” He well understood why the Armed Guard “quickly became known as the least-desired duty in the Navy. The AG was physically separated from his fellow Navymen, placed in a small group aboard a ship run by civilians.” The public didn’t know what he did, and the navy tended to forget about him. “He was not only out of sight of the ‘brass’ but pretty much out of mind, unless something bad happened.” Nevertheless, Britten concluded, almost everyone in it “came to love armed guard service, and the old ‘S.S. Rustpot.’”
That turned out to be a lot of people—145,000 by the time the war ended. It is not the least achievement of a hard-pressed democracy that this peculiar martial arrangement, which depended entirely on a thousand hermetic societies cooperating with small cadres of arbitrarily empowered outsiders, should produce in the first months of the war the ship’s company aboard the Stephen Hopkins.
The Stephen Hopkins was not the “S.S. Rustpot,” nor was she armed with a creosote log. The freighter was brand-new, launched in April 1942 and ready for service by May. When Robert Ruark published his article, in the spring of 1944, he could write that the average freighter “carries two semiautomatic, dual-purpose, 3-inch guns or a 4 or 5 inch gun aft and a 3-incher forward, and eight 20-mms., which fire explosive shells with appalling rapidity.” Looking back, though, he remembered, “There was a time when, if you had a ten-man gun crew, a 4-inch gun and a couple of .50 caliber machine guns, you were considered a very lucky guy.” That’s about what the Stephen Hopkins got: a four-inch gun, mounted on the stern, two 37mms forward, and four .50-caliber Browning machine guns. The main gun was an old-timer from World War I, but it was a considerable weapon. It fired a shell half as tall as a man, throwing a thirty-three-pound projectile upward of nine miles. It could easily cripple a surfaced U-boat if it got one in its sights. A U-boat, however, was not what the Stephen Hopkins was destined to encounter.
The Stier didn’t look any more like a warship than did the Atik. Born in 1936 as the five-thousand-ton German freighter Cairo, she had been taken by her government when the war started. After spending a couple of years sowing mines in the Bay of Biscay, she steamed up to conquered Poland and, hidden in the port of Gdynia, received six 5.9-inch guns with a modern fire-control system to train them, along with eight smaller guns, torpedo tubes, and two seaplanes. These riches were concealed behind a superstructure painted a dingy gray and here and there bleeding red lead. The Stier was meant to deceive but, unlike the Q-ships, she was no decoy. Her job was not to lure an enemy into attacking, but to look innocuous for as long as possible before attacking the enemy. The Stier’s role was the same as a U-boat’s—destroy commerce—but on the surface, and for month after month. The raider could stay at sea for half a year without refueling.
Under Captain Horst Gerlach, the Stier left Gdynia in May 1942, made her way through the Kiel Canal from the Baltic to the North Sea, took on fuel in the Netherlands at the prettily named port of Petroleumhaven, fought her way down through the Channel to the French coast, then broke out, headed for the South Atlantic.
Once there, the routine was as simple as it was effective. The Stier would sidle innocently up to another merchantman, then show her teeth and order it to surrender. When Gerlach tried this on the big ten-thousand-ton American tanker Stanvac Calcutta, his victim fought until her captain was killed and the ship took a torpedo in the stern. The British steamer Gemstone gave up without a fight, and this is more than understandable. The Stier was classified as an “auxiliary cruiser,” and she had the punch of any conventional cruiser. Half a year earlier the Koroman, Stier’s identical sister ship, drew the Australian cruiser Sydney close to her with a flurry of baffling signals. The German opened fire at point-blank range, and the Sydney was lost along with every one of her 645-man crew, the largest Allied ship to go down with all hands during the war.
Captain Gerlach had done so well that on September 1, the third anniversary of the outbreak of the war, he was expecting at least a message of congratulations from Germany, and possibly some medals for himself and his crew. He was miffed when no such word came, but at least a few days later he was told to rendezvous with the Tannenfels to receive supplies and give over some of the prisoners that had been crowding his ship (surface raiders, unlike U-boats, had the room to take on prisoners and did). The Tannenfels was a blockade runner, much larger than the Stier but more lightly armed. The two ships met on September 25 and for the next two days drifted in company while Gerlach took advantage of the good weather to have his men go over the side and chip away at the impasto of marine growth the Stier’s hull had acquired during the long cruise. On the morning of the twenty-seventh the wind and sea rose, and rain came on. The job was all but finished anyway, and Gerlach had called in most of his working parties when, he reported later, “I heard the call ‘Vessel in sight to starboard, direction thirty degrees …’ Then followed an immediate alarm, calling the ship, and the realization that it was not one of our own, nor a neutral vessel, but definitely a large enemy steamer.
“A flag signal ‘stop at once’ was set.”
If the Stephen Hopkins was lucky in its armament, according to Robert Ruark’s assessment, it was also lucky in its fifteen-strong Armed Guard contingent, half again as large as the “ten-man crew” Ruark said was impressive at that time. The Hopkins’s Armed Guard was under the command of Kenneth M. Willett, who, like Beyer of the Asterion, had left battleship duty—the California—for service of a very different kind. He came aboard
the Hopkins as an ensign and was promoted to lieutenant (j.g.) at sea in June. For a man just recently into his twenties—he had been born in 1919—given charge of other young men largely new to the sea and a gun that was older than he was, he had been sent out with pretty stiff instructions. “There shall be no surrender and no abandoning ship so long as the guns can be fought. In case of casualty to members of the gun crew the remaining men shall continue to serve the gun.”
His captain had got the same message more directly:
March 30, 1942
From: The Secretary of the Navy
To: Master SS Stephen Hopkins,
7184 Gross Tons
1. It is the policy of the United States Government that no U.S. Flag merchant ship be permitted to fall into the hands of the enemy.
2. The ship shall be defended by her armament, by maneuver, and by every available means as long as possible. When, in the judgment of the Master, capture is inevitable, he shall scuttle the ship.
The master of the Stephen Hopkins was Paul Buck, a thirty-nine-year-old Massachusetts man who had first gone to sea when he was sixteen, and whose previous command had been a United Fruit Company steamer. Ordinary Seaman Rodger Piercy remembered him as “a quiet, likeable type, but a strict disciplinarian and his officers were much the same. They were friendly, helpful and yet aloof, as officers should be.”
But unlike many merchant skippers, Captain Buck wasn’t aloof from his Armed Guard contingent. Soon after the Hopkins left San Pedro on her maiden voyage, carrying supplies to the South Pacific, Buck called his officers together, along with Willett, and told them they must cooperate. He went on to make sure that they did. There were frequent abandon-ship and fire drills, which the merchant sailors were used to, but, Piercy wrote, “now we were divided into crews under navy personnel and assigned gun positions and duties. We were instructed in ammunition handling, how to take the guns apart and reassemble them, how to load them, oil them, and keep them covered in the weather. … It was intensely interesting and everyone aboard was serious about doing their jobs well.”
The sailors and the Armed Guard were easy with one another long before the ship reached Bora-Bora. Willett became friends with the youngest man aboard, Edwin O’Hara, an eighteen-year-old cadet midshipman—that is, a student at the Merchant Marine Academy receiving sea training. O’Hara was fascinated by machinery and liked to help serve the four-inch gun even when he was off duty.
The Stephen Hopkins went from Bora-Bora to Wellington, New Zealand, then on to Melbourne and down the Australian coast to Port Lincoln, where it picked up sixty-four thousand bags of wheat bound for South Africa.
The Hopkins set sail for Durban on August 3. The voyage across the Indian Ocean should have taken a little over two weeks, but a hurricane so badly punished the ship that she didn’t arrive until September 2, struggling into port with lifeboats smashed, the deckhouse wrenched loose from its pinnings, the forward gun mounts ruined, an ammunition hold flooded, and the bow stove in. In a letter home Arthur Chamberlain, the Hopkins’s other cadet midshipman, added a note to his brother: “Robert, don’t ever go to sea!”
The crew got leave, the ship got repaired, and the Hopkins went down to Cape Town to unload two thousand tons of sugar. There the men learned that they were to go to Paramaribo, on the northeast shoulder of South America, fill up with bauxite, and take it to New Orleans. Captain Buck had been warned that raiders were active in their path and kept up the drills. But the ship was homeward bound, even though it still had half the world to go, and the crew was full of good cheer as they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the South Atlantic. Some of the off-duty men had left breakfast to shoot craps when the lookouts sighted two ships, not all that far off, over a rough, smoky sea.
Captain Buck was on the bridge with Lieutenant Willett when the smaller of the two ships signaled the Hopkins to stop.
Captain Buck did not obey Captain Gerlach’s order. He had the U.S. ensign run up into the rainy morning and told the helmsman hard left rudder, swinging his ship to port and putting her stern toward the Stier. This made the Hopkins a smaller target and let her main gun bear, pointing its muzzle at the six German guns that, although their bore was less than two inches wider, fired a projectile three times as heavy.
The first shots came from the raider’s lighter guns, the twenties and the 37mms. Buck’s second-in-command, Chief Mate Richard Moczkowski, was hit early, in the chest and arm. It was a bad wound, as the ship’s chief steward, Ford Stilson, charged with giving medical help, discovered when he got to the bridge with an armful of bandages. Stilson made a tourniquet and applied it. Moczkowski waved him off. The mate had been lying on the deck, but he got Rodger Piercy to help him to his feet. He was hit again, in the leg, and again Stilson bandaged him. “All this time,” Stilson said, “shells had been riddling the superstructure and our own four-inch had started at a rapid rate about the time I was bandaging the mate.”
When the stern gun opened up, Edwin O’Hara was commanding its crew. Willett had given the order, but he was still on the bridge. “Fire!” called O’Hara, and “we immediately let go,” Piercy wrote. “We knew we hit her but did not know to what extent.” They fired again, and Willett arrived to take over. Piercy had seen him making his way aft: “He got hit in the stomach with shrapnel which sliced him open and knocked him down. He got up and came to the stern with part of his intestines hanging out.”
The shells from the Stier’s big guns were beginning to arrive. Even the largest ship is infinitesimal once it gets out onto the ocean, but to those aboard it any sizable vessel is a whole town, with its concourses and alleys and back lots and crossroads. The Hopkins had forty-one men in her merchant crew, but she was 441 feet long, which is roughly the equivalent of a forty-story office building laid on its side, with one occupant per floor. When the shells began to find it, the ship would have grown larger around its tenants, for they could have no idea what was going on just a few yards away. Each was in his own unending car accident.
George Cronk, the second assistant engineer, was asleep after standing the midnight watch when the general-quarters alarm woke him. Before he could get into his clothes the ship had already been hit several times. Nevertheless the cables of maritime routine pulled the chief engineer, Rudolph Rutz, into Cronk’s quarters holding a rack of three test tubes for the daily analysis of boiler water. “Here’s your test tubes,” said Rutz over the jackhammer noise, “but I don’t think you’ll need them.”
The deck was already ruined when Cronk went out on it. Below him, a shell burst the main boiler, about the worst thing that can happen to an engine-room crew. Cronk and Rutz carried out those who had escaped being scalded to death.
“We were taking an awful beating,” said Piercy. “The shrapnel was heavy, and the boys handling the aiming mechanism were being blown off their seats about every second or third round.” But they got back on their seats, the ones still conscious, and Chief Moczkowski kept the stern to the enemy, and Willett, hand pressed hard against the long gash in his abdomen, kept directing the fire. In the three-foot-high circle of steel armor that surrounded the four-inch gun, men kept dropping. “We knew they had terrific gun power,” Piercy said, “because when they would catch us with a unified salvo, our ship would almost jump out of the water from stem to stern.” One of those shots from one of those salvos found the ammunition locker. “We could not get another shell from the locker, but still had some on deck. O’Hara ran to the gun and climbed on a seat to aim. … Willett was firing.” Then O’Hara was down on the deck.
They ran out of shells. Seaman Second Class Moses Barker saw a few more in the ready box kept near the gun. But they’d been at the ready for too long, since before the hurricane, and were welded together by rust. Barker pulled at them until the skin came off his fingers. He got one final shell into the breech and crouched away from the sluice of machine-gun bullets. “They were coming so hard overhead I hollered, ‘Fire.’ I had my face right against the bre
ech. If he had pulled the trigger my head would have been a block down the street. But he was already dead. They were all dead except me. So I ran and pulled the trigger. I didn’t even look to see what I was shooting or anything. I just pulled the trigger and got behind the gun again.”
Barker gave up. There was nothing else he could do. “We had .50-caliber machine guns; two on each side. I went over there to try to shoot one of them. I didn’t know how to. The only thing I knew how to do was the four-inch. … I got off the gun and went amidship.” Away from his post, he realized he didn’t have a life jacket and was going to need one. When he arrived at the passageway that led to where he knew some were stored, he found the ship’s sole passenger blocking the way. Barker started past him, into a now unfamiliar tunnel full of crushed metal and gouting steam. The man wouldn’t let him by: “Son, you don’t want to go in there. Everyone is dead.” Barker explained why he had to go in. The passenger pulled off the life jacket he was wearing, put it on the gunner, tied it shut, and told him to go save himself.
Who was this passenger who handed his life to another man and then, as Barker said, “just stayed there on the ship”? All we know is his name: George Townsend. Barker thought he had come aboard at Cape Town; Piercy, at Durban. He was listed as working for an oil company. Barker said he was a “soldier of fortune.” If so, he showed himself to be quite a soldier when fortune turned against him.
Although some who survived it thought the battle lasted three hours, in twenty minutes the Hopkins was a floating junkyard, and not going to float much longer. But while she floated, she fought. Willett kept exhorting his crew to aim for the hull, their efforts rewarded by an occasional brief glow that might have marked a hit on their tormentor. Then one of the Stier’s shells blew up the four-inch gun’s magazine.
The main gun was done for, one of the thirty-sevens had vanished with its crew, leaving a scorched hole, and beneath the blazing upperworks hot little clusters of electrical fire hissed and sparked everywhere. The Hopkins was crawling along at one knot. Captain Buck gave the order to abandon ship. Almost every steam line had been cut, and the whistle could give out only a weak slobber.