Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  Sailors made their way around blades of ruptured plating seeking an intact lifeboat. Salvos kept coming in, two and three a minute, and then there was a different sort of concussion. The four-inch gun was in action again. The shells in the ready box that Barker had torn his hands on had been knocked loose by the magazine explosion, and Deck Cadet O’Hara, back on his feet, was spending the last minutes of his short life firing them.

  Three lifeboats had been completely shot away, but the No. 1 starboard boat still hung in its davits. Chief Moczkowski ordered it lowered. Rodger Piercy helped free it and it jerked downward. Moczkowski himself refused to leave the ship.

  George Cronk, who had received the test-tube delivery from Rudolph Rutz twenty minutes earlier, found him putting life jackets on wounded men. The chief engineer told him to help out on the boat deck. Cronk never saw him again.

  As the Hopkins settled lower, some of the crew jumped. Wallace Breck, of the Armed Guard, saw Captain Buck and Cadet Midshipman Arthur Chamberlain, who had urged his brother not to go to sea, coming down from the bridge. Buck was hit and fell. He handed Chamberlain something—the ship’s log, Breck thought. There were no boats, and Chamberlain went off the stern and was pulled in by the still-turning propeller.

  Piercy came upon Lieutenant Willett, still alive and trying to cut away life rafts. “We offered to drop [him] over the side and help him to the raft, but he declined. He was too far gone, and he knew it. He didn’t want to cause anyone to lose precious time when he couldn’t make it.” Willett gave his last order: throw the rafts overboard and go after them. Get away from the ship.

  Piercy did, but once in the sea—“I felt like I had suddenly become a Popsicle! Oh, that water was cold”—he couldn’t see any rafts. After a while he spotted the No. 1 lifeboat and struggled toward it. He got aboard, and a little later helped pick up George Cronk. The boat found Ford Stilson on a raft, and as soon as he climbed in, he started tending the wounded. They looked for more survivors. Someone had seen Captain Buck on a raft; nobody saw him again. The sea grew higher and visibility lower. One of the German ships nosed around and went away. The other one looked as if it might be on fire. They saw a doughnut raft “with at least five men on it,” Cronk said. “We rowed for two hours until our hands were blistered and still could not pick up the men.” The wind rose. They put two corpses out of the boat.

  The next morning they found wreckage but no people. Second Engineer Cronk was the senior man aboard the boat and thus in charge of the other survivors. It was not a job he wanted, but he went ahead and had them take stock: twenty-four gallons of water, and perhaps a month’s worth of malted-milk tablets, C rations, and chocolate. Piercy remembered, “Captain Buck had told someone not to try to go to Africa as the wind and tide would be against you, but take the longer route and try for Brazil.” Cronk put Stilson in charge of all the food and water, set the sail, and headed west.

  Cronk kept a log.

  OCTOBER 1st … Cut water to 6 ounces per day per man, so as to give more to the wounded men.

  OCTOBER 7th. McDaniels, and Cook, died at 6:30 P.M. …

  OCTOBER 8th … Romero died at about 2:30. Buried at sunset. …

  OCTOBER 11th. Good breeze until 9 A.M., ran into rain squall caught 1 gallon water.

  OCTOBER 12th. George Gelogotes, fireman, died this morning. …

  OCTOBER 19th. High winds and seas, shipping lots of water, bailing all night, everybody wet from rain and spray. Most everyone has sores that won’t heal.

  OCTOBER 23rd … Cut food ration in half 4 days ago. …

  On October 25, a frill of motion above the hideously familiar gunwale: “a yellow moth.” The bug was a messenger of life. It had to have come from land.

  Two days later, the only note of emotion in the log: “Hurrah, sighted land 4AM. Landed at the small Brazilian village of Barra de Itabapoana.”

  The village was indeed small, perhaps one hundred inhabitants, and poor. But it seemed paradisiacal to the fifteen survivors who’d just spent thirty-one days in an open boat. “They fed us boiled rice, chicken, fish, bananas, and a pudding made from mandioca,” wrote Piercy. “Wow! What a feast! Women, men, and children were all over the place and all trying to help us. It was wonderful.”

  Word of their arrival reached the port city of Victoria, and the navy immediately dispatched an officer by Piper Cub, from which he had to transfer to a locomotive, and then a taxi when that ran out of track. Sixteen and a half hours after he set out, he was with the men of the Hopkins and reported, “The survivors were in wonderful condition. After thirty days of being battered together on a cramped lifeboat, they were lavishing praise on one another, helping one another, and best of all, wanting to go back again. You were made to realize how small your own troubles were, and how big [and] good humans can be.”

  They were sent to Rio de Janeiro, mended some there, and then it was north, to New York City (where, despite all he’d been through, Rodger Piercy was alarmed by the inhabitants of Greenwich Village), and eventually back to sea.

  Not until the war was over did the survivors of the Stephen Hopkins learn what they’d managed to do.

  Five minutes after the freighter opened fire, Captain Gerlach had thought he was fighting a cruiser. One shell made his torpedo tubes useless; another came into the engine room and knocked out the Stier’s electrical system. Between them, Willett and O’Hara fired thirty-five rounds and scored fifteen hits. One of them started a fire that the Germans couldn’t douse. At 10:42, Gerlach wrote, “The entire crew on the boat deck began to hear my speech of the resolution that we had to give up the ship. ‘Sieg-heil auf Fuehrer … Victory to our leader. …’ A spontaneous singing of the national anthem.”

  The Tannenfels took off the crew, the captain last of all. “As the stern of the ship began to dip our crew watched from Tannenfels’s foredeck as she began to sink faster and faster. … We repeated Sieg-Heil after my beautiful ship reared up and went down stern first and bow showing in dead silence.”

  The Stier and the Stephen Hopkins lie a couple of thousand yards apart two miles down on the South Atlantic seabed. The Stier was the last German raider to break free of the tightening Allied cordon. She is the only German surface warship destroyed by an American vessel in World War II. It is perhaps not necessary to say that she is the only cruiser ever sunk by a freighter.

  “Start Swinging, Lady”

  The Liberty ships, 1941–45

  The Stephen Hopkins was a Liberty ship, one of the firstborn of a family that would grow to more than twenty-seven hundred.

  In 1936, with Europe on the simmer, Congress had established the U.S. Maritime Commission “to provide the nation with a modern merchant marine, which would also serve as a naval auxiliary in time of war.” The commission mandated an ambitious program, one that would create as many as five hundred ships by 1946. Naturally the commission sought standardized dimensions for its cargo ships, but the design for the one most copiously produced was brought us by Britain.

  In September 1940 a British Shipbuilding Mission arrived in America eager to make good some of the losses inflicted by German submarines. They ordered sixty “Ocean-class” ships for transatlantic service. These were needed quickly, which meant they had to be simple. No innovations, no features that hadn’t been well tried. The result would be powered by a triple expansion engine, whose connecting rods reached down from its three cylinders to turn the propeller shaft with a dignified stolidity that suggested the big, slow-breathing steam engines of the Victorian era. In fact, the entire ship was Victorian. After the war was over, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers saluted the Liberty ship as “an 1879 steamer sailing across the oceans of the world to 20th century triumph.” American industry did not pride itself on copying sixty-year-old machinery developed by another country, but these were stringent times, and the congressional committee weighing the proposal for what was called a “five-year vessel” (to make clear that longevity was not expected of it) issued a glum endo
rsement: “It is slow and seaworthy… but for the demands of modern commerce in foreign trade it would not compare in speed, equipment and general serviceability with up-to-date cargo vessels. The design is the best that can be devised for an emergency product to be quickly, cheaply and simply built.” As for the future, “they will be constructed for the emergency and whether they have any utility afterward will be determined then.” This was followed by the tepid prospect that “the coastal trade may offer some possibilities in those directions.”

  In the end, the vessels proved hardy enough to far outlive their five-year expiration date. One that we’d given to Russia when the Germans were in the suburbs of Stalingrad turned up running supplies to Fidel Castro during the Cuban missile crisis. But the ship delighted nobody, least of all President Roosevelt, who, although not denying the need for it, took to referring to it as the Ugly Duckling. This caught on with the public, which irritated Admiral Emory Scott Land, an academy man who had been naval attaché in London and had taken early retirement from the navy to become head of the Maritime Commission.

  Land had a first-rate advertising man’s facility with the language. In 1943 he produced the following for a short-lived quasi-holiday called National Maritime Day:

  God gave us two ends to use.

  One to think with!

  One to sit with!

  The war depends on which we choose.

  Heads we win!

  Tails we lose!

  LAND PUT THE COGNOMEN Liberty ship into the ring against Ugly Duckling, and it won.

  The ships were 441′6" long, 57 feet wide, and could carry 9,000 tons of cargo in their 5 holds, which is to say 440 light tanks packed in along with 2,840 jeeps as well as food, ammunition, and troops. With such a capacity, getting safely through a single voyage would pay for the $1.5 million ship.

  The first, Patrick Henry, was laid down in Baltimore on the final day of April 1941, at the Bethlehem-Fairfield shipyard, which Bethlehem Steel had built in nine months. The Patrick Henry took shape on one of the yard’s sixteen ways and went into the water on September 27. This was fast work, but out on the West Coast the second Liberty, the Star of Oregon, which had been laid down much later, was ready for service only one day after the Patrick Henry.

  She had been built in the Portland yard of Henry Kaiser, who would come to dominate the largest shipbuilding program in history. A stocky, energetic man just shy of sixty, Kaiser didn’t know anything about ships when he started making them, but he knew a great deal about organizing huge projects, and no prospective job seems ever to have daunted him.

  Above all he was a salesman. Jesse Jones, head of Roosevelt’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, once told him, “I don’t want you to deal with anyone around here but me. You’d talk them out of their watches, and when I’d ask them about it, they’d say, ‘See, he talked me out of my watch, isn’t that wonderful?’” He’d been talking people out of watches since he was a teenager in upstate New York. He owned his own photography business by the time he was twenty, but left it when his prospective father-in-law demanded that his daughter’s suitor earn $125 per week. Kaiser went west. He got involved in a Seattle hardware concern, then took up what he modestly termed “the sand and gravel business,” which meant building highways. By 1931 he was so solidly established that he bid in one of the main contracts for building the Boulder Dam, then went on to do the same with the Grand Coulee Dam and the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. Kaiser had a shipyard up and running in Seattle by the time the British Shipbuilding Mission arrived. It was relatively small, but that he had built it and got it working in eleven months impressed the commission members. So did Kaiser’s bluster, or what would have been bluster if he hadn’t had real muscle behind it. “Give me the backing,” he told Cyril Thompson, the commission’s head, “and I’ll build you two hundred ships during 1942.”

  “Kaiser went about the task in a big way,” Thompson wrote later. “First he hired a vast flood of workers; there were 12,000,000 unemployed in America in the early days. Many of the newcomers not only had a high degree of intelligence, but had mechanical aptitude as well. That explains why Americans were able to build up a vast shipbuilding industry in such a short time, practically from nothing. … By 1942 two of Kaiser’s yards alone employed more workers than the whole of Britain’s shipbuilding industry.” Kaiser acquired his workforce and their tools with a swashbuckling, high-hearted rapacity. At a time when established industry managers had not quite grasped the scope of what was being asked them and moved cautiously, Kaiser waded right in—it was cost plus, after all—and seized every derrick and bulldozer he could find. He infuriated competitors by paying wages high enough to lure skilled workers away to fill unskilled slots. He hired people before he had anything to put them to work on. It was all terribly extravagant, but as one of FDR’s economic advisers, Eliot Janeway, put it, Kaiser succeeded by “instinctively grasping Roosevelt’s rule that energy was more efficient than efficiency.”

  Eighteen different yards built Liberty ships, but Kaiser’s were by far the most productive. Since the first European settlement, the East Coast had been the heart of American shipbuilding, and even in 1941 it was responsible for more than two-thirds of the ships produced in the United States. Two years later the West Coast was launching more tonnage than any other region. Henry Kaiser was largely responsible for the shift.

  He set up an assembly line that imitated an automaking plant on a statewide level. Chunks of ships were fabricated hundreds of miles apart, brought together at the yard on flatcars, and swung into place at the last minute. As important, Kaiser welded his hulls rather than riveting them, which was how ships had been built ever since metal hulls replaced wooden ones. But trained riveters were scarce, and welding was much faster. He built ships in months, then weeks, and finally days. The Robert E. Peary was laid down in Kaiser’s No. 2 Yard, in Richmond, California, on November 8, 1942, and the hull assembled from 250-ton prefabricated sections that same day. On the ninth the upperworks and deck went in, and on the tenth the masts and booms were planted and the wiring strung. The ship was launched on the twelfth: four days, fifteen hours, and twenty-nine minutes. This was something of a stunt, but the Peary saw a war’s worth of service and stayed afloat until she was scrapped in 1963.

  In 1944 Warner Bros. put out a cartoon called “The Weakly Report.” It is a drearily mild parody of newsreels about wartime conditions (food rationing: a customer in a butcher shop orders a porterhouse, then pays to sniff it before it’s whisked back into the meat locker), but one scene has a bit of snap. It shows a bunting-draped platform on which a woman waits holding a bottle of champagne next to an official in a top hat. Clearly a ship is to be launched, but no ship is there, nothing but sky and sea beyond the empty ways. The woman mentions this, and the official shakes his head impatiently. “Just start swinging, lady.” She does, and the ship has materialized in time for the bottle to break against its bow.

  ONCE LAUNCHED, A LIBERTY ship was turned over to a private shipping company, which oversaw its loading, while the seaman’s union hiring hall supplied the crew.

  This simply stated arrangement was infinitely complex in its ramifications. When the popular New York City sports reporter Tom O’Reilly sought duty as a purser aboard a Liberty, he was introduced to a shipping-line official who explained it to him: “‘O’Reilly, the shipping business is very simple. It runs smoothly—in jerks.’ He then pointed out that the Liberty ship I was to join would be owned by the War Shipping Administration, operated by the American South African Line, Inc., carry a cargo for the United States Army, sail under strict control of the United States Navy, while at the same time being governed by the rules of the Maritime Commission, the United States Customs Authority, the National Maritime Union, the Masters, Mates, and Pilots Association, the Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Society, and other unions.”

  In the very rarefaction of his profession, O’Reilly might be said to be a typical member of a merchant crew. The
men came aboard the ships from everywhere, and for every reason, some of them valuable old hands, many, like O’Reilly, new to the sea.

  After December 7, he said, “slowly, but inexorably, the sports figures began to disappear and I found myself feeling somewhat superfluous.” Unlike most merchant mariners, O’Reilly was able to deplore his situation with “Mr. John J. Farrell, a sportsman who also happens to be one of the owners of the American South African Steamship Line, Inc.” Farrell asked him if he could add, and “since I once got the result of a Washington, D.C., football game that had ended in a 73–0 score into the paper correctly, I replied in the affirmative.” When O’Reilly nodded yes to the only other question in this job interview—“Can you typewrite?”—Farrell said that was all O’Reilly needed to know to be a purser.

  O’Reilly reported to the Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation, where “I was sworn in and given a certificate of registry as a staff officer on vessels of the United States Merchant Marine. This sounded absolutely wonderful until I looked at my title. I was listed as a ‘junior assistant purser,’ an appellation that couldn’t have sounded any lower if they had called me ‘sub-novice orderly.’” Nevertheless, even though in the steamship offices his job—managing payroll and paperwork—was referred to as “ship’s clerk,” he was an officer. After all, “John Paul Jones had started his sea career as a ship’s clerk. Who knows? Ships have been named after him.”

  O’Reilly picked up his ship in a Baltimore drydock. Censorship regulations prevented him from mentioning her name in his account, but of course she looked like every other Liberty ship, which was, as the president had pointed out, not much. Also, this one had already paid for herself: built six months earlier, she had completed a voyage and grime from the cargo of coal she’d carried still streaked her sides. Welders on her deck crouched in their Aztec masks over the crackling blue-white flames of acetylene torches.