Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  O’Reilly got a perfectly representative first glimpse of a Liberty ship and, when the men assembled in the officers’ mess to sign the ship’s articles, of its crew: “There were serious sailors and screwballs, gay buckos and dullards, veteran ‘shellbacks who’d turned the Horn in sail’ and kids fresh from the plow. Some would have been here even if the world were at peace. Others were making a pretty tough decision.” Later, after a liberty down in the Canal Zone, the captain said that in fact his company was a little out of the ordinary. “You know, O’Reilly, we’ve got a damned good crew on here. They spent eight hundred in ten hours and didn’t pull a single knife.”

  The merchant seamen would have had more to spend than their navy counterparts. Years later an Armed Guard veteran still remembered the difference. In 1942, he said, a seaman on a merchant ship got “$100 a month, 100% bonus, war zone $15 per day, and an air raid allowance of $150 for each port.” A navy sailor “received $56 a month and 10% sea pay.” Yet the navy offered things the merchant service didn’t: retirement benefits, free uniforms and medical care, and all the intangibles conferred by being part of a highly ordered tradition that went back to the birth of the republic.

  As against that, the merchant service had a strain of democracy that would not extend to the navy for some years. There, black sailors were almost always eligible solely for mess duty. In the merchant marine, they held every job right up to captain. This was obliquely reflected by eighteen Liberty ships being named for African-Americans. At least two of them were manned by all-black crews. When the Frederick Douglass, westbound to New York, was torpedoed and sunk, every man aboard got off safely, and so did one woman, the twenty-three-year-old Domillie James, of 23 Oxford Street, Bristol, England, who was said to be “very pretty.” A British rescue ship took the survivors to Halifax, where the Royal Canadian Navy report mentioned that Domillie James was “coloured,” and that “she said she boarded the ship on Sunday 12 September whilst the [gangway] watch ‘was seeking shelter from the rain.’ Alleged that the ship’s bosun Jerome Davis [who can scarcely have believed his luck], had aided and abetted her hiding on board.” The report concluded, “It may be of interest to note that the majority of the ship’s crew including the master, are coloured.”

  Black, white, navy, merchant, they ran the same risks, and, they felt, more of them on the Liberty ships. That swift, thrifty welding sometimes failed in small ways, and sometimes in large ones. Robert Ruark remembered a fellow Armed Guard lieutenant telling him, “And when my coxswain woke me up, he said, ‘Excuse me for bothering you, sir, but the ship just broke in two.’”

  It didn’t happen often, but it didn’t have to in order to make a strong impression on the men whose lives depended on those welds holding. They talked about it a lot on O’Reilly’s ship. “There is the theory that a welded ship, once broken, gets a tear in her side, like the run in a lady’s silk stocking.” During a meal, one of the officers inquired whether the meat had been “cooked or welded.”

  Welding failures tended to happen in the chill of far northern waters, where the Liberties had to go to bring supplies to the Russian ports of Murmansk, Archangel, and Molotovsk. The Murmansk run, up around Norway to the arctic circle, exposed the convoys to every German war machine save trench mortars: planes out of occupied Norway, surface ships (and not just raiders; the battleship Tirpitz was in one of those fjords), lots of submarines.

  The ships putting out from Reykjavik on the fifteen-hundred-mile journey to Murmansk got the worst of a wilderness where every drop of spray had a blade in it and the ice could form on the upperworks so thickly that the ship capsized.

  There was a wild unreality to those arctic voyages. The fully laden ships were given another tier of cargo, and their decks became a Hooverville of wooden crates, some of them eight feet high and ten long. Ships’ carpenters knocked together ladders and bridges between them, over which the Armed Guard would slip and scramble on their way to the guns. Sometimes their antiaircraft fire would be joined by the machine guns mounted on the turrets of tanks lashed down amid the jumble of crating. Sometimes it was always dark, sometimes it never was. The sea was always cold, but in the winter it was as quickly lethal as burning oil to anyone cast into it.

  Arctic service may have been the grimmest sea duty the war had to offer, but the Liberties went everywhere. Tom O’Reilly ended up steaming thirty-six thousand miles, around both capes and through the Suez Canal to Cairo before he got home to Weehawken.

  There was danger to spare in any sea, but Atlantic duty was different. The Japanese believed the targets of their warships should be other warships. Doenitz aimed for commerce and only commerce. His captains avoided destroyers whenever they could, but were willing to give their lives going after a freighter and especially a tanker.

  American sailors called tankers “floating firecrackers,” but they went out on them all through the war. So, too, with the Liberty ships, and all the rest of the merchant fleet. However abundantly America built the freighters and tankers, there were always enough sailors to man them: fifty-five thousand in 1941, and close on a quarter million in 1945.

  Coming back from one of the arctic voyages, Lieutenant (j.g.) Blake Hughes, commanding the Armed Guard on the inaugural Liberty ship Patrick Henry, sent this in to headquarters: “I want to preface this report of our return voyage from Archangel with a tribute to the 23 men under my command, none of whom, with the exception of the coxswain, had even been to sea before, and none of whom had previously been in action. … At the close of the first day of attack … when 25 per cent of our ships had been destroyed by submarines and 60 to 70 Heinkel and Focke-Wulf planes, and while we were still at general quarters, I received the following message by phone at my station on the flying bridge: All the men would like you to know, sir, that their spirits are high and that they are ready for the enemy. With the picture of a near-by ship completely pulverized in a horrible explosion a few minutes before still before me, I thought these were the most courageous words I ever heard.”

  Lieutenant Hughes was speaking officially, and for the record. On the eve of his world tour, O’Reilly heard the same story, less formally expressed. He’d been talking with Savannah, the ship’s chief cook, and asked him the name of the last ship that had paid him off.

  “I wasn’t paid off,” Savannah said, “I was knocked off. A light we thought was on the Baltimore lightship was on a sub. Eight of us got into a lifeboat an’ they all died but me. It was January, an’ cold. I swore I’d never go out again, but here I am.”

  A Visit to the Ship Cemetery

  Desperate times on the Eastern seaboard, 1943

  One day in June 1942, Lieutenant Carl Ossman, training for Armed Guard duty, was standing in the chow line when a classmate came up waving a copy of the local newspaper. It contained the text of Roosevelt’s most recent fireside chat, in which the president happily reported that Americans were now building ships faster than the Germans could sink them. “You can imagine,” said Ossman, “the feelings of us who were getting ready to report to those sinkable merchant ships.”

  If Lieutenant Ossman did not love this strategy, neither did Admiral King. A month before FDR’s broadcast, King had issued a memorandum throughout the Navy Department:

  Subject: Combatting the Submarine Menace—Building Merchant Ships vs Building Anti-Submarine Craft.

  1. It is desired that “all hands” take note of the alternatives posed in the following questions:

  “Shall we continue to try to build merchant ships faster than enemy submarines can sink them?

  or,

  Shall we build anti-submarine craft of such character and in such numbers that we can sink submarines faster than the enemy can build them!”

  2. The answer appears obvious …

  King would prefer to build ships that could sink submarines rather than supply more targets. But even this determined man could not force the immediate construction of escorts. Priorities kept shifting: merchantmen got first call
, then, later, landing craft.

  Still, new escort vessels were beginning to appear. Among the first were PCs—patrol craft—173 feet long, and with real teeth: a three-inch gun and depth charges. They were handsome ships, but small (“Don’t call my friggin’ boat a friggin’ boat,” a sailor aboard one of them expostulated) and not suited for midocean work. The historian Richard M. Ketchum, who spent the war on a PC, remembered, “You didn’t want to be shot at with a rifle aboard one of those.” Of course they were immediately pressed into duties beyond their intended capabilities. So were a lot of other vessels during those harried months.

  One of the first of many civilian ships the navy took in was the yacht Alva, built in 1931 by the Krupp works at Kiel for William K. Vanderbilt II, who gave her to the government a month before Pearl Harbor. Half a year later she emerged from the Norfolk Navy Yard as PG (patrol gunboat) 57, the USS Plymouth. She had nothing to do with the Hooligan Navy. Two hundred and seventy feet long, with a crew of 155, PG-57 mounted a four-inch and two three-inch guns. The morning after he came aboard, her first captain, waking up in his stateroom, spotted a cluster of buttons in the bulkhead next to his bed. Sleepily curious, he pushed one. Chiming and tinkling, there slid out of the paneling an emissary from another world: a shelf of shining barware and decanters filled with liquor. Other millionaires gave over their yachts—Henry Ford, Huntington Hartford, Arthur Lehman, Mrs. Jesse Ball duPont—and in the meantime Admiral Andrews was scouring the Eastern seaboard for anything that could possibly inconvenience a submarine.

  In early July of 1942 Ensign Ellis Sard, aboard the minesweeper Fulmar off Portland, Maine, received a blinker message: he was hereby detached to take command of YP-438. Sard, a recent Harvard graduate (who, according to a colleague of mine who knew him, looked “exactly like Robert Mitchum”), had been in the navy for just over a year; he was twenty-five years old. “The braid on my cap was salty green, and in my pocket were orders taking me to Boston and my first command.”

  Sard found his new command undergoing conversion in a forlorn, third-rate shipyard. She was a 120-foot long, 130-ton fishing boat. Her masts and rigging had been stripped away and lay around her “like the guts of a dead cat.” All that remained of her motive power was the Atlas diesel engine that had been born with her, in 1906. A chief in the yard offered some consolation: “She used to be a beautiful two-masted schooner, and when we get through with her, she’ll be seaworthy enough.” Then he added, “That’s what happens when politicians demand ships out of thin air. They wouldn’t give us the money when we needed it.”

  The conversion of the yard-patrol vessel went forward: three 20mm guns came aboard, and depth-charge racks were set up in the stern. They held four depth charges, two each. A crew of eight arrived—one too few to man the twenties.

  Sard’s ship underwent her dock trials in late September. He found that the YP-438 could cruise at eight knots with a flank speed of maybe ten. The navy accepted the YP from the yard, and Captain Sard took her out under his command for the first time. A few days later, with four new men bringing his crew to “a grand total of twelve,” they ran down the south shore of Boston and put on speed to drop their first depth charge. “We went to general quarters, and the YP shivered and shook with the unaccustomed exertion. The depth charge dropped and went off with a violent thud. As if from fright, the engine broke down immediately, and the heads overflowed.”

  The motor mechanic (the YP didn’t rate anything as lofty as an engineer), a Minnesota Swede named Hansen, explained, “There are things, sir, I’m afraid you can’t do if the engine is to keep running.”

  “Such as?”

  “Don’t drop no more depth charges.”

  Hansen’s repairs got them to Provincetown Harbor, there to be greeted by a full hurricane, which left Sard no choice but to cut the anchor cable (the ship was too fragile to raise its largest anchor) and run before it. Fortunately the engine had recovered from the affront of the depth charge and kept clattering gamely away throughout the ordeal.

  The storm bought them a week of repairs in the yard, then YP-438 was ordered to New York. The engine broke down. Hansen said he could keep it going for three hours at a time. The YP stuttered its way to New York, where Sard was sent to 90 Church Street, headquarters of the Eastern Sea Frontier. A commander told him, “Thirty of these ships have come through New York, and every one of them has come through in miserable condition.” Sard said everything was fine except the engine.

  “Goddammit, Captain, how do you sail with a ship in that condition? You’re the commanding officer, and it’s your responsibility to see that things are right.” Then the commander relented: “I know you have little choice in the matter, but every damn one of these ships has been a waste of money. This time I’m really going to raise hell and see that you get fixed up.”

  And he did. The Atlas came apart and every piece was put to rights, burnished, refurbished, new parts cut when old ones proved beyond repair. At last the engine was reassembled and fired up. It wouldn’t start. “Somebody laughed out of sheer discouragement, and Hansen went berserk. He yelled, screamed, and brandished a kitchen cleaver. The crew subdued him and he was led off to a hospital in a straitjacket. This willing and capable man had simply been driven mad by a crazy demon of an old diesel.” They got another mechanic.

  Now came sailing orders: THERE IS A POSSIBILITY OF ENEMY SUBMARINE AND MINE ACTIVITY ALONG THE ATLANTIC COAST X DESTROY ENEMY FORCES EXCOUNTERED X WHEN FULLY PREPARED FOR SEA PROCEED COASTWISE WITHOUT DELAY TO MIAMI.

  “Destroy enemy forces.” A couple of months earlier YP-389, another Boston fishing boat, had encountered a submarine. Disdaining to squander a torpedo on such a target, the German stood out of range of the YP’s 30mms (over its captain’s protests, it had put to sea with its three-inch gun broken; orders were orders) and sank it with the U-boat’s cannon.

  Sard headed south inspirited by a small miracle: after leaving Norfolk “the YP had for the first time in her history run twenty-four hours without a breakdown.” But this brought them to a somber place. “There is a buoy south of Hatteras, which we picked up in midmorning. It marked the start of the wreck area,” where the U-boats had been busy. “We passed our first wreck … then another, then another. Surely a sunken ship is as sad as any of the sad sights of war. It is not spectacular the way a devastated city is, or as gruesome as a pile of corpses, but it brings a melancholy chill. The masts of the wrecks poked above water with maybe one spar bobbing loose; there was no wreckage or oil visible, and only rarely did a hull show above the surface. It was quiet and sad, and a little spooky. If you ever need proof that a ship is a living thing, look at a sunken one.”

  Now the breakdowns started again, and an ugly cross sea began to work apart the planks in the hull. Water flowed in, and the YP won several weeks in a yard at Charleston. Then on south, the engine racketing itself toward extinction, which overtook it at Fort Lauderdale. Sard signaled for a tow. A boat came and they passed it a line, only to get pulled onto the rocks of a submerged breakwater. The tide began to run out. Another boat arrived and stood by while Sard and his men handed across the ship’s logs and as much equipment as they could: the guns, the depth-charge racks. The cook, seawater sloshing about his ankles, took a roast from the oven and brought it to the bridge. The captain and crew had their last meal aboard. By the next morning, the YP-438 had disappeared.

  So went out Captain Sard’s year, and his nation’s. Between July, when he got his orders to take over his new command, and December, Doenitz’s men had sunk 524 ships.

  “Sighted Sub …”

  A little good news, 1943

  During his long, patient courtship of America, Churchill liked to quote the last line of a poem called (after its first line) “Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth” by Arthur Hugh Clough: “But westward, look, the land is bright.”

  In the context of 1940 Churchill meant it more literally than the poet had. To the prime minister, the land west across the ocean was b
right with factories, money, energy, an inexhaustible supply of potential soldiers. Clough, writing a century earlier, had been speaking of how things can change before our perception of them does. While waves continue what seems their weary, futile nibbling at the shore,

  Far back, through creeks and inlets making,

  Comes silent flooding in, the main,

  And not by eastern windows only,

  When daylight comes, comes in the light;

  In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,

  But westward, look, the land is bright.

  As the dark year of 1942 waned, even as the disintegrating YP-438 picked its way through spars and funnels off Hatteras, the Allied sky was growing imperceptibly brighter. Ten thousand miles away from the smoking shores of Florida and the Carolinas, navy airmen had broken, for the first time, the Japanese advance across the Pacific. At Stalingrad, the furnace that consumed two million lives was about to shut down with the capitulation of ninety thousand German troops.

  There would be no Midway, no great surrender, in the Atlantic. But little by little, we were learning what to do about U-boats.

  In the spring, convoys of a sort began to operate along the East Coast. Their extemporized nature is suggested in the name Admiral Andrews gave to them: bucket brigades. Twenty or thirty ships would assemble at a port and, setting out in the early morning, scuttle in company, guarded by whatever might be at hand, to another port a day’s steaming away. Much of the Atlantic coast north of Hatteras is punctuated by good harbors every hundred miles or so, and the ships would spend the night in these, protected by booms and netting and minefields.