Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  As the year progressed, the operations got more elaborate, culminating in the Interlocking Convoy System, which ran from Guantánamo to Halifax under guidelines laid down by the navy in April: “As a result of experience in the north Atlantic it now appears that the minimum strength that will afford reasonable protection is five escorts per convoy of 40 or 50 ships, of which all should make 18 knots (the maximum at which sound gear is usable), and be equipped with sound and depth charges, and two should be destroyers to permit ranging to the flanks and astern and rejoining without waste of time.”

  If there were many good reasons why escort vessels couldn’t be whistled up, there were few to explain what remains one of the strangest aspects of the U-boat war. Those city lights that amazed and fascinated Hardegan and Cremer on their first American voyages just kept burning. In the disorderly process of a democracy going to war, it turned out that nobody had the authority to make the mayor of Atlantic City darken his town. Admiral Andrews begged municipalities to institute blackouts and was told, in effect, fat chance. The town fathers of Miami indignantly stated that it would discourage tourists and be bad for business. Why a darkened marquee on the Frolic Club or the Chez Paree would dispirit vacationers more than morning strolls past oil-sodden corpses on beaches was never explained. In the end, it took a columnist in the Miami Daily News to prod his neighbors into doing something about what had become a national disgrace. On July 12 Jack Kofoed’s article began, “It seems that no small number of people in our town fail to comprehend that the war is at our doorsteps. There have been ships torpedoed within a few miles of the beach hotels. All of us have seen members of the crews in our streets. It has been pointed out that the lume [a nice word that Kofoed seems to have invented] for the city lights offers an excellent background for predatory submarines. Everyone knows that the ships silhouetted by that lume are vital to our national welfare.” Where Admiral Andrews was helpless, Kofoed did the job, and eight months after Pearl Harbor, Miami went dark.

  Escort vessels may have been scarce, but for antisubmarine work airplanes were scarcer still. This was largely the result of the severe growing pains that afflicted the flying machine between the wars, which had put the services at one another’s throats in an obstreperous rivalry that Congress tried to settle by giving the army and the navy separate and independent air arms.

  This meant that the navy was responsible for all planes that flew off ships, the army for all that took off from land. It was simple. It was simplistic. What about that place where land and water meet? The navy wanted its own long-range, land-based aircraft to patrol for submarines. No, the army sulkily replied, if the plane touches solid ground, it belongs to us. If the navy wanted long-range patrols, it should build seaplanes.

  The navy started to, but didn’t have nearly enough of them by the time Doenitz arrived. King asked the Army Air Force for help. It came, grudgingly of course, in the form of eighty-four—and, eventually, three hundred—medium bombers. The army kept control of them, but the army airmen didn’t like the job. They would far rather have been walking on flak over Bremen than spending hour upon hour over the unvarying flatness and almost unvarying eventlessness of the sea. Eventually King’s persistence and army boredom worked to transfer the land-based coastal planes to the navy.

  An airplane—a navy airplane, a land-based one—got the first U-boat to be sunk by Americans. The plane was a Lockheed Hudson, one of a Lend-Lease order for two hundred light bombers won by the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. As the Atlantic campaign intensified, the U.S. navy managed to pry loose twenty of them for Patrol Squadron 82, based in Newfoundland.

  On March 1, 1942, Ensign William Trepuni, flying out of Argentia, spotted a submarine. It was crash-diving, but Trepuni dove faster and dropped depth charges. Circling the roiled water, he saw a spreading oil slick and fragments of decking. This was enough to justify claiming a kill, and he did. Captured German records confirmed it after the war: U-656, on her second voyage, and never having sunk anything, was lost with all her crew.

  Two weeks later another pilot in Trepuni’s squadron, Donald Francis Mason, came upon U-503 and destroyed it. Any airman would have been pleased with this outcome, but Mason had a particularly pressing reason to hope for it.

  He had been famous for a month and a half. On January 18, patrolling in his PBY—a Catalina flying boat—he had seen something and dropped two bombs on it. He reported this incident in a phrase that the New York Times immediately compared to Commodore Perry’s on Lake Erie during the War of 1812 (“We have met the enemy, and they are ours”), and which still rattles around in the national consciousness: “Sighted sub. Sank same.” (The fatalists of the Naval Armed Guard immediately adopted a paraphrase: “Sighted sub. Glub. Glub.”) It soon became clear, though, that whatever Mason may have sighted, he sank nothing.

  The navy was so desperate for good news just then that it is still widely reported that the service’s propagandists had invented the message. But Mason really did radio his quartet of exultant sibilants.

  Now, though, he had actually sunk same, and soon an American ship would be able to make the claim as well. The USS Roper, a four-stacker launched in the summer of 1918, was turned over to Admiral Andrews for duty on the Eastern Sea Frontier in early March and had spent an increasingly frustrating month steaming through lakes of oil bled by dying tankers and past the corpses of American sailors kept pointlessly afloat by their life jackets.

  The captain, Hamilton W. Howe, had the crew at general quarters almost constantly for five days straight. They were not at their battle stations on the evening of April 13, but those days of wearing vigil added to the volatile brew of ferocity and buck fever that annihilated the crew of U-85.

  Captain Eberhardt Gregor, on his fourth war patrol, had sunk the Swedish freighter Christina Knudson off New Jersey three nights earlier and was waiting in the moonless dark off Cape Hatteras with only a hundred feet of water beneath the keel of his Type VII when the Roper found him just after midnight. Knowing his boat would be an easy target at such a shallow depth, Gregor tried to run for deeper water. Despite the darkness, the sea was phosphorescent and the lookouts of the Roper could see their quarry’s wake from two thousand yards away. Captain Howe followed the cool glow at twenty knots, but he was not convinced that he was closing on a submarine until a torpedo cut past along the destroyer’s port side.

  Howe ordered general quarters and ten minutes later was close enough to use the twenty-four-inch searchlight on the Roper’s flying bridge. There was the U-85, three hundred yards away and swinging to starboard. “Open fire!” But nobody did, the crew apparently frozen now that the invisible thing they had been pursuing for so long was there before them, astonishingly tangible in the chalky glare. Finally a chief got one of the fifties working. Men were coming out of the submarine’s conning tower, and some fell. Were the others going for the deck gun? The Roper carried five three-inch guns, and all of them were dumb. Four of them would remain so: their excited crews had fired before the shells were loaded, producing the same effect as if a dud round had hung fire in the barrel. All four crews, incredibly, followed the prudent peacetime drill of waiting ten minutes before cracking the breach, while their muzzles stayed canted up toward the black sky. Only Boatswain’s Mate Harry Heyman, captain of gun No. 5, had not prematurely fired, and now he called, “Ready, sir!” His men loaded an armor-piercing shell and shot it. A flash showed a hit on the conning tower. Heyman fired again, and the submarine was down by the stern, its crew tumbling into the water.

  The Roper headed toward the struggling men. “Please!” they called as she approached. “Bitte!” She was in among them. One of the German sailors scrabbled at her hull, pleading. The destroyer released depth charges where the submarine had been. Eleven of them rolled down the rails into the water, and every German who saw them splash off the stern knew that he had only seconds to live.

  The Roper stood by until daybreak, dropped more gratuitous depth charges, then set about fish
ing the German dead—there were no survivors—out of the water. They were piled on deck amidships and a tarpaulin put over them to discourage the souvenir hunting that had begun.

  The Roper transferred the corpses to a navy tug, which took them to Portsmouth, Virginia. Neither the town nor the naval hospital there had enough coffins, but the Veterans Administration provided twenty-nine at a cost of $1,193.55, and the German sailors were buried with military honors at the National Cemetery in Hampton. Their graves are still there.

  An American ship had indisputably sunk a submarine, and of course that was good news. But despite this four-stacker having been taken out of mothballs and put back to work as early as 1930, her victory has a feel of amateurism. It is most obvious in those impotent guns but has more to it than that. The U-85 went down in water shallow enough for divers to go inside the boat and study mechanical details, perhaps even get coding material. There could have been at least twenty-nine crewmen to interrogate. But the crew was mute, and their boat had been so thoroughly mauled after it ceased to offer any threat that its secrets were forever sealed in it. Today it is a highly popular objective for sports divers, who have paid it thousands of visits over the years. One of them was Homer Hickham, who understood what he was looking at, because he is also a historian and the author of Torpedo Junction, a thorough history of Doenitz’s East Coast campaign. He had no trouble identifying the G-7 torpedo that still lies on the wreck. But neither Hickham nor the navy divers sent down that spring, or anyone else, has ever been able to venture inside.

  Well, sure, there was amateurism. We were amateurs. Doenitz had been training his men to the strictest standards for years in a discipline he had done much to invent. King had to whistle up a whole navy-within-a-navy in a few months. The ships were almost ready. Once launched, though, they’d be set to waging a highly specialized campaign, and they would need a lot of specialists to work them.

  In the navy, institutions, like ships, get commissioned, as the Submarine Chasing Training Center was, on March 16, 1942, in Miami. The school, which, despite some carping from the Chamber of Commerce, took over a good stretch of the waterfront along with a dozen Biscayne Boulevard hotels, did far more to help win the war than its defiantly bright municipality had done to lose it.

  The school’s job was to teach its students how to fight submarines, and to run it a real destroyerman came in from the sea. Samuel Eliot Morison, the foremost historian of America’s naval war, said that Commander Eugene F. McDaniel, whom he knew, “was a lean, mean, thin-lipped officer whose eyes burned with hatred of the enemy and all his works, and whose heart glowed with devotion to the Navy, especially the antisubmarine part of it. Somewhat of the fanatical zeal of a seventeenth-century Scots Covenanter in his make-up; but a sense of organization and a natural teaching ability were there too.”

  He brought in some professional educators from the University of Chicago to help him get started, but he made sure that his teachers had, like him, hunted submarines and, after their instructional turn ashore, went back to hunt more. McDaniel’s school opened with 50 students, but before long it was taking in 250 officers a week. This was what people have recently (and mercifully) begun to stop calling a 24-7 operation, and a new draft of officers arrived every Monday. Richard B. Snow got there in February 1943, and though he was often overwhelmed and sometimes miserable, my father was impressed and fascinated by Commander McDaniel. No matter how large his administrative duties grew, and the school was soon educating thousands, McDaniel always found time to teach. “Our commanding officer gave a long lecture on convoy duties yesterday,” my father wrote my mother, “and he was corking—having seen a great deal of that duty on a fleet destroyer in the North Atlantic before he reluctantly left his ship to head the school here.”

  My father was a good fifteen years older than most of his classmates, but he had one thing in common with almost every other student in the school: a year or two earlier, the last thing he expected in life was to have Commander McDaniel teaching him how to keep a submarine away from a tanker.

  How Lieutenant Snow Got to Sea

  A reserve officer’s journey, 1943

  Not everyone’s father was an architect, not everyone’s father had a single child long after he thought this an impossibility, not everyone’s father remembered to his last days the words of a novelty song that begins “I run the old mill / Over there to Reubensville.” But, if you will, take this man as your father, or uncle, or grandfather; or your aunt, or mother; or yourself. A person, that is, finding a path through life that, although thicketed with uncertainties, at least doesn’t lead anywhere near gunfire. You may go broke, your best friend may sicken and die, you may be jilted, or fired, or insulted by your dry cleaner. But nobody is going to try to shoot you or drown you or burn you while you sleep. Well, the joke, every generation or so since the contentious world began, is on you.

  My father had a yearning for the U.S. navy very early, but he didn’t know it. Born in 1905 on the Stanford University campus, where his father was resident physician, one of his first memories was of being frantic with desire to go up to “the city” with his parents and brother to see “the Fleet.” But he was too young. “I was wild. They were leaving me behind! I didn’t know what the Fleet was, but I had to get to it. I savored the word. I believe I imagined it as a delicious drink.” It was the Great White Fleet, stopping by San Francisco in 1908 on the final leg of the circuit of the globe another navy-minded Roosevelt, Theodore, had ordered to show that the United States was open for business as a world power.

  My father didn’t get to see it, and that put an end to his naval ambitions for thirty-five years. His family came east; he grew up in Manhattan and entered Columbia College. He learned to play the violin, and during a summer studying the instrument at Fontainebleau in France, he met a tall, slender viola student named Emma Folger. After the decade-long rupture of their engagement, when they at last got married in the spring of 1941, they set up housekeeping in a nice apartment on East Ninety-seventh Street, and all was bright and happy and untroubled for a full nine months while the Great Depression gave its last bow and stepped aside to make way for something worse.

  Emma Snow turned thirty-nine on December 7. “We had a very happy day,” my father said. But midway through it, “we were sitting in our apartment and we were listening to a beautiful Philharmonic concert.” An announcer broke in. “I said, ‘Jesus Christ, this is Toscanini and they’re interrupting—’ That’s how much of a naval officer I was. Pearl Harbor? I didn’t know what the hell it was.” The concert came back on, “but then, as we thought it over, we thought, this is serious.”

  Serious enough for him to seek out Martha Love, an old girlfriend from his architecture school days. She was now Martha McCagg, having married Louis McCagg, who was running the navy’s District Security Office in Manhattan. “Their responsibility was to keep industrial production going, and to keep things from burning up or being dynamited. He needed technically minded people, and so Martha suggested, ‘Why don’t you go down and talk with Louis? He needs people that can read plans, that can make industrial analyses, that can make plan evaluations.’”

  Louis McCagg couldn’t have been more accommodating. He invited my father down to 90 Church Street, talked over the work that needed doing, and said that he could start as a civilian agent and then get a commission in the Naval Reserve.

  That’s just what happened. Before long my father was inspecting shipyards (“I’d never seen a shipyard before”), and when his naval commission came through, he inspected them in uniform. He spent his nights at home, he had time to keep a hand in his architecture practice, and sailors back from the North Atlantic convoy runs saluted him on the street.

  He hated it. “In all my professional experience the thing I liked least is inspecting, because you’re looking over other people’s efforts, and presumably sometimes they knew what they were doing. I learned a lot, I saw a lot, it was serious work. But then when I began to do this wor
k as a naval officer, not as a civilian agent, I began to feel, I’m riding up and down in the subway in a uniform; what kind of a way is this for a man my age to spend his life when we’re really engaged in a war?”

  He talked it over with his still new wife, who was far from enthusiastic, but who understood. He went back to Louis McCagg, who came from society, and had, as the phrase then went, friends in high places. So it was that among the thousand fleabites of his working day, Henry Stimson got to consider the momentous question of whether a Richard B. Snow, who knew a friend of a cousin or something, should get to go to sea.

  First the would-be sailor had to pass a demanding correspondence course. He learned about towropes and spring lines and steam turbines and the rigging of ships from the days of sail. He had always had difficulty with math, and navigation was hard for him, but even in a profession that required good draftsmanship he drew exceptionally well, and he aced every part of the course that required illustration. His rendering of the Baldt Patent anchor was considered a particular masterpiece. He studied the tenth edition of Knight’s Modern Seamanship until passages like this yielded up their secrets: “When the second anchor is let go 88.38 fathoms on the lee chain must be at the outboard lip of the hawse-pipe. The next shackle in the chain is at 95 fathoms. Therefore measure back (95 – 88.38) or 6.62 fathoms from the outboard lip of the lee hawse-pipe and make the mark on deck.”

  By early 1943 he knew as much about ships as you could without going on one. In February he was ordered south to Miami and the tutelage of Commander McDaniel.

  “Thank you darling,” he wrote in his first letter to my mother, on Valentine’s Day, “for your patience in allowing me to chase after a new trade.” He’d never been south, and he was surprised by everything he found in Florida. “I had foolishly pictured it as barren and sandy—not at all! I have yet to see any really good architecture, and yet everything looks charming because it’s dripping with greenery and brilliant color.” He passed his blinker-code test and already felt enough of an old salt to write that he was in “a land where junior officers and ensigns swarm. A stripe and a half is quite respectable and anything above that is impressive! As opposed to the Third Naval District where ex-businessmen are running around in 2½ stripes without the faintest idea of what a bollard is.”