by Richard Snow
They lived well down there—the Sub Chaser school became Miami’s leading business and my father found himself put up in hotel suites and garden apartments—but McDaniel worked them hard: “I have not been very good about writing but we have been having a hell of a week. Last Tuesday afloat all morning doing practice antisubmarine runs. Wednesday all day piloting and navigation (this was very pleasant—we ran down to Key Largo and back on a YP which used to be somebody’s very handsome yacht). All night Wednesday on antisubmarine patrol duty (the real thing, with very little sleep). Friday final examination in mooring board plotting, Saturday final examination in engineering and quizzes in anti sub warfare. Sunday a frightful navigation exam. Monday final exercises in seamanship and tomorrow, final examination in administration—All this, of course, in addition to the regular 8 full hours a day of classes and homework. What a job!” (Although he did find time to notice that “the girls in Miami all seem to have blond hair and sunburned legs on which they wear no stockings—very seductive. I have an idea that by and large they are of easy virtue, but that just may be wishful thinking—and anyway I wouldn’t know anything about that.”)
In early March he was “sworn in as Lieutenant, USNR (temporary, as all these appointments are, for the duration only) which is a great satisfaction, except for the fact that I do not know nearly as much as a lieutenant should. I hope I will be able to close that gap before I disgrace myself or run into a court martial!” This was a steady, ominous theme at the training center: “There is a continual fund of anecdotes from instructors here on the subject of improvident officers losing their commands, commissions, or liberty—such as ‘Well, that got back to the Admiral—and there were a few draughts on that ship.’ or ‘He can consider himself lucky that he got off with a court-martial!’ All good morale-building doctrine, and it’s really amusing to see what the next version will be.”
The course lasted eight weeks and only got tougher as it went along. In early April my father let out a cry of near despair—“This week has been another bitch. The way they load the examinations on here is a joke. This morning the seamanship dept, just before the ASW exam, the climax of the whole course here, decided it would be fun to throw in a little 50-question exam on the rules of the road—so they did—And the gunnery department thinks nothing of scheduling its only examination in the whole term the afternoon before. They’ve got us on the ropes.”
But he made it through. One evening toward the end of the ordeal he and several other larval officers were standing on a pier when a vessel none of them had ever before seen materialized out of the twilight, nosing in toward them past the little YPs. “To us,” he told me years later, “she looked like a battleship.” It was the USS Brennan, DE-13, a destroyer escort.
The fact that the new ship struck him as enormous was a good indication of how urgently it was needed.
“It was a staggering, towering thing compared with what we were studying,” he told me, “the little sporty ships that we were supposed to be practicing on. We didn’t know. Nobody had told us in the courses, which were all taught from mimeograph things by guys who had been in the navy six months longer than we had, they didn’t know what was going on. And then all of a sudden the whole scale of our operation changed.”
The Smallest Major War Vessel
Inventing the destroyer escort, 1942
First there was the snake—or eel—in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s orderly garden of battleships. For a long time it stood to reason that the only thing likely to hurt a battleship at sea was another battleship. The torpedo buzzed in and spoiled that.
It was largely the invention of a British engineer named Alfred Whitehead. He built his first torpedo in 1866. It had an explosive at one end and a propeller at the other, but nobody knows exactly what it looked like because he was so anxiously protective of it that no plans survive. His anxiety was perfectly justified, for his plans were eventually stolen, by a German who was visiting his factory, but not before he had sold his device to the Royal Navy.
As soon as it became clear that this troublesome prodigy actually worked, nations began building ships to carry it within striking range of an enemy. These were, naturally, called torpedo boats, and beginning in 1890 the U.S. navy commissioned thirty-five of them within a decade.
Torpedo boats were lightly armed, but fast. Some of the first generation of American ones could boil along at nearly thirty knots. That meant that any vessel hoping to discourage them would have to be equally fast and carry more and bigger guns. The first American torpedo-boat destroyer—these new vessels were named for their job—was the USS Bainbridge, launched in 1901: four hundred tons, a flank speed of twenty-eight knots, two three-inch guns, five six-pounders, and for good measure two torpedo tubes.
Fifteen years later the Great War was on, the torpedo boat had learned how to sail underwater, and American destroyers were averaging 1,150 tons and mounting twelve torpedo tubes and four-inch guns. These ships had evolved beyond their original mission of chasing down torpedo boats, and that part fell away from their name. They were just destroyers now.
The World War I four-stackers hunted submarines, but they also scouted and screened the fleet, including battleships. With the Davids now guarding the Goliaths, they inevitably grew bigger. No destroyers were laid down during the 1920s, but by 1935 forty-five new ones were on order, the largest of them eighteen-hundred tonners with five-inch guns. These evolved into the two-thousand-ton Fletcher class, which became the standard—and a high one—for the navy during the latter part of the war. They were fast and heavily armed, and expensive.
As the destroyers’ capabilities expanded, so did the calls made on them. There was no mystery about their scarcity along our coasts in 1942. As Churchill had badgered Roosevelt, so did the president badger King, who was doubtless irritated—or, being King, infuriated—to receive in July a memo that said, “I still do not understand the long delay in making all ships sail under escort. I realize the problem of making up escorts for convoys but … frankly, I think it has taken an unconscionable time to get things going, and further I do not think that we are utilizing a large number of escort vessels which could be used, especially in the Summer time. We must speed things up and we must use the available tools even though they are not just what we would like to have.”
“I am in entire accord with your view as to the advantages of escorted convoys,” King’s impressively temperate reply began. He reviewed the difficulties involved and said, “I have used vessels of every type and size that can keep up with the ships they guard. I have accepted the smallest vessels that give promise of a reasonable degree of protection.” He ended by telling the president, “My goal—and I believe yours also—is to get every ship under escort. For this purpose we (the United States and Great Britain) need a very large number—roughly 1000—of seagoing escort vessels of DE or corvette type. I am doing my best to get them quickly.”
What he was asking for was, put bluntly, a ship that was cheaper and weaker than a destroyer. But for the job it was to do, weakness wouldn’t be such a disadvantage. The destroyer escort would not have armor thick as a destroyer’s, it would have fewer guns, and it would be at least ten knots slower. But it would not have to slug it out with real destroyers; the German destroyers were gone. The destroyer escort was designed specifically to fight U-boats, and to cope with them it carried equipment the equal of that on any of its burly Fletcher-class big brothers.
Or, more accurately, would carry, because there weren’t any DEs yet.
The destroyer escort program, said Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, had been “all bitched up from the start.” The start had been in the spring of 1940, when FDR told Knox that he wanted four experimental destroyer escorts of 750 to 900 tons. The Bureau of Ships, responsible for all building, buying, and fixing the navy’s vessels, had plans drafted in three months, which was quick work, but work largely wasted because it turned out that a 775-ton DE would cost $4.7 million and carry only two five-inch gu
ns. The Bureau of Ships came up with a better design, but it cost more: $6.8 million to a sixteen-hundred-ton destroyer’s $8.1 million. FDR lost interest, and the navy stayed with the conventional destroyers.
Admiral Harold Stark, however, did not lose interest. He convened an informal board to consider how to make something between YPs and fleet destroyers. It recommended “fifty escort vessels for the sole purpose of protecting convoys against submarines and for use in the western part of the North Atlantic.” The new plans still made for a feebler ship that cost almost as much as a real destroyer, but the yet-unborn DE kept a hold on life because the British got word of it and pushed for it to be built under Lend-Lease. They wanted one hundred of them.
Captain Edward L. Cochrane, in charge of the Preliminary Plans division of the Bureau of Ships, believed in the DE and brought to his belief the practical skills of a first-rate naval architect. He designed a 1,085-ton destroyer escort that would cost a little more than half as much as a destroyer. The five-inch guns became three-inch, the theoretical ship shed some of its more expensive features, and in the summer of 1941 FDR approved the building of fifty DEs, and the contracts were let that December.
Then came Pearl Harbor, and the pressure for Liberty ships, and landing craft, and the DE kept being jostled farther back down the line. It took the enterprise of Doenitz’s captains to get them back on order, but by then pressure was on to build everything, and although there would, in time, be a great many DEs, all of them would be built in haste and on the cheap.
The DE shaped up as what my father liked to say, with a mixture of pride and irony, the navy classified as its “smallest major war vessel.” At fourteen hundred tons, the largest of them was six hundred tons lighter than a Fletcher-class destroyer. They carried a crew of about two hundred—at least one hundred fewer than a destroyer—and, at twenty knots or so, they could move maybe two-thirds its speed. But they were fast enough to overtake U-boats on the surface, and agile enough to stay on top of one when it was underwater. A destroyer had a turning circle nearly nine hundred yards wide; a DE’s was four hundred.
Once we decided we wanted them, we wanted a lot. What with priorities, this meant the DE would be built out of spare parts, by amateurs.
Take the matter of engines. American maritime tradition held that steam alone was a ship’s proper motive power. “Some of the DEs were steam and had regular boilers and water tenders and had to get steam up,” my father remembered. “They were, of course, the classy ones. You know, the Europeans—the Scandinavians, or the Germans in particular—thought a helluva a lot of diesel, so it’s always been chickenshit in our navy. Steam is what we drive our ships with. So we had steam turbines with reduction gear, steam turbines that drove generators, and the shafts were turned by motors. And in diesel, there was diesel with reduction gear, which we were. And there was also diesel electric. So there’s four basic power systems. They all got the same speed, they all did the same chores, it was the darndest thing. Steam is more difficult in a way, but it’s classier. And the diesels—they were not marine diesels. When you’re saying diesel in a DE, you’re not talking about those big, deep, long diesels that drove the Scandinavian ships and the German ships all over the world, these were railroad diesels.” The six different classes would be differentiated by the kind of power plant they contained. The Edsall class—my father’s—was driven by six-thousand-horsepower Fairbanks Morse diesels.
The DE would closely follow Admiral King’s injunction to make do with whatever was at hand. The big stuff, the cruisers, the battleships, were built like cathedrals, piece by piece, in such long-established shipyards as the one at Mare Island, California. Mare Island was fully booked when the DE contracts came through, but its directors remembered a hungry decade well enough not to be likely to turn away any business. Sure, they said, we’ll build your destroyer escorts.
They decided to do it in a town eight hundred miles from the sea. Most of the residents of Denver, Colorado, had never seen an ocean, let alone an oceangoing ship. But, like Mare Island, they wanted the work. The shipyard sent men with blueprints, and a battle fleet began to take shape up there in the mountains.
They built the ships in segments, forty-ton LEGO blocks that would be snapped together hundreds of miles away. This method was picked up across the country as the program gathered momentum. Like Henry Kaiser’s Liberties, they were welded. Women did a lot of this work, which came to be disparaged as “lipstick welding” by those who distrusted it; but it passed every test nature and the Germans could devise.
DEs were not unconventional ships, but they got built in unconventional ways. Someone in the Devoe yards in Bay City, Michigan (who may have remembered what everybody who has hung a ceiling light knows: working with your arms above your head is a pain), got the idea of making DEs upside down. Bill Devoe, whose father founded the yard and ran it during the war, said, “Since it was easier and faster to weld downwards, we saved very many hours at work, and our workmanship improved greatly. The process virtually eliminated ninety percent of all overhead welding.” The ship lay on a cradle deckside down while the workers moved downward from the keel, fastening every piece of machinery that needed to hang overhead. That done, two semicircular steel arcs, looking like the trusses on a bridge that carried a nonsensical roller-coaster dip of roadway, clamped on to the hull and flipped it right side up so that engines and deckhouses and guns could be applied in the conventional manner.
The hulls made their way to the sea, occasionally across the breadth of the whole country. Some DEs built on the Great Lakes went through a labyrinth of locks and rivers and canals to the Mississippi, where, their masts and propellers strapped to their decks for later installation and riding on pontoons that reduced their draft from thirteen to eight feet, they were floated down to the Gulf of Mexico.
In time, seventeen shipyards were building destroyer escorts, and doing it quickly. Bethlehem Steel’s Hingham, Massachusetts, yard delivered ten DEs in a month and got one completed in four and a half days—more impressive, even, than Henry Kaiser’s four-day Liberty-ship coup because these vessels were built to naval standards, which were stricter than those for freighters.
Some of the yards, such as Mare Island, were navy-owned, some were private, and a few were brand-new, built by the government to meet the current crisis. One of these was the Consolidated Steel Corporation building yard in Orange, Texas. That’s where Lieutenant Snow was sent after he finished sub-chasing school, and it was not much like Miami.
LIEUTENANT EDWARD P. STAFFORD arrived in Orange to commission a destroyer escort a little less than a year after my father did. Consolidated was sending off a new DE every eight days when he got there, and five ships were under construction by the long wooden dock on the Sabine River. Cocooned in electrical cables and acetylene hoses, comic with banana-yellow priming paint, simmering in the smell of creosote rising from the dock and the coal smoke exhaled by the self-important little yard locomotives fretting their way along the tracks just ten feet inshore, the ships nonetheless looked great.
“It was obvious that when the tangle and mess of the yard were cleared away,” wrote Stafford, “the DE would be beautiful in a clean-cut, deadly, efficient way. … The short, raked single stack just abaft the mast added a touch of dash. … The clean, straight sweep of the deck from the anchors at her high, sharp bow to the depth-charge racks low on her fantail and the ordered symmetry of her armament made her as graceful as a yacht. Her appearance inspired a feeling of pride and promise, an itch to stand on her bridge and feel her take to the sea.”
Eager though he was to get seaborne, when his ship, the Abercrombie, was commissioned, Lieutenant Stafford was sorry to leave, and so were most of the men aboard. “The people of Orange had been good to them, in marked contrast to the treatment they had received in Norfolk where the crew was formed. While public buses ran from the gate of the Consolidated yard into town, it was unusual for a sailor to have to take one because normally a passing motoris
t would provide a ride before the bus arrived. Nor was it unusual for the motorist to invite the sailor to his home to meet his family and share a meal.”
This was not the town my father experienced. Forty years later, no trickle of sentimentality had softened his memories of it. “It was just an absolutely crappy, miserable, tenth-rate Texas town which raised chickens primarily. But they stopped raising chickens because the chicken houses were needed for the personnel that were building the ships. It was the damnedest thing.”
To be fair, he was angry that he had been sent there rather than to sea. His profession was to blame. The fast-building navy needed men with an architect’s understanding of structure more than it did hastily trained amateur watch-standing officers.
Now came a restless, cranky eternity that is perhaps the most universal of all military experiences. He wasn’t just waiting: he was doing real work. But he chafed at designing shore installations, and more at helping fit out DEs only to send them off without him. “I can see,” he wrote my mother, “no indications that I will not end this war a complete misanthrope.”
First, there was Orange itself: “the only place I’ve ever been in my life that I would not have the slightest desire to revisit. I used to think that Lowell, Haverhill, and Ayer, Massachusetts were the most boring and unattractive cities in the country. Now they seem fraught with picturesque interest and solid New England virtues.” Part of this disaffection came from seeing firsthand one of the great internal contradictions of America’s war. “A staunch southern defender of our way of life and world democracy (I assume him to be such, as he is giving all his time for considerable money to the shipyard driving a truck, and the shipyard is providing our government with the implements necessary for setting the world to rights) told me today that they were going very soon to have to kill all the ‘black bastards’ around here to teach them their place—getting ideas in their heads, etc. It seems one has recently raped a nearby queen of Southern chastity, and there have been other incidents indicating that Negroes have been giving themselves all the airs of the local white criminals. There must be other things besides absenteeism (administratese for loafing) which cause the Axis to smile.”