Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  It got worse. Race riots broke out in the nearby town of Beaumont and grew “so serious that it is completely out of bounds; a nice little situation in the arsenal of democracy.” This continued to trouble and anger him, producing for a while a far more intemperate man than I ever knew. “On account of the race question they’ve stopped all liquor sales here, but I imagine that won’t be for long. Next to lynching a Negro, I gather Texans love drinking whiskey best. So after they have had their fill of one they will be ready to return to the other.”

  Nevertheless, the work went on, and much of it was satisfying. “I missed a day in letter writing because I had to work all night Friday and all through Saturday. A steering engine went out on one of the new ships which was about to leave. The men in the yard were wonderful about it. Never a murmur about there being anything even unusual about working like beavers all night and the next day too, just part of the job. It was extremely interesting to watch the operation, which was entirely successful. The ship got away on time.”

  Still, he was fretting about everything: from money (“we are going to need it after the war, and we should try to put it by if possible during. If we win the war it will be handy—and if we lose it won’t matter anyway—so it’s a better bet to try to lay by what we can. If anything happens to me, in the popular phrase, a little ready stuff would be a convenience to you”) to the new uniforms that had become a curious idée fixe of Admiral King’s. These were a source of annoyance to every U.S. navy man everywhere. They were a slate gray confection of King’s own design—“We’ll be as smartly turned out as bus drivers,” my father groused—and they were one of the few fights the admiral ever lost. My father’s mood, as he made his way across the griddle of Orange in July, surely reflects itself in his thoughts about an ailing relative: “It’s too bad about Aunt Florence, in that a stroke is always too bad—but she has talked so goddam much for the last 20 years that it is only fair for her to have to listen a while, if she can stand it, which I doubt.” Then, a few days later: “Have you seen Aunt Florence? I don’t give a damn what happens to that evil old woman, but thought it was polite to ask.” (Who was Aunt Florence? I’d never heard her name before I read his letters, and now there’s nobody left to tell me.)

  Even the reliable distraction of books tended to fade under the Texas sun, and he had the slightly paranoid thought that my mother was teasing when she sent him some: “Was your tongue in your cheek when I suggested a little diverting reading, possibly some biography, and you snap back with three volumes of Plutarch?” Movies, however, almost as important to morale as mail for every American sailor throughout the war, were more cheering. He found Random Harvest “the most enchanting picture I’ve ever seen. One of the most exciting and moving—I remember it seemed like a lot of baloney to you but I adored every bit of it.” He was less enchanted by an Andy Hardy sequel: “Mickey Rooney has outgrown any lingering childlike charm, and is incredibly repulsive. The little squirt, I noticed in a BOQ [bachelor officers’ quarters] copy of a movie magazine, has had the effrontery to get married to an attractive whore, and divorced.” Although my father was irritated by the prospect of seeing Sherlock Holmes in Washington (“I imagine contemporary Washington is indicated, though how they have continued to keep the sage of Baker Street alive and active as long as this I don’t know”), he came back buoyed by a joke in it: “Dr. Watson, played by the inimitable Nigel Bruce, on his first visit to America is seen closely examining the American comic sections. Holmes asks him what he is doing. ‘Reading about Flash Gordon,’ says Watson seriously. ‘Seems like a very capable fellow.’”

  Orange, for all its dolors, was producing capable fellows. My father was learning his business. After spending a day on a DE in the Gulf, he wrote, “The captain I was out with is developing a very fine ship. He has been hard working and able in his preparation and it shows. There is quite a difference in the attitudes and application of commanding officers, and it does show up in their ships. The way he brought his alongside the dock under difficult circumstances was reassuring and instructive to watch. It’s very ticklish handling ships as large as these. The slightest wind or current alters the problems of coming alongside. Everything happens very slowly but inevitably. You have no brakes to step on and stop dead, and if things are not planned right there is the possibility of doing severe damage which you have to stand and see happen with no way in the world of controlling it, and see it happen slowly, over a period of what seems like many minutes. With so much weight behind them the ships can be apparently dead in the water, and yet put enough strain on a steel hawser to snap it with no perceptible motion. There is so much to be learned about handling them.”

  As the summer burned on, my father began to be happier with his work planning the stowage of hose and line and ammunition in the virgin hulls of the new ships. “As things get squared away here I can see that the detail is an absolute necessity in getting the ships to sea from the yard here and as I learn more about my job I feel more useful. The ships are coming along much more smoothly than when I got here, as the yard and everyone in it buckles down to the concentrated job of producing DEs. I feel there is no comparison between what I was doing in New York and what I am doing here, both in the work itself, and as a preparation for my job at sea when I get to it.”

  What he really meant was if he got to it. After a brief but intense spell of worry that he was going to be sent to design buildings in Bay City, Michigan, Lieutenant Richard B. Snow received orders to proceed to Norfolk, Virginia, and join DE-150, the USS Neunzer, for Atlantic duty.

  “Set the Watch”

  The birth of a warship, 1943

  Most destroyer escorts were named for men who had already died in the war the ships were going to help fight.

  Machinist Weimar Edmund Neunzer was killed in July 1942 while dive-bombing a Japanese submarine. The ship that would carry his name was built by Consolidated—my father saw it taking shape while he was trying to get to sea—and on April 27, 1943, Ruby Iris Neunzer, the flier’s widow, broke a champagne bottle against the newborn’s bow. The Neunzer slid backward into the Sabine River and bobbed and steadied, riding very high in the water because she was still just a hull, not yet both a working town and an engine of destruction. Accomplishing that meant not only adding the guns, but typewriters, filing cabinets, staplers and mimeograph machines, radios and anchor chains and blowers, soup pots and soup bowls, fire hoses and life jackets, signal flags and elegant, hand-wound chronometers that kept time at sea just as their forebears had when our new heavy frigates were alarming England in the War of 1812.

  The start of this familiar process on DE 150 would have had no special significance for my father, but then his superior, who liked him, hinted he might be assigned to the Neunzer. The moment it happened, he was sent up to firefighting school in Norfolk, Virginia. This was a serious and spectacular course: “Today we put out great big oil and gasoline fires and got hot wet and dirty during it. The instructors are fine, all experienced firemen from various big metropolitan fire departments, and they are eager to help and advise.”

  Then he brought his singed eyebrows to New York for three weeks’ leave with my mother—Oklahoma! was a particularly bright moment of it—before heading back to Orange, where he found the Neunzer the brief center of attention in that whole great forcing-bed of warships. She was still enmeshed, as she had been for months, in hoses and cables, but the tempo of the work had increased and engineers and officers with clipboards and flashlights moved among the welders and painters.

  On September 26, my father wrote, “Our crew arrived today and we were busy all day loading the ship. I have a very young skipper, Lt. Greenbacker, U.S.N., and I am very nervous about satisfying him.” And everything else, too: “I am nervous as a cat about the way things are going to go. There is so much that only experience afloat can teach me, and I am shy on that.”

  So were most of his shipmates. Of the 209 officers and men who had just arrived aboard, perhaps 30 had seen
sea duty. John Greenbacker most definitely had. The son of a Connecticut dairy farmer, he had been so eager to join the navy that as early as junior high school his friends were calling him Annapolis. He got to the academy in 1936 and, as soon as he graduated, was posted to the carrier Yorktown. The ship ran convoys in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbor, then went to the Pacific and the Battle of the Coral Sea, where a near miss ruptured a fuel tank, and to Midway, where Japanese torpedo planes sank her.

  Greenbacker, one of the last men off, was ordered to the new sub-chasing school in Miami and eventually transferred to the Stewart, becoming executive officer of the first destroyer escort built by Brown Brothers of Houston. Brown Brothers was a good example of the pressure of war measures at the time: before the company bid its way into the DE program, the closest it had come to building a ship was winning the contract to put the concrete capping on the locks of the Panama Canal. The neophyte builders took a while to get the hang of it. “I went to Houston,” said Greenbacker, “and got there in February of 1943 and the ship didn’t go into commission until something like the first of June.” After a shakedown cruise, he was ordered back to Texas, this time to Orange, to take over another brand-new DE. Consolidated made a faster job of finishing its ship than its Houston rivals had theirs: “I was only there for four weeks before we went in commission.”

  By the early afternoon of Monday, September 27, 1943, the last of the hoses and welders and men with clipboards had left the ship. A theaterful of folding chairs had sprouted on the dock by her stern. They were occupied largely by friends and family of the crew, and by a band. Behind the chairs stood the workers who had put the ship together. The crew was gathered on her fantail, and her officers stood at attention by a podium set up there. The band played in the cool September sunshine, and my father was surprised to realize that he would miss Orange—or, he hastily modified this extravagant reaction, the friends he had made working on the shore detail there. A little after two o’clock the band subsided. A Consolidated official approached the podium and turned over the ship to the U.S. navy in the form of Captain J. M. Schelling, USN, representing the commandant, Eighth Naval District. Captain Schelling read aloud the orders authorizing him to accept it, did so, and said, “Hoist the colors.”

  At the bow the Union Jack blossomed—white stars, navy blue field—while aft a sailor ran the American flag up the staff. Amidships, the commissioning pennant, a long ribbon with one red stripe, one white one, and a narrow blue field with seven bars, broke from the mast. In that moment the Neunzer became the USS Neunzer. Captain Schelling turned her over to Captain Greenbacker, who gave his first order as commanding officer: “Set the watch.”

  “Set all regular port watches,” begins the DE 150’s log, which would be kept hour by hour, day by day, all the years she was in commission. But even before that the first entry reads, “The following men were received on board for duty (see attached list).” The roster of those who were to give a soul to the machinery begins, “ADAMOVICH, John 646 40 49 [the serial number of the “name, rank, and serial number” that is all the information you’re supposed to give your captors], USNR; ADAMS, Trenouth A., 875 49 20, FC3c, USNR”; and right on through two hundred names until “WHITMAN, Arthur R., 245 03 59 S2c, USNR; WINIEWSKI, Louis F., 224 10 80, SF2c, USN [a valuable man: that USN as opposed to USNR means he is regular navy, not just called up as part of the naval reserve; so is his successor]; ZONFRELLO, Peter, 376 58 15, S2c, USN.”

  The log makes the next day sound awfully quiet, although it had to be one of constant tumult as people were set to new jobs and put into new accommodations. But the whole entry, under the frowning “CONFIDENTIAL” that will head every page for the rest of the war, begins, “0000–0400. Moored stbd side to dock at City Docks, Orange.” At four-hour intervals this is followed by the stolid phrase “Moored as before.” It concludes with the final watch report of the twenty-four-hour day: “2000–2400. Moored as before.” This is signed by my father, and it is a thrilling surprise for me to see his handwriting, which would change not a bit for the rest of his life, fresh, black, immediate, put down there on his spanking new ship, with the familiar glare and clamor of all-night Orange already part of another existence. He had a sense of the occasion. In the months ahead he would sign all the hundreds of log entries he made “R.B. Snow Lt USNR.” But for this, the last watch of the ship’s first full day in commission, he is “Richard Boring Snow Lieutenant USNR.”

  Everyone from Adamovich to Zonfrello was busy the next day as the ship absorbed all the proteins of war. The log’s sparse report says, “0822 commenced loading ammunition; 0947 commenced fueling ship.”

  With the ammunition they would likely have started with the 20mm rounds, which came in olive-colored magazines. Once they were stowed, sailors carried aboard shells for the three-inch guns, each man cradling a single tall, brass-jacketed cartridge while constantly being instructed to “keep those noses up now, goddamn it.” When the ready ammunition had been housed near the guns, the rest came aboard in wooden crates, the 20mm magazines in square boxes, the three-inch rounds in long, coffinlike ones.

  The job took a little less than three hours. Meanwhile a thick black hose came aboard and the DE sucked in diesel oil, eighty-two thousand gallons of it in four hours.

  Then came the first of what would be many hundreds of general-quarters drills: the alarm agitating in shrill bursts, sailors punching their arms into life jackets, running past each other to their battle stations, putting on helmets, while, on the bridge, the telephone talker relayed reports from the stations—“Condition Able set forward. Depth charge manned and ready. Engine room manned and ready”—until the ship abruptly fell silent, and the perpetual noise of the Consolidated yard insinuated itself again, and the talker said, “All stations manned and ready.”

  The ship secured from the drill forty-five minutes later and hurried on toward another milestone. “Made all preparations for getting underway,” the log records.

  “Now go to your stations, all the special sea details.” This was a bosun’s mate, over the ship’s loudspeakers. Once again men swarmed the decks; once again, the bridge talker passed along reports. “Fo’c’sle manned and ready, sir. Fantail manned and ready. Engineering spaces manned and ready.” When everything was manned and ready, Captain Greenbacker gave the order: “Single up your lines.”

  Twelve paired lines held the ship to six bollards along the dock. Consolidated-yard men threw off one from each mooring post. “All lines singled up, sir,” said the bridge talker. Greenbacker spoke again, the remaining lines fell from the dock into the Sabine to be quickly pulled aboard, and the log reported, with “Captain conning and Navigator on the bridge,” as the Neunzer moved out from the dock.

  It wasn’t much of a voyage, just a few hundred yards to tie up alongside another DE, the Peterson, still at the capacious City Docks, but the ship had been under her own power and worked by her own crew.

  Nobody spent any time celebrating the maneuver. My father went back to his endless tasks. On the twenty-ninth he spoke of the routine in the first letter my mother received whose envelope carried the return address “USS Neunzer (DE 150) Fleet Postmaster NY.” It was also the first to bear the rubber-stamped passed by naval censor circling the initials of the censoring officer.*

  His inaugural shipboard letter was brief and far from happy. “Another very busy day! Not as much accomplished on the ship as I should have liked but will have a crack at it tomorrow. … My gear is all crammed into various drawers in an ungodly fashion. When the ship gets straightened out I hope to do likewise but I’m afraid it will be not until! …

  “What a stupid letter. I guess I AM tired.”

  A few days later he was just as busy, but more cheerful about it: “There must be something very dire impending—because it isn’t normal for me to have twenty minutes to myself—Ever since I talked with you on the phone from Orange we have been on the run—myself perhaps more than some of the others, for there have been
so many small hull items to design, rip out, or finish up which involved telling somebody how long or how wide at all hours of the day and night. I have a splendid chief boatswain mate who runs things admirably from the seamanship point of view and of course I’d be making a monkey out of myself without someone like that to help out. Among other pedestrian jobs which have fallen to my lot is that of sorting and distributing about 500 keys, something that would try the patience of the most hardened shipping clerk. Other items which weigh very heavily on me are a leaky toilet, a leaky steam valve, more shelving, less heat etc. etc. So you can see the life of a First Lieutenant is in some respects not very different from that of an architect. However—a watch on the flying bridge is another story. Our executive officer is an ideal person to have charge of the shaping up of such a motley crew of officers and men as are in his charge—patient, experienced and tactful. I feel he fully appreciates whatever capabilities his officers already have and is very willing to work to develop those which come only with experience.”