by Richard Snow
This exemplary officer was Virgil Gex, and my father’s regard for him did not wane during the war, or for the rest of his life. The son of a Missouri farmer, Gex was appointed to the Naval Academy, but a failed eye exam put him into the Naval Reserve. He took a job at Procter and Gamble, but by December 1940 the increasingly hard-pressed navy decided his eyesight wasn’t so bad after all, and he was sent as an ensign to the four-stacker Chew. December 7, 1941, found the Chew in Pearl Harbor moored four hundred yards away from the Arizona. Gex saw the bomb that exploded the battleship’s magazine pierce her deck. The Japanese aim was all too good, and they weren’t interested in World War I destroyers, so the Chew survived to operate out of Pearl for the rest of the war. Virgil Gex, risen to a gunnery and senior watch officer, was detached in May 1943 to help put the Neunzer in commission.
“Our Captain and Executive Officer being both absolutely of the first rank in experience and ability (although both are only slightly too old to be my nephews!) the ship’s organization should develop very satisfactorily.”
Quickly, too, because when my father wasn’t occupied with the familiar tasks of formulating measurements and attending to plumbing, he found himself put into the swim of naval life with unusual speed. Reminiscing years later, Captain Greenbacker said he and Lieutenant Gex “and, I think, the chief engineer, were the only [officers] that had ever been to sea at all. I knew that in some of these cases the captain and the exec would stand off-and-on watches”—that is, one relieving the other in four-hour rotation. “I didn’t do that. I said, ‘You get on out there, you be officer of the deck. Call me if there are any questions. Call me if you sight anything.’”
It was a new world, and not a simple one to my father. “The ship organization is hardly less complicated than the social structure of India, and castes among the petty officers must be as strictly observed. Any deviation from the proper chain of authority causes ripples which eventually rock the whole ship—and it is of great importance to learn the proper channels of activity as soon as possible.”
A couple of weeks later, in a letter he hoped was “not too expository,” he gave his wife an admirably clear account of shipboard routine. “We have had a good deal of steaming since I last wrote you, and all of us have had to stand deck watches night and day, as our turn comes up. The officers are divided up into groups of two, an Officer of the Deck and a Junior Officer of the Deck, and watches are usually four hours, during which the normal operation of the ship is in charge of the O.O.D. The Captain and the Executive Officer come to the bridge from time to time and are always there in any unusual situation, but in normal steaming the OOD has charge of the handling of the ship and her routine. Of course this is intensely interesting—always a grave responsibility and a job in which experience counts for almost everything, and with the constantly recurring watches, experience is the one thing of which there is plenty to be had. Off watch all the officers are busy with organizational and administrative affairs. My departments are Construction & Repair (C&R) and damage control, and I am Division Officer of the First Division—in general the Deck ratings forward. What a lot of detail there is to be straightened out in all that! I am fortunate in having a seasoned and very able Chief Boatswain’s Mate, who has the happy faculty of instructing me under the guise of conferring with me. He has never even so much as hinted that he has forgotten more seamanship than I’ve ever known, which I think indicates great good feeling, and is probably more than I could manage under reversed circumstances. He is well satisfied with the assortment of green but willing seamen under his charge—and the boys are all coming along extremely well in their line handling, and chores about the ship.”
He concluded, “Good night, my dearest—I love you and think of you ‘at all times’—which is the Navy way of saying ‘Always.’”
Despite this authoritative summary, he wrote a few days later, “Time certainly rolls along—but I don’t feel my age as I should. Just when I might begin to feel a certain degree of achievement and settledness (no such word I presume) I wander into an entirely new trade, start in at the bottom of the ladder in competence, if not in rank, and spend my waking hours (and they are many) with youths in their early twenties. However, any doubts I may have held as to whether I am growing old were dispelled by a glimpse of the commissioning picture of the USS Neunzer, in which I look like a not too able character actor of 50, surrounded by ruddy and unlined adolescents not yet approaching the prime of life.”
Still, there were compensations: “I have a very snug little cabin forward of the wardroom. My cabinmate is a very long and attractive young man, who has to fold up like a jackknife to get in the upper bunk, but as he is junior to me, that’s where he goes (the advantage of my great age).”
My father had finally got his belongings—shirts, shoes—“put away in a magnificently orderly fashion.” He was in good company: “Mr. Gex is extremely attractive and so are the other officers. I don’t know whether it is just because they are my shipmates or whether they actually are as a group superior to some of the others I’ve seen. In any case, they all seem O.K. to me.” And “our food continues to be excellent and plentiful.”
The food was good. The first supplies to come aboard the freshly commissioned Neunzer—before ammunition, before fuel—were, the log records, 210 pounds of bread “received from the Fehr Baking Co … inspected as to quantity by R.M. Turner, Jr., Lieut, and as to quality by Y.R. Tate, PhM 1/c [pharmacist’s mate first class].” Three hours later Turner and Tate were called upon to inspect “8 gal ice cream from Stewart Dairy Co.” The navy had long had the reputation of being the best-fed service, and meals improved throughout the war.
The 1940 edition of The Cook Book of the United States Navy is a skinny 164 pages. Although it reflects a diet far better than many Americans were enjoying in the final years of the Great Depression, the recipes—“ALL FOR 100 MEN”—are workmanlike to the point of drabness: “Cut 60 pounds of mutton into 5-pound pieces and wipe with a clean damp cloth. Place in boiling water and boil for five minutes. Then reduce to a simmering temperature and let cook until tender. When about half done season with salt.” In fairness to the Supply Corps officers who assembled the book, the result should be “serve[d] with caper sauce,” but this is also pretty rudimentary: “2 pounds flour. 3 pounds chopped pickles or capers. 2 pounds butter or shortening. Salt and pepper to taste.” Many of the recipes are even less inspiring—“Lima Bean Loaf”—and some are actually dire: “Canned Creamed Codfish” (which employs the only fish mentioned by name other than “Canned Salmon”; the rest of the piscine world is covered by the twin entries “Baked Fish” and “Fried Fish”). One of the seven sandwiches recommended is this imaginative confection: “Put between these slices [of bread] three slices of crisp lettuce leaves.”
The Cook Book of 1944 has grown to 430 pages, nine of them devoted to dozens of sandwiches. The lettuce filling has been augmented with tomatoes and bacon; the mutton recipe has disappeared. There are fifty pages of desserts. Fish are cited by species: “Fillet of Flounder,” “Baked Halibut and Tomatoes.” The creamed codfish remains among the manifold hardships of war, but a typical “winter menu” runs:
Navy Bean Soup
Fried Pork Chop Gravy
Hominy Spoonbread
Buttered Green Peas
Apple Cole Slaw Salad
Lemon Cream Layer Cake
Bread Butter Coffee
Among the Neunzer’s crew were hill-country boys who had got the worst of the Depression since they had been three or four years old. My father remembered them ballooning under the impact of their new diet, giving the ship a population of fat men for a few weeks until their young metabolisms caught up.
A month after Consolidated turned the Neunzer over to the navy, Lieutenant Snow described a scene in which food and shipmates and growing competence had combined to produce, for the moment at least, an obviously contented man: “Last night I had the mid watch with Lt. Gex—midnight to 4AM—or 0000�
�0400 in navy figures. It was a long watch, but uneventful, and we stood all the way topside on the ship under the stars. It was most impressive to look back occasionally and see the tall mast swaying back and forth against the dark star-lighted sky. When I came down off watch I found the steward had left steak and potatoes in the pantry oven, so I had a very early breakfast before I went to bed for two or three hours sleep.”
The Heartbeat of the Pings
The importance of sonar, 1941–45
The Neunzer’s sea career had begun on October 1, when she left the Orange City Docks, bound for Galveston: down the Sabine River, past Port Arthur, shimmering in the perpetual stink of its oil refineries, and out into the Gulf of Mexico, where for the first time the ocean swell lifted the new ship. The sea was not running high that day, but those who were going to get seasick began to. My father could report with satisfaction to my mother, “It appears that whatever other limitations I may have to contend with (and they are legion) sea sickness will probably not be one of them.”
The men went to general quarters, and for two hours the ship steamed through a racket of its own making as all the guns were tested and the torpedo tubes swiveled this way and that. By late afternoon the DE was moored at Galveston, and the next day she ventured into the maw of the Todd construction company’s Floating Drydock 3, a topless, steel shoebox hundreds of feet long and half full of water. The Neunzer inched in amid an ecstasy of shouted instructions and orders between dock and ship. Tall steel gates closed behind her stern, and pumps began to empty the dock, gentling the ship down to rest on keel blocks and cradles. In less than half an hour the Neunzer was standing like a model on a mantelpiece.
For two days it was like Orange again, with workers everywhere and the ship drawing its power and water from shore while final adjustments were made and weaknesses disclosed by the brief voyage set aright. Then the DE was refloated and put to sea, bound for Bermuda and her shakedown cruise.
At 2202 on October 15, with supper already hours in the past and taps just sounded, the sonarman made a sound contact.
The navy had been trying to listen for submarines underwater since World War I, when operators strained to make sense of the noises picked up by an “S.C. [sub-chaser] tube,” which was more advanced than a tin-can-and-string telephone, but not by much. Between the wars the British and American navies developed what they called asdic and we called sonar (for “sound navigation and ranging”). This could passively listen for engine noises, but it also had the capacity to hunt a submarine by emitting a sharp ping from a retractable dome in the ship’s hull. If this pulse of noise hit an object, it would bounce back an echo, which the gear amplified and transmitted to the sound shack up near the bridge. The man listening to the echo could tell from its pitch where and how far away the object was. That is, he could tell if he had an exceptional ear and a lot of training.
By the late 1930s our old four-stackers were being fitted with sonar, and two schools had been established to train operators. The first students helped develop the technique even as they learned it: “Everybody in antisubmarine warfare at that time was an inventor,” one of them remembered happily. This was surely what my father was referring to when, during his training days in Florida, he had written my mother cryptically, “In one of the courses my accurate sense of relative pitch (not to be confused with my intonation when performing on the violin) is going to be a great help. Isn’t that a surprise!”
The electronic chirp became as much a shipboard constant as the engines or the sea itself. Wirt Williams, who served in the North Atlantic aboard a four-stacker and wrote a novel about it called The Enemy, remembered, “Each ping was like the sound a rock makes dropped into a lake, silvery, searching, and finally vanishing but never dying. The pings were seconds apart, like a dead-slow heartbeat. … They were our eyes, and ears, and nose, under the sea.” To Williams, the sonar was the most important piece of equipment on his destroyer: “The heartbeat of the pings was her reason for existence. When they stopped, she was nothing.”
Now the pings had told the Neunzer, on her nineteenth day in commission, that a submarine might be out ahead of her under the night waters. The alarm began its clamor and sailors rushed to their stations.
When he was still outfitting destroyer escorts my father had written his wife that “the DE which just left had on board two of the tiniest most appealing little kittens you ever saw. They were not fluffy ones, but thin wistful little things with large ears and beautiful ascetic faces—they are very tiny, and very calm, don’t scamper about, but walk around deliberately or lie in what shade they can find. There was something delicious in seeing one of them carefully select the shade of a 300 lb. cylinder of TNT to lie down for a little rest. Somehow the kitten looked normal and made all the rest of the show look a little absurd—but don’t say I said it.”
I’ll bet the cylinder of TNT didn’t look absurd to him that night. The kitten had been taking its ease beneath the DE’s main antisubmarine weapon, the depth charge. A sailor would have referred to it as an ash can, and compared with other fixtures on the ship—the sonar, for instance—it was as primitive as the nickname makes it sound. For the first years of the war our ships had been outfitted with the Mark 6, which, unlike the sound gear, had changed scarcely at all since Armistice Day 1918. Rolled off racks at the stern of the ship, or shot out from its sides with K-guns, it would tumble down to a preset depth, where water pressure ignited it.
If simple, the weapon was far from feeble. E. J. Jernigan had received a vivid demonstration of its potency while he was still aboard his new battleship Washington in the North Atlantic. His ship was sailing through heavy fog in company with four British destroyers some two hundred yards astern of the battleship King George V. One of the destroyers blundered across the bows of the George V and, said Jernigan, “the huge battleship cut her completely in two.” As the Washington steamed between the two halves, the destroyer’s depth charges began to explode. Their effect on the accidental and unsubmerged target—one of the largest and heaviest warships afloat—was that “all 1900 tons of the number 2 turret jumped the track. The range finder went out and two-thirds of all the light bulbs were broken. The after-steering engine room crew was so badly shaken … that they got out in a hurry thinking we had been torpedoed. … The screws came out of the water while exploding depth charges drove us high in the air. We finally began to settle by the stern and felt like we were falling. The screws ran away until they bit into the water again.”
By the time the Neunzer put to sea the Mark 6 depth charge had been replaced by the Mark 9, which was streamlined (it looked like the atomic bomb envisioned by newspaper cartoonists in the 1950s), sank faster than its predecessor, and ignited with a far greater concussion. The Mark 9 was said to be lethal to a submarine if it exploded within thirty feet, but nobody knew this for sure, and there were other problems. Throughout the war, sonar could tell where a submarine bore on the pursuing ship, but not how deep it lay, so setting the proper depth on a charge was largely a matter of instinct; sonar lost contact when it got within 150 feet of its target; and when the charge burst, it deafened the equipment for long enough to allow a good U-boat commander—and they were all good—to pivot and sneak off in another direction while the shattered water gave the listeners only scuffling, sterile noise.
So the Neunzer went into its first attack with hedgehogs. As the homey descriptive name might suggest, the British had developed this weapon, an odd, busy-looking machine. Twenty-four steel “spigots” reached up from the cradle in which it was mounted, each one topped with a projectile that carried thirty pounds of explosive. That was a tenth as much as a depth charge packed, but still enough to crack open a submarine with a direct hit. Contact-fused, unlike the depth charge, it would explode only if there was a direct hit. Because of this, and because the bombs fired forward, throwing their projectiles in a semicircle 250 yards ahead of the ship, sonarmen could keep contact with the target while it was under attack.
The Neunzer had all her battle stations manned and ready eight minutes after the alarm and began her first run. The hedgehog projectiles went off in pairs, quickly, throwing a lariat of twenty-four splashes. That was all they accomplished. The contact remained strong. Another twenty-four rounds went out into the dark. They, too, failed to disturb whatever they were fired at, and the Neunzer made one more unrewarded hedgehog run four minutes later.
Captain Greenbacker decided to shift to the depth charges and dropped eight of them. The sea bulged and then broke into hundred-foot-tall spars of foam behind the ship. The contact disappeared but, the log says, “with no evidence of damage to target.”
Sonar was a highly exacting discipline. The Neunzer could have been attacking a shoal of fish, or a stream of colder water flowing beneath the surface, or any number of the other bounteous distractions the ocean had to offer (among them “snapping shrimp,” whose conversations produced a noise that could confound the inexperienced operator). “There was a lot of activity with whales,” Greenbacker said of those early days aboard. “The whales took a lot of beating, I’m sure.”
The Neunzer secured from general quarters half an hour after midnight and steamed on, if unvictorious also unharmed, to learn its business in Bermuda waters.
“How Many Germans Will It Kill?”
Learning to use radar, 1940–43
Whatever Captain Greenbacker had expended his seventy-two hedgehog projectiles and eight depth charges on, it almost certainly wasn’t a German submarine. Just a month earlier Admiral Doenitz had ordered his captains to launch a new offensive against convoys in the North Atlantic. The days of easy gleanings in the western part of the ocean were long past, he believed. And what he believed, he could act on, for Doenitz had recently become the most powerful man in the German navy.