Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  To the end of his days my father spoke with gratitude of the helmsman who one night murmured to him in a matter-of-fact way, “Still on course 120, sir.” The mundane report may have saved a hundred lives, two ships. My father had made the zig but not the zag: he’d given the routine course change, then forgotten to correct it once the ship had reached the new bearing. For a little while he was sailing back into the columns of merchantmen and was at least as great a danger to the convoy as any tracking U-boat. Then, with the five words from the helmsman, he came up on the proper course and was just steaming as before.

  Alarms were plentiful on the voyage, lots of standing to general quarters, but no real trouble, and the routine was made more pleasant because “in our last port we picked up a baker, and have been living on the most wonderful bread and rolls I have ever eaten. The bread is a little like Pepperidge Farm, fresh every day and a little more homemade even than that.”

  On January 21 my father was able to follow some mighty ghosts into port. “Cape Trafalgar light sighted bearing 010T,” he entered in the log, and soon the Neunzer was moored beneath the great fortress-rock of Gibraltar. Ships present, my father recorded, included along with “various merchant ships and units of the British Fleet” the “USS Pillsbury (DE-133), USS Pope (DE-134), USS Chatelain (DE-49).”

  We had a lot of DEs by then.

  The Neunzer took on depth charges from the Royal Naval Ammunition depot, then patrolled the straits to keep submarines from entering the Mediterranean. “We have been operating in some perfectly magnificent waters,” my father wrote my mother without being able to tell her where. “Some of the scenery is so superb as almost to form a distraction for the officer of the deck, but no disasters have actually occurred.” Indeed, “I am very well and very much on the job. The Navy is beginning to get some return on its investment in trying to process me into a naval officer, the picture of my duties and what is expected of me becomes clearer every week.”

  His next duty, if not momentous, was unique in the war. “Italy had turned coat, come in on our side,” he told me, “and there were these five Italian submarines. They’d seen pretty tough, demanding duty in the Mediterranean. Then all of a sudden they were our great friends.” The Neunzer was detached from “our division and formed a task force of one—everything was a task force in those days—to escort these submarines to Bermuda.”

  He found the crossing with his former enemies a fascinating extended lesson in flexibility and improvisation.

  “Greenbacker was a bold, creative thinker,” he said, and paraphrased his captain’s idea: “I’ve got these sub skippers, they know more about it than I do, let’s do some training activities.”

  The Italian officers were all genial cooperation, but “they said we can’t do it, we’ve just got fuel enough, if that, to get across the Atlantic. We can’t fool around.

  “They had, of course, never fueled at sea in the Mediterranean. Italian submarines didn’t have to fuel at sea, they were always twenty minutes away from home base.

  “But this was so ingenious—we had to get an elaborate lash-up where our engineers fueled them through fire hoses.” With twelve thousand gallons of fresh fuel, they could “show Greenbacker what a real submarine could do when it was under pressure.”

  Which was a good deal. The log includes the entry “At 1500 commenced one hour of ASW (antisubmarine warfare) runs with submarine VORTICE. … A new type of submarine evasive tactics was encountered during these runs. After the first simulated attack, sound contact was extremely difficult to establish and maintain. The target seemed to be completely surrounded by wake interference, and it was usually impossible to establish and maintain a definite contact outside of a range of 500 yards. Interrogation of the VORTICE after she surfaced disclosed that she had backed down most of the time, thereby completely surrounding her hull with screw currents, which so quenched the Sonar beam as to make any submarine echo almost unrecognizable. This tactic had never been encountered in any training runs with U.S. submarines, nor heard mentioned by U.S. submarine officers. It was extremely effective as employed by the VORTICE, and is considered worthy of mention as a possible maneuver to be encountered against enemy submarines, and as an evasive tactic to be considered by our own submarines.”

  My father went on, “They were fine mariners. They were instinctive mariners. I remember the sub skipper coming alongside on the surface with this great big evil-looking diving plane a foot, two feet away from our eighth-inch plating. He didn’t do it [give his helm orders], ‘Right standard rudder, left fifteen degrees.’ He’d just go—” And smiling at the memory more than forty years later, my father raised an index finger and moved it left and right across a short arc like a piano teacher instructing an advanced student. “Honestly, we were all agog. We were scared stiff. And he didn’t turn a hair. He might have been watching a traffic light on Fifth Avenue.”

  The Americans could answer this daunting professionalism with some clever extemporizing. The submarines had been at war since 1940, and they were wearing out. “We had a communication by blinker. Somebody in the submarine sent the blink in English—they were better linguists than we were. The Marea, which was maybe a mile away off our port beam, said she was experiencing difficulty with an injector fitting, and she couldn’t make twelve, or even ten knots—the most you could get if you were probably down to one diesel, because they simply had no parts, no replacements.

  “Now, ours was a new ship with a nice little machine shop and some good machinist mates aboard, so we said—blink, blink, blink, blink—‘Send us your fitting and some brass stock and we’ll try to duplicate it.’

  “And the blink blink blink came back, the quartermaster writing it down—‘From Marea to Neunzer. There is no brass stock aboard the Marea or in the entire Italian Royal Navy.’”

  Send over the part anyway, said the Neunzer: “We had a couple of blowtorches aboard and any number of forty-millimeter shell casings. So what did our guys do? Really, we were awfully good in World War Two. They put a blowtorch on fifty shells, melted down their own stock, got a little chunk of brass, put it on the lathe, and sent back the Marea this fitting that it needed to make twelve knots.”

  The Italian skippers took their boats close in, and “the guys got out on their fo’c’sle—their fo’c’sle is about six inches above the Atlantic—and sang us some lovely songs.” The Neunzer sent them over the even better than Pepperidge Farm bread. They came to Bermuda. “And I think that was a marvelous way to get involved in the Atlantic and the submarine warfare.”

  The Neunzer left the submarines and headed, my father was happy to learn, for New York. On the morning of February 15, the log records, “0610 turned on running lights, passed Ambrose Light Ship abeam to starboard, entered Ambrose Channel.” As Hardegan and his U-123 had before it, the Neunzer passed along the beach of Coney Island, emptied by winter. My father watched the still clockwork of the Wonder Wheel as it slid past, the shrouded rides.

  “I’m a son of a bitch!” he exclaimed.

  Why? the others on the bridge wanted to know.

  He pointed to the long glass-and-iron shed of Steeplechase amusement park, looking as industrial as a munitions plant under the February sky. Its owners, the Tilyou family, had evidently bought his wheatstalks when the World’s Fair closed, and there they were, a quartet of hundred-foot-tall steel shafts rising above the roof of the park, still gleaming in the winter light, sending their superseded advertisement for peaceful husbandry to the officers of the USS Neunzer.

  After the men got shore leave and the ship got drydocked, the Neunzer rejoined Task Force 62. She took another convoy to the Mediterranean, stayed at Casablanca for a week, helped shepherd a westbound convoy to New York, returned to the Mediterranean with another convoy, bringing it through to Tunisia. My father went ashore at Bizerte and visited some of the places where the army had fought the year before.

  “There were evidences of not too recent violent military activity in which the quarre
ls of civilized nations had accomplished the destruction of most of the structures they had produced, leaving the natives very much in status quo ante—all at great expense.” He went for a long walk, “sight-seeing in a dead city, a little man-made Pompeii, quiet and deserted, the shop fronts still with their signs up—some with the shutters open for business, some closed, but no one there to buy or sell. All the stock gone—old ledgers lying around on the floors and all the innards gutted with high explosives. From the water this looked like a thriving capital city, but from the streets and walks it looks like last season’s fair. We passed one building militarily occupied and a cool and refreshing Mozart piano concerto rolling out from a radio—the only thing we heard except the military vehicles which are no more than part of the landscape. The boys played a ballgame with another ship today, and although they got trimmed in a double header everyone had a good time.”

  Then it was back west with another convoy. My father left Tunisia not exactly weary of his job, but far beyond being able to find in it any pleasing residual novelty. “It’s hot as Tophet in the wardroom today, but that’s only one reason why I hope we shall soon be heading home. … There is much about this life that is tiresome to everybody, even though our ship is really very well organized now, and runs without too much trouble. The delightful variety of life as it is lived at home, and the opportunities to live just the kind of life you want to, with help from just the people you want to see. The books you want to dabble in—of course that is almost absolutely impossible here and now. In many ways I appreciated it before, but what a colossal difference there will be to appreciation if I am ever able to resume where we left off.”

  The ship ran into heavy weather. There were always storms, or the imminence of them, in the Atlantic, and bad weather was rough on DEs. The shaggy-crested waves with great webs of foam seething down their flanks could run sixty feet high, and a destroyer escort was lively even in relatively calm seas. After hitching a ride on one the war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote, “So now I’m a DE sailor. Full-fledged one. Drenched from head to foot with salt water. Sleep with a leg crooked around your sack so you won’t fall out. Put wet bread under your dinner tray to keep it from sliding.

  “And you don’t know what a DE sailor is? A DE, my friends, is a destroyer escort. It’s a ship, long and narrow and sleek, along the lines of a destroyer. But it’s much smaller. It’s a baby destroyer. …

  “They are rough-and-tumble little ships. … Their forward guns sometimes can’t be used because of waves breaking over them. They roll and they plunge. They buck and they twist. They shudder and fall through space. Their sailors say they should have flight pay and sub pay both because they’re in the air half the time, under the water the other half.

  “The boys talk mostly about the storms they’ve been through, for when you’ve been through a storm on a DE you’ve been somewhere. They toss off angles of rolling that are incredible. They tell of times when the ship rolled all the way from 65 to 75 degrees, which is almost lying flat on the side.

  “There are little things all over the ship to indicate how rough she is. Fiber rugs are fastened to the steel decks of cabins with scotch tape so they won’t slide. Ash trays are tied to stanchions with wire. There are hand railings the entire length of the narrow decks. (My ship never had a man washed overboard.)”

  The Neunzer did, early in 1944. Officers and crewmen knew the drill; the ship came about, tossed over lifelines, lowered a boat. It did no good. The sailor disappeared. “We lost him,” my father said. “We’d been trained, we went though the right motions, but we were still all too green. We didn’t know enough yet.”

  The weather taught them.

  “We took an awful cuffing around from a storm a while ago,” my father wrote in one letter; in another: “We have had stormy weather, a real tossing around. … It is really very fatiguing to go through several days of rough weather, for you are using your muscles 24 hours a day, awake or asleep. It takes almost as much agility to stay in the bunk as to keep your feet on deck, so everyone gets tired and discouraged, and it’s impossible to keep ship effectively.”

  A storm meant day after day when the galley fires couldn’t be lit, so there was nothing to eat but cold corned beef and “horse cock,” the amply supplied bologna sausage that found few admirers on the ship. It meant broken crockery and small accidents: “The wardroom china has suffered a severe beating this trip, and we are reduced to drinking our coffee and soup from eggcups—fortunately the standard Navy egg cup is capacious, and so we do very well. Our only casualty occurred in the wardroom when Quiner [a steward’s mate] had a beaker of freshly boiling coffee slop into his face and chest during a severe roll. … He made very little fuss about it, save for a mighty burst of rage and surprise when it happened.”

  The ocean offered harsher caprices than Quiner’s scalding. Louis Auchincloss, the novelist-to-be, wrote of bucking westward from Plymouth, England, to Norfolk, Virginia. “The winter Atlantic was frightful, and our crossing took more than thirty days, more than Columbus took on his fourth and final voyage. One morning in the chart room, as the ship rolled and pitched, the commander steadied himself by catching hold of the side of an open doorway. I saw that the heavy door was loose and swinging. I shouted at him, but he only looked at me, and as he did so, the door closed, shearing his thumb away as a razor might cut through a piece of rope.”

  The storms always passed, of course, the hectic, jagged landscapes replaced by the vast flat, dully-glinting disk whose center the ship perpetually inhabited. Steaming as before: the Neunzer was under way for all but sixteen hours during the entire month of October 1944. “It is so terrible tiresome to be out of sight of land for weeks at a time,” my father wrote on the thirtieth: “Salt water without a little entourage is the most dismal spectacle in the world. Even the most magnificent sunrises or sunsets—cloud effect and all that hoopla—are desolate for want of a stretch of beach or mountain in the distance, or even the hope of it in a few days’ time. Like Dr. Johnson’s dictum to the general effect that the finest landscape in the world could not but be improved by the inclusion of a comfortable inn in the foreground. This morning I did see a spectacular arrangement of sun’s rays, however, which was quite impressive. The rays were really arrayed as symmetrically as a sunburst in ormolu around a mirror or clock—appearing out of dark clouds beyond which the sun had risen. I wish I could trade all the sunrises over the ocean I have been compelled to witness on the morning watch for a half dozen over some nice mountain or meadow scenery. The only thing they reveal on the ocean is a few whitecaps, a bit of kelp, or a porpoise or two.”

  Not always, though. The Atlantic had been a battleground for five years, and every now and then even the all-concealing ocean would yield up a remnant of old violence.

  One midwinter day lookouts aboard the destroyer escort Sims spotted a dozen life rafts with four or five men on each, some waving to the ship. The captain, Lewis M. Andrews Jr., wrote, “I instinctively gave the order to bear down on them and, at the same time, heard the commodore telling us not to waste too much time.” Andrews was surprised by this callous order, but the commodore had been at sea longer than he had, and “when we came alongside, I could see the gray of death in the faces of men frozen from life, still lashed together in sitting positions, some of the lifeless frozen arms still waving. It was the same with the rest of the rafts. The animation was caused by the rolling rafts in the sea. Our commodore knew this from prior experience but let us learn for ourselves lest we fret that we had abandoned castaways.” The Sims left them to their long voyage.

  THE ATLANTIC WAS A battleground still, but the war was changing. Doenitz’s boats were there, although the wolf-pack attacks were all but over. They had become too costly for the Kriegsmarine.

  Faced with the increasing effectiveness of airborne radar in the Bay of Biscay, Doenitz had responded with a tactic that was anything but timid. He had his boats outfitted with heavier batteries of antiaircraft guns. No mor
e skulking across underwater now, he ordered: bring on the planes to fight. He had the boats cross in company, on the surface, in daylight. They would blast their way through.

  It didn’t work. A plane sighting a group of boats could stay out of range while it called in support, then launch an attack that overwhelmed even the massed antiaircraft fire. Doenitz was offering his enemy battle on his enemy’s terms.

  Soon, even this suicidal measure would be impossible. The Allied forces had come ashore on the Normandy beaches, and before long the Biscay ports, with their immortal bunkers, would change ownership.

  Doenitz did not lose faith in his weapon. He did change tactics. Now, he said, rather than conducting the war against tonnage, his boats’ role was “tying down” the enemy. “The U-boat,” he said, “was the sole instrument that, with a few men on board, could make a wholly disproportionate contribution to success in war by sinking, for instance, just one ship laden with munitions, tanks, or other war material, even if it was itself lost in the process. How many soldiers would have to be sacrificed, how great an endeavor made, to destroy on land so great a mass of enemy war material.” He would fight a holding action, at least until he could send new boats and improved equipment. This was in the works. His enemies knew how to use technology, but so did he.

  When the world learned of the Normandy landings, my mother wrote her husband, “I worried so much when I saw a report from Germany that a convoy had been sunk in the Mediterranean on May 13. I thought it might involve you. I still think so—at last D-Day has arrived and again I worry that you are taking part in it.”

  In fact, my father had just left Gibraltar, headed for Virginia, and an entirely different kind of work. On the morning of July 15, 1944, the Neunzer sailed from Norfolk in the company of her fellow DEs Pope, Pillsbury, and Frederick C. Davis, and a newcomer, the USS Guadalcanal. Unlike her coterie, the Guadalcanal was not a pretty ship. She was a boxy, ungainly dwarf aircraft carrier, an escort carrier, a “jeep.” Her presence changed the kind of war the DE-150 was fighting. Heretofore the Neunzer’s job had been to guard. Now it was to hunt.