by Richard Snow
Combustible, Vulnerable, and Expendable
The escort carrier joins the fight, 1944
Our Atlantic war was being won by a succession of discoveries and rediscoveries. Convoys protected the supply lines, industry supplied the ships to make up the convoys, radar could see above the water and sonar hear beneath it, Ultra could tell where the U-boats were bound before they left port.
Yet victory’s complex recipe demanded one final ingredient, and the Neunzer had just joined up with it.
David Bradley Duncan, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1917 and spent much of his early career in carriers, was an executive officer at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola in the spring of 1941 when he was ordered to Newport News to become captain of the USS Long Island. The ship did not yet exist. On the way, Duncan stopped in Washington and looked up a high-ranking friend in the Bureau of Aeronautics. “What is this thing I’m going to command?”
It turned out that Admiral William Pratt, a former chief of naval operations, had got word about the backs-to-the-wall British expedient of equipping their escorts with a single airplane, which would take off at a crucial moment. The moment had better be crucial because the plane could make just that one flight. It had no place to land. The pilot was to bail out after his single sortie. Admiral Pratt thought the U.S. navy should be doing something like this, and he said so in a Newsweek article. This caught the president’s ever-restless eye, and FDR summoned a somewhat nonplussed Pratt to say he’d thought it over, and rather than just using the plane once and throwing it away, why not get a merchant-ship hull and convert it into a cheap little carrier? And—presidential speculation swiftly changed to presidential order—get it done in ninety days.
Duncan found his new command already well along. He looked over the plans with misgiving yielding to relief. “I felt the ship would be operable and useful,” he said decades later. “She had the three elements needed to make an aircraft carrier: she had the hangar space, which could hold about a dozen airplanes; she had an elevator to get them up and down; she had a catapult to get them in the air and an arresting gear to get them back on deck. Those were the basic things, and that was it.”
Basic was the word. Many of these carriers were built by Henry Kaiser, which meant they became available quickly, but were constructed below navy specifications. Most had inexpensive, cranky Skinner Uniflow steam turbines that navy mechanics knew nothing about, and far fewer watertight compartments than any navy-built fighting ship.
Halfway through watching his prototype take shape, Duncan got a telephone call from Harry Hopkins: the president wanted to see him. Duncan found FDR in bed, drinking coffee and reading newspapers. “He welcomed me very cordially and asked me to sit down and tell him about my ship. So I did, very frankly and completely, including my difficulties in getting a few things done.”
The president heard him out and said, “Well, that’s fine. Is it going to be done on time?”
Duncan said it was.
“Now this is the important thing. This is why I wanted to see you. Is it going to be operable and is it going to be useful? Can it get the airplanes on and off, and can they carry depth bombs, and will it be able to look for submarines?”
Duncan again said yes.
The president was pleased. “That’s what I really wanted to find out.” With Duncan sitting there FDR picked up the phone and called Admiral Howard Vickery, head of the Maritime Commission. “Vickery, about those eight ships—the C-3s [freighters] that are building, that you told me about. I want them converted into aircraft carriers right away. That can go forward right now and we’ll take care of all the paperwork and so forth.”
The ships got built—seventy-eight of them eventually—and officially designated “escort carrier (CVE),” but nobody called them that; they were “Woolworth flattops,” “one-torpedo ships,” “Kaiser coffins”; and as for the CVE, that stood for “combustible, vulnerable, and expendable.”
With a flight deck of less than five hundred feet, they were half the length of a fleet carrier and, at eight thousand tons, weighed slightly more than a quarter as much. They carried twenty-four to thirty planes.
A newspaperman who sailed in one wrote, “A jeep carrier bears the same relation to a normal naval vessel that is borne to a district of fine homes by a respectable, but struggling working-class suburb. There is a desperate effort to keep up appearances with somewhat inadequate material and not wholly satisfactory results.”
“They were just barely good enough,” said Captain Daniel V. Gallery, “but they were good enough.”
Just as the DE was a budget destroyer, so was the CVE a budget carrier, and the ships were built the same way—“by farmers, shoe clerks, and high school gals,” wrote Gallery; “all over our country, factories accustomed to building bridges, oil tanks, and farm machinery, built miscellaneous sections of ships. These sections poured into Vancouver by rail and were put on an assembly line as if they were automobile parts.” Gallery went on, “A bunch of amateurs, setting up assembly-line production for any kind of a ship, are taking a long chance. To do it for a specialized type like an aircraft carrier seems like a miscalculated risk. But the fifty-five jerry-built ships that crowded down those building ways in Vancouver performed at sea like professional men-of-war.”
Vancouver was where Gallery picked up his CVE, the Guadalcanal. He had been transferred from Iceland and was “bitterly disappointed” when he got orders to take his new ship to the Atlantic: “After my year and a half up in Reykjavik I figured I had served my time in that ocean and should be eligible for parole to the Pacific, where the fighting was much more exciting than the monotonous grind of anti-submarine warfare.” Later he changed his mind, realizing that in the Pacific “the jeeps usually were very small fish in a big pond. In the Atlantic they were the big fish in the pond. There was plenty of sea room, and the CVEs still had a big job to do in clinching the victory over the U-boats.” And Gallery managed to bring a good deal of excitement to the Atlantic with him.
The CVEs changed the way things could be done. The rule of convoy had held for two wars that it was a waste of effort to chase after a submarine. The odds of turning one up were infinitesimal. But now the odds were shifting. During its first month of life the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research, a branch of Vannevar Bush’s National Defense Research Committee established in 1942, calculated the effectiveness of search patterns. A destroyer equipped with radar could check seventy-five square miles of ocean in an hour; in the same amount of time a plane with meter radar could cover one thousand square miles, and a plane with microwave radar, three thousand.
As more and more escort vessels became available, some of them were sent not to protect convoys but rather, gathered around the nucleus of a jeep carrier, to go looking for U-boats. These groups had a name with a snarl to match wolf pack: hunter-killer.
The CVEs initially proved yet another irritant to Admiral King, but that didn’t last. An early example, the Bogue, CVE-9, arrived in the Atlantic just before the Tenth Fleet opened for business on May 20, 1943. Two days later, following Tenth Fleet instructions, planes from the Bogue sank the U-564. It was both the Bogue’s first victory and the Tenth Fleet’s.
After the war Captain Gallery wrote a series of highly popular books about his career. My father never much cared for them, and this puzzled me when I was younger, for I knew the Neunzer had spent a good deal of time in company with the Guadalcanal. Reading the books helps explain his coolness. The historian Clay Blair, probably the greatest authority on America’s war against the U-boats, calls them “self-serving.” I’d say self-satisfied might be more like it, but without question Gallery was the real thing.
Not long after the Guadalcanal was commissioned, Captain Gallery was talking with the chief boatswain’s mate. What, Gallery asked, did the chief think of the draft of new men who had arrived yesterday from boot camp? “Cap’n, I’d swap ’em all for a bucket of oily rags.” In three cruises, Gallery built from
this unpromising material a crew capable of pulling off something the U.S. navy hadn’t accomplished since 1815.
In early June 1944, the Guadalcanal, almost out of fuel, was heading back to port when the destroyer escort Chatelain reported a contact on its sonar, and then, “Contact evaluated as sub. Am starting attack.”
THE U-505 WAS NOT a lucky ship. Continually beset by mechanical problems, the submarine had barely been able to start its current war cruise, the crew still unsettled from a weird event unique in U-boat annals. A few months earlier, running three hundred feet below the surface under the buffeting of a depth-charge attack, the crew heard what they thought was some electrical equipment giving way in the conning tower. It wasn’t. The captain had shot himself.*
Now the first hint the crew had that they were in trouble was the hammer of the Chatelain’s depth charges dousing the lights and knocking their Sunday dinner into the scuppers. Desperate voices reported that the torpedo room was flooding. The captain decided to abandon ship.
The U-505 blew her tanks and shot up to the surface. Captain Gallery told his DEs to fire no heavy stuff at the submarine: “I want to capture this bastard.”
Then came—probably for the only time ever over a loudspeaker—the order “Away all boarding parties.” The Pillsbury churned up, launched a boat, and with the Germans all in the water, Lieutenant Albert David jumped onto the sub’s deck. Followed by torpedoman’s mate A. L. Kripsel and S. E. Widomaik, radar man second class, he scrambled down into the lightless, alien intricacies of the submarine’s interior, where, everyone knew, explosive charges had surely been set, and the sea cocks opened to flood the boat just in case it didn’t blow up.
Half of this was true: a solid rod of water six inches across was cannoning into the vessel, which had only minutes more to live. The boarding party managed to stanch it. The Guadalcanal ordered the U-505, the first enemy vessel captured by Americans on the high seas since the War of 1812, taken in tow.
The Pillsbury moved in so close that her quarry dealt her the injury the men on the Neunzer had feared from the Italian submarine. One of the diving planes pierced the DE’s hull, but she stayed afloat.
All the U-505’s codebooks and papers were seized intact. David received the Medal of Honor, one of just two given for the Battle of the Atlantic. Admiral King was angry, of course, this time because he was certain that the news would leak out and Doenitz would change his codes. But miraculously, every single one of the hundreds of sailors involved in this spectacular coup kept his mouth shut about it until after the war was over.
In fact, King himself almost let out the secret. Gallery found on the submarine a book called Roosevelt’s Kampf, which detailed the president’s plans for world domination, and sent it to King. The Fleet Admiral, much amused, passed it up the line to FDR, who replied with a thank-you note. Somehow that note reached Francis Low, who immediately became furious at Gallery for cavalierly endangering the secret. Gallery naturally was quick to explain to Low that King had sent the book, and, Gallery remembered happily, “They dropped the idea of teaching anybody anything about security.”
ONCE THE NEUNZER JOINED up with the Guadalcanal, she became part of a hunter-killer group. Wirt Williams was irritated when his four-stacker was assigned to an escort carrier. “That’s her, that’s our baby,” he has one of his officers say when the CVE first comes into sight. “The white hope of the Yer-ninted Stytes Nyvy. Look at her, boy, look at her. Get used to her. We’re going to be her foot-servant and vassal from here on.”
Nobody aboard the Neunzer minded this servitude. Attending flight operations was far more interesting duty than riding herd on thirty-year-old freighters. Their counterparts aboard the Abercrombie felt the same way when that DE left Orange for the Pacific in the company of CVEs. “There was inherent drama,” wrote Edward Stafford, “in the burst of bright bunting at the signal halyards; in the sharp, fast turnaway from the crawling convoy and the welcome breeze over the bridge and deck as speed built up; and in the roar of aircraft engines on the carriers’ stubby decks that rose to sustained successive snarls as the blue-winged planes made their short runs and took to the air, the agile Wildcats leaping skyward, the heavier Avengers lumbering level with the deck or sinking slightly as they picked up speed.”
Those navy planes rasping off a runway the size of an ice cream truck’s roof accounted for the only excitement the Neunzer had that summer and fall, save for the storms. In a half year of hunting, there was no killing at all. Yet the empty months were themselves a kind of victory, emblematic of the way things were going in the Atlantic, just as the Guadalcanal’s exploit had been.
Two days after Gallery captured his U-boat the Allies went ashore in France on D-day (“Boy, oh, boy!” yelled one happy sailor on the Guadalcanal when the news came through. “Look what Eisenhower had to do to top us!”). Two years earlier the Germans had been able to keep a hundred boats at sea at one time; now it was half that number. American yards were turning out a million tons of new shipping each month.
ON DECEMBER 25, 1944, my father began a letter by pasting a picture of a sprig of mistletoe over the emblem at the top of the stationery, appending the rueful caption “Nothing under here but the Navy seal.”
He thought, naturally, of past Christmases: “I remember a wonderful magic show performed one Xmas afternoon in Sacramento by a mysterious magician in a kimono. Also a new and beautiful little steamboat baked to death in an oven after its maiden voyage in the tub. There is also the smell of the little alcohol lamps burning under new steam engines.”
He imagined the scene back home: “I know you will be surrounded with loving members of the family—and probably about now things will be rather quiet (4:00 pm)—one or two people perhaps feeling a little sleepy, or at any rate comfortably full. Well, it’s exactly the same on board—the post-prandial lull has set in—two hardy players are keeping a card game going and all is quiet. Everybody is thinking of home and family—in other words they would rather be dozing off with them than with their fellow officers. But it does seem like Christmas, even though we spend it floating around in this fighting machine in a thick fog.
“Today there was a magnificent meal served for the boys—and at a leisurely pace so there was time for them to enjoy it. It’s holiday routine, and a movie, which was passed over to us on a line early in the day. We also had a lovely Christmas dinner just as filling and almost as good as the home-cooked variety, and managed with some Christmas wrapping paper and other odds and ends to achieve very gay decorations in the wardroom.
“We had a carol sing last night on the fantail. It was darken ship [all exterior lights doused] but the moon was out, the fog not too thick, and everybody turned out and really had a good time. I played the violin for the singing and it seemed to be much appreciated. I enjoyed it and so did all the men. It was really rather touching to me how willingly and spontaneously they all congregated topside at the mere announcement that there would be a little carol singing for anyone who cared to participate.”
I suspect he was right about the men having enjoyed it. Some fifty years later I was surprised and pleased to get a letter from one of his shipmates talking about how well he remembered that evening—the violin and the singing on the fantail in the moonlight, that last Christmas of the war.
Captain Just’s Last Fight
The final days of the Kriegsmarine, 1945
A month earlier U-1230 had ghosted along the coast of Maine and into Frenchman’s Bay, where the boat put ashore two spies: Erich Gimpel, who had been an effective Nazi agent for a decade, and Willie Caldwell, a Connecticut boy with such passionate pro-Axis sympathies that the German secret service had smuggled him to Berlin by way of Lisbon. Although the landfall had been perfect, the mission was planned with ludicrous crudity. Soon the two men found themselves trudging through a blizzard along Route 37 in their summer shoes, carrying $80,000 in cash—American cash, but bound in wrappers that read “Deutsche Reichsbank”—and a suitcase with a G
erman radio transmitter in it. The FBI trailed them as far as New York, arrested them, and found Gimpel much more talkative than might be expected for one of his calling.
More agents were on the way, he said, to be followed by U-boats that were even then “being fitted out with a rocket-firing device for guided missiles, which would enable them to bomb the coast from positions well under the horizon.” Vice Admiral Jonas Ingram, the new commander in chief of the Atlantic fleet, thought enough of this to call a press conference. “Gentlemen,” he told the reporters, “I have reason to assume that the Nazis are getting ready to launch a strategic attack on New York and Washington by rocket bombs.”
The Tenth Fleet was skeptical (they’d heard such rumors long before, but believed reconnaissance photos of what looked like rocket launchers being fitted to submarines in fact showed something more prosaic: wooden planks laid to help load torpedoes), but the presence of the spies proved that U-boats were back in our coastal waters.
In fact, Doenitz was gathering his boats for Seewolf, as he named this final cast of the dice against the American enemy.
The technology he’d been counting on had come through, but slowly. The Type XXI, powerful and heavy, could carry twenty-three torpedoes and swim underwater on its batteries for three days straight. It also was capable of a submerged speed of seventeen knots. But only two of them would ever become operational.
What the admiral did have on hand was the snorkel. This allowed the boat to breathe as it ran on its diesels with only a tiny piece of apparatus showing, one so small it could escape radar detection. Like the escort carrier, it was just good enough. Crews detested it. The device had a ball float that automatically closed when the snorkel dipped beneath the water. This was supposed to last for only a few seconds at a time, but one German sailor remembered what happened when the ball got stuck and the voracious engines vacuumed up the oxygen in the boat: “The men gasped for air, their eyes bulging. The Chief lowered the boat, bringing the Schnörkel head below the surface in an effort to loosen the float. To no avail. Breathing became ever more difficult; suffocation seemed imminent. The Chief gesticulated wildly, trying to tell his men to lay down the air mast, which might result in unlocking the float. With agonizing effort, the mechanics turned handles, lowered the mast by cable, then erected it again with the primitive winch. Painful minutes passed, but then the mast drained and the seawater gurgled down into the bilges. The float cleared with a snap and air was sucked into the boat with a long sigh. The sudden change in pressure burst many an eardrum. Some of the men covered their faces in pain and sagged to the deck plates.”