Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  The crew had been at action stations for thirty hours, had eaten nothing for twenty-four.

  “The end is here. We must go up.”

  The men gave the boat a tense, weary cheer, then “the valves are ripped open. Hissing, the air presses the water out of the diving tanks. Thank God, we still have compressed air left over, the pipes are in order. We rise. Now—the boat is out. It rocks amid the swells.”

  1838: U-boat surfaced.

  There it was, a few hundred square feet of dour metal, dingy under its brief sea-glaze, a strangely humble sight to have drawn so many people so very far, to have taught them so many new trades, before they could be privileged to see it.

  Every ship in range opened fire, and the Flaherty got off two torpedoes. The submarine had been badly wounded; the first torpedo missed but the second passed right over the now-sinking stern.

  Captain Just and his crew crawled out into this. He had thought of trying to man the deck guns, but gave that up before the crescent of vengeful DEs. “We would be unable to reach our guns even if it had made sense to do so.”

  He gave his last order—“Abandon ship”—and “I slide down the oily wet deck, want to hold tight, tumble into the water.” The U-546, still driven by its electric motors, moved away from him.

  He tried to count his sailors in the water, lost track of them, then saw his boat: “U-546 will no longer swim. There—now: slowly the bow tips, cuts downward, the stern continues to fall, until the bow stands almost vertically for a few seconds and then silently, faster and faster, glides into the deep. I stare at the spot. U-546 is no more.”

  As the sea blossomed with little one-man life rafts, Captain Gex on the bridge of the Neunzer gave the order to cease firing. “So we did,” my father told me.

  “The hell we did,” Bill Epstein told me. He’d manned one of the twenties on the Neunzer and, thinking of my father one day half a century later, had looked his name up in the phone book and got me. A lot of destroyer-escort men—like sailors on any class of vessel—would get into boasting rivalries and then fistfights about the comparative virtues of their ships, but, Mr. Epstein told me (and I’d had no idea of this), the Davis and the Neunzer saw themselves as brothers. They even had a saloon where the crews mingled on leave, a bar on West Forty-fourth Street named the Palace; pictures of the Davis and the Neunzer hung on the wall together there. “So when the cease-fire order came, we took our time.”

  Nonetheless, the U-546 fared better per capita than the Davis. The DE lost over half her crew, and Lieutenant Minerd was one of only three officers who survived. Most of the U-546’s fifty-nine men were pulled, cold, shaken, dripping, aboard the destroyer escorts.

  “The destroyers have ceased firing,” Just wrote. “I lie on my back on the rubber dinghy—a small living creature raised and lowered by the mighty waves beneath the wide sky. For a brief moment I feel myself set free in nature, gripped by its beauty. Life itself has me again, but soon I become conscious of reality. I am soaked to the bone, shaking with cold and exhaustion. Will we be saved?”

  Yes, but not without yet one more scary moment for Captain Just.

  “An American ship moves forward. Over her side hangs a cargo net. Faces stare down upon us, the detested enemies.” Just was too weak to get up the net. Tied to his raft with a “safety leash,” he found himself being raised by the roll of the ship, then dragged back down under the surface. “A tree-tall Negro, a knife between his teeth, climbs down to me over the rail. Muscles seemingly made of steel play under his white shirt. Leisurely he takes the knife out of his mouth—and cuts the leash.”

  “Free—upwards …,” and Captain Just lived to never fight another day.

  THE NEUNZER GOT ONLY one of the prisoners. His raft had been clustered with those of other survivors, at the mercy of the wind, which blew him away from the group. The rafts drifted away from him; a ship stood in toward them. He tried to catch up, failed, then, realizing that being among strangers on the closer Neunzer was a far better prospect than rowing to the Azores, paddled frantically to it.

  He was Machinist Mate Second Class Waldmar Gaseyk, an amiable man, and everyone on the Neunzer took a shine to him. Captain Gex put him in a cabin with the baker, who, along with his mastery of bread and pie, spoke fluent German. Gex had hoped that the intimacy thus established would coax some military secrets out of Gaseyk.

  No such luck, and the captain was a little sulky about it when, just before being put ashore at Argentia, Gaseyk delivered a speech of thanks for the good treatment he had received from his captors.

  He gave away nothing about his service, but he did give my father a pair of German-navy cuff links. They’re not showy. They look to be made out of a modest composition material. But the anchor on their faces is still strong and crisp these sixty-five years later, and somehow they suggest both the tenacious courage and the desperation of the Kriegsmarine in its last days.

  Along with the prisoners, many of the Davis survivors were transferred back to the States from Argentia.

  More than sixty went there aboard the Hayter, and before going ashore they prepared a statement for the officers and men of the destroyer escort: “The survivors of the U.S.S. F.C. DAVIS, (DE-136) wish to thank all of you for the many things, big and small, which you did during the disaster which befell our ship; for your gallant conduct, your selflessness, your excellent and tender care, your spirit of sympathy, warmth and understanding. …

  “We feel that you know what it was like; you saw the ship go down; you were in the water with us; you administered first aid to the injured and those suffering from shock; you were beside our bunks cheering us up and giving freely of everything you had; you made every possible effort to save the dying; you buried with reverence our dead. …

  “We cannot think of the sinking of the U.S.S. F.C. DAVIS except as the bitter loss of our ship and our shipmates. In the tragedy, however, there is one thing which we can count as a gain; and that is the experience of knowing in time of greatest need how kind fellow Americans can be.”

  Do Hostilities Ever Cease?

  After the convoys, 1945

  Early in the morning of April 29, Hitler, having just married his mistress Eva Braun in his besieged bunker, withdrew from his entourage to dictate his last testament. In it he said for one final time that the war was solely the fault of the Jews and those in their thrall, and ended with “In order to give the German people a government of honorable men to fulfill the duty of continuing the war by all means, I, as Führer of the nation, name the following members of the new cabinet: Reichpresident, Doenitz …”

  The next day Hitler killed himself, and Doenitz was in charge of the shards of the riven, surrounded real estate that was all that remained of the Third Reich.

  He was amazed. He publicly called for the fight to continue, but he meant only the fight in the east while as many Germans as could manage it surrendered to the English and Americans. What boats he still had, he used in the Baltic to take German soldiers and civilians away from the advancing Russians, in whom his countrymen had sown implacable ferocity. He did as well as he could until the end, then he surrendered and was arrested.

  TWO SUBMARINES MADE IT through Admiral Ingram’s cordon. U-805, commanded by Richard Bernardelli, sailed at snorkel depth to Cape Race, Newfoundland, ready to go to work. The orders from Doenitz, when they came, were not at all what Captain Bernardelli had expected. Hostilities had ceased at midnight on May 8; all U-boats were to surface, signal their positions, and wait for an Allied ship to come collect them. Bernardelli went up on deck. He had left the ugly weather behind in the Azores; here everything was smiling spring. The captain looked around at the sunny blue immensity that was the grave of 768 U-boats less fortunate than U-805. After a while he spoke. “Verdammter Atlantik!”

  IN LATE MAY, MY father sailed with the final eastbound convoy of the war. Germany had surrendered, but the navy calculated that it would be more costly and disruptive to cancel the convoy than simply to send i
t off according to schedule.

  Every sailor found it a strange crossing because now there was no reason to have the ships blacked out. A hundred times Lieutenant Snow, keeping the watch at night, would glance up from some chore and be shocked afresh to find lights enough to equip a small city shining all around him, bright enough to dim the Atlantic stars.

  The freighters that contributed to the glow, steaming now in perfect safety, were carrying to Britain the last of the Lend-Lease cargoes, which at the final accounting had come to cost $50 billion.

  THE TENTH FLEET CLOSED up shop with the same efficiency it had brought to all its tasks. By June the ramshackle offices stood empty.

  ON SATURDAY, JUNE 16, 1945, the Neunzer was at Pier 35 in Booklyn, New York. The log reports it “moored in a nest of ships—in order from dock: USS FLAHERTY (DE135), USS CHATELAIN (DE149) and USS NEUNZER (DE150).” During the 1200–1600 watch, at 1417 exactly, “Richard B. SNOW, USNR, in accordance with BuPers orders 13–6412 left ship, detached from duty.”

  He thought he’d surely see the ship again—it had been his home for nearly two years, after all—but he never did.

  THE NEUNZER IS AT Pier 35, riding little eruptions in the greasy water as her various systems twitch and snort into life. “Now go to your stations, all special sea details.” The navigator is on the bridge, the captain has the conn. The lines are singled up. The lines are cast loose, whipped smartly on board. She backs away from the pier. She is out in the stream. She is gone.

  RICHARD B. SNOW, USNR, is in Miami, teaching damage control. It is August. The city looks down-at-the-heels to him, worn dingy by all the eager martial life that has poured through its schools for so many seasons now.

  He wants to get back to his architecture job. And, somewhat to his surprise, he wants to see his ship. “One bright spot in the picture is that the Neunzer appears to be due in here as a training ship one of these days. It amuses me to think how greatly I look forward to that—and the friends it will bring me, the same ones over whom I have fretted so often cooped up in the wardroom with them.”

  The Neunzer doesn’t come. Instead she goes north and then, to his amused indignation, is chosen to loaf along the East Coast accompanying the U-505 on a war-bond-selling drive: “What do you think of that soft duty the Neunzer walked into! I couldn’t be more surprised than I was to hear of that. There’ll be some long tiresome deck watches in port for the boys, and I can hear the wardroom saying alternately ‘If this is all they have for us to do, why don’t they let us go home!’ and ‘Well, it’s better than the Pacific!’ It makes me feel a little less useless in my present job to learn what the Mighty Buck-and-a-half is up to. I’ll bet the captain doesn’t like it a bit. Being heart whole and fancy free, and with a certain amount of military ambition, he has been talking hungrily of Pacific duty for many months.”

  When my father thinks about the ship now, it’s never about six straight days of horse cock and corned beef choked down on vertical decks; it’s about coming home from England with the merchantmen’s running lights bright around him for miles, in that final convoy of the war. “We have just completed a very calm and pleasant crossing,” he had written my mother in his last letter mailed from sea, “which I really believe everyone enjoyed. … I was relieved of my duties as watch officer and 1st Lieutenant for this crossing, and acted as navigating officer—You know how much I enjoyed that. If you remember my sitting up until all hours three years ago to finish my navigation lessons you can imagine how I welcomed this opportunity to make an application of my lessons to a transatlantic crossing. We made a very good landfall, with no unpleasant surprises, and the weather all the way across was a dream. This is the only time I ever left New York without a feeling of despair and unbearable loneliness. The short duration of the trip, and the vast change in the feeling of things due to the conclusion of the European war made a great difference in our feelings on putting to sea. … The work I have done on board I have enjoyed more than any I have done on this ship ever before.”

  When I was just old enough to understand it, my father read me The Caine Mutiny. Herman Wouk’s service was very different from his: the Caine is a 1918 four-stacker converted to a minesweeper and operating in the Pacific. No matter: he felt that no other novel to come out of the war chimed so closely with his own experience. He called my attention especially to this passage, about Wouk’s hero, Willie Keith, cocktail-piano-playing college twerp turned warship commander, on his final voyage home, leaving scorched coral atolls for Manhasset, Long Island: “He spent long hours on the bridge when there was no need of it. The stars and the sea and the ship were slipping from his life. In a couple of years he would no longer be able to tell time to the quarter hour by the angle of the Big Dipper in the heavens. He would forget the exact number of degrees of offset that held the Caine on course in a cross sea. All the patterns fixed in his muscles, like the ability to find the speed indicator buttons in utter blackness, would fade. This very wheelhouse itself, familiar to him as his own body, would soon cease to exist. It was a little death toward which he was steaming.”

  The classes go well enough: “The Damage Control training is really excellent, far superior to anything you can develop on board your own ship where you can’t punch holes in bulkheads and pipes at critical places.”

  It’s hot; the streets are hot, the vegetation exhales its remote spiciness; at night the palm leaves clack like dominoes. He finds two coconuts fallen on the lawn of a vacant house. With considerable effort he cracks one open and is amazed how sweet the meat is. He sends the other to Caroline McCagg, the small daughter of Martha, the woman whose husband arranged for him to get to sea.

  One evening he looks up from paperwork into an earlier war: “I thought tonight for the first time in months of the beautiful old Civil War song ‘Tenting Tonight’—because of the refrain ‘Many are the hearts that are waiting tonight to see the dawn of Peace.’ That’s what we all are doing now. Time has softened the outlines of the Civil War and its horrors and miseries for the men and women who lived through it—so the tender old song has a feeling of peace in it, which even with the cessation of ‘hostilities’ (do they ever cease when one nation wins and another loses?) we will probably be long in achieving. It is only an illusion seen through a haze of sentiment, of course. Times were just as rough and bitter then as the reconstruction period surely shows. But if you have your nose right to the grindstone in any job, it’s hard to see the more picturesque aspects of it as posterity may see them. I have heard what I’m sure would be regrettably little discussion of the spiritual values of this war by the men engaged in fighting it. I believe that to appreciate the ethical grandness of a modern war you must keep a safe distance away from the actual theaters of operation.”

  He teaches more classes and begins to think about applying for Pacific duty. “It’s funny how tired I used to get of all the disadvantages of life at sea, and at the same time, how much finer and more rewarding the feeling of serving afloat can be than any duty ashore.”

  And then it is August 16: “My darling. What a wonderful thing it was to be listening to the radio for once! This evening at just seven o’clock PM I heard the statement from the White House announcing Japan’s complete military surrender—promises to sign the terms—turn over their war machines and put themselves in our hands. I felt my face contorted by a broad grin, which I made no effort to control, but I’m sure I looked like anything but a conqueror. Everyone crowded around the radio was smiling with delight, the reputedly impassive Orientals, our Chinese officers, obviously as enraptured as anyone else. One young Chinese ensign stood with his arm around the shoulders of one of our boys, listening to the declaration in a very alien tongue, whose words I know were a little strange to him, but whose purport he could not miss. After a very vivid account of the surrender, an orchestra played the National Anthem. I never heard it sound more majestic and authoritative, and then I think I was closer to tears than laughter.

  “One Labor Day weeke
nd I heard Prime Minister Chamberlain tell the world in a voice heavy with tragedy that all his efforts had failed, and that Great Britain was at war with Germany. There we were together listening to our symphony program when the broadcast was interrupted to announce the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I remember that we neither of us took it in at all and had no real idea of what had happened until we came out of the ballet that evening. And now the cycle of fighting and bombing is completed, and the process of setting things to rights again must be undertaken. I learned the military business well enough to serve effectively in it, and now I daresay I must learn the reconstruction business.”

  But he doesn’t seem quite in the mood to take on the reconstruction business: “I suppose downtown now the sailors are busy tearing the town apart, and I must say, I hope they do a competent job. It seems the Chamber of Commerce or some such civic body treated with the Navy here to have all the sailors restricted to the base as a precautionary measure. I am happy to say the Navy turned them down flat. It occurs to me to wonder what Miami might look like these days if it hadn’t been for the Army and Navy. I think they will make a very good trade of a few windows and restaurant chairs, as against an occupation or bombing. But with the job done, the populace is beginning to get very impatient with the brutal, blundering, avaricious military services and wish them to the devil. I see numerous little remarks, statements, and speeches in the paper to that effect, of which the concern of the Miamians for their plate glass is typical.”

  This does not sound like an architect talking.

  ON SEPTEMBER 5, 1945, my mother got this telegram: DUE FRIDAY 9:15 AM. DONT BOTH[ER] MEETING WILL RUSH RIGHT HOME—THROUGH WITH NAVY ORDERS AND SAILING DATES. DEAREST LOVE.