Measureless Peril

by Richard Snow

  When Daylight Comes

  From then to now

  Karl Doenitz went on trial for war crimes at Nuremberg in November. Douglas Kelley, an American psychiatrist who examined him before the trial, wrote that “he was bitter in pointing out that his seven days of Führership netted him nothing except an opportunity to hang with the other German criminals.” He had brought about peace as quickly as possible, he said, but now he was threatened with the gallows: “This seems to be an example of American humor.” Was that extraordinary remark an example of Doenitz’s own bleak humor?

  The admiral said he said he had fought a clean war and that like so many others in the German High Command he was as ignorant of the atrocities against the Jews as he was appalled by them. The navy, he said, had always been the least politicized of German arms.

  There is some truth in this, although it is also true that Doenitz had no quarrels with Hitler that didn’t revolve around the apportionment of steel. He had spoken of “the spreading poison of Jewry” and declared that he dreaded the idea of his grandson being brought up in “the Jewish spirit of filth.”

  Other German naval officers repudiated the policies of their state. Peter Cremer told an interviewer that if he’d known about the camps, he would have resigned his command. But, then, a highly successful skipper, Joachim Schepke, wrote a book called Submariners of Today that explains the U-boat custom of calling the youngest crew member “Moses” in this jolly passage: “Now, quite contrary to what you, a conscientious Aryan might think, Moses doesn’t mean that we have a Jew on board. No, my dear friend. In the first place you don’t find any Jews at sea at all; and secondly, the seamen would hardly share their space with such an aberration of nature.”

  Doentiz was given ten years, among the mildest of the Nuremberg sentences. He served his time and during it became deeply interested in developing a kindergarten system that would help disadvantaged children by pairing them with a pet. He lived long enough to be told about the breaking of Enigma when it became public knowledge in the 1970s. He had all but believed it in 1943, but he refused to in 1973. When he died in 1980, his government would not let uniforms be worn to his funeral.

  During his trial he found an unlikely defender in Admiral Dan Gallery. Doenitz, Gallery insisted, had been following exactly the same rules of engagement in his Atlantic campaign that American submarines had in the Pacific, and it was hypocrisy for us to prosecute him.

  This wasn’t Gallery’s last gesture toward the Kriegsmarine. After its bond-selling tour down the East Coast in company with the Neunzer, the U-505 was laid up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. One by one its fellow U-boats were destroyed, most as target ships. But Gallery got it into his head that this one—the one he’d captured—should be saved, and he backed the plan with all his energy and promotional zeal. His hometown was Chicago, and he wanted his prize to go there. After a great deal of arguing about who would pay for it and an absurd squabble with Milwaukee, which suddenly decided the boat belonged there (this debate descended to the two cities’ deriding one another’s football team), the U-505 made its last voyage, to the Chicago lakefront. In a bravura piece of tricky engineering, the submarine was winched out of the water, hauled across Lake Shore Drive, and deposited at the Museum of Science and Industry, where it reposes today in somewhat surreal splendor, magnificently restored, and the only U-boat in the United States.

  THE DES, MOST OF them, suffered the same fate as the vessels they had defeated. With the war over barely a year, an ad appeared in a rather squalid precinct of the New York Herald Tribune’s real estate section:

  VESSELS for SALE

  FOUR DESTROYER ESCORTS (DE)

  Total Estimated Weight: 2,800 Gross Tons

  LOCATION: Anchorage 29, Antioch, Calif.

  Bids Accepted Until 15 November 1946

  For Complete Details Ask For

  Catalog B-60–47AVH

  NavyMaterialRedistribution and

  DesposalAdministration

  Other DEs were torpedoed or sunk by gunfire; the Camp, DE-251, made it to Vietnam and was left there; the Bright, DE-747, was given to the French navy; and so it went. The Neunzer was decommissioned in January 1947 and succumbed to the wrecker’s torch in 1973. But one, the Slater, DE-766—transferred to the Greek navy by the Truman doctrine and rechristened the Aetos-01 (under which name she played a role in the movie The Guns of Navarone)—steamed on and on. In 1997 Greece gave her to a veterans’ group called the Destroyer Escort Sailors Association, which raised $275,000 to hire a Russian tug to tow her back across the Atlantic. Today, stripped of postwar additions and carefully maintained, she rides out the years in the Hudson River at Albany, the last of her prodigious breed still afloat.

  THE WAR NEVER LAID a glove on my father. The peace nearly killed him.

  When it had become clear the Atlantic battle was winding down, government pamphlets warning of the impending difficulties of readjusting to civilian life began circulating on the Neunzer. My father read them with a sort of Olympian pity for the boys who had no jobs to return to. He was delighted to get back to his architectural office. He sat down at his drafting table, picked up a pencil—and froze. Days went by, weeks. When somebody said, “Draw a doorway here,” he’d do a sure and lovely job. But he couldn’t think on his own. Give it time, said his partner, who had carried the shop during the war. But the more time my father gave it, the more he despaired. As with tens of thousands of others who had stepped aside from their lives for the past few years, the momentous diversion had worked more deeply on his spirit than he knew. Everything he’d wanted to get back to seemed opaque, cold, changed. My mother told me that one afternoon he telephoned her. A surging clatter in the background let her know he was on a subway platform. “I called to say good-bye,” he said.

  She said no, come home, they would talk about it, he should have some supper. She did her best to summon up all the comforting fixtures of the workaday world, then sat in misery for hours until she heard him at the door.

  Months went by. He got too embarrassed to stay at the firm he’d founded. He left it and reluctantly joined the staff of another.

  Once at sea he had written my mother, “I like the morning watch best, in spite of having to get up at 3:15 AM to start it, for there is something very pleasant about starting the watch in total darkness—often with no visibility whatever, and gradually, imperceptibly have a little light steal over the ship, coming from no apparent source. Later it is intensified on the Eastern horizon—and finally if it is not too cloudy you see the sun rise.” And that is just how his healing went: not by eastern windows only.

  Slowly things began to lighten for him, and the hardest of all his watches drew to a close. He did fine at his new firm (even with the interruption of the war he ended up practicing architecture for nearly sixty years), eventually specializing in university and public buildings: the Barnard College library, the Firestone Library in Princeton, the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, West Point.

  A current convention holds that the veterans of World War II tend to be closemouthed, almost secretive, about what happened to them in it. In my experience, this is not so much the result of brooding over old horrors as it is the basic politeness of not wanting to bore someone. Whatever it may have done to his career, my father was glad he’d gone to sea and always seemed to enjoy talking about it, and visiting with his shipmates.

  My mother died in 1976. Some time after, he remarried, to Martha, his architecture school friend of fifty years earlier, whose husband had swung sea duty for him. Her daughter Caroline, the little girl to whom he had sent the coconut, grew up to be one of America’s foremost practitioners of rehabilitative medicine. When the sturdy constitution that had brought the old man of the Neunzer through the worst the Atlantic could dish out finally faltered in the last years of his life, Carrie and her husband, Michael, brought him into their home, where he received better care than any fleet admiral ever got. He died, at ninety-five, in the year 2000.

/>   A decade before that, when the VCR had spilled its cornucopia of forgotten movies into the national lap, I brought home The Enemy Below. In it, beneath a turquoise South Atlantic sky, a Buckley-class destroyer escort under the command of Robert Mitchum fights a single-ship duel with a U-boat. Although the German skipper, Curt Jurgens, says the Hitler-is-a-madman-who-has-disgraced-our-profession-of-arms stuff that was evidently mandatory for World War II movies in the mid-1950s (when Germany was, as its former boss had once hoped, becoming our ally against the threat of communism), he is nonetheless a canny seaman who is determined to get out of the engagement alive, and the moves and countermoves become increasingly complex and perilous. As the film unspooled itself, my father said, “How the hell did I miss this when it came out?” He watched hypnotized as Mitchum dropped his depth charges and fired his K-guns. Every so often he murmured, “That’s just the way it was.”

  When the movie ended, he sat in silence for a while. Then he exclaimed, with proprietary satisfaction, “Wasn’t that DE a beautiful ship!”

  Bibliographical Note and Acknowledgments

  Anyone who comes fresh, as I did, to the subject of the Battle of the Atlantic will be at once daunted and encouraged by the work of those who have been there before. There is a great deal of it, and the quality is high.

  A glance at the bibliography I’ve drawn on will immediately reveal that much of it flowed from the Naval Institute Press, an operation remarkable not only for the scope of its publications—the titles cited here are the merest sliver of its long list—but for their clarity and verve. The most specialized material is vigorously presented, untarnished by jargon. You may never have occasion to seek out a book on, say, the World War I destroyer, but if you do, you will find yourself most enjoyably engaged by John D. Alden’s Flush Decks & Four Pipes. You’ll find the same quality right across the list, from the oral histories gathered by Jack T. Mason Jr. for The Atlantic War Remembered to the disastrous epic of the “mystery ships,” told by Kenneth M. Beyer, who served aboard one.

  Throughout writing this book, I’ve been fortunate in the reading that has, as it were, been forced on me. For instance, when I was editing American Heritage magazine, I had the good luck to become acquainted with the historian Elting Morison, and to publish some of his articles. I admired them—and him—greatly, but without this project I would probably have gone to my grave without reading Turmoil and Tradition, his biography of Henry Stimson, which is wise, rueful, subtle, beautifully written, and extremely funny into the bargain.

  Other books that proved as diverting as they were useful included Thomas Buell’s biography of Admiral King; The Borrowed Years, Richard Ketchum’s engrossing panorama of America between the invasion of Poland and the destruction of our Pacific fleet; Philip Goodhart’s survey of the destroyer deal; Michael Gannon’s account of the 1942 U-boat offensive off our shores (a favorite of Elting Morison’s, by the way: “a splendid book, moving in description, instructive in well supported analysis”); Peter Padfield’s sympathetic but thoroughly unsentimental biography of Admiral Doenitz; Peter Elphick’s history of the Liberty ships; Count Not the Dead, another winner from the Naval Institute, in which Michael L. Hadley examines how the image of the U-boat has chimed over the years with the spirit of the nation that developed it; Little Ship, Big War, Edward P. Stafford’s memoir of life aboard a destroyer escort; Gerald Reminick’s scrupulous reconstruction of the fight between the Stephen Hopkins and the Stier; Unsung Sailors, Justin F. Gleichauf’s tribute to the Naval Armed Guard … I could cite just as many more with equal enthusiasm.

  The Kriegsmarine has engaged the energies of deeply dedicated scholars. I am convinced that Jak Mallmann Showell knows enough about U-boats to command one in action; so too with Gordon Williamson and Lawrence Paterson. And Clay Blair, whose two-volume Hitler’s U-boat War runs to over seventeen hundred pages. The German sea war is also the subject of two fine websites: uboatarchive.net and uboat.net.

  I am in debt to all the above, but have some more direct debts to acknowledge.

  My friend John Lukacs, who has an unparalleled grasp (at once poetic and rigorously factual) of what befell Europe during the twentieth century, has been wonderfully generous with his time discussing with me the annus mirabilis of 1940, Churchill, Roosevelt, and especially Hitler’s decision to declare war on America.

  I knew the National Archives likely held the logs of the USS Neunzer, but had no idea how to get at them. Martin Baldessari, a first-rate researcher living in Washington, D.C., did, though, and he retrieved them all from the Textual Branch and had them copied for me, as well as finding photographs of the ship in the Still Pictures Branch. Once the pictures for the book had been located, there remained the problem of acquiring in reproducible form the ones in the National Archives. For this I turned to the National Air Survey Center, Corp. t/a Visual Image Presentations. Michelle Pointin and her colleagues there have close ties with the people who work in the archives, and they achieved in days what would likely have taken me the rest of my life. In the mid-1990s my father’s skipper Captain John E. Greenbacker was interviewed for the oral history program of the Special History Collections of the J. Y. Joyner Library at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina; the Joyner produced a transcript with impressive speed.

  I was amazed to discover that Paul Just, the captain of the U-546, had written a memoir. It existed only in German, but this obstacle was overcome for me by Saskia Miller, who translated the sections dealing with his last fight.

  Two equally venerable but very different institutions have sustained me in this project. One is Volare, on West Fourth Street in Greenwich Village, which has been a restaurant for at least a century, and under its present ownership since the 1970s. Most of what became this book first emerged on yellow legal pads while I comfortably occupied the last booth on the right.

  The other is Forbes Inc. The company owned American Heritage magazine; all four Forbes brothers are deeply interested in history (as soon as they bought Heritage, in the 1980s, I discovered to my mixed pleasure and alarm that my immediate boss, Tim, knew a lot more about it than I did), and this book began when, after a long, gallant struggle to keep the magazine afloat, Forbes finally had to sell it. I had worked for American Heritage for forty years and now, suddenly having no more articles to edit, was relieved to get something to do via a book contract. The Forbeses generously gave me a place to do it in. Admirable though Volare is, it is not an office, and I am deeply grateful to have been supplied one while this took shape.

  I must also thank my agent, Emma Sweeney, first for approaching me to write a book, then for showing my proposal to Colin Harrison at Scribner. I could not have a sharper or more helpful editor, and I appreciate his gently getting me to impose more chronological coherence on the narrative. (I trust him on this: anyone who has read his riveting novels will agree that nobody tells a story better.) I am in Scribner’s debt as well for recruiting a superb copy editor, Steve Boldt, whose keen eye and mind saved me from many small—and not so small—embarrassments.

  Finally, my thanks to my friend of thirty years Scott Masterson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Forbes. Through some mysterious bonhomie worked on the golf course, he made contact with Rear Admiral Richard J. O’Hanlon, Commander, Naval Air Force Atlantic, who arranged for Scott and me to spend two days at sea on the Nimitz-class carrier Theodore Roosevelt. I realize this is not an overwhelming qualification for one to write a book on a maritime theme—Two Days before the Mast—but it was a fascinating and valuable experience for me. During my brief time aboard, I learned that although the destroyer escorts and CVEs of World War II have gone to join the U.S. navy’s frigates and ironclads in Valhalla, the spirit that animated them, the energy and intelligence and enterprise that allowed them to prevail in their long struggle, are still very much in our country’s service.

  Bibliography

  Abbazia, Patrick. Mr. Roosevelt’s Navy: The Private War of the Atlantic Fleet, 19
39–1942. Naval Institute Press, 1975.

  Adams, Stephen B. Mr. Kaiser Goes to Washington: The Rise of a Government Entrepreneur. University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

  Alden, John D. Flush Decks & Four Pipes. Naval Institute Press, 1989.

  Andrews, Lewis M., Jr. Tempest, Fire & Foe: Destroyer Escorts in World War II and the Men Who Manned Them. Narwhal Press, 1999.

  Auchincloss, Louis. A Writer’s Capital. University of Minnesota Press, 1974.

  Bath, Alan Harris. Tracking the Axis Enemy: The Triumph of Anglo-American Naval Intelligence. University Press of Kansas, 1998.

  Beyer, Kenneth M. Q-ships versus U-boats: America’s Secret Project. Naval Institute Press, 1999.

  Blair, Clay. Hitler’s U-boat War: The Hunters, 1939–1942. Random House, 1996.

  ———. Hitler’s U-boat War: The Hunted, 1942–1945. Random House, 1998.

  The Bluejackets’ Manual: United States Navy. Naval Institute Press, 1940.

  Bravier, Robert N. Jr. “Introduction to a ‘DE.’” Yachting, July 1943.

  Buderi, Robert. The Invention That Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

  Budiansky, Stephen. Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II. Free Press, 2000.

  Buell, Thomas B. Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King. Little, Brown, 1980.

  Bunker, John. Heroes in Dungarees: The Story of the American Merchant Marine in World War II. Naval Institute Press, 2006.

  Campbell, John. Naval Weapons of World War II. Naval Institute Press, 1985.

  Carse, Robert. A Cold Corner of Hell: The Story of the Murmansk Convoys, 1941–1945. Doubleday, 1969.