by Richard Snow
The Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation—shown here with nearly twenty Liberty ships in various stages of their swift construction—was part of the tremendous industrial response to the crisis: this Portland yard alone turned out over one thousand ships during the war.
A convoy steams east across the Atlantic late in 1942. Soon, destroyer escorts would be helping guard the freighters and tankers.
DE 150, the USS Neunzer, slides down the ways at the Consolidated yards in the spring of 1943.
The officers of the Neunzer: Lieutenant R. B. Snow sits in the right foreground of the photograph, which is surrounded by some of the letters he wrote his wife, Emma. The sketch at the lower right shows the ship’s bridge. (Author’s collection.)
CVEs like the USS Santee were budget aircraft carriers built on merchant hulls: the Santee began life as an Esso tanker. These “baby flattops” helped give the Allies a decisive advantage in the Atlantic.
One of their crewmen, Lawrence Britton of the USS Nassau, embodies the unending vigilance that was at the heart of all war steaming.
Among the many technological innovations Germany brought to the fight were acoustic homing torpedoes; Lieutenant Snow offered the suggestion on how to distract them from their targets. He was told it reached FDR’s desk. (Author’s collection.)
A PC on convoy duty fires a depth charge from one of her K-guns.
Sailors of the big Treasury-class Coast Guard cutter Spencer stand between the depth charge racks at the ship’s stern watching one of the first explosions in an action that destroyed the U-175 on April 17, 1943.
Casualties: The USS Fiske, DE-143, splits in half after being torpedoed off Casablanca on August 2, 1942.
Crewmen can be seen making their way across the severed bow section, which lies almost on its side. The last moments of the U-118. Planes from the escort carrier Bogue sighted the submarine on June 12, 1943, and sank it with depth charges.
Jubilant sailors from the destroyer escort Pillsbury swarm the deck of the captured U-505 on June 4, 1944.
It is touch and go whether they will be able to keep their prize afloat, but they’ll succeed, and the U-505’s last voyage will end at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Type XXIs lie, battered by incessant air raids, in a shipyard at war’s end. The big, fast boats could have made real trouble for the Allies, but they came too late to help Germany.
* The battleships he summoned up are museums now, or long since melted down for razor blades, but Alfred Thayer Mahan is still very much with us: in a 1902 article called “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” he invented the term Middle East.
* The sinking also made him doubt “the story they tell—that the suction of a sinking ship pulls lifeboats and floating rafts under. I floated off the stern and there was no suction I could notice.”
* The hastily built wooden arena in Jersey City where Jack Dempsey fought Georges Carpentier in 1921.
* This was one of apparently only two times the Kriegsmarine took such a measure during the whole of the war, and it wasn’t skillfully done. The Nuremberg prosecutors pointed out that not only had Lemp’s signature transformed itself on the substitute entries, but they were the only ones in the log where the dates were recorded in Arabic rather than Roman numerals.
* Nor were the facilities sumptuous for the officers. One four-stacker veteran, an American, recalled, “The twelve officers, not counting the captain, who had one of each in his cabin, shared one toilet bowl and one shower. At sea, the saltwater in the head erupted with pulse-beat regularity and made a foot-high geyser inside the bowl. Six navy yards had failed to fix it. We called it, variously, the Fountain of Youth, Old Faithful, and the Douche Bowl.”
* It says something about American neutrality that the plane that spotted the German ship and gave away her position to her pursuers was carrying as “adviser” pilot Leonard B. Smith, U.S. Navy.
* Tokyo thought exactly the opposite of what Hitler did: that an attack on Singapore would bring America into the war, on the side of Britain, immediately.
* The mandatory retirement continued to rankle. The next October, with the great victory of Midway behind him, he was still nervous enough to write the president a stiff little letter saying, “It appears proper that I should bring to your notice the fact that the record shows I shall attain the age of 64 years on November 23rd next—one month from today.
“I am, as always, at your service.”
Back came the letter with this scrawled on the bottom:
E.J.K.—
So what, old top?
I may send you a Birthday present!
FDR
* Every piece of mail that went off the ship had to be read by an officer and certified innocent of any information that might possibly be useful to the enemy. My father found this duty both oppressive and touching. “We do our level best to work the boys to death and still they find time to write prolifically. It’s admirable, even though it’s a lot of work for the officers.” He added to his wife, “It is very moving to read the men’s expressions of affection for their wives and families, as they exactly counterfeit (in the Shakespearean sense) our own.”
* This was the same vessel that had hijacked the City of Flint, no longer called the Deutschland because the Kriegsmarine did not want to risk the humiliation of losing a capital ship named for the German nation.
* So understated that to this day even close students of the war don’t know he came up with the idea for the Doolittle air raid against Japan that was the sole gleam in the half-year succession of American defeats that began with Pearl Harbor.
† “Note well the verb,” observed Samuel Eliot Morison; clearly King didn’t think he needed to get permission from anyone.
* Once, Commander Kenneth Knowles, the head of Low’s intelligence operations, stepped out into the corridor and came upon such a press of hurrying people that he thought there might be an air raid; it never occurred to him that it was simply five o’clock, quitting time.
* The boat’s first watch officer took charge and got the badly shaken crew safely home to Lorient.