Sink or Swim

by Steve Watkins

  Maybe even at us.

  Lieutenant Talley ordered another depth charge launched, and we went through the whole thing again, only no more oil and no more debris came up this time, so it probably had been a case of the U-boat pulling a trick and getting away, like Chief said. And it had worked. It was the third time we’d chased a U-boat, and we still didn’t have anything to show for it.

  As we pulled back toward the convoy I could see the other PC far forward of our position still in pursuit of the second U-boat. They must have spotted something because they seemed to be giving chase. I wondered where the others in the wolf pack might be, and suddenly I had my terrible answer as an explosion erupted at the fantail of one of the merchant ships, an arc of fire shooting up like a rocket. Seconds later there was another explosion farther forward on the ship, and more flames and smoke billowed up into the clear afternoon sky.

  It was the same ship all the civilians were on! I couldn’t believe it was happening to them again. The escort PC that had stayed back with the convoy fired its cannon at the spot where the torpedoes had first been spotted as we raced back to join them in defending the cargo ships. The one that had been hit listed hard to starboard, and I could see the lifeboats being lowered and people climbing in. The air smelled like diesel fuel and burning oil. Small bits of metal debris rained down on us, and I had to climb from the crow’s nest to safety.

  We all wanted to go help the survivors—it was a rescue operation now—but we still had to be wary of the rest of the wolf pack, and soon we were off again in pursuit of yet another U-boat. I joined one of the battery crews this time, loading shells into the forward cannon, and we flew over the water at full throttle, hammering the tops of the waves but not slowing down. Behind us, the other cargo ships were taking on the survivors, and the second PC was returning from what must have been a failed U-boat pursuit.

  This time we weren’t going to miss our target. Lieutenant Talley gave the order to reverse engines to slow us down once we got to a certain point, near enough to the U-boat we were chasing, according to our sonar, and then we unleashed everything—depth charges from the K- and Y-guns, rocket bombs from Hedgehogs. Explosions blew geysers a hundred feet in the air all around us, and our PC rocked wildly. Guys were flung around worse than in the storm a week earlier. Damage control crews raced belowdecks again. And gunnery crews kept at the ready in case a U-boat surfaced and we could use the deck guns on it.

  Behind us, the wounded cargo ship rolled farther onto its side, and then, with a loud groan and the grinding sound of twisting metal, broke in half. Both halves went down within minutes, and I prayed that everyone had gotten off safely—especially the survivors from before.

  We repaired damaged bulkheads and reloaded the depth charges and rocket bombs. We stared at the ocean, the water calmer now that the explosions were over. We studied the sonar, pinging off what had to be a sub, now motionless below us. And we waited to see what would come up from the bottom.

  “What do you think?” Straub asked me, as the waiting stretched on for what felt like an hour.

  We were back at the forward gun, the 3"/50-caliber, ready with more shells.

  I’d just come up from the sonar room. “It’s not moving, and it’s definitely a sub,” I said. “Just can’t tell from the sonar if we hit it.”

  “Concussion from the depth charges and those rockets could have blown bolts out, could have caused leaks all over that U-boat,” the gunnery chief said. “They could be drowned inside of there.”

  I shuddered at the thought of that. Then I shuddered at the thought of any of the submarine crew dying in any way under the ocean.

  “I hope they are all dead,” I muttered, though I knew in my heart I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know why, either. For months all I had wanted was revenge for what they’d done to Danny. But now that there was a pretty good chance we’d sunk a sub, I hated the thought of a whole crew of men who were alive just half an hour ago now being, well, not alive. What if it had been our ship that had been hit by a torpedo instead—and what if we were all trapped on board as we sank?

  “I don’t know,” Straub said. “I kind of hope they surface and just surrender and we take them prisoner. That way they’re out of the war for good, but, you know, we didn’t kill them or anything.”

  “Only good Kraut is a dead Kraut,” said another guy on our crew. I knew Kraut was something they called German people, but Mama wouldn’t ever let Danny and me use a word like that.

  I said maybe Straub was right, but even as I said it, I wasn’t so sure I believed that, either. I wanted to bury all the Germans and their U-boats. But at the same time I didn’t want them to die. It was so complicated.

  Maybe what I wanted was for everything to just be back the way it was with Mama and Dad and Danny and me, and nobody trying to blow anybody up in the ocean anymore, and no crazy, stupid war.

  Suddenly, bubbles started rising to the surface, a lot of bubbles, and the water began moving, churning, frothing.

  “It’s coming up!” Straub shouted. “Look there!”

  And sure enough, a dark shape emerged from the depths, rising little by little into the space where the sunlight penetrated down into the water. The higher the shape rose, the more distinct it became, with a clearer outline and color. The bow. The forward deck gun. The tower. Finally, the deck—though not high enough to clear the waves.

  It must have been damaged, because that was as far as the U-boat could surface. The hatch opened on the tower, and we saw hands first—raised hands as a German sailor climbed out and onto the deck, where he had to stand in a good foot of water. The waves continued to roll over the deck and around his legs, and the legs of the sailor who followed him, and the one after that and the one after that. Soon, the whole crew was standing, lined up with their hands in the air, and then the officers emerged.

  They were directly port side of our ship. Half of our crew was perched along the rail, rifles and machine guns aimed and ready. Straub and I stayed with the big deck cannon, though we were too close to the sub to fire at it if anything happened.

  Lieutenant Talley shouted something from the bridge—in German, which surprised me. I didn’t think any of us knew he spoke the language.

  “Probably learned it in college,” Straub said.

  Somebody told him to shut up so we could hear.

  The captain kept speaking in German, and an officer, who I guess was the U-boat captain, answered him. I whispered to Straub, asking if he knew what they were saying, but he shook his head and whispered back that his parents didn’t want him to learn it. “Probably so they could talk about me when I was in the same room, but I wouldn’t know what they were saying,” he joked.

  Somebody shushed him again.

  Lieutenant Talley and the German officer talked for a while longer, and then a couple of the U-boat crew members broke ranks and climbed down the hatch back into the sub. They returned a few minutes later with one of their crew, clearly injured, strapped to a stretcher, and they handed him off to others on the deck. The sailors on deck couldn’t put the stretcher anywhere because of the waves, so they just held him there, swaying as the sub rocked, a couple of times scrambling to keep their balance. The injured submariner’s face was filthy with smoke or grease, and I wondered if he’d been in their engine room. It made me think of Woody.

  The Germans brought up three more stretchers one by one, with more injured crew members. One was covered in blood, but at least he was still alive. There was a sheet pulled over the face of the last man they brought out. All the German sailors pulled off their caps and bowed their heads.

  Half an hour later, the U-boat crew—all living except the one—were on board our ship, sitting in a tight circle near the stern, with several of our crew, me included, standing watch over them with our weapons. I felt important, but at the same time I also felt like I didn’t belong there, that I would never be able to shoot my rifle at anybody—and definitely not at any of the German U-boat crew, even
knowing that they might have been the ones who sank one of our ships. They just looked young and scared.

  The captain ordered water for them and we brought them water. He ordered food for them and we brought them the lousiest food we could find—stale bread, meat that was going bad, some black bananas. I didn’t feel sorry enough for them that I was going to give away anything very edible, especially since we had even more survivors on our side now we had to take care of.

  The engineers got to work hooking cables from our stern to the bow of the sub so we could tow it back to Key West. But then we got a message to sink it instead. The navy didn’t want us to waste any more time on this voyage than we had to and risk being unnecessary targets for the remaining U-boats. We would take the prisoners with us.

  A boarding party went over from our PC and stripped all the communications equipment along with any and everything else that might be useful. They might have also rifled through the German submariners’ personal effects, because later one guy showed me a wallet filled with German money, not that it was probably going to do him any good. Unless he thought Germany was going to win the war.

  Once they finished and came back, the engineers cut the cables. Our PC backed off several hundred yards. Then the gunnery chief aimed the big gun and we fired—and missed.

  Too high.

  So we loaded another shell and fired again and missed again.

  This time too low.

  The third time we scored a direct hit and an enormous explosion split the U-boat in half. A couple of the German sailors gasped. Some shook their heads in what looked like despair. One even started silently weeping.

  The U-boat sank faster than our cargo ship had a few hours earlier, but it was a lot smaller. In fact I was surprised at how small it was. In my mind, the one that attacked me and Danny had been gigantic, the size of a whale, like Moby Dick.

  Just before we rejoined the convoy we got the good news: Everyone on the merchant ship had gotten off safely before it sank, though several were injured and needed medical treatment. The other cargo ships were now crowded, with the survivors mostly huddled on deck—the same as us with all our prisoners—but we cheered anyway. All the explosions, all the depth charges and the rockets and the shells and the torpedoes, and only one person, that German sailor with the sheet drawn over his face, had died.

  “I think it’s a miracle,” Straub said.

  Somebody else, one of the older guys on the crew, just laughed. “Wasn’t nothing but pure dumb luck,” he said. “Just pure dumb luck. Another time, another torpedo, another depth charge, another ten feet this way or that, and either we could have all been dead or they could have all been dead. You go along thinking your life is something so special—until you learn the hard truth that in war it just ain’t.”

  * * *

  The U-boats weren’t finished with us yet. The rest of the wolf pack kept following us up the Florida coast. We’d see traces of them—a glimpse of a periscope, the wake of one that just dove under, some faint pings on the sonar. They bided their time when we pulled into Jacksonville to drop off our prisoners and the cargo ship survivors. They were still out there when we left Jacksonville to continue on up the coast back to New York.

  Another storm kept them away for a couple of days, but then it got calm again, and clear, with a full moon at night and no clouds, which meant we had to be more vigilant than ever as the convoy crawled slowly north.

  We spotted one, gave chase, and lost it. One of the other PCs guarding the other side of the convoy chased U-boats twice, though they didn’t get close enough to fire cannon or launch rocket bombs or depth charges.

  “How can they stay out so long?” I asked Chief Kerr. “I mean, don’t they have to refuel some time?”

  It was a night watch and we were leaning on the rail below the bridge, feeling, more than seeing, the ocean splitting in two as the bow sliced through the water and waves rushed under and around us. There was a soft rolling motion that if I was in my bunk just then would have put me right to sleep, no matter how bad it smelled down there.

  “I guess they didn’t teach you about the milch cows,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Special subs the Germans designed that they send out to rendezvous points around the Atlantic. They meet up with the wolf packs to refuel and rearm them with more torpedoes so they don’t have to go all the way back to their bases in Europe, which can take weeks. So, milch cows.”

  Then he added, as if he didn’t think I could figure it out on my own, “Milch means ‘milk’ in German.”

  We were running dark the way we always did at night, relying on visual contact to keep the ships from coming too close to one another—and hoping we were hidden well enough that the wolf pack wouldn’t be able to see us to aim and fire their torpedoes. But there was nothing we could do about the full moon, except keep to a zigzag course with the entire convoy. The problem with that was it slowed us down even more and might have even made us easier targets. But it was the ranking officer on one of the other PCs who got to make the decision and we followed it, though Chief Kerr kept spitting and cursing, not pleased with what we were doing.

  “Full speed ahead is what I say,” he fumed. “Those cargo ships might not go fast, but they can sure go faster.”

  Other than saying those things to me, though, I was pretty sure the chief kept his opinions to himself.

  On the second dogwatch, I met up with Woody for dinner, which was canned meat and gravy over boiled potatoes, and something green next to it that might or might not have been a vegetable. We just called it evening slime.

  Woody smelled pretty rank as usual, and his clothes—and face and hands—were grease-stained. He didn’t bother washing up but just dove right into the food, which he obviously enjoyed a lot more than the rest of us. I picked at mine and mostly ate crackers and drank coffee, even though Mama wouldn’t ever let me have it back home because she said it would stunt my growth. Nobody said that here, and I figured if there was one thing I did that she wouldn’t approve of, better drinking coffee than a lot of other stuff.

  “Nice to get out of that engine room once in a while,” Woody said between bites. “You know how tight it is back there? And I’m not just talking about the engine room, either. I’m talking about where we all bunk. It’s a good thing everybody gets along.”

  “You sound like you actually like it,” I said.

  Woody nodded. “You know, I kind of do. I’ve even been thinking that after the war—you know, after we kick Germany’s butt and everything—I might even stay in the navy.” He held up a forkful of evening slime. “They feed you, give you a place to sleep, teach you a job, and you get a paycheck once a month that you can spend however you want. Can’t see what’s not to like about it.”

  Another guy sitting with us in the mess scoffed. His name was Fulton. “What about getting yourself killed by a torpedo? I can see a lot that’s not to like about that.”

  “Hasn’t happened so far,” Woody said, reaching over to scrape my uneaten canned meat and slime onto his plate. “Plus where I’m from, you could get run over by a tractor, stomped on by a horse, all kinds of things. You could spend your whole life cropping tobacco on somebody else’s tobacco farm and not have anything to show for it. I don’t mind taking my chances on a little ship like this, running up and down the East Coast, getting to go to those bars down in Key West. And I bet they got some good ones in New York City, too. I hope we get liberty up there once we deliver this convoy back safe and sound.”

  “Here’s hoping that happens,” I said. “We already lost one ship.”

  “Yeah, but we got one of theirs back,” Woody said. “Bet that’s why they’re staying away.”

  Fulton scoffed again. “They ain’t staying away, farm boy. They’re just waiting for us to let our guard down.”

  Woody shrugged and swallowed his last bite of my dinner. “I still like it here,” he said.

  * * *

  Later
that same night I was back on the lookout platform. It was midwatch, two in the morning, that full moon high above us casting short shadows off the ships. The white foam behind the fantail was practically shining. The PC was quiet, but I knew the whole crew was being vigilant since we were so exposed. It might as well have been daytime, except that then I’d at least have had a chance of seeing a glint of sunlight off a periscope lens letting me know that we had U-boat company. I knew they were out there, just like Fulton said down in the mess earlier, waiting for us to make a mistake.

  Well, if anybody did make one, it wasn’t going to be me.

  I doubled my efforts, scanning the horizon with the binoculars and without, straining to pick up any sign of U-boat activity. They often surfaced at night and rode high in the water like any other ship. I doubted they would do that on a night like this when visibility was so strong, though.

  The minutes ticked by slower than I could ever remember, and I kept getting more and more anxious, practically giving myself whiplash turning my head and trying to see everywhere all at once, not wanting to miss anything.

  And then I saw it—a torpedo maybe a quarter mile away coming right at us, lit up by phosphorus in the water so it gleamed silver. I sounded the alarm and yelled down to the bridge to take evasive action NOW! The squawk box barked out the order and the engines roared. We shot ahead and then hard to starboard, nearly spinning in a circle, like a matador fighting a bull. The torpedo kept racing right at us and I couldn’t see how it would miss—until it did! We had pulled just enough ahead, and swung around just enough, that it shot right past us and continued harmlessly out into the ocean—thankfully not hitting any of the other ships.

  The call went out to general quarters and as guys ran to their posts our PC swung all the way around and now raced in the direction the torpedo had come from. I was still in the crow’s nest and the first to see a second torpedo also coming straight at us. I yelled down to the bridge again and this time it was easier to dodge.