We continued on to where the U-boat must’ve been, not waiting to get there before the order came to fire the cannon, even though we couldn’t see the target. But it had to be ahead of us somewhere, and fairly close by. The shells exploded, sending those giant plumes of water up into the night sky like silver fountains in the moonlight.
“Prepare depth charges!” the captain barked over the squawk box as we pressed on, our PC going so fast we seemed to be skimming the tops of the waves again.
There was no time to climb down from the lookout platform, so I held on as tight as I could and might have been the only one to see the third torpedo, just before it hit.
The explosion was on our starboard side, and it threw me so hard against the rail that I would have gone over and fallen to the bridge if my safety line hadn’t been attached. I must have hit my head because I blacked out for a minute—it had to have only been a minute, because when I regained consciousness the ship was still rocking wildly from the explosion.
I dragged myself up and looked down at the ship, where guys were also picking themselves up and going back to their stations. I expected to see torn metal, fires, all kinds of destruction, but the damage must have been under the ship somewhere. And since we weren’t listing to the side I hoped it wasn’t too bad, maybe not a direct hit.
Next thing I knew we were firing back at the U-boat with everything we had. Maybe someone had gotten a sonar ping or visual sighting. My vision had been okay at first, but now I was having a hard time seeing. Something was covering my face, and when I wiped it away, I realized it was my own blood pouring from a gash on my forehead.
More explosions threw me down again—from the depth charges and the rockets—and this time I stayed down, both hands pressed against the wound to stop the bleeding. Something happened, maybe we scored a hit, because there was more firing—machine guns on the aft deck—which meant we had been in a firefight with the U-boat. Which meant the U-boat had surfaced and was fighting rather than surrendering the way the other one had done.
I tried to get up but must have lost too much blood because I felt faint and sagged back down onto the lookout platform, my legs too weak for me to stand. But I wanted to be down there. I wanted to be helping. I wanted to be shooting guns at those Germans and protecting my friends and my ship.
Engines revved and the PC jerked into motion—away from the battle. I heard another engine and that must have been the U-boat doing the same thing. Both ships were damaged, including, I found out later, our big gun, which was why we couldn’t use it in the face-off, and both ships were retreating. I kept hoping I would see the U-boat sink, but it just kept pulling away from us until it was out of sight and out of range.
I managed to drag myself down from the lookout platform, though my hands kept slipping because of all the blood. I still don’t know how I managed it. When I got to the bridge, I collapsed again, but everything was so chaotic on the ship that nobody noticed at first. Others had been wounded, and the officers and crew were scrambling to help them, and to shore up leaks in the bulkhead, and to make repairs down in the engine room. Oily smoke billowed up from somewhere below.
And then I blacked out again.
* * *
I must have been out for quite a while, because when I woke up I was belowdecks in my bunk. It took me a few minutes to figure that out. My head was heavy with bandages wrapped around me like a turban. There was still blood all over the front of my uniform, but it was dried.
Two sailors were talking in low voices nearby, but I only heard part of what they were saying.
“Some guy in the engine room … Pipe burst … Killed instantly.”
Right away I thought about Woody and tried to sit up—to go find him, to make sure he was okay and it wasn’t him they were talking about—but I was too weak. I collapsed back onto my bunk. My heart raced, and there was a pounding in my head that felt as if it was going to split my skull in two.
“Hey now,” one of the sailors said. “Easy there, buddy. Just lie back down there. You got hurt pretty bad. You can’t be getting up.”
“Was it Woody?” I whispered. My mouth was so dry, my throat parched, that I could barely speak.
One of the guys gave me some water. Then I asked again about Woody, my heart sinking at the thought of him gone.
But it wasn’t him. Woody, they said, had been a hero. One man had died in the engine room when the torpedo partially blew in the side of the ship, but Woody had saved two others. “He pulled them out to safety,” one of the guys said. “Burned his hands going back for the second one, too.”
I couldn’t believe it. The guy who didn’t know his right from his left, who had the words tattooed on his arms so he could remember, who conked himself out walking into a pipe in the engine room his first day on the ship, who got so hysterical that he nearly drowned me, and Straub had to knock him out when we went overboard—that same guy had known exactly what to do in the emergency. Not only dragging those two men to safety, burning his hands in the process, but, as I later found out, also going back a third time to put out the engine room fire and staying to help shore up leaks from the blast.
“That farm boy,” one of the sailors said, shaking his head. “You never know who’s going to come through in a situation like that. Some’ll just freeze on you. But some, like him, well, it’s good to have him on our side, I can tell you that.”
I must have slept after that, or just drifted back into unconsciousness. When I came to again, head still pounding but not quite as bad, Woody and Straub were there.
“About time you opened your eyes,” Straub said. “We were just about to give up on you. Figured we might have to do one of those burials at sea.”
“Nah,” Woody said, waving his bandaged hands. “We’re just glad you’re okay. They think you might have a concussion. Nice cut on your head you got there, too. Lots of blood.”
“Yeah,” said Straub. “Better take it easy. But they said you could be up and about in a couple of days. Nothing that won’t heal right up.”
“I heard somebody in the engine room got, uh … ” I couldn’t finish.
Woody nodded solemnly. “It was Big Carrot. The chief motor machinist’s mate. He was standing right next to where the torpedo hit and caught the full force of it.”
Woody shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite get his mind all the way around what had just happened. He didn’t seem upset—I guessed that would come later. He just seemed bewildered. Confused. Lost.
“They got a couple more of our guys, too,” Straub said. “That guy Fulton you were just having dinner with. He caught some metal in his side and bled out. But I’m pretty sure we got a lot more of theirs than they got of ours.”
I started crying then. I couldn’t help it. The tears came on their own and I couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard I tried. I turned my face away from Woody and Straub, toward the hull, and wished I was back home on Ocracoke Island, back in my own house, in my own bed, with my own family. Woody and Straub patted me on the shoulder and left me alone to cry myself back to sleep.
By the time we pulled into New York Harbor I was back at my duty station on regular watch, but there were no more encounters with the wolf pack—no sightings, no nothing. Our PC was able to limp along, keeping pace with the lumbering ships in the convoy, but because of the damage to the hull we weren’t in any shape to chase U-boats. But we could at least pretend, so that was what we did.
There was no way to transport the three men who’d been killed—Big Carrot, Fulton, and a seaman named Cissel—so Lieutenant Talley ordered them buried at sea. I was still too weak from my head wound so I didn’t have to assist, but I watched as other guys placed the bodies in long canvas sacks with weights at their feet and tied tight at the top. They were laid on planks, and the planks carried to the side of the ship. Lieutenant Talley said a prayer for each man, and then a couple of sailors who volunteered—Straub was one of them—tipped the planks up so that the bodies slid off and into t
he ocean and disappeared.
It was a scene that stayed with me for days, for the whole rest of the trip—those canvas bags in the shape of the dead men’s bodies. The way they went into the water feetfirst, as if they were standing at attention, which I guessed they would be once the weights carried them down to the bottom. It was hard to feel anything except sad. Woody seemed to be the same as me whenever I saw him, which wasn’t often since they were down two men in the engine room and everybody had to work extra watches. We would sit quietly together in the mess, drinking coffee and eating stuff from cans, if either of us had an appetite. It was strange to see him like that. It was strange for both of us to feel like we were suddenly a lot older than we’d been just the week before.
And a whole lot older than we’d been just three months earlier, riding that bus to Illinois for basic training.
Neither one of us had much stomach for going into the city for shore leave, either, even though Straub tried his best to cheer us up and get us to go with him. “We can catch a baseball game!” he said. “Eat hot dogs! All kinds of stuff! It’s New York City!”
Finally, we gave in and went with him, and surprised ourselves by having a good time at the Polo Grounds. I’d never been to a real professional baseball game before. Afterward, I couldn’t even remember who was playing—besides the Giants, of course. I was a Washington Senators fan since they were the closest team to Ocracoke, but it was just from reading about them in the newspaper, which always came out a week after the games. There was something kind of nice about being in that big crowd of people yelling and clapping and whistling, and cursing when something bad happened, and drinking and eating, and not caring about a thing in the world except a ball game.
I saw Woody smiling at one point, probably for the first time in a week, and laughing at something Straub said. I got so tired after the seventh-inning stretch that the guys told me I fell asleep in my seat and missed the rest of the game, but I didn’t really care. It turned out to be the best hour of sleep I’d had in weeks.
* * *
For the rest of the summer that was our life: escorting convoys up and down the East Coast, sometimes back to Key West but usually farther, to New Orleans or even Texas. The New Orleans and Texas runs were all about protecting oil tankers from U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico and made us especially nervous, because if one of them got hit by a torpedo, there was an enormous explosion, the whole ship erupting into a giant fireball, even the ocean around the ship on fire. There usually weren’t any survivors. And the ones that did survive didn’t survive for long. They’d be choking on oil when we fished them out of the ocean, coughing up black gunk, not able to speak, and after a while—a short while—not able to breathe.
We lost three tankers over the next three months, but it seemed like every trip, every convoy, we encountered fewer and fewer U-boats. Never as many as we did on that first convoy. We didn’t sink any more, but we chased plenty of them off. Chief said it looked like they were staying farther away, only venturing in close enough to fire their torpedoes at night, and usually when there was some moonlight. So that wasn’t too often. By late September, we had two successive runs without seeing a single U-boat.
“Hardly seems like they need us anymore,” Straub said as we neared New York Harbor at the end of that second run.
“I guess better safe than sorry,” I said. “Sure does seem like maybe we did it, though—chased them off from the East Coast.”
“Gotta give some credit to the spotter planes,” Straub said, which was true.
“And the blackout,” I added, which was also true. All up and down the coast, from small towns to the biggest cities, people were putting out lights or covering up windows at night, like we’d done on Ocracoke, so the U-boats couldn’t see cargo ships’ silhouettes against the shoreline, and so no more easy targets.
“You think they’ll pull us off this duty and put us to use somewhere else?” Straub asked. There were a couple of other guys in the mess with us, but they just shrugged. We’d been working nonstop for months, with only a few days of liberty after that one long weekend in New York when we went to the baseball game while the ship was repaired. Everybody was dog-tired.
“I heard they’re moving closer to sending off that invasion force, and they’re going to need ships to transport our troops over to, well, wherever we end up attacking,” I said. “France, I guess. Or Belgium. Or Italy.”
The army, navy, and marines were fighting the Japanese all over the Pacific, but other than continuing to supply the Soviets and the British with food and weapons, we still hadn’t sent troops to Europe to fight the Nazis and the Axis powers. Everybody kept saying it was about to happen, but nobody seemed to know exactly when or where.
“I don’t know,” Straub said. “They’ll need transport ships for the invasion. And they’ll have battleships and destroyers and aircraft carriers. What would they need a bunch of little bathtubs like ours for?”
One of the guys sitting there with us started quacking. The other guy joined him.
I had to laugh. “Yeah, Donald Duck Navy. That’s still us.”
I wasn’t ready to give up on the idea that we might have a role to play in the invasion force, though. “They’re going to need us PCs,” I said. “Maybe for reconnaissance. Or maybe as command ships. Definitely to rescue survivors when any of those troop transports get torpedoed.”
“You’re dreaming, Danny,” one of the quacking guys said. “Once we’re done running off the U-boats, they’ll probably mothball our entire little fleet of PCs and send us all to typing school.”
Chief walked into the mess just then and must have heard our conversation because he weighed in on it right away.
“They’ve gone north,” he said.
“Who has, Chief?” Straub asked.
“The U-boats,” Chief said. “Or haven’t you noticed they’re not around anymore?”
“Well, sure we have,” Straub said. “So what now?”
“So we go north, too,” Chief said. “Orders just came in. Wolf packs are all over the north passage now that they’re not down here anymore. The last convoy across reported eighty U-boat attacks. Lost a dozen ships. So they need us up there. We’ll be escorting convoys over to England. Maybe to the USSR. Out of Newfoundland.”
We just looked at him for a minute. I guess none of us were too good with geography.
“It’s in Canada,” Chief said, shaking his head. “You boys will get to see Iceland. And Greenland. We’ll pass them on the way over. Assuming we make it that far. Won’t have air support for most of the passage.”
“I’ve never been out of America before,” one of the quacking guys said. “Wonder what it’ll be like.”
Chief snorted. “Just like here, only different. But don’t worry. You’ll be too busy fighting those bad ocean storms they got up there to notice, not to mention all those wolf packs. And did I mention how cold it’s gonna get? Ice and snow like you wouldn’t believe.”
He chuckled. “Other than that, though, a picnic.”
* * *
Two weeks later, everything that Chief had told us was going to happen, happened. We pulled out of Newfoundland as one of a dozen escort ships—six PCs, a couple of destroyers, and four British corvette warships, which were like their version of our patrol crafts. Our job was to protect a hundred ships riding low across the North Atlantic with everything you could think of for the war effort in England—meat, cereals, lubricating oils, machinery, wood, paper, chemicals, iron ore, minerals, cement, guns, tanks, even planes.
Lieutenant Talley addressed us from the bridge as the massive convoy steamed out of port. “You men have heard the rumors and they’re all true. The German U-boats have left the shipping lanes along the East Coast, and you were an important part of chasing them away. But now they’re swarming all over the North Atlantic route we’ll be taking, and it’s our job to see to it that they don’t sink a single one of the ships in this convoy. England’s ability to continue holdin
g out against the Nazis until we can get our American troops over there to bail them out is riding on this mission. From what I understand, that is still some months away. So it’s up to us. It’s up to you. To make sure what’s on these cargo ships makes it across safely to the people who desperately need it to survive.”
He paused and I was struck by how much older Lieutenant Talley seemed, just like the rest of us, compared to the first time I saw him on our voyage out on Lake Huron for the shakedown cruise. Nobody would joke about him being a college boy now. In just these past several months, he’d turned into as hard an officer as any of them.
“The way I see it,” he continued, “and the way you should see it, is that not only are we responsible for getting these supplies over to England to save the people there, we’re also responsible for getting these supplies over to England to help save the world from the Nazis.”
We were the caboose—the last ship in the convoy, charged with protecting against any U-boat attacks from the rear. It was an impossible job, with so many ships, and so much ocean, and so few of us PCs and corvettes and even with the two destroyers, especially as we hit a storm almost as soon as we left port that spread the convoy out over miles and reduced visibility to just about zero.
For two days we sailed into a gale force wind so strong that our PC literally made no headway at all. Radio contact was limited, but from what we could tell, the cargo ships were able to move forward, though slowly, along with the destroyers. The PCs and corvettes, light as we were, would have to play catch-up once the wind died down.
Except when the wind died, we were hit with an early snow of all things, temperatures dropping so low that ice formed everywhere on the ship. Somebody said the deck was slick enough that you could ice-skate on it, though with the still-rough ocean bouncing us around you’d ice-skate right off the side and turn into a human ice cube as soon as you hit the water.
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