Ice Brothers

by Sloan Wilson

  Ice Brothers

  A Novel

  Sloan Wilson

  TO THE MEN OF THE GREENLAND PATROL 1942–1945

  Forgotten now and little honored then, but still

  They’ll never have to wonder if they’re men.

  S.W.

  Author’s Note

  This is fiction based on historical fact. Boston beam trawlers were used by the United States Coast Guard on the Greenland Patrol during World War II. At least one German weather ship was captured by the Coast Guard in Greenland waters. There were many rumors about German weather stations being established on the east coast of Greenland and of German submarines being refueled in the fjords. The author is still not sure how much truth was in them.

  I have used the names of real places in this novel, though the characters and their actions are imaginary. The names of the ships except for the Dorchester are also imaginary, although I have made them sound like the Eskimo words which were used by the Coast Guard for trawlers.

  Although this is not an autobiographical novel in any narrow sense, I did serve as an ensign aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Tampa on the Greenland Patrol in 1942. A year later I served as executive officer and finally, for a brief time, as commanding officer of the American trawler Nogak on the Greenland Patrol. Our sister ship, the Natsek, was lost with all hands, though near Labrador, not on the east coast of Greenland. The incident of the German officer dropping the liqueur glass was told to me by Gerda Klein, author of “All But My Life.” It happened to her when she was a young girl in Poland in 1939.

  The drama in this novel is pure fiction, but I have presented Greenland exactly as I remembered it. It is apparently true that memories of Greenland, like the bodies of people who are buried there, last forever. This book was written in 1979, thirty-six years after I left Greenland, but I did not have to do much research in the libraries.

  —Sloan Wilson

  Part I

  CHAPTER 1

  The people on Fieldstone Road in Wellesley, Massachusetts, celebrated the bombing of Pearl Harbor with an enormous party. Of course the families there were well aware that war is a terrible thing and they kept saying that to each other, but they were excited, even exalted because hate for a common enemy who is a long way away can make people feel almost ennobled. The radio did not make anything clear, except that the United States had been wantonly attacked and was going to war. “We’re off!” Mark Kettel said, as though the war were a horse race or a long-awaited trip.

  The first thing most of the people on Fieldstone Road did was to telephone all their relatives. Families gathered. Neighbors came in, drinks were mixed, and within a few hours the street looked as though a wedding, not a war, were being celebrated in every house.

  Paul Schuman drove up to his father-in-law’s house shortly after dark. He had spent that weekend working on his father’s old yawl which was moored off the end of a pier at a deserted shipyard in Quincy. He had not turned on the radio, and at six-thirty that Sunday evening, he was one of the very few people in America who had not heard the big news. Wars between nations were the farthest things from his mind, which was entirely preoccupied with a small, and to him a most mysterious war with his wife, which had caused him to spend a dismal weekend alone. On the drive from Quincy to Wellesley he was trying to make up his mind whether he should just surrender and buy peace with Sylvia at any price, despite the fact that he felt he had been entirely in the right throughout this latest argument.

  But wasn’t any man who thought he was entirely in the right during a fight with his wife on dangerous territory? Sylvia was young and pretty and loved parties—certainly he should find no fault with that. Her father was a banker who somehow maintained his modest level of prosperity even in the Depression, and it was hard for her to understand that her young husband didn’t have a dime which he didn’t earn or hustle in some way while trying to get through college. Paul and his brother, Bill, spent a lot of time working on their family’s ancient yawl not just because they loved sailing, but because they were running her as a fairly profitable summer charter boat. And though he was somewhat ashamed of it, Paul spent many evenings playing bridge and poker at fraternity houses and yacht clubs because he had found that it was surprisingly easy for him to make money at cards simply by staying sober.

  That all made sense, but the fact remained that Sylvia was not a girl who was accustomed to waiting around home alone, filling her time with vacuuming rugs or reading. She had been going to parties and college dances since her early teens, and as she said, she didn’t think that getting married meant she was supposed to turn into a nun. Her two brothers and Paul’s brother, Bill, often served as her escort when Paul was not available, and what could be wrong with that?

  Plenty was wrong with it, Paul reflected darkly, for once she arrived at a party, Sylvia played the familiar part of the belle of the ball as exuberantly as she had before their marriage. He never was sure who brought her home, often in the early hours of the morning, and when he asked questions about what she had been doing, her answers were at best evasive. Her girl friends appeared to be giving a great many very late parties to which no men were invited and there seemed to be a great many very fine old movies which were shown only at midnight.

  Paul was a jealous husband and a suspicious one, with or without reason, and he knew that this made him ridiculous, a fact which did not improve his temper. He also worried about his wife because she sometimes drank too much at cocktail parties, and she drove their ancient Ford roadster with the same joyful recklessness which won her so much admiration when she danced. She was, as she boasted, a very skillful driver, just as she was a very good dancer, and this scared him most of all. Sylvia was one of those who just didn’t think accidents could happen, not serious ones, and not to her, anyway.

  Sylvia was a handful—her own mother said that, had been saying it for years, and many young men, Paul ruefully thought, had agreed. She was fast and she was wild, had been ever since the age of sixteen, ever since Paul had known her. If he had wanted a nice quiet girl, he should have fallen in love with someone else. He had always known that, but compared to Sylvia, all other women seemed to him to be only half alive.

  As she grew older, she would quiet down—he had always been sure of that. And she really wasn’t anywhere near as fast and wild as she liked to pretend and as envious gossips liked to say—he had always been sure of that. Sylvia was Sylvia, and since he could not stop himself from loving her and couldn’t change her, he would have to learn how to live with her in some kind of peace. Lecturing her and trying to lay down the law did not help. The righteous, he had learned, often have to sleep alone.

  As he drove through the quiet streets of Wellesley, Paul wished he could buy some flowers as a peace offering for his wife, but all the stores were closed. He needed a gift for her—gifts she always understood better than words, even if they had no real value. Trying to think of something available on a Sunday night, he remembered some new foul weather gear he had bought for the boat at a sale some days before and had left in the trunk of his car. It included a yellow southwester hat, and she always loved headgear of any sort. She would laugh, perch it saucily on the top of her head even if it didn’t fit, and for a little while at least, all their troubles would be forgotten.

  When Paul approached his father-in-law’s driveway, he was surprised to see a lot of cars there. The old Plymouth station wagon owned by his older brother-in-law, Mark, had been left on the edge of the lawn, where no one was supposed to park, and the new Buick convertible which his younger brother-in-law had just bought stood at the end of a line of vehicles in which he recognized those belonging to a variety of uncles and aunts. The thought occurred to him that Sylvia might still be so angry at him that she
was thinking of leaving him and that a whole family conference had been called to consider the situation, as had been done when Mark’s wife left him. Certainly his differences with Sylvia were nowhere near that drastic, but Paul still felt nervous as he got the yellow hat out of the trunk and approached the front door. After all, if Sylvia was feeling hurt, and if her relatives had gathered for whatever reason, she would be unable to resist the temptation to get sympathy and support from them. She would tell her version of their arguments, which would have very little to do with the issues as he perceived them.

  When Paul gloomily opened the front door, holding the yellow hat, he was surprised to see what appeared to be a large cocktail party in progress, and he was completely astonished when Sylvia, looking beautiful as ever and much more excited by his arrival than usual, rushed up and embraced him, hugging him with more fervor than she had displayed in weeks. He left the hat on an umbrella stand by the door and forgot it.

  “Oh, Paul!” she said. “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you!”

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “My God, haven’t you heard?” Mark said, coming up to offer him a martini. “The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. We’re going to war, buddy boy! We’re off!”

  CHAPTER 2

  That was an incredible moment, one he was to try to analyze many times for years afterward. Sylvia and a lot of other people were trying to talk to him all at the same time, but suddenly they seemed as voiceless as actors in a silent movie. The fight he had been having with Sylvia suddenly appeared ridiculous, the causes and issues entirely forgotten. He had a sense of everything being swept away, this house full of excited people, his college, the boat on which he had been working, and most of all, Sylvia herself, who now stood with her arms around him as though she expected to dance. Already they all had been torn from his life, and in their place was this new thing, war. As Mark had said, they all were going to go to it, as though it were a dance of some kind. They were off. Soon, perhaps in a few weeks, he would be dressing up in a uniform. He didn’t know anything about war, except what he had read in All Quiet on the Western Front, descriptions of horses trying to run on shattered legs and men trying to hold in their intestines with their hands. The thought terrified him, but of course he wouldn’t be in the army, he would be in the navy. He then had a quick vision of himself as the captain of a destroyer in the act of torpedoing a battleship. This was followed by a sense of absurdity and futility—since he had dropped out of the naval reserve to get married and to make money in the summers instead of going on training cruises, he probably would be unable to get a commission. For him the war would be swabbing decks and saluting classmates who had had enough brains to stick with the ROTC. And before that, war would mean being shipped off to some training camp. War would mean saying good-by to Sylvia for years, maybe forever. Then he had a vision of himself returning to her, his sleeves covered with gold braid, his chest bedecked with medals. He knew this fantasy was ridiculous but his errant mind kept elaborating on it. His gaunt face would be tanned and scarred just a little at the corner of his mouth. He would explain that he got that scar while ramming a Japanese aircraft carrier, and she would kiss him with the intensity he always hoped for and rarely got. Absurd, absurd! War is hell, Sherman had said, and he was sure that it wouldn’t turn out to be a movie starring him like Enrol Flynn. He had the sensation of sinking in a cold sea, being dragged down by a sinking destroyer.

  “You won’t have to go right away,” Sylvia was saying. “They said on the radio that students will probably be allowed to finish college.”

  After hugging him, she stood holding his arm as though to prevent his being whisked away. He resented the news about being allowed to finish college. He might be able to accept war either as death or as a chance to become a hero, but finishing college seemed an anticlimax. He had an urge to enlist immediately, not as an act of patriotism so much as a dramatic necessity. Absurd or not, he wanted to be a hero now. By leaving Sylvia he would win her. A devoted Sylvia was the prize offered by war. This was crazy, of course. He accepted a drink.

  “Hell, I bet the whole damn thing will be over in six months,” Mark said. “Those little yellow bastards can’t fight!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Erich, Paul’s father-in-law, said from the back of the room, where he was sitting hunched over a radio. Turning the machine off, he stood up. “Don’t forget,” he said in his deep voice, “that we will also be fighting the Germans.”

  “Hell, they’re so busy fighting the Ruskies that they don’t know where they are,” Mark said.

  “Maybe,” Erich said. “Perhaps this is not the time to remind you, but everyone in this family has German blood. The only pride I have left in that is the knowledge that Germans are never easy to beat. Get ready for a long war.”

  “I, at least, am German only on my father’s side, and his father left Germany because he saw that everyone was going crazy there,” Lucy, Sylvia’s mother, said. “We’re all Americans now, thank God.”

  Erich did not answer. Slowly he sat down and hunched over the radio again.

  “I think I’ll go upstairs,” Paul said, sounding oddly normal to himself. “I have to get washed up.”

  He started toward their apartment on the third floor, hoping that Sylvia would follow. She did. Their private war forgotten, they hurried to bed, and never before had the love-making been so good. War in its very first stage, at least, was not exactly hell.

  Long after she had gone asleep, Paul sat staring at the curtains which moved slightly in the draft from the window, as though someone were standing behind them. The north wind whistled around the eaves of the old house, and rattled the shutters. He wondered what a storm like this would be like aboard a ship at sea. Since boyhood he had prided himself on being good with boats, but he was only a summer sailor, he suddenly realized, and had no idea what the North Atlantic in December could be. The more he thought about it, the less he wanted to find out. At heart he was probably a coward—everyone was afraid, he had read, and bravery consisted in the ability to conquer fear. Whether he had this ability he could not guess. The moaning of the wind grew more and more mournful, more terrifying when he pictured what it must be like on the open sea. He put his arm around the warm shoulders of his wife and hugged her closer. Never before had he been bold or thoughtless enough to start making love to her when she was asleep, but the rules of peacetime were already disappearing and he did not restrain himself. When he realized that she was helping, the world, however briefly, was his. Despite his exhaustion, he still could not sleep when it was over. Suddenly the first real meaning of the war to him became clear: there would be an end to love-making. Erich was undoubtedly right when he said it would be a long war. His mind was suddenly full of a newsreel he had seen which had shown pictures of young German sailors marching in a training camp. A superior race, the Nazis called themselves, and it made him feel really odd to think that his blood was just as “Nordic” as theirs. If they were superior, he was too, but he didn’t feel very superior as he thought of all those Germans who were now training to shoot at him. Millions of them had already been fighting for years and must be pretty good at it by now. But he would be good at it too, if they didn’t kill him too soon—despite his fears, he had some inner certainty of that. And despite the abject loneliness that he was sure he would feel as soon as he left Sylvia, he realized that he was eager to enlist, to get on with this whole enormous drama which had just begun for him. With all the experience he had had on boats, and his two years of ROTC, maybe he could find a way to wangle a commission in the navy or the Coast Guard, which in time of war was just about the same thing. It would take years, of course, but maybe he actually could get command of his own ship before the war ended. Why was that so important to him? Did he still think he could end up the hero of some crazy war movie?

  Paul didn’t know, but he made up his mind to make some telephone calls in the morning to see if he could possibly get a commission.
After all, it wasn’t just a matter of pride or absurd dreams of glory. Officers got paid a lot more than enlisted men, and he had a wife to support, didn’t he?

  CHAPTER 3

  Before Paul got a chance to call anyone in the morning, his brother, Bill, telephoned him.

  “I’m going to join the army air force,” Bill said exuberantly. “That’s where the real action’s going to be! What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Paul replied.

  “Listen, I’ve got an idea for you. I hear the Coast Guard is going to take over a whole bunch of yachts for an offshore patrol. If they took the Valkyrie, they’d fix her all up, and they might let you go as skipper. They’d probably make you a chief boatswain’s mate. You’d get good pay and you’d probably get back to Boston every week or so.”

  “Why don’t you do it that way?”

  “Hell, I don’t want to fight the Germans with an old yawl. Give me a P-38. You were always the great sailor in the family anyway.”

  “I’ll check into it,” Paul said, but he already had decided that he too did not want to fight the Germans with an old yawl, despite the attractions of the scheme.

  “Just don’t get yourself drafted, boy,” Bill concluded. “I hear the infantry ain’t good for the health.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Paul said, and he envied the apparently carefree bravery with which his brother was planning to join the army air force. The only thing that scared him more than the thought of being machine-gunned in a muddy trench was the vision of crashing in a burning plane. Putting on his best blue suit, he drove to the Boston headquarters of the Coast Guard.

  This day, Monday, December 8, 1941, the streets and sidewalks were crowded with people and the bars were overflowing. Long queues, some of them stretching around a block, stood before each recruiting office. Every car, store and bar had a radio turned on loud to await news, and the sound of music was mixed with an excited babble of voices.