“Yes,” Ash said.
Sims put his elbows on his desk and leaned toward Ash as he spoke. “The fact that Allied merchant vessels are being sunk right off our Atlantic beaches is something top secret, Mr. Miller. Not a word about that hard fact is to leak out to civilians. Our nation’s leaders are adamant about doing everything they can to keep from throwing the American people into a panic. But have no doubts about it, the war is right on our doorstep, and it is deadly. So, mum’s the word, and that command is absolute. Understood?”
“Yes, Sir,” Ash said.
“Lend-lease is all very good,” Sims continued, “but before fast destroyers can escort the really big convoys to England, food has to be raised, raw materials have to be gathered, guns, tanks, and planes have to be manufactured, and mountains of supplies have to be collected and made ready to ship. And what that means is that the merchant marine is going to keep single ships and small convoys steaming constantly up and down the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, bringing in and moving ore, foodstuffs, oil, and God only knows what else from every corner of the world. Hitler will no doubt deploy his U-boats everywhere in the Atlantic from Tierra del Fuego to the Gulf and the Caribbean and straight on north to the tip of Greenland. And what that means, Mr. Miller, is that strapped as we are for effective escort vessels—the big destroyers doing the job in the mid-Atlantic and on the routes to England—we’re going to rely on rapidly built subchasers for coastal convoy duty. Thus far, we haven’t even organized a full-fledged convoy system along the coast. Still with me?”
“I am,” Ash said.
“Right,” Sims said. “So here’s the scoop. Way back in 1917, a friend of Mr. Roosevelt’s—and possibly at Mr. Roosevelt’s urging when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy—a naval architect named Albert Loring Swasey presented the Navy with a design for an effective antisubmarine warfare vessel. On the basis of that design, at least 440 SC-1 class subchasers were constructed, and the designs for the new chasers the Navy is about to build are only slightly changed. In a nutshell, the ships are to be about 110 feet long, nearly 18 feet in the beam and built with a draft of only about 6 and a half feet. Displacement will be near a hundred tons, hundreds of tons less than a standard destroyer. The ships will run on diesel, which is a major change from the First World War types that ran on gasoline. For ease in handling, they will be twin-screwed with twin rudders and have a top speed of between 17 and 18 knots. For the time being, they will be armed with a First World War vintage 3-inch 23-caliber gun mount forward and three new Oerlikon 20mm mounts amidships with the possibility of mounting a .50-caliber machine gun aft between the depth-charge racks. Forward of the 3-inch gun mount, the chaser will carry Mark 20 mousetraps with eight 7.2-inch contact projectiles which, if dropped on a submerged U-boat, will blow the rascal to smithereens. On the fantail, the chaser will carry release chocks for depth charges and two K-guns for projecting charges to greater distance. Detection will be either by direct sight if a U-boat is on the surface or by sonar should it be submerged. My chaser carried two officers and 24 men, so the ship was undermanned. What the Navy is planning for the new design is a complement of three officers and 27 men to upgrade the vessel’s efficiency.”
Sims had rattled off the spiel so fast that Ash felt he’d barely had time to comprehend it.
“I don’t want to sound impertinent, Commander,” Ash ventured, “but I’m guessing that you have something in mind for me regarding subchasers.”
“Good guess,” Sims said, without breaking his tone. “After speaking with your former executive officer last week and on the basis of your records as we have them and the substance of the interview we are presently conducting, the United States Navy with my recommendation would like to offer you command of one of the first new subchasers to come off the ways. According to Lieutenant Thomas, you are a competent navigator, and you have a strong year of seagoing experience already behind you; you’ve also qualified as a Fleet Officer of the Deck, and in my estimation, you have the circumspect maturity to handle the job. You have a choice, of course: either you take command of the subchaser I have in mind for you, or I can send you straight back to sea without prejudice as a division officer on another destroyer. What say you, Mr. Miller?”
Suddenly, Ash felt like he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. The only other time in his life when he’d felt a similar reaction had been mere months before, after the captain of the Parker had signed his letter qualifying him as an OOD for Independent Steaming and then left to go down for supper, leaving Ash with total responsibility for the ship and the men. In reality, the captain had been only a sound-powered telephone call away and a few steps from the bridge, but in the moment, the responsibility had seemed crushing and had nearly driven Ash to his knees. But he had risen to it, accepted it, and done the job.
“I’d like to take the command,” Ash said evenly. “I’ll give it my best.”
“Good,” Sims said, “that’s what I thought you’d say. As I’m sure you must realize, this is going to be a citizen’s war, an amateur’s war, and that makes it our war, Mr. Miller. The regulars, the professionals, are enormously competent, but there simply aren’t enough of them to meet the nation’s needs, not even if every Naval Academy graduate since the turn of the century could be called back into service. So if we are to fight back against these bastards and defeat them, the whole thing depends on us, the volunteer reserves, and on how well we rise to meet the challenge. Once we’ve done our job and won, then we can go home and leave peacetime duty to the regulars—but not now and not for a long time to come”
Ash agreed with a mere nod of his head.
“Right,” Sims said, opening a drawer and drawing out a thick manila envelope which he handed across his desk to Ash. “You’ve got a set of orders in there, another set of documents regarding your command, and a train ticket which will get you from here up to Portland, Maine, by nightfall tomorrow. I couldn’t find a sleeper for you, but you’ve got a reserved seat, so you’ll have to catch what sleep you can sitting up. You’ll be met in Portland and taken up to Yarmouth, to Anson’s Boatyard on the Royal River. The place is small, but it does sound work, and that’s where your chaser is being built. You, your officers, and your crew when they arrive will be billeted in The Jarvis House—a small, family-run hotel for summer visitors about two blocks up from the boatyard. I don’t think you’ll find any visitors there at the moment, but keep an iron grip on your crew because I don’t want to hear of any untoward incidents from them while they are there, and like I’ve told you: security has to be absolute. Got that?”
“Yes, Sir,” Ash said.
“Your crew will begin reaching you quickly,” Sims continued, “so put them straight to work. Stores, equipment, charts, publications, and everything but ammunition will be coming up rapidly from Portland, so you are going to have to be on your toes, both with regard to the crew and with storage and readiness. When the time comes, and it will come quick, you are to commission without ceremony and go to sea because you will be needed for convoy duty as swiftly as you get underway. That means your people are going to have to coalesce on the job without any time to workup, so it will be your responsibility among others to weld them into an efficient crew. Drill them, Mr. Miller; drill them until they think there’s no tomorrow, and then drill them some more.”
Ash knew at once that he faced a grind, a grind the likes of which he had never faced before, but he was up for the challenge. He steeled himself to do what had to be done.
“Heretofore,” Sims said, “subchasers, even though they are commissioned ships in the United States Navy, have avoided carrying names. Instead, they have been identified by numbers only: SC-143, SC-221, SC-506, and so forth. Yours, Mr. Miller, is going to fall into a different category and will be called Chaser 3 for reasons that I am now going to explain. Near the end of the First World War, an updated design and one very much like the design which will govern all of the new chasers that the Navy is to build was put into motio
n for three prototypes. Your particular chaser, Chaser 3, was in fact 80 percent completed in 1918, and at the time, she was assigned a number which was then canceled and retired when the war ended. So your ship, enlarged and reconfigured for better, larger engines, has been sitting in a boathouse for more than 20 years, waiting in case she was ever to be needed again—and now she is. Chaser 1 is being completed at a yard on Maryland’s eastern shore; Chaser 2 is only about 60 percent ready at a yard on Long Island. Rather than resurrect retired numbers, and because all three vessels are really in a class of their own, someone in the Navy Department in Washington came up with the Chaser appellation, and that’s the name she’ll go by.”
Ash smiled. “If the Navy can live with it, so can I,” Ash said, trying on a joke. “It seems apt.”
For the first time since Ash had entered the cubicle, Lieutenant Commander Sims showed him a smile. “Exactly,” he said. “Now, let me tell you what I think you will find the most difficult part of your job, at least in the beginning. With regard to crew and because the recruit depots are only beginning to get up to speed, I’ve been able to purloin some experienced talent from the regular line, a couple of them with hash marks, but your unrated people will come to you straight from boot camp. Your officers are another matter, and there’s the rub; both will come to you straight from the midshipman training program aboard the Prairie State, the midshipman’s school docked in New York and built atop the hull of the old U.S.S. Illinois (BB-7). Those two will be as green as grass when they arrive, so it will be up to you to bring them up to speed as rapidly and efficiently as you can. Until you do, you are going to have to stand around the clock watches with them, which means you will be getting precious little sleep. But here’s a hint that might be useful: if it turns out that your bosun is capable, you might train him up to be one of your OODs; that would free you up to supervise watches and still get a few hours’ sleep from time to time. I did that on the Barrage, and it worked well.”
“Thanks for the suggestion,” Ash said. “I hadn’t imagined the Navy would tolerate an enlisted OOD.”
“On tugs and small craft, it’s done all the time,” Sims said, “so no worries on the Navy’s account. Simply use your best judgment and go on from there.”
“Yes, Sir,” Ash said. “I will.”
“One final thing,” Sims said, rising to his feet as an indication that the interview was about to end. “Your train doesn’t depart until 1530 this afternoon, so once you leave here, get over to the Navy Exchange, buy some new shoulder boards and collar devices, and have the tailor re-stripe your uniforms. In order to give you a leg up on this job and some visible seniority over the two ensigns and crew you’ll have coming aboard, the Navy is advancing you early to the rank of lieutenant (junior grade). Good luck, Mr. Miller, and good hunting. If you can find one of Hitler’s damn U-boats, sink it for me”
At 1530 that afternoon, wearing new shoulder boards on his overcoat and fresh stripes on his blues, Ash boarded a train for Maine, stowed his bag on the luggage rack, and settled himself in his reserved seat. Three hours later, as he passed through Washington, D.C., he glanced out the window and saw that it had begun to snow.
3
Later the following afternoon, beneath a lightly falling snow, the naval rating who met Ash at the Portland station drove him to Yarmouth and then straight to Anson’s Boatyard where he arrived just before dusk. To Ash’s surprise, he found Chaser 3 already in the water and tied up inside a secure but well-lit boat house where several of Anson’s shipwrights, their weathered faces showing their years, were making last-minute adjustments to a variety of fittings, touching up the paint work here and there after the rigors of the launch, and thoroughly cleaning the ship before the crew began to arrive in order to put her into commission.
“Built her in 1918,” Anson said with a gleam in his eye. “In my prime then. Thought she was my best work ever. Still do. Laid her up topside on one of the ways in hopes that they’d want her one day, and now they do. Want to look her over, Lieutenant? Want a tour?”
“Yes,” Ash said, sensing the old man’s enthusiasm.
Starting at the jackstaff and the bullnose through which Ash expected to pass his anchor chain, the old man led Ash back between the two mousetrap racks and down into the forward berthing compartment.
“Tight space,” Anson said, “only about 18 by 10 feet, but we’ve rigged it to sleep 18 men with the remainder bunking back aft. Access to the head is through that hatch forward.”
Glancing forward between the fold-up bunks on either side of the space, Ash sensed an immediate morale problem. Clearly, his men were going to have to get along with each other because they would be living their lives cramped together like sardines in a can. Harmony, he realized, would be an absolute necessity that he would have to encourage.
“The pop-gun’s new as the day it was made,” Anson said, leading Ash up out of the berthing compartment and onto the main deck, “but it’s also old. Never been fired. Been hidden away in some depot since the last war, I suspect. Mounted it for you only yesterday, but it's still covered with cosmoline, inside and out. Left the cleanup and maintenance for your gunners cause we don't do weapons here.”
“Right,” Ash said, knowing that the same would hold true for the Oerlikons and whatever small arms the ship carried.
From the main deck, Anson then took Ash up onto the flying bridge to show him the location of the Pelorus, the signal lamp, and the various voice pipes before the two descended into the pilot house for a look at the helm, engine controls, and the chart room at the rear.
“Can't be sure,” Anson said, “but I guessed that you’d have shavetails coming aboard as junior officers. Pretty much means that you're going to be up here day and night 'til you get em trained, so we rigged you a couple of eye hooks in the chart room where you can sling a hammock when you need your sleep”
“Mr. Anson,” Ash said, “you're a prince.”
“Made you a hammock too,” Anson smiled. “A strong one. It's in the stowaway under the chart table”
“I can't thank you enough,” Ash said.
From the pilot house, the two men descended into the ship's wardroom and officer berthing compartment. The wardroom table seemed to be a fold-down affair with three metal chairs capable of being hooked down to the deck so as not to slide when the ship rolled. Ash's single berth, a narrow one, stood to starboard; a double bunk for the juniors stood to port with a tiny head immediately forward.
“What's forward between the wardroom and the crew's compartment?” Ash asked.
“Didn't take you in there,” Anson said, “cause I've still got men working in those spaces. Sonar, radio room, and a tiny ship's office. They're compact, but adequate.”
Ash made a mental note to have a look at them later.
Remounting the ladder to the pilot house, the two men once more exited onto the main deck, looked over the flag bag arrangements and the three Oerlikons that were grouped port, starboard, and aft like the points of a triangle, and then descended into the engine room to the big GM diesels.
“They're both in, they seem to be in pristine condition, and they're ready to go,” Anson said, “but like the guns, we've left it to your people to do final inspections and bring them up to full operation.”
“Good enough,” Ash said. “My hope is that I'll have whatever engineering chief they're assigning me up here within the next few days. I intend to put him straight to work.”
From the engine room, the two men dropped down into the after berthing compartment, which would also function as the ship’s mess deck, examined the galley which stood immediately forward of the space, and looked over the range that had been installed.
“No refrigerator?” Ask asked.
“No refrigerator,” Anson said with a shake of his head. “BUSHIPS won’t spring for them on these vessels, so prepare yourself. All of you are going to be eating one meal after another out of cans and what you beg, borrow, or steal fresh from the bi
g boys. If you can find a little reefer to glom onto, we’ve installed a fitting, but it would have to be a small one—something that would fit into an apartment ashore somewhere.”
“I’ll have to see what we can do,” Ash said.
“Another thing that you might find inconvenient,” Anson said, “is that the wardroom’s food, in order for you to eat it hot, has to be packed in a container and carried up to you.”
“I imagined that,” Ash said, making one of his first decisions, “so to ease the strain on the cook, my officers and I will eat with the crew. One officer has to inspect the mess every day anyway, so we’ll kill all the birds with the same stone, and that may remind the men that we’re all in this together.”
“Wise choice,” the old man said. “I have yet to see a sailor anywhere who cottons to officers who want to think they’re elite yachtsmen.”
Following an examination of the depth-charge arrangements and a descent into the lazarette to look at the tiller and estimate what might be used as spare stowage space, both men climbed up onto the main deck and walked back across the brow and into Anson’s small office.
Splinter on the Tide Page 2