They came in at dusk, the boot seamen congratulating themselves on having become sea dogs on the basis of their first 12 hours in the bay. “Piece of cake,” said Grubber, a fresh-faced kid who’d come to the ship straight from Great Lakes after growing up on an Iowa chicken farm. “Nothin’ to it,” said Meyer, another midwestern farm boy who’d trained up in San Diego. “That Chief Stobb don’t know shit about bein’ at sea. Them snipes never see it from down in that hole of theirs. Smooth as glass out there.” The petty officers who overheard this talk rolled their eyes but didn’t bother to say, “Just wait.” Instead, with repressed grins, they went about their business with the kind of foreknowledge that Zeus must have enjoyed when he gave birth to Athena.
Ash, Solly, and Hamp, once the ship had tied up and secured its engines, descended into the wardroom, threw their hats onto their respective racks, bent their heads together over the fold-out table, and prepared the immediate message that would notify COMDESLANT’s chief of staff and chief engineer that Chaser 3 had been tried and was ready to answer all bells.
“Things look better than expected?” Solly asked Ash, once their message had gone to radio.
“Yes,” Ash said, after a slight hesitation. “I can’t speak from experience, but I’m guessing that most ships do trials first, spend two, three, four weeks making adjustments, modifications, and repairs, do more trials, and then go into commission. Frankly, I’ve been stunned to see the way DESLANT handled us, but we can give Anson the most credit; he’s done a first-class job all around. This ship’s tight, clean, and ready, and she runs like a honey. The war, I think, accounts for the fact that the usual honors and ceremonies have been truncated and pressed forward.”
“Think we might be given some time off over the weekend?” Hamp asked, showing Ash and Solly the smile of a tomcat. “I had a thought that the three of us might enjoy running up to The Eiseley and meeting a few of the locals while indulging ourselves with modest refreshment as a prelude to light entertainment.”
“I think, Mr. Hampton,” Ash said slowly, with an acid tone, “that our masters at COMDESLANT are going to stick out their commanding fingers, pinch ensigns by the ears, and snatch them straight down to the fueling facilities with something approaching the accelerated speed of light. And after that, I think we are going to witness any number of otherwise stalwart individuals start barfing up their breakfast as soon as we put to sea. I regret to disappoint you, but I would expect orders to arrive about as soon as our ammo is stowed and our tanks are topped off. The ‘locals’ are bound to feel deprived by your absence, but there’s nothing for it. Let us hope that they find a means to console themselves.”
“Oh,” Hamp said, “you mean that COMDESLANT hasn’t been extensively impressed by all of our hard work?”
“You can bet on it,” Ash said.
“How will they notify us?” Solly asked. “Message or messenger?”
“Message,” Ash said. “With radio up and operating, by message. I’ll wait for it. You two go ahead and turn in because we’ll probably pipe reveille at 0300 in order to get down to the foot of Casco Bay by sunrise. I won’t put money on it, but I’m guessing they’ll want us as soon as the net tenders are able to open the gates so that we can get up the channel.”
“That early?” Hamp said.
“That early,” Ash said.
Without hesitation or much more in the way of conversation, Solly and Hamp peeled off their uniforms and turned in for the night. Ash, leaving word with the radioman about where to find him, went up to the pilot house, bent over the chart table, and once more studied the location of the minefields guarding the conglomeration of ships he knew to be anchored in Casco Bay. Then, reassured about mine belt distributions, he turned to examining the locations of individual buoys and the anchorages, one of which he imagined that COMDESLANT would designate for his use. At 2215 that night, when the radioman found him and handed him the expected message, Ash was still in the pilot house measuring distances on the chart with a pair of dividers. The message when handed to him carried no frills:
Pending operational assignment, proceed Casco Bay. Moor, Buoy 16, 0715, for fuel, water, and ammunition. Report completion by signal light.
Ash read the message twice, ordered the deck watch to sound reveille at 0300, and turned in, thinking that it had been a long day and knowing in his bones that another would follow.
At 0300 on the dot, Samarango piped reveille for the crew. Half an hour later, after a hurried sweep-down, the crew went to breakfast.
“Joy ’em,” Watts announced as he served out their mess trays “’cause these is the las’ fresh egg y’all likely to gets. We’se goin’ ta da powder kind right quick after today.”
Ash set the Special Sea and Anchor Detail at 0415, and 15 minutes later, Solly climbed up to the bridge to tell him that Chaser 3 was ready for sea with all hands at their stations for leaving port.
The line handling that morning went off without a hitch. Pushed by a light breeze, the chaser gently drew away from the dock. Then, by backing her smartly on one engine while going ahead on the other, Ash quickly turned the ship in Anson’s boat basin. Speaking with a steady tone into the voice tube, Ash ordered all engines ahead one third with turns for 3 knots and started down the river toward the bay. To Ash and the crew’s surprise, an immediate cheer went up from the beach. Beneath a flood light attached to the boat house, the builder, Mr. Anson, had assembled his entire work force to witness Chaser 3’s departure, and following a tradition that Ash imagined went all the way back to the Vikings, the collected shipwrights were saluting and cheering the fruit of their labors as she made her way to the sea.
“Run up the Bravo Zulu for ‘Well done,’” Ash called to Glick, and within a matter of seconds, the signalman bent on the hoist and ran it up to the yardarm, once more eliciting a cheer from the men they were leaving behind. With the lookouts calling out the buoys, Ash took the chaser downriver and out into the bay.
Considering how calm the bay had been the previous day, Ash had imagined that it might stir up like hell. Fortunately, to his surprise—and to the relief of the petty officers who didn’t like the thought of having to take on everything from provisions to ammunition with a green crew of seasick sailors—the morning sea continued to be utterly tranquil, with hardly the hump of a wave anywhere in sight. It was a wonder; there could be no doubt about it. An hour later, when they finally made the sea buoy that heralded their approach to the swept channel and sighted the net tender preparing to open the entrance to let them pass through, the dawn had just started to break, an Aurorean blush gracing the eastern sky. And then, without undue hesitation, Ash faced his first major trial of seamanship.
Owing to the lowly rank he’d held aboard the Parker, Ash had never been on the bridge when his captain had moored the destroyer. Instead, he had been stationed on the fantail of the ship, supervising line handlers. There he had gleaned what he could of the procedure by glancing up the sides of the ship, catching glimpses of the ship’s boat crew as they put a man on the buoy, passed the line, and then hooked up finally by means of shackling one of their anchor chains to the buoy. Nevertheless, only days before, Ash had pored over the appropriate entries in Knight’s Modern Seamanship until he thought that he knew them by heart. So, first finding and then approaching buoy 16, he ordered the ship’s wherry into the water with one of Samarango’s green seamen aboard to make the connection; then, with the boat crew rowing like they were in a race, Ash moved Chaser 3, to within 10 yards of the buoy and held her in position while the wherry sent the seaman scrambling up the side of the buoy and onto its top. With Samarango barking orders from the fo’c’sle and Ash holding the ship in position by means of light adjustments to the engines, the messenger was passed, a larger line with a hook was pulled over, and finally, the anchor chain, detached from the anchor, was pulled over by the seaman and shackled to the strong steel ring on the top of the buoy.
Ash felt a sudden wave of relief. From the start, he
’d imagined that someone, somewhere, on one of the surrounding ships, some observer designated by COMDESLANT, had been watching and judging his every move, and his worst fear—that the ship would have to attempt the moor multiple times before she could finally hook up—drifted away in an instant.
“Mr. Solomon,” Ash said, speaking firmly to the pilot house through the voice tube, “pass a ‘Well Done’ to the crew. I consider the moor to have been made in a manner smart, shipshape, and seamanlike.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Solly responded, registering precisely the kind of support that Ash expected. Strict attention to duty, no frills, no implied horseplay, merely an order given and a straight answer that it would be carried out. On top of the relief and satisfaction he felt for having made his first moor without trouble, Ash felt an additional boost to his morale in the belief that Solly was going to make a good exec.
With signal lights flashing back and forth between harbor control and Glick, not ten minutes passed before Ash received word that a yard oiler would soon be alongside to top off Chaser 3’s tanks. From the bridge, Ash called down to Samarango to stand ready, and when he looked up, he could already see the oiler, a mile distant, coming out to them from the fueling piers located somewhere along the reaches of Portland’s inner harbor.
They needed less than an hour to top off with fuel, the chief petty officer commanding the yard oiler descending from his tiny bridge onto the well deck in order to exchange words with Chief Stobb while the ship was alongside and the transfer was underway. After the oiler disengaged and pulled away, the chief came to the bridge to report “a full consignment of fuel taken on.” Then, almost casually, he added grimly, “Don’t know if there’s anything in it Cap’n, but that chief on the oiler told me the krauts sank a freighter last night, ’bout 20 miles out, down off Portsmouth.”
“That puts them right on our doorstep,” Ash said. “If that’s true, we ought to see some message traffic about it pretty quick.”
And they did, not 20 minutes after Stobb passed the news to Ash and at about the same time a tug pushed a water tender up alongside, Solly and Stobb once more supervising as the tender filled their tanks with a fresh water supply.
The freighter—3,500 tons, relatively small, and riding independently and largely empty on its way down from Halifax en route to Baltimore—had gone down in less than seven minutes, taking five of the crew with her while 16 managed to scramble into the only lifeboat they’d had time to launch. By pure chance, they’d been found and towed in not four hours after the sinking by a minesweeper that came across them while headed for upkeep to a Rockland yard farther up the coast.
As soon as he’d read the message, Ash passed it to Solly and Hamp, and then he delegated Samarango and Chief Stobb to inform the crew.
“For better or worse,” Ash said, “it’s bound to grip their attention, tighten their resolve, and give them an additional motivation for remaining alert on watch.” He was right.
Provisioning, also from a lighter, commenced as soon as the water tender drew away, Watts seeing to it that they took on as much fresh bread, as many potatoes and fresh vegetables as they had room for, and enough hamburger to serve the men spaghetti for supper. “Tomorrow’ll be soon ’nough,” he told Ash, “fo’ me to ’gin serve ’em that can salmon, an’ powder egg. They most won’t like it at firs’, Cap’n, but dey ain’t seen what I can do with it yet. It’ll go down good, my cookin’. Den dey like that spam better den t-bone steak.”
“Watts,” Ash said, “you’ve got an uphill climb ahead of you.”
“You jus’ watch me climb, Cap’n Sir. Dem boy think dey die and gone ta glory.”
Ash grinned; he couldn’t help himself.
With Chaser 3’s galley spaces filled to overflowing, bags of fresh bread hanging from the overhead, and two crates of onions crammed into a sheltered corner of the lazarette, a tug removed the provisioning barge. Around 1300 that afternoon, after a sandwich and a cup of coffee, Solly came to Ash in the mess deck and reported that an ammunition barge equipped with a portable crane was approaching.
“Had a look through the binoculars, Captain,” Solly said. “Looks to me like the ammo barge is carrying a chief warrant officer, a salty chief warrant by the looks of him.”
“Solly,” Ash said, “if you ever find a chief warrant officer that isn’t salty, let me know. We could probably charge admission to see him. Those guys are usually 40-year-career men who would rather die in service than step a foot ashore.”
As the barge drew abreast of them and threw over its heaving lines, Hamp joined them. Together, they returned the warrant officer’s salute as the barge passed over its mooring lines, edged in against their fenders, and tied up.
The warrant officer, clad in a boiler suit and wearing a cap whose cover looked like it might have been snatched straight from a grease bucket, the cap device of which looked like it had been constructed of chipped barnacles and glued back together, seemed a bulky man but a short one. As he stood, hands on hips, looking the trio up and down, Ash imagined that he could detect a smile, not of derision but of mild disbelief on the man’s face. How, the man seemed to be wondering, could the United States Navy send a trio of spring chickens like Ash, Solly, and Hamp out to command anything? To the chief, Ash thought, they must have looked like peach-cheeked midshipmen going for their first sail in a knockabout or a dingy.
“Chief,” Ash said, “if you’d care to step aboard, I think we can offer you a decent cup of coffee.”
“Thank you, Captain,” the chief said, his fists still doubled against his hips, “but I’d better not. I’ve got a green boy on the crane this afternoon, and I don’t want to risk him dropping one of them depth charges on your deck and blowing us all to hell.”
“I take your point,” Ash said. “Well, then, we’re ready when you are. Mr. Hampton here and Gunner Teague will work with you on the inventory, and I’ll want all three of you to double check the lot numbers on each item. I don’t want a slip up, you’ll understand; I don’t want us going to sea with the wrong caliber ammunition for the right guns” Ash tried to sound jocular, knowing it wouldn’t do to ruffle the warrant’s feathers.
“Good idea,” the man said. “And one more thing, Captain.”
“Yes?” Ash said.
“I’ll hope this Gunner Teague of yours is a dead shot because we’ve only got ten rounds for that 3”/23 caliber gun you’re carrying. Foul up at the factory somewhere; they misdirected our consignment to Staten Island, so what we’re giving you is sound and stable, but its World War I vintage, and it’s the most we’ve got. Couple of minesweepers took near everything we had last week.”
Ten rounds! Ash thought, a nasty burning sensation invading the interior of his stomach. Ten rounds! Ten rounds for Chaser 3’s main battery while any U-boat they were likely to meet would be carrying well over two hundred rounds for its 4-inch deck gun! They’d be sitting ducks. It was the war, of course, but that didn’t make it easy to swallow. Some twit sitting somewhere in Pennsylvania, or Indiana, or even the hills of Kentucky had screwed up monstrously through inattention, ignorance, or plain indifference, and screwed them in the process. It couldn’t be helped; it had to be lived with and somehow overcome until whatever orders they were given took them into a port where an adequate supply of 3-inch could be taken on and stowed in the magazine.
“Nothing for it, Chief,” Ash said, his jaw hardening as he said so. “I guess we’ll have to fight, if fight we do, on a shoelace.”
“I’ve brought you plenty extra for the 20mm,” the chief said. “And I’ve found you a fairly new .50-caliber machine gun that’ll need a good cleanup.”
“Thanks,” Ash said, “that’s something.” But was it, really? On the surface, beyond 2,000 yards, Ash knew that the Oerlikons would be ineffective, and the .50-caliber even less so. As anti-aircraft guns, Ash knew them to be much better, but the thought of the Luftwaffe attacking the ship anywhere along the Atlantic coast almost made Ash break into laught
er. Well, they’d do what they’d do because it would be what they’d have to do, and then, they’d try to make the best of it.
“All right, Chief,” Ash said, “let’s get to it.”
Carefully but with reasonable dispatch, the little crane began transferring depth charges onto Chaser 3’s fantail, where Hamp and young Cornfeld, Teague’s designated torpedoman, began removing the detonators from their cases, setting them on safety, and inserting them into the barrel-like, explosive casings of the depth charges. Forward, meanwhile, under Solly’s watchful eye, gun ammunition, small arms ammunition, and pyrotechnics began coming over the side, where nervous sailors ramrodded by Teague and Samarango carried them gently to the ready boxes behind the guns or struck them below to their designated magazines. Throughout the evolution, the smoking lamp remained out, and from time to time, Ash could see that handling the ammunition made this or that sailor nervous. But by 1600, the job was complete, and the ship had returned to what would become its standard plan of the day with evening chow to go down at 1700.
As soon as the final ammunition inventory had been checked and double checked and the appropriate papers signed in triplicate, the warrant officer and his barge crane departed. At that point, standing on the main deck across from the pilot house, Ash called up to Glick, who looked down to him from the signal platform.
“By signal light to COMDESLANT: ‘Chaser 3 is ready for sea.’”
Glick leapt to the ladder, climbed to the bridge, and sent the message by flashing light. Not 30 minutes later, as Ash sat in the wardroom, once more going over the inventory, Hamp dropped down to report what looked to him like a fairly well-appointed gig approaching from the direction of the inner harbor.
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