“I was on deck and saw her when she first started out,” Hamp said, “and she’s headed straight for us without a single deviation since she first appeared.”
“That sounds like DESLANT sending us our orders by messenger,” Ash said. “I’ll come up.”
Fifty yards out, the gig cut its speed, allowing the rooster tail behind it to subside while the bow hook emerged from the boat’s well and scrambled forward to hail the ship. Then, after Hamp signaled the ship’s permission to come alongside, the gig’s coxswain whipped the small boat in so that an ensign had only to reach across the gunwales in order to hand Ash a sealed packet.
“Orders, by my guess,” the ensign grinned, saluting Ash and wishing him luck, and in the next second, the boat’s coxswain swung the boat away at full throttle, heading straight back toward the inner harbor.
Back in the wardroom, seated at the table with Solly on one side of him and Hamp on the other, Ash broke open the packet and began to read.
“Pipe reveille at 0400,” Ash said after a few minutes of careful study, “with breakfast to go down at 0430, and I’ll want the Special Sea and Anchor Detail set at 0530 so that we can be underway by 0600. We’re assigned to be the single escort for an empty tanker and three freighters making for Hoboken. One of those freighters appears to be slow, so the convoy speed is set at 8 knots, and we’ll run a zig-zag pattern all the way down. Just off the top of my head, and considering the fact that we’ll have to clear around Cape Cod, I’m guessing that we’ll have to go about 400 miles, which means something more than a two-day trip. Once we see the ships into Raritan Bay, we’re released and ordered to proceed to the Coast Guard piers on Staten Island where a full consignment of 3-inch ammo is supposed to be waiting for us.”
“Generous of them,” Hamp said.
“Very,” said Ash. “Let’s just hope we don’t run into a U-boat before we get there. Somewhere out there on the way down, Hamp, you can warn Teague that we’ll test our guns, the Oerlikons and the .50-caliber; I won’t waste any of the 3-inch until we have some rounds to spare.”
Hamp indicated his agreement.
“Now,” Ash said, “we haven’t talked about the next subject yet, but this is the time, so pay me close attention. Once we pass the sea buoy tomorrow, I intend to set Condition III watches and start training the two of you and Samarango up to the point where you can be considered qualified Officers of the Deck for Fleet Steaming. Needless to say, you’ll have a lot to learn, so for the time being, I’ll swing a hammock in the pilot house and sleep there when I think that I can. The essential point for you to understand is this: I’m the man who’s responsible for the ship and the lives of the crew. That’s what it means to be in command, and I will expect both of you to understand that and act accordingly. I’ll give you the con once we get out there in the morning, but if you spot a tin can in the water, a ship on the horizon, a whale, a log, or a U-boat—anything, day or night—and it doesn’t matter if I’m asleep, sick, or even wounded, you are to report it to me at once. And that goes as well for anything like an engineering casualty, an equipment failure, or even a dust up between members of the crew that happens aboard. Even course and speed changes are to be reported to me. From here on out, the only thing that can relieve me of my responsibility for this ship and relieve you of your responsibility to me is if I am killed in action, at which point Solly will have to step up and assume command, and if Solly is killed, Hamp, you’ve got it. Am I making myself clear?”
Ash had sobered them; he’d meant to, and he could see from their eyes that his point had been made.
“All right,” he said to Solly, “let’s get Bell up to the chart room, pull out the charts, and lay out the track so that we can see where we’ll be going, and then, you can pass the word to the crew.”
And thus, they prepared for sea.
9
On February 22, 1942, alone and manned by a half-green crew, one thousand yards out ahead of three freighters and a tanker riding high, Chaser 3 sortied from Portland and went to war, Lieutenant (j.g.) Ashford Miller USNR, commanding.
On the bridge, muffled in foul-weather gear against the harsh winter cold, Ash ordered sonar’s echo sounder to be lowered so that it could start pinging. Then, after coming around to the southeast while still under the shelter of Cushing Island, and with only the first faint traces of dawn beginning to break far out on the eastern horizon, Ash turned to Hamp, who had drawn the early morning watch.
“Go below and make a quick run through, stem to stern,” Ash ordered. “This isn’t going to be like yesterday. We’ve got a sea running out there, and we’re going to meet it the minute we come out from under the lee of this island that’s protecting us. Be quick, but make sure everything is secured, and warn Watts to stand by for rolling in the galley. I’m guessing that you’ve got about ten minutes, so go.”
Hamp disappeared down the ladder onto the main deck. Seconds later, Ash watched him descend down the Booby hatch into the fo’c’sle. In the meantime, periodically shooting bearings on known lights and recognizable points of land, Ash mentally tracked his position, checking regularly with Bell, who was taking readings of his own from the compass in the pilot house and then plotting them on the chart to record the ship’s progress.
“How long before we’re out from under the lee?” Ash called down.
“I’d give us another couple of minutes, Cap’n,” Bell replied.
Hamp climbed back onto the bridge as Ash shut the voice pipe.
“All secure, Sir,” Hamp said, “except for those two crates of onions in the lazarette. Someone left the keeper bars sitting on the deck, so I reinstalled ’em.”
Watts had served the crew scrambled eggs laced with fried spam and onions for breakfast that morning, and Ash imagined that Denison, the mess assistant who’d been sent to fetch the onions, had left the keeper bars off the storage racks in his haste to return to the galley. “Mention it to Watts?” Ash asked
“Yes, Sir; he said he’d take care of it.”
“Whoa!” Ash laughed, suddenly reaching for a handrail as Chaser 3 took a hard snap roll to starboard. Equally surprised by the motion, Hamp only kept his footing by throwing an arm around the post that supported the signal light, but when the ship snapped back and fell into the trough, he’d prepared and set his feet for it, and he managed to stand, legs spread, without having to clutch the post. From below, both fore and aft, the two men could hear the crew’s reaction, shouts of alarm mixed with the kinds of raucous laughter that usually accompanied a thrilling carnival ride. The consternation, Ash assumed, arose from the boots, the laughter from the petty officers. The ship rolled back to starboard once more, and Ash knew that the heavy roll, a roll that he estimated to be 30 degrees, would continue until they rounded Cape Elizabeth and turned south so as to start down the coast; that, he hoped, would give them a following sea. That they would continue to roll, Ash felt certain, but with the sea behind them, coming down from the northeast, their roll might be slightly reduced, offset by whatever yawing developed as the ship began to pitch. No matter how it developed, Ash knew that they weren’t going to be comfortable.
With enough light to see by and after checking astern to make sure that the convoy was maintaining its spacing and distance, Ash once more turned to Hamp.
“Take a good look to port,” he said. “I’d say that those waves hitting us from the northeast must measure about 8 to 12 feet. That’s what a State 5 sea state looks like, and the number goes up or down from there. Have a good look and commit what you see to memory. And then Mr. Hampton, when you’re ready, I’ll give you the con, and in about 15 minutes, once we’re a little farther out, we’ll start to zig-zag, and you can practice giving orders to the helm and judging how well he turns”
“Captain,” Hamp said, suddenly showing Ash a wan face and a strange expression, “shit, Sir, I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Barf bucket”s right beside you, tied to the rail. Just go right ahead, Hamp, wheneve
r you feel like it. I don’t feel so hot myself.” And Ash didn’t. It was the result of coming straight out into the trough after a more than hearty breakfast, and Ash knew that he couldn’t do a single thing about it. He’d known from the start that chasers rolled and rolled heavily even in relatively moderate seas, and Chaser 3 was obviously going to be no different from the rest of her type in that regard. Fight it he must, and fight it he would, but considering the amount of time he would have to spend on the bridge, he counted himself lucky. Sleepless he might be, might have to be, but fresh air was often the best medicine for seasickness—fresh air, and the ability to look ahead with a clear eye and see what was coming.
Fifteen minutes later, Ash called down through the voice pipe and announced to the pilot house, “This is the captain speaking; Mr. Hampton has the con.’ and Hamp, after already having thrown up twice, stepped to the pipe, mustered as strong a voice as he could project, and announced, “This is Mr. Hampton, I have the con, steer course 165 magnetic and make turns for 8 knots,’ and heard the words repeated to him from below. After ordering Glick to raise the appropriate signal flags, Ash gave Hamp the order to commence their designated zig-zag pattern. Their zig-zag would prolong the voyage, but in so far as Ash was concerned, by hopefully confusing a U-boat commander’s firing solutions, it might give them the best possible chance for avoiding a torpedo—unless, by some amazing stroke of luck, Gomez happened to stumble onto a sonar contact and give Ash the chance to hold down, damage, or even sink an attacking U-boat with depth charges. The possibility seemed unlikely, if not downright unthinkable. Ash knew that he was out there in Chaser 3 doing a job alone that, at a minimum, at least three or even four escorts might be hard pressed to accomplish. But at the moment, caught once more with its pants down, the United States Navy didn’t have the escorts to send, so they sent what they had; it was the best they could do, and Ash intended to give it the best that was in him.
Before Solly came up to relieve for the 0800-1200 watch, Hamp had gone to the bucket twice more, but he remained game. His head nevertheless sometimes hanging, he encouraged the lookouts who were each as sick as he was, and tried to set an upbeat tone, while giving the helm the frequent changes of course that their zig-zag pattern demanded.
“And you, Solly,” Ash asked as his executive officer climbed onto the bridge, “how are you feeling this fine salty morning?”
“Not fine, Captain,” Solly replied, his face pale. “I’ve upchucked a couple of times, but I’m starting to get a handle on it. Seems better up here than down below.”
“What’s it like down there?”
“Eggs, spam, and onions everywhere,” Solly said. “Stinks like hell, Sir, and the decks are a mess. They’re even throwing up on the bulkheads, some of the petty officers as well as the boots, but Samarango and Stobb, in between wiping a few faces down with wet towels, are also making them clean up their mess. We set a rule, each man cleans up for himself, no matter how sick he is, no matter what the sea state, and no waiting.”
“Good man,” Ash said. “They won’t be happy, but it has to be done. As we knew from the start, they’ll have to work through it. There’s no other choice”.
Prior to rounding Cape Elizabeth, noticing that the smallest of the freighters had already begun to have trouble keeping up, Ash cut the convoy’s speed to 7 and a half knots and reorganized the ships into a tight box at 500-yard intervals; then, with the maneuver complete and after ordering their turn south, he resumed the formation’s zig-zag. By that time, Solly had relieved Hamp, and with the turn, the ship’s roll had blissfully reduced itself to a mere 20 degrees. Nevertheless, as the chaser began to yaw and pitch before a following sea, the boots in particular had reluctantly discovered yet another form of motion that they found no less discomforting than the roll.
Solly, Ash was pleased to notice, standing with his legs set apart and his feet planted firmly on the deck, quickly learned how to absorb the pitch and roll with the flexibility in his knees. While he might have thrown up his breakfast before coming on watch, he managed to hold the malaise in check, and his color actually began to improve once he became involved with his duties on the bridge. It wasn’t that Hamp had been in any way deficient—he hadn’t been—but Solly, Ash realized, showed signs of being a quick study, and Ash imagined that he would develop into an excellent watch stander.
At 1020 that morning, with the convoy adjusted to the zig-zag and plowing south at a steady speed, Ash ordered Solly to maneuver the ship out onto the formation’s port beam. There, after notifying all four ships by means of a flag hoist that he intended to test his guns, Ash sounded the alarm for General Quarters and sent the men to their battle stations. It was not, in Ash’s estimation, a very successful evolution. With two thirds of the crew seasick, they were slow—minutes too slow to suit the ship’s needs—and Ash knew it and determined that he would correct it. Still, with all battle stations finally manned and ready, he went ahead with the gun shoot, expending ten rounds from each of the Oerlikons to prove Teague’s competence in making them ready, and another ten or 15 rounds from the .50-caliber to make sure that it, too, could perform if needed. Throughout the exercise, which didn’t last 20 minutes, here and there, this or that sailor still threw up, necessitating a quick wash down over the main deck. Meanwhile, below decks according to Hamp at least three more men had turned to with swabs and scrub buckets. And when, finally, the clean-up ended and the men had returned to their bunks, Ash once more sounded the alarm, brought the crew to General Quarters, and continued repeating the evolution until 1500 that afternoon when, finally, he thought the men had achieved a speed that battle would demand. And then Ash spoke to them over the ship’s address system.
“This is the captain speaking,” he announced. “It does not matter that you are sick; it does not matter that the sea is rough. If you are not fast enough going to General Quarters, the Germans will kill us” Ash paused to let the idea sink in and then said, “That is all”.
Ash did not go down to the mess decks for lunch that day. Instead, around 1130, Denison brought a spam sandwich and a cup of coffee to the bridge, and on that combination, mustard slathered over the meat, Ash made his meal. Samarango then relieved Solly, and an hour later, after assuring himself that Samarango, enlisted boatswain’s mate though he might be, knew exactly what he was doing without Ash having to watch his every move, Ash went down to the chart house, climbed into the hammock that he immediately slung, and managed to sleep for an hour before Bell woke him so that he could go back to the bridge and order the next General Quarters drill.
Around 1600 that afternoon, at about the same time that Hamp relieved Samarango as the junior officer of the deck and with the ship screening out ahead of the convoy, Pierre, the watch stander sitting before the sonar scope, reported a strong contact several hundred yards off the starboard bow. Immediately Ash ordered the quartermaster to examine the chart for sunken wrecks on the reported bearing, but before the man could report back to him, the contact broke up. This led Gomez, who had leapt into sonar, to classify the contact as a probable school of fish, and Ash was satisfied that Gomez had made the right call.
By that time, Ash’s tiny convoy had steamed nearly 60 miles south of Portland and into a position several miles to the southeast of Portsmouth. No sooner had Hamp relieved and Samarango gone off the watch and the sonar contact broken up than the port lookout had shouted that he’d seen a man in the water, two, perhaps three hundred yards off the port bow. Immediately, Ash raised his binoculars to scan the distance, reasoning that it might be a survivor from the freighter which the Portland petty officer had reported sunk off Portsmouth on the previous day. With the entire watch intensely focused on scanning the waves, they indeed spotted the man, rising and falling as each succeeding swell passed beneath him, but when they changed course and drew alongside, they discovered at once that the man was not a survivor. He was stone dead, riding like an inert cork within the confines of his kapok life jacket, his right arm blown
off below the elbow, his chest and abdomen perforated by steel splinters, one of which protruded from his boated body like a needle in a pincushion.
With grappling hooks, Samarango and three deckhands hoisted the corpse aboard, grotesque evidence of the immediate danger that all of them faced. By Ash’s orders, Samarango encased the remains in canvas, sewed up the seam, and stowed the cadaver aft in the space between the depth-charge racks so that the body could make its final transit for delivery to the mortuary detail on Staten Island. Most of the crew, but not all, had filed past the corpse before Samarango had wrapped it into canvas. In some cases, the sight had added revulsion to the sea sickness that most of them were already enduring. In others, it merely added anger and awe to what they had already seen on the trawler. In all cases, the effect had been sobering. The men were no longer safe and secure on inland American streets and farms and they knew it. They knew, too, that aside from the men with whom they served, they were utterly alone.
During the first of the evening dog watches, the 1600-1800, Ash ordered the formation onto a more southeasterly course, his intention being to clear Cape Cod during the night with 10 miles to spare. And then, while bracing himself against the rail, almost inadvertently his mind drifted from the corpse and back to Yarmouth, to the afternoon he’d spent with Claire Morris. Quality time, he thought; that’s what the wardroom on the Parker used to call quality time—time spent with a nice-looking woman in a comfortable place with enough conversation to lend the moment spice. Ash wondered if he would ever get back to Yarmouth, if he would ever see Claire Morris again. Then, taking a grip on himself, he dismissed the idea. Such thoughts, he knew, could be distracting, and out there in the Atlantic with a spindrift blowing off the waves, distractions became dangers that could get a man killed. Suddenly, Ash found himself wondering if the dead seaman on the fantail had been distracted by something in the moment he’d been hit, but as Ash knew, the idea didn’t bear thinking about.
Splinter on the Tide Page 9