With his eyes fixed on the mine, Chaser 3 responded as Ash hoped she would, and then, Ash stopped all engines, waiting, as the crew erupted from wherever they had been working and raced to their battle stations.
“Teague to the bridge!” Ash called below as the gun crews manned their weapons. “Lookouts, peel your eyes for mines!”
Suddenly, Ash knew that he had to keep track of more things than he’d ever before had to face in a single moment. Chaser 3 had to be kept in position so as not to lose sight of the mine as it rose to the top of one wave after another and disappeared into the troughs behind them, the convoy had to be maneuvered so as to keep it clear of danger, additional mines like the floater he’d discovered–if they existed–had to be sighted and kept in view, and the event had to be handled with dispatch so as not to delay the convoy or endanger it. As Teague raced up the ladder to the bridge, Ash ordered the convoy to slow its speed to 3 knots and to steam in a square pattern, 2 miles on a side, while he took action to eliminate the danger. Then, with Teague standing beside him, Ash did his best to put his gunner onto the mine.
“There,” Ash said, “two points off the starboard quarter, about 70 yards out. See it?”
With a minimum of urgent coaching, Ash directed Teague’s line of sight.
“Got it,” the gunner’s mate said after scanning the wave crests.
“That doesn’t look like one of ours,” Ash said, his voice steady, his pulse finally coming under control. “I think it’s German, probably launched from the U-boat at some time in the last day or two. We can’t leave it out here; we’ve got to blow it or sink it. What’s your best recommendation?”
“I’ll try to blow it with the 20mm, Cap’n,” Teague said, “but it might just sink if I get it in the right spot. Hell of a concussion if she blows.”
“Oh, don’t I know,” Ash said, “and a risk of damage to ourselves in the mix. Can you still do it if I open the range?”
“I’ll try,” Teague said. “I’ll give it my best shot, Cap’n.”
Ash opened the range by another 30 yards and then gave the order so that Teague could take the mine under fire with the aftermost Oerlikon.
When Ash gave the order, Teague, manning the 20mm himself with the help of his loader, sank the mine in less than a minute. It took him 24 rounds to do it, and miraculously none of them struck a contact detonator so as to explode the mine.
In the meantime, a sailor nicknamed “Skinny” Krupp, a tall, thin seaman apprentice serving as starboard lookout, had sighted a second mine another 200 yards out, only seeing it as it crested an immense swell where the spindrift flew away from it in an irregular way. Once he’d guided Ash onto it, Ash put on 3 knots and maneuvered Chaser 3 into a position downwind so as to give Teague the best possible chance for catching the mine as it floated up the face of each wave onto their crests.
This time, Teague struck a contact detonator with his third round, and the mine blew, throwing a geyser of sea water a hundred feet into the sky, shaking the ship like a leaf with the force of the concussion and showering them with sheets of downwind spray.
“Solly,” Ash called down to the pilot house through the voice tube, “damage control reports to the bridge as soon as you and Chief Stobb can inspect the spaces. And send Polaski up here with some message blanks. I’ve got to message COMDESLANT and Naval Headquarters, Norfolk, about this so that they can promulgate an alert.”
For 30 more minutes, making no more than 5 knots, Ash searched the area, looking for more mines. Finding none he quickly put the convoy back on course and resumed speed, working out ahead of the box, searching on either side of their zig-zag. In the meantime, after a thorough inspection of the ship, Solly returned to the bridge with Chief Stobb in tow, both men reporting no serious damage. A water connection had vibrated loose so as to spring a tiny leak and been immediately repaired, some of Watts’ mess utensils had been shaken from their racks, and a fire extinguisher had broken its strap and crashed to the deck.
“But the hull remains intact?” Ash asked. “No leaks?”
“No leaks,” Chief Stobb said. “Sounded the bilges myself. She’s in good shape.”
“I guess we can thank Anson for that,” Ash said. “He built her strong.”
“We had the same thought,” Solly said.
“Nasty things, mines,” Stobb remarked. “Damned lucky you saw'em comin, Cap’n.”
“Yes,” Ash said. “Let’s just hope our luck holds. Sighting one of those things tends to make the blood run cold.”
“This has been a really interesting day,” Hamp said to Ash as soon as he relieved for the first of the dog watches. “If you don’t mind me asking, is that what it was like on your other ship, the Parker–the concussion, I mean?”
Ash tried to remember and couldn’t. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I can’t quite say because the first lift, or wave, or whatever launched me straight into the air. I was more or less in flight as the vibrations passed under me, and then, I hit the water after they’d moved out and beyond where the ship was going down.”
Hamp didn’t press the point, and Ash didn’t offer to expand on it. It was done–the Parker was gone, sunk–and now, Chaser 3 was everything, had to be everything. His stomach still in knots, Ash went to the mess deck for his supper, knowing that his worries about the ship had been ratcheted up by one more notch. Intellectually, command was turning out just what he’d expected it would be, exactly what any reasonable human being could expect it to be, but experientially and emotionally, being the chaser’s C.O. seemed to be thrusting him into the unexpected and the unknown at every turn.
Over supper, Ash, Solly, Chief Stobb, and Samarango, the four of them sitting at the head of the table, talked over the mine, and when Teague came down, he joined the conversation.
“If we'd had more of a sea running out there,” Teague said, “I can’t guarantee that I could have hit them rascals. Might have had to go to the 3-inch and blow em by proximity. That Oerlikon is great for anti-aircraft fire and for hittin’ somethin’ bigger like say a PT Boat or one of them U-boats, but takin’ out that mine was like tryin’ to shoot a flea off a dog’s back.”
“You think, then, that the 3-inch might do a better job?” Ash asked with a straight tone of inquiry.
“Cap’n,” Teague said, “I’m jus’ guessin’, but now we done it once with the 20mm, I think the splinters from a 3-inch-shell burst might give us a faster result.”
“I’ll make a note,” Ash said, “and if we ever come within range of another mine, we’ll try it–if it’s a floater, that is. I have no idea how we’d deal with anything more sophisticated like a magnetic mine or one of those delayed-action types that only pops to the surface after two or three ships have passed over it.”
“They make mines like that?” Solly said, showing some astonishment.
“I’m afraid so,” Ash replied. One glance down the table showed that he had shocked everyone. “But thus far, I haven’t heard that any have shown up on this side of the pond,” he continued, eliciting a collective sigh of relief. “We’ll just have to keep the lookouts sharp and up to the mark; that will always give us our best chance for detection.”
The word would get around below decks in a hurry, Ash knew, and if it prodded the lookouts to bump up their attention to duty, the revelation would have served its purpose.
At dusk, as Ash studied the distant horizon with a practiced eye, he spotted another small convoy coming north on a reciprocal bearing and maneuvered his own flock so as to pass it outboard. Within the hour, and even as Ash and Bell shot their stars beneath last light, nine vessels, all of them fully loaded, with a minesweeper and another fleet tug acting as escorts, passed to starboard, none of them showing lights, all of them making more than 12 knots according to Solly’s calculations as he timed their passage.
Ash knew about radar. He’d heard about some of its capabilities, but in that moment, he came to understand what it might mean to a ship like Chaser 3. As t
hings stood, with nothing more than the lookouts to rely on and in the midst of a pitch dark night, without anyone showing running lights as a means for judging another ship’s position and speed, Ash and his lumbering chicks might have run smack into the other convoy, physically, with great destruction to both of them. Equipped with radar, Ash could have spotted them at a greater distance and maneuvered accordingly. Considering the scarcity of the new radar inventions and the size and importance of his ship to the Navy, Ash did not imagine that she would ever be given a set. He amused himself by wondering if feeding carrots to the lookouts would improve their night vision as current myths suggested.
Leaving Solly to man the deck, Ash slept through the last three hours of the 2000-2400 watch but got up for the mid-watch as Samarango came on, knowing that their approach to Atlantic City might add complications to the voyage. As Ash expected when he climbed to the bridge, the lights of Atlantic City, although still distant, nevertheless threw a glow from over the horizon. The lookouts, he knew, would be pleased; their ability to see oncoming ships in silhouette would be improved, but the same thing would hold true for any U-boats that might be on the hunt, so by means of flashing light, Ash signaled a course change to the convoy, took them farther out into the Atlantic and well over the horizon before once more turning south and continuing on their track toward Norfolk. He’d anticipated the move from the moment He’d read his orders at Staten Island. To avoid the glow from off the beach entirely, Ash would have had to make a detour of more distance than he could afford, so having slightly increased his chances to avoid being detected by a U-boat, something he imagined to range by between 10 and 15 percent, he continued running, striking a course that would eventually take him past Cape May and the mouth of Delaware Bay to the point where he anticipated meeting the ship, a freighter, which was supposed to be coming out to join him.
Ash slept again between 0100 and 0300, but at 0300, the radioman on watch, Grubber this time, woke him in the chart room.
“Message, Cap’n,” Grubber said, all business and standing at attention. “Just received from COMDESLANT.”
“Be easy, Grubber,” Ash said, swinging out of the hammock and starting to read the message under the red lens on his flashlight. “No need for formality at this hour.”
“Yes, Sir,” Grubber said, sagging a little.
The message contained two lines. The first delivered a well done to the command: “BRAVO ZULU, sinking enemy mines.” The second notified Ash to expect two ships coming out of Wilmington that morning, a collier being added to the mix.
At 0400, without an ounce of preparation or advanced notice, Ash’s tiny convoy found itself suddenly surrounded by fog, fog so thick and dense that Ash could barely see the fo’c’sle from his own bridge. With the use of voice radio prohibited, visual signaling in order to slow the ships in the convoy was out of the question; the signal light couldn’t have penetrated the fog, and, locked in darkness, not even the best signalman would have known where to direct the beam. Instead, Ash had to rely on the operations order governing the convoy and count on each ship under his care to continue to zig-zag in accordance with the precise times set in the pattern. If they did not, they risked the dissolution of the convoy as each of them drifted off in independent directions or, worse, collision. Realizing that he was virtually blind, suddenly facing the unknown, Ash woke the ship and brought them quickly to General Quarters in order to be prepared for any eventuality that might materialize in the midst of the fog. To Ash’s shock, the eventuality that most worried him suddenly materialized not 200 yards distant. Breaking unexpectedly into an open hole in the fog and beneath the dawn’s first dim shade of gray, Ash sighted a black shape, an apparent U-boat, running on the surface, charging its batteries beneath the cover of the mists. Instantly, machine-gun rounds slammed into Chaser 3, splintering the edge of the starboard gunnel, shattering a running light, and wounding one of Teague’s loaders who crashed to the deck screaming beneath the ready magazine. Even before Ash could draw a breath, the U-boat began to disappear into yet another fog bank, the mere outline of its conning tower and its stern still exposed, giving Ash the second or two he needed to direct Teague onto the target, and Teague barely enough time to slam out a single 3-inch round from the main battery before the U-boat utterly disappeared from sight, the raging passage of Chaser 3’s single shot no doubt forcing the Nazi captain instantly to submerge even as Ash himself once more rushed into the fog bank somewhere behind where the sub had gone down.
As one of Teague’s gunners knelt to tend to the wounded man, sonar reported a hard contact to port. Within 20 seconds, owing to temperature gradients in the water or the ineptitude of the rating on the sonar repeater, the contact was gone–and gone finally before Ash could so much as order the fantail to drop a single depth charge on a legitimate target. From start to finish, the entire engagement had been a freak, a lightning flash, a never to be repeated gash in the cycle of time lasting less than a minute but long enough to leave Ash shaking with fury and shocked with wonder. Had Chaser 3 been equipped with radar, Ash believed that he could have executed an attack while avoiding collision with his convoy, but as things stood, he didn’t dare deviate from his zig-zag pattern, owing to the danger of colliding with one or another of the ships he was trying to shepherd. The only advantage that he could see in the moment was that the U-boat, with its periscope masked by the fog, would be unable to execute an attack of its own, and if or when the convoy did emerge from the fog, Ash intended to station himself astern of them in order to dissuade the U-boat if it tried to stalk them from somewhere behind.
The wounded sailor–Wilkins, a seaman, removed by Hamp to the mess table for treatment–had not been struck by a German round. Instead, splinters from the damaged gunnel had been driven into his thigh, and those, not without pain, Hamp managed to extract before applying a burning antiseptic and a bandage that was both thick enough and strong enough to close the wounds. That they would remain painful and keep the man in his bunk for several days, Hamp said that he felt certain; that they would leave the man permanently damaged, Hamp strongly doubted.
In the event, and after an hour’s steaming, Ash and the convoy emerged from the fog bank beneath a cold but fully breaking dawn with the U-boat nowhere in sight, Ash confident that if the German had indeed submerged and remained so in order to escape further attack that its underwater speed would never be enough to allow it to catch up with the convoy. That his convoy had avoided utter dissolution in the midst of the fog came as another surprise. Each of the ships had drifted–there could be no doubt–but by sticking to the zig-zag pattern, none of them had moved so far out of formation that they couldn’t be easily gathered. So, within the hour following, all of them moved back into the formation that Ash had set for them and proceeded on their way, Ash feeling waves of relief over the almost unthinkable fact that they had escaped relatively unharmed without a single ship being either gunned or torpedoed. How Ash had stumbled onto the U-boat remained a mystery to him, but given the German’s position and the events preceding its sudden appearance, Ash concluded that it was probably the same vessel which had laid the mines that Chaser 3 had destroyed on the previous day.
Chaser 3 and her little convoy made rendezvous with the new freighter and the collier south of Cape May later that morning, not long after the watch had been relieved, Ash directing both ships into positions on the convoy’s right flank so that the box became a rectangle, with three ships across the front rank at 500-yard intervals and three across the rear rank behind them. Then, as before, with Chaser 3’s sonar pinging, the convoy went on its way at 10 knots while zig-zagging, Ash maneuvering in a random circuit from one side to the other, with variable advances out in front of the ships and occasional periods where he dropped back behind the formation in case the U-boat might be found stalking them.
Three more times that day, they were met by small convoys headed north, two shepherded by a single escort each–a destroyer in the case of the first and a
minesweeper in the case of the second. In every case, Ash flasHe’d a warning about the possibility of meeting a U-boat ahead. The third convoy which consisted of only five ships had no escort whatsoever, but upon close examination, Ash did notice that the freighter leading the pack carried a 3723 mounted high up on its foc’sle, and through his binoculars, he could see two white-hatted sailors working around it. And then, around 1500 that afternoon, as the ship approacHe’d Ocean City, a single ocean liner passed them, her decks filled with passengers, many of them waving from a distance as the ship raced by.
Hamp, although he didn’t have the watch at the time, happened to be on the bridge standing next to Ash, holding some papers that Ash needed to sign.
“Jeez,” he said, “aren’t they taking a hell of a chance steaming independently like that?”
“I can’t be sure,” Ash said, “because I didn’t figure her speed, but I’d estimate it to be something in excess of 25 knots, give or take. At that speed, she can outrun any U-boat she’s likely to meet. There’s a risk, you’re right, but unless she practically runs directly over a U-boat, it is much diminisHe’d. Give her another six months, and I’ll bet she starts carrying troops somewhere rather than paying passengers. How’s Wilkins?”
“He’ll be fine, in so far as I can see,” Hamp said. “Two of those splinters went in about an inch, and a small one less deep. I’ll have him looked at as soon as we tie up somewhere, but I’m not too worried.”
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