Splinter on the Tide

by Phillip Parotti

  “Yes, Sir,” Samarango said.

  Two hours later, no more than 20 miles northwest of where they had picked up the German, Ash, Hamp and the lookout spotted a lifeboat in the water. The boat, when they reached it, turned out to be carrying the captain of a freighter named the Vincent Lane along with his chief engineer, his third mate, and 11 of the 22 sailors that had previously made up the crew. Two of the men were badly burned, and one of them had lost a hand. According to the captain, they’d been torpedoed two nights before but had had time to launch one of their two lifeboats. When Ash found them, they were starting to show the effects of being about to run out of water.

  Chaser 3, without taking the men aboard, took the lifeboat in tow, waited for the convoy to come up, and with minimal difficulty, managed to see all of the survivors transferred onto the Venezuelan oiler. He did not tell them about the German sailor that he had picked up.

  “I don’t suppose that we’ll ever know for sure,” Ash said to Hamp, “but I’m guessing that the man we have handcuffed beside the flag bag was washed overboard from a U-boat that was stalking the Vincent Lane. That’s why I didn’t particularly want to bring them aboard. You never can tell, of course, but one of them or more might have tried to kill him, and then we’d have had a hell of a mess on our hands”

  “They’re far better off aboard the oiler,” Hamp said, “particularly if the oiler has someone who knows how to treat burns. All we’ve got aboard is a can of petroleum jelly, and I can’t imagine it would have been much help with the way those two men were burned.”

  “Probably not,” Ash said.

  In Nassau the following day, Ash saw the German turned over to a pair of British red caps who placed him in a paddy wagon and drove him away to be interrogated by the Royal Navy’s intelligence section. Ash did not speak to the man as he walked ashore, and in so far as Ash knew, the German offered no one a word of thanks for his rescue. Ash simply felt relieved to be rid of him.

  The ship didn’t remain for long in Nassau. After taking on fuel, water, and some fresh bread, Ash once more headed out to sea, bound for Savannah in company with a refrigerator ship carrying perishable cargo up from Rio de Janeiro. Two hours later, north of Nassau, they came upon wreckage, a few splintered planks, an empty barrel, and two men, wearing life jackets, both dead, floating in the water, the sea birds already having pecked out their eyes. Nothing about the wreckage that the crew hauled aboard gave any indication of the ship to which the men had belonged. In the pocket of one of the dead men, however, Solly found a wallet, wrapped in oil cloth, from which he extracted a paper indicating that the holder had been appointed second mate of a Dutch freighter, the Alkmaar, three months before, which suggested to Ash that the ship had been in transit north from Dutch Guiana or one of the Dutch islands when the U-boat had caught up with her. The bodies, already bloated and swollen from their time in the water, rapidly began to give off the sweet, sticky odor that no man could avoid associating with death, so much so that within the hour, Ash called Samarango to the bridge.

  “We can’t have that for the next two days,” Ash said, indicating the smell. “Sew them up in canvas, weight them, and we’ll bury them at sea. I’ll read the service; off duty men to muster on the fantail for it”

  “With a single stitch through their noses to make sure that they’re dead?” Samarango questioned. The man wasn’t being facetious; he was reminding Ash of the traditions of the sea.

  “Personally,” Ash said, “I don’t see the need, but this is the bosun’s work, so I will leave it to you to do as you see fit”

  “Understood,” said Samarango.

  Two hours later, with the off duty men assembled on Chaser 3’s fantail around the depth-charge racks, Ash read the burial service, and in accordance with the traditions of the sea, the two men were committed to the deep.

  The remainder of the voyage proved uneventful. Two days later, Ash released his charges north of Tybee Island from whence they proceeded up the Savannah River toward whatever shore facility beckoned them. Then, bringing Chaser 3 back outside the bay, Ash set a course for Charleston where he intended to refuel and replenish while awaiting his next assignment. Two weeks later, near the end of May, and after moving a variety of coastal freighters up and down the sea lanes, Ash finally received orders to escort two British, one American, and one Norwegian freighter from the mouth of the Chesapeake into New York.

  “Have you informed Hamp yet?” Solly asked, showing Ash a sly smile.

  “No,” Ash said.

  “I will expend my best effort,” Solly ragged, “in attempting to moderate his euphoria.”

  “Yes,” Ash said, “and a timely warning to your sister, if you can reach the phone booth before Hamp, might also seem wise.”

  “I anticipate the moment,” Solly laughed.

  But the voyage, which should have finished without incident, did not. With the onset of dusk on the evening before they were to make New York, Ash suddenly received a flashing light signal from the British freighter on the inshore side of the formation, a frantic missive reporting that one of their seamen had just fallen overboard. Immediately, Ash put on turns, reversed course down the inshore flank of the convoy’s box, barely managed to locate the man who had at least remembered to flick on the tiny flash light clipped to his life jacket, and successfully recovered him. Then, as swiftly as Chaser 3 would respond, Ash once more reversed course and sped north to rejoin his little convoy which had continued its zig-zag at the reduced speed Ash had ordered.

  With the sun showing its last yellow traces to the west over Atlantic City, Ash had enough light to come up alongside the British ship, wait for them to rig a boom, lower a bosun’s chair, and hoist their dripping sailor back onto his own deck. But in the minutes that Ash was alongside, masked by the height of the freighter from the wide Atlantic to the east, things changed.

  During the moments in which Chaser 3 effected the transfer, save for voice commands from the freighter’s deck and Ash’s own responses shouted up from below, the seas remained silent. Then all hell broke loose. Ash and everyone else aboard Chaser 3 heard the thundering flat crack of a not too distant gun and the resounding impact of the round on what Ash knew to be the American freighter on the forward, outboard corner of the convoy. Confirmation followed instantly as Ash sighted debris flying into the water forward, well out beyond the bow of the British ship to which he had come alongside. By that time, Ash had already sounded General Quarters and, in a flash, determined upon a course of action, swinging instantly away from the freighter, reversing course, putting on maximum turns, and electing to round the stern of the freighter even as Teague and his gun crew manned the 3-inch.

  From the instant that Ash had heard that first round fired, he’d known that the convoy was being attacked by a U-boat on the surface. Why the German had surfaced for the attack, Ash could not understand. Ash reasoned that the U-boat commander could have remained submerged and fired off torpedoes at will. Perhaps the enemy boat had already expended its torpedo load, or the German was having trouble with his tubes or the compressed air system that sent the fish on their way? Ash didn’t know, didn’t care, and didn’t take time to think about it further. Instead, he did the only thing he could think to do–he attacked, hoping to give himself a slight edge by coming around the stern of the freighter which had been masking his presence so as to start his attack from a direction that the U-boat might not have anticipated.

  Calling on Chief Stobb for maximum turns and every extra ounce of speed, Ash swung his circle and brought Chaser 3 ripping out from behind the British freighter at an almost instantaneous 17 knots in the same moment that the German U-boat threw out a second round, this one blasting into the American ship’s stern with enough of an impact to throw steel and debris in all directions.

  The German’s shooting was less than spectacular. At first, Ash imagined that the rise and fall of the swells might be giving the Nazi gunners fits, but then realized that approaching from outboard t
o the east but aiming west, the German gun layers had the sun directly in their eyes. That’s when Ash decided that the U-boat had indeed expended its torpedoes or it would never have risked such a difficult and dangerous attack.

  As Chaser 3 rounded the freighter’s stern, Ash had his glasses up. It didn’t take him three seconds to spot the U-boat some 4,000 yards out, its gun still pointed toward the American freighter, its white-shirted crew even then rushing to load yet another of its 4-inch shells. “Fire!” he ordered. Teague slammed out the first round. A distant splash followed, indicating that it had landed not 30 yards beyond the U-boat’s bow, and over. Through his binoculars Ash could see that the German gun crew had dropped the round they were rushing to load. Clearly they’d been shaken.

  Teague’s gunners slammed out their second round within the space of a breath; with this one, Teague connected, the round striking the U-boat’s stern gun, its anti-aircraft emplacement, unseating and displacing the gun while throwing burning debris in all directions including up over the U-boat’s conning tower.

  Like frightened mice menaced by a stooping hawk and probably on their captain’s orders, the German gun crew, rather than contest the engagement, turned tail and ran. They disappeared instantly into submarine’s hull even as the U-boat’s skipper was already flooding her tanks and taking her down in an emergency dive, Teague’s third round splashing not 20 yards ahead of her and throwing up a geyser that once more showered her conning tower. The last thing that Ash saw of her before that conning tower disappeared beneath the waves was the giant coal-black seahorse painted on its side.

  While radio flashed out a coded message to alert COMDESLANT about the U-boat’s presence, Ash did his best to anticipate the escape route that the U-boat would attempt. Indeed, Gomez swiftly picked up a solid sonar contact which indicated that the sub had turned away from the convoy, her sonar track showing her to be making for the mid-Atlantic. Three minutes later, racing ahead at full speed, Ash dropped a depth charge pattern at a point he thought to be directly ahead of the U-boat; then, still in contact and after pulling a tight turn, he dropped a second pattern, both without results. Solly rushed to the bridge with a DESLANT message ordering Ash to break off whatever attack he was making and stick with his convoy, the convoy of four already having opened the distance between themselves and the suspected contact by as much as 5 miles.

  Frustrated and not a little exasperated, Ash broke off his attack and turned north. Minutes later, as two low-flying, sub-hunting Catalinas appeared overhead, calling for Ash to direct them to the supposed area in which the U-boat had headed, Ash knew why–the Catalinas would hold the U-boat down. While they did, the German would have no chance for stalking and catching up with the convoy, and if the Nazi did surface for any reason, the Catalinas, armed with depth charges, not to mention possible bombs, would make short work of him. But Ash did not believe that the U-boat would surface. In fact, unless the sub’s skipper had to charge his batteries, Ash didn’t believe he would again surface until he thought himself fully safe and well away from the area.

  Within the hour, running at maximum speed, Ash managed to rejoin the convoy. Miraculously, only one man on the American freighter had been injured, and no one had been killed, but the U-boat’s 4-inch gun had thoroughly wrecked the peak of her fo’c’sle, peeling back burned steel and twisting it into blackened and grotesque shapes as though it had been the skin of a rotten orange, and leaving the crown of the fantail in not much better shape, twisted stanchions and girders showing considerable blast damage where the round had impacted. Only later did Ash learn that the forward hold had been packed with a cargo of howitzer ammunition for the United States Army’s field artillery. They’d been lucky, Ash realized. Had the U-boat’s gunners thrown a round into that compartment, just forward of the freighter’s superstructure, the explosion might have been enough to sink or damage the entire convoy. The revelation left Ash shaking. He decided he would spare the remainder of the crew from this knowledge, although it did perhaps explain to him why he’d been ordered to disengage and return his attentions to the convoy.

  Throughout the night, Ash remained on the bridge, alone with his thoughts, Solly, Hamp, and Samarango, each in his turn, consulting with him only in the course of official business. Finally, around 0300, when Ash could feel his pulse quieten to a more normal pace, then–and only then–did he sling his hammock in the chart room and allow himself to sleep.

  14

  As before, Chaser 3 tied up, not inside the Navy yard but to the Coast Guard piers on Staten Island and this time in a nest of other chasers–newer ones which, only days before, had finished with the training course that had been established for their officers and crews at Pier 2 in Miami. Immediately and somewhat to their surprise, Ash, Solly, and Hamp found themselves surrounded by a virtual whirlwind of chaser captains and their junior officers, all of them fresh from the training school, all of them new to the job, none of them ever having been out before on genuine convoys save for their transit up from Miami. Their ships, Ash learned, had been built in boatyards up and down the Chesapeake from whence they had gone down to Florida for six weeks of shakedown training. What they wanted, the lot of them, was to feed off Chaser 3’s “vastly more experienced” officers, none of the newcomers realizing that Ash had only qualified Solly and Hamp as Officers of the Deck for Fleet Steaming mere days before their arrival in New York.

  It wasn’t that the new men distrusted their training; they didn’t. To hear them tell it, they had been worked half to death, each and every day, both in the classrooms at Pier 2 and out at sea aboard their chasers, starting with a lecture in front of a lifeboat that had been shot through with bullet holes and spattered everywhere with blood, their instructors pointing to it and declaring that the Nazis and the Japanese were nothing more than a pack of ruthless murderers and that it would be their job to put a stop to such monstrous behavior. No, Ash reasoned, it wasn’t the rigor and the effectiveness of their training that these men doubted; it was themselves. What they were looking for, all of them, in one way or another, was an edge, something that could or might give them a leg up on the Germans, something that might allow them to prevail and survive. When Ash realized as much, he knew that he couldn’t give them what they were seeking. Instead, patiently, Ash, Solly, and Hamp

  offered them what they had or thought they had: minimal combat experience, some knowledge gained in handling Chaser 3 during heavy weather, notes about keeping small convoys together in relatively disciplined formations, a few tips about navigating along the coast, and moderate notions about what did and did not work in handling his ship’s administration and managing the crew.

  “I’m afraid,” Ash said at the end of what had seemed a rushed hour, “that the little we know, we’ve learned on the job. You guys seem to be way ahead of where we started, and my best guess is that you will pick things up fast. The truth of the matter seems to be that the unexpected is always out there waiting, always ahead over the next wave, and if any one of you knows how to prepare for that, you’re already a better man than I am, but I won’t try to speak for Solly or Hamp in that regard. The best advice I can give is for you to remain alert, tend to business, and react when the need arises. And there are times, I think, when any decision at all is better than none.”

  Whether or not anything that the three “vastly more experienced” officers had told them would make a mole hill of difference in the futures of the men to whom he had been speaking, Ash couldn’t have imagined. He simply hoped that he hadn’t led one or another of them down a blind path.

  Later, after the various officers from the new chasers had returned to their ships and as Solly and Hamp prepared to go ashore, Polaski emerged from radio with a message he said that Ash needed to see.

  Ash took the message board and began reading. Ten minutes later, as Solly and Hamp were about to climb the ladder up to the main deck, Ash stopped them before they could start.

  “This is Friday,” he said. “Acco
rding to COMDESLANT, we don’t go out again until Monday morning. I don’t know what the two of you have planned, but why don’t you get back here by 2200 on Sunday night. Seems we’re in for a change. We’ll be leading out 19 ships on Monday morning, heading for Casco Bay, and the people we just talked to will be going with us. That means five chasers for the screen, and I seem to be stuck with being both the commodore and escort commander for this one. What that means in a nutshell is that I’m going to spend this weekend reading up on communications and screen patterns. I’ve got an idea about sector screening, where I will send these birds patrolling sectors around the convoy rather than forcing them to hold fixed positions relative to whatever ship we select as the convoy’s guide. That will reduce the need for pinpoint station keeping, reduce the strain on the watch keepers, and introduce a degree of random movement among the chasers which will create uncertainty for any U-boat that tries to make an attack. I’ll toy around with some diagrams, see if it seems feasible, and get the word to the others by Sunday evening. I’ll brief the two of you when you get back.”

  “You sure we can’t be of some help?” Solly asked.

  “No,” Ash said, “this is something I’ve got to work out for myself before we try it. And besides, if we keep Hamp from meeting Chana, we risk upsetting the entire order of the universe.”

  Hamp, who had experienced a moment of near apoplectic frustration while Ash explained his intentions, fearing that necessity might keep them aboard, brightened visibly.