By the time Hamp relieved the watch at midnight, Ash felt certain that all of his watch standers had mastered the intricacies of the sector patrolling. Content with the fact that he had once more brought Samarango up to speed, Ash left Hamp on watch and descended to the wardroom only to find the lights still on and Solly still awake.
“I’ve roughed out an after-action report,” Solly said, as Ash came down. “All you need to do is make whatever corrections or additions you think necessary. Otherwise, it should be ready. I think you ought to include the spare copy of that operations plan you handed around. If you ask me, sightin’ that sub and making the attack proves your tactics.”
Ash sat down and read the report. “This is good work, Solly. Thanks,” Ash said.
“My contribution’s clerical,” Solly said, looking at Ash with a straight face. “The good work is all yours, Boss. I’d think DESLANT owes you a pat on the back.”
“The irregularity of what I’ve tried could just as easily get me relieved and bring down a court martial,” Ash said. “A week or two from now, you may find that you’ve suddenly been elevated to command.”
“I think they’ll show better sense,” Solly said. “I’m banking on the idea that they’ll appreciate initiative.”
“Possibly,” Ash said, “possibly not. The Navy likes to follow the rules, and the rules seem to involve time-honored bent-line screens. On the other hand, an escort of five subchasers with a lieutenant, junior grade as its commodore seems like a whole new thing, so if I escape the rocket for this sector business, that might be the only explanation.”
“Well,” Solly said, “I’ll keep the faith and hope for something better. I think you deserve it, but I won’t belabor the point. I’ve got to get some sleep. I go on watch in another three hours.”
“Right,” Ash said, “I’m going to try to catch a few zzzzzs myself.”
Not long before dusk the following day, Ash saw his charges steam through the minefields into Casco Bay, released the other four chasers to proceed independently, and finally entered himself as the net tenders worked to close the channel behind him. Chaser 3 then anchored without going into Portland, took on fuel and water from a tender, and went straight back out the following morning, leading two Norwegian merchantmen and a seagoing Dutch tug towing barges, all three bound for New York. Once arrived, Chaser 3 replenished from yet another tender in Raritan Bay and turned straight around, once more bound for Casco Bay as independent escort for two coastal freighters carrying stores to the Portland Navy facilities and an ammunition ship, loaded to the gills, bound for the massive convoy forming in the bay and ultimately headed for Halifax. Moving through waters that again seemed blessed with early summer tranquility, the voyage proved uneventful. Once into Casco Bay and anchored while replenishing, Ash received notice by flashing light that he was required to appear at COMDESLANT Headquarters and that he could expect a boat within 15 minutes.
Ash had heard of an entertainment called “a uniform race” which upperclassmen often used when running Plebes at Annapolis. The trick seemed to involve sending a Plebe racing down one of Bancroft Hall’s long passageways to his room where, in mere minutes, he had to change from service dress blue into service dress white and return to whatever upperclassman happened to be hazing him, before being sent once more to shift from the new uniform into some other combination of official naval dress. Aside from the apparent humor it afforded to the upperclassmen, the objective seemed to relate to how much the Plebe’s weight could be reduced, in a matter of minutes, by pure sweat. Failure to enter into the spirit of the exercise could result in worse punishment–multitudes of pushups or even extended periods of adopting a sitting position, without a chair for support, while holding out a rifle at arm’s length.
“Christ!” Ash exclaimed to a much-amused Hamp who lolled in his bunk while Ash raced to change from dirty, working khakis into fresh service dress. “If this is what those Canoe U. Plebes have to put up with, screw it! I feel suddenly fortunate to have escaped their ordeal.”
“It appears to me,” Hamp said, “that there is much to be said for being a reservist. Don’t forget your shoulder boards.”
Ash didn’t, and as he stepped up onto the main deck, he did so just in time to find the boat’s bow hook making up to Chaser 3’s sea painter so that Ash could board it.
“I would guess,” Ash said, as he turned over temporary command to Solly and prepared to leap over into the DESLANT boat, “that the rocket is just about to burst”
“If you are incarcerated,” Solly said, “Hamp and I will muster a boarding party and come to the rescue.”
“Laugh it up,” Ash said, saluting as he left the ship, “I may need substantial relief before the cock crows.”
Inside the COMDESLANT Headquarters building, a yeoman checked Ash’s I.D. Card and name against a typed list and then looked up.
“Commander Gibbons, Sir, Room 229, second deck. He’s an assistant to the chief of staff for operations. You’re down for an appointment at 2200 hours”
Ash took a look around. Uniformed people seemed to be coming and going everywhere.
“You set a watch at night in this place?” Ash questioned, “Or is something special on?”
The yeoman laughed. “Three watch sections, Sir,” he said. “We run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and to hear our masters tell it, every minute is special.”
Ash found his way to Room 229, where a WAVE petty officer directed him to a chair across from her desk.
“He’s got someone with him,” she said, all business. “He’ll be with you in a minute”
Ash waited. Fifteen minutes later, a lieutenant commander, looking red in the face and running with perspiration, emerged from the inner office, threw the WAVE a disgruntled look, and made straight for the outer door. That the man had received a rocket, Ash had no doubt.
“You can go in now, Sir,” she said to Ash. “Knock once and go straight through the door”
Ash did as he was told, braced up inside, announced himself, and looked straight ahead.
“Take a seat” said the man behind the desk.
Without relaxing fully, Ash sat down in the straight-backed wooden chair, and looked up at the man behind the desk. Commander Gibbons didn’t strike Ash as being the sort of gray-headed retread that Ash had come to expect among the staff officers to whom he had been introduced. Instead, it seemed instantly apparent to Ash that he was sitting in the presence of a comer–a sharp, relatively young commander who was on the rise and destined for better things. In place of salt and pepper hair, Gibbons sported a mop of dark brown hair, thick and curly over a pair of dark brown eyes with nothing close to crow’s feet at the corners, and to Ash’s surprise, he seemed to be showing Ash a hint of a smile across exceptionally straight teeth.
“I’ve read the after-action report you submitted regarding your next-to-last escort duty,” the commander began. “You’ve obviously done something irregular, Mr. Miller. If this scheme you tried had failed and you’d had some ships sunk on the way up here, I think you’d have wound up in a peck of trouble. What made you do it?”
Ash hesitated. It wasn’t quite the question he’d anticipated.
“As far as I know, Sir,” Ash said, speaking tentatively, “our bent-line screens don’t seem to be all that highly effective in the mid-Atlantic. Most of the work I’ve done so far has been as an independent escort, or at the most, with a two- or three-ship escort, and I have never yet been appointed leader of one of those. All of a sudden, I found myself designated to lead four other subchasers up here with the largest convoy I’ve ever gone out with, and I wanted to give us the best edge that I could devise, with perhaps some offensive capability added to the mix.”
“Are you aware that the Navy has already been studying something along the lines of what you tried? Sector patrols of various types?”
“No, Sir,” Ash said.
“You just thought this up on your own? And put it into practice on your own r
esponsibility?”
Suddenly, Ash realized that he’d started to sweat. It wasn’t that the office was hot; in fact, the place felt air conditioned. It was that Commander Gibbons’ eyes were boring into him like a pair of high-speed drills.
“I knew that I was taking a risk, Sir, without consulting any higher authority, but at the time, it seemed our best chance for bringing all the ships through. I take full responsibility.”
“All right, Mr. Miller, you can rest easy. For what my opinion is worth, I think you developed an intelligent plan and carried it out well. The Navy appreciates innovations that work, so your report with the admiral’s comments appended has already been forward to the Navy Department in D.C., and the admiral is putting a letter of commendation in your file. Don’t expect to be promoted to senior rank next week, but do accept our congratulations for a job well done. I don’t know that you will hear from the Navy Department, but you might. In the meantime, carry on with the work that you are doing, and we wish you every success. Now, ever seen the plot?”
Ash didn’t know what the man was talking about.
“No, Sir” Ash said.
Commander Gibbons stood up, extended his hand toward Ash who had risen with him, shook it, and said, “Tell Reese out there to take you down to the basement so you can have a look at the plot. Shows every ship we have at sea, shows where the convoys are, what escorts are with them, and where we’ve sighted U-boats. I think you’ll find it interesting, if not instructive.”
Petty Officer Reese took Ash to the basement, and there, Ash experienced a revelation. The plot turned out to be a massive map of the Atlantic. Colored counters–counters pushed around the horizontal board by sailors and WAVEs armed with long sticks not unlike pool cues–showed the location of every ship in the Atlantic, Navy and merchant alike, with specially colored counters to show where U-boats had been sighted or made a recent attack.
“What you see in this room, stays in this room,” Reece said, with a knowing eye. “This is all top secret, so you may not talk about it when you leave here. The officers on the ledge above us are the routers; they assign escorts and send out orders which reroute the convoys at sea to avoid any U-boats that have been sighted. The Nazis are starting to collect U-boats into squadrons or packs and stretching them across wide distances, so it is getting harder to pass convoys through them without being detected. For what it’s worth, this is something like a nerve center or central brain for fighting the naval war. I’ve been told, although I have no way of knowing, that the Brits have laid out something similar, both for the Royal Navy and for the R.A.F. There is a similar set-up down in New York, at the headquarters of the Eastern Sea Frontier. Seen enough?”
“Thank you,” Ash said, following the WAVE back out.
Back aboard Chaser 3, Solly and Hamp were all ears.
“I’m afraid that you’re stuck with me,” Ash said. “I’m not to be shot at dawn after all”
“What, not promoted to admiral?” Hamp quipped.
“’Fraid not,” Ash said.
“But it did go better than you’d expected?” Solly said.
“Really,” Ash said, “they were very good about it. Seems we stumbled onto something the Navy is already looking into. DESLANT forwarded our after-action report to Washington, as a sort of commentary or confirmation of what they’ve already been studying.”
“All’s well that ends well,” Hamp said.
“Yes,” Ash said.
“Yes, but… ” Solly chimed.
“We have orders?” Ash said.
“Right you are,” Solly continued.“They want us through the minefields by 0700. We’re picking up two empty tankers, two freighters, and a cable carrier, all of them coming down from Halifax, all of them bound for Boston”
“Are we the only escort?”
“We’re the only escort,” Solly said.
“You have to wonder,” Hamp said. “Where are all of the rest of these chasers that they’re supposed to be building? And what about the slightly larger PCs, and the destroyer escorts that are supposed to be coming off the ways?”
“I think we’ll begin seeing a lot more chasers by the end of the summer,” Ash said. “The PCs will probably begin showing up in the fall, but the DEs are going to take longer. Steel construction, even with the yards working full tilt, still can’t be done in a day”
The following afternoon, 40 miles south of Casco Bay, Ash sighted thick black smoke on the horizon and knew at once that a ship had been torpedoed there. Putting on turns and redirecting the little convoy he was escorting closer to the beach so as to lessen the chance for an attack from inshore, Ash made for the conflagration by pushing his herd all the way up to an unheard of speed of 14 knots.
The sea when Ash arrived was virtually on fire. Whatever tanker had been sunk–a small coastal oiler he later discovered–had been carrying crude oil north toward the mouth of the St. Lawrence, the ship steaming independently, the owners apparently thinking that they could snatch a profit by sending out something so small that a U-boat would ignore her. They were wrong, and the five or six men that Ash found dead and horrifically burned in the water, skeletal almost with their skin eaten away by the fire, showed the owners’ mistake. Three men who had somehow been able to swim away before the fire could consume them were nevertheless covered with oil, black from head to foot, and one of them badly burned. The other two, having swallowed not a little of the oil, were choking to the point of already coughing up blood, and Ash didn’t imagine that they would live; indeed, one of the men died before they reached Boston while the burned man had passed into delirium. The men already dead and burned beyond recognition, Ash left in the water, refusing to risk the ship by going into floating oil that might reignite at any minute. The sea, he reasoned, would either float them ashore where qualified morticians could be called, or swallow them, along with the sickening scent they were emitting, into the last refuge of a seaman’s grave.
Four hours later, with two dead men on the fantail and another barely alive, Chaser 3 tied up alongside a pier at the Boston Navy Yard, offloaded her passengers into waiting ambulances, and settled down so as to begin refueling and taking on water beneath a flood of pier lights.
“What an awful way to die,” Hill, the yeoman, said to Ash, as he handed him the typed report of their pick up for Ash to sign.
“Yes,” Ash said, “awful.”
“But if you stop to think about it,” Hill said, “I don’t suppose there is a good way.”
“No,” Ash said, looking out across the black waters of the bay, “I don’t suppose there is.”
16
May and then June offered Chaser 3 no break from the unrelenting pace of operations as she ran escort duties to and from Casco Bay, Boston, New York, and Cape May. As a rule, Ash considered himself lucky if he managed to tie up alongside the Coast Guard piers at Staten Island or to one of the piers in the Boston Navy Yard by 2100 on a summer night. Fuel, water, and stores would then be hastily taken aboard so that the crew could snatch a few hours’ sleep before rising, usually by 0400 in order to make the last sea buoy and be back out in the Atlantic herding yet another collection of merchantmen toward a gathering convoy in transit to a more distant war. Twice during that time, once on a May morning and later during a sweltering June afternoon, the lookouts had spotted wreckage, debris, and, in the June sighting, a single dead seaman floating over the swells. The May incident had taken place about 12 miles south of Fire Island, almost within shouting distance of New York; the dead seaman, his hand still gripping the tiller of an empty lifeboat, they retrieved from the waters east of Cape Cod. In so far as Hamp could determine after examining the man where Samarango had laid him out on the fantail, the seaman had died from loss of blood, the result of a shell splinter that had pierced his right side just beneath his rib cage. Because they were putting into Boston that night, Ash kept the body on board and turned it over to a Navy mortuary detail the minute the ship tied up to her berth.
&nbs
p; June finally gave way to the steaming humidity of July, and on the morning of July 2, 1942, Chaser 3, in company with a fleet tug, a Coast Guard cutter of considerable size, and two oceangoing minesweepers, emerged from the mine belts protecting Casco Bay and led out a convoy of 22 merchantmen, all of them bound for Raritan Bay and the sheltering piers beneath the shadowing towers of Manhattan. During the day, steaming at 10 knots, the convoy had made steady progress, Solly following Hamp for the afternoon watch,
Samarango following Solly to stand the first dog, Hamp coming on again for the second, with Samarango taking the evening watch until Solly once more relieved to stand the mid. Throughout that time, Chaser 3–taking her orders from the captain of the Coast Guard cutter who was, in this instance, the senior man afloat–had remained on the flank of the bent-line screen, guarding the port side of the convoy. Watts, having taken on a generous quantity of fresh ground beef that morning, served the crew large portions of his famous meatloaf for supper that evening. Later, Ash, having consumed every ounce of his own share and having every confidence in his watch standers, for once took himself to his bunk, read a few chapters of Trollope, and turned in, sleeping soundly and without a care in the world until he was almost thrown from his bunk by a not-too-distant explosion and a wave of concussion that caused Chaser 3’s every plank to vibrate like a harp string right down to the keel. Leaping into his sea boots, Ash dashed up onto the bridge. Solly had already sounded the alarm for General Quarters, the crew were exploding from their bunks, and Gomez shouted up from sonar that he had a firm contact, two points abaft the port beam, range 1,600 yards.
Splinter on the Tide Page 17