Splinter on the Tide

by Phillip Parotti

  “That tug’s got a 3"/50,” Ash heard Teague say to one of the gun crew. “She’s a mite better armed than we are, so I wonder what we’re s’posed to do.”

  “It’s the depth charges,” Samarango told him. “That tug ain’t got any, so if she’s towin’, we’ll do the huntin’. That make sense?”

  “You got it,” Teague said.

  At 16 knots, it took them nearly seven hours to work out far enough to find the Meldon Empire, and when they did they discovered her down at the bow with a 15-degree list. The good news, as Ash perceived it, was that she didn’t appear to be on fire. The bad news came with the fact that she was leaking oil and would leave a trail that any U-boat in the area could follow all the way to New York.

  As Ash began to circle the freighter and the tug—holding a distance from them of about a thousand yards, lookouts alerted, his radar searching and sonar pinging—he watched through binoculars as the tug’s crew went swiftly to work, passing a messenger and finally their great towing hawser up through the freighter’s bullhead as they took her in tow. Then, finally, after some delay, at a speed of no more than 5 knots, they started for New York.

  “Solly,” Ash said, when the watch relieved. “How are we on fuel?”

  “I had Chief Stobb sound the tanks before I came up,” Solly said. “We’ve got about 60 percent. Should be more than enough to make Raritan Bay with a good 10 or 20 percent to spare.”

  “No leaks anywhere?”

  “No leaks,” Solly said, “and the engines are running smooth, both of them.”

  “That’s a comfort at least,” Ash said, “but the more fuel we use up, the more this rascal’s going to roll, and I’m not about to flood the tanks with salt water just to improve our stability. I hope the troops are ready for this; it’s liable to be the worst ride they’ve ever had.”

  It was the worst ride they’d ever had, ever. With a State 5 sea and 12-foot waves coming straight against them from the beam whenever they weren’t riding into it bow on or catching it from the stern, Chaser 3 began rolling nearly 35 degrees and sometimes 40, leaving the crew no alternative but to take to their bunks and strap themselves into them. On the bridge and on the gun mount which Ash knew he had to keep manned, the men lashed themselves to stanchions or rails and simply tried to hold on, and then, 50 miles from New York, while being tossed harder than poor Sancho Panza in his famous blanket, Gomez got a solid sonar contact 8,000 yards off the starboard beam, and Ash was forced to sound General Quarters and go over to the attack.

  Oddly, even with the waves as high as they were running and with spray flying back like sleet into their faces, the port lookout actually caught a glimpse of a periscope before it disappeared, but the sighting made no difference. Before Ash could even close to within 2,000 yards of the U-boat, the German had rapidly worked out a firing solution and launched a torpedo. To Ash’s consternation, the torpedo struck, blowing a massive hole in the Meldon Empire’s starboard side even as Ash signaled Hamp to begin rolling their first depth-charge pattern.

  Gomez managed to hold the sonar contact long enough for Ash to shoot off a mousetrap array and drop four entire depth-charge patterns on the German, each one of them causing the sea to boil and shaking the ship like a leaf. But with sonar contact finally lost and no visible results to suggest that Chaser 3 had either sunk the sub or damaged her in any way, the tug captain—senior officer for their attempted rescue—called Ash back to help pick up the crew of the Meldon Empire. By that time the freighter’s crew had also admitted defeat, their ship sinking out from under them with increasing speed, no matter how much effort they’d expended in trying to save her, and the fire that had ignited in the freighter’s mid-section had exploded completely out of control.

  Cursing the U-boat and his failure to sink her, Ash raced back to the Meldon Empire, nearly losing two of his own men on the way as the pounding waves swept up over the side and knocked them off their feet. Zwick managed to snatch a lifeline before he almost went over the side. Benson, loosed from the gun mount to which he had previously lashed himself, broke his wrist in the fall he took and was only saved from the sea by Teague, who had the presence of mind to reach out and grab the thick collar of the man’s life jacket before he was swept away.

  “Christ,” Ash said to himself, “what next?”

  What came next, for Ash, proved to be the short version of hell. By the time Chaser 3 returned to the freighter, those men who had not been killed when the torpedo exploded in the ship’s engine room had abandoned ship. Some of them were floating on rafts. Others wearing life jackets were riding up and down over the waves. Most of them were covered with oil, and many were injured, and the wind seemed to be blowing the choking smoke from the fire everywhere, making it hard to breathe and harder to see. The tug, already working ahead of Chaser 3, had started to pull the survivors aboard, but it was exceptionally hard going owing to the turbulent seas. Had the sea state been anything like it was in previous instances where Ash had recovered men who had gone overboard, he would have had an easy time of it, but with the seas running a good 13 feet and higher, Chaser 3 would move in to pick up a man only to find the man plunged into the trough, 12 feet below, as the ship towered above him. Then, before anyone could act to counter the motion, the chaser would plunge into the trough as the floating merchant sailor swiftly rode up the next wave until he seemed actually to be above them. Samarango and his men solved the problem as well as the sea allowed—throwing individuals lines with pre-tied bowlines and simply hauling them aboard—but not without buffeting them enough to knock the men nearly senseless by the time they were dragged on deck. For the men on the raft, he rigged a cargo net on the starboard side aft, so some of them could jump as the raft came up and the ship went down, and clinging to the side, those men eventually made the deck under their own power; injured men had to be secured with a bowline under their arms and dragged aboard. And all the time, as the Meldon Empire sank deeper and deeper into the blackening sea, Ash had to be alert to the moment when she would finally go down so that he would be able to break away and avoid the suction that she would produce.

  They took 45 minutes to haul the survivors aboard, and the Meldon Empire—like the good ship Ash imagined that she’d been—cooperated, only going under about ten minutes after Ash finally pulled away. All told, he had picked up 17 men, the fleet tug having rescued 16 more, the remainder, a number Ash put at ten, having been killed in the engine room when the torpedo exploded.

  The survivors, most of them in miserable shape, found refuge on the ship where they could, some on the mess decks, some in the forward crew’s compartment, a few stowed on the deck in the wardroom. Once Chaser 3 and the tug got underway and began to zig-zag toward Long Island, Hamp opened an operating room of sorts on the mess table in the after crew’s compartment and began tending to injuries as far as he was able, splinting three broken arms, one broken leg, and sewing up four gashes which, Solly later said, were good enough to find Hamp work as a tailor. About the men who had swallowed oil, Hamp could do nothing, their fellow survivors taking up their care as well as they could while Watts, even with the seas running high, lit off the range and managed to brew tea for all hands, the ship being British out of Liverpool and tea being the one thing that he could give them to try to brighten their spirits.

  “I guess,” Solly said to Ash when he came up to resume the watch, “that there are times when men can’t win for losing. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out what we’re doing wrong. We should have had that bastard, and still he got away from us. I never wanted to hate, Ash, but after seeing what those men in the compartment look like I’m really beginning to hate those kraut-eating shits.”

  “I’ve hated them since the time I saw them in Germany,” Ash said. “I never saw so many strutting, arrogant cocks anywhere. All I wanted to do was haul off and kick them in the balls, and for my money, this is the next best thing. I don’t know if we got that one or not, but if it shook some of that overweening pr
ide out of a few of them down there, scared them half to death, and damaged them enough to hold them down … well, that’s something. Given what we’ve got to work with, I don’t think we’re doing anything wrong. They’re just damned hard to sink, U-boats, so we’ll just have to go on doing the best we can with what we’ve got.”

  Later that day, 30 miles north from where Ash estimated that he had made his attack, a Catalina out of Cape Cod sighted a U-boat on the surface, reported it damaged in some way, and dropped a depth-charge pattern on it. According to the report, the crew had been sighted abandoning ship, and later, while the Catalina had reported seeing men in the water, the U-boat had been nowhere in evidence. COMDESLANT had then dispatched a DE out of Boston to hunt for survivors.

  “I’m guessing we got a piece of it,” Ash said when he received the news. “I don’t think we hit it with a mousetrap or we’d have heard or seen results. I’m guessing we damaged it with a depth charge and that it had to come up. I’d say that the position that the Catalina reported is too close to where we were for that not to have been the boat we attacked. I could be wrong, of course, but since Dönitz withdrew most of his boats to the mid-Atlantic, there aren’t all that many along the coast anymore, so I think this one was ours, and good riddance. Pass the word around; tell the crew that I think we damaged one and that owing to their efforts the Catalina finally sent her down. That’ll make the crew happy and give the Meldon Empire people a lift.”

  Half an hour later, Chief Stobb came to the bridge to see Ash.

  “We’re takin’ some water in the lazarette, Cap’n,” Stobb said, shifting a chaw of chewing tobacco from one side of his mouth to the other, something that Ash had never before seen him do and which Ash found slightly amusing in the midst of the turmoil that followed their engagement.

  “How much?” Ash asked.

  “Pumps can handle it, no trouble,” Stobb said, “but them depth charges, them last ones, must have popped a seam or two. We’d best have it seen to, Cap’n. It ain’t somethin’ that we can do ourselves.”

  “All right,” Ash said. “I’ll get off a message.”

  Five hours later, as they entered Raritan Bay, the engineering staff at COMDESLANT had already sent them a message directing them to make the Brooklyn Navy Yard and tie up alongside one of the piers. With all lines over and doubled up by 2230 that night, Ash found himself slightly astonished to see three yardbirds come aboard with their carpenter’s tools and go straight to work in the lazarette, the noise they made keeping the crew in the after berthing compartment awake until 0300 in the morning when the workmen disappeared, and at 0500 sharp, Polaski woke Ash with yet another message directing him to get underway in order to convoy two empty tankers south.

  “Shit,” Hamp said, rolling out and getting into his blues. “I thought we’d get at least one night in port. Keren will be faint with lament, and Chana will be like to throw herself from the top of the Empire State building.”

  “Hmm, possibly a small loss,” Solly said.

  “I think I’d neglect to mention that we were in,” Ash laughed. “The mere thought that you two Lotharios have been within arm’s reach, or at least within a taxi’s reach, will ruin the both of those girls for a week.”

  24

  So they moved south, escorting ships from New York to Cape May, from Cape May to Charleston, from Charleston to Jacksonville, from Jacksonville to Key West, and from Key West to New Orleans and Galveston, and without once putting in for a good night’s liberty, the war continued. Gradually, January gave way to February, Ash, Solly, and Hamp surviving on the letters they received—the only things that could break the tedium of their transits—but even with Claire writing to Ash every day, the mail so often failed to catch up with them that Hamp declared himself on the point of despair.

  “Patience,” Solly said. “Once Chana drops that Marine sergeant she’s probably been leading around and plundering, I’m sure she will write—if, that is, anyone has taught her to hold a pen by this time.”

  “I’m going to tell her that you said that,” Hamp said.

  “What you’ll want to ask,” Ash said, “is how her cooking course is coming along.”

  Solly broke out laughing. “Chana does not expect to cook, Ash. She expects to hire a cook, not to mention a lady’s maid, with the vast sums that her husband will be expected to lavish on her. If Master Hampton here knows what’s good for him, he will apply for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, which is about the only thing that will ever satisfy my sister, unless, of course, he takes what he’s learned about stitching up wounds and sets up as an expensive plastic surgeon after the war.”

  “Are you suggesting,” Ash said, “that Chana will not commit to village life in Kansas or, perhaps, northern Michigan?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Solly said. “Chana thinks the west coast is located on the outskirts of Newark. If anyone ever tries to move her 3 miles from Bloomingdale’s, he’ll have a fight on his hands.”

  “You two should go on stage,” Hamp said. “If either of you had listened to Chana for five minutes you would have known that she is talking about ‘the suburbs.’”

  “Oh,” Solly said, “you mean The Hamptons or, perhaps, Westchester, with a summer cottage in Newport.”

  “Exactly,” Hamp laughed. “Chana is a girl who thinks ahead.”

  “Yes,” Solly said, “and bringing home the bacon, as far as Chana is concerned, means driving home a Brinks armored truck filled with plenty of loot. Just remember, Hamp, as a good friend, I’ve tried to give you fair warning.”

  “And the ‘person of interest,’” Hamp rejoined, “what dream has she?”

  “Quiet apartment, tree-lined street, three children, greeting me at the door with pipe, slippers, and a good bourbon the minute I return from my labors,” Solly said. “Practical girl, Keren. Intends to wait on me hand and foot.”

  “I’m going to remember all of this,” Ash said. “It ought to make for peals of laughter about ten years from now.”

  Suddenly, Polaski appeared, leaping down the ladder into the wardroom. “Sorry, Sirs,” he said with a smile. “Nothin’ in the mail for youse officers when the tender handed the bag over to us, but they give me a Houston paper, if youse wants to see it.”

  “We do,” Ash said, reaching for the paper which Polaski thrust toward him. “Want it back after we finish?”

  “Yes, Sir,” Polaski said, “so’s the crew can see it.”

  “Right,” Ash said, “we’ll get it back to you.”

  “So,” Solly said as soon as Ash began to read, “what’s the scoop?”

  “Stalingrad,” Ash said, brightening. “The German Sixth Army has surrendered. The Ruskies are claiming to have bagged upwards of 250,000 prisoners!”

  “Ha,” Hamp laughed. “That ought to give the krauts a lift. I’ll bet Hitler’s wetting himself.”

  “Looks like we’ve got Rommel bottled up as well,” Ash said, his smile spreading. “Patton’s pounding him from the west while Monty’s chopping him up from the south. That ought to about bag the whole of the Africa Corps. We’ll probably have to go on rationing in order to feed the POWs.”

  “Can’t happen too soon,” Hamp said.

  “Anything else of note?” Solly asked.

  “Says here that Jimmy Durante’s insured the old schnozzola for $50,000,” Ash laughed.

  “Earthshaking,” Hamp said. “I’ll speak to Chana; she should insure her lips for a million.”

  “Go right ahead,” Solly said. “Ash and I intend to insure the contents of your wallet for a bundle. That ought to make us instant millionaires ourselves, about five minutes after Chana next gets hold of you.”

  “Chana’s ‘requests’ have never been more than modest,” Hamp said. “How you could have lived in the same house with your sister for two decades and not know that is one of the mysteries of all times.”

  Ignoring Hamp, Solly said, “What’s next, Ash. After Tunisia, what do you suppose our plan is?
Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, Southern France? Stalin will be pounding the table for a second front the minute that Rommel is wrapped up.”

  “Honestly, I have no idea,” Ash said, handing the paper over to Solly. “Italy is close; Sicily is closer, but only our masters know. The question I have is what’s next for us? Personally, I’d like to get back to Yarmouth about as fast as this thing can go.”

  What came next turned out to be a 30-ship convoy gathering in the Gulf before heading for Panama and the canal with a probable final destination in Australia. In order to make the transit, Chaser 3 joined an escort of eight other ships, a destroyer carrying the squadron commander, three DEs, a PC, and three subchasers. To Ash’s satisfaction, Chaser 3 was assigned to ride herd on the formation as tail-end Charlie, and throwing in the time required for the convoy to collect—some coming from the east while others made their exit from the Houston ship channel—the trip took eight days, the convoy proceeding at a steady speed of 10 knots while zig-zagging. Twice, Ash had to run up inside the convoy to refuel and replenish the ship’s water from an oiler, but otherwise the trip proved uneventful, save for one merchant sailor who fell overboard from a collier and who Ash managed to find and retrieve wet but unharmed after only 15 minutes in the water.

  In the meantime, the temperature rose steadily until everyone, soaked through with sweat and forced to bathe with salt water, gave second thoughts to the virtues of the mid-Atlantic winter and couldn’t help wishing for some more of it. And to Ash’s amusement, one other event went down in his memory as a matter of note. On one particular morning not far west of Cuba, the convoy had passed through an enormous school of flying fish. As they did so, one or another of the fish began landing on deck, unable to make the sea on the far side. Watts and the mess cook suddenly appeared, buckets in hand, and began racing back and forth, snatching up the flopping fish with a speed which Ash, particularly in Watts’ case, had previously thought unimaginable.