Splinter on the Tide

by Phillip Parotti

  “When they’re done down there,” Ash said to his messenger, pointing to Watts and the mess cook, “I want to see Watts up here quick march.”

  “Had a good time fishing?” Ash asked, when Watts finally climbed to the bridge.

  “Yas, Sir,” Watts said, beaming from ear to ear.

  “So,” Ash said, “what’s it all about?”

  “Gilly-Gilly, Cap’n. Dem boys gonna love it!”

  “And what,” Ash asked, “is Gilly-Gilly?”

  “Fish stew, Cap’n. Learn it from a Philippine, cookin’ school, ’fore the war. Him say them flyin’ fish best ever for it.”

  “And you’re sure you won’t poison the crew?” Ash said with a laugh.

  “Them’s fresh as dey get, Cap’n. We’s goin’ to have us a feast!”

  The Gilly-Gilly turned out to be a treat, enough so that Ash told Watts to keep his buckets handy forever after, just in case they ever ran into flying fish again. The crew, served with a double portion, didn’t hesitate to extend kudos to their cook, who already stood in high regard with them for what he’d been able to do with the ubiquitous canned salmon that came to them in cases as a part of nearly every replenishment.

  In Panama, in the Bahia de Limon, Chaser 3 watched with interest as the destroyer, the DEs, the PC, and one of the chasers disappeared into the canal, followed one after the other by the merchant vessels in the convoy. Then, they made for Colon, tied up to the piers in Cristobal, and enjoyed a two-day respite, one section of the crew going over on liberty for each night they were in port. Solly and Hamp went ashore, but Ash didn’t. Instead, bone tired from the watches he’d kept, Ash slept, the heat making his sleep restless and less than comfortable, his exhaustion nevertheless making it necessary.

  After one such nap and after writing to Claire, Ash happened to look in the mirror, and for once, what he saw looking back at him surprised him. Only the year before, Ash had thought of himself as young. Aboard the Parker, as the ship’s “George,” the most junior officer aboard, he had been treated as a mere youth, even by officers a year or two younger than himself. Now, as Ash studied his face—the dark circles under his eyes, the crow’s feet starting to form at their corners, the harder features that seemed to stare back at him—he began to perceive the toll that the war was taking on him. After their first few times out the year before, exhausted as he had been by remaining constantly on the bridge, he’d slept and sprung back like the youth he had been. Now, the spring-back was taking longer, the exhaustion never quite releasing him, the desire for sleep, and rest, and tranquility put off, delayed, held back by the incessant and even increasing pace of operations. The rigors of command, Ash knew, increased the toll. Solly and Hamp, free from ultimate responsibility, did not carry his load. Their jobs, no matter how important to the ship and the crew, did not carry the constant stress with which Ash had to live, and there was no one, no one, who could lift his load. Other naval captains—of destroyers, cruisers, carriers, and fleets—must have felt the same thing, and Ash could only wonder about the greater stress all of them must have been under in conjunction with their much larger commands. But that didn’t change matters for Ash. He had the ball, and that meant that he had to run with it, night and day, for as long and as far as his responsibilities took him. Probably, he imagined, Solly would be ordered to relieve him at some time during the summer. When he thought about it, Ash knew that he would be ready, that he would need something, some form of rest that would go well beyond the two nights that the Navy only occasionally gave him.

  Chaser 3 went out again the following morning. As usual the crew moved a trifle slowly, their hangovers hammering them, their fisherman’s lies about the times they’d had and the girls they squired around mounting steadily as the morning wore on. Cornfeld had brought back a rooster, suggesting that it would make a suitable mascot for the ship, but after Samarango informed him that roosters were French talismans and after he’d had to clean up the rooster’s droppings, the rooster, expensive or not, went straight into Watts’ stew pot, gifting the crew, if not with perpetual good luck, at least with a bowl of excellent chicken soup. As they ate, Watts and Cornfeld extolled its medicinal benefits as a VD preventative and cure for other assorted ailments.

  “My mother once called it her Jewish cure-all,” Solly laughed. “I don’t know what it is about chicken soup, Ash, but we got a regular dose the whole time we were growing up, both Chana and I, and we almost never came down with colds or flu.”

  “Mothers know a thing or two,” Ash said.

  The convoy they picked up for escort back to Galveston turned out to be nothing like any convoy they had escorted before, much of it returning from the Solomons with battle damage that exceeded anything Ash and the crew of Chaser 3 had ever seen. Central to the convoy was a light cruiser with its bow blown off, a makeshift arrangement of welded together steel plates permitting it to make 12 knots but no more, the cruiser’s best speed dictating the speed of the convoy. Three destroyers—two of them missing their after gun mounts entirely, one with its forward 5"/38 gun mount tilted at an angle, all three of them blackened with battle damage and shell holes—flanked the cruiser, and falling in behind, several Navy cargo vessels slumped along showing blackened superstructures, the obvious effects of bomb damage. In so far as they were able, the injured destroyers fleshed out the screen to which the southern command had added three additional subchasers, two fleet tugs, in case they were needed, and a battle-scarred PC that had also apparently come under attack somewhere in the islands. Taken as a whole, the formation did not present an encouraging picture of the fighting that had been taking place around Guadalcanal, and Ash could only wonder about other ships that had not made it back. The cruiser, he imagined, would be in dry dock for months, the destroyers for less time, perhaps, and about the cargo vessels, he could not estimate; ships their size surpassed his understanding based upon any previous experience.

  The trip to Galveston took them ten days, February already slipping toward March by the time they finally made port, but as before, Chaser 3 did not go in. Instead, after yet another underway replenishment and after dropping off four undamaged freighters into Galveston Bay, she continued with the damaged combatants toward Key West. There, finally, she was relieved of them, turning them over to an entire squadron of six DEs that had come down from Charleston to screen them up the coast.

  COMDESLANT gave them two welcome days off in Key West. So, with the crew once more granted port and starboard liberty, Ash, Solly, and Hamp went over on the beach and made straight for the telephone exchange to place calls to Claire, Keren, and Chana. With the long distance lines crammed to the limit, Ash had to wait more than half an hour before he could get his call through to Claire, but when the operator finally told him that his party was on the line, Ash thrilled to the moment, his annoyance with the wait clearing away like a mist dispelled.

  “How are you, love?” he asked.

  “You sound tired,” Claire said. “Where are you?”

  “Key West. We just got in. We’ll be here a couple of days I think.”

  Hearing Claire’s voice served him like a tonic, perked up his energy, and gave him a momentary release from the things that had been plaguing him. Ash couldn’t be sure, but he sensed that he’d had something of the same effect on his wife, judging from what he thought was an audible uplift in her voice. Given the charges that the call cost, Ash and Claire only talked for ten minutes, and when he finally replaced the receiver and walked back outside the exchange, he found Hamp and Solly waiting for him, broad smiles on their faces.

  “The two of you look as contented as if you had been chewing your cuds,” Ash said.

  “And you don’t?” Hamp said. “Personally, I feel like a whole new man. Chana sent me endearments. The two of you should have been so lucky.”

  “We were,” Solly said. “I haven’t seen the boss so pleased since he last sunk a sub.”

  “I know I can’t speak for the two of you,” Ash said,
“but I’m up for a couple of drinks, a good steak, and a walk. Anyone care to join me?”

  “Let’s do it,” Hamp said. “In the absence of Chana’s cooking, we’ll have to settle for second best.”

  Solly broke out laughing, and the three proceeded to the club.

  After drinks and a meal, moving at a leisurely pace beneath a moonlit sky, the three walked out into Key West, not saying much, avoiding the bars and confining themselves to residential streets where the light remained sufficient for walking but where the quiet and the absence of traffic suited their mood. In the midst of the walk, regaining their land legs as their muscles relaxed, on the corner of Whitehead and Olivia, Solly suddenly stopped dead and gawked.

  “I know this place,” he said. “I’ve seen it in a photograph. That’s Hemingway’s place.”

  “Hemingway? Ernest Hemingway?” Hamp said, turning to look.

  “Yeah,” Solly said. “That’s it, sure as hell. No mistake about it. Distinctive house.”

  “I thought he was living in Cuba,” Hamp said.

  “I think he is,” Solly said, “but this is where he lived in Key West. Whether he still owns the place or not, I have no idea.”

  “Read him, have you?” Ash asked.

  “A couple,” Solly said. “The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms. You?”

  “Those two,” Ash said, “plus Green Hills of Africa. I liked the first two better. He’s got a new one out, For Whom the Bell Tolls, about the Spanish Civil War. It’s supposed to be long, but I haven’t seen a copy.”

  “Gary Cooper was in the movie of it,” Hamp said. “Cooper and Hemingway are supposed to be friends, but that didn’t make much difference when Cooper filmed A Farewell to Arms. I thought it was kind of a dud as a movie.”

  “Same here,” Solly said. “I’m afraid I skipped it,” Ash said. “But the book was first rate.”

  “Read any Faulkner?” Solly asked.

  “I hear he’s hard going,” Hamp said.

  “But worth the effort,” Ash added. “Try The Sound and the Fury.”

  “What about F. Scott Fitzgerald?” Solly asked.

  “Who’s he?” Hamp said.

  They were back at the ship by 2230 that evening, undressed, in bed, and sound asleep. When Gomez, standing the quarterdeck watch, woke Ash not long after midnight and told him that the shore patrol wanted him, Ash got into his clothes and arrived on deck just in time to see two paddy wagons unloading an even dozen of his crew.

  “Fight uptown,” the chief petty officer in charge of the paddy wagons told Ash. “Your boys seem to have settled in at a place called The Green Moon when a pack of boots from one of them new DEs descended on ’em and told ’em to move over for some real sailors, and that touched it off. Your people gave as good as they got and some better, but the manager called for us, so we picked up the whole bunch, the DE’s people as well as yours, both bunches tellin’ us they was just havin’ fun when we arrived.”

  “Any damage?” Ash asked.

  “Seems they were smart enough, or drunk enough, or sober enough to go out in the street, so no damage ’cept to themselves, but the Key West police is pissed off and don’t want no more of it.”

  “We’ll be going out in the morning,” Ash said, “so the police can rest easy, and as long as there are no charges, I’ll come up with something to discipline the crew.”

  “Puttin’ ’em to bed without their suppers would about cover it,” laughed the chief. “Makin’ ’em replace their uniforms at their own expense would be better yet.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” Ash said. “Thanks for getting them back, Chief. What next, I wonder?”

  Caracas turned out to be next, by way of San Juan, Chaser 3 going out early, joining a swift-moving convoy ultimately headed for North Africa before detaching two tankers, both of them riding high, which Ash herded south for their refill. The liberty section from the previous night, many of them bruised and scabbed from their fight, swaggered a little over what they announced as their trouncing of the DE’s crew and took the light punishment that Ash dispensed with considerable pride.

  25

  Two days after leaving Key West, official correspondence picked up in Jacksonville informed Ash that Samarango had been promoted to Chief Boatswain’s Mate while Teague, Glick, Hill, and Bell had also passed their rating exams and been advanced one rank. Not long after, as the ship headed for Charleston amid a swelling March sea, Samarango spoke to Ash on the bridge after he had relieved Solly from his watch.

  “Captain,” Samarango said, as the two men scanned the horizon with their binoculars, “if you’re still willing to recommend me for Officer’s Candidate School, I’m willing to try. I’ve held off’cause I wanted to make Chief first. Might seem a little short sighted to some, but making Chief Petty Officer was a goal I set for myself when I first joined up. Now that I can sew on my crow and if you still think it’s a good move, I’m ready to try for a commission.”

  “Good,” Ash said. “I’ve already written your recommendation. All I have to do is send it in, and I think we’ll hear something within a month, or two at the most. Once we hear back, I’d imagine that you’ll get a set of orders without delay. Like I said, Boats, I’ll hate to lose you, but I think you’ve made the right decision. With what you know already, you’re going to be miles ahead of any officer candidates coming to the school straight from college or civilian life, and that ought to guarantee you a good billet once you leave the course behind. And once the war is over and if you opt to stay in, I think the Navy will put you straight through college before sending you back to sea. It would mean a good engineering degree, or something like, and that will give you a real leg up when it comes time for your retirement.”

  “Hope so,” the bosun said. “And Cap’n, thanks. I appreciate what you done for me, bringing me up here on the bridge, an’ all, and I appreciate the recommendation for OCS. I’ll give it my best.”

  “Never doubted it for a second,” Ash said. “No thanks needed. You’ve more than earned your place.”

  Twenty miles from Charleston harbor, Chaser 3 received a message which detached her from the screen in which she had been serving and sent her back southeast to search for survivors from a South African merchantman that had been steaming independently up from Angola, carrying ore of some kind, and which had been attacked and reported herself sinking about 40 miles off the coast. An hour after Ash started toward the contact, a Catalina reported two rafts in the water about 30 miles southeast of where Ash was making headway; then, the pilot and his crew guided Ash towards where he made visual contact with the rafts and moved in to pick up survivors. With regard to the U-boat that had sunk the ship, the Catalina could find nothing to indicate an enemy presence in the vicinity. But the minute that Ash pulled alongside the first raft and examined it, he found all of the evidence that he could require. The five men in the raft were no longer men at all; instead, they numbered among the dead, their bodies stiff from rigor mortis, their hopeless condition resulting from the fact that the Nazis had machine-gunned them not long after the seamen had abandoned ship. The second raft, which held seven corpses, showed Ash the same evidence, the same bullet-riddled bodies, the same blood stains, the same unthinkable brutality.

  “Get the men up here,” Ash said to Solly. “I want every one of them to see this, to see what those bastards have done.”

  Reactions among the crew varied. They’d seen dead men before—men killed by the Germans, one killed by themselves—but they’d never seen anything like what the two rafts showed them. Some were infuriated to the point of rage. Others remained silent, their jaws set hard with a kind of hate that they had never before felt, and in one or two instances, men cried. On the bridge, Ash found that he had clamped his teeth so hard against the stem of his pipe that he had cracked it beyond repair.

  “Get them aboard,” Ash said to Solly, “and put them under canvas on the fantail. We’re taking them back. I want our people in Charleston to
see this, to photograph it, and to publicize it, if they will. This is evidence of a war crime so clear and straightforward that no one could deny it, and it’s as clear as anything we’ll ever see. There’s got to come a reckoning one day in a way that will stick, and if the men who did this survive without being sunk, I hope we live to see the whole damn lot of them hanged.”

  To Ash and his entire crew’s shock, one of the men they dragged aboard turned out to be still alive—shot through with three rounds, but still breathing. To Ash’s further shock, after Hamp had tended to the man and gotten a half of cup of soup into him, the seaman had lived long enough to give them a single piece of startling intelligence when he revealed that the U-boat that had attacked and murdered the men had carried the image of a large black seahorse painted on its conning tower.

  Immediately Ash reasoned that the sub in question was the same Nazi U-boat that he had attacked off Cape May, the same boat from which Teague had displaced its after gun mount, and the same which had attacked the trawler and killed the fisherman the year before. Ash knew that the boat could not have remained on station for the length of time involved. Obviously, the German U-boat had gone back to Brest, or Wilhelmshaven, or somewhere in occupied Europe for repair and overhaul, and returned, possibly more than once. As far as Ash knew, all of Hitler’s U-boats carried large white hull numbers on their conning towers; only one had ever had the gall to show the black seahorse.

  Entering Charleston harbor that night, Ash was ordered to an anchorage, but for once, rather than do as he’d been told, he refused the order and spoke directly to the harbor master.

  “Give me a pier assignment,” Ash said over the radio-telephone. “I’m bringing in a dozen dead bodies, all of them riddled with gunfire and evidence of a war crime. I want a mortuary detail on hand and whoever’s in charge of the Office of Naval Intelligence, and we’ll let ONI take it from there.”