They Go To Sea: The Story of an American Merchant Ship and the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Revisions in this edition of the novel are amplification of dialog and narration and deletion of questionable though still factual scenes and narrative due to some criticisms from well-respected sources, and to these persons who read and reviewed the book and advised me to take their criticism to heart, I wish to extend my sincere thanks.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Author's Note

Illustrations

Dedication

Report on Convoy Fatigue

Merchant Marine Casualty Figures

Some Kind Words

Chapter 1 Sie Los

Chapter 2 How Not to Climb a Gangway

Chapter 3 Running Off To Sea

Chapter 4 The Smoke of Battle

Chapter 5 Signing Off Foreign Articles

Chapter 6 Leaving a Ship

Chapter 7 Home from the Sea

Chapter 8 The Masons

Chapter 9 Family Dinner

Chapter 10 Roxanna and Her Parents

Chapter 11 Don't Go Back

Chapter 12 Dinner at the Maisonette

Chapter 13 Dinner at 21

Chapter 14 Alice and Morpheus

Chapter 15 A Survivor's Story...

Chapter 16 And His Spouse's Torment

Chapter 17 Captain Cedric Adams Rockland

Chapter 18 To Our Last Night on Shore

Chapter 19 The Storm

Chapter 20 Coffee Time

Chapter 21 Trouble in the Shaft Alley

Chapter 22 Dropping Out of the Convoy

Chapter 23 US Naval Armed Guard

Chapter 24 Kapitänleutnant Walther Starken

Chapter 25 My Darling Lorraine

Chapter 26 YOU ARE DIVERTED

Chapter 27 Stalking the Freighter

Chapter 28 Delirium Tremors

Chapter 29 A Bright Momentary Flash

Chapter30ABANDON SHIP

Chapter 31 The Pelican Hook

Chapter 32 The Valkryies Are Coming!

Chapter 33 So Are the Bombers

Chapter 34 Life in a Lifeboat

Chapter 35 The Commander and the WAVE

Chapter 36 Outstanding Work

Chapter 37 Ken's Challenges

Epilogue

Bibliography

About The Author

Author's Port Visits

ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover: World War II US Maritime Commission Poster

World War I Hog Islander

World War II Liberty Ship

World War II North Atlantic Convoy

Gee! I wish I were A MAN

Pennsylvania Station

Loose Lips Might Sink Ships

You Bet I'm Going Back to Sea

A Careless Word

Let's Finish the Job

SS Laconia Incident

World War II Victory Ship

Armament on Conn of a WWII German U-boat

RMCA 4-U Radiotelegraph Console

U-boat Torpedo Room

Launching Lifeboats at Sea

DEDICATION

This story, if it has any merit whatsoever, is dedicated to those courageous and uncomplaining American, British, and Canadian merchant seamen living or dead, who served in World War II, in convoys or in unescorted ships, who suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazi U-boats.

Dedicated also to those remarkably brave sailors of the United States Naval Armed Guard, living or dead, who willingly shared the dangers of those lightly armed merchant ships to protect those self-same seamen from death and destruction on the surface of the sea they all loved.

CONVOY FATIGUE

They go to sea, and back to sea, and back to sea again, until one wonders how it is possible to face the continued expectation of death or long chances of survival. Those who have suffered the most seem the most anxious to get back to sea.

—January 1943 Report on Convoy Fatigue,

as quoted in Escape From Archangel.

An American Merchant Seaman at War,

by Thomas E. Simmons,

University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

CASUALTY FIGURES FOR

THE UNITED STATES MERCHANT MARINE IN WORLD WAR II

American-flag ships sunk....................................833

American seamen killed...................................8,397

Wounded.......................................................12,000

Died of wounds...............................................1,100

Interred in German/Japanese POW camps….......671

Died in POW camps……………………………..66

Worked on bridge over the Kwai River...................1

Comparison of Merchant Marine Casualty Rate to Other Services

Service: Merchant Marine. Official Number Serving: 243,000.

War Dead: 9,497. Per Cent: 3.90. Ratio: 1 in 26.

Service: Marine Corps. Official Number Serving: 669,108.

War Dead: 19,733. Per Cent: 2.94. Ratio: 1 in 34.

Service: Army. Official Number Serving: 11,268,000.

War Dead: 234,874. Per Cent: 2.08. Ratio: 1 in 48.

Service: Navy. Official Number Serving: 4, 183,466.

War Dead: 36,958. Per Cent: 0.88. Ratio: 1 in 114.

Service: Coast Guard. Official Number Serving: 242.093.

War Dead: 574. Per Cent: 0.24. Ratio: 1 in 421.

Total: Official Number Serving: 16,576,667. War Dead: 295,790.

Per Cent: 1.78. Ratio: 1 in 56.

Note: All figures copyrighted U.S. Maritime Service Veterans at www.USMM.org.

Some Kind Words for the American Merchant Seaman...

President Franklin D. Roosevelt:

The men of our American Merchant Marine have pushed through despite the perils of the submarine, the dive-bomber, and the surface raider. They have returned voluntarily to their jobs at sea again and again, because they realized that the lifelines to our battlefronts would be broken if they did not carry out their vital part in this global war.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Every man in this Allied command is quick to express his admiration for the loyalty, courage, and fortitude of the officers and men of the Merchant Marine. We count upon their efficiency and their utter devotion to duty as we do our own; they have never failed us yet and in all the struggles yet to come we know that they will never be deterred by any danger, hardship, or privation. When final victory is ours there is no organization that will share credit more deservedly than the Merchant Marine.

General Douglas MacArthur:

I wish to commend to you the valor of the merchant seamen participating with us in the liberation of the Philippines. With us they have shared the heaviest enemy fire. On this island I have ordered them off their ships and into foxholes when their ships became untenable targets of attack. At our side they have suffered in bloodshed and in death. The caliber of efficiency and the courage they displayed in their part of the invasion of the Philippines marked their conduct throughout the entire campaign in the southwest Pacific area. They have contributed tremendously to our success. I hold no branch in higher esteem than the Merchant Marine.

And For the British Merchant Seaman

Winston Churchill:

Wonderful exertions have been made by our Navy and our Air Force...and, need I say, by the officers and men of the Merchant Navy, who go out in all weathers and in the teeth of all dangers to fight for love of their native land for a cause they comprehend and serve.

Admiral Sir Percy Noble:

Day in, day out, night in, night out, they face to-day unflinchingly the dangers of the deep—the prowling U-boats. They know, these men, that the Battle of the Atlantic means winds and weather, cold and strain and fatigue, all in the face of a host of enemy craft above and below, awaiting the specific moment to send them to death... When the Battle of the Atlantic is won, as won it will be, it will be these men and those who have escorted them whom we shall have to thank.

The British Parliament (Resolution):

That the thanks of this House be accorded to the officers and men of the Merchant Navy for the steadfastness with which they maintained our stocks of food and materials; for their services in transporting men and munitions to all battles over all the seas, and for the gallantry with which, though a civilian service, they met and fought the constant attacks of the enemy.

Historian John Keegan:

The 30,000 men of the British Merchant Navy who fell victim to the U-boats between 1939 and 1945, the majority drowned or killed by exposure on the cruel North Atlantic sea, were quite as certainly front-line warriors as the guardsmen and fighter pilots to whom they ferried the necessities of combat. Neither they nor their American, Dutch, Norwegian or Greek fellow mariners wore uniform and few have any memorial. They stood nevertheless between the Wehrmacht and the domination of the world.

A Sailor Serving In a Royal Canadian Navy Corvette:

We had great respect for the merchant seamen. I think they were underestimated, especially now by the British public today, because they talk about the Battle of Britain. Granted the pilots did a marvelous, marvelous job, but when you stop and think, how did they get the fuel across to fly those planes, it was the merchant seamen. And, honestly, I think they're the bravest men out, the Merchant Navy.

World War I Hog Islander freighter painted angularly to befuddle enemy U-boat periscope watch standers in World War II.

Chapter 1

Sie los!

Two torpedoes in rapid succession struck the Hog Islander, a rust-streaked, black-hulled American freighter from World War I that labored at night in the transatlantic convoy. The eruption produced secondary and tertiary explosions that tore apart the freighter's iron innards. Steel plates screamed through the air. Some crashed on the decks of other ships a mile distant, some punctured hulls and amidships houses closer in, while other jagged sections sliced the cradled, wooden booms of West Coast-built Liberty ships in half. Inch-thick rivets shot out of the smoke like a thousand machine guns firing simultaneously over nearby ships.

With excited cries of self-congratulation, the wolf pack rose to periscope depth in the middle of the convoy. Like Perseus lopping off Medusa's head and flinging it into the ocean, the hissing serpents that were periscopes spun their hooded crowns in all directions. Their glassy eyes absorbed the shapes and silhouettes of the unsuspecting prey, remaining in rigid formation, following the commodore's ship like cattle to their slaughter. This information traveled down through the prisms of the periscopes to register on the determined, squinting eyes of U-boat Kommandants who, subduing their celebrations, gave the orders to dive into the dark wintry waters—and to launch torpedoes again.

Sie los! Korvettenkapitän Bruno Rothhardt shouted for the second time.

Deadly torpedoes, initially propelled from their tubes by powerful bursts of compressed air, ran swiftly and bubble-free under battery power toward the hulls of the merchantmen only hundreds of meters distant, not thousands as would be required in daytime, which ensured success twice over. This thought brought a victorious grin to the Kapitän's thin and hawk like features.

Fire! The command in English roared from the bridges of the warships to their stern depth-charge crews.

Simultaneously, the cries of victory and despair leaped from the throats of the underwater attackers and surface defenders.

Three miles off the port quarter of the disintegrating Hog Islander, a thunderous explosion and illumination marked the spot where another torpedo found its mark. In a center column, a third ship and her crew were blasted out of the ocean.

Though the enemy had been spotted, alarms continued to sound and defensive measures taken. Destroyers and corvettes heeled sharply to port and to starboard to hunt down the intruders. Flares shot into the sky from panicky freighters' bridges while seamen—donning lifejackets fearful that their ship would be hit next—ran up and down decks with hoses putting out smoldering fires. Their eyes reflected the terror that came from stepping into a nest of vipers. Naval Armed Guard crews operated their guns and fired, but did not know where to direct their shells, only imagining the fluid, gliding, and subsurface shadows of the submarines that tormented them.

What the hell're those sailors shooting at? the Merchant Marine skipper in the darkened wheelhouse asked as he gave the orders to sound the General Alarm. An Armed Guard lieutenant stood combat duty at his side, talking quietly yet excitedly into the sound-powered telephone that connected him to his gunners. All the captain had to do was ask the man why he was firing his guns. However, Captain Earl Hawkins had no use for navy officers on his ship or, for that matter, anywhere ashore. He grumped inwardly, while on deck some of his men were being riddled not by machine-gun bullets but by World War I rivets.

Ken Mason, his young radio operator apprentice, picked himself off the deck when the explosion of the nearby ammo ship had flung him out of the bunk. He raced to the radio shack. Jake had already cut the seals on the transmitters and now was tuning the receivers and snapping antenna switches into place. He grasped the telegraph key with his fingers positioned to send Morse code.

Ken, stand by on the bridge in case the Old Man orders us to send an SOS or something. The something Jake referred to was the SSSS signal indicating a ship was under attack by a submarine (RRRR was for a raider attack).

Jake's apprentice ran through the thwart ship passageway and reported to the corpulent, middle-aged mariner in charge of the ship. Exploding ammunition from the doomed Hog Islander illuminated the darkness of the bridge.

What are you doing here? the captain asked.

Mr. Whitman told me to report to you in case...

We don't send out SOSs in this situation, son. The commodore or the navy will do that for the convoy.

Yes, sir, Captain Earl Hawkins! Ken ran back into the radio shack, wondering only for a moment under what category to put him in: a nice guy or a crusty ol' barnacled grouch.

Jake, captain said the commodore or the navy will do that for the convoy.

Well, that's interesting. There're already two ships sending out messages. We'll send ours out too in case we're hit. In the heat of battle, he just might be too busy to give us the order. Listen to Five Hundred on the other receiver and try to log as many ships as you can that're responding to the attack. Then the Old Man can get a picture of what's happening out here when he plots 'em on the chart.

While the radio operators occupied themselves with their duties, the battle at sea continued.

Detonating depth charges sent huge geysers of water up to the moon-waxing sky, drawing some eyes up to the heavens and the lazily waving curtains of the Aurora Borealis. Far beneath the firmament, shrapnel and whole sections of deck plates from the explosions continued to fall on the surface of the silvery sea.

When the old but stalwart freighter was hit, forty-three American merchant seamen and twenty-one US Navy sailors on board were killed instantly, most in their narrow bunks. Then the sky, the water, the very air that men on nearby ships breathed turned into a boiling cauldron that forced them to inhale the fumes of burning cordite and magnesium. Ammonia fumes swept the area. The sharp, choking smell blew into Jake's radio shack through the porthole whose glass, almost an inch thick, had shattered, and peppered the room with lethal shards. This resulted from the radio officer's oversight. He had completed his watch at midnight, then had turned off the lights and hooked the heavy cast-iron blackout lid open. Jake had spent a few idle moments looking out over the dimly lit sea and convoy and exited the room, forgetting to dog the blackout lid again.

Nearly seven thousand tons of munitions and blockbuster bombs had exploded the length of a football field off the port side of their ship. The concussion and pressure wave caused a large chunk of steel plating from the Hog Islander's hull to slam up against the outer bulkhead against which Ken and Jake's bunks were.

Crewmembers on the ships witnessed a flaming inferno when the fiery fragments of steel ceased raining down on the blazing convoy. Red, white, orange, and gray smoke rose in tumbling spirals into the sky.

On the surface, destroyers raced up and down the columns of ships hurling depth charges off their sterns as their sirens sounded alarms. The shadow of one of them screamed by Ken's ship, no farther off than forty yards, belching dragons' fiery breaths, and thunder at the tormentor who caused the deaths of their wards.

***

One of those tormentors and the cause of the convoy's misery were Korvettenkapitän Bruno Rothhardt and his U-105, a type VIIc boat. Rothhardt commanded and now had steered his wolf pack into the upper latitudes of the North Atlantic Ocean on his second sea patrol. This was his seventh of the war, the others conducted closer to home. The six U-boats of the group were sectioned off from Seventh Combat Flotilla that the ace submariner also commanded. He had organized the Frontflottille a little less than two years ago for duty in the English Channel, sinking more than ninety thousand tons of allied merchant shipping. After France fell, he moved the command from Kiel to a port on the Bay of Biscay, St. Nazaire, whose fourteen impenetrable pens, constructed of reinforced concrete over ten meters thick and therefore imperious to air attack, housed seventy-one subs of the flotilla.

The Unterseebootwaffe arm of Die Kriegsmarine, headed by World War I submarine ace Admiral Karl Dönitz, loaded the U-boats with a rapidly becoming standard torpedo: the type G7e-T2-Electric. Its speed of thirty knots, range of five thousand meters, and being fitted with a lethal warhead of five hundred kilograms of explosives, proved invaluable in ensuring that Britain, and lately America, suffered horrendous losses of merchant shipping at sea.

***

The Navy Department in Washington and the British Admiralty in London counted seven more ships that were lost that night from Ken's convoy, proof positive that Dönitz's strategy was effective. Eighty-five American merchant seamen were killed and eighteen were injured. Thirty-nine US Naval Armed Guard sailors were killed and two more were wounded. Half a dozen U-boats, then, were responsible for sending nearly 85,000 tons of war materiel to the ocean floor between New York and Land's End. This was in keeping with the startling ratio of ships sunk in transatlantic convoys: one out of every three ships that attempted the crossing lately was lost, and one out of every twenty-six seamen killed. In Davy Jones's locker, sunken ships carrying tanks, crated aircraft and replacement engines, armored vehicles and artillery, food and other provisions for a desperate ally joined the piled up debris of America's farms and war factories, not to mention the drowning, burned, mutilated bodies of American mariners sinking to their watery graves—all mute testimony to the success of the attack.

Admirals on one side of the Atlantic put their heads together and drew up plans for more men, more ships, more food, and more weapons, more of everything that the United States Merchant Marine could ferry across the dangerous sea in convoys. On the other side, on the Continent, another group simply made plans for more U-boat attacks that they swore would bring England to her knees.

Chapter 2

How Not To Climb a Gangway

How had he found himself in this position, in a merchant ship convoy exposed to exploding torpedoes when he could be enjoying the good life for a few more months before Selective Service caught up with him? However, that was not a fair question to ask, he chided himself. He knew his father would allow him to enlist in the Navy one week before he came of age to avoid the stigma of the draft, but not a day earlier. That was the crux of the matter. That was the reason he and his father argued that morning before F. Clyde Mason had gone off to work at his office in downtown Manhattan in a limestone structure that was located on Rector Street. Chiseled above the first floor facade was its illustrious name: TYLER LOWELL MASON BUILDING. After he had left, Ken simply walked out of the town house he and his family lived in, hopped into a cab, and joined his ship berthed at a West Side pier.

Four men on that ship were leaning over the railing, wondering who he was. They saw a young man put a foot on the bottom step of the gangway, look up at them, and blow out a breath.

The temporarily idle crewmembers, called railbirds, who lined the railings of the ship before departure watched to see who would be joining the ship at the last minute. Was he a new crewmember? they wondered, or a person selling shiny new Abercrombie and Fitch luggage?

They watched as the kid, dressed in a suit and tie, which lent him some status and age beyond his teens, climb the gangway or accommodation ladder. His light blonde hair, parted on the left side and not yet dried, indicated to them that he had not traveled far to get here.

A forty-three-year-old deck maintenance man dressed in worn dungarees nudged his companion. Look't him, he said.

I am, 'n I don't believe what he's carrying.

That ain't no way to climb a gangway.

One slip and he's meat.

Yeah. This man, a thirty-six-year-old able-bodied seaman, had a heart problem the company clinic doctor thought would prove fatal if the man shipped out again. Nevertheless, the physician still signed a Fit for Duty slip. I wonder if he thinks he's boarding a passenger ship. Suit and tie. What's he, an insurance salesman?

Ken definitely saw that he was not boarding a luxury liner. He smelled spilled Bunker C fuel oil floating in rainbow patches on the Hudson on the outboard side of the ship. He saw rust bleeding down the sides of weathered, steel cargo sheds on the pier. Manila lines strained web-like from blackened bollards through hawse pipes to the ship's bitts. The knot in his stomach and the surge in his pulse told him he was boarding a freighter crewed by a weird class of men, a group which he believed he could not in a lifetime comprehend. Nevertheless, the alien and somewhat intimidating scene that he bravely thrust himself into invigorated him because he had vowed to himself that he would die trying—simply because he hungered mightily to go to sea and become one of them. Become one of those exotic seafarers that traveled the globe and spun sea stories that held friends and family in thrall. More to the point, however, going to sea afforded him the best chance he had of seeing combat before his eighteenth birthday. He felt giddy with the thought of experiencing the explosions of battle.

First, though, he had to conquer the frightening contraption that loomed up in front of him, rising from the dock to the sky. The gangway had Manila lines that ran along both sides of it. Forged aluminum and steel steps were held hopefully in place by blocks and tackles, falls, and other parts called a bridle and bails and strongback, every term of which he was blissfully ignorant. He had also to ascend the accommodation ladder with purpose, head high, shoulders squared, not missing a beat or a step, feet propelling himself upward with absolute surety.

The admiralty lawyer's son struggled with his two heavy leather suitcases as he climbed the metal steps. The luggage banged up against those taut Manila lines that snaked through holes in the iron posts of the handrails. These lines guarded the sides of the ship's stairs against a first-tripper such as himself who was not practiced at climbing them. Tipsy seamen, as the railbirds knew, had fallen off to the left or right and into the murky harbor water of the world's seaports from time to time. A few had been crushed against the sides of the ship and the pilings of the dock; others had been drowned in the swift currents of the roadsteads when their ships offloaded in those rivers of silted brown water.

Ken was not sure of it, but he imagined they also said something like, Too bad you decided to ship out in the middle of a war, kid.

A member of the black gang remembered he had only five minutes to get down to the engine room to go on watch. He hollered to Ken: You'll get used to it, kid. Then he ran into the amidships house, tucking in his back pocket a cotton waste rag that he carried with him.

Another railbird laughed at the comment. "No he won't! You know you can't cross the Atlantic nowadays without getting whacked. Nobody gets used to that."

Jake Whitman, the senior radio officer, grabbed one of Ken's suitcases. Welcome aboard, son, he said. Jake bunked next to the newcomer in cabins on the bridge deck where the radio shack was located. Don't let 'em scare you. They look tough, but they're not.

Ken grinned. You could've fooled me.

***

Jake led the way to the radio shack. Ken looked around the tight quarters. Kinda cramped in here, he said. And it smells of acid.

The battery room's behind that door. Where're you from, son?

Here.

Here? New York?

Over there on East 65th.

East 65th? What's that?

A street.

Supposed to mean something to me?

To a New Yorker, yes. Thought you might be a New Yorker.

No. I'm from Vermont. Means nothing 't all. The speaker rubbed his lined, ashen cheeks and chin. Raspy sounds of a few days' accumulation of whiskers ensued.

Okay then. Forget I said it, Jake.

Where'd you get your license?

Washington Street, after leaving Hoffman Island.

Jake laughed. You mention names like I'm supposed to know 'em.

Washington Street, downtown Manhattan. Where the FCC is.

Oh. Oh, of course I knew that.

But you said you didn't know New York.

I mean, where'd you study?

Hoffman Island. Ever hear of it?

Why should I have?

"'Cause you're a radio operator. Every radio operator's heard