He paused, took off his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief, then put them back on.
“As you leave here today, I want you to look at something I have had placed right outside—so you can see it every day of your training. It is, or was, a lifeboat. Two months ago a navy destroyer went to the aid of a British cargo ship that had been hit by torpedoes. I was on that destroyer. By the time we arrived, the ship was sinking, so we began the search for survivors. Lookouts spotted a lifeboat—the lifeboat you will see outside this room. No one on it was alive. It was riddled with bullet holes, splattered with blood, and littered with dead sailors.”
He paused again. He picked up a glass of water and drank some. Then continued.
“What that meant, gentlemen, in case you are unfamiliar with how the Nazi beasts operate, is that after torpedoing the British ship, the U-boat surfaced, approached the lifeboat, and instead of taking prisoners as is required under international law, they uncovered their deck guns and machine-gunned those helpless, defenseless merchant sailors.
“We gave those sailors a proper burial at sea. I ordered their lifeboat lifted onto the ship and had it placed on the training grounds—bullet holes, blood stains, and all—as a constant visual reminder of why you are here.”
And with that, Lieutenant Commander McDaniel turned and walked off the stage.
“Old Blood and Guts,” the guy sitting next to me said. “That’s what they call him. And I can see why.”
I nodded, and so did Woody, sitting next to me on the other side.
We saw the bloody lifeboat when we filed out. It was sitting in the sand under a couple of low palm trees. All the bullet holes were marked with rings of white paint—and there were a lot of them, too many to count. There were dark stains inside the boat, soaked into the wood. I felt a chill just looking at it, even though it was sunny out and a hot eighty degrees.
For the next six weeks we were even busier than we’d been in boot camp, learning everything Lieutenant Commander McDaniel ordered us to learn about protecting cargo ships and sinking submarines. A lot of it was what they’d already drilled us on over and over in boot camp, only now we knew it even better: seamanship, boat handling, damage control, firefighting, ship-to-ship communications. And a lot of it was figuring out how to spot a U-boat—the reflection off a periscope lens, a swell like the one that came up under Danny and me, a shadow just under the surface of the ocean—and how to tell the difference between a U-boat and something else, like a whale or a school of dolphins.
The first thing they taught us, though, was why the German submarines were called U-boats.
“Anybody know?” an instructor asked. There were at least a hundred of us crammed in a classroom made for maybe thirty.
A guy who didn’t look much older than me raised his hand. I held my breath, wondering if it was going to be like boot camp, where a question wasn’t really a question, and the instructor would yell at that kid and order him to do push-ups, or worse.
But the instructor just nodded at him and said, “Yes?”
“Unterseeboot,” the guy said.
A bunch of guys laughed. “Speak English!” somebody shouted.
The instructor told everybody to quiet down. “That’s right,” he said. “Unterseeboot. It’s German. And do you know what it means, son?”
The kid looked like he wished he could disappear, but he answered, “Yes, sir. It just means ‘undersea boat.’ Boot is German for ‘boat.’ ”
Somebody in the back of the room yelled out, “I’d like to take an Unterseeboot and kick Hitler in the butt with it,” and everybody laughed again.
Much to the relief of the kid who was translating, the instructor moved on.
More classes followed that one. They taught us all about depth charges, which were big metal drums full of explosives that could be set to detonate at different depths, and how to launch them off our ships with what they called K- and Y-guns. They taught us how to shoot rocket bombs with devices called Hedgehogs. They taught us about how those depth charges and rocket bombs would also damage our own ships, and how we were supposed to do emergency repair when it happened—and when we got hit by somebody else’s bombs, whether sub or ship or attacking plane.
Classes were mostly in sweltering Quonset huts, where everybody sweated through their clothes in the Miami heat and stunk up the place. When they lit up cigarettes in there, too, I thought I would pass out. A lot of guys smoked cigarettes, or used chewing tobacco or dip. Woody said he’d done it all, growing up in tobacco country, but I never saw him with a cigarette, tin, or pouch, and he actually turned green during an especially smoky class one day and went outside and threw up.
I stayed away from all that tobacco because I knew Mama wouldn’t want me to ever do any of that stuff.
On Saturday we went out to sea on our first practice run on a patrol craft, which was about 170 feet long and had a crew of sixty men and five officers. The PC’s job was to escort cargo ships and troop transports and protect them from U-boats. The commanding officer was a lieutenant named Chris Foss, and he introduced us to the ship while we were still tied up to the dock.
“Think of it as a sort of mini-destroyer,” he said when we all gathered on deck. Woody and I had been assigned to the same ship, and as usual he was standing right next to me like he thought we were under orders to literally stick close together.
“These PCs were designed for one single purpose, and that’s antisubmarine warfare,” Lieutenant Foss said. He was above us on the bridge. “Most of you will be assigned to a PC once you finish your training, so no better time than the present to learn everything there is to know.” He tapped the rail. “This baby can trail a U-boat at its maximum speed, and it’s got the navy’s best sound equipment. A PC is more maneuverable than a sub, and it presents a small target for a sub to evaluate, so there’s less chance of a PC catching a torpedo, which should mean a greater chance of a PC catching the sub.”
Woody elbowed me. “Sounds like he’s trying to sell us a car,” he whispered.
A petty officer was standing behind us. He leaned close to Woody’s ear and hissed, “I’ll be having words with you later, sailor. Now shut it while the captain is talking.”
I thought Woody was going to faint. I inched away from him, wishing I’d been standing next to somebody else.
Lieutenant Foss was explaining all about the PC’s two diesel engines, how seaworthy it was, and how it was possible to practically spin it on an axis near the mast. He said the ship was designed so that in rough seas it could right itself even if it rolled 110 degrees, which would mean the ship could be almost upside down and still not capsize. That was kind of hard to believe. I’d been on a lot of boats, and in some very big waves, but I’d never seen anything like that.
Then he stopped for a minute, maybe to let us absorb all the information he was giving us about the patrol craft, or maybe to change the subject.
“You will hear people—good navy people—refer to the patrol craft fleet, and all of you who will serve on a PC, as the Donald Duck Navy. Small ship, thin hull, limited firepower. But what you will be doing is no joking matter. And how well you are trained to do it is something your instructors are dead serious about. Dead serious because if you don’t learn everything about antisubmarine warfare stone cold—eat it, sleep it, breathe it—you and the ships and the people you are sworn to protect will end up at the bottom of the ocean.”
He paused again while we all looked at one another, wondering what he was going to say next.
“U-boats are not true submarines,” he continued. “They are warships that spend most of their time on the surface. Their deck-mounted guns are more powerful than yours will be. They can submerge for limited periods, but they can do a lot while they’re there. They can travel anywhere from sixty to a hundred miles underwater at a time—to attack our ships, evade our pursuit, and escape the bad weather that will neutralize your effectiveness, but not theirs.
“A U-boat crew can cl
ear its bridge, close hatches, and dive to periscope depth in thirty seconds. Half a minute and they’re ready to fire a twenty-foot-long torpedo at you or at one of the ships you are sworn to protect. That means after a U-boat sighting, you have even less time than that to get to general quarters. In order to attack that submarine when you see it submerge—instead of just dodging its torpedo, or worse, watching helplessly as it sinks another ship in your convoy—you must be able to scramble to general quarters in twenty-five seconds.
“You will begin training to do this”—he paused to set his stopwatch—“RIGHT NOW!”
And at that, a Klaxon horn sounded the call to general quarters. We’d all been assigned a post already—mine was loading 34-pound shells into the 3"/50-caliber gun just below the bridge; Woody’s was in the engine room—so we all took off and immediately started running into one another, knocking each other down, blocking somebody else’s way. Guys were screaming at one another so loud that nobody could hear anything. The officers roared at us and shoved guys this way and that way, but we couldn’t seem to get anywhere. And I was only trying to make my way about ten feet from where I started!
Maybe it was because I was so small, but the jostling forced me closer and closer to the edge of the ship until I was clinging to the rail to keep from going over the side—and then, next thing I knew, a couple of big guys slammed into me and I lost my grip and over I went, twenty feet down and straight into the water.
I’m not sure anybody even noticed. No horns sounded, no whistles blew—I knew that much. I found my sailor’s cap and stuffed it in my pocket and swam over to the dock, though it was hard going in my work shirt and dungarees and boots. By the time I hauled myself out and walked the gangplank back onto the patrol craft, everybody had miraculously found their way to wherever they were supposed to go—except me. My boots made a squishy sound as I navigated over to the deck cannon and the pile of shells I was supposed to help load for us to fire at whatever U-boat might have been on the attack.
Lieutenant Foss glared at me from the bridge, as if he thought I’d deliberately jumped in to go swimming. I felt guilty even though I knew it wasn’t my fault, but there was no way to explain.
“Five minutes,” he said. “That took five minutes. Congratulations. You’re all dead.”
* * *
I found out later that Woody didn’t do much better down in the engine room, two decks below and as far aft as you could go on the ship. Twelve guys packed in there like sardines at first, only as soon as Woody got there the engine room chief ordered eight of them to turn around and make their way back topside to load depth charges. He gave Woody some kind of order that Woody couldn’t remember when he told me about it, because when the chief said “port side” he went starboard instead, hit his head on a pipe, and knocked himself out.
The next day was a Sunday, but instead of going to chapel, Woody went off somewhere by himself. He didn’t tell me where, but I didn’t mind having a few hours to myself. I went to chapel and prayed for Mama and Danny and everybody else on Ocracoke. The minister had us all pray for our troops and ships fighting the Japanese out in the Pacific. And he had us pray for the poor Soviet people in Leningrad, which was surrounded by Hitler’s army and under siege. It was threatening to fall like every other city in the Soviet Union had fallen to the Nazis. And finally, he had us pray for the British tank forces who were battling the German army under Field Marshal Rommel for control of North Africa—and not faring very well.
So far we’d been sending supplies and weapons and food to England and the Soviet Union under President Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Act, but people were still wondering when America and the Allies would be able to launch a counterattack against Germany and Italy, a full-on invasion to take back France and liberate the rest of the European countries that Hitler had steamrolled with his blitzkriegs. Right now, England was the only holdout, besides the Soviets. And it didn’t seem like either one of them could hold out for much longer without our help.
And meanwhile, the German U-boats kept sinking more and more of our cargo supply ships all along the East Coast and down in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
I was lying on my bunk that afternoon thinking about all that, and missing Mama and Danny and home, when Woody came back from wherever he’d been. It didn’t take long to get it out of him. He rolled up his sleeves and showed me: On his right forearm he’d gotten a tattoo that said Starboard and on his left arm he had one that said Port.
“Should have done this a long time ago,” he said, rubbing the bruise on his forehead where he’d run into the pipe. “Now that I know which direction is which, I’m ready to go hunt us down some U-boats.”
My next paycheck I also cashed and mailed to Mama, along with another letter telling her I was good and that I was praying for Danny and for all of them. It was probably word for word about the same letter as I’d written before from Great Lakes, but I couldn’t really tell her anything else, so I figured the same was better than nothing.
The day I got the check was my thirteenth birthday, so at least I wasn’t as underage as I used to be. I kept a dollar out of my paycheck to treat myself to a burger and a Coke at the commissary, which was a kind of general store they had on base, and another dollar so I could treat Woody, too, since he was the closest I had to a best friend in the navy. He kept pestering me about why I was being so generous and what was the big occasion?
“I ain’t never seen you spend even a nickel before,” he said as we walked over to the commissary. It was another Sunday. We only had two weeks left at the Subchaser Training Center, two weeks left in Miami.
“Heck, I don’t even have a nickel left out of my paychecks,” he added.
I shrugged. “I send mine home. They need it a lot more than I do.”
“Yeah, guess I ought to be doing that, too,” Woody said. “Only I ain’t never got to have any money of my own my whole life. Even when I was cropping tobacco, my mom took it all from me. Said I owed it for rent.”
“For rent?” I asked. That didn’t make any sense. Nobody paid rent to stay in their own bedroom at their own house.
But apparently Woody did. “My dad left us when I was little, and we ain’t seen him since. He wasn’t good for nothing anyway. So my mom, seems like she always had one boyfriend or another around, and not much time for us kids. She was working and all, too. And she said we had to work if we were going to stay in the house. So that’s what we did, from the time we couldn’t hardly even walk.”
“Sorry,” I said. “That sounds rough.” I told him I’d lost my dad, too. “But he didn’t leave us,” I quickly added. “I mean, not on purpose.”
“What happened?” It was Woody’s turn to ask questions. We were almost at the commissary but stopped to finish the conversation.
“There was a storm, and he didn’t make it back to the island in time. He’d been out fishing. They said the waves got to thirty feet. They never found the boat, or any of the men. But I knew in my heart that however it happened, Dad would have been the one doing everything he could to try to save the others.”
I paused for a minute because I was getting kind of choked up, then I swallowed hard and told Woody the rest of the story—how after the official search ended, Mama wouldn’t give up, and day after day for probably two weeks she took me and Danny out in the skiff to look for any sign of Dad’s boat. Nobody had the heart to tell her there was no point to it. Nobody on the island said much of anything except how sorry they were about Dad. It was like everybody had agreed to just pretend Mama wasn’t doing what she was doing.
The way Danny had explained it to me was that Mama wasn’t ready to let Dad go just yet, and us going out to search for him was her working up to the idea that he was gone forever, that he wasn’t coming back, and that we were going to have to be a family without him.
Finally, the last day we went out, Mama had turned the boat around after just an hour. She didn’t say anything at first, didn’t speak at all until we made
it back to the island and docked the boat.
Then she’d hugged Danny and me, sighed, and said, “I am sure going to miss him.”
Danny had whispered, “Me too.”
I hadn’t said anything. I’d hated every second we were out on the ocean looking, but now that Mama had let us know she was done, I’d realized I wasn’t ready to let go.
I was too little to take the boat out, so every day for a month I’d climbed the highest dune on the island with a pair of binoculars and searched for Dad that way.
Of course, he never did come back home.
Woody and I sat quietly for a while after I told him my story. We’d both been through a lot of sadness about our dads, and sometimes there just wasn’t much to say.
I was the one who finally broke the silence.
“Anyway, it’s my birthday today,” I told Woody. “So we’re celebrating.”
“Whoa!” Woody exclaimed, happy to change the subject. “How old are you? Eighteen? That ain’t possible, young as you look. You don’t even shave yet.”
He grabbed me around the neck and rubbed his knuckles hard on my scalp. With my navy buzz cut I didn’t have any hair for protection, so it burned and I howled in pain.
“Happy birthday, Danny!” Woody shouted. And then, as we stepped into the commissary, he shouted to everybody who was there that it was my birthday and the next thing I knew they were all singing “Happy Birthday to You” like a bunch of kids at a party. Somebody even gave me a stale doughnut that must have been sitting around since early that morning and stuck a lit match in it for me to blow out like it was a candle.
It wasn’t the best birthday I’d ever had, but it ended up not being too bad. Plus now I was officially a teenager.
In the last couple of weeks at subchaser school I spent hours in classrooms and on board learning how to operate sonar to locate U-boats underwater and enemy ships above it—while Woody got his crash course in operating, maintaining, and repairing patrol craft engines. They had a simulated ship interior in a warehouse, where they drilled us in fighting fires and shoring up bulkheads damaged by torpedo hits or by the concussive effects of our own depth charges. They trained us in lifeboat survival, and we spent hours rowing until we thought our arms would fall off—and still kept rowing for hours after that.
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