Sink or Swim

by Steve Watkins

  They tried having us learn cold water survival techniques, but the ocean was too warm, and they couldn’t get the pool cold enough no matter how much ice they dumped in. We practiced firing machine guns from our patrol craft at targets towed behind old biplanes out over the ocean so we wouldn’t hurt anybody, though a couple of guys aimed a little too close to the planes and that was the end of their target practice.

  Woody always came back from his training covered head to toe in grease, which never seemed to come all the way off, no matter how hard he scrubbed in the shower and no matter how black the tile floor got. I got more and more sunburned from standing and staring through binoculars from the lookout post—what they called the crow’s nest—on our patrol craft off Miami Beach, scanning the ocean for any sign of one of the US Navy submarines stationed out there for our training exercises. I looked like an owl with white circles around my eyes from having the binoculars pressed there for so long. So far I was the only one to spot a periscope, though it was in calm water, no waves to cut into visibility—besides, I knew it was out there somewhere.

  “The biggest challenge you’ll face, once you’re deployed, won’t be identifying the thing you’re looking for, although that will be a huge challenge, too,” Lieutenant Foss said. “But the biggest challenge will be boredom and fatigue. Hours and hours on your watch, watching and waiting. Your mind will wander. It’s just human nature. But you can’t let it be your human nature, because if you’re not vigilant, people die.”

  It was the same with the sonar—training myself to pay attention the whole time I was on duty. I hadn’t ever had much patience growing up. Danny was always the patient one. I was the one who jumped out of bed first thing in the morning and raced down to the beach to see what might have washed up overnight. And I was the one always getting guys to play baseball after school, or catch and tame the beach ponies, or have races during recess, or go body surfing. Mama said I must’ve been part dolphin, probably because of what a good swimmer I was and how much I liked to be in the ocean, and probably because I was always moving all the time.

  But now I had to just sit there with the headphones on and listen for the pings of the sonar bouncing off objects underwater that I couldn’t see, and learn to tell which ones were schools of fish, or sharks, or dolphins, or ocean junk, or boats skimming the surface, or coral reefs—or submarines—and how deep they were, how fast they were going, and what direction they were going. There was a lot of math involved in the calculations, too.

  They told us sonar was invented by bats and dolphins, but what they meant was that bats and dolphins did it naturally to find their prey or whatever—send out these sound waves and then have them come back to them when the waves bounced off something. It was called echolocation, which sounded like a mouthful, but made sense once they explained. I doubted the bats and dolphins had to do the math part, though.

  * * *

  Once again a lot of guys’ families came for graduation-day ceremonies, but none for Woody or me. Just before things got started, as we were walking over from our hotel to the subchaser school, we saw a couple of other sailors holding a newspaper and talking loudly about something in it.

  “What’s the news?” Woody asked.

  One of the guys stabbed his finger into a picture on the front page of the paper. It was a plume of black smoke out in an otherwise cloudless April sky over the ocean. “Right off Jacksonville Beach,” the guy said. “People out on the beach with their families, and right there a mile out, U-boats sunk a passenger ship, the USS Gulfamerica. Everybody saw it. Kids and everything. Couple of hours later, bodies washed up on shore.”

  “There’s been a lot more ships sunk by U-boats than they’re telling people about,” his friend added. “On account of they don’t want people to be too worried. But they couldn’t keep this one quiet. Not when your kid’s playing in the waves and up washes somebody dead.”

  “Murdered, you mean,” said the other guy.

  Suddenly, I was ready to skip the graduation and get my ship assignment right then and there—and give those Nazis what they deserved. “I want to track them down and sink every last one of them,” I said fiercely.

  The two friends nodded. “Course you better take us with you,” one of them said. “Little fellow like yourself ain’t going to be able to whip all those U-boats on your own.”

  Woody punched me on the arm. “He might be little, but he’s a tough one, all right,” he said. “Plus he’s got eyes like an eagle. Can spot a U-boat just thinking about raising a periscope.”

  The two guys laughed. “Well, then, those Nazi U-boats—don’t sound like they’ll be around these parts much longer.”

  I just grinned and we all headed off for the graduation. I held on to the newspaper, though, and kept looking at that column of smoke rising out of the ocean off Jacksonville Beach, and thinking about those people who saw it—and, later, found the bodies washed up on shore. They would probably know a little bit about how I felt after the U-boat wrecked Danny’s boat and put him in a coma—and how I would keep feeling until every last one of those Unterseeboots was under the water for good.

  A week later, Woody and I were on the train again, heading to Michigan of all places—though not back to boot camp. Instead, we were going to Bay City, where a company called the Defoe Boat and Motor Works was building patrol crafts and had just finished the one we would be on, me as a sonar operator and signalman and Woody in the engine room as what they called a snipe, which was about the lowest-level engine room job there was.

  The officers had already prepared our PC, so pretty much as soon as we got there—on a cold day in late spring—the sixty of us that made up the crew shouldered our sea bags and marched up the gangplank and on board for our shakedown cruise.

  The chief petty officer, whose last name was Kerr and who didn’t seem to have a first name, was a tall, wiry guy with a jaw that looked like it’d been chiseled out of stone. He was the one who greeted us—by barking orders at us to stow our gear first thing. He called us deck apes and said we’d better “Move it, move it, move it!” making me think he’d spent some time drilling recruits at boot camp. But there wasn’t time to ask him—not that I was so dumb that I ever would, of course—as we made our way belowdecks to the crew’s quarters in the forecastle, which was the forward part of the ship, just behind the head, and the worst place of all because that was where the ship would rise and fall the most in rough water.

  We wedged our gear into lockers that were about half the size we needed, then made up our bunks, slipping fart sacks over mattresses, adding on folded blankets, and then doing what they called tricing up the bunks to the walls in the up position using chains at the foot and head of each bed. They said we had to do this to make more room in the narrow galley, but really it was to keep guys from sneaking naps on their bunks when they were supposed to be on duty.

  Because I was the lowest-ranking seaman I got last pick of the bunks. Mine was as far forward as you could go in the crew’s quarters, which I knew would make a bad situation even worse when I tried to sleep in the stormy ocean. Plus I’d get the stench from the head. Plus they made me take the top bunk—the third one up—which was almost higher than I could climb.

  Before I could try to climb up on my own, though, somebody grabbed me from behind and without saying a word threw me onto the bunk. I slammed against the wall and yelped, and the rest of the crew laughed.

  I heard a familiar laugh—deep and loud—and knew right away who it was.

  “Straub!” I shouted. “What are you doing here?”

  “They needed some muscle around those depth charges,” he said. “And they figured I was the guy, even if I didn’t get to go to your little submarine school.”

  I practically hugged him, and then said, “Want me to throw you up on your bunk next?”

  Straub tipped his head back and roared. “I still don’t know how you escaped from kindergarten and made it into the navy, but glad to see you, Danny.” />
  That broke the ice with the other guys down there with us making up their bunks, and everybody started introducing themselves to everybody else. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t spotted Straub before when we were first coming on board the ship, as big as he was. I guess I’d just been too excited, and nervous, about getting my assignment and getting out on the Atlantic Ocean and going after those U-boats.

  Woody, meanwhile, had followed the chief motor machinist’s mate—another big guy, with red hair, who Woody later told me the other motor machinists and snipes called Big Carrot. All the engine crew slept where they worked, closer to the back of the ship in a compartment just off the engine room, so at least the rough water wouldn’t be as much of a problem, even if the stink of twelve bodies crammed back there, coupled with the grease and fumes from the engine, made it hard to breathe—or to want to breathe!

  Boy, was he ever surprised to see Straub when the snipes came back up on deck. They pounded on each other’s backs so hard that they probably left big bruises.

  That all stopped when Chief Kerr ordered us to stand at attention—adding at least a dozen cusswords to the order, which seemed to be just how he talked. Some of them actually made me turn red in the face to hear them. But I did what he said, just like everybody else.

  We were waiting for Lieutenant Walter Talley to address the crew.

  He kept us waiting for a really long time. Half hour. Forty-five minutes. An hour.

  And then finally he showed, standing on the bridge, staring down on us, still at attention but not happy about it. We weren’t supposed to look around, but it was hard not to check him out—what he looked like and all. He was young, maybe in his midtwenties, and clean-shaven, and must have just joined the navy right out of college—which turned out to be the case. Chief Kerr was what they called a navy lifer—he’d been in the service since the Great War—but Lieutenant Talley had just taken a bunch of officers’ classes, along with training in antisubmarine warfare at the Subchaser Training Center. He was the one who would be captain of our ship, PC-450, which didn’t have a name because they told us that in the Donald Duck Navy the ships were too small to deserve one.

  Lieutenant Talley nodded a few times as if he were counting heads, then he took a deep breath in and seemed to hold it. I realized I was also holding my breath, and so were some of the guys around me. When Lieutenant Talley finally breathed out, we did, too. “Welcome aboard, men,” he said in a stilted voice. “This is your new home. I can’t tell you for how long. That depends on how long the war goes on. But anyway, welcome.” He paused as if he was gathering himself for whatever else he had to say, but instead he just said, “Follow orders. Be where you’re supposed to be at all times. Do your part to defeat the enemy. Take care of your fellow sailors. No exceptions.” And then he said, “Dismissed.”

  * * *

  Two weeks later, after our shakedown cruise on Lake Huron, it was time for our first mission—escorting a convoy of cargo ships out of New York Harbor. We got there on an evening in late May, all hands on deck to marvel at the spectacular city lit up. I could see everything: the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island and the Empire State Building. All those famous places I’d heard about but didn’t ever think I’d get to see.

  “You think we’ll get to go on shore?” Woody asked Straub and me, joining us to lean on the railing. I couldn’t stop staring. “I bet there’s all kinds of girls just waiting to go out on a date with a bunch of sailors like us,” he added. “You know, navy heroes and everything.”

  Straub laughed his big laugh. “I don’t remember us doing anything heroic just yet,” he said.

  “I ain’t never seen so many lights in my whole life,” Woody said, adding a whistle of amazement. “And you couldn’t pay me enough money to go up in them tall buildings they got over there. I’d get scared of the heights just going up the stairs.”

  “They got elevators, you know,” Straub said, as if he’d spent his life in a big city instead of some small town in Ohio.

  “Same thing,” Woody said.

  Chief Kerr joined us then.

  “Stupid idiots,” he swore.

  That caught me by surprise. “Sorry, Chief,” I stammered. “We just haven’t ever seen anything like this before.”

  “I’m not talking about you sailors,” Chief said. “I’m talking about the stupid idiots who still won’t order them to black out the lights in these cities at night. As if a dimout is enough. It’s still a blazing bull’s-eye. You don’t think there’s U-boats out there right now with the same view as us? Probably smiling away, sizing up targets. Ships coming in here, backlit by all those city lights. Heck, they could take out one or two of those buildings if they had a mind to.”

  I looked around nervously at the dark water surrounding us, kicking myself for not already having thought about what the chief said. This was the war, and here we were talking about riding in elevators in New York City and going on shore leave and girls.

  “Back to your stations,” Chief said. “You’ve seen your New York—or all of it you’re gonna see this time around.”

  “Aye-aye, Chief,” we said at the same time. It wasn’t our watch yet, but we knew better than to say that, and instead we scattered to either hit our bunks and catch some shut-eye, or go down to the galley or somewhere else to hide. On the way I took a last look around, first inland at New York Harbor and the dangerous lights of the city, and then behind us where there was a fleet of cargo ships ready to begin their voyages, and beyond those were several navy destroyers and PCs that would be joining us when we set out for Key West in a couple of days.

  I hoped they were being vigilant, the way that instructor had told us back on the pretend ship at basic training, the way we were also going to have to be vigilant from now on if we were going to protect the merchant ships on our convoy—and ourselves—from the U-boats lurking out there in the dark Atlantic, just waiting for an opportunity to sink us all.

  Our job was to escort supply ships from New York down to the Naval Air Station off the tip of Florida in Key West. We had to be on high alert for U-boats lurking around the shipping lanes along the East Coast—probably the same U-boats that had sunk ships near Ocracoke and in sight of all those people on Jacksonville Beach were still out there. Along with who knew how many others. There were three patrol crafts, including ours, protecting a dozen cargo ships loaded with weapons, food, vehicles, spare parts, and a hundred other things needed to keep a thousand-man naval base in operation.

  Destroyers and planes from the Naval Air Station Key West had their own job to do—patrolling the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico in case Germany tried to sneak attack the US. Plus they had to keep the shipping lanes open for oil and other products we needed from South America going up to ports in Houston and New Orleans.

  For the first couple of days, no matter whose watch it was, hardly anybody on our patrol craft slept. I knew I didn’t. I couldn’t say about Woody, because the engine crew kept pretty much to themselves, but from what he’d told me, their chief had Woody working himself stupid doing back-to-back watches.

  I spent one watch in the sonar room and my next watch in the crow’s nest on lookout duty, scanning the silver ocean for signs of U-boat activity until I thought I was going blind. But after those first few days of a whole lot of nothing—no pings on the sonar to indicate submarine activity, no telltale reflections off periscopes poking up out of the waves to take the measure of us and our convoy—it was impossible for our minds not to wander to other things, like how nasty all our uniforms were getting and how bad everybody smelled after all these sweaty days at sea.

  The captain had given the order that nobody could take a shower. The plan was for the convoy to make the East Coast run without stopping at any of the ports along the way, so we had to preserve our supply of fresh water.

  Not only that, but we could only brush our teeth twice a week. So everybody was getting pretty ripe. Then, to make matters even worse, the cooks served up beans for di
nner two nights in a row, and all the fart sacks in the world wouldn’t have been any help in containing the gas attack that hit us next.

  Straub actually came crawling out through the canvas hatch onto the deck one evening, gagging from the smell and saying he felt like he was going to be sick. I didn’t put too much stock in what he said, since he had such a weak stomach and got seasick any time the ocean got any kind of rough. But then I went below and the stench hit me like a baseball bat, and I turned right back around and crawled out behind him.

  Finally, Chief Kerr took pity on us and told us to tie up all our dirty uniforms and toss the lines over the stern. The whole crew was in just skivvies and boots and sailor caps and that was about all while we washed our clothes like that, pulled along behind the ship for fifteen minutes until Chief ordered us to haul in the lines, and then he had us lay our clothes out all over the deck in the afternoon sun. They dried fast and smelled a lot better, but now everything was stiff and salt-encrusted, and chafed our sunburned skin when we put it all back on.

  And there was still the problem of none of us having bathed in a week and stinking to high heaven, as Straub put it. But at least the cooks quit serving us beans.

  * * *

  The officers kept drilling us all the time, day and night, to make sure we were always prepared—and were able to be at general quarters in twenty-five seconds when we spotted a U-boat. So far, though, there’d still been a whole lot of nothing. The only excitement on the sonar turned out to be a school of dolphins. Two of the merchant ships miscalculated one of the zigzag turns and nearly rammed each other but were able to veer away at the last minute. A light rain turned a little heavier, and a few guys got seasick, but that passed pretty quickly, too.