“Why Norfolk?” I asked. I knew it was a big shipbuilding port, and there was a lot of military stationed there.
“Nobody’s saying,” Straub said. “But we’re all pretty sure this is it. The invasion force. It’s finally going to happen. Probably in a couple of weeks, maybe even early November. Wish you could ship out with us.”
Straub went on for a while, repeating all the rumors he’d heard, speculating on what everybody thought the Allies ought to do, and when, and how bad we were sure to beat the Germans once we were there—wherever there turned out to be. “I’m betting on North Africa,” he said. “Lot of people are saying that. Hit the Germans and the Italians there, then cross the Mediterranean and into Italy. Work up to the rest of Europe, up to France. They call that the soft underbelly of Europe, going in that way. Or maybe we’ll do that, and go across from England, too. Hit them on two fronts. Everybody’s got ideas about it. I’m just ready for it to happen.”
I asked what he thought the Donald Duck Navy would be doing. Our ships weren’t big enough to carry troops or heavy weapons for bombing enemy defenses from offshore.
“Command vessels, definitely,” Straub said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. You got all these destroyers and battleships and transport ships and supply ships, you’re gonna need some smaller ships to run around and coordinate it all.”
“Who’d you hear that from?” I asked.
He grinned. “Chief Kerr. He told me that. He also told me to tell you he was gonna come by and see you before we shove off, too. He’s been busy getting to know the officers and the crew on our new PC. But he said he wanted to check in on you.” He paused for a second, and then added, “He knows, by the way—we all know—about how you’re not really seventeen, and your real name, and about your brother. Some navy investigators tracked Chief down and asked him a bunch of questions about you, and that’s when they told him.”
I gulped, wondering if Chief could still make me do push-ups or clean decks even though I wasn’t in the navy anymore. I figured he was furious with me.
Straub had to go, but he walked me to my bed from physical therapy first. I was exhausted and could barely drag my legs back under the sheets.
“You take good care of yourself, Colton,” he said. “I want you to get all well and out of this place. When we finish up with those Nazis I’ll come back here and you and me will go to another baseball game in the spring. Or else maybe I’ll come visit you at the Outer Banks. I guess they’ll be sending you home now that they know everything.”
“I’d like that,” I said—meaning the thought of going home to Ocracoke, and the thought of Straub visiting me there when the war was all over.
* * *
After Straub left, I drifted off to sleep—something I was doing a lot of in the hospital—and had worrisome dreams about U-boats and silver torpedoes streaking toward our ship. I was on the lookout platform, trying to yell, to warn everybody, but no sound came out.
I woke up in a sweat, tossing and turning, mumbling, vaguely aware that somebody was sitting next to my bed. Whoever it was put a hand on my arm to calm me, and then put a cool cloth on my forehead. A familiar voice, one I hadn’t heard in months, said, “It’s okay, Colton. You were just having a bad dream, but you’re awake now and I’m here with you.”
I took away the cloth and opened my eyes, not believing what I was hearing and now seeing:
It was Mama.
I might have cried some before, but now I was practically bawling like a baby as Mama sat there and held on to me until I guess I cried myself dry of tears. Everything seemed to wash over me, lying there with her holding me: how scared I’d been, and how worried about Danny, how guilty I felt for running away like I did, and for hurting her, and for deserting her when she probably needed me the most. How angry I was at the Germans and their U-boats for killing Woody and Lieutenant Talley and so many other guys on my crew—and how much all that anger had taken over the whole inside of me.
Mama just stayed there and kept holding me while I let it all out.
Then she told me, before I could even ask, that Danny was going to be okay—that he was out of his coma, which I already knew, and a lot more. He did have some kind of brain injury, but he was slowly regaining everything they were afraid he might have lost, like the ability to walk on his own, and talk, and feed himself.
“He’s such a strong young man,” Mama said, sounding a lot softer than I’d heard her sound in years, probably since Dad died. “I believe he’ll eventually be all the way back to how he was before the incident.”
She told me the navy had contacted her when we got to port and I was transferred to the hospital since she was listed on Danny’s enlistment paperwork as next of kin. That was how the truth finally came out. People on Ocracoke took up a collection to buy Mama a bus ticket to come up to New York to see about me.
She stayed for three days but had to go back before I was formally discharged—from the hospital and from the navy. A couple of different officers came by one day—this time to officially chew me out for lying about my age and pretending to be Danny and putting my fellow sailors in harm’s way. The one who said that—a captain—was snarling the whole time he talked to me. But the officer who was with him stayed behind when the captain left.
“I read your file,” the second officer said. “I don’t know what possessed you to enlist, or how you got past everybody, as young as you are and as young as you look, but your chief petty officer went to great pains to let us know what a top-notch seaman you were and that it was an honor for them to serve with you on PC-450.”
He tapped a folder he’d been holding, which I guessed contained whatever file the navy had on me. “It says in here that you voluntarily dove into a stormy ocean to save one of your shipmates. And it says without your hard work and your diligence, PC-450 might well have sustained a direct hit on more than one occasion from enemy torpedoes.”
He saluted, and I saluted back from my hospital bed. “Fine job, sailor,” he said, and then he did an about-face and marched out of the room.
Chief Kerr came in to see me the next day. His face had mostly healed from where it had been burned, but I could still see some scars. He got on me about lying about my age, too, but he couldn’t keep a straight face while he was doing it, and finally he just started laughing.
“I knew you were underage, but I had no clue that you were just barely a teenager!” he said. “You got some serious guts, I can tell you that. Some very serious guts! I’m just glad you didn’t spill any of those serious guts out on the deck instead of that little scratch you got there on your leg.”
“Little scratch!” I exclaimed. “I can barely walk on it, Chief!”
He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Take it easy, son. Just messing around with you a little bit.” He got kind of serious. “You were a good sailor, no matter your name. I wish I’d had a whole crew of men just like you. Maybe a little older, but just like you other than that.”
“Thank you, Chief,” I said. “But I don’t think we could have had a better crew.”
He nodded. “You’re right about that, son.” He got a faraway look in his eyes and then repeated it. “You’re right about that.”
A week later I was on a long bus ride back to North Carolina and then a short ferry ride over to Ocracoke. My career in the navy as a subchaser was officially over.
* * *
Danny and I were both different after that. Mama said so, and I could see it for myself. Danny had problems remembering things that just happened, like if we’d just had lunch, or if he’d read the newspaper yet that day. He got better over time, so that if you hadn’t known Danny before, you wouldn’t know that he was sometimes a little behind on everything—answering a question, getting up to go when it was time, cleaning a fish he’d caught. More than once I found him just standing and staring at what was right in front of him, as if he needed to mull over for a minute what he was going to do next before he did i
t.
My leg healed okay and I didn’t have any problems with weakness or balance, except every once in a while. When summer finally came again, Danny and I sat on the porch a lot, in the afternoon shade, watching the surf, or on stormy evenings sitting out there with Mama to watch the lightning dance way out over the dark ocean.
We didn’t talk much. Eventually, I told them all about what happened when I left the island, but after that, we were mostly silent. Worried about the war. Worried about what would become of us all. And at the same time thankful we were all alive, and safe, and together again.
I wanted to go to eighth grade, but since I was a whole year behind they decided I would have to finish up the year in seventh grade. I didn’t like that much—all the kids seemed so little and so young. But I probably would have felt that same way if I was with my old friends, too. Guess you couldn’t go off to war and expect to feel the same about things and people when you came back home.
Some days after school Danny and I corralled our beach ponies and rode them all over the island, over the packed dunes, through the gentle surf, back along the edges of the marsh on the sound side. More and more fishing boats were venturing back out to sea. More and more cargo ships passed without escorts or convoys.
We had never bothered to name our beach ponies, since they didn’t actually belong to us, or to anybody. They were just wild and used to being around people and nice enough to let us ride them. I asked Danny what he thought of us giving them names now, though. He considered it for a few minutes, and then said he guessed that would be all right.
He hesitated again, thinking hard about something, and then asked what names I had in mind.
“Woody and Straub,” I said.
“Your friends?” Danny asked. “From your ship?”
I nodded. It was funny how I hadn’t thought of either one of them that way for a long time after I met them. But besides Danny, I couldn’t think of any better friends I would ever have in the world.
While Sink or Swim is a work of fiction, it was inspired in part by the true story of Calvin Graham, who enlisted in the US Navy when he was twelve years old, and at thirteen served on the battleship USS South Dakota in the South Pacific in intense fighting with the Japanese. In one memorable and tragic battle, the South Dakota took forty-two enemy hits. Thirty-eight men were killed and sixty were wounded, including Calvin Graham, who fell through three stories of the ship’s superstructure. Though seriously injured, he crawled through the ship, helping others who had also been wounded. Graham was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, but when his mother back home in Texas saw newsreel footage of the battle and recognized her son, she contacted the navy and told them his true age. She had thought he was living with other relatives. Calvin Graham was subsequently sent home, his military career over.
According to the American Veterans Center, as many as 200,000 underage men and women served in the US military during World War II, a number of them as young as fourteen, though Calvin Graham, at twelve, was the youngest. For more of his story, check out author Gilbert King’s article in the December 19, 2012, Smithsonian magazine, “The Boy Who Became a World War II Veteran at 13 Years Old.”
Though twelve-year-old Colton Graham in Sink or Swim is a fictional character, the events depicted in the novel—occurring during the Battle of the Atlantic—were all too real. From January to December 1942, German U-boats sank or damaged hundreds of ships and killed around five thousand men and women along the East Coast of the United States and in the Gulf of Mexico, disrupting supply lines, hampering the war effort, and instilling fear in millions of Americans bracing themselves for the terrible coming war in North Africa and Europe against the Axis powers. Many of the cargo and passenger ships attacked by the U-boat fleet went up in explosions and flames within sight of hundreds of people on shore. During the early years of the war, the U-boat wolf packs sank hundreds of other boats crossing the Atlantic to bring desperately needed weapons, food, and other supplies to Great Britain and the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease Act, which was passed in March 1941.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was so concerned about the possibility that the German U-boats would succeed in cutting off the North Atlantic supply line from the US that he wrote, “The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril.”
Unfortunately, many of the ships sunk by U-boats mentioned in this story actually happened, including the USS Allan Jackson on January 18, 1941; the Atlanta passenger ship on January 19, 1942; and the USS Gulfamerica on April 10, 1942. These are just a few of the many ships that were lost in the Atlantic during the war.
The scene at the Ernest Hemingway house in Key West is also fictional, but the descriptions of the house, the pool, the six-toed cats, and Hemingway’s sons, who were living there with their mother at the beginning of the war—while their father, Ernest Hemingway, was living in Cuba and hunting U-boats on his fishing boat—are all true.
Additionally, Lieutenant Commander Eugene McDaniel actually was a commanding officer at the Subchaser Training Center in Miami, Florida, and the stories about him are all true and drawn from historical accounts, as are the descriptions of the Subchaser Training Center itself and the Naval Training Center Great Lakes, where thousands of young navy recruits were sent for their basic training at the start of World War II—and spent countless hours in drills on the Grinder.
Writer Kevin Duffus interviewed eyewitnesses on the Outer Banks for his fascinating article “When World War II was fought off North Carolina’s beaches” for the spring 2008 issue of Tar Heel Junior Historian, and Michael Graff tells the story of Ocracoke Islanders’ encounters with U-boats in an article titled “Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum” in the April 2013 issue of Our State magazine. Both were important sources of information for Sink or Swim. I highly recommend them for those who would like to read more on the subject. Also helpful in my research were Nathan Miller’s War at Sea: A Naval History of World War II, Richard Hough’s The Longest Battle: The War at Sea, 1939–45, and Chris Howard Bailey’s The Battle of the Atlantic: The Corvettes and Their Crews: An Oral History.
Most important, I could not have written Sink or Swim—or learned a fraction of what I now know about patrol crafts, the Donald Duck Navy, navy boot camp, subchaser school, and so much more concerning these unsung heroes—without the help of William J. Veigele’s Patrol Craft of World War II: A History of the Ships and Their Crews. My thanks to him, and my deep appreciation for his service in the US Navy during World War II and for his years of work to tell the story of all the unnamed PCs and those who served on them.
My friend Rob Jobrack, Lieutenant, USN-retired, who served on the navy’s newest class of destroyers, the Arleigh Burke class, and has operated and developed navy surface ship combat since 1984, was kind enough to review the Sink or Swim manuscript to help ferret out inaccuracies. Any mistakes that remain are, of course, mine. More importantly, my thanks to Rob for his years of service in the US Navy.
aft: the back of a ship
Battle of the Atlantic: A naval campaign that began in 1939 and lasted until 1945. It was German U-boats hunting Allied navies, including the US Navy, the Royal Navy, merchant ships, and others. During the war, U-boats sank 2,779 ships for a total of 14.1 million tons, approximately 70 percent of all Allied shipping losses in all theaters of the war. The worst year was 1942, when more than 6 million tons of shipping were sunk in the Atlantic.
belowdecks: inside the ship
Bluejackets’ Manual: handbook issued to all new recruits intended to cover a range of navy procedures, rules, etc.
bowline: a loop-shaped knot that doesn’t slip
bridge: the area of the ship from which it’s navigated
bulkhead: a wall within the hull of a ship
calisthenics: exercises done without equipment to increase strength and flexibility
commissary: a supermarket for military personnel
corvette: a highly maneuverable armed
escort ship
coxswain: sailor who is in charge of the boat and crew
depth charge: a drum filled with explosives that is dropped near a target before it explodes
dogwatch: one of two two-hour watch shifts on a ship, from 4 to 6 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m., during which crews not on duty eat their main meal of the day
double time: a marching speed
echolocation: process of locating objects by sound waves reflected back from the objects
evasive action: defensive movements to avoid enemy fire or capture
flying bridge: the highest bridge on a ship that has more than one
forecastle: part of the upper deck of a ship in front of the foremast
foremast: the mast nearest the bow of a ship
forward: front part of a ship
general quarters: assigned duty stations for a crew, especially when under attack
Grinder: drill field
head: bathroom on a ship
Hedgehog: antisubmarine weapon
hull: main body of a ship
knot: unit to measure a ship’s speed; one knot, or nautical mile per hour, is equal to approximately 1.151 miles per hour
lee: side of a ship away from the wind
Lend-Lease Act: A bill enacted on March 11, 1941, under which the US provided supplies such as food, weapons, oil, etc. to the Allied nations, mainly the UK and the USSR. (Later this included other countries on the Allied side.) In exchange, the US had leases on military bases within Allied territories. It was initially seen as a way to help the Allied forces without actually engaging in war against the Axis. That all changed after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but the Lend-Lease Act was in effect until September 1945.
liberty: a brief, authorized leave from naval duty
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