Across a War-Tossed Sea

by L. M. Elliott

  Evacuee memoirs recount the fun they had—sailors taking them into the navigation cabin, and massive games of tag. But many were horrendously seasick and frightened. One child watched eleven of the twenty-eight ships in his convoy go under. Another survived dud torpedoes ricocheting harmlessly off his ship.

  Then, tragically, in bad weather and high seas, the City of Benares, carrying ninety children, was torpedoed by U-48. Many children died in the explosion. Some fell into the sea as lifeboat pulleys jammed, tipping the boats. Other lifeboats capsized in the typhoonlike wake of the enormous ship as it went under. The convoy continued on, under orders to do so. The nearest British destroyer took nineteen hours to get there through a gale and hailstones. The crew reportedly wept when they found boats filled with dead children, a few survivors clinging to rafts.

  One family lost all five of its children that night. Only thirteen youngsters survived, including the six CORB boys Charles thinks of as he struggles against the James River. The Benares tragedy brought an abrupt end to Britain’s transatlantic evacuation of its children.

  After the war, U-48’s captain was tried for war crimes. Responsible for sinking fifty-five ships, he was put on trial specifically regarding the Benares. Nothing had marked the Benares as a children’s ark. Outfitted with a large antisubmarine gun, she could be interpreted as a troop transport or military supply ship. The captain was acquitted, his actions deemed “within the rules of engagement.”

  Throughout World War II, a few U-boats did help survivors of the ships they torpedoed, giving them food and water, or even taking them on board, as did U-156 and Captain Werner Hartenstein after sinking a passenger ship, the Laconia. But, tragically, there were no international requirements that U-boats do so.

  The British evacuees who made it typically relished their time in the States. Freed of gas masks and dark, long nights trembling in shelters, listening anxiously to the thud and bang of an aerial bombardment, they rediscovered childhood. They delighted in ice cream, hot showers, co-ed schools, Fourth of July homespun parades, and the unrestrained friendliness of most Americans. They marveled at our abundance of food, the suddenness and range of weather in the States plus its vastness, Frigidaires and ice cubes, jazz and blues, peanut butter and BLT sandwiches, toasted marshmallows, watermelons, and how small the White House was by comparison to Buckingham Palace.

  They were disappointed not to meet Native Americans, cowboys, mobsters, or movie stars. But they heartily adopted American slang, dances, and mannerisms, and came to speak their minds with adults in a way that would shock their more formal British parents back home. Even so, evacuees often struggled to fit in. Isolationists embarrassed them by blaming the British for pulling the United States into war again. They were baffled by regional accents or sayings, and words having very different meanings. “Pants,” for instance, in England meant “underwear.”

  Many felt guilty, and worried that their friends thought them “chicken” for leaving. Others, like my fictional Wesley, suffered what we now know as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). They wet their beds, suffered bad dreams, and worried about their parents, especially since letters from home could take two months to arrive. Ironically, letters could spark nightmares. Accustomed to the Blitz, parents often spoke nonchalantly of terrifying events. One father matter-of-factly described his family’s favorite pub being obliterated by a bomb, the blast near and strong enough to blow the shaving brush out of his hand.

  U-boats, the American Merchant Marine, Shipbuilding, and Segregation

  While the Luftwaffe bombed London, the German navy torpedoed incoming supplies—equipment, food, gas, and medicines—that kept England on its feet to fight. Called “gray wolves,” the U-boat submarines skimmed along the water’s surface at seventeen knots, much faster than cargo ships’ average speed. They easily tracked convoys by spotting clouds of steam from smokestacks, or trails of discarded garbage.

  When Hitler’s U-boats turned their periscopes on the U.S. East Coast, they announced their threatening presence by German newspapers running a close-up photograph of Manhattan taken from a U-boat’s conning tower. In the first eight months of 1942, a mere five Nazi U-boats managed to sink 397 freighters and tankers along our Atlantic coast.

  Suddenly at war on two seas, our U.S. Navy could offer little protection. Tankers and freighters sailed unescorted, equipped with vintage guns from the First World War, their untrained, civilian watchmen searching the ocean for a tiny enemy periscope. German U-boat commanders, on the other hand, had easy viewing of our ships. Ignoring British warnings, we didn’t mandate nighttime blackouts until May, meaning cargo ships sailing along our coast were backlit by a bright horizon of city lights. Nazi U-boat crews dubbed it “the great American turkey shoot.”

  Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, became nicknamed Torpedo Junction. Outer Banks residents kept kerosene by their back doors to wipe from their shoes the oil that covered the beaches from exploded tankers. They grimly joked they could read at night by the glow of the ships burning off shore. They raked the sand every night and checked it each morning for footprints, to make sure no U-boat put saboteurs ashore as one managed to do in Florida. The account Wesley gives of Virginia Beach sunbathers witnessing four ships explode as they ran into a string of magnetic mines left by a U-boat the night before is true.

  In the end, 1,554 American merchant ships were sunk and 9,521 mariners killed. According to USMM.org (American Merchant Marine at War), civilian sailors suffered the highest casualty rate of any service in World War II. One in eight experienced his ship going down. Yet they still joined. Their ranks quadrupled as they bravely delivered the critical supplies that kept Allied forces fighting.

  A 1940s recruiting poster features a rough-hewn merchant mariner with a determined grimace on his face. The headline? “YOU BET I’M GOING BACK TO SEA!” Many of these volunteers, aged sixteen to seventy-eight, were African American. The merchant marine was the first racially integrated service.

  Part of what finally stopped U-boats was the United States producing ships at an enormous speed. Just down the James River from the Ratcliffs’ imaginary home was one of the country’s busiest shipbuilding centers. Between 1942 and 1945, the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company built forty-seven fighting ships, including nine aircraft carriers like the Ticonderoga.

  Cargo boats, called Liberty ships, were designed to be built in large numbers in the shortest time possible—welded rather than riveted together, reducing construction to thirty-five days. Welding could be taught quickly. Demand for such labor skyrocketed. Many African American workers won their first mainstream industrial jobs in newly integrated assembly lines. Some Liberty ships were even named for African American mariners lost to German torpedoes. The SS William Cox, for instance, honored an African American fireman who died on the Atwater, the same cargo ship on which Freddy’s fictitious uncle dies.

  All this while the country clung to segregation laws that mandated separate schools, water fountains, bathrooms, and seating on buses for black people. (To be accurate to the 1940s, my characters say “Negro” or “colored” rather than “African American” and “Indian” rather than “Native American.”) Congress did not pass civil rights legislation until the 1960s, but the courage and dedication of African Americans during World War II—civilian and military—went a long way to hasten those laws.

  Native Americans faced similar inequalities. In the 1940s, Virginia residents could only check off “white” or “colored” on documents such as birth certificates, so tribes ceased to legally exist. Native Americans’ segregated schooling ended at the eighth grade. The only way for them to achieve a high school diploma was to go to a boarding school in Muskogee, Oklahoma.

  And yet, Native Americans enlisted to fight, just as African Americans volunteered for legendary units like the all-black Tuskegee Airmen—fighter plane squadrons credited with saving hundreds of bomber crews from Luftwaffe attack. Navaho became important code talkers, using their nati
ve language to transmit messages during some of the Pacific’s worst battles. The Japanese were never able to decode it.

  Secret Air Bases

  Also in the Richmond-Norfolk area was the Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation, which handled hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops heading to North Africa or Europe, processed POWs, and rushed D-day casualties to Richmond’s McGuire Hospital. Tons of military supplies left its docks each month. January 5, 1944—the night several squadrons of the famed African American Tuskegee Airmen shipped out—was typical of its daily traffic. Convoy UGS.29 departed, taking sixty-three cargo ships and tankers, seventeen escort vessels, and nine troop transports carrying 6,067 fighting men.

  Scattered between Norfolk and Richmond were more than a dozen military bases plus many war factories, producing things like Jeep tires, flak jackets, radar-baffling devices, parachutes, ship anchors, and jungle hammocks. Because of such critical activity, Elko was built just east of Richmond by the 936th Camouflage Battalion. Its soldiers cleared swamps, bulldozed in runways, and constructed dummy airplanes, antiaircraft guns, and barracks out of plywood and canvas. If Hitler managed to launch an aerial attack from carriers off our coast, Richmond’s lights would shut off, while the fake airfield’s lit up, hopefully tricking Luftwaffe bombers into dropping their loads harmlessly on the decoy.

  Elko remained a hush-hush project even after the war, with locals speculating on all sorts of clandestine activities. It’s likely the FBI, CIA, and National Guard conducted training there until it was sold to commercial development.

  German POWs in America

  Across the United States, 371,683 Germans were imprisoned in five hundred camps. POWs helped pick crops, log, and repair roads, and worked in nonwar factories like peanut-processing plants. Occasionally, they engaged in disruptive protest—scratching swastikas into peaches they picked in Virginia, for instance—but mostly their labor helped the United States when so many Americans were overseas fighting.

  Only 1,583 escape attempts were recorded. The United States was vast and the POW camps rather luxurious, their food and housing equal to what our military provided its own personnel. POWs were offered college-level courses. Camps had libraries, soccer games, and art facilities, and allowed prisoners to carve puppets or plant gardens. The motivation to escape was small. Most escapes were as Sheriff Bailey describes to the Ratcliffs—sightseeing jaunts for a few hours.

  Within the camps, however, die-hard Nazis did terrorize moderate Germans who they felt didn’t adequately revere Hitler. The worst perpetuators were Rommel’s elite Afrika Korps, ardent believers in Aryan superiority, shipped from African battlefields directly to the United States. They never saw German cities bombed or the Allied assault of Normandy’s beaches. They dismissed such reports as American propaganda, and German prisoners recounting them as liars.

  Any fraternization—listening to jazz or saying grits were tasty or befriending American guards—could bring the wrath of the Lager-Gestapo or “Holy Ghost.” Offenders were warned by chicken bones in their bunks or were beaten in the latrine. There was a suspicious number of “suicides”—German soldiers hanged, suicide notes pinned to them confessing disloyalty to the fatherland.

  Detecting such intimidation tactics was complicated by the fact that few American guards spoke German. But as reports of violence reached Washington, the United States separated Nazi fanatics into higher security facilities and offered more open-minded German POWs—like my character Günter—courses in democratic principles.

  V-1 Rockets

  Hitler’s response to D-day was to launch the V-1 flying bomb, a pilotless jet-engine monoplane with a 150-mile range and one-ton warhead, like that described by Charles and Wesley’s mother. V stood for “Vergeltungswaffen” or “vengeance.” Their explosions were terrifyingly random, as rockets plummeted to earth wherever their engines cut off. Londoners froze upon hearing the V-1’s telltale putt-putting hum, waiting for the silence that signaled its fall. Blasts were enormous. Windows as far away as a quarter of a mile would shatter.

  At their height, the V-1s destroyed twenty thousand houses a day. The V-2s were even deadlier and faster, unstoppable once launched. More than three thousand Allied flyers sacrificed their lives to bomb those launchpads, their locations discovered by unnamed French Resistance heroes.

  Odds and Ends

  CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow rode on twenty-four bombing runs during World War II. He survived to host TV news back in the States after the war. Jock Abercrombie, however, the pilot of D-Dog, was killed a month after taking Murrow to the “Orchestrated Hell” the Ratcliff family listens to on their radio.

  Günter’s favorite author, Karl May, is still beloved in Germany. Annual festivals celebrate his fifteen books about Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. Germans dress up as Apaches, build tepees, and re-enact his stories. Charles and Wesley’s school is modeled on Dulwich College, a London boys’ academy that remained open during the war, its teachers and students braving the Blitz with incredible pluck. The Union sharpshooter tragically killing his own son at the Battle of Malvern Hill is fact.

  And if you hike in areas where there may be snakes, please carry a premade snakebite kit equipped with an extractor pump! Do NOT attempt the rescue Charles and Wesley did.

  See www.lmelliott.com for more information.

  Acknowledgments

  Several librarians were a tremendous help to this novel’s detail and authenticity. I am particularly indebted to Bill Barker, archivist of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, who provided reams of documents about the Merchant Marine, Newport News docks, U-boats off our shores, and African Americans in wartime shipbuilding. Bill (and assistant archivist Bill Edwards-Bodmer) opened avenues to explore I hadn’t even known existed. Thanks, too, to McLean High School’s Joan McCarthy; St. Catherine School’s Laura McCutcheon, and Tyler Paul; Mike Litterst of the National Park Service; Macs Smith for his research and German translations; and Captain Mike of www.discovertheJames.com, who introduced me to the James River’s eagles and sturgeons, and to the place where Charles almost drowns.

  Many friends helped: Dr. Howard Weeks edited scenes regarding hunting, quail, and general Southernisms. Illustrator/author Henry Cole corroborated my memories of Virginia wildlife. Rowland Wilkinson kept my Briticisms “spot-on.”

  Editor Lisa Yoskowitz gently guided me in reining in tantalizing tangents that could have led Charles and Wesley’s story astray, and in more clearly defining their personalities and demons. This novel is better given her deft touch.

  My husband, John, a teacher who keeps the love of literature alive in teenagers, and Dr. Denise Ousley-Exum, who grooms fledging educators for that all-important job, reminded me of what captures the adolescent heart.

  A real pleasure of this novel was reconnecting with my cousins Martha and Sarah, who enriched my painting of Tidewater Virginia. We spent a delightful afternoon along the James, laughing over stories about my grandparents and father, who inspired the characters of Under a War-Torn Sky, the first story in this World War II trilogy, and its sequel, A Troubled Peace.

  Most important, as always, my children, Megan and Peter—who have grown up to be eloquent and insightful creative artists themselves—inspired me and then honed this novel through their repeated readings of its various stages of manuscript. Their adroit suggestions and questions quickened the novel’s pacing, fleshed out its characters, plus deepened and chiseled its themes. Their influence permeates every page.

  L. M. ELLIOTT (www.LMElliott.com) is the author of a number of picture books and award-winning historical novels, including Under a War-Torn Sky and its sequel, A Troubled Peace; Annie, Between the States; Give Me Liberty; and Flying South. A longtime journalist, Elliott was twice a finalist for the National Magazine Award and recipient of numerous Dateline awards. She is a graduate of Wake Forest University and also holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina. She lives in northern Virginia with her family.