Attacked at Sea

by Michael J. Tougias

  Lucille began to cry quietly, the shock and separation from her family starting to set in.

  “Now, Lucille, you’ll have a lot to tell your mother and dad when they find us,” Sorli said to comfort her. “Have you ever swum in the ocean before? Have you ever built a raft like Robinson Crusoe? This is quite an adventure for you.”

  “I did swim in the ocean, in Costa Rica,” she said. “There were big waves at the beach, and Sonny got knocked over by one.”

  “That’s funny,” said Sorli. “Now, you’re from Texas. Have you ever seen snow? I’m from a place with a lot of snow.”

  “No, but I want to,” she said. “Did you build snowmen? I’ve seen pictures of them.”

  The chatter helped distract Lucille from her worries, but even she thought it peculiar to be in the ocean in the middle of the night talking about snowmen. She knew Sorli was trying to console her, and she didn’t resist.

  “Yes, snowmen,” Sorli said. “We had so much snow in Norway that I would ski to school. Have you seen skiing?”

  Lucille shook her head.

  Burke spoke up: “It’s like ice-skating, except you don’t have to be on a pond. Skis are long boards on your feet that let you slide over the snow. I’m from a place that gets a lot of snow, too. Boston.”

  “I would surely like to try that,” said Lucille. “Sonny got a scooter for Christmas, and he wants to ride it to school when we go back to San Antonio. Will someone be able to get it out of the ship when we get rescued? And my dad’s car—it was on the ship, too.”

  The talk ebbed and flowed, with Sorli doing his best to keep Lucille’s spirits up and direct her thoughts away from her family, the plight they were all in, and the cold they all felt right to their bones.

  About two hours had gone by since the Heredia had been torpedoed, and Lucille shivered as she sat on the hatch cover and boards with her legs dangling in the water. The men were talking among themselves, but she was so tired and cold that she didn’t listen.

  She forced herself to stay awake, afraid of falling off the hatch cover. Amusing herself by splashing a bit of water with her foot, she was fascinated by the phosphorescence that spattered on the surface like a glowing sparkler. Pieces of the makeshift raft knocked together in the trough of each small wave that briefly lifted it, and that, too, helped her stay awake. The thought of sharks caused a new kind of chill to shoot through her body. She considered asking Mr. Sorli about the possibility of sharks, but she didn’t even want to say the word out loud. It was so frightening to consider, she forced herself to focus on listening to the men talk. Anything to keep her mind off what might lurk below.

  14

  BATTLING THE COLD

  SONNY AND RAY (SECOND AND THIRD HOURS IN THE OCEAN)

  Ray vowed to himself that he’d do whatever it took to keep his son warm, even if it meant hoisting Sonny out of the water and somehow putting the boy on his shoulders.

  In the darkness, the father could faintly see Sonny’s shape but not the features of his face because high, thin clouds blocked out most of the light from the stars and moon. Ray looked toward Sonny and thought, This is all my fault. I should have known the full danger when they made me sign the release papers before we boarded the ship. He shook his head, realizing that this kind of thinking was torture. Stop. Just focus on Sonny.

  A minute later, Sonny, as if reading his father’s thoughts, asked, “Will Mom and Lucille be all right?”

  “They should be fine,” lied Ray. “They are probably floating on a raft just like us.”

  “That’s right,” said Captain Colburn. “The ship had three rafts.”

  “Where were we when the ship was torpedoed? How far from port?” Conyea asked the captain.

  “About forty miles out from New Orleans. To the southwest.”

  Ray turned his head in the direction of the captain and asked, “When do you think help will come?”

  Captain Colburn hesitated before answering, concerned about saying anything negative in front of Sonny.

  “Just tell us the truth,” said Ray. “We’re going to be fine no matter how long we have to sit on this raft.”

  “Okay,” said Colburn. “We were operating on radio silence, but that doesn’t really matter, because I think the section of the ship where the radio was took a direct hit from one of the torpedoes. So the authorities on shore only know that we were scheduled to reach New Orleans about six A.M. I’m guessing that by eight A.M. they will become concerned. One of the patrol planes will start looking for us.”

  Conyea, who was from New Orleans, added, “And we might get lucky. There are probably several Coast Guard and shrimp boats in the area, and one of them may find us at dawn.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Conyea,” said Ray. “Just gotta sit here patiently until the sun comes up.”

  “Call me George,” said Conyea.

  Ray nodded. Then each survivor settled in for a long night, lost in his own thoughts. Ray tried to make an honest assessment of their situation. They had no food or water. Once the sun came up, their thirst would increase, and dehydration would wear them down with each passing hour. The weather was calm, with just a light breeze, and for that Ray was thankful. If the seas had been rough, like the day before, none of them would have been able to hang on to the flimsy raft. They were lucky indeed to be in gentle swells rather than breaking waves. Because the waves were not large, none of the survivors were seasick. However, they had no flares to signal a plane or patrol boat that might appear on the horizon.

  After days of traveling from South America on the Heredia, Ray had an appreciation for the vastness of the ocean. He felt that the little raft was like the proverbial needle in a haystack: it was going to be difficult to find. And a person in the water without a raft would be nearly impossible to locate. Ray said a silent prayer that Ina and Lucille were together on a raft and not alone in the endless void of the sea.

  * * *

  Around five in the morning, Sonny was shivering slightly. He could hardly believe how slowly the night was passing. It seemed like it had been days ago that the Heredia was torpedoed. He knew he was supposed to tell his father if he was cold, but he thought it best not to say anything for a while. The grown-ups had stopped talking, but every now and then Sonny’s dad would ask how he was doing.

  “Sonny, it will be dawn soon, and we’ll all get a chance to warm up in the sun.”

  “Yes, Dad, I, I … know.”

  Ray picked up the hesitation in the boy’s voice, and he could tell Sonny was shaking.

  “Mr. Conyea—I mean, George,” said Ray, “I’m going to have Sonny come sit with me, so you may need to shift position slightly.”

  “Okay; it will be good to move. My back is as stiff as can be.”

  Ray slid down to the end of his side of the raft closest to Sonny’s side, and then said, “Sonny, you can scoot over to me now.”

  The boy had no trouble sliding to his father. It was wonderful to feel his dad’s muscular arm pull him in tight so that he was leaning into his dad’s chest. Sonny could relax, and he began to examine the luminescence where the gentle swells swirled around the raft. On board the ship, his father had called the eerie light phosphorescence, and Sonny was fascinated by the glowing plankton that shimmered in the night.

  Feeling secure in his father’s embrace, the boy closed his eyes for the first time since the ship had been torpedoed. He must have dozed for a few minutes but was awakened by a commotion.

  “I’ve got it,” said Captain Colburn.

  Sonny could see that the captain had something large in his hands, but the boy had no idea what it was.

  “What’s happening, Dad?”

  “We saw a board floating on the water, and the captain was able to grab it. Might come in handy in the morning. Maybe use it as a paddle.”

  * * *

  U-BOAT COMMANDER WÜRDEMANN

  The same night that he torpedoed the Heredia, Commander Würdemann saw a small freighter on an easterly course.
This ship was lucky. The young commander estimated that he could not get in position before daylight, and he let the ship sail away. U-506 submerged. Würdemann was content with the prize of sinking the Heredia … for now. He still had more torpedoes.

  The commander didn’t have to wait long for his next target. The Halo, a 7,000-ton tanker loaded with oil, was zigzagging in a rapidly changing pattern, making it a much more difficult target than the Heredia. But Würdemann knew that this was a loaded tanker, a real prize, and although the ship came in and out of sight, he doggedly pursued it. When he finally was within 450 meters, he ordered two torpedoes fired.

  “After twenty-one seconds,” the commander wrote in his diary, “[the torpedoes] hit forward edge of the bridge and center. Tanker bursts into flames and in just a moment is a torch. A heavy internal explosion follows. Apparently the tanker is torn apart in the middle. Details cannot be distinguished in the bright fiery flare.” Würdemann watched his prize burn for a few minutes, then “dived, ran off.” But an hour later his curiosity got the better of him, and he surfaced in a different location, farther away and confirmed that the ship had indeed sunk and that “burning oil can still be seen some time on the water.”

  While most of the Halo’s sailors survived the initial explosion by jumping into the sea, help was slow in coming, as the ship did not get off an SOS. Over the next few days, men began dying of exposure. Of the 42 crew members, one was rescued after five days and two were picked up after seven days of clinging to a half-burned raft. The other 39 crew members perished.

  Within hours of sinking the Halo, Würdemann spotted two freighters and used his last three torpedoes in a vain attempt to sink them. With the first freighter, Würdemann thought he had miscalculated the freighter’s speed, but the second left him scratching his head. “Both [torpedoes] missed, unexplained with low range and good data. From sound, both torpedoes ran perfectly.”

  While the commander was miffed at this waste of torpedoes, the crew was likely thinking of home. They had been at sea for 45 days, and their time in the Gulf was especially difficult because of the intense heat. It felt as if they were in the mouth of a dragon. No one had bathed during the trip, and condensation formed inside the sub, adding a clammy feeling to the men’s stinking bodies. All the fresh food had been consumed, and the men were living on rice and gruel.

  The crew had survived depth charges dropped by enemy aircraft and a near grounding off the mouth of the Mississippi, but it was the day-to-day challenges of being locked inside a steel tube that wore down even the most gung-ho sailor. Würdemann was a rare exception. He had used up all his torpedoes and set a course to return to Lorient, yet he still hoped to bag another ship by using his deck guns. As U-506 plowed eastward, the commander sent a short message to Lorient, encouraging his superiors to send more U-boats to the area. “Off Mississippi continuous heavy independent traffic. Certainly worthwhile for other boats. Constant air, however no sea patrol determined.”

  15

  DAWN

  INA (FIFTH HOUR IN THE OCEAN)

  Morning’s gray light crept across the sky. Ina could no longer see any sign of the Heredia or the U-boat that had sunk it, just debris in the water. After a few minutes, with sunlight now breaking through hazy clouds, she thought she could make out the shapes of people in the distance, sitting on a raft of flotsam.

  Her hopes soared. Ina’s vision, however, was badly blurred by the oil in her eyes, so she wasn’t sure if the shapes really were survivors. Her left eye stung, and her eyelid was almost sealed shut. She said a silent prayer, wiped at her eyes with an oily hand, and then kicked her legs to get closer to the shapes.

  When she was 20 feet away, she could hear the group talking, and she called out, “Sonny! Lucille! Ray!”

  “We’re sailors!” came the response. “We’ll help you.”

  The sailors were sitting on a large piece of wood that likely had come from the Heredia. Holding on to her tiny board, Ina kicked toward the sailors and asked, “Have you seen my husband and children?”

  “No, ma’am,” the two sailors responded. One slipped into the water, keeping his naked body out of sight. They all looked around at the horizon, helping Ina scan the bobbing debris for her family. The heaps of broken wood and scattered pieces of the ship’s equipment were thinning out with time and the pull of wind and currents. Nobody wanted to guess if she’d ever see her family again.

  * * *

  LUCILLE (FIFTH AND SIXTH HOURS IN THE OCEAN)

  Lucille, drifting over a mile away from her mother, also saw the arrival of dawn. A cloudless sky slowly brightened to reveal a scene of destruction as far as Lucille could see. She shivered at the sight of pieces of wreckage, the dead body of a sailor floating facedown in the distance, and a dull gray sheen on the water where oil stained the surface.

  As the makeshift raft rocked up and over small swells, its occupants scanned the horizon: no sign of ships, rescuers, or Lucille’s family. The sailors in the water around Lucille’s raft did their best to stay warm and alert, knowing that drifting off to sleep might kill them.

  Lucille laughed and said, “Hey, Mr. Roy, quit tickling me.”

  “Tickling you?” asked the second mate.

  “Yes, my feet.”

  “Maybe you could shift over here a bit and bring your feet up on the raft,” Sorli suggested. “That will make it easier for me to tickle them.”

  Sorli had seen the large shape of a shark beneath them and knew that was what had brushed up against Lucille’s feet. He would do his best to keep her from looking down and discovering what was there.

  Lucille started to hum. The men encouraged her to sing, and she sang one of the church songs that her mother liked.

  To pass the time, Sorli proceeded to teach Lucille the meanings of many of the signal flags and how they could be combined to convey a ship’s circumstances.

  The second mate knew how to make the best of a bad situation. He didn’t want to talk in depth about his home and family because many of the memories were painful. Roy was the youngest of 12 children who had learned to work hard at an early age on his family’s subsistence farm north of the Arctic Circle. Long, sunless winters forced him and his siblings to make up games to entertain themselves when they had free time. His father had been a harsh taskmaster, and leaving home at 16 had seemed like Roy’s only option. Yet Roy Sorli was a gentle soul who sought quiet companionship, and he worshipped his fiancée, who he knew would worry when she didn’t hear from him that day. Distracting Lucille was also distracting himself, keeping the sailor from worrying that his future plans might not come to pass.

  * * *

  SONNY AND RAY (FIFTH AND SIXTH HOURS IN THE OCEAN)

  A faint hint of dawn enabled red-haired Captain Colburn to better see his bleak surroundings. The gray canvas-covered raft seemed minuscule and so flimsy that he wondered how long it would take for the fabric to rip and the balsa wood to float free. He glanced at his shipwrecked mates. George Conyea appeared exhausted, and he had said very little during the night. The boy, Sonny, hadn’t cried once, but he looked so small and skinny that the captain knew he must be extremely cold. His father, Ray, had calmed down since he’d thought he heard his wife shouting, and he was now holding the boy close to his chest.

  It crossed the captain’s mind that the four of them might be the only survivors of the ship. If that were true, his own survival would become a lifelong burden and source of shame rather than a blessing. He imagined what the newspapers would say and what other mariners would think. It would look bad when they learned that of the entire crew of Heredia, he, the captain, was the only one who lived. That would mean 49 of his crew had perished, six of the Navy Armed Guard, and three out of the six passengers—all on his vessel, on his watch, during his leadership. He knew that the notion that the captain should go down with the ship was still strong. But, he thought, at least these three civilians on the raft with me can testify that we were the very last ones off the ship. It didn’t ease
his anguish, but it was something.

  Colburn had also been thinking about sharks on and off all night, doing his best to put the predators out of his mind. But when Ray Downs shifted positions slightly, the captain’s eyes widened. In the gloom he saw a dark smudge on Ray Downs’s knee.

  “Is that blood or oil on your leg?” asked the captain.

  “Blood,” said Ray. “I cut myself trying to break through the window.”

  “Let me help you cover the wound. I can tear off a piece of my shirt.”

  “I can get it,” answered Ray. “We’ve got the raft pretty well balanced, and the less moving around, the better.”

  Ray wore only a sleeveless T-shirt and his boxer shorts. He ripped a small patch of cloth from his T-shirt to tie around the cut.

  Sonny watched his father’s hands work. The gash looked deep, and even after Roy had been in the ocean more than three hours, the wound was still trickling blood.

  “How bad does it hurt, Dad?”

  “Can barely feel it. Salt water stings a bit. This bulky life jacket bothers me as much as the cut, the way it’s rubbing against my skin. I’ll bet your life jacket is doing the same.”

  “I don’t mind. I’m sure glad I had it on when we were climbing up the stairway from our cabin. I felt like I was being dragged to the bottom of the sea.”

  “Me, too,” said Ray. “I tried to hold on to you, but the water just yanked you away.”

  “Did you try and grab my leg?”

  “Don’t remember. Everything happened so fast.”

  “Something grabbed my leg and scared me, so I kicked at it. Hope it wasn’t you. Hope it wasn’t Mom or Lucille.”

  Ray winced. The thought of Ina and Lucille being pulled to the depths was more than he could handle. He had never been religious like his wife, but now he said a silent prayer. He thought it was a miracle that he had escaped the sinking ship, and maybe God did have a hand in his survival so he could be here with his son. Mixed with these thoughts of God was a brooding anger that bubbled to his consciousness periodically. His most intense fury was directed at the Germans on the submarine. They had crossed an entire ocean and most of the Gulf to hunt down and torpedo a ship that wasn’t even part of the military. They will pay for this, he thought. Nobody hurts my family and gets away with it.