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.