The black armor-plated Lincoln convertible slowly rolled down a ramp and into the Washington Navy Yard. A contingent of Secret Service agents stood on the car’s running boards with a sharp eye on the Sunshine Special’s passenger, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was not feeling well that Saturday afternoon, plagued with a constant headache and still recovering from a recent surgical procedure to remove a sebaceous cyst from the back of his neck. Eleanor Roosevelt and Anne, his son John’s wife, were in the backseat with the president.
Concerned about the president’s health, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, the president’s cousin and one of his closest confidants, urged Roosevelt not to put the convertible’s top down, as he usually liked to do, especially following his recent neck surgery. “I’ll wear a scarf,” the president told his worried cousin in a telephone conversation the night before his trip. “Will that cover it [the surgical site]?” Suckley inquired, to which Roosevelt replied that it would not. Suckley urged him to wear an ear muff. “Yes, & have the other ear muff over my forehead,” Roosevelt joked.1
Roosevelt ventured to the navy yard on that cold February day in 1944, Lincoln’s birthday, to commemorate “the ancient friendship between France and the United States” and to transfer to the Free French a new warship, the destroyer escort Senegalais. Roosevelt began speaking via a radio hookup in the back of his open car parked next to the new ship as the Stars and Stripes and French Tricolor whipped from the shiny vessel’s main masthead in the brisk winter wind. “On behalf of the American people, I transfer to the Navy of France this warship—built by American hands in an American navy yard.” Roosevelt continued: “She is a new class—a destroyer escort—speedy and dangerous. I want to tell you something else about her—that there are more where she came from. Under our Lend-Lease agreement, she is not the only ship that you will receive from us—we are building others for your sailors to man.” Roosevelt concluded by saying, “Good luck, Senegalais—and good hunting” as a full crew of American-trained French sailors stood on the deck in full salute to the American president.
In remarks broadcast by shortwave radio to France and North Africa, Roosevelt said the transfer might better be described as a “reverse Lend-Lease” because in his nation’s early days the situation was reversed. “At that time,” the president noted, “instead of France receiving an American-made ship, the young nation of the United States was glad to receive, happy to receive, a ship made in France by Frenchmen—the Bon Homme Richard—a ship made illustrious under the command of John Paul Jones, in the days of our Navy’s infancy.” Roosevelt, a student of naval history since childhood, went on to remind listeners that the ship was named in honor of America’s minister to France, Benjamin Franklin, “that wise old philosopher who was the father of the close friendship between France and the United States.”2
Named in honor of the French West African natives who assisted in the American invasion of North Africa, the Senegalais was originally commissioned as the USS Corbesier in January 1943 and would become one of six destroyer escorts transferred to the Free French, fighting under British control. Other DEs sent to France included the USS Cronin, USS Crosley, and three other ships (DE-109, -110, and -111) not named before transfer to the French.3
This new class of warship, the destroyer escort, was smaller than the traditional destroyer. The ships were more agile and maneuverable with a smaller turning circle than their larger cousins, allowing them to better track, attack, and evade German submarines. They also carried the latest antisubmarine equipment, including sonar echoing used to find German U-boats using supersonic sound transmission. Built in six different designs using available power plants, the warships ranged from 1,140 to 1,450 tons unloaded, were 290 to 308 feet long, and carried a complement of men ranging from 180 to 220, including officers. They were mass-produced and could be built faster and more cheaply than destroyers, costing about $5 to $6 million each compared to a price tag of $10 million for a traditional destroyer.4
The USS Liddle’s captain, R. M. Hinckley Jr., peers from the bridge as the DE makes its way through the stormy North Atlantic. Commissioned in December 1943, the Liddle safely escorted three convoys to Wales, Gibraltar, and Tunisia. Later it was converted to a high-speed transport ship and assigned to the Pacific, where it successfully shot down five Japanese kamikazes. Photo taken by Harold S. Deal; courtesy Jeff Deal
Sailing at speeds ranging from twenty to twenty-four knots (destroyers could sail at forty knots or more), the ships also carried an ample amount of fire power. Ships had two depth-charge racks on the stern, which housed twentyfour drumlike units often called “ash cans,” each packed with two hundred to six hundred pounds of trinitrotoluene or TNT. These rather crude implements were the original antisubmarine weapons used in World War I, when submarines did not operate at great depths. They would be dropped from the stern of the vessel and set to explode at a preset depth based on water pressure, destroying U-boats prowling below.
DEs also carried another weapon that would prove deadly for Hitler’s U-boat fleet: hedgehogs—twenty-four individual bombs, each packed with thirty pounds of TNT—that could be launched simultaneously in an elliptical pattern 270 yards ahead of the ship and would explode on contact with any solid object, such as a submarine. The weapons, developed by the British, earned their odd name because, when unloaded, the rows of empty spigots where the bombs fit were said to resemble the spine of the small mammal. A hedgehog would not require the ship to be directly over a submarine to launch, as depth charges did, but could be fired ahead of the ship to clear its path. The ships also had antiaircraft guns and three torpedo tubes.
Sailors on board the USS Liddle watch depth charges explode off the stern of the ship. DEs had two depth-charge racks on the stern, which housed twenty-four drumlike units, often called “ash cans.” Packed with two hundred to six hundred pounds of TNT, the ash cans were dropped over the stern and set to explode at a preset depth based on water pressure, destroying any U-boats prowling below. Photo taken by Harold S. Deal; courtesy Jeff Deal
Hedgehogs explode off the bow of the USS Liddle in the North Atlantic in 1944. These British antisubmarine weapons consisted of twenty-four individual bombs—each packed with thirty pounds of TNT—launched simultaneously in an elliptical pattern 270 yards ahead of the ship. They would explode on contact with a solid object, such as a submarine. The photo also captures two of the still-unexploded bombs in the air. Photo taken by Harold S. Deal; courtesy Jeff Deal
Life for the sailors on board these tiny ships was not always a comfortable one. More than two hundred sailors cramped into a vessel about 300 feet long and 35 feet wide made for interesting but necessary sleeping arrangements. Some sailors had assigned bunks or hammocks, while others slept in the mess, where their bunks were turned up to make room for sailors to dine. Often there were more sailors on board then there were lockers, forcing some to live out of their seabags. They slept with their uniforms placed carefully under their two-inch-thick mattresses so that they would be pressed and ready when the ships were in port and sailors were given a few hours liberty. In the Pacific liberty often consisted of a few hours on a sandy beach with each sailor given two or three cans of warm beer to quench his thirst.
In order to pass the time, many sailors kept a diary of their days afloat. Although strictly forbidden by the Navy, sailors such as Jim Larner of the USS Day made daily entries into his journal beginning the first day he stepped on board the destroyer escort in June 1944. “I recorded a lot of information I saw, heard and experienced,” Larner recalled, describing how he would lie in his bunk backward while he wrote in his diary. “No officer ever tried to look to see what I was doing and I never told any of my shipmates, who were always playing poker down below me.”
DE sailors had plenty of chores to do while on board ship, including swabbing the deck, chipping paint, repairing guns, and cleaning the engine rooms. All living spaces were swept down three times a day. Here two sailors are scrubbing their hammocks on deck. Because of limited space, many new arrivals slept in hanging hammocks instead of bunks. Photo taken by Harold S. Deal; courtesy Jeff Deal
Larner’s bunk was number 206 up on top, between a steam pipe and the port side hull, with the deck just above his head. “In the North Atlantic Ocean, I slept beside that steam pipe and it was nice and warm,” Warner said. “But as winter was coming on, the deck above my head and the port side wall was getting cold.”
Sometimes at sea for months at a time, sailors had to rely on their shipmates for many basic grooming and personal care services. Eugene Squires of Aynor, South Carolina, uses his barber skills to give a trim to Yeoman Clarence W. LaFollette of Hazelpark, Michigan, while the USS Liddle escorts a convoy through the North Atlantic. Photo taken by Harold S. Deal; courtesy Jeff Deal
Despite their smaller size, these new warships were built to be taken seriously, as German U-boat captains were about to discover. Although they were tardy in arriving to the war, DEs would end up being the Allies’ most efficient and effective vessel to detect and destroy submarines and would be credited with playing a key role in halting the massive slaughter of Allied and merchant vessels at the hands of German submarine commanders.
But these novel new vessels would not carry out their mission without some casualties, as the youthful sailors on board the Coast Guard–manned USS Leopold discovered when, on one cold moonlit night in March 1944, the four-month-old Leopold and five other DEs were escorting a fifteen-ship convoy across the North Atlantic from New York to Ireland. Sounds of the Mills Brothers’ popular new hit, “Paper Doll,” emanated from the midship compartment. A five-piece ragtag band of DE sailors was playing the song that catapulted the African American entertainers to stardom in 1943, while sailors dreamed about their upcoming liberty in Ireland. The weather was rough, said Signalman J. Armond Burgun, and it took tremendous effort just to keep the convoy of ships from drifting apart as they sailed through the turbulent and dangerous waters about 540 miles southwest of Iceland.
Of the 563 DEs built in World War II, only sixteen were lost to enemy action over the course of the entire war in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, a remarkable record since these little vessels were sent out in harm’s way. Only five of the sixteen were sunk by U-boats, including the USS Fiske, pictured above, disappearing beneath the waters of the North Atlantic. The DE was sunk by U-804 east of Newfoundland, killing thirty-three American sailors and badly wounding fifty others. U.S. Navy Photograph, courtesy the Destroyer Escort Historical Museum
Son of a traveling eyeglass salesman, Burgun left school to enlist in the Coast Guard when he was only sixteen years old after lying about his age. After boot camp at Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, where former heavyweight boxing champion Jack Dempsey taught him physical education, Burgun went to signal school before being assigned to the Leopold, under construction in Orange, Texas.5 Making its first convoy from Norfolk to Casablanca in January, the ship was escorting vessels loaded with ammunition, food, and troops. The crossing took about a month and was uneventful except for one sailor falling overboard and disappearing beneath the turbulent ocean waters. They never even picked up any sonar contacts in the waters that were believed to be rife with prowling German U-boats.
On their next convoy in March 1944, things would change. Fifteen tankers carrying high-octane aircraft fuel for use in shuttle bombing by England were being escorted by the Leopold and USS Joyce—both running along the convoy’s flank—and four other DEs, all manned by Coast Guard crews under the command of Lt. Cdr. Kenneth Phillips. The waters were rough and the weather stormy. “Just keeping the ships together was murder,” Burgun said, adding that it was fortunate tankers ride low in the water and were fast. The Leopold also was equipped with a high-frequency direction finder, nicknamed Huff Duff, for use in monitoring German radio traffic in order to triangulate a position of the U-boats.
“I was reading some letters from home at 7:20 that night,” Seaman Lucas Bobbitt said. “I had just washed and pressed my tailor-mades. We were all getting excited about liberty. We hadn’t made any liberties in Ireland. The guys were wondering if you could get some beer and what the girls were like,” Bobbitt said. “In the midship compartment a jam session was going on. We had a five-piece band, trumpet, clarinet, guitar—couple of other instruments. It was just a pickup band, but they were good.”6
That night, as the happy musicians played “Paper Doll,” the alarm sounded and everyone rushed to battle stations, preparing for a yet-unseen enemy. Sailors first thought it was just another drill, but they soon realized that this was the real thing. The Leopold quickly reversed course racing to investigate the radar contact about five miles south of the convoy, and it wouldn’t take long to find what their radar had detected. Dead ahead, about two thousand yards, was the German submarine U-255, sitting on the surface in the stark winter moonlight and brightly illuminated by star shells fired from the Leopold. The DE skipper gave the order to commence firing and to stand by to ram the submarine at flank speed. “We fired everything we had,” Burgun said.7
Captain Erich Harms, commander of U-255, had been tracking the convoy, but he and his crew were startled that they had been discovered while presumably surfaced to recharge their batteries. Scrambling off the deck of the submarine, the Germans quickly plunged down the conning tower hatch and prepared to dive—but not before firing an acoustic torpedo at the Leopold. It was a direct hit, with a violent explosion nearly splitting the destroyer escort in half. Lights and communication on board the ship instantly were knocked out and the dreadful sound of groaning metal could be heard as the mortally wounded ship started to break in two. The Leopold, which had been built in a near-record ninety days and commissioned only four months earlier, would earn the dubious distinction of being the first destroyer escort sunk in the Battle of the Atlantic. It would not be the last.
“The main lamp exploded in my gut,” said Burgun, who was on the signal bridge getting ready to illuminate the submarine. The torpedo tore through the ship, lifting it right out of the water. Burgun said, “I was thrown about twenty yards,” whacking his head and fracturing his leg. The captain ordered the injured sailor to get a damage report. Hobbling as best he could on one leg, he went down the ladder to the engine room to find out the condition of the ship. “The keel is broken,” the damage-control officer told Burgun. Rushing back with his report to the skipper, Burgun heard the order to abandon ship. “That’s the worst thing you can hear in the North Atlantic,” with its forty-foot waves and 22-degree temperatures, Burgun said.8
“The explosion threw me against the breech of the gun. I had a shell in my hand,” Seaman Bobbitt said. “The grating from the deck was ripped loose and hit me on the side of my right leg. I got up. The second loader had the whole side of his face blown off. He was begging for a pharmacist’s mate.” Seaman Troy Gowers also was at the gun station when the torpedo hit. “I was blown right out of my shoes and into a life net a dozen feet away,” he recalled. “I crawled back to my station, and without power, tried to work the gun manually, but it was jammed.”9
Seaman Richard Novotny, a quartermaster trainee, or “striker” as it is known, had just hit the sack because he had the midnight watch. Jumping out of bed, he raced to his battle station on the 20-mm starboard-side gun. Turning, Novotny saw the submarine’s conning tower off the port bow, now brightly illuminated by the star shells. “It appeared we were running at flank speed, approaching the sub bow on, and about to smash into the conning tower,” he said. Suddenly, disaster struck the DE as the torpedo ripped through its hull. “I was in and out of a conscious state,” Novotny recalled. When he awoke he found himself struggling to stay afloat in the frigid water, clad only in shredded dungarees, swimming with one arm to a life raft some fifteen yards away. He was not able to use his left arm or his legs to propel himself since the explosion had severely damaged three of his spinal vertebrae.
Gazing up at his wounded ship, Novotny saw the chief quartermaster, William Graham, hanging by his foot on the starboard anchor’s fluke as dozens of his shipmates struggled just to stay alive in the freezing waters. A delirious Novotny lapsed in and out of consciousness.10
Scrambling across the deck awash with blood and dodging the body parts of shipmates, Burgun, the signalman with the broken leg, leaped into the icy water filled with burning debris and corpses bobbing up and down near the buckling ship. Fortunately for Burgun he had been on watch and was dressed in foul-weather gear, which acted as a sort of wet suit, helping him to survive in the freezing waters. Grabbing hold of a float, Burgun and twenty-seven of his shipmates gripped the raft in the freezing water and would wait more than ten hours before help arrived. When the USS Joyce finally came to rescue the sailors the next morning, only six of the original twenty-seven were still alive.
“We had to stay awake. We sang, we yelled at each other, we slapped each other to try to not go to sleep,” Burgun said, noting that once sailors fell asleep they often lapsed into unconsciousness and died. Hope among the shivering sailors was raised as the Joyce’s silhouette appeared in the moonlight around midnight. But those hopes were dashed when Capt. Robert Wilcox of the Joyce came out on the bridge and, using a bullhorn, said, “We’re dodging torpedoes. God bless you. We’ll be back,” and the destroyer escort sped away into the darkness as the freezing sailors watched in despair. Burgun held one of his shipmates in his arms all night, hoping to keep him awake and warm so he would live. He did not survive, and Burgun handed the lifeless body to sailors on board the Joyce the next morning. Only twenty-eight sailors of the crew of two hundred on board the Leopold survived. All thirteen officers went down with the ship. And U-255 escaped and returned to France unharmed.11
With one DE under their belt, it was not long before Adolph Hitler’s men took aim at more of America’s newest U-boat fighters since, after all, the little destroyer escorts were starting to rack up a respectable number of “kills” sinking nearly a dozen U-boats in only five months following the torpedoing of the Leopold. During that same period two additional destroyer escorts—the USS Fechteler and USS Fiske—were sunk by U-boats and four others badly damaged by German torpedoes, sending more than 130 young American sailors to watery graves.
But destroyer escorts had more to worry about than just Hitler’s U-boats. There was danger in the skies as well, as Germany’s highly trained Luftwaffe targeted the little ships sailing on the dark and lonely oceans of the world. Terry Thomas, the seventeen-year-old son of immigrant parents living in Detroit, was on board the Coast Guard–manned USS Rhodes when he was jarred awake in the wee hours of the morning of April Fool’s Day 1944. His ship, along with several other DEs, was escorting a convoy of ninety-eight ships carrying vital war supplies through the Mediterranean Sea en route to Bizerte, Tunisia. Thomas soon discovered this was no April Fool’s joke.
The DE picked up a voice radio signal that enemy bombers were overhead. Sailors topside peered into the eerie darkness but could not see any planes, although they could hear the telltale sounds of aircraft engines nearby. Immediately opening fire at the unseen enemy, they hoped it would keep the Germans from attacking the convoy. It didn’t work. Nazi bombers and torpedo planes dove out of the night sky, dropping flares to illuminate the convoy and firing at the destroyer escorts and their charges. When the call to battle stations rang out, Thomas could tell from the urgency in his captain’s voice that this was no drill. He jumped from his bunk and ran up to the 20-mm guns where he served as a loader.
The night sky was illuminated by tracer bullets, and the young sailor was struck by how beautiful they looked—just like fireworks he remembered at home. But he knew this was no Fourth of July show and that mortal danger lurked in that darkness. The planes were flying very fast and so low that he saw the face of one of the German pilots and the swastika emblazoned on the plane’s fuselage as it dived about fifty feet above the Mediterranean waters. They continued to fire on the convoy as the little DEs peppered them with antiaircraft fire. The mast of his ship was nearly hit twice by the low-flying planes, Thomas recalled, but the bombers were turned away by the incessant antiaircraft firing. “We got one German plane,” he said, “and everybody claimed it.” Five German aircraft were shot down during the battle.
Sailors on board the USS Savage, another Coast Guard–manned DE in the convoy, also pounded the night sky with gunfire. Radioman Daniel Farley, who grew up in Methuen, Massachusetts, as the son of a textile mill worker, was asleep when the call came to man battle stations. “Boy, you wake up quick and run up the ladder to your post,” Farley said. During the attack one of Farley’s shipmates was injured when he was struck in the ankle by shell fragments.
A Liberty ship, the SS Jarard Ingersoll was heavily damaged by the German aircraft and started to sink. The USS Mills, another destroyer escort, rushed to rescue survivors, then came alongside the blazing ship in order to put a fire-control party on board to extinguish the flames. The battle with the Luftwaffe lasted only about a quarter of an hour, but for the sailors on those DEs firing at unseen targets in the darkness, it seemed a lot longer. The destroyer escorts USS Tomich, Sloat, and Sellstrom also participated in repelling the German air attack.
John W. Avener was a nineteen-year-old torpedoman on board the USS Ramsden, a six-month-old DE built in Houston, Texas, and manned by the Coast Guard. Once the German bombers retreated, Avener said, an incident every bit as chilling and unsettling as the attack itself occurred: “After the firing was over we saw a flare go up from a life raft off the port beam.” It was still dark out and they could not use their powerful searchlights to find the location of the raft for fear they would be seen by the enemy. “Hang on old fellow, we’re coming to get you,” the captain broadcast over the loudspeaker, as the Ramsden headed in the direction of the flare.
“As we approached the raft, someone threw a line toward his voice. It must have missed as he yelled, ‘No good, no good.’” Then the unthinkable happened: “In trying to maneuver the ship closer, the engines suddenly reversed and he [the man on the raft] was sucked into the screws. Come daylight we searched the area but found nothing.”12
Ten days later destroyer escorts would again encounter the German Luftwaffe, but this time the Americans would not fare as well. The USS Holder was leading a convoy of sixty ships carrying vital supplies through the dangerous waters off the coast of Algeria in the Mediterranean. As a near-full moon reflected off the dark ocean, the Holder had taken the place of the flagship USS Stanton as head of the convoy, about a day away from reaching its port.
Holder signalman Edmond J. Anuszczyk had watch on the bridge around midnight on 11 April when suddenly a red flare, the color of grinding cast iron, dropped dead ahead of the ship, followed by four bright yellow flares off the three-month-old vessel’s starboard side. Anuszczyk watched the flares descend slowly from the dark skies, as though attached to parachutes. The sounds of airplane engines pierced the darkness as alarms were sounded. The Holder fired into the darkness and smoke machines were activated to help hide the ships, but by then it was too late.
Suddenly thirty-five German bombers and torpedo planes struck in a coordinated attack as they dived down, skimmed the water, and launched a torpedo, which ripped right through the Holder amidship on the port side below the water line. Joseph Carinci, gun captain on board the sister ship USS Hissem, fired more than 150 rounds from his 3-inch guns but the planes quickly veered off into the dark skies, out of the range of fire.
The Holder went dark as all power and communication were knocked out and the vessel began to list to starboard. Fires erupted with flames reaching into the night and the ship, which now lay motionless, began to take on water. The brave young sailors remained at their battle stations as their ship, engulfed in flames, pounded the night sky with gunfire to keep the bombers from returning and harming any other ships in the convoy. Damage-control sailors were able to keep the ship seaworthy and the destroyer escort USS Forester came alongside to assist with the dead and injured.
Seaman Charles Grunewald said the Holder was a sitting duck for the Germans, “a perfect silhouette” in the bright moonlight, as the flares helped even more to pinpoint the vessel for the German bombers. The explosion “blew me higher than the stack because when I started down, I could see inside of it.” Signalman Anuszczyk also was blown into the air, and he lapsed into unconsciousness for a period of time, waking up in a half-sitting position against the bulkhead, his face and forehead streaming in blood. Sixteen sailors, including the ship’s chief engineer, died, and thirteen others were wounded in the attack.
Still afloat, the crippled ship was towed to Algiers for temporary repairs before joining a convoy of ships back to the United States. Damage was extensive—the Holder’s first battle with the enemy would be its last. But the destroyer escorts had done their job—not a single merchant ship was damaged, and their essential supplies were protected during the barrage, which lasted for more than an hour and a half, according to a report prepared by the yeoman on the Hissem, on its first combat mission during the Holder assault.13
Within three weeks of the Holder’s demise, two more destroyer escorts— the USS Menges and USS Donnell—would suffer extensive damage and another would be sunk at the hands of German submarines. The Menges, a Coast Guard–manned ship only seven months old, was part of an eighty-ship convoy traveling along the African coast when the entire collection of ships nearly ran right into a German submarine, surfaced near Bougie to recharge its batteries. On its maiden convoy, the destroyer escort already had distinguished itself by splashing a German aircraft after thirty torpedo bombers— on their way to the East Coast of the United States—attacked and sunk an American destroyer, the USS Lansdale. The Menges rescued more than two hundred survivors. But the young ship’s luck was about to run out.
Realizing he had been detected, Captain Horst-Arno Fenski, commander of U-371, quickly dived his boat in the early morning hours of 3 May 1944, but not before firing an acoustic torpedo at the destroyer escort, closing in for what he hoped would be a U-boat kill. The Menges deployed its foxer gear after seventeen-year-old sonarman Robert McMichael detected the boat. “I had just picked up the sub, made one complete sweep and started back when we were hit,” McMichael recalled.
The submarine’s torpedo ripped through the ship’s aft section, destroying the vessel’s propellers and rudder. The blast carried every one of the ship’s depth charges into the sea and was so violent that it hurled a washing machine, bolted to a lower deck, 150 feet forward and upward until it smashed against an antiaircraft gun on the upper deck. Apparently the foxer gear, which consisted of metals rods towed behind the ship that would hit each other theoretically to create a sound louder than the ship’s propeller, failed to attract the acoustic torpedo, which wrecked one-third of the ship’s stern. Thirty-one American sailors died and twenty-five others were wounded.
As the young destroyer escort continued its death throes, the U-boat went deep and crept silently along the coast with two other destroyer escorts and other Allied vessels in hot pursuit, bombarding the waters with depth charges, which caused damage and flooding on board the submarine. But Fenski went deeper—more than 750 feet below the water—where he lay silently for the rest of the day. Without a full charge in his batteries, however, the air inside U-371 was starting to foul and flooding was said to be “knee deep.” The commander needed to surface.14
Waiting on the surface were six Allied warships, including the destroyer escorts Joseph E. Campbell, Pride, another Coast Guard–manned ship, and the Senegalais, the DE given to the French by President Roosevelt only three months earlier. As the submarine surfaced the Allied vessels closed in, firing their guns at the fleeing boat. Fenski fired an acoustic torpedo, which hit the Senegalais, killing 49 of the 179 men on board. Realizing he could not escape, the submarine captain ordered his men to abandon ship and scuttle the boat. Prisoners, including the captain, were taken on board the Campbell and Senegalais, the latter towed to Bougie and repaired.15
That very same day, the USS Donnell was steaming east on its fifth crossing, screening a convoy of tankers to assist in the buildup for the cross-Channel European invasion. Sailors on board the destroyer escort were conducting an antisubmarine drill that, unknown to them, was about to turn into the real thing. Lurking nearby was one of Hitler’s U-boats, U-473, commanded by twenty-seven-year-old Captain Heinz Sternberg, traveling silently at periscope depth. Sternberg had sailed from Lorient with several electronic specialists on board who were testing radar and radar detectors. The Nazi captain peered through the periscope as the convoy steamed about 280 miles east of Ireland. Suddenly battle stations sounded as the Donnell’s sonar picked up an echo, and within minutes Sternberg’s periscope was sighted piercing the water’s surface. The Donnell left the convoy and took off after the submarine.
Twenty-four-year-old seaman Daniel Sileo rushed to his battle station behind the torpedo tubes as sailors readied weapons. But it was too late. Sternberg already had fired an acoustic torpedo at the DE, which blew off the stern of the American ship. It all happened so fast that there was little time to fire weapons or deploy the foxer gear.
Although the ship remained afloat, twenty-nine American sailors lost their lives from the explosion, which left another twenty-five battered and bleeding. Sileo, who left his job as a color grinder at the Atlas Powder Company in Stamford, Connecticut, after being drafted into the Navy in 1943, recalled one of his shipmates was found alive floating on a mattress some two hundred yards from the ship. In addition to the explosion from the German torpedo, some of the Donnell’s own depth charges exploded, causing additional damage to the vessel. “I can still see her, dead in the water,” recalled Radioman A. J. Petty, “her after-end curled up like a scorpion’s tail, up and toward the 1.1 gun.” Some speculated that the curled-up tail very well may have saved the ship from sinking.
Daniel Sileo had no desire to go to war. After quitting high school at seventeen, he went to work at Atlas, married, and had a seven-month-old daughter. He was just starting out, had a good job and a young family, and his whole life ahead of him. But the war changed all that, just as it did for so many young Americans, and when the Navy called him to serve, he knew it was his duty. Because of the desperate need for manpower, Sileo spent just two weeks at boot camp in Sampson before being shipped to Pier 92 in New York City, where he went on board the Donnell. His ship made four successful transatlantic crossings prior to the fateful one in May 1944, safely escorting convoys through U-boat-infested waters between the United States and Londonderry.
Sileo said the legendary heavy North Atlantic weather battered the ship on some of those convoys. In fact, one crossing was so rough that he could still see the shores of Ireland after being at sea for a full two days. He also remembered another instance when an airplane flew over the convoy and shined a powerful searchlight right on his ship. “I thought it was the last day I would see,” Sileo said, noting that the aircraft turned out to be a friendly British plane.
After the 3 May attack, a gravely injured Donnell was towed by the destroyer escorts USS Reeves, USS Hopping, and HMS Samsonia to Dunnstaffnage Bay, Scotland. Repairs would have involved extensive reconstruction, so the ship was sent to Northern Ireland as an accommodation ship. Later it became the first destroyer escort to supply electric power from its turboelectric engines to shoreline installations at Cherbourg, France, providing power from August to December 1944.16
The slaughter continued. Twenty-four hours later another destroyer escort would meet its match. Little more than one year after commissioning, the USS Fechteler was on the Mediterranean returning from Bizerte in the early morning hours as part of a sixty-four-ship convoy bound for the United States, including a hospital ship carrying wounded Americans. Proceeding westward near Elberon Island, radar contact was made by the destroyer escort USS Laning indicating a possible submarine about thirteen miles ahead.
The Fechteler rapidly maneuvered between the convoy and the possible U-boat contact when suddenly a tremendous explosion lit up the dark skies as a torpedo from U-967, commanded by Captain Albrecht Brandi, who had achieved celebrity status in Germany for sinking so many Allied ships, ripped through the DE, wrecking three of the four engineering spaces as seawater poured into the cracked hull. The ship started to break in two.
“The force of the explosion drove me back against the depth-charge racks,” recalled Seaman Howard R. Bender, who was at his battle station on the number two, 3-inch, 50-mm gun. “Debris was flying everywhere. I was hit by small particles of metal.” Once all depth charges were set to “safe,” the order was given to abandon ship. “So we cut the life rafts loose, blew up our life belts, jumped into the water, and swam toward the life rafts, which were drifting away from the ship,” Bender said. “Then I heard screaming and yelling, ‘Help me!’” Bender swam in the direction of the voice, where he found a badly injured shipmate who had been blown overboard by the explosion. Bender tried to keep him afloat and hold his head out of the water. “I don’t know how long we were in the water, trying to stay alive; it seemed like forever to me. The water was very cold and we were getting very tired.”
Lt. Burton T. Kyle, the ship’s engineering officer, was a Naval Reserve officer and former instructor at both the merchant marine training academy in New Orleans as well as at the Subchaser Training Center in Miami, Florida. But even for an experienced sailor like Kyle, the shock of a torpedo ripping through your ship can be, at a minimum, disconcerting. “A violent explosion filled the passage way with a thick fog of steam and smoke preceded by a heavy shock or jolt strong enough to create a blank space in my mind as to what happened,” Kyle said. “When I recovered I was still a little foggy as to what happened.”
He soon realized that his ship had been struck by a torpedo, as he observed that the middle part of the ship had settled into the ocean. “Looking aft it was clear that her keel was fractured,” Kyle said. Sliding into the water atop a piece of damage-control wood, Kyle gripped the wood throughout the night until the Laning and an unidentified rescue tug arrived. “But when the ship threw me a line I could not tie a knot. My fingers would not work. So I wrapped it around me and squeezed it so they could haul me up the fifteen feet or so.”17
“Everything went pitch black and I knew it was all over for us down there,” William Quackenbush, a water tender in the fire room said. The seven men scrambled in a desperate attempt to open the hatches but they could not budge it. After what seemed like an eternity for the sailors trying to pry their way to safety, the engineering officer opened the starboard hatch so the seven men in the forward fireroom managed to get out safely. All men in the forward engineering room and aft fire room died in the blast. Quackenbush and his shipmates dove over the side.
Twenty-nine American sailors were killed and 26 were wounded in the attack. The Laning and other ships in the convoy rescued 186 survivors, who watched in horror as their ship, broken in half, buckled and groaned as the bow and stern rose up together 125 feet out of the water. A violent explosion followed as the Fechterler, the second destroyer escort sunk in the war, disappeared beneath the waves about an hour and a half after the torpedo struck.18
But the United States’ new destroyer escorts had much more fighting to do. The next day in what only can be described as one of the oddest confrontations between the U.S. Navy and the Germans during the entire war, crews from the USS Buckley and the Nazi submarine U-66 engaged in hand-to-hand combat using coffee mugs, bare knuckles, and empty shell casings in an encounter the Navy later called the closest naval combat action in modern warfare. The destroyer escort, part of a hunter-killer group looking for U-boats about five hundred miles west of the Cape Verde Islands, was prowling under moonlit seas as Grumman Avengers, so-called Night Owls, streaked through the dark skies on the hunt for enemy submarines. The Tenth Fleet, America’s intelligence gathering unit, had picked up a Huff Duff radio transmission from a U-boat and dispatched the hunter-killer group to find it.
Captain Gerhard Seehausen, the twenty-six-year-old commander of U-66, already had sunk five Allied ships when he decided to surface his boat to recharge its batteries and allow his crew to get some fresh air. The U-boat had been under way for one hundred days and by now the crew of sixty-two was described as “pallid, haggard, and filthy.” They had no fresh water and had long ago run out of lemons, stocked to counter vitamin deficiency. Seehausen hoped a supply boat, U-188, a so-called milk cow, would arrive to restore their provisions and fuel, but that submarine was nowhere on the horizon. The captain was growing more and more frustrated and radioed to Admiral Karl Döenitz, Germany’s U-boat commander, that refueling was very difficult with the constant stalking by the Allies, most notably the destroyer escorts. So in what would turn out to be a fatal mistake, Seehausen decided to surface.19
Armed with radio transmission information, the hunter-killer group had been tracking him for several days by the time he surfaced. In the early morning hours of 6 May, Lt. Jimmie J. Sellars spotted the submarine sitting atop the water as he piloted his Night Owl, which had been stripped of its bombs and machine guns and fitted with extra fuel tanks so it could fly for longer periods in search of U-boats. He radioed the Buckley, which rushed at flank speed to the sub’s location, seven miles away.
Whether the sub commander mistook the destroyer escort for his longawaited milk cow is not known, but Seehausen fired three red flares to signal his position, barely missing Sellars’ airplane. Capt. Brent Maxwell Abel, a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer assigned to command the newly commissioned Buckley in the spring of 1943, opened fire on the surfaced submarine. “Boy, I have never before seen such concentration,” Sellars radioed to the Block Island, the group’s escort carrier. “Buckley is cutting hell out of the conning tower!”20
With guns blazing the two vessels zigzagged, running neck and neck, at times only twenty yards apart. In fact, airplanes launched from the carrier to assist in the attack were not able to bomb or even fire their guns at the U-boat for fear of hitting the nearby Buckley. After avoiding a possible torpedo fired directly at his vessel, Captain Abel finally had enough and prepared to ram the submarine. Abel ordered a hard right rudder, and the destroyer escort’s bow smashed right into U-66’s foredeck, laying atop the submarine like a ship aground, as a startled German captain issued the command to abandon ship.
While most of the Nazis started jumping into the water, about a dozen leaped on board the Buckley, startling the American sailors. It had been more than a century since the order “stand by to repel boarders” had been issued on board any American warship, and it is unclear whether it was issued in the dark morning hours of 6 May. Captain Abel only recalled saying something like, “My God, they’re coming aboard.”
A wild and furious brawl ensued, as American and German sailors fought hand-to-hand, bare-knuckles combat. As the Nazis stormed the ship, one sailor picked up a hammer and threatened a German into surrendering. Another sailor knocked a German overboard by hitting him in the head with an empty ammunition shell. And still another hit a German with a medical kit, as his shipmates kicked him over the side. Clobbered with a coffee mug, U-66’s helmsman Werner Frolich later said the mug “didn’t injure my head, but the coffee cup was bent thereby. Heads were hard in those days.”21
Abel reversed engines and separated the two vessels from their deadly embrace. To the surprise of the Americans, the U-boat still had enough crew on board to man the battered boat, which quickly sped away after being freed from the Buckley’s grasp. The Buckley took off in pursuit, peppering the boat with a hail of bullets. Abel prepared to ram U-66 a second time, but this time the tables were turned. The U-boat swung around and rammed the Buckley, opening a gaping hole on its starboard side and locking the two ships together once again. One sailor leaned over and dropped a hand grenade down the U-boat’s open hatch. The submarine, now in flames, veered away out of control, as the remaining Germans on board leaped over the side. The ocean swallowed up the boat, and a few minutes later a muffled underwater explosion signaled its end.
In spite of the Buckley’s damage and the real danger that more U-boats might show up, Captain Abel combed the waters for three hours looking for German survivors. Thirty-six survivors from U-66 were picked up, including four officers. They were allowed to wash up and were given clean clothing, cigarettes, food, and drink before being transferred by breeches buoy to the Block Island. Captain Abel noted in his log that the prisoners stated they “were glad we were Americans as the English always beat the hell out of them.” The entire battle lasted a mere sixteen minutes. The Buckley, with a sheared-off starboard propeller shaft and damaged engine and laundry rooms, went under its own power to New York for repairs.22
The next German threat came from the skies as Harold Peterson, chief yeoman on board the destroyer escort USS Decker was about to come face to face with the German Luftwaffe as his year-old ship, originally built for Great Britain before the United States decided to keep the vessel herself, was escorting a convoy of seventy ships from Gibraltar to Bizerte. During the evening hours of 11 May 1944, about twelve miles off the north shore of Africa in the Mediterranean Sea, Peterson would witness firepower from the sky.
Alarms sounded as Decker’s crew rushed to their battle stations. The skies were thick with Nazi fighter planes flying directly toward the American ships in what was said to be one of the largest German aerial attacks on a convoy in the war. Although the young sailors hurried to their battle stations, eyewitnesses report that heads also were bowed in prayer all over the ship as the Nazi torpedo bombers swarmed through the dark skies honing in on the American vessels. “The planes came in at about three hundred miles per hour and very low, probably thirty feet above the water,” Peterson recalled. “The first wave, about fifteen or twenty planes, came directly for us as we were in the goat position, screening the convoy from the front. We opened fire immediately,” forcing the planes to break formation.
Thanks to the smoke screen laid out by the escorts, the German bombers had difficulty locating the merchant ships, the main targets of their attack. The Decker and the other escorts pounded the planes with antiaircraft fire as the little escorts maneuvered at full speed of twenty-one miles per hour, dodging torpedoes launched from the German planes.
Frustrated that the destroyer escorts were able to hide the merchant ships in the heavy smoke, the planes started to open fire on the DEs, Peterson said, sneaking up on the ships and firing their torpedoes. The moonless night made it difficult to spot the planes, which continued their attack, sometimes flying so low they nearly missed hitting sailors standing on the deck of the ship. “He was just over my head and just high enough to clear the ship,” Peterson said. Two torpedoes were fired at close range and passed safely directly beneath the ship. Several other planes burst into flames from the antiaircraft fire before crashing into the dark waters.
No ships were sunk nor American lives lost during the attack, but sixteen German planes were shot down during the furious thirty-five-minute battle. Peterson credited Capt. A. B. Adams’ deft ship handling with saving the ship from being torpedoed. At least seven torpedoes were said to have been launched directly at the Decker, all of which missed their mark. Just in case, the cautious yeoman added, “I had my hand on my life belt and was ready to jump over the side any time.”23
Three months later another destroyer escort would come face-to-face with a German U-boat, but unfortunately for the Americans, the tale would not end as well for them as it did for the crew of the Buckley or Decker. The USS Fiske, like its sister ship the Leopold built at the Consolidated Shipyard in Orange, Texas, was part of a hunter-killer group looking for U-boats that were gathering weather data in the central Atlantic and transmitting it back to Germany.
Eighteen-year-old Robert White joined the Navy while still in high school, went on board as a fireman, and worked in the ship’s diesel engine room. He had just finished lunch on 2 August 1944 when the USS Howard, another escort in the hunter-killer group, reported a brief sighting of a U-boat conning tower and puff of diesel smoke. Dashing to investigate, the Fiske was ordered to accompany it and the pair raced at flank speed to the location of the possible sighting, about 750 miles east of Newfoundland. Upon arriving, they commenced a sonar search, while the accompanying carrier, the USS Wake Island, launched a bomber to assist the DEs in the search. Depth charges were ordered and the hedgehogs were manned. Suddenly a strong sonar contact was made less than two thousand yards away. Both ships quickly changed course to intercept, but for the Fiske there would be no return.
The hunter-killer group had been dispatched to find the submarine after Allied intelligence intercepted weather report radio transmissions between U-804 and Germany. White, who was in the forward engine room when U-804 fired its torpedo at the Fiske, first thought the auxiliary boiler, used to make steam for cooking on the ship, had blown up. Every once in a while the finicky boiler would backfire when it was lit and the sailors expected one day it might blow. Some thought this was that day.
But White knew differently, especially as water started pouring into the ship’s ruptured hull. Lights went out as the ship lost electricity and one of its engine stalled. Sailors in the engine room clawed their way through the dark compartment to find the hatch. Finally, someone opened a hatch, which provided enough light for the sailors to make their way up the ladder. Climbing up on deck, they were shocked to see their ship had been cut in half by the torpedo. The ship’s hedgehog magazine detonated with a blinding flash, filling forward living compartments with a dense, suffocating smoke. White had a buddy who worked in the fourth engineering space in the rear of the ship, and he hurried aft to make sure his friend made it to safety. “I ran back and jumped across the break and opened their scuttle so they could get out,” White said, and the sailors scurried out. They quickly donned their life jackets and prepared for a swim in the 39-degree water.24
Sixteen-year-old Leo F. Stinson, said to be the youngest sailor on board ship, was eating lunch when the alarm sounded. He rushed to his battle station on the 3-inch gun. The German torpedo struck the Fiske on the starboard side amidship. The force of the explosion threw Stinson against the forward gun shield. Debris was flying all over the ship including potato bins, swabs, brooms, as well as one of Stinson’s shipmates—a man named “Rocco,” a former boxer from Brooklyn who had been catapulted into the air by the explosion.
Stinson knew the ship, now breaking in two, was sinking so he rushed to the starboard side and prepared to jump overboard. That was more easily said than done, though, since the ship was listing heavily to the port side and, in order to avoid hitting the side of the ship, he had to jump outward, far away from the ship to avoid crashing into the hull. With nothing to lose, the young sailor jumped and managed to hit the water and swim to a life raft, where his fellow shipmates were struggling to hang on in the frigid ocean.25
“It felt like an erupting volcano when the torpedo hit us midship on the starboard side,” Newman said. “The torpedo had broken the keel of the ship. The bow and stern sections were still connected but only by the deck plates. I found myself with a Thompson machine gun, standing at the port wing of the flying bridge, shouting obscenities at the ocean. I must have sounded a bit crazed because the captain came over to remind me to keep the safety on.”
It wouldn’t be long before the dreaded order to abandon ship was given by the Fiske’s twenty-seven-year-old captain, John A. Comly. “There were about ten of us on the bridge as we started our slow trip to the main deck. I remember tightening my May West [life vest] and noting that the captain was still on the bridge as I started down the ladder,” Newman said. The bow had a 15-degree list to port, making the descent a little tricky, and by the time Newman and his shipmates made it to the main deck, the list had increased to 25 degrees. He slid down the side of the ship before sufficiently clearing the vessel so he could jump into the water.
Newman was swimming away from the ship as fast as he could, heading to the life raft. “I looked back at the ship and you could see the deck plates had snapped. It was now in two sections with the bow rolling more and more to the port. At that moment Captain Comly appeared on deck. In true naval tradition, he was the last man alive to leave his ship,” Newman said. It took barely ten minutes from the time the torpedo broke the ship’s back for the vessel to sink.
In order to stay focused and keep their minds off their injuries, the survivors sang choruses of “Roll Out the Barrel” as they clung to the raft, which pitched in the frigid, white-capped waters. “The water was cold and as the hours passed and the adrenalin wore off, there came the realization that I was in pain. . . . My left ankle was broken. The simple task of holding on to the raft became more and more difficult. I don’t remember much after that but some of my shipmates must have recognized my problem because I ended up on the raft, not knowing how I got there.”26
The ship’s skipper, John Comly, was a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, native who rose from the rank of ordinary seaman to commander in only four years. Comly previously served as ensign on board the USS Downes, a destroyer sunk in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, before being promoted to lieutenant in 1942. Now, as the young commander looked out over his buckling and burning escort vessel, he soon realized that, like the Downes, his ship was going to sink. Once he reasoned the ship could not be saved, he ordered life rafts and nets be put overboard, with swimmers pulling them clear of the area.
“Wounded men were treated as quickly as they could be—many could not be treated at all,” Comly recalled. “As soon as that had been accomplished they were ordered put in the water either taken to rafts or had to get there under their own power.” About five or ten minutes after the initial explosion, Comly said, a second explosion occurred in the forward section of the ship in the vicinity of the paint locker or projector magazine, resulting in large quantities of smoke that prevented the men from investigating the area. In spite of his crew being young and inexperienced, the skipper said he was pleasantly surprised “by the absolute lack of any confusion, the absolute lack of any panic on the part of any individual. Each man knew exactly what was expected of him and performed accordingly. All the wounded were diligently looked after. All of them were put on rafts.”27
George W. Brodie, chief hospital corpsman, had his hands full once the torpedo broke the ship’s back. Brodie, in the mess hall at the time of the explosion, made his way to the hatch and climbed the ladder to the main deck, where he found a “certain death-like quietness,” as men, some injured and bleeding, walked around in a trance-like stunned state. He quickly set up an emergency dressing station on the forward deck and started to treat the wounded. But he would not have much time to help the injured sailors. Once the order to abandon ship came, Brodie and his shipmates went overboard into the icy water, as the vessel continued its violent death throes.
“The men’s teeth were chattering and their color was almost blue from the cold,” Brodie wrote. He watched sailors, frozen to the core, shivering uncontrollably. “At the raft I was hanging on to there were about twenty men. One man with a possible fracture of the leg was helped onto the raft, the rest of us hung on via the hand lines.” Eventually the destroyer escort USS Farquhar arrived to rescue the freezing men in a rescue operation that lasted about two and a half hours. Thirty-three American sailors died and fifty were badly wounded as a result of the sinking, which became the third DE sunk and the 175th American ship lost since the beginning of the war.
For a young ensign named William Geiermann, the sinking of his ship brought into stark relief for the first time the terror and the real human cost of warfare. The North Dakota native enlisted in the Navy’s V-12 program while attending Columbia University and became a commissioned ensign in April 1944, assigned to the Fiske. When the order was given to abandon ship on that August day, only three months after he had stepped on board, Geiermann knew his new ship was doomed and he quickly slid down the starboard side of the crippled vessel, swimming a short way to a rope net floating on the turbulent and icy waters.
Later, as the young officer was helped on board the Farquhar, he was startled to see the six lifeless bodies of his fellow shipmates laid out on deck. “This was the first time I was fully aware of what had happened,” Geiermann said. “As I was taken through the officers’ wardroom, I observed two crewmen who were being worked on by the doctor and medic. I learned later that they died.” The next day his shipmates were buried at sea and the Farquhar made its way to Argentina so the wounded could be treated in a hospital.28
Although the loss of the USS Leopold, Fiske, and Fechteler so early after the arrival of destroyer escorts to the battle was disheartening to the Allies, these tough little ships and their courageous young crews were demonstrating their mettle and were credited with helping to turn the tide in the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest and most costly battle of World War II. DEs sunk fifteen U-boats in the first six months of 1944. Before their arrival German submarines had been exacting a heavy toll on Allied merchant ships in the North Atlantic, where the Allies were simply not prepared for a submarine battle.
In 1939 Allied losses exceeded a quarter of a million tons. The following year, as German activity picked up in the North Atlantic, this number jumped to 7.8 million tons. It soon became clear to many, especially President Roosevelt, that something had to be done to curtail the U-boats, otherwise Germany would have a stranglehold over Atlantic Ocean shipping lanes, threatening not only England’s survival but also the survival of the United States. The few vessels that were available—a handful of destroyers, wooden submarine chasers, patrol craft, corvettes, and even luxury yachts pressed into government service—were overtaxed and unable to keep up with the increasing number of U-boats prowling through American waters, often right along the coastline.
In the summer of 1940, eighteen months before the United States officially entered the war, President Roosevelt initiated the destroyer escort program. World War II naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison said the president proposed to Frank Knox, a Republican just appointed by Democrat Roosevelt to serve as secretary of the navy, that two experimental DEs be built. Following Roosevelt’s direction, the Bureau of Ships produced its first plan for a DE two months later, with additional plans drafted in the fall. But further progress toward DE construction was halted when the General Board of the Navy decided it would be better to use the nation’s limited money and steel resources to build destroyers rather than these new type of ships. In what later would be regarded as a serious and costly mistake, Roosevelt acquiesced and agreed to shelve plans to construct DEs.29
The president did move ahead on another plan he considered critical “for continental defense in the face of grave danger.” Fifty old “four piper” World War I destroyers and ten Coast Guard cutters would be traded to England in exchange for rights to construct naval and air bases on Crown colonies in the Western Hemisphere, including Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua, British Guiana, and Newfoundland. This “destroyers for bases” deal was essential, FDR said, for the United States’ “peace and security.”
Fortunately for the nation, Roosevelt, who loved the Navy and all things nautical, had taken significant steps to rebuild the Navy after his arrival at the White House in 1933. He had allocated some $281 million from the National Industrial Recovery Act to start rebuilding the Navy. “This was one of the finest and most statesmanlike things Roosevelt ever did,” remarked Adm. Harold G. Bowen, who served as chief of the Navy’s Engineering Bureau and, later, as chief of the Office of Naval Research. Roosevelt knew if this allocation became public, especially with the increasingly isolationist and pacifist sentiment in the country, he would be roundly criticized. “Claude, we got away with murder this time,” FDR reportedly told Claude A. Swanson, his secretary of the navy. But Roosevelt’s project did put plenty of people to work building ships, something that few could object to as the Great Depression gripped the country and unemployment continued to soar.30
“Been fired on by U-boat and sinking slowly. Require assistance,” was the SOS message picked up by a radio receiver in Long Island, New York, in the early morning hours of 3 January 1940. The Swedish freighter Kiruna, heading with a cargo of iron ore to Baltimore, Maryland, had been torpedoed about 2,200 miles east of New York, and the neutral vessel, along with its captain and crew of thirty-nine sailors, was sinking in the stormy waters of the North Atlantic. Meanwhile, another Swedish freighter, the Svarton, was torpedoed by U-58 off the coast of Scotland, sinking in about a minute and a half, sending twenty of its crew members to their death. Eleven survivors were clinging to a life raft when they were rescued by a fishing trawler.
A few days later, the British freighter Langleeford was torpedoed and sunk without warning in the North Atlantic. Fifteen survivors, who managed to make it to two lifeboats as their vessel sunk below the raging waves, were in for a bit of a surprise as U-26, the submarine that had just torpedoed them, approached. “The commander (Heinz Scheringer) asked the name of our ship and also the names of some of us,” one of the survivors said. “When told that we had only provisions of biscuits and water he supplemented these with two bottles of rum, tobacco, cigarettes, matches and a package of bandages. He was pretty decent to us, even though he sank our ship without warning.” Remarkably the survivors were able to reach the western coast of Ireland after being at sea for fifty-six hours, using a sail as well as their oars to make it to safety.
Hostilities between England and Germany also had a chilling effect on plans to build the world’s biggest luxury ocean liner designed to carry passengers between Britain and New York. Although fighting was under way, work continued on the new Queen Elizabeth, a 1,000-foot, 84,000-ton floating palace, with the ship ready for its maiden voyage just after the waters of the North Atlantic became alive with German U-boats, sinking virtually every vessel they encountered. Quietly and without the usual fanfare accompanying the maiden voyage of an ocean liner, the vessel slipped out of Clydeside and began its passage across the U-boat-infested North Atlantic on 26 February. British minister Winston Churchill wanted to shield the new vessel from becoming a target of German bombers, so he ordered it into exile in America.
In what the New York Times described as the “most spectacular and dangerous maiden voyage in maritime history,” the ocean liner zigzagged in a mad dash across the Atlantic, arriving off Nantucket Island the evening of 6 March. The next day the vessel, camouflaged in battleship gray, with a still-unfinished luxurious interior, docked safely at Pier 90 in New York City, alongside three of the world’s other great ocean liners, the Queen Mary, Normandie, and Mauritania—all far from the reach of any German submarines or bombers.31
Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister in May, was becoming increasingly alarmed as Adolph Hitler’s U-boats continued to send more and more merchant ships to the bottom of the ocean. On 7 December 1940 Churchill wrote President Roosevelt a four-thousand-word letter, which he termed “one of the most important I ever wrote,” pleading for help to curb “the present destructive losses at sea.” In addition to munitions, the prime minister asked for financial help for his cash-strapped country, noting that England had only $2 billion in cash to pay for $5 billion in orders from U.S. factories.32
When Churchill’s letter arrived Roosevelt was where he most loved to be—on the water. The sea-loving president, just elected to an unprecedented third term, had decided to escape the cold Washington weather, boarding the heavy cruiser USS Tuscaloosa for a vacation cruise to southern waters, including Florida and the Caribbean. While the cruiser was at anchor, a Navy seaplane delivered Churchill’s correspondence, a letter that profoundly affected the president. Roosevelt sat in his wheelchair on deck alone, reading and rereading Churchill’s letter. It was there, while FDR was enjoying the refreshing salt air and blue waters of the Caribbean, that he hatched an idea that would allow him to provide England with critical financial and other support for the war effort, while still abiding by the law.
The Lend-Lease program thus was conceived, a brilliant and creative means devised by Roosevelt himself to circumvent a 1934 law that forbade the United States from trading with any warring nation, except on a cash basis. The overall goal of Roosevelt’s program was to provide material aid to countries whose defenses were vital to the defense of the United States.33
Roosevelt returned from his southern cruise with a healthy tan and some big ideas on how the United States could help England fight the Nazis. During a White House press conference on 17 December 1940, the president spoke publicly for the first time about his Lend-Lease concept, which he said would not only help England but also increase productivity here at home, thereby boosting America’s national security as well:
Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have got a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away; but, my Heaven, if he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before the operation, “neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have got to pay me $15 for it.”
What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it. Suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire; we don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, “I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it any more, it’s all smashed up.” He says, “How many feet of it were there?” I tell him, “there were 150 feet of it.” He said, “all right, I will replace it.” Now if you get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.
As he often did in his fireside chats, Roosevelt used this homespun simile to explain his plan to help Great Britain, adding, “If you lend certain munitions and get the munitions back at the end of the war, if they are intact—haven’t been hurt—you are all right; if they have been damaged or deteriorated or lost completely, it seems to me you come out pretty well if you have them replaced by the fellow that you have lent them to.”34
Four days after his traditional family Christmas celebration at the White House, Roosevelt stepped up his efforts to garner public support for his Lend-Lease proposal, and explain to the American people the great peril the nation would face unless action was taken now. On the evening of 29 December, London was burning as the Nazis bombed the city in one of their heaviest attacks to date. Meanwhile, Roosevelt, who had not walked since polio paralyzed his legs in 1921, was wheeled into the diplomatic reception room in the White House to deliver his sixteenth fireside chat to millions of Americans gathered around their radios in homes all across the country. In the White House the president had his own audience seated before him, including his devoted mother, Sara, movie actor Clark Gable and his wife, and Carole Lombard, along with a host of presidential staff members.35
“We must be the great arsenal of democracy,” the president declared. “For this is an emergency as serious as war itself.” Roosevelt warned that “if Great Britain goes down, the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the high seas—and they will be in a position to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere. It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun—a gun loaded with explosive bullets, economic as well as military,” arguing that the width of the oceans no longer protects America as it did in the days of the clipper ship.36
The campaign worked, and despite grumbling that the Lend-Lease program was giving Roosevelt a blank check, Congress approved the proposal two months after it was submitted and appropriated the $7 billion requested by Roosevelt. The president signed it into law on 11 March 1941, two days after U-boats sunk five Allied ships in the Atlantic Ocean and four days before thirteen other Allied ships were sent to the bottom of the sea by German submarines. The next month U-boats sank forty-five Allied merchant ships, and in May another fifty-eight Allied ships were destroyed by the Germans. Thousands of merchant seamen were being sent to their deaths as U-boat attacks were reaching a fevered pitch.
Roosevelt gave Prime Minister Churchill the good news about the legislation in a personal note within hours of passage of the Lend-Lease program, and within minutes of the president signing the legislation into law, Army and Navy war materials were speeding their way to Great Britain and Greece. Churchill responded: “Our blessings from the whole British Empire go out to you and the American nation for this very present help in time of trouble.”37
Now the stage was being set to begin a monumental shipbuilding program, with many of those ships being sent to England, France, and other Allied countries at war with Germany. So in what was nothing short of remarkable, the U.S. government joined with private industrialists to undertake the largest shipbuilding project in American and, perhaps, world history. From 1939 to 1945, 5,777 ships were constructed in more than seventy shipyards, which sprung up, some seemingly overnight, throughout the nation. More than 640,000 Americans, most of whom had little or no experience in the shipbuilding business, were put to work to start building ships at a faster pace than the Axis powers could sink them. More than 50 million tons of cargo carriers and tankers were built, with 18 million tons built in 1943 alone. This monumental undertaking, helping to create a “bridge of ships” across the ocean, would start to reverse or at least slow down Germany’s extraordinary success in the North Atlantic.38
But what about those destroyer escorts that FDR wanted the Navy to build back in 1940? As more and more merchant vessels, some of which were flying the Stars and Stripes, continued to be sunk by German U-boats, the Navy brass decided that maybe Roosevelt was right in wanting to build what he later called “speedy and dangerous” warships—the destroyer escorts— to protect convoys of vital supplies, and also search out and destroy those prowling U-boats. But there were still doubters among Roosevelt’s top naval advisors, further delaying DE construction so desperately needed by England. Winston Churchill would not be pleased.
On a beautiful June day in 1942, the prime minister delivered his plea directly to the president, in his second wartime visit to the United States. As the small plane carrying Winston Churchill banked over the majestic Hudson River, President Roosevelt waited patiently below in the driver’s seat of his blue, hand-controlled Ford. The plane bumped as it landed on the Hackensack airfield near Hyde Park, in what Churchill described as the “roughest bump landing” he had ever experienced. After greeting his English friend, FDR drove Churchill around his Dutchess County estate, talking business and giving the prime minister more than a few scares as the president “poised and backed on the grass verges of the precipices over the Hudson,” and drove his car through fields and woods, successfully playing hide-and-seek with his Secret Service guards, who were trying to follow the president. Not to worry, however, as Churchill would soon learn that FDR was quite skilled at navigating his car around back roads using the hand controls that had been installed to allow the paralyzed president to drive. Although the primary purpose of Churchill’s visit was to settle on military plans for 1942–43 and discuss with Roosevelt the development of the atomic bomb, he took the opportunity to describe the U-boat attacks on shipping as “our greatest and most immediate danger,” raising the need for escort vessels once again.39
When Roosevelt and Churchill met in Washington later that week, the subject of DE construction was raised by Adm. Ernest J. King. Opening the conference just before lunchtime, King began by declaring that one ship saved was worth two ships lost, his way of saying that the escort program should be given high priority. Adm. Emory S. Land, head of the War Shipping Administration disagreed, noting that the DE program would use up valuable steel and diesel engines and prevent the building of 100 to 150 merchant cargo ships.40 Lewis W. Douglas, Land’s deputy, agreed with his boss, adding that merchant ships should be top priority because they were in short supply. Churchill, who had voiced strong support for King’s stand that DEs should be built, said, “One ship saved may be better than two ships sunk, but it is also far better that one ship deliver munitions to the fighting front than no ships at all.”41 The conference ended, and Churchill would return to England on 25 June without any firm timetable as to when the first DE would roll off the production line.
Franklin Roosevelt could not have been satisfied with this outcome. As assistant secretary of the Navy under President Woodrow Wilson, FDR had been a strong proponent of small vessels—much smaller than DEs—to combat the German submarine menace in World War I and helped influence the development of sub chasers, 110-foot wooden vessels, nicknamed the “splinter fleet.” Manned mostly by amateur yachtsmen from the Naval Reserve, these spunky little warships had two officers and about twenty-five enlisted men on board. They were equipped with underwater hydrophones for detecting submarines and two machine guns and two 3-inch, 23-mm guns for battle. By the end of World War I, some 440 sub chasers had been commissioned, thanks in large part to the support of Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt.
FDR’s interest in antisubmarine warfare can be traced all the way back to the 1920s, during his stint as assistant secretary of the navy. In an article he wrote while vacationing in Warm Springs, Georgia, Roosevelt told of a trip he took to Brunswick, Georgia, and Biloxi, Mississippi, to hear petitions from residents anxious to have the federal government establish naval stations in their harbors. “The harbor entrance in both cases proved too shallow,” Roosevelt wrote, “but I remember chiefly for the possum banquet they gave me—every known variety of possum cooked in every know variety of style I ate them all.” But dining on possum, one of FDR’s favorite dishes, was not the only thing he remembered from his visit.
Roosevelt tried to encourage the General Board of the Navy to prepare a plan of coast patrol for use in the event of war; however, the board rebuffed Roosevelt because they did not think “it worthwhile to bother its head about such little matters.” Roosevelt later said, “It is amusing to note that a couple of months before we actually got into the World War, in 1917, the higher naval officers did a lot of running around and planning for the Naval patrol stations which we maintained throughout the war.”42
During World War II, some of the delay in the construction of escort vessels may also be traced to internal bickering between the Navy and the Army. Battling Nazi U-boats, Navy officials believed, was the responsibility of that agency. The Army had a different view, according to Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who fought to change the operational arrangement that put all antisubmarine forces, air and sea, Army and Navy, under control of the Navy.
Stimson argued—and even went so far as to lecture the president and Knox—that the newly developed tool called radar should be installed on Army bombers for antisubmarine duty. Stimson said the ship sinkings were having a devastating effect on the Army with the loss of supplies and equipment necessary to fight the war in Europe. “Though submarine success might hurt naval pride,” Stimson wrote in his autobiography, “it was the Army which more seriously felt the pinch.”43 Admiral King believed that “escort is not just one way to handling the submarine menace; it is the only way that gives any promise of success.”
Although King agreed that planes should be equipped with radar to fight submarines, they should remain under the control of the Navy and provide supplemental assistance to his ships. Neither he nor Secretary Knox honestly believed airplanes were effective submarine killers. He argued strongly, and eventually successfully, for construction of more ships to ensure that “every ship that sails the seas [is] under constant close protection.” This certainly proved no insignificant task, with more than seven thousand miles of Atlantic coastal sea-lanes, not including the ocean convoy system to Great Britain and Iceland, as well as traffic to the east coast of South America.
King was not alone in his views on the need for escort vessels. The New York Times, in a strongly worded editorial in December 1942, urged construction of large numbers of escort vessels, especially what they described as the “rugged, fast, long-ranging destroyer escorts,” to protect merchant ships in the North Atlantic. “We cannot built too many ships,” the editorial stated, “but there is not much use building great numbers of merchant ships unless we protect them adequately. Today, not enough escort vessels of various types are being built.” The Times, seeming to echo King’s viewpoint, stated: “More escort vessels can materially reduce such losses—particularly so if enough are built not only to provide adequate defensive screens for all convoys but to create so-called ‘hunting groups.’”44
Finally, in March 1943, the internal disputes and reticence to build escorts started to be overshadowed as Nazi submarines, using wolf-pack tactics, pounded away at shipping in the North Atlantic, sinking an average of three ships every day. More than 500,000 tons of much-needed supplies were lost in the month of March alone. Admiral Karl Döenitz, a former U-boat commander in World War I chosen by Adolph Hitler to head U-boat forces in World War II, would send his submarines out in a fan pattern, with an advance or reconnaissance submarine looking for slow-moving convoys. Once located, Döenitz would coordinate the wolf pack’s attack from his central command at Lorient, a French base on the Bay of Biscay, radioing each “wolf” within the area to participate in the convoy attack. This was a highly successful military strategy, one that threatened to defeat Allied forces in the North Atlantic.45
Taking a page from Döenitz’s playbook, it appeared that the time had come to more efficiently coordinate antisubmarine activity, placing it—at least in the United States—under the umbrella of a central Navy command. Thus the so-called Tenth Fleet was born. A fleet without any ships or guns, and with only a handful of men, it would do its battle huddled over desks in the Navy Department. The men would use brains rather than brawn devising plans to battle the U-boats, for the first time unifying all intelligence and operations under a single command. This type of operation had never been attempted in the history of the Navy.
As Germany’s March U-boat blitz continued to send merchant vessels to the bottom of the sea, a conference was called to address the U-boat menace. American, British, and Canadian officials met for twelve days in Washington in sessions aimed at curbing the success of Admiral Döenitz’s wolf packs. The stage finally appeared set for entrance of the previously authorized but long delayed destroyer escort into the thick of battle in the stormy North Atlantic.
But before destroyer escorts would start rolling off the shipyard launching ways, President Roosevelt’s predilection for using small vessels to battle U-boats already had taken another interesting twist. Vincent Astor, a close friend and Hudson River valley neighbor of FDR, would propose in spring of 1942 a scheme to equip fishing boats with two-way voice radios so recreational boaters could alert the Navy when they spotted a U-boat or other suspicious object.
Astor, related to FDR by marriage, was founder and owner of Newsweek magazine and owned the 263-foot luxury yacht, the Nourmahal, that took FDR on three lengthy vacation cruises, two after he became president. Like FDR, Astor loved to sail, and beginning in 1933 and stretching to the early war years, he performed clandestine spy duties for Roosevelt under the guise of “scientific” or fishing trips. As storm clouds gathered around an increasingly unstable world Astor, a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves would monitor activities in the Caribbean, the Panama Canal Zone, Latin America, the Galápagos, and the Marshall Islands, reporting directly to President Roosevelt.46
So when Astor, a former submariner in World War I, proposed equipping fishing boats with radios, President Roosevelt jumped at the idea. “My Navy has been definitely slack in preparing for this submarine war off our coast,” Roosevelt wrote to Prime Minister Churchill in March 1942. “As I need not tell you, most naval officers have declined in the past to think in terms of any vessel of less than two thousand tons.” Roosevelt told Churchill that England learned that lesson two years earlier. “We still have to learn it,” FDR said, stating that he had “begged, borrowed and stolen every vessel of every description over eighty feet in length.”47
Franklin Roosevelt also was intrigued when fellow white-flanneled yachtsman Alfred Stanford of New York, commodore of the Cruising Club of America, proposed that yachtsmen volunteer their time and yachts to patrol offshore looking for U-boats. Roosevelt loved the idea; however, the Navy did not. Even though U-boats continued to have their own way with Allied vessels in the North Atlantic, the Navy brass did not feel the amateur yachtsmen were up to the job.48
Arthur D. Camp, a volunteer who signed up for a thirty-day stint with the picket patrol, was assigned to guard the Atlantic Ocean between Fire Island, New York, and Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. He was on board a 78-foot sailing schooner, which was equipped with an 80-horsepower engine, hot and cold shower, and an eleven-member crew, including an engineer and a cook. Camp said it took twenty-four hours to sail out to their assigned grid using dead reckoning and the sun to find the way. Once at the site, they shortened the sails and tried to stay in their designated areas watching for U-boats. But with a stiff wind, the schooner would drift off grid in five or six hours.49
“When our skipper found that we had drifted off the edge of the grid, he would order us to hoist more sail and we would then tack back to the weather boundary of the station. These maneuvers were repeated endlessly,” Camp said, explaining that the sailing tactics employed on picket duty were entirely different than those of a normal yachtsman, who would get the most speed out of the vessel as he raced to his destination. The yachtsmen would stand watches, six hours on and six hours off, from noon to midnight, and four hours on and off from midnight until the next noon. Lookouts were doubled at night. They got very little sleep, and sometimes, when something unidentified was spotted, a yachtsman had to climb up the ratline to the masthead to get a better look. “That is a real sensation when the ship is pitching and rolling, as the top of the mast lashes out like a buggy whip and will pitch a man off if he doesn’t have a leech-like grip,” Camp stated.50
The coastal picket patrol had some successes despite its limitations. During an unannounced Navy test in August 1942, a squadron of ten planes swung across Cape Cod before heading south and west for Philadelphia. Although no naval vessel or shore station reported contact with the planes, four of the coastal picket patrol did report the planes “promptly and accurately.” Another picket patrolling south of Long Island in a light fog spotted a U-boat just one hundred yards away. Although the yacht did not have a depth charge, it did man its machine guns and started firing at the submarine, which vanished under the water. In January 1943 Admiral King ordered the picket force cut 35 percent for economy reasons and because smaller Coast Guard cutters were starting to come online.51
Another idea strongly supported by President Roosevelt and Secretary Knox, was the construction of small, 1,968-ton cargo freighters propelled by sixteen 110-horsepower gasoline engines. The 270-foot ship Sea Otter II could be mass-produced at a low cost and would be able to escape damage by submarines because its shallow draft would allow torpedoes to pass harmlessly beneath the vessel. Designed by an automobile engineer and retired Navy commander, the vessel was to have a ten-foot draft (although the actual draft was nearly double this amount) and gasoline engines without mufflers, which could alert an enemy submarine within a fifty-mile radius. The ship had a lot of problems.
After the Sea Otter’s maiden voyage in October 1941, Secretary Knox advised Roosevelt that he had already organized a corporation and that money had been provided for the initial forty-eight ships. Knox said that once the sea trials, under way off Charleston, were finished they would be ready for a “quick start.” President Roosevelt, who frequently tinkered with ship designs, was “delighted” with Knox’s report but said that he did not believe these small vessels should be used on the North Atlantic, except in the summer time, but that they could replace larger ships in the Gulf of Mexico, the West Indies, and the East and West Coasts of South America, as well as in other areas where heavy seas do not often occur.
Although Roosevelt had a lot of faith in the ship’s potential, the Maritime Commission and Bureau of Ships were reluctant to divert scarce resources to its construction. Roosevelt, however, remained adamant in his belief that the vessel could serve a purpose. During a news conference on 10 March 1942, the president said the Sea Otter was the right size when it was designed but “like so many things it got bigger—grew—the tonnage grew.” He said the original idea, which he still believed in, was to use the small ship in coastal trade in the West Indies and along the coast of South America, and in smaller harbors. Although Roosevelt contended that there was a “great deal of merit in the basic idea” and felt that more tests were necessary, the Sea Otter idea was not to be. No further design work was done and no more sea trials or tests were conducted.52
This program, like the picket patrol, would not be the ultimate answer to elimination of the U-boat menace, which continued at an alarming pace. Yet if some of these measures had been tried earlier in the war, there might have been a better outcome earlier and the lives of some merchant seamen might have been spared. However, by now it was too late for them to significantly reverse the German slaughter escalating in the North Atlantic. Clearly a stronger deterrent was needed and needed without delay. It appeared the stage finally had been set for the arrival of the destroyer escort—and not a moment too soon.53