NOVEMBER 1942
In 1942, the Americans hoped to make quick work of the war in Europe with an invasion across the English Channel. The Soviets, who were bleeding lives by the tens of thousands as the Germans closed on Moscow, wanted the same thing—a second front in Europe. Winston Churchill didn’t. He tallied the number of German divisions in France and feared a direct assault on the Continent would be as devastating as Britain’s direct assault on the Somme, where they’d lost sixty thousand men in a single day. Neither the Brits nor the Americans were yet in a position to go head-to-head with the Germans where they were strongest. And so Churchill argued for an end run around Hitler’s Fortress Europe, to North Africa, where the compromised Vichy French held sway in the colonies of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. He argued as much in the late spring of 1942 when he visited Roosevelt at Hyde Park and in Washington. Gradually Roosevelt warmed to the idea of an operation known first as Gymnast, then as Torch.
The Torch task force debarked for Europe from Norfolk, Virginia, and Portland, Maine, on October 24 and 25, coordinating with troopships dispatched from England, all bound for landing places on Morocco’s Atlantic shore and Algeria’s Mediterranean. While the first wave of the invasion zigzagged toward its destination, doing its best to thwart German intelligence, Plunkett idled at the 35th Street Pier in Brooklyn, fastened to cleats with six-inch manila rope. Compared to the Navy Yard, few liked 35th Street. It was a merchant shipping facility, dreary and lonely, with a long warehouse lapping out into the stream, and a narrow pier where six other ships of Destroyer Squadron 7, known as DesRon 7 in Navy parlance, made preparations to get underway in the second wave.
There were nine ships total in the squadron, all launched and commissioned around the same time, all about the same size at 1,620 tons, and each the beneficiary of some fame for this and that. Niblack had dropped the first depth charges of the war in April of the previous year. Hilary P. Jones had rescued survivors of the first U.S. ship sunk by the Germans a year earlier. In September of 1942, Mayo and Madison helped rescue 1,400 men from a torpedoed troopship. Plunkett was the squadron’s flagship, which meant the commander of the squadron, the squad dog, kept his quarters and directed the group’s activities on a ship the crew had warmed to as the Charley P, for their namesake Charles P. Plunkett.
That afternoon of November 1, the crew could sense the imminence of departure, reading signals with a sixth sense they’d refined individually and interpreted as scuttlebutt. They’d been readying the ship for days, the provisions coming aboard in bulk, each new raft of stores dutifully noted in the ship’s log. The veal, when it showed up, would come as part of a 172-pound shipment. They’d load 315 pounds of lettuce at a throw, 115 pounds of fresh squash, 330 pounds of tomatoes, 300 pounds of roast beef, 150 pounds of rolled oats, 220 pounds of cornmeal from Quaker Oats, hundreds of pounds of grapefruit and cabbage. A spud locker on the main deck housed 1,500 pounds of potatoes. On it came: canned hams, soda crackers, dry milk, pork sausage, hominy grits, ripe olives, honey, Jell-O, cereal, peanut butter, tomato juice, cranberry sauce, jars of pickles, cornstarch, celery salt, assorted candy, mixed nuts, brown sugar, mustard, fresh eggs, hundreds of pounds of apples. There would be cakes from Drake’s, and gallons of ice cream from Good Humor, with the officer of the deck inspecting the arrivals “as to quantity and quality.” Jim Feltz, when he came into the service, weighed 117 pounds, partly because his build was naturally slight but also because he was still a kid and growing. On the edge of Operation Torch, writing from the YMCA on Sands Street just outside the Navy Yard, he reported to Betty that he’d gained 30 pounds.
In his first three months aboard Plunkett, Jim had convoyed back and forth across the Atlantic twice, each time as a deckhand and each time as part of a troopship escort, ferrying soldiers to the Firth of Clyde in Scotland by way of Iceland. His first time out, cast off to the strains of “Kalamazoo,” his stomach plagued him all the way up the Atlantic Seaboard, and then surged forth after Halifax when the ship steered into heavy weather. “I’m going to be sick,” he told the officer of the deck one evening. He was up on a wing of the bridge with binoculars, pulling lookout duty, or trying to. “Not on my watch,” the officer said, and sent him off the bridge. Jim vomited on the ladder going down the superstructure, heaved on the superstructure deck, then got down to the main deck at the forecastle and chucked up some more, this time at least into the North Atlantic. He was found there by the ship’s cook George Schwartz, bearing bread and advice. “Every time you throw up, eat a slice,” George told him. It was a far better thing to throw up something than nothing. Jim ate bread the next three days and then, as if by magic, didn’t need to eat bread anymore.
Over those first few months as an apprentice seaman, he’d been sleeping in a hammock tied up in the mess, rising in the morning before the first round of breakfast and retiring only after everyone had had supper and, perhaps, a movie. The bunk you were supposed to get on a Navy ship, the putative bunk, was elusive. The crummy sleeping situation notwithstanding, the worst part about being an apprentice seaman was the duty. Jim was constantly painting while at sea, and when the ship came in, he was constantly chipping paint. He’d made it known he wanted into the electrician’s department when there was an opening. When a job opened in the forward fire room, and the engineering officer asked if he wanted on that crew, known generally as the black gang, at least until a spot opened in the electrician’s department, Jim didn’t think twice.
He lugged his sea bag down from a locker in the mess to the engineering department in the rear of the ship. His new berth wasn’t all the way to stern; there were deckhands in that compartment, men they sometimes referred to as deck apes when they felt like denigrating them. He climbed down the ladder to the first platform and stepped through a bulkhead door into the torpedo men’s tiny compartment, and then into a larger compartment with three aisles and four lengths of bunks stacked three high. His new home was dimly lit, and a record scratched out a plaintive melody, playing off a Victrola shelved on the port side of the compartment, sometimes in fine fettle but sometimes with a voice that slowed strangely to a drawl.
He vaguely recognized all of his new bunkmates. One of the new men in his compartment had eyebrows that were wide and full, not Groucho Marx by any means, but headed in that direction. His smile yanked up slightly to the right, tentatively, and in it there was an implicit recognition that things didn’t always turn out for the best. Something about the Mediterranean lurked in his appearance, adding a subtle, swarthy tint to his complexion. This was Irvin “Dutch” Gebhart. Another man had front teeth slightly more protuberant than anyone would have liked. He had a widow’s peak so exact it looked drawn, and a certain puffiness under the eyes that lent him the appearance of someone who should have been wearing glasses, except that his eyes were excellent. This was John Gallagher.
Jim had come into the engineering department with a bit of notoriety already established. He was the lookout who’d spotted a periscope in a run over to Scotland a couple months back. With Jim’s alarm, the officer of the deck called all hands to general quarters. The bridge jumped on the talk-between-ships phones, the TBS, alerting the convoy to the proximity of a U-boat. The ship moved on the periscope, readying a so-called embarrassing attack by depth charges, but all of the embarrassment was on Jim. The periscope was found out to be the handle of a broom or mop, probably dropped off the deck of one of the other ships in the convoy and floating vertically, a freaky resemblance.
Testing out the accommodation, Jim wedged into the middle bunk in a tier of three, just below Gallagher. His upstairs neighbor weighed a concave shape into the berth, giving Jim about a foot of space over his face and what felt like inches at the midsection. But he may as well have just stretched out in the Waldorf Astoria, such was the upgrade from a hammock in the mess to a bunk in the black gang’s compartment.
He quickly learned a few things about his bunkmates. That Gallagher was Catholic and mumbled his prayers out of a little black book he’d received as a kid at confirmation, that he used to press chocolate at a mill on the southern fringe of Boston, that he’d worked in a hardware store before that, and that he’d throw a punch now and then. A few months earlier, he’d mixed it up on shore and was fined $25 for all the fun. Dutch Gebhart’s claim to fame was that he was the first man in Delaware to sign up after Pearl Harbor, or so he said. His grandfather had been the chief of police in Wilmington. He’d made gunpowder at Hercules before the war, and he’d worked at DuPont, too. In time, they all had a working appreciation of each other’s life outside the tin can. When they didn’t have to “turn to,” which was the term they used for having to work, or there wasn’t a movie to watch again, or shut-eye to catch up on, they talked about home, and girls, and what they wanted to eat, but home first and always.
On the morning of November 2, New Yorkers would awake to news of a major naval victory in action northeast of Guadalcanal, with bomb hits on Japanese carriers and the destruction of more than one hundred planes. Canterbury, England, was digging out after a German bombing run in daylight, the most intensive daytime bombing by the Germans since the Battle of Britain two years earlier. An advertisement in the New York Times promised readers they could learn the rumba, the latest dance craze, in just six hours. Arturo Toscanini had just given the first all-American program of his career at Radio City, with Benny Goodman on the clarinet for “Rhapsody in Blue” and the late George Gershwin’s mother in the audience.
By the time New Yorkers flapped their papers on this news, Plunkett and its squadron were underway. At one o’clock that morning, Ken Brown sounded a special detail and tested the ship’s engines. The previous month he’d molted from ensign to lieutenant (junior grade), and with the ship’s new CO he’d started standing watch as officer of the deck. Underway on his first watch as OOD, it was night, and they were to start zigzagging as a thwart to enemy submarines. At the moment he was to give the order to set a new course, he was stricken with indecision: Do we turn right, or left? The engineering officer Spangler, on one of his early watches as OOD, had also bungled the zigzag and put Plunkett at the vanguard of another convoy entirely. But Ken collected himself in time, called for the change of course, and stayed in formation. This November morning, Ken had the ship’s deckhands disconnect the water and telephone lines, and then the half dozen manila lines as a tugboat captain came aboard. Plunkett’s captain, Lewis R. Miller, emerged from his stateroom and joined Ken and the ship’s navigator.
Miller had just turned forty. Born of a well-established Texas family, he’d come out of the Naval Academy in 1926 with not a single extracurricular interest to his name, but a reputation for philosophizing, for humor, and as a pretty good judge of character. He’d been steering for destroyers since the Academy, preferably one down South somewhere, and preferably one on independent duty. That, he reckoned, would be Utopia. “Just let me see the old sun sinking down and hear the water lapping at my baby’s sides.” That was Lewy. His type, it was said, formed the backbone of the Navy.
On Plunkett, Miller had what he wanted but for the independent duty; his ship was ferrying the squad dog. Coming into middle age now, he cultivated a thin mustache at a time when a mustache was something fancied by effete foreigners, and a commitment to the well-being of his crew. Where Captain Standley hadn’t generated much goodwill in the wardroom or on the deck, Miller was another story. Not long after he’d assumed command in September, he’d let the junior officers have their wives on board, not merely for a look around but while the ship was actually moving, guided by tugs from a pier on the Hudson to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Around the same time, he’d called Kenneth P. “Dutch” Heissler to his quarters and told him this: “I want this to be the best-fed ship in the Navy. If you need money to get more, I’ll get it.”
The new chief commissary steward liked the sound of that. Dutch was a natural wheeler-dealer, and he knew how to provision a ship in such a way that he could trade a little bit of this for a little bit of that when push came to shove. The onetime Iowa farm boy was twenty-eight years old, but already a thirteen-year veteran of the Navy, having lied about his age in order to enlist at fifteen. Dutch’s size augmented the lie. He was six-foot-two, and his hands were massive, a prominence that inevitably prompted Dutch to use them again and again. He’d boxed as an amateur, and his nose, repeatedly broken and swollen and broken again, flew his flag as a fighter. One of his nieces claimed a title for him as the middleweight boxing champion of the Navy, and said he’d once fought Jack Dempsey, which was more a matter of family apocrypha than something that happened. But for the complications of the nose, or maybe despite them, Dutch was movie-star handsome, with a broad smile and a Superman-like curl of hair over his forehead. He was new to Plunkett that fall, but he was getting off on the right foot. “I like this duty better than I did the [USS] Augusta,” he wrote to his sister. “A better gang on here, too.” A better gang, but a pack of scroungers. Dutch was writing to his sister on some of the nice paper she’d sent him, but he couldn’t enclose the letter in one of the matching envelopes. His new shipmates had pilfered those.
At 7:15 that morning, embarked on its first invasion of the war, Jack Simpson lighted the ship and shortly thereafter mustered the entire crew to station. Five men were missing, absent over leave. Jack Collingwood relieved Simpson at 8:00 and moved the ship into the inner screen of a convoy called UGF-2 that included twenty-seven merchant ships in nine columns. UG was the routing designation the Navy gave to convoys moving east from the States to the Mediterranean theater, and F meant it was a fast convoy, steaming at fifteen knots. At eight and nine knots, which was about as much speed as a heavily laden merchant ship could muster, U-boats were more likely to graze along the margins, setting up for a torpedo shot. At fifteen knots, it was infinitely more difficult for a U-boat to land a charge, so much so that U-boats rarely expended the effort.
Plunkett was one of fourteen escort ships screening the nine columns, like a “loose-jointed necklace,” the columns about one thousand yards apart, with six hundred yards between the bows and sterns of the vessels. Day after day, Plunkett steamed on the outer edge of the convoy, a mile or more from the nearest column of ships, guarding against incursion by U-boats. All the while, the destroyers “looked” for surfaced submarines and aircraft with radar, a newfangled technology that ranked as the greatest technological development of the war to date. And they “listened” for submerged subs with sonar. The convoys zigzagged, each ship following instructions for turns at prescribed times, to stymie the geometry of submariners trying to line up a shot. The sub had to determine the ship’s speed, estimate the distance, and then allow for the several minutes it would take for the torpedo to reach its target. Ships that zigged and then zagged unpredictably foiled those calculations. In addition to radar and sonar, Plunkett looked out for subs the old-fashioned way, too, with a man on the uppermost decks of the ship, scanning the waters with binoculars.
The first wave of Operation Torch crossed the Atlantic without the Germans knowing. They “knew from ship and troop movements that something was in the wind, but they never guessed what,” naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in his account of the operation. On November 8, when the first wave hit the beaches of French Morocco, Plunkett’s crew finally learned they were headed to Casablanca. There was little information about the destination, but for the odd piece picked up here and there about the Barbary Coast and the shores of Tripoli. That was as far as anyone’s knowledge extended, but they were thrilled to have a hand in the war at last. The day after the crew learned they’d be wading into the war, the British confirmed a major victory at El Alamein in Egypt, and Churchill mobilized the English language, once again, as a springboard to morale. “Now this is not the end,” he said after lunching at the lord mayor’s house in London. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Casablanca wasn’t on anyone’s radar screen in 1942. Americans had a better sense of what was happening in Shanghai, halfway around the world, than Casablanca, a relative near neighbor. Until then, Casablanca and its 250,000 residents had been a preoccupation of the French, like far-flung outposts from Hanoi to Pondicherry to Madagascar. They’d laid out great boulevards and planted public gardens. In the Place de France, they erected a clock tower that looked like a Moorish minaret. When art deco came into vogue, their apartment buildings acquired rounded corners and nautical flourishes. The French hadn’t been the first to invade this corner of the Dark Continent. The Arabs had swept into the land of the Berbers more than a thousand years earlier and married into the culture to produce a people known as Moors—an intermingling that precipitated a joke among the men getting their first taste of this destination. What do you get when you cross an Arab with a Berber? Moor for your money. Outside Casablanca, Morocco persisted as it had for hundreds of years. And that’s what Jack Simpson wanted to see.
First day in port, he fell into admiration of a motorcycle parked on the mole, then into conversation with an Army captain who also rode a bike in the States. Jack talked at length about his own bike, a Harley-Davidson, and a cross-country trip he’d made from Atlanta to Chicago for the officer’s training program at Northwestern University. He bumped into the captain the next day, and the man pointed out another bike. “I got you a bike,” he said. “Be careful. And don’t get me in trouble.”
Now, day after day, there was a bike, courtesy of a kindred spirit, filled to the cap with gas, and all of French North Africa to explore. The city itself was tame country after the invasion, a supply depot and port of debarkation for thousands of U.S. troops now streaming into the war. The “Ice Cream Front” is what they’d taken to calling it. But outside the city, here was the North Africa that excited Jack. The bike was a Harley-Davidson WLA, not all that different from the WL model he’d been riding at home, olive drab with a knucklehead seat for one and the same forty-five-inch engine, but outfitted for service, too. A heavy-duty luggage rack on back meant the bike could haul a radio if need be, and the scabbard could handle a Thompson submachine gun. He motored out into country that people were telling him wasn’t exactly the Sahara of everyone’s imagination, but something a little more like Ohio here, and a little bit like California there. If they’d missed the war here in Casablanca, and they had, that was clear, then he was looking for desolation as consolation, for Africa was where civilization was but a rumor of things to come.
Up the coast, he traveled through Fedhala, where the Navy had set thousands of men ashore in darkness and without incident on the first day of the invasion. Beyond, the road to Rabat teemed with cyclists and with locals who seemed too big for their burros. In Rabat itself, fifty-five miles to the north, were the medieval ruins at Chellah and a once-mighty wall, now crumbling at its ramparts but formidable still at the corbels and watchtowers, and evocative at its Moorish arches. The tracery about one arch retained glazed turquoise tiling that went back centuries. It was all unaccountably green and lush about the ruins. He could hear the splash of water and glimpse orange gardens. Local men napped by springs while women and children frolicked by the water.
In Salé, where Robinson Crusoe had lived a couple years as a slave three hundred years earlier, the French had applied a lighter hand than at Casablanca. Its terraced houses volleyed the sunlight so powerfully they themselves seemed a source of all that brightness. The blue-white domes of mosques hovered above all, and if a magic carpet were to have swerved past one of those domes, it wouldn’t have surprised Jack. The war wasn’t here, but he was getting his money’s worth of adventure. Here, indeed, there was more for your money.
Exhilarated, Jack emerged one afternoon on the edge of the sea where a cliff jutted into the Atlantic. He cut the motor and listened to the muffled wash of the Atlantic below, and the lightness of wind behind him. There was room for him in all this, and he hollered into it, calling out for his boyhood hounds Blackie and Queenie and Sissie, as he’d called for them in the woods of Georgia a lifetime ago. He called for them, and the cliffs called back to him with echoes that sounded as clear and momentous seventy-five years later as they had one day at the end of the beginning of the war on a lonely cliff in Morocco.
In Casablanca, Jim Feltz wasn’t trying to slake any kind of thirst with liberty. He hadn’t resorted much to time off the ship since he’d come aboard, preferring instead the $1 his shipmates would give him to stand their watch while they waded out into the thick of it. Jim hadn’t turned eighteen yet, and he didn’t drink hardly at all, and most of the men were older than he was, more seasoned in vice, more inclined to indulge, and he wouldn’t.
One Sunday morning while they were still tied up in the inner harbor, tradition notwithstanding, Jim waded out into the streets of Casablanca with Gallagher and Gebhart, with Ski and Jim McNellis. You couldn’t come to a place like Casablanca, he’d decided, and have nothing to show for having been there. The temperatures were cool, and the air was scented with charcoal. They wore dress blues into the streets, mingling with men wearing red truncated cones on their heads called tarbooshes, others in turbans, others in skullcaps. Every now and then, there’d be a local man in a twill suit, but usually, the local trundled by in a burnoose or some nondescript shift or bloused pantaloons. Most of the women they saw were French, dressed in Sunday finery for Mass. Far more elusive were the local women. The Americans had all been made cognizant of how they were to behave toward Moslem women, but they were still half dreaming there’d be a little bit of the Arabian Nights about these women. Instead, the local women peeked at them from slits in all-white haiks, with everything concealed but for the eyes. But what eyes, the corners massaged with cream, the lashes lustered with oil, the kohl dabbed upon the lids, the pupils the women might enlarge with a dose now and then of belladonna.
The five sailors walked aimlessly all morning, past a French post office with Moorish arches, a crenellated banque that looked like a castle, and finally into the Place de France with its resplendent clock tower. They hadn’t seen much evidence of Africa since they’d come into the city, not one stinking camel, but that didn’t stop them from summoning props to stand with them for a series of pictures in a studio not far from the Place de France. Wearing dress blues in the photographs, the sailors stand in white caps, cocked left or right. They’re arrayed in a row and are remarkable for their similarity in height, as if they’d all decided to become friends because they all stood about five-eight. A canteen dangles from Jim McNellis’s right arm, and Ski is wearing a cartridge belt since he had duty on shore patrol. They stand for one with a French boy in a black beret, a black turtleneck, an overcoat, and a great grin on his face. Hands clasped at his waist, the French boy is absolutely delighted to stand for this picture, which Gallagher would later caption “11/29/42—Liberty at Casablanca.” He’s poised between two shipmates, smiling more buoyantly than any of them, a hand on McNellis’s shoulder. They took another picture with three local boys in skullcaps and raggedy white hooded cloaks, for the colonial French kid was no proof of Africa at all. When a dark-skinned foreign sailor came into the studio, they dragged this fellow into the picture, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Two U.S. Army chaps in garrison caps stand behind the five men off Plunkett and the dark-skinned sailor, out of place, as if Photoshopped into the scene. This was their first great foreign port of the war, and in this Casablanca series they look more legendary than actual, each of these men the product not so much of enlistment as of Hollywood. They’d been to Africa now, and they could prove it.
On Thanksgiving, Dutch Heissler put on the best feed possible, though there wasn’t any turkey. At mail call, Jim landed a heap of mail (Betty was writing every day), and read them all on deck, one after the other once he’d put them in chronological order. There was cause for concern. In one, Betty shared news about Ruthene, a girl from Overland who liked Jim and whom Betty sometimes referenced for reasons Jim couldn’t quite fathom. He remembered one line from a letter in the summer that stayed with him still, about how “Ruthene is a friend the same as I am.” Now she was telling Jim that he “should see her now—what a figure. In fact, she is also very pretty and hasn’t lost the sparkle for you either.” Something dimmed in the wake of that line. You never knew what was going to come in a letter. Letters from home were often sugar reports, but what was this? Jim dodged a bullet in that letter, and in the next two letters of his chronological journey, she still signed off that she “liked him lots.” But it was no better. Then it got better all of a sudden because Betty was also now making plans to come to New York with Jim’s mother at Christmas. She told him in one letter, and then confirmed as much in the letters that followed. She’d bought a new red coat. She was no longer going to Tunetown. She was visiting Jim’s parents. He stopped worrying about Ruthene.
Gallagher’s news was less welcome. His mother had been out singing with a gang his aunt Peggy pulled together, the Looney Band, and they’d been at an old-age home when she’d had a stroke. She was still able to walk somewhat, but they’d made a decision to acquire a wheelchair for her. So now there was this to worry about, on top of what the war would do to his brothers. His brothers Frank and Joe were already in the Army, and his oldest brother, Tom, was waiting to be called. He was 1-A, a Selective Service Act classification that meant he was available for military service, and had decided to wait on the draft since he was already thirty years old and working now as an accountant. “I hope that draft board don’t call Tom,” John wrote home. “I think three out of one family is plenty.” His next-oldest brother, Charlie, had one son, and another baby on the way. He was 3-A, officially deferred from service because of hardship to dependents, and struggling with the pressure to enlist. You were damned if you did, and damned if you didn’t. They’d wanted one of the boys home with their mother, as opposed to having all five of them yanked into the service, and Charlie was the heir designate.
Back home at the moment, the country celebrated Thanksgiving as the war production board was considering a 50 percent cut in everyone’s annual cocoa ration. Housewives were turning to gelatin to make two pounds of spread with one pound of butter. In New York, a fourteen-year-old boy was home on Lexington Avenue after a three-day trip to Canada, where he’d tried to enlist in the armed forces. And a “rich, suave, exciting and moving tale” was about to debut at the Hollywood Theater in New York. Free French supporters paraded down Fifth Avenue and lofted their flag inside the theater, where they sang the “Marseillaise.” It was as much a patriotic rally as the debut of a movie that Warner Bros. had hurried into the theater as coupling on the Allied invasion of North Africa. At 8 p.m. in New York, while Plunkett slept, the curtain was drawing open on the world premiere of a new movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman called Casablanca.