John Winn Miller

The torpedo shot out of the darkness through a raging sea and slammed into the steel hull amidships with the ominous clank of a death knell.

At the awful sound and the steel hull’s violent shudder, Capt. Jake Rogers bolted to the three small windows at the front of the wheelhouse of his newly minted American Liberty ship, the 7,100-ton SS Charles C. Walcutt, but couldn’t see any flames or smoke. Swirling fog banks and torrential rain driven by gale-force winds shrouded the heaving North Atlantic, making it difficult to see any of the other 40-odd ships in the convoy.

“Helm, hard left!” Rogers yelled, his windburned face and hazel eyes impassive, his tall, gaunt frame rock steady, projecting a calmness for the benefit of his men that he did not feel.

“Hard left. Aye, Captain,” said the young helmsman at the small wooden wheel in front of him.

Rogers slammed the General Alarm on the aft wall, setting off a loud bell, signaling the forty Merchant Marines and twenty-eight US Navy Armed Guards to man their stations. He lifted the sound-powered Hose-McCann telephone receiver on the wall, set it for Number One, the engine room, and cranked the handle. “Chief, what’s the status?”

“No serious damage to the engine room, Captain. A few gauges broke, and asbestos flakes came down. We’re checking the hull. Bosun’s sending men to the holds.”

“So, did we hit something, or did something hit us?” Rogers asked. Out of the corner of his eye, through the front windows, he glimpsed another ship ahead. “Helm, hard right,” he shouted.

“Hard right. Aye, Captain,” the helmsman said, spinning the wheel just in time to avoid the approaching ship. Another deafening bang rattled the ship as it slammed down from the crest of a thirty-foot wave.

“Report to me as soon as you know anything,” Rogers said, slamming down the phone.

First Mate Ali Nidal rushed in from the starboard door, shaking the rain off his sou’wester hat and oilskin raincoat. “It does not appear to have been a torpedo, Captain,” Nidal said, his swarthy, pockmarked visage grim as usual.

“A dud?” Rogers asked. German torpedoes sometimes failed because they struck at the wrong angle.

Stroking his black goatee, Nidal shook his head. “I do not believe so. If it was, we should have been struck by other torpedoes by now. Must be something else,” said the Tunisian, one of the few men aboard with whom Rogers had sailed before and trusted completely. They had barely survived their last voyage together on the ancient tramp steamer the Peggy C, one-third the size of their current ship.

Steel scraping across steel caused a dreadful shriek—something that meant serious trouble. “Take the watch. Keep the men at their stations until I find out what’s going on,” Rogers said, pointing at Nidal with a crooked right arm that he couldn’t straighten out all the way. Gunfire from a German Armed Raider had shattered it during a surprise attack on the Peggy C. “And continue evasive action.” He threw on his rain gear, including rubber boots and gloves, grabbed a large flashlight, and ducked out into the driving rain, slipping in his haste down the ladder almost to the main deck three stories below. He leaned over the starboard bulwark and searched the hull with short flashlight bursts. Trying to avoid detection by any nearby U-boat, he inched his way toward the stern. Relentless waves rammed him back against the main deckhouse.

To continue his inspection, Rogers had to tug his way along the bulwark, head down and leaning at almost a forty-five-degree angle against the wind. He anchored his feet from one metal stanchion on the side to another like rungs on a ladder.

“Come see this, Captain,” a voice called out behind him. The nearby sailor clicked a flashlight on and off his face in a short burst so Rogers could see he was the ship’s bosun. Able Seaman Thomas Vimont, who oversaw the deck crew, was one of the older crew members, having “come up through the hawse pipes,” what sailors said of someone who had risen in the ranks without much formal education.

Vimont led Rogers forward toward the bow and pointed his flashlight down from where the superstructure met the hatch for Hold Number Three. In front of them was a horrifying sight: a long, jagged tear stretched up the hull where two prefabricated sections of the Liberty ship had been welded together. The tear seemed to grow with each bounce of the ship on the turbulent waters. The bosun clicked off the flashlight.

“Station two men here to monitor the damage!” Rogers shouted over the howling wind. “Have one of them run up to the wheelhouse every five minutes and report to me. Send two others down below to check inside Hold Number Three and report back to me in the wheelhouse on the phone. Is that clear?”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” Vimont said.

“And tell Chief to organize a damage control team with Chips to see if we can do anything to patch it up from inside!” Rogers yelled, using the slang for the ship’s carpenter.

The bosun motioned over an immense black sailor named Obasi, who always hovered about whenever the captain was on deck or in dangerous situations. Rogers smiled at his old friend before running to the officers’ mess. There, Chief Steward Cookie, another old friend and cook from the Peggy C, and the other stewards had laid out bandages, yellow sulfa powder, and other medical supplies on tables in preparation for treating the wounded. “All set, Cap’n,” said the portly Brit. With molted jowls and thin white tufts of hair on his bald head, he was easy to spot.

Rogers saluted and struggled back up the ladder to the wheelhouse. “She’s coming apart, Mr. Nidal,” Rogers said, brushing back his wavy brown hair as rain streamed off him.

“How is that possible?” Nidal asked. “Were we hit?”

“I have no idea. Didn’t look like damage from a torpedo. But sections are splitting apart. Bosun and the Chief are checking it out,” Rogers said, scanning the ocean through the windows with large binoculars. Visibility was less than the length of a football field. “Helmsman, hard right. All ahead slow.”

“Hard right. All ahead slow. Aye, aye, Captain.”

“We will lose the convoy,” Nidal said.

“No choice,” Rogers said. “We have to slow down and get out of the way.” U-boats were always lurking about, waiting for a lame duck like his ship to fall behind and become easy prey. It was a terrible dilemma. But Rogers couldn’t risk endangering the other ships in the east-bound convoy. HX-229 ships were trying to maintain a rectangular formation with five columns 1,000 yards apart and 600 yards from the stern of one ship to the bow of the trailing vessel.

It didn’t take Rogers long to do the math. The convoy was moving at seven knots, the slowest ship’s speed in rough seas. If his ship slowed down to even three knots to do repairs, it would take less than five minutes for the trailing ship to ram his ship. With the Charles C. Walcutt blacked-out except for a low-voltage, shielded blue light on its stern—a light that couldn’t be seen in such low visibility in time to prevent a disaster—she would be all but invisible. And that assumed the ships could maintain any semblance of a convoy formation in the violent seas. That near-impossibility made the situation even more dangerous and unpredictable.

They were on their own. No rescue ships were assigned to this convoy. And it was too dark to get protection from covering aircraft, even if the convoy wasn’t in the dreaded “Black Pit.” The 300-mile-wide gap from east to west in the middle of the North Atlantic was out of range for almost all land-based planes from either America or England. It was a hell of a way for Rogers to celebrate his fortieth birthday, an hour away on St. Patrick’s Day, 1943.

A burst of light flooded the wheelhouse before the sound caught up, rattling the windows and sending shock waves through the ship. Tentacles of yellow and orange flames ripped through the sky. A second blast followed within seconds. Given the proximity, Rogers guessed it was the Norwegian motor ship Elin K, carrying a load of manganese, an essential ingredient for stainless steel used to make helmets and other military equipment.

“Those were definitely torpedoes,” Rogers said. But he could do nothing about it as his ship fell farther behind its assigned position in the convoy. He could only hope any survivors would be picked up by one of the four destroyers in their escort or by the lone corvette, a lightly armed warship smaller than a destroyer that could match the speed and range of U-boats.

At the whining squeal of the sound-powered phone, Rogers hustled to the back of the wheelhouse to answer it. “Chief here, Captain. We’ve got a real problem. Hold Number Three is flooded, and we can’t get to the crack for repairs. We’ll have to try to weld it from the outside.”

“Using a blow torch would attract every U-boat for miles, even if we could get someone safely over the side in this weather,” Rogers said. “Can you pump out the hold enough to lower a welder inside?”

“Possibly. But we’d have to come to almost a full stop.” A full stop would kill any hope of catching up with the convoy, even at his ship’s top speed of 11.5 knots, which wasn’t possible anyway. She was loaded down with 8,000 tons of steel, cotton, and food and had a deck crammed with aircraft, tractors, and trucks.

The proud stevedores in New York had bragged that the Charles C. Walcutt was “full and down,” meaning they had accomplished the rare feat of filling all her cargo space so that she was loaded down to her white-painted Plimsoll lines, marking how low the hull was in the water. That wasn’t true. The Plimsoll line was below the waterline, and his ship was clearly overloaded. It didn’t matter for Rogers’ ship. It was wartime, and being beyond capacity was a necessity, even if it meant his ship was slower and more unwieldy than usual.

“Helm, all ahead slow,” Rogers said.

“All ahead slow. Aye, Captain,” the helmsman said, pulling the handle to his right back and forth on the brass engine order telegraph, which was connected to the engine room’s telegraph by a chain. He halted the arrow on “ahead slow,” which the engine room acknowledged by repeating the steps with a loud clanging of the telegraph’s bell.

“Chief,” Rogers said into the telephone, “you’ve got less than five hours until sunrise to make repairs. After that, we’ve got to make a run for Liverpool as best we can.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“And send someone to find Bosun and tell him to deploy the torpedo nets.” The nets were interlocking steel rings attached to cargo booms lowered to ninety degrees port and starboard. They only protected about three-quarters of the hulls, but that was better than nothing.

Rogers returned to the windows and searched the turbulent sea with his binoculars. In the distance, a cargo ship passed through the fog to his port, its blue taillight fading like a dying ember. The passing of what sailors called the “coffin corner”—the last ship on the starboard column of a convoy—meant they were now utterly alone and at the mercy of luck and the weather.

Urgent ship alarms wailed in the distance. Rapid explosions shot flames and billowing smoke sky high, illuminating dreaded silhouettes: conical towers atop low-slung hulls of U-boats. The German subs blasted away with their 8.8cm deck guns and launched torpedoes as they wove in and out of the columns like steel sharks in a savage frenzy among lumbering whales. More torpedoes found their mark, turning the whole area into a horrible scene of shooting flames and burning metal.

Rogers pivoted to US Navy Ensign Johnny Mitchell standing at his battle station in the wheelhouse. “We have reduced speed,” Rogers said. “So, I’d advise you to hold your fire unless you’re 100 percent certain you see a target.”

“That is my decision, sir,” Mitchell said. Rogers had no authority over the Armed Guards, and relations were not always the best between the naval personnel and the unionized Merchant Marines, who were employed by private companies and paid higher salaries, including combat bonuses, than the Navy. The Armed Guards, most of whom had never been to sea before, were bitter about being the “Navy’s stepchildren” and often derided by sailors as “fish food” on suicide missions.

“Of course, Ensign,” said Rogers, who always went out of his way to be deferential to the sensitive young officer. “But if you open fire while we can’t maneuver, you’ll be sending a signal flare to all the U-boats to come pick off an easy trophy. Better to let them keep moving away with the convoy.”

There was a long pause. “OK, Captain. I understand. We’ll keep our powder dry as long as we can.”

“Thanks. And you should know that we have developed a serious crack in the starboard hull amidships. If it gets worse, I’ll recommend you pull your men on the bow back to the stern.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.” Using his helmet phone, Mitchell told the chief gunner’s mate in the stern gun tub, who commanded the ship’s primary weapon—a 4-inch 50-caliber gun that required at least seven men to operate—to hold his fire. He repeated the commands to crews manning the 3-inch 50-caliber gun in the bow, the 20mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft machine guns on the four corners of the main deckhouse, and the two 20mm Oerlikon guns atop the poop deck at the stern.

They all huddled in the driving rain in their semi-circular gun tubs made of “plastic armor,” a made-up name to confuse the Germans. It was actually a thin steel plate covered with a layer of stones mixed with asphalt that would deflect bullets and not shatter as concrete barriers would.

Although there were many weapons on the Charles C. Walcutt, they were primarily defensive. In the event of an enemy attack, the recommended course of action was to flee and use the stern gun for cover. That was another source of bitterness among the Armed Guards. They had joined the Navy to attack the enemy, not run away, a frustration reflected in a derisive sign at one training center: “Ready—Aim—Abandon Ship!”

A speeding British corvette hurtled past Rogers’ ship, churning up a foamy wake as it chased the U-boats into the flaming convoy, its spotlight swirling around. As it roared away, the corvette launched a flurry of barrel-shaped depth charges over both sides of the ship. They exploded with bone-jarring thumps in rapid succession, triggering geysers of water and sound waves that rocked the Charles C. Walcutt.

Long-tailed snowflake flares, tracer bullets, and bursts of star shells lit up the sky over another exploding cargo ship. Rogers never understood the use of flares because, in his opinion, they simply made the Allied ships easier targets. He couldn’t be sure what ship had been attacked because Liberty ships painted over their names after launching so the Germans couldn’t track them. But based on its position in the convoy, it appeared to be the SS James Oglethorpe. It, too, was on its maiden Atlantic crossing, aflame and listing to its starboard.

Desperate sailors scrambled over the decks, some fighting to lower two lifeboats. One boat flipped over when someone prematurely cut the fall—the rope and blocks used to lower the boats from davits—and dumped more than a dozen men into the icy sea. Death for them was mere minutes away.

Rogers let out a silent curse as he lowered his binoculars, unable to watch any longer. He had repeatedly drilled everyone on his ship to lower the lifeboats slowly and safely. Now, there was nothing he could do to help as the wounded ship circled out of control to port.

One of the rain-drenched sailors who had been monitoring the crack in the hull darted in the starboard door. “Come quick, Captain! You gotta see this!”

Rogers followed the sailor down the ladders to another sailor, holding a large flashlight. He handed it to the captain with a shaking hand. When Rogers pointed the flashlight down onto the hull, a chill shot up and down his spine. The crack was still growing.