Stage Door Canteen (30 page)

The Esher, owned by Elliot Steamships of Newcastle, England, was Captain David Griffth’s first command. He’d joined her as first officer, then moved up to captain at the outbreak of war when the Esher’s original master was assigned to one of the company’s larger ships. Built in the mid-Thirties in the Clyde and operated before the war out of Cardiff, Wales, exporting Welsh coal and importing iron ore, the Esher was a shelter deck ship with a flush deck, loaded with tanks and airplane parts, and with a main deck eight feet below that. She was a sturdy vessel with few quirks—although the ones she had were important. Ten thousand tons deadweight, she could make a respectable ten to twelve knots in good weather.

What the Esher could not do, and presumably everybody who shipped aboard her was well aware of it, was defend herself. On the other hand, an actual attack by the old Esher on any other target was, too, out of the question.

The anti-aircraft guns mounted on the afterdeck and on both side of the bridge were salvaged from gunboats that had, according to the Navy crew that had installed them, seen final action at Malta. They were workable, unlike the impressive—at a distance—four-inch gun mounted aft. This armament was also salvage, but of a quality that indicated the state of England’s current efforts to provide for its depleted and often obsolete merchant fleet. The aft gun was something of a mystery. The navy gun crews had been exploring it since they’d come aboard, and were of the opinion that the gun on the poop deck was a relic from the Boer War.

It was routine to test the ship’s guns on the trial run. But after examining the four-inch gun the RN chief petty officer had inquired of the Esher’s second mate, who was in charge of the ship’s gunnery. Who then passed the question to the first officer, who brought it before Captain Griffiths, as to whether there would be an actual firing of the poop deck gun on trial runs in Long Island Sound.

It was an easy decision to make. Any competent master of a merchant ship would see at once that the Boer War gun was there to impress and intimidate the enemy, and not to be put to actual use. “Tell the gun crew,” David Griffiths had informed the first mate, “there will be no firing of the poop gun until such time as the ship is under enemy attack.”

This order seemed to be greeted in all quarters with visible relief. The betting had been that the Old Man, a dour, by-the-book young Welshman, would be too smart to try it. A bigger betting pool had been on whether the four-incher, when fired, would blow up. Or even prematurely fall apart.

Few seamen on ships supplying war materiel for Britain had any illusions about up-to-date weaponry. Weapons assigned to civilian cargo vessels could be nothing short of exotic. The Esher had, on the bridge behind the antiaircraft gun emplacement, a mysterious row of steel cylinders, each roughly thirty-six inches high, with a trap at the bottom. In the event of an urgent need to retaliate against an enemy attack, the manual of operations advised that the pin of a grenade be pulled and the grenade dropped into the steel cylinder, down a chute provided for it. Whereupon the trap at the bottom would then open a steam valve. Theoretically, at this point, the expanding steam would propel the device upward to make contact with any enemy aircraft unlucky enough to be flying at approximately fifty feet altitude and directly over the Esher.

The one and only time, in early 1940, when one of the cylinders had been tested, it had leaped some thirty feet in the air, landing on the galley and shattering the skylight. The cook, who was inside the galley at the time had, as an immediate reaction, what appeared to be a prolonged and profane nervous breakdown. The test was never repeated.

The Esher warped her way up the East River in the snowfall, passing the drydocks and piers of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. From her decks the platform of a U. S. aircraft carrier at dockside loomed as a towering gray phantom, dwarfing East River traffic. Here, blocked by the office towers of lower Manhattan, there was no wind, but the stillness was icy.

Captain Griffiths had been aware for some time that the Lloyds agent was studying him. From his expression he gathered the insurance man wanted to ask about the Esher. How it felt to be aboard the same ship that had been torpedoed and nearly sunk in October not too far down the coast from where they now were. He wasn’t too surprised when the Lloyds’ man said jovially, between foghorn blasts, “Good to be back at the job, eh, Captain?”

Griffiths stared down the length of the Esher’s decks for a long moment before he answered. It was a damned silly question, typical of people who lived and worked on land. One got used to it. He gave a taciturn nod, then lifted his glasses to survey the approaches to the Williamsburg Bridge.

The Lloyds of London’s agent wasn’t discouraged. He dealt with crusty sea captains all the time. “I know about your U-boat attack,” he said cheerfully. “Quite a narrow squeak, that, six feet of water in the boiler room, ship dead in the water, the U-boat hovering, ready to pounce and finish the job.” When the captain continued to silently examine the midtown Manhattan shoreline, he went on, “The U. S. Coast Guard reported the number on the conning tower as U-426, didn’t they? Do you know that’s Ensmann? He’s almost as famous as their Wolfgang Luth or Erich Topp. They make national idols of sub commanders back in Germany, you know, put their faces on banners to hang in public places, make songs about them, the whole ‘wolves of the sea’ rigamarole. The reports say the U-426 must have fired her last torpedo and when she didn’t sink you, she surfaced to finish the job.”

David Griffiths watched the millionaires’ riverside townhouses on East End Avenue glide by, blurred by whirling snow. Until that moment he hadn’t known that the U-boat that attacked the Esher off the New Jersey coast was commanded by someone named Ensmann. Or that Ensmann was famous, according to the Lloyds’ agent. But the ‘down to her last torpedo’ seemed correct. If the U-boat had carried a spare, the Esher probably would have gone down.

The ship had been headed, in the mild early evening off the upper New Jersey coast, for Hampton Roads, to pick up orders. She was running comfortably at nine knots, the seas calm, the lookouts in place, scanning the ocean. Then out of nowhere, shattering the peaceful twilight, came the shock of impact. Followed by the ship shuddering like a living thing as the torpedo ripped into her amidships and into the boiler room, killing both firemen on duty there. Water quickly flooded the engine room. There had been time enough only for the engineer and oiler to escape up the ladder. The Esher began to sink. From the bridge David Griffiths saw the U-boat surfacing, literally popping up from the depths like a cork, spouting great gouts of water that fell back, foaming, into the sea. A terrifying apparition. A slick, amphibious gray-black shape. A genuine underseas monster.

“Must have been quite a feeling, sitting there confronting it.” The Lloyds’ agent’s nose was red with cold; he rubbed his gloved hands together briskly. “Did Ensmann manage to get off a shot at you?”

They both knew it would have been a different story if the Esher’d had a volatile cargo. The first torpedo would have been enough to finish her. As it was, the Esher was empty, a “light” ship. The hatches managed to stay intact, the Esher bouyant enough to only settle down a few feet in the seas, her decks awash. Still, dead in the water. With six feet of sea water in the engine room she wasn’t going anywhere. Some of the Esher’s crew ran to the rails to stare at the submarine. The Royal Navy gun crew, though, raced to battle stations at the Boer War gun.

The captain lowered his binoculars. The snow had thickened so it was useless to pretend one could see anything. “No shots fired,” he said tersely. “The U-boat crashed dived.”

The Germans hadn’t had time to do anything else. Even as they saw the U-bat crew dropping out of the conning tower and onto the U-boat’s deck to man the deck guns, they heard officers shouting, ordering them back. U.S Coast Guard spotter planes were already overhead, having picked up the column of smoke and steam from the Esher’s ruptured boilers. The crews of both boats looked up into the sky. A Coast Guard anti-submarine patrol PBY arrived and roared over them to drop depth charges. The Yanks to the rescue.

David Griffiths had asked himself later what he would have done if the eager gun crew, placed at the four-inch Boer relic to do their duty, had actually attempted to fire the thing. He still had no answer.

“You had a rather grim time,” the agent was saying, “when the Esher sailed in Convoy PQ 17, didn’t you? They told me in Halifax the Esher was only one of nine ships to survive. To make it all the way.”

He waited a moment before he said, “Eleven. The convoy contained thirty five merchant ships, twenty two American, and a RN escort of twenty one, including submarines.”

Convoy PQ17 had been a floating town, a moving, high-visibility rectangle of cargo ships twenty-five miles wide, spread out nakedly against the surface of the ocean. And, critics said, a prime demonstration of the occasional insane idea generated by war.

The convoy, which had made up in Hvalfjordur, Iceland, bound for the Russian port of Archangel above the Arctic Circle, was carrying war materiel that Churchill and Roosevelt had promised Stalin: seven hundred million dollars worth of planes, tanks, guns, oil and munitions. Their destination, Archangel, was a hell of a place to find, because one had to swing clear of the coast of German-occupied Norway from which the U-boats and Luftwaffe bombers were launched.

Things started out badly. Halfway to Russia the Luftwaffe attacked PQ17 so steadily that two merchant ships were so massively damaged they had to be sunk. The Luftwaffe kept on the pressure. No one had known, then, that the British Admiralty had just found out through intelligence sources that the battleship Tirpitz, long holed up in a Norwegian fjord, was rumored to have put to sea. Respomnding to this perceived threat, the Admiralty had reached the conclusion that the Tirpitz was headed toward the great, slow-moving PQ17 to attack it. It issued perhaps the most astonishing command of the war so far. British warships guarding the convoy were ordered to abandon it and steam away to look for the dread battleship Tirpitz. Merchant ships were issued orders to scatter and , proceed individually to Archangel. Each ship was on its own.

Seeing Allied warships leaving the convoy unprotected, the Luftwaffe and German U-boats began a relentless attack on the scattering vessels of Convoy PQ17 that lasted an entire week.

On the first day fourteen ships were sunk. Men plunged into icy waters coated with flaming oil. If they managed to get into lifeboats they were still two hundred miles from a barren, uninhabited landscape. One resourceful commander of an escort ship that had somehow, in defiance of orders, stayed with its three freighters, had a brilliant idea. Within hours the ships’ crews had painted their freighters white, ingeniously using sheets from the bunks to fill in the parts of the superstructure that couldn’t be covered by paint. The trick worked. Both submarines and the Luftwaffe passed over the small, camouflaged group of ships, never spotting them in the ice floe-filled seas. The Esher had been one of the ships that had, all hands working twenty four frantic hours, painted itself white.

David Griffiths stuck his hands in the pockets of his greatcoat and hunched his shoulders. Damned if he knew what he was supposed to say. He had been there on the PQ17’s run to Archangel, living with the hell of constant alert, four hours on duty, four hours off. No time to eat or sleep or wash, only standing watch with fatigue so heavy it was like being drunk. Seeing torpedoed ships in the convoy breaking apart, exploding and going down. Helplessly waiting for the U-boats to strike the Esher.

There was no way he had found since then to tell about the slaughter of the PQ17 as a war anecdote. Even if he were so inclined. The words would stick in his throat.

Since the hellish summer of ‘42, the U-boat war had not abated. Convoys were still making the suicidal runs to Archangel and Murmansk. German U-boats were still attacking in wolf packs of seven and eight and ten for days at a time. In November alone twenty one ships had been torpedoed. In December—and the month was not yet over—the Admiralty’s tally of total merchant ships sunk by U-boats in the North Atlantic was already at fourteen.

Newspapers reported that the damnable part of it all was that in spite of the horrendous loss of Allied ships to German submarines, Stalin was insisting the convoys to Murmansk and Archangel had to continue for the morale of the Russian people. If for no other reason, that they would know that he, Stalin, personally could guarantee the backing of the English and American war effort.

David Griffiths climbed down the ladder to the cargo deck and headed for the galley. It was not necessary to inform the wheelhouse he was leaving the bridge. The New York harbor pilot was in charge of the ship when he was onboard, and would take them out into the Sound and bring them back.

He went to the saloon and sat down at the table. When the steward appeared from the galley, he told him to fetch a mug of hot milk.

He was supposed to take a phenobarbital pill for the ache in his midsection that had become, since breakfast, a fine, knifelike agony. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he rested his elbows on the table and clamped his hands over his eyes, shielding them from the glare of the saloon’s overhead light. He took a deep breath. Under the soles of his boots the thrumming of the engines was solid, comforting.

After the trial runs, after provisioning and the completion of recommissioning, the Esher would leave New York and, unescorted, make her way through Long Island Sound once more, then through the Cape Cod Canal to Portland, Maine, tracked by the U.S. Coast Guard and spotter planes. Then across Cape Sable to Halifax, and its ship-filled harbor of Bedford Basin. Where the Esher would eventually take on munitions and get her particulars for the next convoy.