In recollecting the months and years of the Second World War, it can be noted that most captains of combat ships meant and did well. Besides, American sailors were long-suffering and durable. They did what orders required. Mutiny, if indeed it ever threatened, rarely got past a muttering stage. The result was generally a “tight and well-fought ship.”
All that notwithstanding, practically every vessel that carried the American flag aloft, carried also a skeleton rattling around somewhere down below.
That was inevitable. There were personality clashes that resulted when men lived too long, too close, on ships too small for comfort.
American sailors, unused to class distinction and the power of rank, kept peace, sometimes grudgingly, by accepting officer authority as a necessary part of their military experience. Ensign or admiral, he got his salute, and the navy got on with the job.
Submarine chasers were sometimes referred to as the “splinter fleet.” they were wooden, 100 feet long, the smallest of the regular sea-going fighting ships. They had a crew of three officers and 30 men.
If ever a mutiny could have come out of our Navy during the period 1940 to 1945, it should have involved a submarine chaser. Each man “owned” just three feet of the ship — on average. Subtract the magazine, the officers’ quarters, fore peak and the lazaret (the storage room at the stern), and you’ve given the men very little room in which to turn around.
Sailors slept clinging to their bunks. Pitching and rolling underway made circus thrill rides poor by comparison.
The galley was about as big as a closet. More often as not the cook had gone through baking school and could make a loaf of bread. That was all.
Underway at sea it was not unusual for SC crews to eat fresh bread and grape jelly till they got into a harbor where calm water let the cook experiment past his loaf of bread, maybe turning out a batch of tomato and spaghetti.
All this might have broken the will of ship’s crew, broken spirit, broken morale. Grumbling might have led to mutiny. There was no grumbling, no mutiny.
But there came a skeleton into one of those little ships, and its coming makes a sad and rather strange story.
After an island invasion great ships drew off into the darkness to get away from hostile night raiders close to the war zone. Battleships and cruisers would go back at dawn to resume their bombardment.
Around these great ships destroyers and lesser craft made a protective screen that would prevent submarines from attacking. Every ship in the screen had a station assigned that must be kept, a position relative to the big ships and other screening vessels. To keep station required consummate piloting skill and constant attention.
In the course of one of these night maneuvers a storm blew into the region, a classic Pacific typhoon with winds in excess of 10 mph.
Station-keeping was impossible for small craft. Radar became useless when ships were buried in troughs so deep that signals were lost and swallowed up in salt-water canyons.
Our captain did his best. For three days and nights it took the storm to blow itself out. He stayed on the bridge. Most of the time the best his ship could do was stay out of the way of other vessels in the convoy as they came, from time to time, careening unannounced across our bow.
In time the wind and wave subsided, the fury of the storm abated, and the sea took on a more promising face. Ships that had scattered 50 miles and more formed up — the navy was once again ship-shape.
Shortly thereafter our captain was summoned aboard the command vessel that had been in charge of the screen.
There he was subjected to an angry tirade, a fist-class navy bawling out, for failure to keep his position during the nighttime maneuvers.
Poor Captain R. For a year and a half he had survived on poor sleep and a poor diet, yet commanded a clean ship and ready ship and had the willing respect of his crew.
He never grumbled and would have hanged himself for any mutiny he made. His was the unchronicled story of one man’s martyrdom in the face of uncompromising Navy bureaucracy.
In a manner of speaking you could say that he was an American military man cut down by friendly fire.
Paul Seamans is a permanent resident of the Charlene Manor nursing home. A picture window on his room’s west side gives a full view of Shelburne Mountain, a continuing inspiration for “Said & Done,” his regular column on The Recorder Outdoors page.