Ducks & Men

Warmly bundled up against the winter wind, an amateur ornithologist snooped around the shore line of Long Island last week to see what the scum of oil from torpedoed tankers was doing to the wild fowl. Oil is bad for ducks. It gets into their feathers and feed, makes them sick, keeps them from flying. The birdman was relieved to see only one miserable, oil-smeared duck.

Oil on the sea is bad for men, too, especially when it catches fire. There were stones last week of intolerable exposure, of hunger and thirst in lifeboats, of burned, screaming men, of heroic attempts to save crazed, suffering men from leaping to their death. When two tankers were attacked and burned off New Jersey and Florida, there were only three survivors from crews of 79. At week's end the Axis U-boat campaign in U.S. coastal waters had destroyed at least 27 ships, of which 17 were tankers.

Hundreds of men died, but most of the survivors said they would return to the sea as soon as they could. Some of their tales:

> A group of sailors was standing in the stern of the W. D. Anderson, chewing the fat about foreign ports. One of them, Frank Leonard Terry, was a strong swimmer; he used to be a lifeguard. When the torpedo hit, he jumped overboard at once, without a life belt, while the rest hesitated. A billowing tower of fire and smoke swallowed the ship, and fire spread over the water. In the icy water Sailor Terry stripped off his clothes and swam hard for an hour, to get away from the fire. He could feel the heat of it on the back of his neck. He bumped into a body and towed it for five minutes before he realized it was dead. He was just about ready to give up when a fishing-boat captain found him and pulled him out.

> John Forsdal was lookout on the R. P. Resor, northbound off the Jersey coast. Seeing running lights inshore of the tanker and less than a quarter mile away, the lookout thought it was a fishing boat--but two torpedoes proved it was not. Sailor Forsdal was slammed to the deck and knocked out for a moment, but recovered and went to the windward side of the ship, realizing that the wind would blow the fire the other way.

"I knocked the gooseneck [rail fastening] off the life raft," he said later, "and dropped it to the water. When I hit the water I looked around for the raft. It was gone. I kicked myself away from the ship and swam aft, thinking I'd grab the rudderpost. Instead I hit the propeller. I thought to myself: 'Oh, oh, this is no place for me.' But the propeller was dead. I swam away from the ship. It must have been ten minutes later that I heard someone holler. It was Sparks [the radio operator]. He hollered: 'Try to make it over here; I've got a raft.' Then I saw the raft in the light of the burning ship. It was about 20 feet away. I thought to myself: 'Can I make it?' I was getting awfully pooped, for you see the oil was caking on me, and my arms were so heavy I couldn't lift 'em."

Sailor Forsdal made it. When a Coast Guard vessel picked up the two men they were so heavily coated with congealed oil that they weighed (the Coast Guard captain estimated) 500 Ib. apiece.

> When three torpedoes in 50 seconds finished off the Norwegian freighter Blink, 23 men got into a power-driven lifeboat. Only six reached shore alive. The first night they dragged a sea anchor, hoping to stay within sight of other survivors. In the morning none was visible and they tried to start the engine. It balked. They raised a sail; a gust of wind upset the boat and they lost all food, all drinking water, the oars and one man. They righted the boat and got back in.

Others began to die. "We all dreaded night to come on." a survivor said. "It was colder at night. Several men tried to jump overboard, but we kept them inside. When they died we had to throw the bodies overboard. Sharks came close, waiting. We shouted, we made noises, we did whatever we could to scare them off. The men's lips were swollen and cracked, and once when it rained we tried to catch a few drops of rain on the tongue." Total hours at sea: 66.

> When the Cities Service Empire went down, torpedoed and burning off Florida, 30 were saved, eleven lost. Said John Walsh, wiper: "I saw our captain on a life raft. He and some of the other men were on it and the current was sucking them into the burning oil around the tanker. I last saw the captain going into a sheet of orange flame. Some of the fellows said he screamed. I didn't hear him. . . . Monroe Reynolds was with me for a while. He was screaming that he was going blind. . . . Gus, the quartermaster, was with us. He had a piece of steel in his head and he said: 'I won't last long.' He didn't."

Coming thick & fast, harrowing tales like these were hard for the U.S. public to take. No one described the last thoughts and feelings of German submarine crews as their boats, plates cracked open by depth bombs, settled into the black crush of the sea. Ranging so far from home bases, attacking so close to enemy shores, the Germans were paying a tall price. And the men of the tankers continued to move oil. They were men, not ducks.

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