Heroics Without Headlines

Last week's compilation of ship sinkings showed that from Jan. 1, 1942 to Oct. 1, 490 Allied ships had been sunk in the western and south Atlantic by Axis submarines; from Oct. 1 to Dec. 20 only 65 more. This notable success in the Battle of the Atlantic was not gained in any single thrilling action. The following account of the labors of a U.S. convoy vessel (given with a fictitious name) tells something of how that success has been won:

The U.S.S. Angry turned her snub, sea-battered nose out into the grey wilderness of wintry Atlantic. Green water pounded the corvette's narrow decks, doused her open bridge where the hooded skipper stood squinting into the mist. Now and then he gave a quiet command for relay to engine room, signalmen and the helmsman below. The Angry was heading back to sea, guarding another convoy of rusty freighters, laden with men and supplies for distant battlefronts.

As the sea grew rougher, Lieut. Commander Noah Adair, the Angry's captain, pulled his weatherproof hood tighter over his red thatch, drew the voluminous coat closer around his tall, lanky frame. The bridge, where he stood swaying with the ship's roll, was open to rain, wind and spray, except for a strip of canvas lashed to the rail and another strip overhead.

Beside the bridge, Signalman 1st Class Ralph Moore, pea jacket buttoned tight, watch cap pulled down over his ears, fiddled with a blinker signal. Beating his spray-flecked gloves together for warmth, Moore reported a destroyer's signal to take up position in the escort.

"Right rudder 20DEG," ordered the captain for relay to the helmsman. Over a speaking tube came the Iowa-sharp voice of John ("Shanghai") Frajman, Machinist's Mate 2nd Class: "Engines making one-oh-two revolutions, sir."

Captain Adair nodded, ducked to miss a bath of chilling spray.

Since May 14, when the first coastal convoy moved from a U.S. port with the Angry among its escort, the Angry had, helped shepherd 22 convoys to their secret destinations through seas where submarines hid. Two days out of every three, the Angry had been at sea. To bigger ships, to men in situations more readily recognizable as heroic, had gone the headlines and the medals. The Angry's first task was to get each supply-chocked freighter through to safety; its second, to sink U-boats.

Sturdy, well armed, and round-bottomed to wallow over the waves rather than cut through them, the Angry is a queer duck to be flying a U.S. ensign. Her 206-ft. length is shorter than a destroyer's, longer than most cutters'. In the Royal Navy, for which she was built in 1940, she was classed as a corvette. When Britain gave the ship and five others like her to the U.S. last March, the U.S. Navy quickly changed her name and classed her with gunboats, since the U.S. has no corvette class.

Down U-Boat Alley. No sooner had a U.S. crew, briefly trained in Britain, brought the Angry home, than they were in the thick of battle. Hitler had turned East Coast waters into U-boat Alley. In the weeks that followed, the General Quarters signal, raucously summoning all hands to battle stations, wailed dozens of times, day & night. Men of the Angry slept in their work-stained dungarees, roused hastily, donned life belts and climbed quickly to the darkened deck to heave depth charges when another submarine tried to break through the protective ring of escort ships.

Sometimes a great oil slick would boil up after the depth charges--TNT packed in containers the size and shape of small ash cans--had been rolled off the Angry's stern or fired from small catapult-like Y-guns. Each subterranean explosion, as the sea seethed for 50 sq. yds., made the Angry's stern buck and quiver like a blooded stallion's. It seemed that her seams would open, so close was the muffled thunder.

The Technique. Other ships have been credited with definite kills; never the Angry. But neither has she ever lost a ship entrusted to her care. For Captain Adair, his gunner's mates and sound-detection men have learned their business. Its primer lessons are:

> Depth charges are best dropped in a diamond-shaped pattern around the target, to bring the submarine, seams bursting, to the surface.

> Charges are best set to explode at two depths, say one at 100 ft., the other at 200. Thus a submarine may be crushed like sandwich filling between two slabs of explosive.

> U-boats caught cruising on the surface, as they do at night, can be disabled by 3-or 4-in. shells from a corvette's deck guns. If the conning tower is damaged, the submarine may be helpless.

> U-boats like to attack at dusk and dawn; they prefer to lurk in passages between islands or off harbor entrances.

Light & Darkness. The British favor sending up "snowflakes" (a kind of flare) simultaneously from each ship in the attacked convoy. Hanging in the sky three or four minutes, snowflakes turn the entire area bright as day. By their light the escort ships, hovering in the outside darkness, can see where the U-boat has attacked. U.S. experience has been that merchant ships seldom fire their snowflakes simultaneously, with the result that a convoy may be illumined for 15 or 20 minutes, giving the U-boat a chance to choose further targets. If the attacker is one of a pack, submarines outside the circle of light can attack the escort ships, silhouetted against the snowflakes' light.

So the U.S. Navy favors the limited use of flares and greater dependence on submarine-detection devices. These are miracle machines, but men must operate them. Highly trained and acutely attuned, those operators are the superbrains of a convoy escort. Their job and their accomplishments will not be fully told until after the war, perhaps longer.

The Record. "Our Navy has gotten so cagey," mused an officer of the Angry, "that you have to bring back the U-boat skipper's pants to prove you've sunk a sub."

In this war the Navy will not be caught, as it was after World War I, with claims far outstripping German records of U-boat losses when a post-war check comes. Exactly how many have been bagged in the western Atlantic is a naval secret. In certain sections of the Caribbean and on the convoy lanes to Africa the U-boat heat is still on. But in the western Atlantic, along the approaches to the U.S., there are only occasional marauders where once there were scores, for men of the Angry and countless other escort ships have done their job well.

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