Books: Tales of the Atlantic

CLEAR THE DECKS! (242 pp.)—Daniel V. Gallery—Morrow ($3.50).

This narrative of World War II might well be called “Tales of the North Atlantic.” It is unusual among war memoirs in that its author is a bright, youngish (50) rear admiral of naval aviation with no intention of retiring—he currently commands a carrier division in the Atlantic and Mediterranean from the flag bridge of the Coral Sea.

Dan Gallery started the war as commander of the fleet air base at Reykjavik, Iceland. His relationship with the U.S. Army Air Force was sometimes-less than cordial. One day when the Air Force reported 13 German JU-88s on the radar screen and the pips turned out to be twelve ducks, Gallery gleefully asked for full technical details “of this revolutionary development in bombardment aircraft.” He also asked what had become of the 13th. Says Gallery: “The colonel made a very silly, unmilitary, and totally impracticable suggestion as to what I could do with that missing duck if I found it.”

Overstuffed Iceland. Gallery confides that Iceland wasn’t nearly so cold as everybody imagined, but at the time he had no inclination to dispel any illusions. Only the deepest snowdrifts were photographed. That softened the supply officers back in Washington, who, at the whisper of the word “Iceland,” scrupulously filled requisitions for pianos, bowling alleys and overstuffed sofas.

After 17 months, Captain Gallery got command of a “jeep” carrier. She had a name to conjure with: Guadalcanal—and “I wouldn’t swap my cruise as skipper for all the Admirals’ stripes in the Navy.” One of the Guadalcanal’s few veterans was a chief boatswain’s mate, with 15 years’ experience. When Gallery asked him what he thought of the crew—80% of whom had never seen salt water before —the chief said: “Cap’n, I’d swap ’em all for a bucket of oily rags.” But the kids (average age 21) learned fast. Gently but firmly, Gallery instilled in them a sense of duty, and of discipline. He taught them that every sailor carries the responsibility for other men’s lives—even the captain of the head (who cleaned the toilets)—and he told them yarns to prove it. There was prayer every morning, and not just before battle. “It was poor psychology, as well as bad theology, to wait until we were looking down the enemy gun barrels before starting to pray.”

Salvaged Codes. Gallery hoped to get into the Navy’s big show, the Pacific, but the Guadalcanal was ordered to the Atlantic for antisubmarine duty. Like other aviators, those in Gallery’s task group were “notoriously optimistic” in their claims, but they were actually in on the kill of five Nazi submarines. The last of these was the U-505, which became the first foreign man-of-war boarded and captured by U.S. sailors since the Peacock took H.M.S. Nautilus in the Sunda Strait in 1815. A boarding party from one of Gallery’s destroyers leaped aboard just after the Germans abandoned the crippled ship, and just before enough water poured in to sink her.

The documents salvaged from the U-505, says Gallery, enabled Allied intelligence agents to read German sub codes for the last eleven months of the war. In Clear the Decks! the story is told in full for the first time, and it makes one of the best adventure tales of the war.