BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC: Not So Hot

Submarines still wallowed all along the Atlantic Coast. Lurching along under the whitecaps, they spread death & destruction from Maine to the West Indies. Each week they accounted for some half-dozen ships. There was no blinking their efficiency, or the fact that the death toll among U.S. mariners was running abnormally high.

Only 30% of the crews of torpedoed U.S. ships came out of their jousts with the subs alive. Scandinavian crews (80%) and British (60%) seemed to have better luck. Reason: Nazi subs operating off the East Coast are chiefly occupied in blasting tankers, which usually burn or explode when a torpedo bores into them.

Last week the activities of Nazi sub packs had the United Nations worried. On the heels of Winston Churchill’s admission that the Battle of the Atlantic had “worsened”‘, a London spokesman commented: “Our end of the battle . . . is going pretty well, but the United States end is not so hot.”

With its strength spread thin, the U.S. Navy had a job on its hands to keep the sub packs from blocking sea lanes to the south. But it was determined that it would not fall in with Nazi plans by recalling U.S. destroyer fleets to home waters. Last week the Navy was given command of all anti-submarine activities off both the East and the West Coasts, which brought under its jurisdiction several air units of the U.S. Army.

The business of running the submarine gamut was full of terrible danger. From the hospital at Coco Solo Naval Base in the Canal Zone last week came one of the grisliest tales of the war. It was told by a haggard, wan-eyed, bearded sailor, who looked like a man of 50. He was a mess boy named Robert Emmett Kelly, aged 17, sole survivor of a middle-sized tanker that a pig boat potted somewhere in the Caribbean.

The torpedo struck at dusk. The cargo of petroleum was ablaze in an instant. On the stern of the tanker, Kelly and ten shipmates struggled frantically with the falls of a lifeboat. Said Kelly: “I saw the captain, with his face all bloody, run through the flames along the flying bridge and come aft.” In launching, the lifeboat turned over, and Kelly and his shipmates hid under it when the sub cut loose with deck guns. When things quieted down, they clambered up on the bottom of the boat and waited for dawn.

When it came, one of the sailors had already drifted away. The others righted the boat and bailed it out, found that they had eleven cans of condensed milk, some hardtack and chocolate, a compass and a small dictionary with a map of the Western Hemisphere. In good spirits, they headed west, helped along by an improvised sail made out of a lifeboat cover. On the fourth or fifth day, they sighted a tanker, but the quartermaster, who was senior man in the boat, was afraid to release a flare for fear of attracting a sub. He blinked an S O S with a flashlight, but the tanker did not respond.

After that it was all bad. Somebody stole the milk and drank it all. They prayed for rain. Without water, they were afraid to eat the hardtack and chocolate. They ate seaweed and some of them drank sea water. Once they came within a few yards of a coral island, but the coral was so sharp that they could not wade ashore. Hunger, thirst and the Caribbean sun began to madden and kill them.

The first to die was Kelly’s pal, William Wenzel. Then the cook, with $163 in his pockets, stepped casually over the bulwarks, remarking: “I’m just going across the street to get some pineapples.” Another shipmate, dying, begged: “Just leave my mouth open when I’m gone so that I can get plenty of water.”

One tried to swim ashore. One ate a jellyfish and jumped screaming over the side. Another, in demented fury before he died, tossed the one bucket of rain water overboard. They agreed to hold each body a day to make sure that death was real. By the third week only Kelly and another mess boy were left. When his sidekick gave up, Kelly waited 36 hours before he tossed him overboard. “After that,” he said, “I laid down and tried to make myself comfortable, hoping that I could die without any more trouble.” He was lying there waiting for death when the lifeboat muzzled into a small steamer. His open-boat voyage had lasted 21 days.