World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC: Scratch the Pigboats

A U-boat pack was somewhere around. Off tootled the old (1919) four-stack destroyer Borie, found a sub. Her straining, aged sides shook as her depth charges burst.

A terse message went back to the task unit’s flagship, the U.S.S. Card, an unarmored merchant ship equipped with an aircraft landing deck: “Scratch one pig-boat—am searching for more.” The Borie found another huge pigboat on the surface. Cried a signalman: “My God, what is it, the Bremen?” In ten to 30 seconds the Bone’s guns swept the sub’s deck. The destroyer leaped forward to ram, went partly over, her bow straddling the U-boat’s forward deck. There she stuck. For ten feverish minutes the Borie poured metal from her 4-in. guns, her tommy guns, shotguns and pistols at the Nazis and their sub’s steel sides. One signalman banged away with a harmless Very flare pistol. A gun captain hurled empty shell casings at the sub, knocked a Nazi overboard.

Finally the battered submarine, her engines straining, pulled out of the trap, still seaworthy. For more than an hour the two ships fought each other “like a couple of tomcats in the dark,” the U-boat hurling torpedoes at the destroyer, the destroyer blazing away with her guns. At last, her superstructure shot away, the sub exploded and sank.

The Borie, holed by ramming the sub, was mortally wounded. Her engine-room crew had worked neck-deep in water to keep her going during the fight. They had used cigaret-lighter fluid to keep the auxiliary radio engine going. The next night the crew was ordered off the ship. Twenty-seven crewmen lost their lives in the freezing North Atlantic. Friendly shells sank the Borie.

To Task Force 21.14—the Card, the 1919 destroyers Barry, Goff and the late Borie—last week went a Presidential Unit Citation for destroying “more submarines than any other team in Naval history.” That beats a previous high scorer: the escort carrier “B” (TIME, July 26), another “baby flat-top,” and her escorts. Their pigboat score: eleven probables, three certains.