Destroyer from America

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DESTROYER FROM AMERICA

By

JOHN FERNALD

Destroyer from America was originally published in 1942 by The Macmillan Company, New York.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

INTRODUCTION 5

1 6

2 22

3 32

4 37

5 48

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 84

INTRODUCTION

When I served in an ex-American destroyer in 1941, I was shipmates with some fine people. They seemed not only fine, but extraordinary to me, because of their singleness of mind, their unceasing endeavor, their persistent cheerfulness under sometimes unfamiliar and often extremely unpleasant trials, and because of their courage—by which I mean their capacity for enduring a life which was characterized perhaps more by its extreme tediousness than by its dangers.

Now, after nearly another year at sea, I must revise this opinion. These people were not extraordinary at all: they are to be found in every branch of the Naval Service today, and, no doubt, in the other Services as well.

It is not always realized what a comparatively small proportion of our sailors are fated to take part in the obvious heroics of battle. Neither is it always understood that Boredom, more often than not, is the Service man’s greatest enemy, and that the measure of his triumph over that enemy, year in year out, is the true measure of his sticking power and of his capacity to win the war. Of the lives of most of these men little will be told: their names do not make news. But the forty thousand words which follow may at least stand for a little as my own personal tribute to some of them—the men of my first ship.

Perhaps one is always a little sentimental about one’s first ship. Perhaps—I don’t care. I wish all the good luck I can wish for to Lieutenant Nigel Bowden Smith, our first ‘Number One’; to Engineer Lieutenant (now Lieutenant-Commander) E. F. Partridge, as good a ‘Chief’, I am convinced, as any in the world; to Sub-Lieutenant (now Lieutenant) R. W. David, that learned amateur of sailmaking and botany; to Sub-Lieutenant J. M. Makins; to the very lovable Surgeon Lieutenant G. D. Taylor; to Frederick Heywood, Gunner (T), the toughest, yet gentlest spirit I have ever known; to Chief Petty Officers Clarke and Searle; to Chief Engine-room Artificers Woodward and Hodge (who can do without sleep, apparently, for ever); to Petty Officer Williams, whose gay conversation in the night watches I shall never forget; to the Chief Quartermaster, Able Seaman Cyril Nutman; and to many others, whose names, after months spent in different waters, I can no longer remember.

And, lest any of my old companions seem tempted to see something of themselves in the pages which follow, let me hastily add the usual disclaimer: ‘All the characters in this book are entirely fictitious.’

Two acknowledgments I wish to add. I am indebted to my old friend John Rodgers, of the Department of Overseas Trade, for having first made me aware that I was capable of writing the book at all. And to ‘Sagittarius’ my most grateful thanks are due for having so kindly introduced me to her publisher.

J. B. F.

At Sea

May, 1942

1

H.M.S. Porchester had been christened in San Francisco twenty-three years ago with the name of ‘Robinson’. In January 1941 she was wallowing unbeautifully in a long Atlantic swell. As far as beauty is concerned, it is doubtful whether she had ever possessed very much of that. ‘How could she possibly’, as the Gunner said when he first saw her, ‘seeing as how she had been christened with nothing better than a half-bottle of dry ginger ale?’

The Chief Engineer, on the other hand—and he was a very accurate man—said that whatever liquid a ship was christened with, it could not possibly make any difference to her appearance, which was entirely a matter of block co-efficients and metacenters and various other things too involved for the comprehension of the lay mind.

However, Porchester was looking particularly unlovely at this particular moment, because she simply would not go. ‘And a destroyer what won’t go don’t make sense’, as the Gunner said.

There she lay, useless, her four funnels staring vacantly first at one quarter of the sky and then at another. Her roll was vicious, and the masthead lookout bent his knees and stuck out his elbows and made himself as fat as possible inside his boxed-in crow’s nest in order to withstand it: forty-five degrees of swing made him wonder about his stomach.

The Navigator, who was also Officer of the Watch, had sent down the voicepipe for the Captain, who was now on the bridge feeling angry and foolish, as he waited impatiently for the Chief Engineer’s report. The Navigator avoided catching the Old Man’s eye, though the trouble was no fault of his. But he knew that there are some occasions when unnecessary conversations should be avoided. He had been only six months in the Service, but he knew that.

The Captain stared grimly ahead to where the remaining five ships of the flotilla were drawing away fast. Already the senior ship was flashing: ‘Why have you stopped?’

‘Bloody fool!’ muttered the Captain, as he stumped irritably up and down the bridge. It is particularly aggravating for the Captain of a ship to be asked questions to which he does not know the answer, and Lieutenant-Commander James Broadstairs, R.N., being quite helpless until the arrival of his Chief Engineer, felt his position keenly. He kicked the chart-room bulkhead and shrank sulkily into his greatcoat. The signalman who stood by, pad in hand, ready to transmit the reply, smiled to himself.

There was more than injured amour-propre behind the Captain’s irritation. The six odd-looking American destroyers had steamed sixteen hundred miles across the North Atlantic. They were the last six of their kind to leave the other side. They had been constantly beset by head winds—a thing in itself most unreasonable, for the number of occasions upon which a north-east wind blows in the North Atlantic in winter are so few that statistics ignore them: yet for the past week a north-east wind had decided to blow, and to blow hard. The flotilla had only forty more hours to go before reaching the safety of the North Channel and the Irish Sea. The ships were needed by the British Navy, and needed quickly. Yet here was Porchester, stopped dead in the middle of the Atlantic, with enough oil for only two days’ steaming, burning fuel at the rate of nearly a ton an hour and not getting anywhere. Worse than that, the barometer was falling, which would probably mean a blow, and all sorts of stories had been told of the unseaworthiness of these elderly Yankees. No, the Captain was not happy.

The Navigating Officer, on the other hand, was secretly pleased, but then it was his failing that he frequently took too personal a point of view about rather important matters. The Navigator knew little about marine engineering and cared less. If it had pleased Their Lordships to construct a fighting three-masted schooner with four jibs, tops’ls, jib tops’ls and spinnaker (and incidentally a gun or two, though this might be a disadvantage if the sails were to be preserved from damage) and to place him, Lieutenant Harker, in command thereof, he would have been almost the happiest man alive. As things were, the art of Navigation had attracted his interest to the exclusion of almost every other aspect of naval knowledge, and as the Navy in wartime is always in need of navigators he was a useful man for all his one-sidedness. For the past week he had been longing to show that although he had been only a mud-squatting yachtsman, he could none the less navigate a destroyer in the wastes of the western ocean.

But although he had diligently taken star sights before breakfast, sun sights before noon, sun sights again after lunch, and shot the moon before dinner, it was discouraging to know that, practically speaking, he need never have taken any sights at all, since all that Porchester had to do was to follow the ship ahead. Of what use was it to be able (in spite of a somewhat sketchy acquaintance with arithmetic) to juggle with Hour Angle and Right Ascension, even to be on familiar terms with that pleasing abstraction, the First Point of Aries—if in spite of all this knowledge his work was simply going to boil down to a prosaic game of Follow My Leader?

Now, however, if Porchester were to be left alone five hundred miles out from Ireland it would be a different story. The Navigator would come into his own, and the safety of the ship would depend on him. What was more, the Captain, who was always inclined to take navigation for granted, would have to admit it.

These thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of the Chief, who stood at the top of the bridge ladder, his feet splayed out on the swaying deck, his eyes expressive half of apology, half of defensiveness. The Navigator could only just hear what he was saying, for he made his report in a low voice and with a secret air, like a witness in a police court describing an indecent occurrence.

‘Feed pump, sir...lost pressure...estimated time ten hours....’

It hurt him to say it. Not that he loved his engines, like, the engineers of Conrad and Tomlinson (whom he had never read); actually, it is more than likely that he hated them as being alien and not quite out of the top drawer. Indeed, many a time had the Navigator seen him, while they were still on the Canadian side, staring at some piece of machinery or other and shaking his head sadly and muttering something about ‘...not sound engineering practice’. But engines were engines, however old, however neglected, however unsound in their conception: engines Mattered, and their failings were not to be discussed with mere deck officers any more than could be helped. And so the Chief made his report quietly, tactfully and briefly, and hoped the Captain was not in cross-examining mood.

The Captain wasn’t. He called the signalman to him and gave his answer:

‘To Senior Officer, X Flotilla, from Porchester. Have defect in main feed pump. Propose proceed independently when repairs