In war or peace, large vessels can be pushed just so hard against the rigors of the winter North Atlantic. They can take the pounding up to a certain unpredictable point, then the latent strength of the sea asserts itself, sometimes with dramatic suddenness.
The severity of North Atlantic winter weather is well known to many seamen. The storms which move across the United States and Canada during the winter usually become deep disturbances by the time they pass out into the Atlantic from the Eastern seaboard or the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Often, revitalized by the warm air masses lying over the Gulf Stream waters, these storms become vast cyclonic whirls which whip up mountainous seas with their howling gales. In the North Atlantic, winter wind from any direction seems impatient in its eagerness to become a full gale.
In addition to being an exit for the continental storms of North America, the North Atlantic in winter has another reason for its rough reputation. It is a matter of geography and meteorology that the trade routes between the British Isles and the United States coincide in winter with the position of the Icelandic polar front. This front, a zone between the northern polar air and the southern Gulf Stream air, moves southward during the fall and by winter covers a part of the North Atlantic shipping lanes.
It is within this frontal zone that the mixing of the warm tropical Gulf Stream air with the colder, drier polar takes place. Unfortunately for those who sail the North Atlantic in winter, this mixing of air masses is not a gentle process. Instead, whirlpools of air, families of them, develop along this front and act as great horizontal paddlewheels blending the tropical and the polar air.
A procession of these lows treks across the North Atlantic during December, January, February, and March, and there is little respite, for as soon as one “low” passes, another appears. The classical clearing with a shift of the wind from southwest to northwest is not often encountered in a North Atlantic winter. A low overcast of stratocumulus clouds and poor visibility combine with the seas and winds to give the North Atlantic some of the world’s dirtiest weather.
Hours late at Ambrose Lightship, some luxury-liner captain makes the headlines with “Roughest Atlantic Crossing in Thirty Years. Height of Seas Beyond Belief.” The following year, or the year after, another skipper will make a similar startling statement about the record-breaking North Atlantic seas and gales. By late May, however, in time for the tourist season, the polar front has moved well north again and then the North Atlantic begins to lose much of its winter severity.
The westward passage from the British Isles to northern United States ports in winter is the meanest because the winds over the North Atlantic are predominantly northwest to southwest. With both sea and wind ahead, ships and men take a terrific beating at times. But it is the ships that suffer most.
The winter of 1943-1944 was the strategic period in the preparation for the Normandy invasion. Enormous quantities of war material and thousands of men were to be brought to England from the United States, and the highway over which they had to be moved was the rough and stormy waters of the North Atlantic. The Germans, with their usual keen perception of logistical situations, must have realized that if the Atlantic lines of communications could be only partially interrupted during the winter of 1943-1944, the invasion of the continent might fail, or better yet, there was a possibility that it might not even materialize. The Germans counted on their submarine concentrations and the winter weather in the North Atlantic to win that phase of the war.
In February, 1944, pounding westward across the North Atlantic, was an 18,000-ton transport, a unit of a large convoy which had brought troops and cargo to the United Kingdom. It was a long return trip for Convoy XX, as it had been necessary to scrape the southern coast of Iceland to escape Hitler’s concentration of subs. The sea was rough, but an 18,000-ton ship of pre-war riveted construction can take a lot of punishment and still keep going. Though the convoy was then fourteen days out of the Clyde, there was little growling about the discomforts of the rough weather, for “all hands” knew that high seas and howling westerly gales reduced the possibility of effective sub attacks. It was rough going for the surface ships but tougher on the subs.
The safety of the convoy depended, to a large measure, on pounding right through the high seas. Only as a last resort would speed be reduced. The Convoy Commodore had ordered “standard ahead” and had not changed it since taking departure off the Irish coast.
During that trip, the watch officers commented several times that they had a hard time keeping station. The common complaint was that the guide, the escort commander in a battleship, had some jitterbug throttle men. The senior watch officer even maintained that at times when a big wave rolled in on the center of the convoy, the guide made sternway.
With a large convoy in a rough sea, it is not easy to determine which ships are the poorest station keepers. And a battleship guide certainly complicates the problem. The huge mass of such a ship plows right through the seas which the lighter vessels ride. But when that every seventh super wave comes along, a battleship is slowed with a shudder. But only momentarily, for like a broken field runner, it spurts forward again after the bow has knifed through the seas. It was when the big ones hit the convoy guide that engine revolutions had to be changed by the Officers- of-the-Deck of every column.
One February night, one captain in that convoy, bracing himself between a stanchion and the chart house desk, printed laboriously in his night order book, “Be alert to detect the unpredictable speed changes of the guide. Keep good position but do not exceed 70 R.P.M. without first calling me. I shall be in the emergency cabin after midnight and in the chart house until then. Steaming as we are on the right flank of the guide, I don’t want to get out of step.”
After the night order book was delivered to the Officer-of-the-Deck, the “Old Man” rattled around in the chart house trying to construct a weather map from the observations of his own ship until a big roll almost spilled him to the deck. After sputtering about that and sizing up the convoy situation again for about the tenth time, he dozed in his favorite chair in the chart house until midnight. Then he turned in.
Somewhat before daylight, after restless hours of hanging on to the mattress in the emergency cabin, he was on deck again, realizing that a stiff ship does a forty degree roll with too much snap for good sleeping.
Noting that the rolling corkscrew motion continued and that the sea had not moderated during the night, the Captain jolted into the pilothouse and while he leaned over the desk trying to figure out the most probable position of the ship, his train of thought was interrupted by the orderly reporting eight o’clock. Then, almost on the bell, there was a loud, short, sharp sound from somewhere aft, something like a greatly amplified bark of a 45 automatic. The “Old Man” swung around and as he was trying to think what that strange noise might be, an officer blew into the chart house from aft and excitedly reported, “Captain, we are cracking in two!”
Thinking powers were thrown into high gear. The ship was in maximum watertight condition, the Captain knew that. He knew also that the damage control parties would be at the scene of the casualty in a few minutes.
“Speed,” he thought almost audibly, “cut it down, might reduce the twisting motion. Haul out of column.” Yet he hated to slow the whole convoy because of the misfortune to his ship. “Still,” he thought, “better pocket professional pride, the ship is in danger.”
A brief dispatch was sent to the Commodore and convoy speed was reduced promptly. As the ship swung out of column, the Captain started below.
The Executive Officer led the way down to the main deck and then aft of the superstructure. There, without saying a word, he pointed to the plating which was split for a third of the distance across the deck. Looking over the side, the Captain could see also that at least one seven-foot sheer strake plate was split cleanly in two.
Below in the troop officers’ country, there was a scene which relieved the tension. The insulation had been stripped from the bulkheads and from the overhead, exposing the crack in the hull and in the deck, so that every time the ship rolled to starboard, daylight came in through the side of the ship. Then, on the roll to port, the sea shot in, dousing the damage control party. The picture of wet, somewhat scared men clinging to a bulkhead ramming packing into a crack and cussing every time the Atlantic squirted in their faces would have been laughable if the situation had not presented such serious possibilities.
The broken plates were examined critically, particularly at the deck beading and at the place where the deck crack tapered off. Measurements were taken, and it was noted that the rupture ended abruptly at a large deck rivet. No, there was no working. The crack had no more motion than if it had been in a century old stone wall. Yes, the rupture had relieved the strain. It should be safe to go ahead again at convoy speed.
“Temporary repairs completed. Can now resume previous speed!” was sent to the commodore who, no doubt, had been debating just how long it would be safe to proceed at reduced speed in submarine waters.
Most of the sailors aboard that transport believed that it was only the luck of something or other that saved the ship from destruction on that February dawn in the rough waters of the Atlantic, but the captain still maintained, when I last talked to him, that it was just one of those mornings that Davey Jones “slept in.”