A torpedo all but broke her back and most of her officers left her. A warship ordered her sunk, but a junior third mate refused to leave his ship and he brought her back to port, although she weaved like a snake and threatened to break in two at any time. The ship was the tanker Brilliant, and she was carrying 92,000 barrels of oil and gasoline—a load of liquid dynamite—through an area of the North Atlantic ravaged by U-boat wolf packs in 1942.
Submarines had been stalking the convoy, and early in the morning of November 18 one U-boat found an opening. An unseen torpedo hit the tanker amidships. There was a muffled explosion, followed by a streak of flame that burst from the fuel laden tanks and shot higher than the masts. If the flames touched off the gasoline, the Brilliant would like a flaming volcano explode in eruption.
Alarm bells summoned the crew to genera quarters. A life boat was lowered from the forward deckhouse, with the captain, several officers, and some of the merchant crew and Navy Armed Guard. Soon afterward, another lifeboat was lowered away from the stern. Before the first boat was launched, the captain ordered J. C. Cameron, a junior third mate, to stock the boat with cigarettes, navigating equipment, and the ship’s papers. After young Cameron obtained these items and put them in the boat, he suddenly remembered his cap. It was a new officer’s cap with gold braid, and he ran back to his cabin to get it. His action was not unusual, for men were always trying to take strange things with them after their ships were torpedoed, and often it cost them their lives.
When Cameron returned to the boat deck, the lifeboat had gone. The empty falls dangled overside. The boat was now halfway along the side of the ship and he shouted to them, but no one paid any attention. He didn’t dare to run aft along the deck, which threatened at any moment to become an inferno of fire. But he remembered the lifeboat on the other side of the bridge deck and decided to try and launch it. Running around the deck house, he collided with Lieutenant Brown, the Navy Armed Guard officer. They were both knocked flat on the deck by the impact. The situation appeared so ludicrous even in those tense moments that they began to laugh. Laughing broke the tension.
“Well,” said Brown, “It appears that all the deck officers have left the ship except you. That puts you in command, Captain.”
The thoughts were sobering, but Cameron had those qualities of confidence and assurance which merit the responsibility of command. Without hesitation, he ran into the wheelhouse and shut off the general alarm, which had been clanging its wild summons ever since the torpedo hit.
He then called the watch engineer in the engine spaces below decks near the stern of the ship. Sheaver, the third assistant, answered the phone. Cameron told him what the situation was on deck and said he was going to try and save the ship. Sheaver said the engine was still going and that the torpedo hadn’t damaged any of the machinery.
At about this moment, Chief Engineer Matthew Gutherz stepped out of the after deckhouse to see flames leaping sixty to eighty feet into the air along the deck. The heat was so intense that he had to take shelter in the deckhouse again. He stepped onto the catwalk high above the engine spaces and watched the men on watch below. There was no excitement—no panic. Third Assistant Sheaver and First Assistant Wallace, together with oiler Jamojski, were standing by at the engine room log desk. The huge diesel was throbbing along as though nothing had happened. There was a reassuring sound to the deep throated chock-chock-chock of the exhaust. Cameron, meanwhile, had turned on the automatic fire control system with the help of radio officer Paul Yhouse and within a short time the flames began to die down.
When an escorting corvette signalled them to “abandon ship,” Cameron replied that everything was under control and that he was going to try to make the nearest port. The corvette repeated the signal, ordering him to “abandon ship immediately.” Cameron again replied that he and his crew preferred to stick with their ship. Unable to persuade him to leave the tanker, the convoy commodore signalled for the Brilliant to proceed to St.Johns, Newfoundland.
Cameron slowly turned the crippled ship around and crept off toward the west while the convoy and its escorts disappeared eastward. The men on the Brilliant knew that there were submarines in the vicinity. Somewhere close at hand, they knew, must be the U-boat which had already struck once and which was probably waiting to finish the job.
Although a light sea was running, the Brilliant creaked and groaned from the loosened plates and beams. The engine was put on “slow ahead” for fear the strain would break the ship in two. The torpedo had ruined the pumproom, so pumpman Karelis teamed up with steward Russell Wilson to stand bridge watches on the now shorthanded vessel. Guns were manned continually, for the Brilliant was soon alone on a vast and empty ocean. The crew expected at any moment to hear the general alarm and to feel the shock of an explosion from a “tin fish.”
Cameron kept to the bridge without rest. Chief Gutherz listened to the grinding hull plates and wondered how long the ship would hold together. The convoy commodore had ordered them to proceed at 85 knots, but they found it impossible to maintain such a high speed. From the bridge, the stern of the Brilliant could be seen swinging in and out like a burlesque dancer doing her “bumps and grinds.”
Fortunately, the sea held calm and the winds fair and the submarine which had torpedoed them did not try again. Several days later they sighted a small Canadian schooner, whose skipper piloted them into Musgrovetown, Newfoundland. Now being able to use his radio, Cameron contracted the Navy and received orders to St. Johns. There they stayed for six weeks before continuing on to Halifax for emergency repairs.
The U. S. Maritime Commission had received word of the ship and decided that the action of her crew merited special commendation. Cameron was recommended for the Distinguished Service Medal of the merchant marine and the Commission sent a telegram to St. Johns asking Cameron to fly immediately to Washington by Navy plane. Presentation of the medal was to be made in the presence of high ranking merchant marine and Navy officials. Cameron, however, never received the telegram informing him of this high honor. A few hours before the cable reached St. Johns, the Brilliant had put to sea for Halifax, with a temporary patch over the sixty-foot slash in her hull.
Almost at once, the weather became bad. Winds and seas, as they so often do in that area, grew worse by the hour. Changeable winds created a tumbling mass of confused seas, the worst possible sea condition for a vessel crippled as the Brilliant was. The tanker swayed so violently that the steering mechanism which ran from the bridge to the steering engine room in the stern was snapped off. The hand steering gear on the poop had to be hurriedly connected and manned.
Cameron ordered all hands to don life jackets and rubber immersion suits. He realized that their situation was now desperate. Within a matter of minutes after this was done, the Brilliant began to break up. The weakened hull collapsed with a crash of shattered plating. The ship broke completely in two.
The bow section and all the men on the bridge were soon lost to sight obscured by a driving snow from the stern section, on which were 31 merchant seamen and Navy Armed Guard gunners. The bow probably sank soon afterward. On it were Captain Andrew Lagan, who had been sent to Newfoundland to command the ship; Third Mate James Cameron, First Mate Thomas Hickey, who also joined the vessel at St. Johns; radioman Paul Yhouse, and seven other members of the crew and Navy Armed Guard.
Luck was with those on the broken stern, they drifted for five days and were finally taken off by a Canadian minesweeper. Thus ended the story of the tanker Brilliant, another epic of heroism in the war at sea, as well as an example of the irony of fate.