There are few predicaments more stomach-sinking than being caught in a really bad storm at sea without one’s engines. It is the kind of thing naval authorities deplore.
In 1963, with a hurricane boiling up the eastern seaboard, the newspaper headlines about a disabled ship were enough to make any sailor nervous, but it was a UPI dispatch from Cape Hatteras that crystallized my attention:
Hurricane Ginny sent gale-force winds across North Carolina’s outer banks today and threatened a disabled destroyer carrying 10 persons. The USS Fogg, a decommissioned destroyer escort, bounced helplessly near the storm center with its engines and most of its equipment not operating. The Coast Guard said it was being battered by 40-to-50-foot waves.
Two ships and search planes probed the blinding rain which kept visibility at near zero. The Fogg, which broke away from a tow-ship in heavy seas Saturday, was last reported about 45 miles southeast of Cape Lookout, N. C., or almost in the storm center.
This wasn’t just any ship—this was my old ship—the USS Fogg (DE-57). Named after Carleton Thayer Fogg, a naval flier from Maine who had lost his life in combat over Guadalcanal, she had acquired a nickname before she was off the ways. Because of her hull number, the shipyard workers had dubbed her the “Pickleboat”—after Heinz’s 57 Varieties of pickles. Somehow, I was not surprised that she was in trouble again. My immediate reaction was: “Well, that’s the Fogg. Consistent to the bitter end.” In fact, almost 20 years to the day—and on her maiden combat voyage of World War II—the Fogg had wallowed through one of the worst hurricanes of the century not far from this same spot in the Atlantic. Even then foul weather had become the hallmark of the Pickleboat. It never left her during her war days. Now, two decades later, she seemed determined to carry this precarious flirtation with the elements right down to the wire.
I am sure that all her old hands who read about the Fogg’s last venture went through the long hours of uncertainty remembering what it was like to be at the mercy of the violent and frighteningly impersonal forces of a storm at sea in a small ship. The Fogg rode it out, however. Some 46 hours after she broke away from her tug, she was spotted by a hurricane hunter plane and eventually the Coast Guard got her back. Today she is in mothballs with the Reserve Fleet, Norfolk Group. Someday, perhaps she will be sold to another country. If so, or if she goes back to sea with the Fleet, I should like to know the sequel to her story. For, in my estimation, she will no more change her spots than a leopard.
Every sailor’s ship assumes for him a definite personality—particularly if he is a plank owner and spends any length of time on board. He thinks about his ship in almost the same terms as he thinks about the important people in his life. It can be a very personal relationship. And to those of us who commissioned the Fogg in the spring of 1943, the Pickleboat became, if not exactly a thing of beauty, at least a girl with real character. This is not to suggest that the Fogg was ever one of those ships which from the beginning seems marked by destiny for a spectacular career of action and glory; she was not. Her war record as a convoy escort was respectable enough, but did not quite qualify her for a spot in history next to Old Ironsides or the Big “E.” What set the Fogg apart was her curious affinity for troubled waters. Wind, rain, hail, snow, ice, fog, cold, haze, sleet— wherever these conditions prevailed in the Atlantic, we could depend on the Fogg to find them. It was like a psychological compulsion with her.
In a journal which I kept on board ship, this notation appears:
20 Oct. ’44. We got underway around noon today; took departure from Ambrose seabuoy about 1500/Q. Funny feeling. Heading into what looks like a sea full of deviltry and sky full of misery. Hundreds of ships inbound, but only the Fogg outbound. All naval district HQs along the coast have pulled their ships in, anticipating the storm moving up the coast. The map at operations, 90 Church St., shows only one thin green line along the seaboard, and that’s us.
This was typical. The notation a day later, as we headed south from New York, was both usual and unusual.
22 Oct. ’44. Started this day off with the midwatch. Wretched wind and black night, but the phosphorescent conditions were phenomenal. The ship left a glowing trail for a mile behind her. Spray coming over the bridge was like a shower of Roman candles. Every wave crest etched itself on the blackness in lines as fine as those made by a draftman’s pen. Waves hitting the bow threw chunks of phosphorescent matter ¾ inch in diameter against the spray shield of the flying bridge, where they burst like small rockets. It was a wild, wet fairyland.
The relationship between the Fogg and bad weather was complex and subtle. It was almost as if the Fogg were attracted to the sea in the role of an angry mistress, as if she were engaged in a continuing lover’s quarrel with a rowdy, boisterous force which she could neither reform nor bring herself to abandon. There were, of course, moments of peace and sunshine when the Fogg and the sea kept company in apparent harmony. Occasionally there were several days of such tranquility at a time. But I can recall only one stretch in two and a half years when it lasted as long as a week—and even then one could sense that both parties to the truce were getting a bit impatient.
As a member of the Fogg’s pre-commissioning detail, I arrived at Hingham, Massachusetts, on a wet, blustery day in April 1943. It was surely an omen, for we lived in foul weather gear for the next three months. Even the brief commissioning ceremonies were held hurriedly between summer squalls.
After a stormy shakedown cruise to Bermuda, we spent what should have been a balmy six weeks of training and drills, but it was not. We devoted too much time to ducking tropical storms, even to scurrying under the lee of the island to ride them out.
Then, on a grey day in mid-October, the Fogg set out on her first real mission from New York with a small convoy bound for Algiers via Aruba and Curasao. We were happy at the idea of going south where the water was, presumably, flat. Two days out, however, warnings of a “large and dangerous” storm began to reach us. Twelve hours later, with the barometer dropping, heavy swells and huge banks of low clouds building up in front of us, we did what we could to get ready for the big blow. In another eight hours our small convoy was thoroughly scattered, and about all anyone was able to do was hang on.
There may be nothing unusual about going through storms at sea. All seamen have, of course. But to those who have never spent a couple of days in a grade-A hurricane in a destroyer escort it is an interesting experience, I submit.
The lines of a DE, of course, are a determining factor in her seaworthiness and comfort at sea. The Fogg was roughly 305 feet long and about 36 feet wide. Her topside armament and bridgework were relatively light, her center of gravity low. You could walk through her, from stem to stern, without ever coming out on open deck. Like all DEs, she had high stability and, consequently, her motions in rough water were on the violent side. She had a turboelectric power plant which could bring off about 25 or 26 knots in a stiff following breeze.
In the course of this particular storm, the Fogg suffered a good deal of damage. She lost all her life rafts and life nets. Her ASW gear was smashed and her radar put out of commission. Ammunition broke loose in its lockers (which was disquieting to some of us); splinter shields on all AA gun mounts forward were twisted or broken. Radio antennas were carried away. And below decks, due to the DE’s characteristic snap roll, things were a shambles—a thicket of broken crockery, loose mattresses, battered chairs, skidding books and papers—and every now and then a body rolled past as someone lost his grip on his private anchor or was thrown from his bunk.
I have a vivid memory of the Captain standing barefooted at the helm in the pilothouse, wearing black oilskins, pants rolled up, water sloshing above his ankles, staring intently at the gyro, trying to keep the ship’s nose into the waves. It was not easy since our screws and rudders were out of the water about half the time. I remember the chief engineer crawling below from compartment to compartment with a flashlight looking for cracks in the hull’s welding. (Also a disquieting procedure.) On the flying bridge no matter where one looked there was a wall of solid green water. The waves were enormous, of course, but flat on top, as the wind, like a huge cleaver, cut off their crests and atomized them. We could not stay on the bridge very long because we found it impossible to breathe there. The wind was too strong.
This was the Fogg’s introduction to the Atlantic’s “calmer” regions.
Her first experience in the Caribbean was less strenuous but not much more satisfying. As she and her sister escorts sat in Willemstad, Curasao, patching themselves up, the Fogg received urgent orders to hunt for a submarine sighted by aircraft in the vicinity.
31 Oct. ’43. Got underway at midnight in a hurry. This was the crew’s first foreign liberty and we had to round them up in town. It was quite a task. They came back in a happy, if not entirely sober, frame of mind, sporting sombreros, big bunches of bananas and a number of monkeys. It was raining when we finally left and so dark that getting out of the narrow channel without getting stuck was a minor miracle.
We never got the submarine. The only thing we got was a bill from the Standard Oil Company several months later, claiming we had damaged an ESSO pier as we hurriedly steamed off that dark night. This annoyed the Captain considerably, and he advised the Navy not to pay it.
The balance of that trip to Africa and back was the only relatively quiet journey the Pickleboat made in her wartime career. Even so, she had to tip-toe through the Straits of Gibraltar in a fog so dense we could not see from one end of the ship to the other—not usual for that part of the world. We would have welcomed the fog a bit later when the German bombers were about.
From that point on, the Fogg worked the North Atlantic and the duty got rough. In the course of a dozen crossings, usually to northern Ireland or England and routed well north to avoid submarine packs, we were lucky to make it eastbound in two weeks even with the fast convoys we escorted. Coming west always took several days longer.
I am not suggesting that the time itself was long or difficult, but for some reason the Fogg and her escort division never seemed to draw a smooth passage regardless of the season. I don’t suppose the North Atlantic during the period from 1943 to 1945 was any worse than usual. Yet we were constantly caught up in stubborn blows of Force 8 or 9 winds, covering diameters of a thousand miles and lasting for weeks at a time.
Lengthy storms of this nature can stir up the water as much as hurricanes or typhoons. As a result, life on board became miserable indeed. Sailors could not sleep even if they managed to stay in their bunks, and they could attend to their duty stations only by lashing themselves to their equipment. Normal hot meals were impossible to prepare. And after three or four days of such buffeting, muscles were strained and sore, fatigue cumulated, and time seemed endless. It was not uncommon to go for a week without attempting to set a table; we lived on coffee and sandwiches. When we tried to get a bit of “sack time,” all we could do was to lie spread- eagled on our stomachs and grip the sides of the bunk with both hands. One dared not relax his hold for more than the few seconds that the ship happened to hit a vertical plane as it rolled and pitched. I have seen officers sitting on a wardroom couch with their feet braced against a foot rail suddenly and irresistibly hurled against the opposite bulkhead.
Many times I wedged myself in the pilothouse of the Fogg and watched the clinometer register consistent rolls of 40, 50, even 60 degrees. The deepest roll I ever observed was 68 degrees, but other DE sailors testified to higher rolls than that.
Even if the convoy were headed directly into the wind and waves, this did not help the escorts which were forced to patrol on station and alter course frequently. So we had to pound our bottom while the mainmast snapped and shivered and the sea broke over the decks with a fearsome noise like a coal mine caving in.
21 Nov. ’44. First time in three days it’s been calm enough to write, or even sit in a chair. The chair is still lashed down and we haven’t quit heaving about. Funny about bad weather at sea. Even when you watch it, you don’t quite believe it. You don’t see how a level surface can be whipped into the unbelievable impulses that roll for endless miles. Nor how the ship stays on top of it.
4 Dec. ’44. Looks as though we’re inside the sub patrol lanes [off Land’s End, England]. I think the heavy weather helped. Wind force 8. Sea high. Fo’c’s’le continuously under water. Bottom pounding. I don’t suppose it’s easy for subs to operate in this stuff. On the northern leg of our patrol we’re taking water over the flying bridge—and getting all the stack fumes on the southern leg. Nobody has been able to sleep for 72 hours. Dead on our feet. Dispatches pouring in from Admiralty, warnings of mine fields. The Channel is black as pitch tonight. West wind screaming. Its usual nasty self.
But if those of us who rode in her f-inch tin shell got weary of this sort of thing, it never bothered the Fogg. Even when the skies were clear and visibility good, the Fogg would often be operating in temperatures that turned the spray into ice. There are few places at sea where the winter cold is more bitter than off the northeast coast of the United States, which was both a rendezvous point for the big troop and cargo convoys and the regular training ground for wartime DEs.
Once the Fogg was shifted to Little Creek, Virginia, for refresher training. I remember this quite well because as acting Exec, I was doing the navigating. We were maneuvering off Casco Bay in our usual squally weather when the word came to head south. By the time the Fogg got through the Cape Cod Canal, visibility was close to zero. So we navigated nervously down the coast by dead reckoning and Fathometer—a procedure I do not particularly recommend for apprentice navigators such as I was.
Eventually we found our destination, to my great surprise and equally great relief, but hardly had we begun to thaw out when the Fogg lost a sparring match to a larger LST in bizarre and stormy circumstances.
Warned of a hurricane moving up along the Carolinas, the Fogg was ordered into a Hampton Roads anchorage. So, it seemed, was almost every other craft on the west side of the Atlantic. Ship masts in Hampton Roads resembled the back of an agitated porcupine, and our radar scope looked as though it had a bad case of measles. When the big winds finally hit (after dark, naturally), it was inevitable that there would be jostlings, groundings, and collisions. But the Fogg’s entanglement with the LST was downright creative.
Though steaming at anchor, the force of the wind upon the massive freeboard of the LST caused her to drag. Before we knew it, the LST’s stern had drifted against the Fogg’s bow and was banging into it at every wave. Trying to pull away, the LST tangled her screw in the Fogg’s anchor chain. Pretty soon the chain broke. The Fogg dropped her other anchor, at which point her stern swung into the LST’s bow. This time the Fogg’s propeller fouled the LST’s anchor. The Fogg’s second chain broke; the two ships began hammering together again with a fearful clangor. There was nothing to do except drop fenders between the two ships and lash them together, using heavy manila cable around the winches, then sit together and ride it out.
By now, such weather-provoked problems seemed standard procedure for the Fogg.
The Pickleboat’s final wartime quarrel with her brawling Atlantic boy friend was, by all odds, the most violent and prolonged of any she effected during my service on board.
Her task at the time was not an ordinary one. She was directing the escort of a tow convoy from Charleston, South Carolina, to Antwerp, Belgium—a convoy carrying items necessary to the reconstruction of Antwerp following the landing of the Allies in Western Europe. This meant floating and hauling across the ocean such un-nautical hardware as huge diesel-electric power plants built into boxes vaguely resembling a ship’s hull; towering 60-foot cranes assembled upright on barges; plus a weird assortment of Army oilers and merchant marine tugs.
7 Nov. ’44. Well underway with the oddest assortment of craft imaginable. A sub skipper taking a peek at this gang through his periscope would surely swear off the bottle.
After three or four relatively quiet days of progress (making good around 5 knots), the weather lost its temper again. From here on, the convoy was strung out over a fairly sizeable piece of ocean. Murphy’s Law, which states that “anything that can go wrong, will,” suddenly went into effect. Almost every unit in the convoy seemed to come down with its particular brand of seagoing mumps. We were lucky when we could keep our charges on the long-range radar scope, let alone see them all.
11 Nov. ’44. The ships have been given an assortment of feminine code names which results in peculiar TBS talk. We have Molly, Mary, Patricia, Sadie, Brenda and so on. The tugs are Alex, Jack- son, Hiram and Playboy. Playboy is the problem child, consistently causing trouble. And Molly and Brenda have a feud on. Everytime the commodore calls Molly to correct her station, she claims Brenda is pushing her back. This makes Brenda mad, so she calls Molly names. Outside of the Navy ships, circuit discipline is lousy.
One night, after some TBS prodding about station keeping, we heard this transmission in pure Brooklyn accents:
“Brenda, dis is Molly. For da fourt’ time, will ya bend on a few toins an’ move up. Over.”
“Molly from Brenda, wilco.”
Then, after a few moments of silence:
“Molly, this is Brenda. Captain says belay that wilco and go to hell. Out.”
My journal showed that on 18 November one of the tugs lost her tow, which was one of the big cranes on a barge. On the 19th, Mary’s steering gear went out. On the 21st, two of the tugs developed cracks in deck seams. On the 25th, more cracked seams in the power- plant tows and one tug had balky condensate pumps. On the 26th, Molly burned out a main thrust bearing and Jackson blew a boiler gasket. On the 27th, good Samaritan Hiram went beyond TBS range to help with some repairs and got lost.
So it went. At several points we had straggled so far apart that we had to go to low frequency voice radio for communication—a dangerous procedure. All during this time the weather, which was responsible for most of our troubles, did not get worse; it just stayed bad.
“This is another of those grey days,” I wrote, “when nothing has any color and nothing has any shadow. Even the Green Hornet [an oiler painted bilious green] looks grey today. Feels very much like snow.”
Thirty-two days after leaving Charleston, we reached the Straits of Dover and turned over our charges to local escorts. This may not have been the longest non-stop tow convoy in naval history, but I have never heard of a longer one.
7 Dec. ’44. Dover is impressive, with its old castles and ruins and its modern fortifications giving it a queer contrast. The day is bitterly cold and raw. Everyone on the bridge is numb-blue and tempers are short.
After turning over the convoy to the British, we escorts turned around and headed for port. It misted, rained, sleeted, and snowed on the way down the Channel that night. But for the first time in a month we could rev it up and set sail. We turned on our running lights, dodged traffic all night long and took our fixes on the fly. Old Foggymaru was like a colt just let out of the barn. (We could also hear the buzz- bombs going over, but couldn't see them often.) . . . As we eased into Plymouth harbor this morning we got a dispatch from CinC Plymouth indicating our entire Channel navigational data was out of date and the new stuff not passed to us. Glad we didn't know it, the mine situation being what it is.
Once again, as we began our westward trek across the ocean, I was moved to comment philosophically on the Fogg's endless courtship with miserable weather.
12 Dec. '44. I have often wondered if the name of our ship has anything to do with the weather we usually put to sea in. Of the scores of times we have gotten underway, I can recall only three when the weather was excellent. Once leaving Bermuda to return from our shakedown; once leaving Algiers under a hot November sun and on a glassy Mediterranean; and once leaving New York for Casco Bay in the middle of the night with a brilliant sky and a bitterly sharp wind. Every other time we have taken off in rain or drizzle or fog or sleet or haze or in snowstorms.
This morning, as we hauled out of Plymouth, was no exception. Grey and chill and wet. We started down the Channel with 21 units—slow tows, broken down amphibious craft and so on. There was still a concentration of U-boats around the southwest approaches and we were happy to get through without any trouble. About 12 hours after we left Lizard's Head astern, a British escort was attacked there by a submarine.
For several days the wind, at least, was low. Then it came on with a howl and in fairly short order the whole outfit had to slow until it was just making steerage way.
What happened during the next four days was a complex story, but, to summarize, the convoy ran into one of the last Nazi submarines operating in mid-ocean. Some 400 miles northeast of the Azores, one of the ships, a damaged LST with a skeleton crew on board, was torpedoed and subsequently sank. The Fogg, which left the escort screen to investigate and search near the stricken ship, shortly thereafter took a second torpedo in her screws. Casualties were relatively light, 15 seamen lost and four wounded, but the ship herself was seriously hurt.
The fantail was a wreck—nothing but twisted steel and gaping holes—full of potential danger. We did not know what condition our remaining depth charges were in since we had been ready to attack when we were hit ourselves. All the after living compartments were ruptured and flooding fast as far as the after engine room. Here the bulkhead was shored and reported holding with no leakage. Of course, we had no propellers or rudders.
After transferring the bulk of the crew, plus the escort commander and his staff, to other ships, the Fogg was taken in tow by a net tender and, with one escort for protection, we headed for the Azores. As it turned out, there would have been no serious problem if the Atlantic had behaved itself, but, of course, it would not. The wind came up and we were in for it.
25 Dec '44. We tried to cut away all the jammed and buckled weight aft, particularly the depth charges which had been locked into the twisted racks. Men worked for six hours with torches getting them off. Pistols were removed from all but two, and those we could not get at. When jettisoned, they detonated.
It would be foolish to say that anyone slept that night. For one reason or another, no one did. My reason was the possibility that the sub might double back on her track and pick us off during the night. At our slow speed, it would have been easy. The next day it became obvious that the after part of the ship would go. All heavy gear had been dumped over the side, including the main battery guns. Still the stern was working and settling. The sea was kicking up again. A crack appeared transversely across the main deck aft of the 1.1 gun mount. This was about 20 feet aft of frame 113 which formed the bulkhead of #2 engine room. Everything depended on where the keel had been broken. If it sheared far enough aft of frame 113 chances were that the stern section would break clean. If not, most likely we would flood when the engine room bulkhead tore out, and we would capsize. We got through the night and held. By noon the next day waves were breaking 4 and 5 feet over the stern section and the ship was riding with a swaying motion behind. We did everything possible in the way of precautions—and waited. By dinner time there were strange creakings and noises in the ship's passages that had not been there before. It was a strained dinner.
After that the crew members not on watch stretched themselves out on the boatdeck, each with his life jacket and garbed in his idea of what a sailor going over the side ought to wear—and waited. The chief engineer and his assistant sat in the log room playing cribbage—waiting. Everything was ready to shift fuel and ballast as necessary to correct list; we did not worry about trim. It was a slow full roll that bothered us. The captain sat in his room, fussing with a report he was going to have to make, but mostly listening and waiting. Lozier [the executive officer] and I were on the bridge with the OOD—waiting. And watching the fantail. At 1945 we heard a dull ripping sound and the ship teetered fore and aft. I took a flashlight and went back to the 1.1 mount for a look. The crack in the deck was about 16 inches wide and riding back and forth as if the stern section were hooked on with a hinge at the keel. At 2030 the engineer and his assistant gave up on cribbage and went down to the engine room to inspect shaft alleys. It was getting very dark and cold. Everyone was thinking, to himself at least, that if the stern section did not shear clean, there would be a lot of guys jumping into that rough sea who would not be found.
At 2130 another ripping noise brought the skipper topside. We notified Jeffery [USS Ira Jeffery (DE- 63)] by TBS of what was pending and to stand by. At 2144—she went! You could hear a loud crashing and metallic tearing. Two points of light moving forward fast on the boat deck were flashlights of the first lieutenant and his telephone talker. They had been back observing and were now getting the hell out of there. The whole stern section, 102 feet of it, heeled over in a half-flip, bumped the ship in shearing off, floated high for a moment on a white-tipped wave, and disappeared. The Fogg began to reel to starboard, slowly but steadily. Five degrees—ten—-fifteen—twenty—twenty-five—it was getting difficult to stand up—thirty—forty. The captain stood with the TBS phone in his hand, waiting another moment. Fuel was being pumped to port tanks. We slowed. “ Take it easy,” the captain was saying to nobody in particular. We hung. We signaled the tug to heave to. Still we hung. Then we began to come up again. Word came up from the §2 engine room—“all secure.” The captain informed Jeffery that we were okay—and the Jeffery’s comment was a simple “congratulations.” For a while nobody said anything. Then we came to and began to unfasten things about our persons. The ship came to an even keel. Our stern came up and our bow went down. The roll had been reaction to unbalanced portside weight caused by the explosion—and to the partially filled compartment aft, which was now cut in half and open like the end of a railroad observation car, creating a suction and taking water. The Fogg—or about two thirds of her anyway—was watertight. And when you're watertight, you float. We went to bed.
Traditionally the weather in that part of the globe is supposed to be good, dominated by the Azores high. For the Fogg, this did not turn out to be the case.
Arriving at Horta on the island of Fayal, we were moored behind a long breakwater and divers set to work putting a buffer bulkhead over our exposed stern section. It was made of 2X6 lumber and secured with big ring bolts. We also rigged a sea anchor from four shortened telephone poles wired together in a clump. By 2 January we were ready to leave but the weather was so bad we .could not. In fact, our tug and escort had to steam to the lee of the island and stay there for a week.
On 9 January we started off, towed by an Army tug manned by a merchant marine crew. But the tug either could not or would not pull us at over three knots, and at that speed we yawed badly. Decent weather held for two days; then it reverted to type. We found we could make no headway at all in the direction we wanted to go. We could only go into the wind; otherwise we rode at right angles to the tug. Normally the winds in that part of the ocean are southwest, but all we got was a strong east-by-south gale. So we had to head southeast, which is a hard way to get home from the Azores.
After 36 hours of the gale, our buffer bulkhead suddenly let go. The sea began pounding in on the #2 engineroom bulkhead, and we really came close to losing the ship. When our nose rode up over a wave and our stern went down, water crashed into the after compartment bending that bulkhead from four to six inches. My notes commented: “Brother, did those sandbags fly!” Sandbagging and reshoring helped, but continuing our voyage was impossible. So we turned around and dejectedly began the 200-mile return trip. In another day and a half the weather moderated and it was not until then, fortunately, that our towing shackle gave way and we lost our tow- line. This we found to be a very uncomfortable feeling, especially in a capricious ocean like the Atlantic.
We also found it impossible to retrieve our towing bridle, made of heavy chain which we had wheedled from a passing merchantman. The bridle weighed about six tons, and after a few hours of trying to haul it up on deck, we gave up. We just let it hang and hooked up the towline to our anchor chain; then, holding our breath, we crept back into Horta.
Six weeks later we were underway again, although we were not quite sure why. It would have been cheaper for the Navy to forget the whole thing, donate the Fogg to the Portuguese, fly the remaining crew home, and build a new ship. By this time the Pickleboat really looked her name. We had long since run out of paint, and (mostly for something to do) had begged a few gallons here and there from any scow that happened to pass by. This was, as the first lieutenant ordained, to “hold down rust and corrosion.” We did, indeed, resemble a big jar of cucumbers mixed with onions, red peppers, yellow squash, and parsley.
But GominCh had diverted a homeward bound salvage ship to weld a steel buffer bulkhead to our stern and had also provided us with a Navy Fleet tug. Thus, the Fogg set out for Boston, gaudy and gay in her patchwork paint, looking more like a chippy than a hardworking lady of the U. S. Fleet. We were routed the long way around, by Bermuda, in order to avoid bad weather.
The Fogg avoid bad weather? This was a laugh. We might as well have gone by way of Greenland.
15 Mar. ’45. Hiring me for a repeat performance of that trip would cost an awful lot of money. We hit one gale after another. The fourth day and the sixth, and then on the eighth day, March came in like a lion. The barometer dropped from 30.32 to 29.30 in the space of eight hours and we were bucking a really severe storm. The 20-24 watch was the most nerve-racking I’ve ever had. We’ve been in many worse storms, but having no power made our condition entirely dependent on the strength of our tow wire, three shackles and each link of our bridle. The main problem was that when we lost our stern section, the metacentric center of the ship shifted, to where we knew not. But it was the consensus that our maximum roll had been reduced by 20 to 25 degrees. This meant that should our towing gear break, we would fall into the trough of the sea, taking waves on our beam, and most probably go over.
If anyone should ever ask me what the American flag means to me, I’ll always think of the night of I March 1945. The wind, at force 9, was coming out of the southwest, which meant the center of the storm was to the northwest of us. What we wanted was a shift in the wind to the north, since we knew the storm was going east from weather reports. All during that watch Covington [the gunnery officer] and I kept our eyes glued to the flag, which was already in shreds from the first two gales, waiting for the first sign of a shift in the wind. There was nothing we could do, except stumble along behind the tug, and hope the water wouldn’t build up too much. At about 2315 the flag began to edge around, and within 10 minutes it indicated a change in the wind to due west. Furthermore, the barometer had hung, so we were much relieved when we went off watch. We had forgotten that there are two sides to such gales. And that while the center is passing you, the wind will die to a whisper, the stars will come out and the barometer begin to rise. You get a sense of false security, because you still have to go through the other half of the storm.
All of a sudden, with a shriek, the wind pounced on us again and the clouds were low, fast and solid. All during the mid watch, I sat in the wardroom and tried to read. During this time, the sea really began to build up. We were riding up over the waves and taking off down the other side like a dive bomber. Sometimes, when the swells came close together, our nose would get buried in one of them, and we wouldn’t be sure whether it was going to come up again or not. By morning the wind was out of the north and the sea at its peak, a series of young mountains. And then, by dark, we were in calm water and on our way again.
For three or four days after that we had good weather, but after the other ships had been refueled from a tanker out of Bermuda another southwest gale caught us. This time we were heading northwest, so that the sea came in on our quarter. We rode it as long as we could, until our roll reached about 40 degrees. Then the captain decided to heave to. He reasoned that since the Fogg would necessarily have to lie in the trough for a few minutes while the tug came around to bring us up into the wind, we would be better off to do it sooner than later. If we waited too long we might not make it. All hands who were not on watch donned life jackets and distributed themselves topside at their pleasure. The exec and I went aft on the boatdeck. In case of turning turtle, we intended to step off into the water from there with a minimum of difficulty.
So the ship came around, and she did lie in the trough for a while; and she rolled better than 48 degrees. We figured our maximum to be about 55 degrees. All night long and half the next day, we lay on a southwest heading, the tug just making steerage way, and the escort circling us. We were only 300 miles from Boston, but it seemed like 3,000.
The last two days going in were filled with an edgy excitement, the kind you get when you begin to sniff the USA. We had quiet water, a moderate north wind that took the temperature down to 27, and clear skies. The familiar fishing trawlers around Cape Cod were the most welcome vessels we'd sighted in five months. About midnight of the 8th we rounded the Cape and headed into Massachusetts Bay. I went up on the bridge for a breath of New England air before turning in. The OOD and JOOD were kidding each other; the bridge talker and the signalman were singing in the dark, making a trio with one of the lookouts; in the charthouse the quartermaster was fussing over our position, although most of the time he just stared at the little red circle that marks the Boston Lightship on the chart. There was a knifelike cold topside and a jewelled sky. Way off ahead of us, forty miles or so, I could see the glow of Boston spread over a small arc of the dim horizon. Bless her! It seemed like a good idea to go below for coffee before sentiment set in.
Like the Mayflower 300 years before her, the Fogg had taken off from Plymouth, England, and—87 days later—had limped around Cape Cod and into Charlestown harbor. As a matter of fact, the Mayflower beat our time by 21 days.
Then, as we were nosed into drydock by tug and landlines, we found out what CominCh had in store for us. A brand new, ready-built stern was floated in right behind us and set down on the ways. By the time the water was pumped out of the drydock and the crew scurried ashore, the welders were at work and the inevitable chip-hammers were droning out their deafening, metallic chatter.
We all knew then that the Fogg’s stormy romance with the sea was not over. And while we might reasonably have expected her to acquire a certain matronly mellowness as time went on, there was nothing really odd about her fling with the 1963 hurricane. In fact, it was eminently in character. She simply closed the books on her naval career by engaging in a final battle with Neptune or Triton or whichever sea god is in charge of foul weather. And her former plank-owners were satisfied merely to read about the Pickleboat from the haven of their easy chairs.