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When I joined the SS Kahuku on 15 May 1942, at the Claremont Terminal in Jersey City, she had been in port over a month getting her wartime armament and loading military cargo for the Persian Gulf. A 5-inch gun had been mounted on the poop and quarters for the accompanying Armed Guard had been built in a hot and crowded storage space over the engine- room. Some kind of poured mastic "armour plate” had been put around, and on top of, the pilothouse. The extra weight on top had started to cave in the roof and four 4-inch timber supports had been hastily placed beneath. These timbers further obstructed an already small, much-encumbered, pilothouse. Many a hark night we mates cursed those four-by-fours as we hanged into them while trying to get to the chartroom °r from one bridge wing to the other in a hurry. A final war-necessitated addition was four 20-person life rafts. They were installed in skids on the port and larboard shrouds of the fore and main masts.
The U. S. Navy officer in charge of the Armed Guard ^as assigned the second mate’s room; the second mate (°ok the third’s room, and the third was moved into
The SS Kahuku, wearing the Matson colors, in 1940.
the linen locker where a wooden bunk with drawers had been built along the athwartships bulkhead. As the room was only about four feet wide, the third couldn’t open the drawers without awkwardly standing to one side or getting on top of his bunk. The unlicensed crew, deck and black gang, lived aft in the poop except for the bosun and the carpenter, who shared a small room under the fo’c’s’le next to the paint locker, and the steward who bunked amidships.
The Kahuku was owned by the Matson Navigation Company of San Francisco, but while on the East Coast, was husbanded by the Isthmian Steamship Company. Isthmian mates condescendingly referred to Matson ships as "pineapple clippers.” She was a 6,000-ton vessel, designed by the U. S. Shipping Board, and built in 1920, with a raised fo’c’s’le head and poop. She had a flush deck amidships which put the pilothouse and bridge deck lower than on most ships. Consequently, the only way to get a good view ahead was to climb on top of the pilothouse. This made watchstanding, especially in convoy, an extremely active operation, with frequent fast trips up and down a vertical ladder from the navigation bridge to the house top. Our main engine was a little 2,000-h.p. turbine. At full speed, it hummed away like a sewing machine and pushed the 402-foot freighter along at a breathtaking eight-and-one-half or nine knots.
Our crew was typical of merchant crews before the war. Captain Eric A. Johanson was a long-time Matson mate who had been given his first command, the Kahuku, when in his late 50s or early 60s. Though conscientious and competent in the peacetime carriage of lumber, bagged sugar, and canned pineapples, he was hesitant and uncomfortable when dealing with the changed conditions brought about by the war. The chief engineer had been with Matson a number of years and had been chief of the Kahuku for three. The chief mate was an Isthmian man who said half jokingly that he had been assigned to the Kahuku as punishment for turning down a job as mate of an Isthmian ship loading for Murmansk. The third mate was a graduate of the New York State School Ship. He had been in the Kahuku on her previous trip to Suez via the Cape of Good Hope. The unlicensed crew were members of West Coast maritime unions and with two exceptions—an ordinary seaman and a wiper making their first trip—all were experienced seamen.
I was the second mate and the Kahuku was my first berth as officer in a freighter. At the outbreak of the war, I was third mate in the Sun Oil tanker Mercury Sun. I took one trip off in March of 1942 to raise my license and was then promoted to second mate in the Northern Sun. Both vessels were in the coastwise run carrying crude oil from Gulf of Mexico ports to Philadelphia or New York. During these early months of
80 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, July 1973
war, the German U-boats were literally unhindered in their attacks on the shipping along our eastern seaboard and loaded tankers were their prime targets.f After six months of seeing torpedoed tankers go down, or up in flames, I decided I would give my nerves a rest and ship on a nice safe freighter.
We finished loading cargo on 19 May. On the 20th, we ran the degaussing range and compensated compasses, and early on the 22nd took our departure from New York bound for Delaware Bay, arriving the same afternoon. Before daylight the next morning, we sailed for Chesapeake Bay and anchored in Hampton Roads early the following morning.
We were not convoyed coming down the coast but, as the ships departed more or less at the same time each morning, and steered approximately the same courses, the result was one big bunch of ships moving along together. As the day wore on, the faster ships naturally pulled ahead and the Kahuku, zipping along at eight knots, was soon bringing up the rear. During the passage from New York to the Chesapeake, a blimp was usually hovering over the main cluster of ships. It was a comforting sight, the first evidence of antisubmarine measures I had seen.
We left Chesapeake Bay 29 May 1942 at 6:00 a.m. in convoy bound for Key West. As I recall, there were six rows of ships and five or six ships in each row, about half of them tankers. The Kahuku was next to last in one of the middle rows. Since the Kahuku was the slowest ship present, the convoy’s speed of advance was set at 7 knots so she could keep up. Some of the newer 12-to-13-knot tankers must have been very unhappy to be held back by "an old Matson bucket.” Our escorts were a converted British trawler and an old American four-stack destroyer of World War I vintage. The trawler kept station about a mile ahead and slowly worked from one side of the convoy to the other. The destroyer was on the seaward flank and swept back and forth across that flank and the front. Several times she suddenly changed course and darted in some different direction, presumably in response to a contact on her sonar gear. Once, just at dusk, she went charging through the center of the convoy and we could hear some explosions, but never found out what it was all about. The convoy commodore, who gave all the signals for course changes, zig-zag instructions, etc., was on board a British freighter stationed at the front of the outside row to our starboard.
It was the first convoy for most of the ships present,
f Samuel Eliot Morison, in the United States Natal Operations in World War II Volume X, wrote: "June of 1942 was the all-time high for the U- boats and low for the Allies. In the Gulf and Caribbean, off the Panama Canal, and in the easier approaches to the Caribbean, 69 ships of 365,115 tons were sunk by submarines.”
and it showed in their poor station-keeping. Running along at close quarters, especially at night, was too much for masters and mates who had spent a career keeping as far away as possible from other ships while at sea. As darkness set in, the distance between ships would become greater and greater and, by daybreak, they would be spread almost to the horizon. It was noon before we were back in our assigned positions.
Passing Cape Hatteras, about 70 miles off, the convoy headed south somewhat to the east of the northerly-flowing Gulf Stream, but then had to head back into it where it approached the Florida Straits. About the time we entered the narrowest part of the Straits where the current was strongest, we ran into a nasty southeast gale and also had a couple of submarine "contacts.” We were ordered to zig-zag, which further reduced our distance made good. One day a few miles north of Palm Beach, we took a noon position with Jupiter Lighthouse almost abeam and the next day it was still only a couple of points abaft the beam—a discouraging day’s run of 24 miles.
On 8 June, nine days from the Chesapeake, I came on watch at midnight to find us off Rebecca Shoals Light to the west of Key West. The convoy had reduced speed and stopped zig-zagging. Some of the ships were almost stopped, others were slowly edging away from the convoy formation. Captain Johanson was on the bridge and the third mate was on top of the wheelhouse trying to figure out what was happening- It was an eerie night, with a half-moon shining through a thin overcast, not a breath of wind, and quiet as death. We could hear the water lapping against the hull as we drifted along on a slow bell. The debris in the water—part of a ship’s settee, a door, hatch covers, and the ever-present oil slick—added to the tenseness of the night. The captain said the commodore had signaled to stop zig-zagging about an hour earlier and the two escorts had disappeared just before I came on watch. While we were talking, the commodore’s ship gave the signal: "All ships proceed independently-’ That really started a scramble. Here were about 35 ships in relatively close formation, half of them bound for the Gulf on a west-to-northwest course, and the rest bound for Yucatan Channel in a southwesterly direction. As luck would have it, most of the vessels going north were on the south side of the convoy, and vice versa. It was a few hours before everyone was unscrambled and headed toward their destinations. We had been on our new course about an hour when we saw two flashes on our northern horizon, followed by the sounds of explosions. At least one tanker—possibly two—had gone as far as they were going to go.
The next morning when I came on the bridge to work up the noon position there were 15 ships in
Caribbean Convoy 81
sight ahead, eight freighters and seven tankers. The mate said that at daybreak the British freighter that had been our convoy commodore had sent up a signal to form two columns. In the absence of any escort craft, that didn’t seem to make much sense, but gradually the ships achieved some sort of formation and continued down through the Yucatan Channel west of Cuba.
On 11 June we reached Serrana Bank, a shoal of several square miles, and once again our convoy commodore sent up the signal to proceed independently. The Britisher and four others continued on in the direction of the Panama Canal, the rest of us turned hard left on the base course laid down in our Navy routing instructions, zig-zagging our way towards Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. Next day the Kahuku had the ocean to herself; the other ships had rapidly left us behind as soon as our unescorted convoy had disbanded. That evening our radio operator received an "SOS, we are torpedoed and abandoning ship” from one of the Panama-bound ships.
Up to this time we had never fired our 5-inch gun on the poop, but the gunnery officer had drilled his small crew every day with a few of the merchant seamen acting as ammunition passers. Now that we were alone, "Guns” decided to have some target practice so we threw a few boxes overboard and, when they were a half a mile or so astern, he fired a shot at them. Our only other defensive armament were two 30:06 Springfield rifles and a Lewis machine gun of the same caliber.
The day after the Kahuku turned the corner at Serrana Bank, "Sparks” came to the bridge with an SOS from a ship giving her position about 140 miles northwest of Port-of-Spain and, early in the morning of the 14th, we received an SOS from one of our former convoy mates at about the same position. From then on, Sparks was making frequent trips between the bridge and the radio shack with reports of submarines sighted or distress calls from torpedoed ships. The ships were all getting knocked off in the same area and it seemed evident that the subs were onto a good thing— they simply waited astride the "safety lane” and sank the ships as they came by.
To the best of my knowledge, of the 16 ships of the unescorted convoy that stood down the Yucatan Channel, only one reached port. None of the Panama- bound vessels made it, and a U. S. Lines freighter that skirted the Venezuelan coast was the only vessel to teach Trinidad.
On board the Kahuku, we, the mates, tried to talk the captain into leaving the safety lane and dropping down close to the Venezuelan coast and trying to slip through to Trinidad that way. However, the Navy had publicly stated that any merchant captain who deviated
from his routing would be subject to having his license suspended or revoked, and Captain Johanson wasn’t very keen on taking that risk.
About noon on the 15th, some 150 miles northwest of Trinidad, we were again running through heavy debris from sunken vessels when we sighted three lifeboats ahead. Drawing closer, we saw they were filled with men and, at about the same time, we saw two vessels approaching from the south. As we made preparations to embark the men from the lifeboats, the two vessels came within hailing distance—they were the USS Opal, a converted yacht, and the YP-63. The men in the boats, to our not very great surprise, declined to be rescued by us. As we hove to, they waved us on, shouting "We’re better off where we are. We’ve been sunk once and don’t want to get it again.” We started to resume our course and speed, but the Opal signaled us to stop and by megaphone ordered the men out of the boats and aboard the Kahuku. By three o’clock all were on board, their lifeboats tied astern on long painters, and we were underway again, the Opal and the YP-63 running alongside. The men we had picked up, 63 in all, were survivors of two freighters; the Cold Harbor, a U. S. Lines Hog Islander, and the Scotts- burg, Lykes Brothers Steamship Company, that had been sunk the night before.
By 6 o’clock, steering a 75% zig-zag pattern, we were feeling relatively relaxed with our escorts nearby, when gradually they widened their course and disappeared in the darkness to the south. At 8 o’clock, there was an explosion a mile or so to the north of us and a few minutes later we could see the waterlights of rafts bobbing around in the darkness. This vessel we later found to be the American Hawaiian Line’s Arkansan, returning from the Persian Gulf. I went up on the bridge where the captain, mate, and gunnery officer were having a conference. It was decided that the sub that torpedoed the Arkansan would need at least an hour to get in position for a shot at us, so the mate went around telling all hands to stand by to be torpedoed in about an hour. The captain called down to the engineer on watch and told him the same thing. Then we noticed someone signaling by blinker on our port bow and, while attempting to read it, saw it being answered by someone to starboard. Apparently two subs were choosing which ships to sink.
At 9:20, I was sitting on my cot talking to the Scottsburg’s purser when someone yelled, "Here it comes.” Before I could react, the torpedo exploded directly under me and when I came to a few seconds later I was lying in the waterway on the other side of the deck. Getting up, I went to the bridge just as the captain sounded the signal to abandon ship. My lifeboat, the starboard one, was blown up when the
82 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, July 1973
torpedo hit, so I went over to the port side to help that one get away. It was just being lowered and there were so many men in it that the boat itself was barely visible. Fortunately the sea was calm and the overloaded boat safely cleared the ship with the third mate in charge. I went forward and saw that both forward rafts were already gone and men were jumping over to swim to them. I then started aft and on the way looked in the radio shack where Sparks was trying to repair his equipment. I told him he was wasting his time and to come with me to see if we could find something that would float, but he went on with his repairs and I never saw him again. I reached the poop where the gunnery officer had just ordered his men to jump—the vessel had now taken a starboard list and was down by the stern. Seeing a waterlight some distance astern, which apparently wasn’t going to get any nearer, and, as all my options had run out, I jumped off the port quarter.
As soon as I hit the water I was sure I was in trouble. Two of the three lifeboats we were towing astern had swamped and were being towed along below the surface (the Kahuku was still going slowly ahead) with their gear trailing after them. Men from the Cold Harbor and Scottsburg, knowing their boats were tied astern, had jumped or slid down the painters, only to find nothing at the end except a lot of entangling gear which, instead of supporting them, dragged them under. Fortunately, I got clear of this mess and, after about an hour’s swim, reached the waterlight I had spotted previously and found it attached to a raft with only three or four men on board. A fireman from the Kahuku was standing and waving the waterlight over his head to make it more visible to the men in the water. Others kept arriving and in another half-hour there were 22 men on, or clinging to, the raft.
The Kahuku was still afloat and a submarine had surfaced and was firing tracers at the radio shack. After a few minutes of this he started firing at the poop with a larger caliber gun. The third shot apparently hit the 5-inch magazine as there was an explosion, a flash of fire, and the ship settled a little more by the stern. Sometime around midnight a second torpedo was fired and the Kahuku finally went under, stern first.
Several of the men on the raft had been picked up first by a German submarine, presumably the same one that sank us, and subsequently put aboard a raft. The submarine’s captain told them that the Opal would be out the next day and pick us up. He also informed them that he had been in Port-of-Spain a few days earlier and had gone to see a Gary Cooper movie. The next morning our little flotilla of two lifeboats and three rafts managed to maneuver together, transferred passengers to even up the number on board each, and hope
fully tried to make some progress toward Trinidad.
About 2:00 p.m. a couple of smudges on the southern horizon got bigger and bigger until our old friends the Opal and the YP-63 hove to nearby with rope ladders over the side. Clad only in my underwear and covered with fuel oil, I was helped over the rail by a chief machinist’s mate I had known when I was in the Navy at the Submarine Base at New London. He gave me a dungaree shirt to wear—his trousers and shoes wouldn’t fit—and I got a kerosene-soaked rag from a Navy seaman and cleaned the oil off me as best I could. As the Opal and her escort, YP-63, headed for Port-of-Spain, we made a check of the crews, merchant and Armed Guard. Six of the Kahuku's crew, including the captain, first mate, and gunnery officer, were missing. Eleven were lost from the Cold Harbor and the Scottsburg, making a total of 20 lives lost.
Down in the Opal's chiefs’ quarters, I asked nay former shipmate the obvious, "Where were you last night? You must have seen the gunfire.” His answer, in summary, was, "Yes, we saw you and the other ships being sunk, but there wasn’t much we could do about it. We’re no match for the subs so we don’t bother them, and they don’t bother us when we come out to pick up survivors. We keep track of each other by sonar and keep our distance.” It was a sort of gentlemen’s agreement for which we were thankful.
We docked at the Naval Operating Base, Port-of- Spain, at 4:00 a.m. on the 16th, where five of our ere* were sent to the hospital and the rest of us marched to an empty barracks. During the two weeks we were billeted at the Base, merchant seamen were prohibited from leaving the compound and the Navy supply system did not provide for issuing, or selling, clothes or toilet gear to civilians so we were a pretty disreputablelooking bunch as we lined up for chow at the end of the line at the enlisted men’s mess hall. As more survivors were arriving almost daily (our agent said that approximately 600 seamen from torpedoed merchant vessels were stranded in the Port-of-Spain area) the barracks soon became filled and, about ten days after our arrival, we were assembled and told we would be issued tents, cots, and cooking equipment and be moved to a new survivors camp in the interior.
In the meantime, Isthmian had been informed of the loss of the Kahuku and, the day before our ere* was to be transferred to the new camp, the welcome word came from the local Isthmian agent that ait passage back to the States had been arranged for us We therefore left Trinidad at 5:00 a.m., 1 July, arrive^ at Miami that afternoon, left Miami by train the same evening, and arrived in New York on the 3rd. Late that evening, the 30 lucky survivors were paid off, an^ thus ended the final voyage of the freighter Kahuku■