Incidents in Naval Warfare by James Sullivan

 

In the wardroom they treated Anderson for lacerations on his ankle and his head and noted the distinct possibility of internal injuries. Then he started talking. He told them they’d picked up radar contact at about five thousand yards just after midnight. The Buck rang general quarters, and Anderson went topside to his battle station on the ship’s platform just ahead of the forward stack. The bridge rang full ahead, and the charged after the contact, black smoke spewing from the ship’s funnels, looking out for a challenge from an unknown vessel. Just as the ship came up to speed, an ensign on one of the Buck’s 40mm guns felt the ship hesitate, as if she’d had a collision. She had, with a torpedo that slammed into the starboard side of the ship near the forward fireroom and exploded. The pressure  in the ship’s steam line fell from 560 pounds to nothing.

‘ I was blown over the side by the explosion.’ Anderson told Plunket’s officers.

The explosion knocked down an ensign on the 40mm gun and raked him with flying debris while a foot of water surged over the deck. The ensign got to his feet and ran to the fantail, yelling for the crew to set all the depth charges to safe. He glanced back for a sight of the stacks or the bridge and saw neither. Either the ship was cut in half, or smoke and steam from the forward fireroom blocked the view. Another lieutenant was now on the fantail, also calling for the depth charges to be set to safe, so they would not explode when the ship sank. . .

The need to abandon ship was obvious, and they made quick work of it, releasing life rafts if possible, shucking shoes if they could, and plunging into the sea. The stern sank, dragging  down all of the depth charges that had been set to safe, and one, a three-hundred-pounder in a K-gun, that had not. When that ash can sunk to 100 or 150 feet, or to whatever depth they’d set for explosion, the TNT burst from its shell, doubling down on the carnage.

The concussion brutalized the men in the water. The explosion ruptured pneumatic life belts and hit survivors like kicks in the stomach and pelvis. The blast perforated the membranes of their abdomens, bruised the loops of their intestines, and open lesions on their lungs. It was hell on the viscera. Those who weren’t killed immediately were so traumatized they drifted to death through the small hours of the morning. Fifty men who’d grouped on one life raft after the stern sunk dwindled to thirty by dawn.

With Anderson on board Plunkett, the lookouts spotted a group of objects that proved to be three more survivors, clung together. One of the three came aboard with a broken ankle, another with pain in his abdomen, and a third, wiped out from holding up his two shipmates through the night. When the lookouts heard shouts off the port bow, Jack Simpson scrambled back into the whaleboat to retrieve five more men from the sea. Each of them was smeared black with oil, and it was a slippery, frustrating business hauling them into the boat, and even to Plunkett’s deck. . .

After they brought these men on board, they resumed listening for shouts, and wondering that the men in the water didn’t have whistles, a simple piece of equipment that now seemed so obviously essential. Plunkett crept along at one-third, cutting a wake that muffled the ability of anyone to hear much of anything. Burke nudged the ship into thick fog and watched his lookouts for signals, but none heard the same thing. There were men in the water and they couldn’t be heard for the depth of the fog and the churn of Plunkett’s propellers. Burke ha no choice, ‘All Stop’, he said… the reassuring thrum of the ship underway gave way to silence made all the more deep by the muffling fog, and that was dreadful to every sailor topside and below deck. They may have well heard the ticking of a time bomb. You might lie to inside a submarine net, but you wouldn’t want to in contested waters, and you especially did not want to in the vicinity of a torpedoed ship. A U-boat liked nothing so much as a return to the scene of a crime, where the pickings might be good [ The refusal of the British navy to send rescue ships immediately to the Lusitania for this reason resulted in many passengers dying of hypothermia]. . . .

 

Soon Plunket had fifteen more men from the Buck onboard. Late the next morning, they brought on  four more, one man they weren’t ever going to identify because all there was to the trunk were two legs and one arm. Ken Brown watched them hoist the gig and remove the men, and the parts of men. Their work was done by then, and the cook had sent sandwiches up onto the deck for men who had labored through the night.

One of the young deckhands was eating a sandwich as they emptied the last gig, when Dutch Heisler, who was still in the gig, called for him to lend a hand. The sailor hopped to and waited for Dutch, who lifted from the belly of the whaleboat a last severed limb, this one with the bone exposed. He extended it to the unwitting young sailor. Ken Brown remembered that the kid stiffened, as if catatonic, and stayed that way while Dutch continued to hold the arm out, a gesture that took on the coloring of black humor and that was, if anything, one way to deal with the horrible consequences of a torpedo.

                   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

From seventeen thousand feet, the tracers spewing from the perimeter of the target winked out intermittently. But the bull’s-eye never dimmed. Looking through a little window in the floor of his Junkers Ju 88, a Luftwaffe pilot maneuvered Plunkett into position, then pulled his dive brakes with the 1.1- inch gun firmly anchored in his bombsight. The plane’s nose dipped trough forty-five degrees. Its speed accelerated for 350 mph.

At five thousand feet, a warning horn sounded as tracers flowed past the cockpit. Moments later, the horn stopped and the pilot released his payload. A stick of five bombs, each weighing 550 pounds, dropped from the bay. The first tumbled into the sea, as did the second, and then the third, though they walked a path right up on the ship’s stern. The fourth exploded twenty yards off the starboard stern, blowing off the ship’s port screw.

A 5:58 p.m., the fifth bomb in this stick fell directly on the 1.1-inch gun, at frame 134, as the area was known on a diagram of the ship’s anatomy, and exploded with a flash that illuminated the vessel in a stark, apocalyptic snapshot, a moment that would cleave time for the crew between everything that happened before Anzio and everything that happened after. In the forward fire room, the lights blinked out with the blast, and Jim felt the ship going down, straight down, a preternatural feeling as if the hand of Neptune had clutched the Plunkett by the hull and was pulling for the bottom. The explosions rattled the men on the bridge like ‘dice in a cup’ and Skunky grabbed the wheel, sure the ship was going down . . .

In the aft engine room, Irvin Gebhart had been climbing for the main deck when the bomb hit. The noise was like nothing he’d ever heard before, followed by the gushers of steam spewing from the ruptured lines; the roar of flames and the cries of the men as superheated steam spewing from the pipes at seven hundred degrees jerked, stabbed and sliced them to pieces.

The explosion obliterated the 1.1-inch gun mount and everyone one of the eight men on it, so thoroughly gone they’d have to be listed forever after as missing in action. Likewise, the no 5 gun mount for one of the ship’s 20mms: gone. The bomb cratered through the main deck by the no 6 gun and marooned the nearby 20mm gun mount above the rent. The explosion tore the arms and legs of the trunk of the strapped in gunner, as well as his head, though the straps held, leaving what remained in the embrace of the harness.

Gallagher’s gun tub was fifteen yards from the 1.1-inch mount but was spared the full thrust of the explosion by the back of the deckhouse. Still the upper reaches of the blast downed Garner and the gun’s handler and drove Gallagher into his shoulder braces. Shrapnel flailed his backside like a whip with a dozen tips. The heat of the fire was all over him and there was fusillade of 20mm and 1.1 inch shells, punctuating the roar of flame and the cries of downed men.

In McManus’s turret the concussion gripped each man in a vise of air that perforated eardrums and threatened to implode the cavities of their chests. But then it exhausted most of its surge out the canvas top of the mount. The force blew Mac’s trainer off his seat and dragged his leg over a jagged end of a pipe from hip to heel, gouging an inch-wide channel. Shrapnel raked each of them. The concussion sprang flecks of paint from the inside of the mount and embedded them in exposed skin. Flames flared everywhere.

At the searchlight, the blast blew every shred of clothing off Eddie Webber, blowing out the seams of his jasket, shirt, and trousers, even his underwear, but left him his shoes and the pneumatic life belt clipped around his waist. The integrity of his body was intact, however, unlike the men around him who lost limbs to flying shards of ship – limbs that would have no fidelity to where they’d come from and that would scatter about topside like obscene clues to a guessing game that would have to be played later.

Together the searchlight and the men on it were blown forward off the mount, onto men from the mid-ship repair party and towards the ship’s second stack. Flames scorched Webber’s stomach on route, and the collapsing mount broke the bones in his legs. Shrapnel pummeled his head and torso. One piece shot through his biceps, and other his thigh, and a large swatch of metal lodged in his stomach. The searchlight crashed against the superstructure, tangling Eddie and three shipmates in a heap Some of the same superstructure caught Jim Shipp at the waist. Splinters of metal lashed his face as he was brought down to the deck, and just before he blacked out, he said to himself, ‘Well this is the end.’

. . . . . At 6:30 p.m., the bridge rang the bell for getting underway, and the forwards engine room dialed up ninety-two turns on the still operable starboard screw. They shifted steering back to the bridge and followed a heading for Naples . . . Ken, in retrospect, would talk about teamwork on Plunkett that night, and Jim Feltz would talk about how they had all done their job, reaching for metaphors from the world of sport and employment to communicate, as understandably as possible, that they had not bucked in fear. They fought and they hadn’t stopped fighting when the odds were stacked against them. It was all that they could do, and it had been enough.