Escape from Archangel: An American Merchant Seaman at War

Harm's Way

Harm's Way Smith soon tired of instructor duty. He requested and was granted sea duty. Jac had no exact knowledge at the time of just what lay ahead. He knew the duty was hazardous, but he thought in romantic terms—the glamorous, heroic danger of boyhood stories. The truth was known only to those already at sea. The North Atlantic itself was often more deadly than the enemy torpedoes and bombs. Ifthe order was given to abandon ship, the crew had only minutes to reach the relative safety of a lifeboat or raft before the cold incapacitated their muscles and they died from hypothermia or drowned. Those in lifeboats faced days or weeks—or longer—of isolation on cold and stormy seas. There were many occasions when crews escaped injury but could not survive the sea in their lifeboats. The S.S.Cado, a Socony-Vacuum tanker,was torpedoed in November of 1942. Allof the forty-two crewmen and seventeen -29- naval armed guards survived the sinking and successfully launched and boarded three lifeboats. Of those fifty-nine souls, only six survived the freezing and stormy sea. When a ship was hit, all the crew was exposed to terrible injury, but especially those manningthe ship's engines down below, the black gang.* When engine rooms took a direct hit, they turned into horror chambers of broken steam lines, exploding boilers, and flaming fuel, scalding and burning the trapped stokers far below decks. Every Americantruck, tank, ship, and plane—and most of those of our allies, including the Soviet Union—ran on fuel transported to the war zones by tankers. Tankermen knew their chances in the cold water, but their greatest fear wasof fire.The tankers were loaded low in the water with cargoes of high test gasoline or oil. Whenhit, a tanker usually became an inferno, isolating crewmen from escape or preventing the launching of lifeboats. Even when lifeboats or rafts were launched successfully, the sea around them could erupt in flames as millions of gallons of petroleum poured onto the water and ignited. Men leaped from flaming decks into seas on fire. There were occasions when lifeboats and their passengers , well clear of their burning ship, were still set on fire when oil blown high into the air by explosions on board the stricken vessel ignited and fell from the sky like burningrain. The men who sailed the merchant ships were civilians, seamen makinga living for themselves and their families, volunteers . They had no military obligations. No one could order * In sea jargon"black" has nothing to do with race but refers to the sooty faces of stokers who in early days shoveled coal all day long into the fireboxes of ships. Diesel engines have replaced coal, but men working in the engine rooms are still called the black gang. -30- them into harm's way. But they went just the same. Transporting cargo was their job. Those who survived one convoy sailed on the next one—and the one after that. Some were terribly wounded, some died by fire, some by ice. Over six hundred were taken prisoner by the Germans and Japanese. At least three were placed in a prison camp near the Arctic Circle by the bureaucracy of an ungrateful Stalinist Russia. One of them was a Mississippian. Seamen were hired out to man merchant vessels through their union and seaman halls. Acompany needing a crew for a certain vessel, requisitioned for government service, called the halls and requested the number of men ofsuch-and-such qualifications required. Those men registered for jobs the longest went first, alwayson a "destination unknown"basis. Jac was told that Philadelphia was a good place to be hired on quickly. Crews were desperately needed for the T-2tankers being turned out by the Sun Shipyard. It was a long train trip from St.Petersburg to Philadelphia, and was as far asJac had ever traveled from home. When he got there, he found Philadelphia awash in Navy sailors and merchant seamen. The Naval Yard and all docks and shipyards in the areawere crowded with ships of every description and in every stage of building, repair, outfitting, and loading. The arcs of welding torches flared brightly day and night. Trucks lined the streets waiting to load or unload at the docks. Cranes hefted cargo of every description aboard ship. There was one message in the air:Hurry. Europehas fallen...