were duly respectful when I said I had played three years’ Varsity baseball, and became quite deferential when I assured them I had also survived a season of bush-league in the North-West. There was some kind of electrician rating in the crowd who had been a bush-league twirler before his “wing went glass,” as he put it, and he, it soon transpired, had played in one place or another with a number of my old team mates of the Montana League. Deep in reminiscence of those good old days, I quite forgot my subtle scheme of using baseball as a stalking-horse for destroyer yarns, when the arrival of some callers from a British sloop lying a mile or two farther down the harbour recalled it to me. They had been in the Moonflower, the man next me said, when she put a U-boat out of business not long before, and one of them—he had some sort of decoration for his part in the show—spun a cracking good yarn about it if you got him started. This latter I managed to do by asking him how it chanced that the Moonflower was allowed to sport a star on her funnel. The story he told, the while he rolled cigarettes and worked his jaws on Yankee chewing-gum, revealed rather too much that may be used in some future surprise party to make it possible to publish just yet, but it had the desired effect of turning the current of reminiscence U-boatward. That was what I wanted, for, now that men from several other destroyers had come aboard and sauntered aft to join
the party, the opportunity for finding out at firsthand just what the American sailors thought of the anti-submarine game at the end of a year and a half of it was too good to be missed.
There was a considerable variety of opinions expressed in that last hour of the second dog-watch on the intricate inside stuff of the anti-U-boat game, just as there had been about baseball, but there was one point on which they were practically agreed: that Fritz, especially during the last six months, was not giving them a proper run for their money. This is the way one of them, a bronzed seaman gunner, with the long gorilla-like arms of a Sam Langford, and gnarled knots of protuberant muscles at the angles of his jaws, epitomized it: “We sees Fritzie, or we don’t. Mostly we don’t, for he ducks under when he pipes our smoke. If he’s stalkin’ a convoy there’s jest a chance of him givin’ us time for a rangin’ shot at him on the surface. Then we waltzes over to his grease and scatters a bunch of ‘cans’ round his restin’-place. An’ if the luck’s with us, we gets him; an’ if the luck’s with him, we don’t. If we crack open his shell, down he goes; if we jest start him leakin’, up he comes. Only dif’rence is that, in one case, it’s all hands down, and in t’other, all hands up—‘Kamerad!’ In both cases, no fight, no run for our money. Now when we first come over, an’ ’fore we’d put the fear o’ God into Fritzie’s heart, he wasn’t above takin’ a chance at a come-back now an’
again. Then there was occas’nal moments of ple’surabl’ excitement, like the time when”—and he went on to tell of how an enterprising U-boat commander slipped a slug into the Courser abreast her after superstructure, and “beat it” off before that stricken destroyer had a chance to retaliate. Only the fact that, by a miracle, the torpedo failed to detonate her depth-charges saved the Courser from destruction, and even as it was, rare seamanship had been required to take her back to port. And he also told of the unlucky John Hawkins, which a U-boat had actually put down, and the grim situation which confronted the sailors when they found themselves sinking in a ship which carried a number of depth-charges set on the “ready.” But all that, he said, with the air of an old man speaking of his departed youth, was before they had begun to learn Fritzie’s little ways, and before Fritz, perhaps as a consequence, had begun to lose his nerve. Now, far from being willing to put up a fight with a destroyer, it was only “once in a blue moon that he’s got the guts to put up a scrap even to save his own hide.”
A slender fair-haired lad, with a quick observant eye which revealed him as a signalman even before one looked at his sleeve, cut in sharply at this juncture.
“Then there must have been a blue moon shedding its light over these waters last month,” he said decisively. “I quite agree with you that
Fritz hasn't got the nerve—or it may be because he’s got too much sense—to take a chance at a destroyer any more. But in the matter of putting up a fight for his life—yes, even for giving a real run for the money—well, all I can say is that if you’d been out on the Sherill about three weeks ago, you wouldn’t be making that complaint about one particular Fritz at least. If going eighteen hours, with two or three destroyers and a sloop or two doing everything they know how to crack in his shell all the time, without chucking his hand in, and very likely getting clear in the end—if that isn’t putting up a fight for life and giving a run for the money, I don’t know what is.”
I had heard this astonishing “battle of wakes and wits,” as someone had christened it, referred to on several occasions, but had never had the chance to hear any of the details from one who had had anything like the opportunities always open to a signalman to follow what is going on. “Most of the bunch have heard all they want to hear of it already,” the lad replied with a laugh when I asked him to tell me the story; “and, besides, a more or less long-winded yarn of the kind I suppose you want would tire ’em to tears anyway. If you really want to hear something of it, come over to the Sherill (that’s her stern there, just beyond the Flossie) any time after eight bells. I go on watch then, but it’s a ‘stand easy’ in port, and there’ll be time for all the yarning you want.”
I closed with that offer at once, and eight bells had not long gone before I had picked my precarious way over to the Sherill, and climbed the ladders to her snug little bridge. My man was there already, whiling away the time by rewriting an old college football song (he had been in his freshman year at Michigan when America came into the war) to fit destroyer work in the North Atlantic. I found him stuck at the end of the second line of the first verse, because the only rhymes he could think of for flotilla were Manila and camarilla, neither of which seemed sufficiently opposite to be of use, and he was rather glad of an excuse for putting the job by to await later inspiration.