The Corsair in the war zone

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

THE ANTILLES CROWDED WITH TROOPS ON HER LAST VOYAGE TO FRANCE

THE ALCEDO PICKS UP THE ANTILLES SURVIVORS

It is not easy to quench a sailor’s sense of humor even in the presence of death and disaster, and Ensign Schanze wrote, in a letter to his mother:

The commander of a supply ship bound to New York promised me that he would look Dad up if he could possibly do so, and tell you how I was getting on. His ship was in our party on the morning the Antilles was torpedoed, and maybe he got sore at us for letting a submarine scare the wits out of him. Our yacht had to stop and fish a lot of very wet citizens out of the ocean, and the last view I had of his ship was in a great cloud of smoke, and he was crowding on full speed to make his get-away. He was going like a scared rabbit. He never even waved good-bye.

Another gentleman who promised to call on Dad was a naval officer in charge of the gun crew of the Antilles. I yanked him out of the ocean and helped make him at home on the Corsair during the time between the sinking of the ship and the return to our base.

The fifty survivors saved by the Corsair found a warm-hearted welcome. Nothing was too good for them. They were promptly thawed out in the cabins and engine-room and tucked into bunks, while the crew, as a committee of the whole, ransacked their bags and boxes for spare clothing. They were ready and eager to give the shirts off their backs, and some of them actually did so. Every man who needed it was comfortably rigged in the togs of Uncle Sam’s Navy and told to go ashore with the clothes. You may be sure that such treatment warmed the cockles of the hearts of these forlorn derelicts from the Antilles and that they cheered the Corsair before they left her.

The yacht’s officers made room in their own quarters for the officers picked up from the Antilles. These included Brigadier-General W. S. McNair, of the United States Army; Lieutenant Commander Ghent, Lieutenant J. D. Smith, and Lieutenant R. D. Tisdale, of the Navy; Chief Officer A. G. Clancy, Third Officer R. M. Christensen, Assistant Engineer L. L. Rue, and Purser W. C. Gilbert. They were most cordial in their expressions of appreciation of the kindness and good-fellowship which they had found in the yacht during the voyage back to Brest.

A dramatic bit of gossip went the rounds of the Corsair after she reached port. A steward of the Antilles had been among those rescued and he was heartily disliked aboard the yacht, the one exception in the shipwrecked company. He was a Spaniard, by name and complexion, and he displayed a curiosity which the Corsair’s crew called “nosey.” He was discovered poking about in all sorts of places. Attempting to take a look at the radio-room, he was tersely told to beat it or have his block knocked off. The Executive Officer chased him away from the after quarters, where he appeared to be interested in the stateroom occupied by General McNair. Thereafter the movements of this gimlet-eyed passenger were vigilantly restricted.

The word came later from Saint-Nazaire that he had been arrested by the French authorities and shot as a notorious spy. The inference was that he had been endeavoring to slip away to the United States in the Antilles when fate returned him to the secret intelligence service which had information against him, and he was trapped by the heels. His last words as he faced the firing squad, so the Corsair story ran, were that the German submarines would get the Finland on her next trip home, just as they had intercepted and sunk the Antilles. This was peculiarly interesting, because after coaling ship and taking on stores, the Corsair was ordered to escort a convoy which was expected to sail from Saint-Nazaire on October 24th. The transports were the Buford, City of Savannah, and the Finland.