“What is it? I’ll bite.”
“When and where is the meal pennant flown?”
CHAPTER VII
SMASHED BY A HURRICANE
On the last day of November the Corsair got under way from Brest to find and escort seven American store-ships which were bringing cargoes to France. A division of Queenstown destroyers had picked them up at fifteen degrees West and was guiding them to the rendezvous. With the Corsair went the Reid and Preston, also three French patrol craft, the Glaive, Claymore, and Marne. As the senior officer, Commander Seiss, in the Glaive, was in charge of the Allied escort group. The voyage was without notable incident, but the difficulty of working together in different languages and with a mixed British and American convoy was indicated by Commander Kittinger in his official comment:
The senior officer of our escort was in a ship lacking efficient radio communication. As it is not to be expected that an eight knot convoy from New York will ever arrive at a rendezvous on a predetermined course at a predetermined time, the Chief of Escort should be in the vessel having the best communication. This is especially necessary during the winter when the daylight periods are short. I do not believe that the ships of our convoy knew their destination. With ships on their first trip, as most of these ships were, the masters of the vessels are not prepared to have another escorting force join them and proceed to give them orders. This is especially true in the case of the British ship Anglo-Saxon, the master of which could not understand why an American patrol vessel should tell him to quit a British convoy. It would facilitate matters if the masters of all vessels, were informed of their destination and the probable time and place of their detachment from the New York convoy.
The Chief of Escort did not require the ships to zigzag nor to assemble in line formation as per doctrine. I do not believe it is advisable for the Chief of Escort to be a French officer acting with large convoys of American and English ships.
After this cruise the Corsair was placed in dry-dock at Brest, where a week was occupied in scraping, painting, and such overhauling as was necessary. The ship was in surprisingly good condition after six months of far more severe and punishing activity than she could have been reasonably expected to perform. Chief Engineer Hutchison and Assistant Engineers Mason and Hawthorn had kept things running down below without a serious mishap or delay, although the yacht’s engines had shoved her through 19,427 miles of sea during this half-year period. The fires had not died under the boilers for a stretch of five months. It seemed no longer quite fair to the Corsair to think of her as a pleasure craft. The words were incongruous. She had proved herself to be a brawny toiler of the sea.
An examination in dry-dock showed that the hull was almost as undamaged as when the yacht had sailed overseas. A few butts of the plates needed calking. A small dent in the keel required new rivets and two blades of the port propeller had been bent by hitting something submerged. The crew very much hoped that the obstruction might have been the submarine which the ship attempted to ram on that moonlit night of October.
On December 13th the Corsair returned to her mooring buoy after this little respite in dry-dock and undertook the sooty job of filling the bunkers. Next day she stood to the southward and found a convoy waiting in Quiberon Bay. There the transports and supply-ships were split into two groups. The escort of the fast convoy, fourteen knots, was in charge of Commander Kittinger and comprised the Corsair with the three destroyers, Warrington, Roe, and Monaghan, which had been added to the flotilla. The slow convoy escort, twelve knots, was under the orders of Lieutenant Commander Slayton in the Reid, who had with him the Flusser, Lamson, Smith, and Preston. The whole destroyer force then available was therefore employed on this cruise, with the Corsair as the only yacht.
The German submarines had been creeping in to lay mines in the channels outside of Quiberon, and the yacht Guinivere and four American mine-sweeping vessels were busy clearing the fairways for the outward-bound convoys. In clear, pleasant weather the two groups of transports gained the open sea without running afoul of any mines and were well on their way by nightfall of December 15th. The sea was smooth, unseasonably so for the time of year. The air had a nipping edge, but the temperature was well above freezing and the deck watches kept warm and dry in the wind-proof clothing which the Navy supplied for this service. The Corsair and Monaghan held positions on the right flank of the transports Madawaska, Occidente, and Lenape, while the two other destroyers trailed or scouted off to the left.