Shepherds of the Sea by Robert F. Cross

Author:Robert F. Cross [Cross, F. Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612512723
Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Escorting large numbers of ships across the North Atlantic was a dangerous and difficult job for the DEs. Just keeping the larger ships from drifting apart or colliding, particularly at night, kept the escorts very busy. Looking out from the USS Liddle, a convoy of ships is visible as far as the eye can see. The Liddle’s depth-charge racks are in the foreground. Photo taken by Harold S. Deal; courtesy Jeff Deal

After basic training and advanced gunnery instruction, Taylor was sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to await his ship, the USS Weber, returning from convoy duty in England. Taylor boarded his new ship, moored in the navy yard, and was assigned to chip paint while awaiting his first convoy duty. This would be the first time the seventeen-year-old Bronx kid had ever been on the water, and he was in for some wild ride.

Taylor said, “I had the midwatch” on one particularly black night on the North Atlantic crossing from Norfolk, Virginia, to Sicily in late October 1944. “I was up on the 20-mm gun, when all of a sudden this fishing vessel comes across our bow.” Taylor said the five-hundred-ton Portuguese fishing trawler, trying to sell fish to ships in the convoy, crossed from right to left directly in the path of his ship. “We hit him right in the middle. We climbed up over top of him,” Taylor said. The collision ripped a twenty-eight-foot gash in the DE.

Taylor was thrown from the gun tub to the deck below. There was complete mayhem as the ship’s crew rushed to reverse the engines to get the DE off the top of the sinking fishing trawler. The Portuguese fishermen were frantically trying to cut the lines holding the lifeboat so they could escape to safety before their vessel sank. Taylor said he would never forget the eerie sound of the two ships scrapping together: “It was a wailing, screeching sound, as we reversed, buoyancy returned to the fishing boat and she popped up out of the Atlantic with her lights still on.”

The Portuguese sailors piled into the lifeboat and headed for safety on board the DE. They watched as the hatches on their trawler sprung open, releasing their catch of thousands of pounds of fish. With each wave washing over the fishing vessel and the initial crash damage, the hatch covers began to break loose and the contents flowed out into the sea. “When she pulled apart, you could see under the hull, fish and fish and more fish,” Taylor recalled. The fishing vessel disappeared below the ocean’s surface. The Weber took the fishermen to Gibraltar, where the vessel also underwent repairs. Taylor said the only casualty, besides the fish, was a single caged canary on the trawler.

Robert Hoenshel, executive officer on the Coast Guard–manned destroyer escort USS Marchand, was on the bridge during one North Atlantic crossing when the convoy encountered a severe gale. With mountainous waves and torrential rain, visibility was near zero as his ship escorted a convoy to Ireland.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.