C H A P T E R T E N 1 When we reached Freetown, where we would have to wait an indefinite length of time for transportation back to the United States, the majority of the Scapa Flow's survivors was taken ashore, but seven of us were transferred temporarily to a hospital ship in the harbor. Prince, the gunner with the mangled arm, had to have expert attention. Georgie, the saloon messman, was suffering from serious boils; the Egyptian second cook needed treatment for his legs, and the Egyptian fourth engineer claimed he had appendicitis. The chief engineer and the deck cadet had semiserious infections. I had passed the worst stages of my current bout with malaria, but the doctor on the corvette thought I should spend a few days on the hospital ship before going ashore to the survivors' camp in Freetown. The hospital ship was a monumental example of snobbery, a snobbery which took many forms, each contriving to minimize the usefulness of the ship. This hospital ship stayed at anchor indefinitely in the harbor of Freetown; it would not leave the harbor until another hospital ship came to relieve it. At night, though the port and other ships in the harbor were blacked out, the hospital ship was lighted brilliantly, floodlights playing on its prominently displayed red crosses. The Germans were kept informed in scrupulous detail of the activities of this ship, and most of the patients on it undoubtedly were safer than they would have been in hospitals in their home towns. However, it wasn't at all easy to be admitted to the hospital ship: the fact that you might have been desperately wounded in an engagement with the enemy wasn't sufficient reason for admittance if [244 ] your face happened to be black, or brown, or any of the shades of yellow except that which inaccurately is called white. Superficially, the ship was a beautiful expression of modern science, operated by members of three United Nations: Holland, Britain and China. The ship itself, originally had been designed as a luxury passenger liner, and had been under construction in Holland when Hitler invaded that country. The still uncompleted ship was towed to England, where her original design was altered and she was made into an ultramodern hospital ship. Thus, her maiden voyage under her own power was made as a mercy vessel. Her sea officers were Dutch; her crew, Chinese; her medical officers and staff, British. Almost needless to say, there was no fraternity among the members of the three national groups. The Dutch sea officers thought they were the natural superiors of the British medical officers and staff; the British medical officers and staff thought they were the natural superiors of the Dutch sea officers, although here the British unanimity broke down, because naturally the British medical officers thought they were superior to the members of their staff. The British and Dutch alike thought themselves superior to the Chinese coolie paid crew. What the Chinese crew thought of their British and Dutch allies and shipmates I don't know, but probably not much. The hospital ship could accommodate at least half a thousand bed patients, but there were hardly fifty patients aboard during the few days I spent on the ship, which meant that the patients were heavily outnumbered by the men who worked the ship. A mile or so away the shore hospitals were stuffed with wounded and disease-ridden soldiers, sailors and merchant mariners, not to speak of shore civilians; the hospital staffs were dreadfully overworked, unable to administer efficiently to all their charges, and the death rate was very high. It would have been easy to transfer many hundreds of the patients from the shore hospitals to the hospital ship, but this was not done except in the rare cases when a white patient got into one of the shore hospitals first by mistake. Although the crew of the hospital ship was composed of Chinese merchant seamen, it was impossible to bring on board as a patient a Chinese merchant seaman whose legs had been torn off by a torpedo blast, or a Lascar seaman suffering from blackwater fever, or a colored member of His [245] Majesty's Colonial Army, or a colored member of His Majesty's Navy. The survivors of the Scapa Flow who were transferred to the hospital ship were carefully examined by doctors immediately upon arrival. Presumably the doctors were seeking to determine the exact natures of the ailments discommoding us, although it is impossible to be sure: they may have been seeking to assure themselves that our skins were reasonably white under our sunburn, tan, blisters, boils, infections, matted hair, mustaches and beards. The majority of the members of our original group of survivors had contrived to shave and trim up on the corvette, but we who were less well had not been able to do so, and therefore arrived on the hospital ship in approximately the same condition that we had been in when picked out of the water, except that we were less thirsty, and, paradoxically, hungrier. During our first examination on the hospital ship there was a stormy moment when it was found that the corvette's doctor, in the depths of his abysmal ignorance, had seen fit to send to the hospital ship two Egyptians. The fact that one of these Egyptians was a thief, a consistent malingerer, and was even then claiming an attack of appendicitis which was as imaginary as he said it was acute, was of no interest to the examining doctors on the hospital ship. Their grievance against the corvette's doctor--and against both Egyptians--was the color of the Egyptians' skin. Eventually the authorities on the hospital ship decided that it would be more embarrassing to send the two men ashore, now that they were on the ship, than to keep them, so they were allowed to stay. There followed another examination. It was now the doctors' task to determine what rank aboard the Scapa Flow each of us had had, so that we might be distributed properly about the ship. It had apparently become necessary to separate by corridors, wards and even bulkheads men who had managed to live for seventeen days with equal rations of water and food, with equal watches at the tiller, taking equal turns lying in the water in the bilge-bottom of the lifeboat, supporting the weight of one or more other men. The chief engineer and the deck cadet were taken off to an officers' ward; the rest of us were put in a common ward. The authorities found a way to punish the Egyptian fourth [246] engineer for having a brown skin: they forced him, an officer, to stay in the common ward. His own defensive snobbery was as great as their offensive snobbery; his indignation was unbounded, and his squawks surely would have ruptured his appendix had he had appendicitis. A few hours later, he looked vastly relieved as he was trundled from our common wardroom to an operating room, but when he was returned to us a day later he was utterly crestfallen: not only had he been cut open to no good purpose, but he had been returned to lie among common crewmen to recover from his operational and social--cuts. His bed, incidentally, was marked "S.B." which meant "Strictly Bed" to the medical staff but "son of a bitch" to most of the patients in the ward. In four or five days all the hospitalized survivors were sent ashore except two: the gunner with the mangled arm, and the Egyptian fourth engineer. The Egyptian was able to leave the hospital ship before the Scapa Flow's survivors got passage on a ship to the States. But Prince, the gunner, was still on the hospital ship in the harbor when the rest of us left Freetown, though we were happy in knowing that his eventual recovery was assured, and that his mangled arm would be saved. It was the unpleasant task of the Freetown representative of our shipping company to arrange for our board and lodging, and for our passage to the United States. We were on full pay, and would be until we got back to New York. Inasmuch as our contracts provided for salary plus bonus plus subsistence, the shipping company representative would have had to use company money for our subsistence were it not for the generosity of British religious seamen's missions. There were twenty-one of us, not counting the four Navy gunners ashore who went to the United States Navy depot in Freetown, and the two men still on the hospital ship. Actually, the shipping company representative should have issued subsistence money to the twenty-one men, allowing us to make our own arrangements for food and lodging. Instead, he managed to get us admitted to the British survivors' camp which was run by the religious missions, where we were fed and lodged for a month, and [247] clothed, on money supplied the camp by almsgivers in Britain. Thousands of seamen had passed, through the British survivors' camp during three years of war. The camp was situated in a school building which had been commandeered for the duration. Survivors were given tropical clothes for use until they were ready to leave Freetown, and then given European clothes, In all, I got a pair of shoes made in Ceylon, another pair of shoes and a sun hat made in India, shirts, socks and underwear made in Hong Kong, a cap made in Australia, shorts made in Sierra Leone, and a suit made in Manchester. Seamen came into the camp in various stages of health and array, with the accent on poor in both cases. They might be members of practically any race or nationality. Their ships had been torpedoed off the African coast, and they had sailed into the coast in lifeboats or drifted in on rafts; or they had been picked up near the coast by merchant ships or British warships or Sunderland flying boats; or their ships had been destroyed far out in the Atlantic and they had been picked up by ships having Freetown as their next port of call. Most of the seamen who reached Freetown stayed in the British survivors' camp until passage could be arranged for them to, or near, what had been the final ports of destination of their lost ships. The survivors of the Scapa Flow, for instance, would await passage on a ship going to some port. in the United States, preferably New York, even though the survivors were not all Americans, because the last port of destination for the lost Scapa Flow had been New York. Some of the survivors in the camp during our stay there had been out in boats as long as forty days before rescue; others had had it relatively easy, like us, or had had a breeze, having been adrift less than a week. One group of Britishers had been torpedoed almost within sight of Freetown, and had rowed two lifeboats into the port in less than a day. A Britisher who had lost his ship told me that his vessel had only just started its journey east across the South Atlantic when a group of survivors was spotted in a lifeboat. The men were Norwegians. They had lost their ship only a couple of days before and were sailing their boat toward Trinidad. The Norwegians had plenty of room in their lifeboat, as it was a very [248] large one and their number was small, and they had had time before the sinking to stock their boat with good amounts of water and food. They even had a chronometer and sextant for navigation. The Britisher said that the Norwegians refused to be picked up. They said they'd just come from Africa and didn't fancy being picked up and taken back there inasmuch as they were so close to Trinidad. They would appreciate some cigarettes and rum, however, which were given them. They then set off in their lifeboat to go the rest of the way to Trinidad. Lucky for them. Had they got on the British ship they'd only have been torpedoed again. There were four or five different grgups of survivors in the camp at Freetown whose ships had been torpedoed, singly, over a period of several weeks, by the same U-boat. After each torpedoing, the German submarine commander had brought his U-boat up to the group of survivors, and, after the usual questioning, as the submarine sped away he had waved his hand and called, in English: "Remember me to Winston Churchilll" , One group of American survivors had been out for about forty days. They had had a dreadful time before they were rescued by a fast Norwegian freighter. They had even had an unusually hard time during the sinking of their ship. They had been headed toward the States, after a ten-month trip to India, when their ship was attacked by a U-boat. Their ship had left the States soon after we got into the war, and had not been armed. The U-boat commander, noting the absence of a deck gun, surfaced his sub in order to get a cheap sinking By shellfire. A number, of the American seamen were killed in the shell sinking of their ship, but the rest got off into a lifeboat, which was not molested by the submarine. The Americans were adrift for nearly six weeks before they saw their rescue ship. They said the fast Norwegian freighter which eventually came along looked like a cruiser when they first saw her, because of her size and speed. The freighter was one of the beautiful jobs sent to sea by the Norwegians just before Hitler's invasion of their country. She was about ten thousand gross tons, and her two Diesel motors allowed her to cruise at seventeen knots, and to make twenty-two knots at full speed. The survivors said the Norwegian put on a burst of speed as she approached, and raced [ 249 ] right past the lifeboat at a distance of only a few hundred yards. The men in the boat thought for a few terrible moments that, after six weeks in their lifeboat, they were being cruelly and deliberately passed up. But the captain of the Norwegian freighter simply was taking as few chances as possible on being torpedoed while picking up the survivors. He made a wide, complete circle at full speed around the survivors' lifeboat; he wanted to assure himself as well as he could that no U-boat was around to torpedo his freighter while he was heaving to and bereft of the great speed which was his ship's chief defense against U-boats. Then he picked up the survivors. In picking up the drifting men, the Norwegian captain paused as briefly as possible. Fall ropes having been made ready from a set of empty davits, the survivors' lifeboat was hoisted out of the water with the men still in it, and the freighter set off at full speed before the. survivors and their boat had even been hoisted up as far as the main deck. The most dramatic survivor story heard while we were at the camp in Freetown concerned the aftermath of the torpedo sinking of a transport. There had been a heavy loss of life in the actual sinking, for the ship had been packed with people and went down rapidly. But even so there were hundreds of survivors struggling in the water or aboard the few lifeboats which had been launched. The torpedoing had taken place about dusk. The submarine surfaced for a look around. The German commander decided to do what he could for the survivors. Tow ropes were attached to the lifeboats, and all the survivors who could not be accommodated in the boats were allowed to come on the deck of the submarine. He proposed to tow the boats to the African coast and let them go free there, and also to land the survivors from the deck of his sub. The U-boat towed the lifeboats all night, and by morning was nearing the coast. Soon after daylight an American bomber appeared overhead. The crew of the bomber must have thought the scene below an amazing one man submarine on the surface, its deck covered With people, towing several lifeboats full of still more people---for the bomber did nothing but fly in aimless spirals over the scene for a few minutes. Then the U-boat commander, using a Morse lamp, sent a message to the bomber to the effect that he had hundreds of survivors in his custody and was taking them to the [250] coast. And would the bomber please go away? The bomber disappeared for a while, and then came back over the submarine. Bombs began to fall near the U-boat. The sub commander got all his crew inside and made a quick dive. The casualties among the hundreds of survivors who had been on the sub's deck and in the lifeboats were very heavy. Many were drowned as the sub dived; others were chewed up by the sub's propellers; others were killed by fragments and concussion from the falling bombs. One of the lifeboats was swamped before its occupants could cast free the tow rope attaching it to the diving submarine. The dilemma which faced the bomber's crew was terrible: if the sub were allowed to get away it might eventually kill many more people than would be killed inadvertently if they attacked the sub, not to mention the loss of the ships which the sub might torpedo in the future; on the other hand, survivors were sure to be killed in the attack and it was no sure thing that the sub would be hit. (As a matter of fact, it wasn't hit.) My own view is that the decision of the bomber crew was wrong, although I do not hold this view too strongly. It seems to me that this particular case, considering the number of survivors involved and the certainty that many of them would be killed in an attack even if the sub got away, would justify a decision to let the sub land its survivors unmolested. But the bomber's crew thought differently, and about half the people I have told of this incident agree with the men in the plane in their solution of this difficult problem in ends and means. During our stay in Freetown, liberated Allied prisoners of war began to come into town from the parts of French Africa which had been under the rule of Vichy. Many of these released prisoners of war were Allied merchant seamen who had been torpedoed off the African coast and who had had the misfortune to make landfall in Vichy territory, where they were put into concentration camps. Some of these men had been prisoners in Vichy Africa for more than a year. In the closing days of 1942, they finally were released, and could now continue to sail against the Axis. [251] One of the merchant seamen who had been a prisoner of Vichy near Dakar was a young American whose acquaintance I made at the survivors' camp, where he was waiting to get passage to the States, like the rest of us. He had quicker luck than the Scapa Flow's survivors: he got passage on an American freighter which would take him home. This young American was an unusually sturdy antifascist and had shipped on a Dutch ship so that he could fight the Axis during the days of 1941. When he found himself in a Vichy-Africa concentration camp, our State Department would do nothing for him. He said that he would occasionally get a message through to the American consul at Dakar, but to no avail. The United States was not at war with Vichy; diplomatic relations existed; but our State Department would not get an American civilian-citizen out of a ú Vichy camp for prisoners of war. This young American made an attempt to escape but was nabbed by his French communist jailers. This was before Hitler's attack on Russia, and the communist jailers could be trusted to guard well prisoners of war who wanted to escape to fight the fascist dictator whom Stalin was supplying with materials. After Hitler's attack upon Russia, the Stalinist jailers were replaced by Darlanists. The young American seaman was put on a diet of wild rice and cassavas as punishment for his attempt to escape. He didn't get free from either the concentration camp or his diet until all the prisoners were released after Vichy's African surrender to the Allies. Although he was still as antifascist as ever when I got acquainted with him in Freetown, his neglect by his government's representatives, added to what he had been able to learn about what was happening in the United States and the other leading Allied countries, had made him as much against the leading Allied governments as against the Axis. He argued, in his debates with me, that antifascism, like charity, should begin at home, and that there was little use fighting Hitler until the fascist appeasers at home had been defeated, and big business and its fascist tools had been prevented permanently from establishing outright fascism in the United States while so many young men were busy fighting fascism abroad. My contention was that the fascist forces abroad had to be defeated first, for [ 252 ] they were still the stronger, and after that attention could be turned to the antidemocratic enemies at home. He said he didn't believe there was enough difference any longer between the leading governments of the Allies and those of the Axis to justify his continuing to risk his life in doing his part to defeat the Axis. Much better, he said, to stay in the States, fighting the enemy at home, which still could be done with less personal risk than was involved in fighting the enemy abroad, although more dangerous to oppose big business and their fascist tools at home than it presently was to oppose the big business and fascist tools of the Axis countries. He wanted to know how we could be fighting a war to preserve democracy against fascism when one considered the present characters of the leading Allied governments. The Roosevelt administration, he said, had given aid and comfort to Japan almost up to the time we were attacked by that country, big business had doubled its yearly profits, after taxes, over 1939, and liberal factions in our government still were in retreat. England, he went on, was led by Churchill, a man who had said that, had he been an Italian, he would have been wholeheartedly with the Italian fascists "from start to finish"; who had made this statement: "I will say a word on the international aspect of fascism. Externally your movement has rendered a service to the whole world"; and who, as recently as December 23, 1940, had said: "That he (Mussolini) is a great man I do not deny." Russia was under the dictatorship of the Stalinists, who, the young American seaman contended, had allowed Hitler to fight two years of war as he pleased, one front at a time, and had helped him in the bargain. China, he went on, was under a one-party rule, led by Chiang Kai-shek, who refused to permit some of his books to be translated into English because they are so anti-democratic, and whose massacre of agrarian radicals rivaled Japanese atrocities. I was not able to persuade this young American seaman that the enemy abroad still was greater than the enemy at home, and that we should go on fighting abroad until we obtained complete defeat of the Axis governments, hoping that meanwhile the enemy at home hadn't grown too ,powerful to be defeated after the foreign phase of this war; that if the foreign phase were [ 253 ] lost the civil phase could hardly be won in a hundred years, but that if the foreign phase were won the civil phase might be won in a decade, After about a month in the survivors' camp in Freetown, the civilian survivors of the Scapa Flow managed to secure passage on a British transport which was going from Freetown to New York. The Navy gunners, except Prince, who was still in the hospital, had gone to the Navy depot in Freetown to be assigned to gun crews on ships which came into Freetown. We were the only passengers on board this big ship, which was going to the States, as one of the stewards said, "for a cargo of frozen meat and soldiers." Of our number, Flathead and the young Puerto Rican A.B. had the severest attacks of torpedo nerves on this westward crossing of the South Atlantic; several times they raced to the boats when a door was slammed particularly loudly, Our journey west across the South Atlantic in the transport was a pleasant one, and uneventful as regards submarines. The ship was an even better place than the survivors' camp had been in which to rest, eat, and try to catch up with what was happening in the States. There was a radio at our disposal on the transport, and the survivors listened to their favorite American ú programs, including frequent news programs. Many of the popular commentators were heard, far out at sea--John Vandercook, Walter Winchell, Raymond Gram Swing. Our radio was switched frequently to the BBC overseas programs for the British slant on things. The men who said they were going to ship out again told each other what they would do between ships in New York. By this time we had recovered full health, and our plans for activities ashore in the States were not quite the same as they had been in our daydreams in the lifeboat. Soft drinks were never mentioned. It took the survivors several hours to get off the ship after we docked in New York. There were more men aboard the ship to investigate us than we numbered. Most of us had lost our papers in the torpedoing, and we had to go through a stiff ques- [ 254 ] tioning before we could assure Customs officials, Immigration officials, FBI men, Navy officers, Coast Guard officers, and Army officers, that we were not enemy agents. A representative from our shipping company came to the ship from the New York office, but his identification of us did not serve to cut short the questioning. Eventually we all were able to get this massed officialdom to admit that we could, after all, set foot once again in the United States. The representative of the shipping company had a few dollars apiece for us; we could call any time in the next few days at the shipping company office to get our money for the trip. The survivors broke up into many small groups when we got on the dock. The coolness among us had not changed appreciably. With few exceptions, the men wanted to get away from each other. We realized we wouldn't all be apt to be in the office of the shipping company at the same time to collect our money, so we knew as we stood on the dock that this probably was the last time we all would be together. We had got our ship to West Africa with its cargo of war products: we had shared a victory; we had had our ship and its cargo of war materials sunk on the return journey to the United States: we had shared a defeat; we had spent seventeen days together in a small open boat before rescue: we had shared a struggle for survival. We didn't even have a drink together at a bar within sight. We split up, waving casual hands at each other. Not over four or five of our number bothered to shake hands. [ 255 ]