The Corsair in the war zone

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:

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.

There was no premonition of terrific weather. For several days the barometer had been almost steady, at 30.50 inches or thereabouts. During the watch from eight o’clock to midnight of this first day, the sky clouded and the breeze blew stronger, hauling from northeast to north with steadily increasing force. The barometer began to drop and was at 30.00 when the watches were changed. There came a lull in the early morning, the 16th, when the rain squalls passed over, and with calm water the convoy steamed at fourteen knots. The Corsair was somewhat short-handed for this trip. Lieutenant Tod, the navigator, had been granted leave of absence to go to the United States and Lieutenant McGuire was acting in his stead. Boatswain Rocco Budani was also absent on leave.

By noon of this second day the wind had risen again, and this time it was boisterously in earnest, with a weight that swiftly tore the sea into foam and tumbled it in confusion. The barometer was still “falling gently,” as noted in the ship’s diary, and hung at 29.30 until the weather was at its worst. The Corsair pluckily clung to her station with the tall transports until 2.30 in the afternoon, although the seas had begun to pile on board of her. The destroyers of this escort group concluded to turn tail to it and run for shelter before the storm increased to hurricane violence, but the five other destroyers with the twelve-knot convoy, the Smith, Reid, Lamson, Flusser, and Preston, stubbornly held on and so were fairly caught in it along with the Corsair.

When it became impossible to smash ahead any longer without suffering serious damage, every effort was made to signal the senior naval officer of the transports, by semaphore and flag hoists, but no response could be made out. The big ships, riding high, were able to snore through the wicked seas at ten or twelve knots, but the yacht and the wallowing destroyers had to slow down and ease up or be swept clean.

Aboard the Corsair it was decided to make for Brest as a refuge, but this course brought the sea too much abeam, as was discovered after three hours of reeling progress which slowed to ten knots. When the afternoon darkened into dusk, the shouting gale had so greatly risen in fury that it menaced destruction. The destroyers had vanished in the mist and murk, endeavoring to save themselves and fairly rolling their funnels under. The Bay of Biscay earned an evil reputation long, long ago, but very seldom does it brew such wild weather as this great blow of December, 1917. French pilots and fishermen could recall no storm to match it in twenty years.

It was the supreme test for the Corsair, a yacht which was, after all, handicapped for such a struggle. Officers and men prepared her to face it as best they could, but she could not be “battened down” like the rugged ship that is built to tramp the world. The deck-houses, contrived for comfort and convenience, presented an expanse of large windows and mahogany walls and were exposed to the battering of the seas. There was no passageway below to connect the fore and after parts of the yacht. As a war-vessel, she was already stripped of all extra fittings, and all that could be done was to make everything secure and meet it in the spirit of that famous old chantey of the Western Ocean:

The medium-sized destroyers, like the Reid and Preston, which also weathered this hurricane, had a narrow beam and a shallow draft that made them roll terrifically, but, on the other hand, they could be sealed up like bottles, and they dived through it with no great risk of foundering even when swept from end to end. With less than half the tonnage of the Corsair they had ten thousand horse-power to whirl their triple screws. The decks might be washed clean of gear, but there were no houses to be knocked to pieces. The popular fancy that the destroyer is a fragile craft was disproved in the war zone. There were no more seaworthy, tenacious ships afloat.

Concerning what happened during this black night when the Corsair seemed to be washing to pieces and her holds were flooding, there were various versions and opinions. Most of the youthful landsmen, convinced that the yacht was going to the bottom, were frightened out of a year’s growth and not in the least ashamed to admit it. If they said their prayers, it was to be counted in their favor. The professional seafarers had their own misgivings, but with the stubborn, unreasonable confidence of their kind, they somehow expected to pull her through, believing in the ship as long as she was able to float. This was particularly true of Lieutenant Commander Porter, who had lived with the Corsair for so many years that she was almost a part of himself. He knew her moods, her strength and her weakness, and because she had never failed him he could not have been persuaded that she was unable to survive.

Man has contrived many cunningly ingenious structures, but none of them nobler than a staunch and well-found ship. The Corsair was a shell of thin steel plates, but every line and curve and hollow of them had been influenced by the experiences of centuries of warfare with the sea. A good ship is, in a way, the heritage from unnumbered builders who, patiently, intelligently, wrought in wood by rule of thumb to fashion the frames and timbers and planking of frigates and barks and stately clippers long since vanished. The Corsair was given beauty, to a sailor’s eye, but there was more than this—the indomitable quality of resistance which is like the will to endure.

What may be called the professional language of mariners is curiously restrained and matter-of-fact. It is to be found in the pages of ship’s log-books, which are, as a rule, the dryest possible reading. This hurricane, for instance, in which so many amazing and heart-quaking things happened, in which the Corsair all but foundered, is dismissed in such entries as these, so far as the ship’s record is concerned:

The war diary compiled by Commander Kittinger for the Navy Department is somewhat more explicit, but displays no signs of emotion. One begins to catch glimpses of the situation, however, and even to conclude that this intrepid naval officer would have felt much safer ashore. He also commits himself to the statement that the wind blew with hurricane force. A sailor will seldom go as far as this. When he does, you may be sure that old Boreas is giving the ship about everything he has in stock. What the agitated land-lubber calls a storm, and refers to it as a narrow escape, the skipper jots down as “a strong breeze”; or if it blows hard enough to snatch the hair from a cat’s back he may stretch a point and log it as a “moderate gale.” There seems to have been no disagreement among the experts that the Corsair poked her nose into a bona-fide hurricane, to be certified as such.

In their own diaries and letters home, the men of the Corsair managed to get more excitement out of the hurricane than one might infer from the tabloid narrative of the skipper. There were unusual features, such as the explosion of the depth charges which washed overboard and “functioned perfectly,” blowing up so close astern that many of the crew supposed the yacht had hit a German mine or the boilers had gone up. Other “ash cans” were adrift on deck, thumping about with the drunken motion of the ship or unreeling the cable which detonated them. In the tumult and commotion of wind and sea, petty officers and seamen groped to find these perilous metal kegs, diving after them as though they were so many footballs and trying to hold them fast.

Dave Tibbott, for example, was discovered with a depth charge jammed against his stomach while he clung to it and the rail. E. L. Houtz won a letter of commendation from the Secretary of the Navy for clambering down into the blackness of the lazarette and hoisting out a depth charge which had plunged into this compartment when the hatch cover was washed off. The cable had unwound and he followed it down, hand over hand, so locating the infernal machine. He floundered about with it, managing to get a footing upon some boxes, and so hung on by the eyelids until comrades could help him and his burden up the ladder. One of the quartermasters wrote his own impressions, somehow finding a dry spot in which to use a pencil:

Throughout the ship men were endeavoring to do their duty and to perform the allotted tasks, just as this quartermaster had struggled to his station on the bridge when he thought that the Corsair had been blown up. When one of the boats was in danger of being whisked away by a breaking sea, young Henry Outwater climbed into it and rove new falls, sticking to it until he had finished the job of working the stiff rope through the blocks. He was under water part of the time, and the fury of the wind was such that “he whipped straight out like a pennant,” as he afterwards told his mates. At any moment he and the boat were likely to go careering off together on the back of a thundering sea. No officer of the Corsair would have ordered him to risk his life in this fashion. He did it because he thought it ought to be done, a detail in the line of duty. The same spirit was shown by Boatswain’s Mate Mulcahy, who noticed that the port anchor needed to be secured. The ship was plunging her bows clean under as he crawled forward and fought the smothering seas while he wrestled with the lashings.

It was bad enough on deck, but worse to be far down below in the engine- and fire-rooms where the black water swashed to and fro and rose higher and higher. The pumps had choked with coal and ashes and it was touch and go before they were finally cleared. In this immensely difficult task, working mostly under water, Carpenter’s Mate Evans bravely helped to free the bilge suctions. Engineers, oilers, water-tenders, and the grimy watches of the furnace gang had dumbly, courageously run the chance of death by a torpedo through voyage after voyage. Now the sea had become an enemy even more ferocious than the U-boat, showing every intention of drowning them where they stood; but these were no quitters and the ship had steam enough to hold her hove to or to send her surging off before it. They were alert and steady for the signals from the bridge and they kept the heart of the ship beating strong and responsive to the need.

The twin screws helped to steer her, now with a thrust to starboard, again with a kick to port, whenever the hurricane would have rolled her helpless. One of the bridge watch, yarning about it in Lisbon, recalled this incident:

“I went below to roost on the steam pipes and thaw out, and you couldn’t call that outfit excited at all. What made a hit with me was a kid of an oiler who stood in the water between the two throttles, with a grip on each of ’em while he nursed the engines along. He had to help steer the ship as he got the word, opening up a little on one, shutting off on the other. Getting drowned was the least of his worries. All he had on his mind was coaxing the ship as she needed it, and the water was splashing around his legs, at that.”

“It reminds me,” chipped in another of this reminiscent group. “In the morning of the big blow, a guy of my division appeared on deck all dressed up in his liberty blues. The bo’s’n’s mate asked him what he meant by turning out all dolled up like that. ‘Why, Jack,’ answered this cheerful gob, ‘I have a date with a mermaid in Davy Jones’s locker.’”

“Like a couple of huskies of the black gang,” said some one else. “They were in their bunks snoring away like a pair of whistling buoys, dead to the world, although the fo’castle was flooded and the water was sloshing under ’em. The hurricane had worked itself up and was going strong, but they were off watch and the important business was to pound their ears. The first depth charge exploded and shook the ship up, and all hands were beating it for the deck, leaving their clothes behind. These two birds rolled over and sat up and yawned. ‘Say, bo, do you suppose we’re torpedoed?’ observes one, sort of casual-like. ‘It sounds and feels like that same little thing,’ replies the other. ‘I guess we might as well dress and see what it looks like.’ They were calm and deliberate, just like that, waiting to put on their shoes and pea-jackets and oilskins, and sort of strolling topside. My theory is that they had dreamed of being torpedoed and talked about it until the real alarm had no pep to it at all.”

“Do you fellows remember this? Somebody found ‘Tex’ on his knees, just after the whole wet ocean spilled into the after hatch. He was not a prayerful man, as a rule, so the spectator stood by to listen to ‘Tex’ at his supplications. He wasn’t praying for his own life, but for the safety of Shelton Farr who had tried hard to make ‘Tex’ follow the course of a virtuous sailor. ‘Oh, Lord, don’t bother about me, but save Fair,’ was the petition. ‘He is entirely too good to die.’”

“I said my prayers earnest and often,” confessed a stalwart gunner’s mate. “On the whole, the crowd behaved pretty darn well. I happened to see two or three boys sort of sticking to each other for comfort, and there were tears in their eyes and maybe one did blubber a little, but they were mere kindergarten infants, sixteen or seventeen years old, and it was a rough deal to hand ’em. A quartermaster came off watch from the bridge and one of these babies stopped him to ask what the skipper and Captain Porter thought about it. ‘They say the ship is going to pull through,’ the quartermaster tells these children. That was all they wanted to hear. They bucked right up and began to grin.”

To have the deck-houses smashing about their ears was enough to make the battered crew unhappy, but the most serious accident was the loss of the heavy round hatch plate which covered the entrance to the store-room or lazarette. Into this opening the sea poured in torrents as it broke and roared aboard, and it might have sunk the ship in a short time. You may be able to fancy how they labored to plug this hole with anything that came handy, while searching parties crawled and groped to find the missing hatch plate. Never was a game of hide-and-seek so desperately energetic. Luckily the metal cover had not gone overboard and before the holds filled with water it was found and screwed down to stay.

Much water flowed down the stairways and ladders when deck-houses and bulkheads were rent and twisted, and the living quarters were as wet as a duck farm, but such damage was not vital. When the spacious forward house, used as the officers’ dining-room, was crushed for half its length, among the débris flung this way and that was the panel with the carved couplet:

It was fished out from under the deck planking which had been pried up by the sea, and the seaman who found it eyed the oaken board in a pensive manner as he said:

“Truer words were never spoken. The old boat has sailed every which way in the last two days, including upside down, and you can take it from me that there’s been nothing restful about her, nothing at all.”

Ensign Schanze tried to tell what happened when next he wrote to the folks at home and he succeeded very well, adding details and touches which might otherwise have been overlooked:

Yeoman Connolly was not likely to forget the night of the storm which caused him to say of his own emotions:

Of the destroyers which were caught offshore and rode out the hurricane, the Reid was blown into Oporto, severely knocked about. Her log recorded:

The engine-room log of the Reid makes interesting reading, for the Corsair was in much the same plight:

The Smith destroyer lost both masts and a fireman overboard who was rescued after an hour when the cook swam to him with a line. The paint locker was stove in and the yeoman’s office washed out, which meant the loss of many painful hours of paper work. The vessel spent two weeks in dry-dock in Brest. The Roe and the Monaghan were nearer the coast, and although each lost a mast they scudded for shelter in time to avoid the worst of the blow. The Flusser and the Warrington were badly battered and had to lay off for repairs. The Preston limped into Lisbon, sighting the Corsair just outside the port, and the two ships remained there together until they could be made fit for sea again.

That lively historian of the Reid, Seaman (later Lieutenant) Timothy Brown, added some bits of life in a storm which the crew of the Corsair considered appropriate to their own unhappy hours:

Blown far away from her base port in France, the Corsair was thankful to find shelter in the Spanish harbor of Vigo as a brief respite. She could not be called crippled, as a matter of fact, for in a rough sea she picked up speed to twelve knots and so made a landfall. Her condition was that of a pugilist with a broken nose, blackened eyes, and a few teeth missing, who still “packs a punch” and has no idea of taking the count. The Corsair no longer resembled a trim, taut, and orderly ship of the American Navy, nor would her weary crew have cared to line up for an admiral’s inspection. They wore whatever clothes they could lay hands on, and might have spilled out of the fo’castle of a Cardiff collier. All that really concerned them was the hope of getting dry and eating a few regular meals.

There were obvious reasons why Commander Kittinger preferred to seek some other port than Vigo in which to repair and refit for several weeks. The American Consul warned him that the Spanish authorities were bound by the laws of neutrality to intern the ship until the end of the war, a fact of which he was well aware. On the other hand, the senior Spanish naval officer of the port waived such formalities aside and most courteously assured the Corsair that she would not be meddled with and was at liberty to remain for necessary repairs and to depart when they were completed.