World War II Ocean Escorts and Their Fast North Atlantic Merchant Convoys

   The USS BUNCH, later reconfigured as APD 79 (High Speed Attack Transport), participated in three opposed landings in the Western Pacific, and put ashore an Underwater Demolition Team at Okinawa on D-Day – 2.  There she carried the flat of Capt. Roy D. Williams, USN (later Admiral) and Underwater Demolition Team 21 under Cdr. Edward P. Clayton, USN.  BUNCH was named after Kenneth C. Bunch, Aviation Radioman 1^st Class, shot down at Midway.

            BUNCH was commissioned by Cdr. Alan A. Campbell, USNR, on  21 August 1943.  The writer assumed command on 29 June 1944, having served as Executive Officer since her commissioning.

            April 1943 is often taken as the midpoint of the Battle of the Atlantic, One second to none in its influence upon the war’s outcome.  Thus, April 1943 is a reasonable point at which to assess the situation.  Winston Churchill called it “the end of the beginning,” though victory was scarcely in sight.  While this was indeed the turning point in favor of the brave Allied merchant seamen who kept the merchant ships sailing, as well as that of the embattled Allied naval forces who escorted the merchant ships in the North Atlantic, the contest remained bitterly fought.  This is shown by some appalling numbers.  For April 1943 alone, 44 Allied and neutral merchant ships were lost to German submarines.  These ships had a gross tonnage of 276,790.*  During this same month the Nazis had 111 submarines at sea while 23 new U-boats were completed.  Thus, to the Allies, it was then less than evident that the battle’s midpoint had really been reached!  Only with much later hindsight did it become apparent.

            During the first three months of 1943, the Germans lost 39 U-boats to Allied escorts.  Clearly, no submarine force could withstand this rate of attrition.  Furthermore, it implied an unacceptable rate of loss of irreplaceable experienced submarine skippers, even if the U-boats themselves were being replaced at a rate exceeding losses.  So while the battle was no longer a standoff, it was far from won.

            Already many American merchant seamen had made numerous Atlantic crossings against heavy odds and at great personal risk.  Similarly, the American and British escorts in the convoy screens had fought their overworked ships and near-exhausted navy crews on this North Atlantic run.  Here the winter months provided a test frequently greater than that of enemy submarines.  The merchant seamen were on the receiving end of German torpedoes, and for many of the War’s earlier months the naval crews made do with escort vessels ill suited to the task and where customary maintenance was often neglected.  Indeed, before gaining command of a long awaited Destroyer Escort, this writer had ridden some woefully inadequate escorts scarcely equal to their assigned missions.  Such were the wages of unpreparedness, and heavy indeed were the merchant ship losses of which many might have otherwise been prevented.

            Let us then examine the scenario played out by the Destroyer Escorts and their crews in their effort to prevent the Germans from winning the war through winning the Battle of the Atlantic.

            The increasingly inexperienced U-boat crews grew younger and younger as they were sent forth to do battle in the North Atlantic.  This situation is well described by Lothar-Gűnther Bucheim in his excellent word and picture record of German submarine warfare in World War II entitled U-Boat War, Alfred Knopf, May, 1978.  He made several war cruises in Hitler’s submarines and lived to tell his story.  He writes:

            As the former commanding officer of a Buckley Class Destroyer Escort operating on the North Atlantic run from mid-August, 1943 on, and who made six trips from New York or Boston to various ports in the United Kingdom, I believe that a description of the daily routine at sea and the shipboard environment on the escort DE’s might interest your readers.  Some questions to be answered would include:

How could the new American escorts be described?

What was the typical daily routine aboard these ocean escorts?

Who were the officers and men who rode the escorts through the severe North Atlantic weather?

What weapon systems, sensors, training devices, and tactical procedures were used to fight the German submarines?

           Unavoidably, certain subjective opinions are bound to creep into an effort such as thing.  Perhaps the writer will be forgiven, for all of this took place some 40 years ago.  This is part of the historical record and perhaps an important part, for it has a relevance to any future conventional surface warfare conducted in the North Atlantic.  While the opponent may not be the Germans, the game will be quite similar except that today the enemy submarines are much faster and quieter when submerged, and can operate to greatly increased depths.  Many of them are nuclear powered.

            To this writer, one of the most extraordinary aspects of the new Destroyer Escorts was the sheer magnitude of the program itself.  Few people then ornow fully grasped the size of tremendous economic and manpower resource that were, of necessity, dedicated to combat a relatively small number of enemy submarines.  These German submarines were of mature design and were intended for mass production without allow for future innovations.  World War I, towards its end, had given a strong indication of the future potential of submarine warfare.  This lesson was not lost on the U.S. Navy, although both the Americans and the British were caught relatively unprepared at the start of WW II.  Fortunately for the Allies, the German submarine was slow to really get under way in terms of operational boats.

            The Destroyer Escorts became a reality, starting from scratch, within a span of about two years.  Their final design was completed in July, 1941 and the first hsips delivered in the spring of 1943.  They met an urgent need for an ASW (anti submarine warfare) warship that could prevent the Germans from winning the war through control of the North Atlantic convoy routes.  Along with the need for a platform to carry the best electronic sensors and ASW weapons of the day, there was the fundamental need for sea-keeping ability and reasonable livability under winter, North Atlantic, conditions.  Their earlier British, Free French, and Polish counterparts had proven somewhat short on both counts, with the result that their tactical capabilities were impaired, and their people had a pretty miserable time of it while at sea.

            For example, a Free French ship, frequently mentioned in WW II historical articles, and which played a key role in certain early convoy vs. submarine actions, really wasn’t much of a ship.  Formerly a British ship, she had the following characteristics:

            LOBELIA was, of course, a corvette.  Marginal sea-keeping ability, low speed, poor fueling-at-sea capability, and precious few amenities for officers and men were her hallmarks.  Certain of these ships had extraordinarily skillful C.O.’s who could think like a U-boat skipper and they invariably gave a submarine a bad time of it.  However, this ship of modest speed was of little use in protecting fast convoys.  The result was that the British often had to assign some of their limited numbers of destroyers and frigates to the fast convoy screens.  These powerful ships were badly need elsewhere and their characteristics were less than ideal for convoy work.  They could better provide protection from enemy land-based aircraft and surface raiders, really secondary requirements for North Atlantic convoy work.

            The noteworthy fact here is that the first DE’s did not become fully operational until July-August 1943:  By this time the Battle of the Atlantic had essentially been won by the Allies.  They just didn’t know it.

            However, the arrival of the DE’s was timely for there were some important submarine innovations which threatened to become operational soon.  Indeed, one of these, the snorkel, was deployed in significant numbers, but proved to be of limited utility against good radar.  More important were potentially higher submerged submarine speeds, ability to go to greater depths and the general use of acoustic torpedoes by the U-boats.  Fortunately, these last two capabilities were not realized in time to greatly affect the performance of the ocean escorts.  The European war came to an end just in time.

            While the American escort groups usually included a small number of Gleaves-Livermore Class full powered destroyers with five inch guns and a speed of over 35 knots, they were predominantly made up of about eight of the newly commissioned Destroyer Escorts which first appeared in the summer of 1943.  Their characteristics are given below, and this account is oriented toward these new ships manned by inexperienced officers and very green crews.  While these DE’s rated as “major warships,” they lacked the speed and armament of the U.S. Fleet destroyers carrying 5" guns.  Indeed, their 3"/50 cal. dual purpose guns were not to be compared with the auto-loading, radar-controlled 3" guns of today.  In short, their ASW role dominated the DE’s basic design and they could not really protect themselves, leave alone another ship, from enemy aircraft attacks.  A critique of their abilities is beyond the scope of this article, as here only the ASW mission is truly relevant.

            As for the convoy itself, this might consist of 45 to 50 vessels with a front four to six miles wide and containing a variety of high value ships bound for the UK.  The most valuable ships were, of course, the troop transports, usually converted from fast luxury liners.  There were also fast tankers carrying aviation gasoline and with “cocooned” fighter aircraft on their weather decks for delivery to England, and fast merchant ships carrying all manner of priority wartime supplies.  Although these ships in the convoy had a 16 knot, or better, capability, the convoy’s actual steaming speed seldom exceeded 12 to 14 knots.  Weather more often set the formation’s speed and also it was the closeness of these large ships to each other and the frequent need to make emergency turns on short notice, as well as the use of zig-zag patterns, that limited their speed.  However, since the escorts in the screen had to actively patrol their assigned sectors in order to preserve the integrity of their sound search pattern, they usually had to steam at 15 knots or better.  In heavy weather this speed could put the escort and its people through considerable punishment.  It invariably resulted in plenty of green water on deck.  A typical eastbound trip might last 9 or 10 days.

            At the end of an eastbound trip the main convoy would make its landfall on the rocky island of Inishtrahull in the Northern Approaches.  It would then run down off Orsay Island and the Mull of Oa off Islay where the formation would be broken down into sub-groups according to their individual final destinations.  These might be Swansea, Loch Ewe, the Mersey, the Clyde, Plymouth, Belfast Lough or some other United Kingdom port.  Upon arrival off Rathlin Island off the north coast of Ireland, the weary escorts were relieved and ordered to proceed to some nearby port where the wind no longer blew and the peaceful calm of a well sheltered harbor was to be found at last.  So Rathlin Island became a most welcome sight at the voyage’s end.  It is a forbidding limestone and basalt mass with cliffs 450' high and with a rather grim 12^th century castle visible on its southern shore.  History says that Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland, went into hiding here in 1307 to escape Edward I.

            Upon arrival of the escorts at Gourock or Greenock in the Clyde or at Londonderry in Northern Ireland, about a four day layover was customary.  These days were used for catching up on sleep, ship’s preventative maintenance, officer training on the Attack Teacher ashore, and last but not least, sightseeing.  Our hosts were always hospitable and often supplied buses and guides to take the ship’s company on memorable tours of their beautiful country.  As gasoline was very short, this was a true act of hospitality.  At Londonderry the Destroyer Escorts nested in groups of four ships at the American base on the River Foyle, North Ireland.  Looking up the river, they could see the ancient walled city of Londonderry.  If the layover period was spent in the Clyde, the escorts lay out in the roadstead, at best a somewhat exposed anchorage.  On occasion, in the Clyde, one of the “Queens” would be lying close by, having just off-loaded her troops and now refueling for a return trip to the USA or Australia.

            On one gray December day, HMS DUKE OF YORK lay anchored close by.  She bore the marks of hits by heavy caliber gunfire, and only several weeks later did we learn that a few days before, she had sunk the Battle Cruiser SCHARNHORST in what was doubtless one of the most spectacular night actions of the entire war.  It was fought in force 10 gale winds and mountainous arctic seas.  This was the Royal Navy at its very best!  the 44,000 ton, 29¼ knot DUKE OF YORK and her accompanying cruiser HSM JAMAICA and four destroyers, HMS SAUMAREX, HMS SAVAGE, HMS SCORPION, and HSM STORD sent the 40,000 ton, 31½ knot SCHARHORST to the bottom.  The German Battle Cruiser’s group contained five large destroyers of 3600 tons, capable of 38½ knots.  Throughout the action, the flat on SCHARNHORST communicated directly with Hitler.

            Thus the people on BUNCH, though much gratified, were somewhat surprised when passing by DUKE OF YORK, there came a bugle call signaling “attention to starboard” as our salt-streaked and rust-flecked DE slipped down the Clyde.  BUNCH responded smartly, though sadly, we lacked the required Royal Marine bugler to reply in kind.

            Thus some sort of routine of eastbound and westbound trips became established for the ocean escorts.  The winter months were the ones remembered and then the convoy’s speed often dropped to 10 knots or less, slowing as necessary in the frequent winter gales.  This was latitude 56 north or higher and it could blow in winter although really cold weather was only occasionally a problem.  Of course, it made a world of difference whether you were bound east or west.  In the former case the westerly gales, which follow each other in endless succession during a North Atlantic winter, frequently had their own speed of advance which closely approximated that of your convoy.  Thus a storm picked up off New York, Boston or Halifax would often remain with the convoy until it made its landfall on Scotland or Ireland.  These storms built up heavy seas resulting from a 2,000 miles “fetch” and made it difficult for the merchant ships to maintain their assigned stations.  The much smaller escorts were hard to steer and suffered discomfort while patrolling station with these seas under their quarter.  Such conditions implied reduced effectiveness for escort sonars and their ability to detect and to carry out attacks on suspected submarine contacts.

            In the case of the westward bound convoys, there was the endless slamming of the merchantmen into the head seas, often at painfully low speeds.  These empty ships were steaming light, and rolled and pitched in extraordinary fashion.  Sometimes the formation’s speed would fall to 4 knots, virtually hove to.  Thus these valuable, though empty, ships returning to the U.S.A., became prime targets for U-boat torpedoes.  Where and when possible, air cover was supplied to all convoys by land-based Very Long Range Liberator aircraft and Flying Fortresses.  Both often flew at the outer limits of their range and thus could often only remain with the convoy for two hours or even less before having to return to base to refuel.  Communications between aircraft and the convoy were often very difficult because of low ceilings and rolling escorts, so that exchanges by flashing light were nearly impossible.  Without communications, the effectiveness of the patrolling aircraft was greatly reduced.  (Voice communications were never permitted except in the case of an emergency such as a visual submarine contact and the need for an evasive course change.)  Finally, there was a period of three to four days during the voyage where no air cover could be furnished because of distances from air bases.  As might be expected, this was the zone of greatest submarine activity.  Of course, these Allied aircraft sunk their full share of German submarines besides fulfilling their surveillance mission.  later in the war Escort Carriers became available on these runs and thus air cover was available throughout the voyage.  However, the carriers were subject to their worst enemy, the weather.

            Perhaps the “feel” of a typical day at sea aboard an escort may be best captured by extracting a day’s write-up from the Captain’s Night Order Book as written up each day at sea and constituting orders to his watch officers on the bridge.  They customarily initial the page before going on watch as Officer of the Deck Under Way.

Perhaps a few words should be given to the fueling at sea evolution as mentioned in the above extracts from the C.O.’s Night Order Book.

            U.S. Navy ships customarily go alongside the oiler to fuel, unlike British ships which fueled astern of the oiler.  the U.S. ships fueled through two heavy hoses, one forward, one aft.  The “black oil” came across heated to about 150 deg. F and at 100 psi pressure.  Thus a DE could take about 95,000 gallons of fuel in 50 minutes, once hooked up.  However, coming alongside the oiler and getting the hoses across in rough weather could be a somewhat nerve-wracking job for the escort skipper who conned his ship into position alongside the oiler.  Both ships had to be steaming at exactly the same speed and the escort had to maintain a precise position relative to the oiler.  It was necessary to bring the two hsips in close proximity to first get heaving lines across and then with heavy lines to haul the 6" diameter fuel hoses over to the escort, and commence pumping fuel.  This task was usually carried out at 9 to 10 knots off to the side of the main formation and with an escort fueling from each side of the oiler.  Astern waited another escort, ready to move into the fueling position as soon as one was clear.  Of course, all this had to be carried out with alacrity, as the escorts being fueled left unwanted gaps in the anti-submarine screen.  It was customary to fuel each escort twice on each passage, so that their bunkers  remained at least 40% full in case of emergency or extended bad weather made fueling impossible.

Below is tabulated a brief description of the American DE commanded by the writer.  A typical product of American production genius, BUNCH was built in an incredibly short time at Bay City, Michigan.  To facilitate work by newly trained welders, the hull was constructed in the inverted position and then rolled over by giant fixtures.  Topside and bridge structures, prefabricated elsewhere, were later welded to the hull prior to launching.  The completed ship was towed down the Mississippi River for commissioning and outfitting at New Orleans.  This took about four weeks, after which the ship reported to the Atlantic Fleet for training and shakedown at Bermuda, a rigorous and demanding period of long days and very high standards under Admiral Holloway.  When the Admiral decided your were “ready for sea,” after about three weeks at Bermuda, the next stop was New York and joining up with the first convoy run to Londonderry, North Ireland.

SHIP’S CHARACTERISTICS

USS BUNCH, DE 694

            Forty-six of these ships were leased by the British whose submarine warfare experience, of necessity, greatly exceeded that of most American skippers.  The British, especially their ace submarine hunter Capt. Donald Macintyre, RN, gave the new American DE’s good marks except for their poorly suited deck guns and their rapid motions in a seaway.  He had many confirmed submarine sinkings to his credit and the fate of a U-boat, when taken under attack by him, was virtually sealed.  Of the many books written on WW II anti-submarine operations, his U-Boat Killer, Naval Institute Press, 1976, is probably the best available personal account of these submarine vs. ocean escort battles from the standpoint of the escort C.O.  At the end of his book, Capt. Macintyre says:

            Who were the officers and men who manned the American DE’s?  How was it possible to train them in a very short time to safely and successfully operate the sensors, guns, propulsion machinery and navigational equipment of such a complex system as a modern warship?  A ship destined to operate in some of the worst ocean weather to be found anywhere, a ship quite untested like its crew, and a ship capable of operating for long periods at sea with a minimum of time in the navy yard; these were the requirements to be met.  These carefully designed ships were only as good as the officer and men who manned them.

            As always, in the history of warfare, extreme youth characterized the men and, to a lesser degree, the officers.  On this ship, except for the senior petty officers, the average age of the enlisted personnel was under 21.  The C.O. and the Executive Officer, both under 30, were the only officers aboard with prior escort sea-going experience.  For the first two Atlantic crossings these two officers stood “watch and watch” on the bridge at sea as there were no others qualified to stand “Officer of the Deck Underway” watches.  These officers got very little sleep.  They were former C.O.’s of 133' O.A. wooden minesweepers designed only for coastal work.  Each officer had about 12 months’ previous experience in a C.O.’s billot:  Some of this was good experience indeed, as it had often taken these small sweepers on long escort runs far from the continental U.S.A.  Both officers were Naval ROTC graduates from a large East Coast university.  Both had undergone intensive refresher courses in anti-submarine warfare at a specially established training facility at Miami.  There they took courses in the latest requirements in tactics, gunnery, communications, navigation and engineering.  In retrospect, this training was, of necessity, somewhat limited by available time, but the “school experience” provided valuable contact with fellow officers with whom one would work for several years to come.  The officer who ran the school was a man of outstanding ability.  Later, if you had an underperformer as an officer on your ship, he could quickly be removed by a word to the C.O. of this well-known Miami school.

            The writer had a formal background in engineering and earlier had served as Engineering Officer on a motorship for some six months on the Key West to New York convoy run during the first days of the war.  Later, this experience proved valuable during periods of the DE’s navy yard overhauls.  On this ship there were eleven other officers.  Of these, two were “engineering duty only”; one was the ship’s doctor and a fourth was the Supply Officer.  Naval regulations prohibited these officers from standing bridge watches under way.  Thus there remained seven potential under way watch officers.  In due course, most of these became qualified through standing Junior Officer of the Deck watches, and thus the C.O. and the Exec. became non-watchstanders who then got a little more time in their bunks.  Often the most promising watch officer, as certified by his fitness report to the Bureau of Naval Personnel, would be transferred by name to report to “new construction” as Prospective Executive Officer.  You then lost his services, as well as the feeling of confidence you always had when he was on the bridge at sea.

            The enlisted men were not only young, but usually total strangers to the sea.  Only a few Chiefs and 1^st Class petty officers were sent aboard at commissioning.  They formed a trained nucleus from which to build a crew capable of operating and fighting the new ship.  They were the true key personnel who could make or break your ship and upon whom you relied totally.  Many of them came off larger ships and had heavy sea-going experience in wartime.  In retrospect, they were extraordinarily tolerant of some of the obvious mistakes made by the officers, and their loyalty was unquestioned.  They maintained the ship’s readiness, and trained and educated the youthful seamen and firemen put in their charge.  One freshly enlisted foursome on this ship particularly comes to mind.  Starting as Seaman Second Class, from the lowest rung, they all came from an unlikely place in Virginia called Piney River.  Before joining the Navy they had enjoyed precious few advantages.  These four men soon showed that the potential within them was extraordinary and that they had learned much.  They never failed to pull their weight.  Indeed, many months later in the Western Pacific, they demonstrated a willingness to remain in their gunmount, while firing at an incoming Japanese plane, until it appeared nearly time to jump overboard!  They became good seamen, machinists, electricians, radiomen, and shipmates.  When they finally returned to civilian life, they were different men than those who had boarded the ship shortly before her commissioning.

            These limited notes will be ended with a few comments, perhaps a bit subjective, on the training of the ship’s senior officers to enable them to initiate and carry out attacks against enemy U-boats.  After all, this was the ship’s basic mission.

            After initial training at Miami prior to commissioning of the ship, the most effective officer and enlisted ASW training took place between trips to, and from, the United Kingdom, and consisted of two basic kinds.  First was detection, tracking and attacking of “tame” or friendly submarines in the open sea.  These were made available off Newport, R.I., Norfolk, Va. and Portland, Me. in the U.S.A. and off Lough Foyle at the northwest part of North Ireland.  The second type of training consisted of simulated runs against submarines on the so-called Attack Teacher on shore bases.  Here simulated ships’ tracks, along with those of the simulated submarine under attack, were presented on an illuminated display, complete with dynamic traces of the attacking ship’s sonar traces or “pings.”  The sonar signals and sweeps included fairly good simulated doppler returns from the submarine’s hull; also included were such tactical parameters as own ship’s and submarine’s turning circles, depth charge hedgehog patterns and quality of sonar returns under various sea-going conditions.  In short, the skill or lack thereof of the escort’s ASW team could be assessed with some confidence.  This permitted identification and elimination of procedural errors by the ship’s ASW team during an attack on an enemy submarine.

            The use of “tame” submarines for training was quite effective in its realism, while providing environmental factors such as “wind and wave.”  Above all, it exercised the ship’s total operational ASW suite within the shipboard environment and with the ship’s team all participating.  Unfortunately, such exercises usually took place in relatively shoal water and thus the sub’s maneuvers were constrained, with resultant loss of some realism.  Also, the skipper of the “tame” submarine seldom was a very accurate copy of his German counterpart, both in training and in thinking.  Furthermore, the opportunities for this type of realistic training were infrequent, and the individual escorts seldom had the opportunity of making more than a half dozen or so runs during a given training exercise.  During these exercises, keyed transmissions enabled the submarine and the escort to communicate so that the escort’s performance could be evaluated.

            When a ship’s company has been at sea under wartime conditions for some ten days with a convoy, it requires great dedication for an officer to get up to the shore base and practice on the Attack Teacher.  Many simply did not have this dedication, and thus this vital training had to be compulsory, such that each officer demonstrated his level of skill.

            One of the most important tools aboard certain of these WW II escorts was the HF/DF (high frequency radio direction finder) for obtaining precise cross bearings on the transmissions of surfaced enemy submarines reporting to their home base command.  From a tactical standpoint these data were vital.  Yet the watches on this equipment were sometimes stood in a perfunctory fashion as it was an incredibly boring station to man.  Days might pass without a significant signal being received.  And then it was difficult to be certain that a German transmission had indeed been received.  Frequently this transmission lasted only a minute or so and furthermore, considerable skill was required to get an accurate “cut” on the surfaced submarine.  The following page presents plotted positions of enemy U-boats in the North Atlantic on a given day.  These positions were promulgated by a central shore-based facility using HF/DF bearings obtained by specially equipped escorts.  BUNCH was one of these and carried specially trained personnel to operate this equipment.

            These pages tell of the typical days at sea as lived by the people aboard the ocean escorts of the fast convoys and thus they must also mention the monotony.  There was really more of this than anything else.  In winter at these high latitudes the sun was very low on the horizon and only occasionally free of a heavy haze.  Some days it might appear long enough to permit an indifferent noon navigational sight.  Always, the northern ocean had that particular slate-like color in winter which told of very low sea water temperatures.  On a clear night, the tops of the seas, driven by the strong prevailing westerlies, would show flashing white through the watch officer’s night glasses, and the black hulls of the merchantmen in the convoy were barely distinguishable against the dark sea.  Occasionally a ship would straggle from her assigned slot in the convoy formation, and the Screen Commander would detail one of the escorts to steam over to her and herd her back on station.  This could be a very slow process as these large merchantmen did not have the relative power of a warship, and could alter their position only slowly.  It was necessary for the escort to run up close alongside and, with a dimmed and highly directional Aldis Lamp, order the merchant ship to close up or drop back, as required.

            Weather permitting, the ship’s navigator would plot three or more star sights, taken at morning twilight, and work up his best estimate of his ship’s predicted position at 0800 that day.  At this hour each ship in the convoy’s screen would make known to the others its best estimate of its 0800 position through flat hoist.  Thereupon, each escort’s Chief Quartermaster would tabulate and compare the various positions.  If his own ship’s navigator had failed to get an accurate fix there was no concealing this fact, and the error was there for all to see.  So a daily chore was turned into some sort of a game.  Of course, the “true word” was that of the Escort Commander.  He usually rode a light cruiser near the center of the screen.  This was a steadier platform from which to take sights, and his navigator was allowed the privilege of rank through being the last to make his flat hoist from the ship of the Senior Officer.  These were the last days of reliance upon pure celestial navigation, for Loran C. Omega, and other electronic hyperbolic position finding systems had not yet been developed.  Today, satellite navigation limits even these systems to back-up role.  While the DE’s were equipped with RDF, the writer never achieved good results with this limited range system, since the received beam was often distorted through passage over intervening land.  This rendered it unreliable.

            Accurate navigation was most important, as friendly aircraft relied upon it to find and shadow the convoy against surfaced submarines.  Often several convoys were in a given ocean area, frequently on opposite sources.  They relied upon good navigation to remain clear of each other through following their assigned routing.  This was given to them by Commander Eastern Sea Frontier, the American Convoy Control authority up to the “chop point,” approximately at mid-passage, when eastbound.  At this point responsibility for the convoy was assumed by Commander Western Approaches, the British authority.  At times there was the recognized threat of German surface raiders, “heavy ships” slipping down through the Denmark Straight between Iceland and Greenland to attack especially valuable convoys.  If Commander Western Approaches was to assist such a threatened convoy, he had to know its exact position at all times.

            Against this daily routine, the ship’s department heads had a strong incentive to complete as much as possible of their paperwork at sea, so that, upon their return to Boston or New York, they could maximize their time ashore.  Endless work lists and material requisitions were the rule.  The C.O. and the Chief Engineer usually were compelled to settle for minimum times away from their ship, as they were expected to see to the ship’s needs during the all-too-short stay in the Navy yard.  Repairs, alterations, installation of new equipment – all had to be accomplished in a few short days.  The yard workforce worked around the clock, seven days a week, often hauling their welding cables, hoses and steam lines off the ship just an hour or two before the first test of the ship’s main engines preparing for the next trip.  There was always the fearful din of air hammers, and the unpleasant hiss of electric welding.  On the ship in this story, one repair was repeated nearly every winter voyage.  Cracks would appear in the side of the main deckhouse, the result of the hull’s working in heavy seas.  These were repaired by welding doubling plates over the crack, only to have one of them reappear a few feet further along at the end of the next trip.

            This was, in part, the human interest side of submarine and anti-submarine warfare in World War II.  Like all forms of warfare carried to the ultimate end, it was a most dismal business, and whether you were among the hapless crewmen of a torpedoed merchantman thrown into the icy North Atlantic in the middle of the night, or you were the youthful crew member of a German U-boat with her hull about to be crushed by depth charges with no chance of escape, you were surely finished, and faced certain death.

            Perhaps Joseph Conrad said it as well as it could said:

             So the ship at the center of this bit of history has gone to the ship breakers, her hull and its parts gone under the cutting torch at a dreary yard in San Pedro.  Some of her sisters still steam under the flags of Third World countries.  This ship had steamed 140,000 miles, part in the North Atlantic, a greater part in the Western Pacific where she was configured as a High Speed Attack Transport, and carried an Underwater Demolition Team and the Division Flag.  Her newly fitted and heavier guns helped clear more than one beach in three opposed amphibious landings.  BUNCH was also credited with four enemy planes.  She also took 64 men out of the water off a burning destroyer south of Kerama Rhetto near Okinawa.

            Her engine and boilers were tired, her original commissioning crew are now spread far and wide, returned to civilian life ashore where they could now live and survive in the jungle, each according to his individual ability.  Perhaps most remarkable of all, not a single man failed to return home after nearly three years of wartime duty.

            
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USS Bunch contact: David L. Hibbs, Sr.