Scanned By Deputy Dawg in tribute to the memory of shipmate
Rear Admiral Daniel Vincent Gallery, U.S.N. (Ret.)

OTHER BOOKS BY ADMIRAL GALLERY

Away Boarders
Cap'n Fatso 
The Pueblo Incident
The Brink
U-505
Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea
Stand By-y-y To Start Engines
Eight Bells (Original title: Eight Bells and All's Well)
Clear the Decks
Now, Hear This!
We Captured a U-Boat

"ADMIRAL DANIEL V. GALLERY HAS HIT THE JACKPOT WITH EIGHT BELLS." (San Juan Diary)

"Readers who enjoyed the author's best-selling NOW, HEAR THIS! shouldn't miss this one." (Atlantic News Telegraph)

"Already well-known for his hilarious stories about the U.S. Navy, Admiral Gallery... now turns to the 'Gallery Story.' And the result is an equally hilarious autobiography, with several good laughs on most pages, interspersed with occasional belly-busters that keep the reader laughing for several pages -- after they recover enough to start reading again.' (Nashville Banner)

"This book has all the essential ingredients for reader enjoyment action, adventure, an uninhibited sense of humor.... " (Glenview Announcements)

"A gusty, salty style... lively and interesting." (Library Journal)

Eight BELLS
(Original title: Eight Bells And All's Well)

Rear Admiral Daniel Vincent Gallery, U.S.N. (Ret.)
July 10, 1901 to January 16, 1977
Buried at: Section 4  Site 61-3
Arlington National Cemetery 

PAPERBACK LIBRARY, Inc.
New York

PAPERBACK LIBRARY EDITION

First Printing: April, 1968

Copyright © 1965 by Daniel V. Gallery

Library of Congress Catalog Card No.65-18021

All Rights Reserved

This Paperback Library Edition is published by arrangement with W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

TO MRS. D.V. G.

Who has ridden out some brisk gales
with me in the thirty-six years that we have
been married

Vera Dunn Gallery
March 17, 1902 to June 07, 2000
Buried at: Section 4  Site 61-3
Arlington National Cemetery 

Paperback Library books are published~by Paperback Library, Inc., Its trademark; consisting of the. words “Paperback Library" accompanied by an open book, is registered in the United States' Patent Office. Paperback library, Inc., 215 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Contents
1.	EIGHT BELLS	7
2.	ANNAPOLIS	19
3.	ENSIGN U.S.N.	28
4.	EUROPEAN DUTY	34
5.	PACIFIC FLEET	39
6.	FLYING SCHOOL	44
7.	NAVAL AVIATOR	54
8.	LONDON	61
9.	ICELAND	67
10.	BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC	76
11.	COMMISSIONING	85
12.	SHAKEDOWN CRUISE	91
13.	FIRST KILL	97
14.	U-515 AND U-68	103
15.	U-505	111
16.	PENTAGON -- HANCOCK	124
17.	BACK TO THE PENTAGON	133
18.	SIXTH FLEET	144
19.	GLENVIEW	150
20.	SAN JUAN	160
            EPILOGUE TO MY RELIEF	174

PREFACE

	Eight bells is the end of the watch After you are relieved, you still have to write up your log before you go below and that's what I'm doing here.
	Whether I will go below or not when I have finished remains to be seen You are entitled to your own opinion
	So this is the record of an active life up to the time of my retirement after forty-four years in the Navy.

CHAPTER ONE

EIGHT BELLS

I have it from sources which I believe to be reliable that I was born at 4 P.M. on July 10, 1901, at 49 McCallister Place, Chicago. My mother and father were both native Chicagoans All of my grandparents were Immigrants from Ireland.

	My arrival brought the population of this country up to just about seventy-five million. The national debt at this time was a billion several hundred million dollars. My share of it as they installed my first diaper and started me on my way through life was $16.60. The United States was then a lusty young giant of a country, not quite recognized yet as a first-class power but rapidly becoming one.

	My people were not rich, nor were they very poor. Their ancestors had come to this country with nothing, and by hard work and thrift had become Independent self-supporting citizens able to raise and educate their families.

	My dad was a lawyer, and we owned our house in an Irish neighborhood about a mile west of the Loop. When my. grandfather built there in 1880 his friends asked him why he moved so far out of town. Our old house still stands, but the neighborhood is now a slum area in the shadow of the Loop.

	Frankly, I remember few details of my birth and early infancy. Most of what I know is hearsay from 'fly mother. She said I walked a couple of months sooner than normal and began talking much sooner than most kids. (In later years many of my naval superiors claimed that I often kept on talking longer than I should have.)

	There was a brother two years older than I who died when I was about three. I don't remember him at all. After me came three more boys and two girls. Two of the boys, Bill and Phil, grew up to be Rear Admirals too. The other, John Ireland, went straight and became a priest. Margaret still lives in Chicago. The youngest sister, Marcia, died when she was seventeen.

	I'm not sure what my earliest recollection is. There are a number of things which I may in fact remember or may only think I do because I heard them told by my parents later On.

		One such episode must have happened when I was between three and four. At times I think I really do remember at least parts of it. At others I think maybe it is all hearsay.

		Anyway, one morning I was out in the backyard keeping out of mischief by building a tower of boxes, tin cars, bricks, and bottles. When I had built it as high as it would go, I took a baseball bat, clouted the bottom of it, and brought the whole thing down with a wonderful crash, sending our dog Dixie into a frenzy and making him bark like crazy. Spurred on by Dixie's excitement I did this three or four times, learning as I went along how to make each new crash bigger and better. I was having a ball.

	This was going on about twenty feet from the kitchen window, where Katy, our cook, was doing breakfast dishes. Finally it got on Katy's nerves. She came storming out the back door, grabbed me by the ear, marched me into the kitchen, and sat me down on a chair. While she finished the dishes she gave me a running lecture about life on this earth and how certain things are all right for little kids but as you grow older you can't do them anymore. One of the things she put the finger on was making loud noises in the backyard of 49 McCallister Place. She claimed I was too big a boy to do things like that any more.

	I sat there for some time thinking it over when Katy had finished her philippic. I felt I was getting a bum deal. I was being deprived of something that was important to me and that wasn't hurting her, much, anyway. But the way Katy put it I was belittling myself and acting like a small boy whereas actually I was a big one..I wasn't fast enough on my feel at that time to rebut her.

	Finally I gave up and simply said, "Katy,...I wish I was young again."

	Of course this observation sent Katy so far into orbit that she busted a couple of dishes and both her bra straps. She rushed upstairs to tell my mother, and Mama told everyone she knew in Chicago, with me present at many of the tellings.

	I'm sure this happened just about as I've told it. But whether you are getting it straight from the horse's wont" or as second-hand hearsay, present deponent knoweth not.

	I remember one afternoon Katy and Nurse hired a hack on theft day off and took me for a ride along the swanky section of Lake shore Drive. They were both dressed up like Mrs. Astor's pet horse, with billowing skirts, big hats, and parasols. I was no slouch either in my new Buster Brown suit.

	As we drove north on Michigan Avenue we all sniffed disdainfully at the common people on the sidewalks. At that time Mrs. Potter Palmer was the arbiter of Chicago society, and as we passed her castle on Michigan Avenue, they had the driver slow the horses to a walk so Mrs. P. F., if she happened to be reeking out her front window, could see some of her peers passing by.

	I'm afraid our coachman was not properly impressed. He knew damned welt that his fares were just one generation removed from Shanty Irish. He kept spitting tobacco juice contemptuously whenever he heard snobbish comments from the back seat of his open hack.

 	Finally Katy ordered him to "stop that spitting." When Katy ordered anyone to do things they obeyed. We finished the ride with no more expectoration, but when we paid him off he spewed out a mouthful.

	Another of my early childhood recollections is a somewhat Rabelaisian episode involving Archbishop John Ireland. My ￡grandfather, William J. Onahan, who lived next door, had been one of the first to receive Notre Dame's Laetare Medal. He had also been made a “Carmerari di Caba y Spada" by Pope Leo XIII, one of the few Americans who have ever been so honored. He and Archbishop Ireland were close friends, and whenever the Archbishop passed through Chicago he would drop in to see Grandpa.

		He was a distinguished looking churchman with courtly manners and a hearty, booming voice, and he spoke in rolling, free-wheeling sentences. He wore a black vest which buttoned clear up to his Roman collar and left just a bit of his Monsignor's purple peeking out around the neck. My eyes popped at the heavy gold watch chain that hung in a bight across his midsection, and at his great ring which, of course, we all knelt to kiss when he came m. You had to be on your very best behavior in his presence.

		At the time of this particular episode I couldn't have been more than four years old. When the Archbishop arrived to call on Grandpa my two little brothers, John and Bill, were presented to him at the door, and after he had pronounced them to be "gr-r-r-and bhoys," were taken back to the nursery. I was allowed the great privilege of remaining for the visit, having been scrubbed till it hurt and dressed up in my Archbishop inspection clothes.

	I remember we sat in Grandpa's library, with the Archbishop in the center, Grandpa on his left and Mama on his right I sat on the sofa, a little apart from the others, my feet dangling a few inches off the floor, with my ears flapping, but naturally taking no part in the conversation. I knew better than to try to do that.

		I perched there with my mouth ajar spellbound, just sopping it all up. I'll never forget it. Then it happened.

		Then came a brief lull in the conversation, and with no warning whatever I suddenly broke wind from the wrong end, audibly and sonorously. I still can't see how such a little guy could have let such a big one. It was a rip snorter.

		Of course Grandpa, Mama, and the Archbishop politely ignored my boo-boo. They were just about to resume the conversation where it had been so rudely interrupted. But small as I was, I knew very well that you have no right to make funny noises from ether end in the presence of an archbishop, especially such a distinguished one as Archbishop Ireland.

		So as Mama was about to say something that would get the conversation rolling again and sweep my faux pas under the rug... I piped up in a clear but squeaky voice and said "Pardon me.”

		Mama wanted to grab me by tile scruff of the neck and give me the bum's rush. (For butting into the conversation, of course.)

		But the Archbishop. God rest his great soul, wouldn't have it. He jet out a billowing laugh and said, 'Let the la-a~ad stay. He's a broth of a bhoy."

		This story I know for sure is based on actual memory because it was never told to visitors, at least not in my presence.

		Looking back now almost sixty years later the Archbishop reminds me very much of Pope John XXIII. He looked a great deal like him and had a face that seemed to have been chiseled rather carelessly from a block of granite. Be was also the same sort of bluff, hearty, outspoken character, and had similar advanced ideas about opening a few windows in the Church and letting some fresh air in.

		His ideas were much too advanced for his time, and often got him into hot water -- and it wasn't holy water either.

		He was one of the greatest churchmen in the early part of this century, ranking right alongside his good friend Cardinal Gibbons. Pope John would have made him a cardinal right off the bat and chuckled over the fuss this would have stirred up in the Sacred College. But in the early 1900's the United States was still regarded as a missionary country in Rome and the Archbishop was too blunt a character for the Curia to stomach.

	My granddad kept a cardinal's red cap on his desk ready to present to Cardinal Ireland when the time came. But it never did.

	When my brother who is now a priest was christened "John Ireland" in honor of the Archbishop, he confidently predicted that John would be the first American pope.

	There is one other episode of my early childhood, which may shed some light on this business of childhood recollections. This is the incident with my Guardian Angel. I knew, of course, as all Catholic kids do, that you have a guardian angel who goes around behind you trying to steer you straight. Up to this time I hadn't met mine, but I knew he was there.

	Whenever any of us kids went downstairs, we always slid down the banisters. You got on up at the third floor, slid down to the second, and flipped off to the right just before you busted your little butt on the newel post. Then you walked about twenty feet to the head of the next staircase and repeated the procedure to get down to the ground floor. If Mama or Papa had ever seen any of us walk downstairs, I'm sure they would have hustled us into bed and called the doctor to see what was wrong.

	This morning I got up a little bit late, and when I started downstairs nobody else was around.

	Just as I was about to throw my leg over the banister and start my let down, my Guardian Angel appeared behind me, his hands under my armpits, lifted me up, and took off!

	He spread his wings, nosed over, and glided down the stairs like a pelican.

	At the bottom of the stairway he did what I now know was a wing over, pulling up in a steep chandelle to the left, and reversed course 180 degrees. Then he soared down the hall in level flight, made another beautiful chandelle, and glided down the next stairway to the ground floor. There he leveled off, made as nice a full stall landing as I've ever seen, and set me down on my feet so gently I wouldn't have cracked a wren's egg.

	Looking back now after thirty-three adventurous years as a naval aviator, I still regard this as the most skillful bit of flying I've ever taken part in.

		There was not a word spoken by either one of us while this was going on. He had his hands full and was too busy, and I was smart enough even then to realize that you don't talk to the pilot when he's doing a job like that one. When he set me down I said nothing because the family was in the dining room next to the ground-floor landing and I didn't want them to think I was talking to myself.

		When I entered the dining room I also kept quiet. What was the use of telling the family about this? They might not even believe it! I could be subjected to ridicule or worse, for making things up. So I clammed up.

		But I still remember this just as vividly as anything that happened yesterday. My memory certainly isn't the result of hearsay, for I never told anyone about it except my wife, when I got a little bit crocked one time. And I never told her about any other stuff like this that happened to me when I was young, because she looked at me so funny that time.

		So there you are. This is a definite recollection of my childhood. You can believe it or not as you like. If you ask me whether I believe it, all I can say is, "I was there when it happened and that's the way I remember it."

		Kids can do funny things with time. Once, when my oldest son, Jimmy, was about seven, I was trying to find out what his earliest recollection was. I led him back year by year to the age of about three and a half, and he remembered things pretty well. Then, just to see what would happen, I asked him about something which he knew had happened a couple of years before he was born.

		He looked at me kind of puzzled and then reversing the flow of time said, "Hunh. By that time I was gone."

		One of the highlights of my early youth was the peddlers' strike which occurred when I was about eight years old. At that time most of the peddlers were "Eyetalians." They had horse-drawn open wagons and drove around the streets hawking their wares in operatic arias of wonderfully broken English.

	The day after the strike started, a peddler came singing down McCallister Place with his wagon full of fruit and vegetables. He was evidently a screwball who had cockeyed ideas about his rights as an American citizen under our system of free enterprise. But that sad state of affairs was soon corrected.

		As he passed our house and neared the next corner, a screaming mob of five hundred wild-eyed Italians came storming out of Lytle Street, surrounded the wagon, hauled the offending peddler off the seat, and beat the hell out of him. They unhitched his horses, clouted them (where you clout horses) and sent them galloping down the street. When last seen they were swinging into Center Avenue neck and neck, heading for Madison Street. The strikers demolished the peddler's wagon, rolled the wheels careening down the street, and flung apples, bananas, oranges, and watermelons all over the place. It was the loveliest riot since the Donnybrook Fair in Ireland.

	I was right in the middle of it, dodging in and out between the legs of the infuriated Dagos, grabbing for apples and oranges and having one hell of a swell time.

	Finally the paddy wagon dashed up with the gong clanging, bringing some official from City Hall. After much excited yelling the mob adjourned to a nickel-show theater over on Taylor Street for a conference with the city father. I tagged along, fully expecting to assist in a lynching.

	The powwow over on Taylor Street was a great anticlimax. There was a lot of yelling, arm waving, and speech making, but nobody did anything.

	Although I didn't realize it at the time, this riot gave me a prophetic preview into the way that labor negotiations would be conducted for the rest of my life. Now, unions don't have to use violence any more. Their constitutional "right" to do so is so firmly recognized by the courts that the mere threat of violence is nearly always enough. Collective extortion has become the American way of settling labor disputes. I got a fine firsthand insight into how it works that morning.

 	My first open rebellion against authority (not quite my last) took place when I was going to kindergarten at Notre Dame School, just around the corner from our house. One day Mama made me put on a pair of white kid gloves to go to school. I protested vigorously because obviously this would make me a sissy in the eyes of the other kids. Mama was adamant and I had to shove off from the house wearing those awful gloves. But I wasn't about to show up in the classroom wearing them, no matter what.

	I marched from our house to the corner, seething against the injustice of it all. There I cast a furtive glance back at the house, thought I was unobserved, and eased over to the curb. I yanked off the gloves and dropped them down the sewer. When came home from school I told Mama what I thought was a convincing lie about how some other kid had swiped them. But she had been watching and knew what had happened.

	That evening when Papa came home he had to haul down my pants and beat my bare little after-end severely.

	This taught me a lesson I've never forgotten. If you have to do something wrong, for cry sake wait till you get around the corner and can't be seen.

	Another time when I was still just a little brat, maybe about six, my mother took me to Detroit to visit my great aunt, who was a nun in the Sacred Heart convent at Grosse Ile. While at the convent something which I did was construed to be out of line. I'm not sure now what it was, but anyway I was banished to the visitors' parlor, to sit for a whole hour and meditate on my iniquity.

	As I say, I don't remember the details, but I still feel it was a bum rap. I hadn't done anything near as bad as what I was accused of doing.

	I remember sitting there in the little parlor for about fifteen minutes getting madder and madder by the minute. Finally the injustice of it all was just too much and I blew my stack. I hauled down all the pictures from the wail, busted the glass in them, and heaved them into the fireplace. I tipped over all the tables and chairs, rolled the rug up into a heap, and sat back to see what would happen next.

	Since Pop wasn't there, and since you can't haul a young man's pants down in a convent, the pay-off was not too bad. I was only sent to bed without my supper.

	About fifty years or so later, when I was a rear admiral and Commander Naval Air Reserve Training, I had to inspect our air station at Grosse Ile one Saturday night. Next morning I went to mass at the Sacred Heart convent's chapel. Afterward I called on the Mother Superior, wearing my blue uniform with lots of gold braid and a flock of campaign ribbons.

	Sister Onahan, my great aunt, was of course long dead. Not even the oldest nun in the convent could remember the atom bomb that had burst in their visitors' room about thirty-eight years before the one at Hiroshima. But in that same visitors' parlor the Mother Superior assured me that all was forgiven and forgotten and there was no record of my sin in the convent's archives.

	The reader may get the impression from some of the things I told so far that I was an ornery little punk and should have been put in a reform school. Katy, our cook, was constantly predicting that I would be.

	My brothers and I had fist fights regularly. But I was the oldest; an older brother has got to maintain his status, and the only way kids, as well as nations, can uphold their rights is by force.

	I never stole anything much when I was a kid, and I was obedient to Mama, Papa, and my teachers except when I was pretty sure the odds were about a hundred to one that I could get away with something really worthwhile. But I didn't mind heaving rocks through the neighbors' windows on Halloween and other appropriate occasions.

	One time I got shagged by a cop. I had hit him with a small rock when his back was turned. He was about a hundred feet away, so it was a good peg. He chased me right to our front door, which I slammed in his face just in time.

	Luckily my dad was home. He didn't like cops. He was a lawyer and claimed that cops had a habit of beating up law-abiding citizens to make them confess crimes that the cops couldn't solve. For a cop to take after one of his kids was like waving a red flag at a bull.

	Pop was a big, husky man and this cop was an under-sized one. For a while I thought Pop was going to break him up into small pieces and throw him away. I guess the cop did too because he dropped the charges against me and got the hell out of there fast.

	I lived in a dream world most of the time when I was a kid. To me things were never what they seemed to be to the grown people around me. I was a miniature Walter Mitty, surrounded by unseen enemies and making desperate hair-trigger decisions throughout my waking hours. If there were two ways of doing anything -- one safe, the other dangerous -- I always took the dangerous way.

 	When I had to cross a street in the Loop I never went to the corner and waited till the cop stopped the traffic. I always darted across in the middle of the block, dodging between streetcars, horse-drawn beer trucks, and automobiles, pretending I was a Notre Dame halfback making a broken-field run for a touchdown. I almost got creamed every time, but that couldn't be helped. If you wanted to keep your self-respect that was the only way you could cross the street.

	One time when Donald Brennock and I were about seven, we had a big gun battle with the Jesse James gang. After a wild shooting affray, Jesse and his mob, invisible to grown people, took refuge in Donald's house. Naturally we couldn't go into the house to get them. After all, there were only two of us, and although we were past masters of the fast draw and shot accurately from both hips, there were at least a dozen of the bad men, all armed to the teeth. We decided the only way to get them out into the open again was to smoke 'em out. So we set fire to the front porch of Donald's house.

	It was a big frame house standing by itself in the middle of a large lot. It should have made a wonderful blaze. But the fire-engine house was only a couple of blocks away and the firemen were able to confine the damage mostly to the front porch. Worse yet, in our anxiety to capture Jesse and his mob, Donald and I had failed to cover our own tracks properly. We were trapped into admitting that we had set the blaze, and we both got whaled for it. It was sloppy work all around.

	Grandpa was a very generous man. His largesse ranged from anonymous gifts for worthy causes to handouts for doubtful ones. I learned at an early age that any time I asked him for a nickel I would get it. A nickel in those days was about equal to a quarter now.

	Some of the stumble-bums from the saloons around Madison and Halstead got the word about Grandpa being a soft touch at the same time I did. About a dozen of them took turns coming around and putting the bite on him for a dime, sometimes three or four in one day.

	They always staggered up our front steps to the VIP entrance, and I usually answered the door. When I did, they would start mumbling something; I would leave the door ajar with the cabin on it, and go in and announce, "Grandpa, there's a poor man at the door." Without fail he would give me a dime, and I would pass it along to the poor man, who would stumble down the steps and head for the nearest saloon. There, for a dime, he could get either two big schooners of beer or a shot of rotgut whiskey, plus all the free lunch his stomach could accept.

	One day I forgot to put the chain across the door, and when I came back with the dime the poor man was gone. So was Grandpa's expensive overcoat, which had been hanging in the hall.

	A few days later the same poor man came back, shivering with a reeking hangover, having drunk up the proceeds from Grandpa's overcoat. Despite my excited report to Grandpa that the thief was at the door, the guy got his dime.

	I've always remembered what Grandpa said when I came busting into the back parlor and offered to help him beat the hell out of the poor man and turn him over to the police.

	He said, "He probably needed that overcoat more than I do."

	This kind of shook me up. The next time a panhandler rang the bell I marched back to the parlor and announced. "Grandpa, there's a bum at the door."

	I never did that again. That was one of the few times I ever saw Grandpa get angry. He made it quite plain to me that no "bums" ever come to his door. I saw immediately that I was on the wrong tack and switched back to the "poor man" formula from then on. After all, as long as I stayed on the right side of Grandpa I got as much out of this setup as the poor men, because in those days a nickel would buy a lot of stuff at the candy store.

	Strangely, Grandpa was not on intimate terms with our pastor. We lived in St. Patrick's parish, and the church was about a mile away from our house. There were three other Catholic churches much closer. Grandpa was very friendly with the Jesuits, whose Holy Family church was over on Twelfth Street, only four blocks away. He always went there on Sunday, often taking me along to sit with him at the altar at high mass. Just around the corner from our house was the French church of Notre Dame, where he went to mass every weekday morning.

 	Naturally our family went to nearby Notre Dame on Sundays, or sometimes to the Italian church only a block east of us, instead of to St. Pat's. But people are supposed to go to their own parish churches and put money in their collection plates. The only occasions when any of our family showed up at St. Pat's were baptisms and funerals. So there was a noticeable coolness between our pastor and us.

	My religious affiliations as a kid were spread across the board. I attended a Catholic school, of course, run by the Sisters of Mercy. On Sundays I distributed my patronage about equally among the Jesuit, French, and Italian churches, all right in our neighborhood I belonged to a Boy Scout troop that met in the First Congregational Church. And finally I joined a gym class at the Hebrew Institute!

	The Hebrew Institute calls for a bit of explanation. It was located on the south side of Vernon Park, just opposite our house. When I was born it was (believe it or not) a Sacred Heart convent. In 1901 our neighborhood was mostly Irish. By the time I was seven or eight the nuns had closed up shop and gone elsewhere. Then the Jews bought the place and converted it into the Hebrew Institute. (Only in America!!)

	When a convent is opened there is a solemn ceremony in which all evil spirits are exorcised from the building. I have no doubt that before the Cardinal permitted title to be transferred to the Jews he caused another ceremony to be performed lifting the ban and letting the evil spirits back in.

	Anyway, I went to gym class at the Hebrew Institute, wearing a miraculous medal around my neck. There I began learning how to wrestle, and ten years or so later I went to the 1920 Olympic games at Antwerp on the U.S. wrestling team.

	I used to draw pretty well when I was a kid, so my mother enrolled me in a Saturday-morning class at the Chicago Art Institute. I went into it thinking I would get to draw nekkid wimmen from life models, but that illusion was soon shattered. All we drew was bowls of fruit and stuff like that. So I shifted to clay modeling.

	Thirty years later, out of a clear sky, I sat down one day and started drawing again. I remembered what I had learned pretty well, and in the next year or so drew some cartoons that were thought to be pretty good in naval circles.

	I have no doubt that if I had devoted my life to art instead of war I would have turned out some real masterpieces before starving to death in a garret. Even now I can paint better pictures with either foot than most of the phonies who pose as "modern" artists and palm off stuff on the public which insults normal intelligence but which sends screwball longhairs into orbit.

	Each summer when I was a kid the family took a cottage in the country. At first we went to Fox Lake, sixty miles northwest of Chicago, and later to Pottawatamie Park, just across Lake Michigan from Chicago.

	I took to the water like a fish. I learned to swim, to row, to paddle a canoe, and to sail a boat. I loved the water and felt at home on it right afrom the start.

	I have only been seasick once in my life. That was when crossing Lake Michigan in a gale of wind on one of the old wooden side-wheelers that used to run between Benton Harbor and Chicago. Lake Michigan, although fresh water, can kick up a nasty sea when it blows. In the ninety-mile sweep across the Lake, rollers pile up that command respect even from old-time salt-water sailors.

	There was a sun-baked clay bluff in front of our place in Michigan. It dropped almost a hundred feet to the sandy lake shore at an angle of about 45 degrees.

	We kids used to run down this bluff wide open like mountain goats. Once you started down you couldn't stop even if you wanted to. You had to zigzag a little on the way down to avoid losing control completely and going ash can over applecart The only way you could zigzag was by banking up against a few ridges that stuck up from the rugged face of die bluff.

	But you were gaining speed all the way like a jet fighter in a power dive. You were going so fast at the bottom that to avoid going into the lake you had to flip and go rolling over and over in the soft sand.

	I learned how to fall without hurting myself, a knack that was useful later on in wrestling at the Olympic games. It's a wonder we didn't all break our necks.
When I was around nine or ten my Dad took me down to the lake front one day to see Lincoln Beachy loop the loop in his flying machine. I was impressed, and decided to build my own airplane (in those days we called them aeroplanes). I don't mean a model, but a full scale man- (or rather boy-) carrying machine.

	I built it in the backyard out of boxes, wire, and bed sheets. It was a hand-powered job that would fly by flapping its wings like a bird.

	When I got it finished I gave it a thorough preflight inspection, making sure that everything was properly secured and that the controls were hooked up right.

	I didn't tell the other kids about the impending adventure because I meant to surprise them. My flight plan was to take off from the backyard and land on the roof of the house -- or if things were going well enough when I got up that high, to fly clear over the house and land out in front in Vernon Park.

	I put my cap on backward, climbed into the pilot's seat and flapped the wings vigorously for five minutes.

	We never got off.

	But fifty-five years have gone by since then and nobody has yet built a successful omithopter. So I don't feel too bad about it.

	The influx of immigrants brought some pretty rough kids into the neighborhood. Some of Al Capone's later henchmen grew up within a block or so of where I lived. When I was about twelve I used to play baseball with a team of "Eyetalian" kids who all had the makings of the gangsters. They swore, told dirty stories, smoked, stole anything left lying around loose, carried knives, and had some pretty rough rumbles with kids from nearby blocks.

	My status with them was peculiar. Since I was an "Irisher" they never really accepted me as one of them. This was OK by me because full-fledged membership in their mob required doing things I couldn't afford to get mixed up in. But I did want to play baseball, and I had a good fast ball, for a kid, and a roundhouse curve. So they let me pitch on their ball team. I think maybe Grandpa's status as the neighborhood VIP also had something to do with my being tolerated as a sort of associate member of the junior Mafia. The fact that I sold scorecards in the White Sox park helped too.

 	Anyway for the last five or six years before going to Annapolis I was hanging out with some pretty tough guys -- with but not of them. All this time Chicago's notorious Levee, bailiwick of Bath House John and Hinky Dink, was going full blast only a mile and a half southeast of Vernon Park. One of the civic landmarks at that time was the Everleigh sisters' plush whore house in the Levee, which was world famous and drew visitors from all over. At that time I knew nothing about all this. I found out years later, reading books about Chicago.

 	Alderman Johnny Powers lived on McCallister Place, half a block west of our house. "Johnny de Pow" they called him. He, Hinky Dink, and Bath House John owned and operated the city council in those days. They didn't always pull together, but they all had the same philosophy of government -- "What's good for me is good for Chicago."

	They could always deliver their wards on Election Day with a big enough Democratic majority to wipe out the lead which starry-eyed reformers might pile up in other parts of the city. Grandpa, Papa, and Mama have been dead many years. But I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they are still voting the straight Democratic ticket in the Nineteenth Ward, where we lived. Maybe Johnny de Pow even registered me when I became of age after having gone to sea, and I may be voting there now!

	My dad's principal interest in life was his kids, and he did more for us than we realized until after we had grown up. He played a bigger part in our early education than any of our school teachers did.

	Every night after dinner Pop and the four boys would adjourn to the study room and do the homework. When we finished he would look it over and if it was correct, that was that. If it wasn't, he would hand it back and just say, "Number so and so answer is wrong."

 	He never told us just what was wrong or how to correct it. We had to dope that out ourselves, although sometimes on difficult problems he would ask leading questions that might give us a clue. Some of the problems in arithmetic were difficult. In fact they were s.o.b.'s like the "how old was Anne" problem.

	But Pop could do them and he never had to look in the back of the book for the answer. He had a keen, logical mind, and when our feeble brains were baffled by some outrageous conundrum which he could solve easily, it made him mad. When Pop got mad he got mad all over and no matter how tough the problem was, it wasn't as tough as Pop. So you just got busy and worked the goddamn thing right.

	Modern educators may think you can't browbeat knowledge into a dumb kid. I know better. I had plenty of it browbeaten into me, and I've been grateful to Pop for it ever since.

	Thanks to his help I became a pretty sharp student, standing first in my class in grammar school and also, as far as I went, in high school. The big thing Dad taught me was how to study, not simply memorizing things but getting down to the basic facts and understanding them. By the time I got to high school he didn't have to help me any more. I could dig the essentials out for myself.

	I went to St. Ignatius High School, run by the Jesuits, for two and a half years and then dropped out to prep for the Annapolis entrance exams. The Latin, Greek, and ancient history that the Jesuits taught were of no use on those exams. The Jebbies didn't bear down too hard on math, and the Navy did.

	One thing the Jebbies did insist on was discipline. They never clouted you but they would make you stay after school. The Prefect of Discipline's classroom was known as the Jug. If you got "jugged" for some infraction, you had to go there after school, memorize a half a page of Caesar in Latin and recite it perfectly. Or maybe you had to write "I must not talk back to Father Leahy" five hundred times. (And you had better not get caught using a multiple rig of pencils that could write five lines at once!)

	The Jesuits are fine teachers and I learned a lot from them. The Latin and Greek were never of any practical use but they do train a kid to think and to use his head for something besides a storage bin for a lot of memorized stuff.

	Pop was a great one for records and statistics. He kept a scrapbook for each one of the kids, starting off with our birth and baptismal certificates and including everything in which our names ever appeared in print. He was also a camera bug, and a new snapshot, with date, was added to everybody's book every few months. My book includes every report card ever sent to him from the Naval Academy, all programs for athletic events in which I wrestled, and a full record of my participation in the Olympic games.

	It's a shame Pop didn't live till after the war. Bill, Phil, and I all did pretty well for ourselves in command of ships, got a hat full of medals among us, and all retired as rear admirals. Pop would have had his hands full trying to keep the scrapbooks up to date. But he would have done it even if he had to hire a lot of help. He would have had himself a ball and been the proudest man on earth.

	However, I'm afraid he might have gotten to be a pain in the neck to the neighbors. He wasn't a bit bashful about spreading the news when one of us did something good.

	Pop used to tell us Uncle Remus stories when we were little. My favorite was the one about the Tar Baby. He told it vividly and illustrated it with gestures. When Brer Rabbit tangled with that bobby trap that Brer Fox set for him it really used to send me. The best part was when he got all four hands and feet stuck and Brer Rabbit said, "If you don't turn me loose I'm goin' to butt you cranksided." The Tar Baby didn't "say nothing," Brer Rabbit let him have it, and wound up with his head stuck too. I loved it.

	In later years, when I was having trouble with the Secretary of Defense, the Honorable Louis Johnson, I took the page from Brer Rabbit's book. He eventually got away from Brer Fox by begging him not to fling him into the brier patch -- Brer Rabbit's natural habitat. When an irate Mr. Johnson was threatening to do bad things to me I pleaded with my superiors not to heave me out of the Pentagon and send me to sea. They did!

	Pop's ambition, frustrated by the loss of the sight of an eye when he was a kid, was to go to Annapolis. He fulfilled his ambition by sending three of his sons there. We didn't have any choice in the matter, either. It was understood right from the beginning we would go there. The other brother, John Ireland, became a priest. He too joined the Navy during the war and became a lieutenant commander in the Chaplains Corps.

 	Once a year Pop used to take the four of us aboard the U.S.S. Wolverine to spend a couple of hours looking around. The Wolverine was a side-wheel gunboat of 700 tons. She was painted white, had a beautiful scrubbed teak deck and a lot of well-polished brass work, and was full of things to interest kids -- and Pop.

 	As I learned in later years, she was just a little bit of a spit kit, but she looked pretty big to us then. And she was an official, commissioned man-o'-war in the U.S. Navy.

 	She was originally named the Michigan, and was the first iron ship in the U.S. Navy. In Civil War days her main battery was two 8-inch smooth-bore muzzle-loaders. By the time we got to know her she proudly mounted four 3-inch breech-loading rifles.

	We always looked forward to this annual inspection, but I think Pop got an even bigger kick out of it than we did. He had profound admiration for the U.S. Navy, and anything with the Navy's stamp of approval on it was tops with Pop. Whenever there was a sale of surplus Navy equipment he would be there. Navy shoes, Navy underwear, Navy blankets were naturally better than any others because the Navy tested everything it bought on a no-nonsense basis, just as they tested armor plate by firing 16-inch shells into it at the Proving Ground.

 	For many years the Wolverine was the only man o' war on the Great Lakes. She never got out of the Lakes. She was finally broken up for scrap in 1949, at the incredible age (for a warship) of 106 years.

 	It was little packets like the Wolverine, patrolling the rivers of China and visiting out-of-the-way ports in Central and South America, which gave the rise to the term "gunboat diplomacy." This kind of international intercourse, primitive though it was, often produced better results than the more sophisticated kind which they now try to practice at the UN. Gunboat skippers never got a nyet from the people they were dealing with. But now, the newest cannibal "republic" in Africa has just as big a vote in the UN Assembly as the United States of America does!

 	My association with the Navy, through the Wolverine, began at the age of about seven. Some forty years later, I commanded task groups in the Mediterranean with ships in them that could almost have hoisted the Wolverine aboard.

	Pop didn't go in for this modern stuff of letting the young man decide for himself which profession was to be favored with his services. He had an old-fashioned idea that a father knows more about life and what makes this world go round than any teen-aged punk. I'm glad now he felt that way. He did me a big favor by sending me to Annapolis.

CHAPTER TWO

ANNAPOLIS

	I marched through the main gate of the Naval Academy at Annapolis on August 1, 1917, with my head in the clouds and my eyes as big as golf balls, my Dad alongside me in just about the same state. I'm sure that as we went through that gate time was rolled back for him, his youthful ambition was fulfilled in me, and he was my age again for a while. I was just a few weeks over sixteen.

	There was one thing Pop wanted that morning that I wouldn't hold still for. He wanted me to go in there wearing short pants. But I would have run away before doing that. I had never worn anything but short pants until about six months before, and all my demands for long jeans had been refused. So I entered an essay contest, run by a Loop department store, and won a suit of clothes, with long pants. I marched through the gate that morning to take the oath that I would "defend the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic," clad as a man, even though I still had five years to go legally.

	I was sworn in by Rear Admiral E. W. Eberle, the Superintendent, who wore a goatee and was referred to by all the midshipmen as "Old Mattress Face." There were ten of us in the group of rookies that morning, all retired now.

	After the swearing in, Pop shoved off for home, mission accomplished. From here on it was up to me, although any time he felt I needed parental guidance he was never backward about giving it.

	Our group of ten, under the tolerantly amused command of a midshipman with a month in the Navy behind him, marched over to Bancroft Hall, doing our best to be nonchalant and to act as if this were small potatoes to all of us.

	Near the entrance to Bancroft Hall we passed the OFFICER of the day (!), a most impressive looking LIEUTENANT COMMANDER (!!!), wearing a snow-white uniform, sword, a couple of rows of campaign ribbons -- even in 1917. To me he looked like John Paul Jones, Horatio Nelson, and Noah (in his younger days) all rolled into one. Later on he turned out to be just about that. As we neared him it seemed to me he sniffed disdainfully, as if he smelt a garbage truck approaching from windward. He turned his back on us, and strode away.

	I found out later that this officer's name was William F. Halsey. You may have heard of him. He was known to the midshipmen then, and to all the world later, as "Bull." Got to be a five-star admiral in World War II, and gave the Japs a Bad Time.

	In later years I had the privilege of counting him among my best friends. I gave him his first crack at flying an airplane and planted the bee in his bonnet that made him go to Pensacola to qualify as an observer so he could command the great aircraft carrier Saratoga. I served under his command in the Saratoga before the war, and later in his Third Fleet just before the Japs surrendered. In 1954 he came to Chicago to preside over the dedication of the German submarine U-505 captured by a task group I commanded in the Atlantic, and turned into a memorial to the American sailors who lost their lives defending this country at sea.

	Admiral Halsey was one of the great leaders without whom we couldn't have won the war. Maybe he wasn't as brilliant a naval strategist as some of his contemporaries. But he was intensely loyal to his subordinates and inspired confidence in them. This can often cancel out bloopers in global strategy. His flag flying from the masthead of a fleet flagship steaming into battle in effect added an extra carrier task group to the actual striking force. As a leader of fighting men I rank him ahead of John Paul Jones in our own Navy and alongside of Nelson in the Royal Navy.

	I'm sure now the reason he turned his back on our motley, straggling array that morning was to conceal a grin. It's un-military for the DUTY OFFICER to be seen grinning by a bunch of civilian kids.

	I had no warning as we tramped into Bancroft Hall that day that this job with the Navy would turn out to be only a temporary one. It fizzled out on me forty-three years and two months later, when I had to retire on September 30, 1960, for "physical disability."

	The change from Jesuit to Navy discipline was not too difficult. Instead of jugging you they gave you demerits and you march extra duty in your spare time after school. In some ways the Navy discipline was easier because it was more impersonal. No Navy duty officer ever put the fear of God into me the way that Father Leahy could.

	The same was true of the change from the Vernon Park junior Mafia to the plebe class of 1921 at the U.S.N.A. At the Academy the kids didn't carry knives, didn't steal, and didn't have rumbles. Outside of that they weren't much different from the Vernon Park mob. They swore, told dirty stories, smoked, and talked much bigger than they performed. I think that all but a few of our junior Mafia sodality on McCallister Place could have gone to Annapolis and become successful and respected naval officers or judges, doctors, or clergymen for that matter.

	I got through plebe year without much difficulty in studies. All the subjects except math were memory courses.

	They didn't teach you much at the N.A. when I was there. You taught yourself. Subjects were math, English, French and Spanish, physics, electrical and steam engineering, chemistry, ordnance, mechanical drawing, seamanship, and navigation. You spent half the day studying in your room and half in the classrooms. Most of the "teachers" were naval officers doing a hitch of shore duty. They hardly ever tried to teach and probably wouldn't have been much help if they had.

	The classroom sessions were simply quiz periods in which each midshipman got a mark on how well he seemed to have memorized stuff in the study periods. This daily mark was important because, averaged in with your semiannual exams and adjusted according to your demerits, it fixed your class standing. Class standing at graduation determined your seniority among your classmates from then until you reached the rank where you could jump over people's heads. In the military services seniority is... well, seniority. It is not to be sniffed at.

	Despite some academic flaws, the Naval Academy training did stress two things which belong very definitely on the credit side―discipline and respect for authority. I realize that some of our egg-headed "liberals" will claim that these are fascist virtues which must perhaps be tolerated at West Point and Annapolis but which have little place in a real liberal education. I differ with them. In my opinion these things are vital to the education of our youth if this country is to survive. They contribute much more to good citizenship than some of the high-falutin hogwash that masquerades as education these days, like the cinch courses provided for athletes with strong backs and minds by many of our leading colleges to help pay off the mortgage on the stadium.

	Looking back on it now I think the Naval Academy did a fine job in fulfilling its major mission of preparing youngsters to defend their country at sea. My class produced two four-star admirals, four three-star and eighteen two-star flag officers. Those twenty-four are just the ones who made admiral on active duty. Counting our "tombstone" admirals the class of 1921 must have a couple of hundred. (More later about tombstone promotions.)

	And academic deficiencies notwithstanding the Naval Academy did produce Admiral Rickover, who has his own ideas about present-day American education, including I suppose that of the Naval Academy, and isn't very bashful about expounding them.

	About the only impact that World War I had on the Regiment of Midshipmen was to shorten the course from four to three years while the war lasted. When you cut a four-year cram course to three, you have to really put on the squeeze. My class studied no naval history whatever. We didn't even have time to pay much attention to the great battles then raging in Europe and the North Atlantic.

	Millions of tons of ships were going to the bottom in the first great Battle of the Atlantic, Pershing was telling the French, "Lafayette, we are here," and the Marines were writing history at Belleau Wood. But these things were happening far away and meant little to the plebe class of 1921. We crammed our lessons in seamanship, ordnance, and gunnery, and marched up and down the exact center line of the corridors in Bancroft Hall, our eyes fixed dead ahead, trying to keep out of trouble with upperclassmen. Global strategy and the battles in France were for the birds as far as we were concerned.

	I don't even remember what celebration, if any, we had when news of the armistice broke. I think most of us were a little chagrined that the war finished before we had a chance to get into it.

One thing that survived this drastic wartime shortening of the course, believe it or not, was dancing drill. Every Saturday night there was a formal dance in the gym, but plebes were not allowed to drag to it. They had to sit up in the running track, observe the gals that the upperclassmen at their tables dragged, and make a frank and impartial report at breakfast Sunday morning on the relative sex appeal of these gals.

	However, the Navy, with its usual foresight, looking ahead to the time when the plebes would be upperclassmen, hire4 Professor Bell of Baltimore to come down and teach the plebes how to dance. The Professor was a little bald-headed character, and he conducted the drills wearing a full-dress suit. He wasn't much of an English scholar, but he had a good sense of rhythm.

	One of his famous pronouncements on ballroom etiquette was, "I would rather see a man chew tobacco and spit on the ballroom floor than see him cross his legs in the presence of ladies." (So help me, I heard him say it myself.)

	At dancing drills we would choose up partners and dance with each other. The Professor would circulate among us, giving instruction and emphasizing the tempo of the piano player. Every now and then he would yell at the piano player to stop, and would announce, "Them that was leaders will now be followers."

	When the dance was a waltz, he would go around intoning "Boom, drip, drip.... Boom, drip, drip." To this day, so far as I am concerned, the lyrics to every waltz ever written, "Blue Danube," "Missouri," or "Merry Widow," are simply "Boom, drip, drip."

	I stood fiftieth in a class of 650 at graduation and would have stood about twenty-five numbers higher except that I got so many demerits. They were all for trivial stuff such as talking in ranks, being late for muster, leaving room in disorder, not being properly shaved, etc. I never did anything spectacularly wrong except the time I beat up the son of the Secretary of the Navy. (More about that later.) But I got caught at a lot of little things that knocked down my class standing.

	The first time I hit the pap sheet for not being properly shaved I felt real good about it. I hadn't yet started shaving! In those days they issued straight-edged razors to the midshipmen. I had to go up to my room, shave for the first time with this lethal instrument, and report back to the Duty Officer who had put me on the pap. I came back to his office looking like I had just lost a fight with a flock of wildcats. When he learned I had never shaved before I think he felt a little guilty about it. But I got five demerits just the same.

	There wasn't much real hazing at Annapolis in my time, at least not physical hazing. But a plebe had to be at attention at all times except in the privacy of his room. He couldn't stroll down the corridors of Bancroft Hall with his blouse unbutand his cap on the back of his head as upperclassmen could (except when the D.O. was watching). He had to march down the exact center line of the corridor, eyes fixed dead ahead, and turn square corners. The D.O.'s condoned this on the ground that it taught military behavior to the newcomers.

	In the mess hall the plebe had to sit on the last two inches of his chair, and speak only when spoken to by an upperclassman. If he gave the wrong answer the upperclassman would stick his fist out with his thumb down and call the attention of the other upper class Romans at the table to the blooper. They would all stick their thumbs down too, and he had to take his plate under the table and finish his meal there.

	There was a hazing "scandal" the year after I graduated when some crybaby wrote home after getting his butt beat with a broom for something which deserved it. As a result they moved all the plebes into one Wing of Bancroft Hall and forbade upperclassmen to set foot in that part of the building. This era was known as "segregation," and stirred up at least as much blood pressure in the junior officers' messes throughout the Fleet as the same issue is generating now in the U.S.A.

	We had no Negroes at the Academy when I was there except for what we called the Fifth Battalion―the colored mess "mokes." There had been two or three colored midshipmen before my time who didn't graduate. From what I heard they must have had a very Rough Time indeed. They had to be supermen to come out of it alive if the sagas about them handed down from class to class were true.

	I have no doubt the sagas were true because any bunch of teenage kids can be brutally cruel if they decide to gang up on some other kid. We had a flagrant example in my class.

	There was a little odd ball in the class who never bothered anybody, and was harmless, but completely out of place at the Naval Academy. He was a dried-up, wizened little guy, looked like a cartoon, and any bunch of sailors who drew him for their division officer would have laughed at him.
His family made great sacrifices to send him to the Academy, and he worked like hell to stay there. But he just didn't have what it took and missed passing grades plebe year by a few points.

	By tacit agreement of everybody, he was in Coventry from the day he was sworn in. He couldn't get a roommate and no one spoke a civil word to him all the time he was there. I felt for the poor guy and I'm sure others did too. But you can't afford to buck public opinion in a case of this kind, especially among kids. I never picked on him, but I'm sorry to admit I never was nice to him, either.

	When we went on our summer cruise at the end of plebe year he was "unsat" in several subjects. But he was close enough to the line to take re-exams at the end of the cruise, which would entitle him to continue if he passed.

	He took all his books along on the cruise to bone up for the re-exams. The boys threw them overboard. He busted his re-exams and bilged out.

	I got into only one serious jam as a midshipman. For a while I thought it had brought my naval career to an abrupt end. Early in my youngster year I had a fist fight with another midshipman that made the front page of all the eastern papers because the kid was the son of the then Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels.

	Young Daniels was in the class behind me, and soon after the armistice stopped World War I, he resigned. A lot of people accused him of being a draft dodger, and I was one of them. I must admit now that this was an unfair charge and I'm ashamed of having made it. But at the time I was foolish enough to make it direct to young Daniels' face.

	He challenged me to a fight, as anybody would. But fighting with bare fists was forbidden by the regulations. It was a kick-out offense, so I said I would fight him in the gym with gloves. He didn't buy that and insisted on bare fists. So I finally had to agree to a fist fight, but said, "Not till after your resignation is accepted." He would then be a civilian and the Book didn't cover fist fights between midshipmen and taxpayers.

	It took about two weeks for his papers to go through, and they were a bad two weeks for me. All my friends came around with alarming stories about how handy young Daniels was with his dukes. I learned he was the welterweight boxing champ of his class. I was wrestling bantamweight that year, so I would be giving away twenty-five pounds, and my boxing experience consisted of just a dozen alley fights as a kid. My friends built him up so big that I figured I was due for a hell of a shellacking and even considered going through the motions of putting up a fight but taking a dive as soon as the going got tough.

	The resignation was published at noon one day, and when I back from afternoon recitation period he was waiting for me in my room. We agreed to fight fair, and that it would be to a finish, with no rounds.

	We shoved the tables and chairs out of the way, my roommate, Cootie Koops, stood watch outside the door for D.O.'s, and we went to it. I was scared stiff, and still toying with the idea of taking a dive.

	But almost right away I found out he was a sucker for a straight left jab. Every time I poked my left out, it hit him smack on the nose. All thought of a tank job was virtuously banished.

	The scrap lasted five and a half minutes, during which he didn't hurt me much, but got his nose busted up pretty good and took some stiff jabs to his right eye. I only threw one right-hand punch and it was the last one of the .fight. It caught him smack on the button and he went out like a light for about a whole minute.

	Cootie and I revived him and helped him clean up. Then I apologized, we shook hands, and he shoved off to report home to the Secretary of the Navy with a hell of a shiner. Cootie and I just barely had time to change clothes and beat it down to drill.

	Drill lasted for an hour, everybody was in ranks, and you weren't supposed to talk. But word of the fight spread through the regiment like an atomic reaction. When drill was over everybody knew about it and I was suddenly catapulted into fame.

	The trouble was that the news got all over Annapolis too, and next morning it was on the front page of the Washington and Baltimore papers. They didn't mention my name and they garbled the story a little bit. They made me out to be a big bully who was picking on a little underclassman unable to strike back till his resignation was accepted. They also fluffed the decision and had him flattening me instead of vice versa. They made a Dick Merriwell yarn of it with the Secretary's son as the hero.

	Early that morning I got word to report to the Commandant of Midshipmen, Captain W. H. Standley (who later became Chief of Naval Operations and during World War II was ambassador to Moscow). Any time the Commandant sent for you it was a hundred to one you were in bad trouble. I was certain I would get the bum's rush out the main gate before lunch time. When I crept into Captain Standley's office I wouldn't have been surprised if a squad of marines had been there waiting handcuffs, leg irons, and tommy guns. Standley was seated at his desk with the morning paper before him.

	After I had announced in a trembling voice, "Midshipman Gallery third class, sir," he pointed to the headlines and said, "Mr. Gallery, I understand you are the midshipman involved here."

	"Yes sir," I said.

	"Tell me about it," said the Captain.

	So I told him -- just about as I've told the story here. I was so sure the jig was up I didn't try to justify or excuse anything or to shade things in my favor.

	When I finished, Captain Standley sat there for what seemed to me to be an age, though actually it was perhaps no more than a minute. He kept tapping on the newspaper with his paper cutter as if warming up to plunge it into me, and didn't say a word. Finally he peered over his glasses and said, "Mr. Gallery, your conduct was entirely blameless. You may go."
I soared out of that office, and almost had to duck my head going out the door. If I am ever sentenced to be hung and get pardoned at the last minute I won't feel any better than I did then.

	Ever since that day I have considered Admiral Standley to be the greatest naval strategist since John Paul Jones.

	I went out for wrestling youngster year, and to my amazement and that of everyone else, I made the team right away. I was a skinny, gawky kid, 5 foot 8, weighing 127 pounds, and looked like a scarecrow rather than a rassler.

	But I was wiry, fast, and had one hold that was peculiarly adapted to my lanky frame, although I never saw anyone else use it. It was a scissors on the near arm and a far-side half nelson. Unless the reader is a rassler there is no use trying to go into much technical detail on this.

	But after you got your opponent off his feet you clapped a leg scissors on the arm next to you and stuck a half nelson in on the other side. It was such an unusual hold that when you first applied it your opponent's reaction seemed to be, "What the hell is this crazy guy doing now?"

	If you did it right, you wound up a few seconds later flat on your gut with your opponent's body stretched across yours at right angles, belly up. His arms were pinned under your body, and nothing but his heels and shoulders touched the mat. The shoulders touching gave you a pin fall.
I used that hold time and time again.  I wrestled banone year and special weight the next (125 pounds). I never lost a bout in two years of big-league intercollegiate wrestling, thanks mostly to that hold.

	Eddie Willkie, a classmate of mine and brother of Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, wrestled heavyweight for Navy when I was a bantamweight. Eddie used to pin his opponents with a brutal half nelson which he could apply from either the right or the left side. He used to rib me about being a one-hold guy because I had to apply my hold only from the right-hand side. Eddie was on the 1920 Olympic team and got a little closer to the finals than I did.

	Wrestling was the major indoor sport of the Naval Academy at this time. There were eight of us fighting for the bantamweight berth on the team, so there was a round-robin elimination each week to see who would rassle in the meet on Saturday. It usually was harder to win your place on the team than it was to win your bout in the meet.

	The hardest part of all was making weight. I started oft as a bantamweight, 115 pounds. You were allowed to be three pounds overweight, and my normal weight was 127. So each week I had to take nine pounds off my skinny frame to weigh in at 118.

	I started dieting each week on Wednesday, and by Friday I was on a bare subsistence diet. On Thursday I began drying out. No water from then till weighing in. When I got thirsty I would gargle and spit the water out. Friday afternoon I bundled up in flannels and put in a couple of hours in the steam room jumping rope and passing the medicine ball. No supper at all Friday night. I would go to bed weighing 118½, and dry out during the night, although it's hard to see how there could have been anything left to dry out.

	We weighed in at 6:30 Saturday morning, each one of us precisely down to weight, with the visiting team's manager checking to make sure it was precise. Then we would beat it to the training table and stuff like hogs, sleep for a couple of hours, and by meet time in the afternoon we had gained back four or five pounds and were ready to go. This seems like a hell of a thing to make a growing kid do but it was routine for all intercollegiate wrestlers.

	Wrestling got me a bad deal from one of the math profs. I was pretty good in math and used to stand among the top ten in the class. You got a new professor every month, and one month, after I had just stood fifth the month before, I got a lieutenant commander who went to all the wrestling meets. I he figured that anybody who was a good wrestler must ipso facto dumb. At any rate, he gave me lousy marks on the daily quizzes and although I made a perfect score on the monthly exam this dropped me down to sixtieth for that month. I still claim this was a bum rap. Even professional "wrestlers" aren't dumb. They eat higher on the hog than lieutenant commanders do.

	Navy had such good wrestling teams in those days that they barred us from the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament During the course at the Academy there were about four gym drills in which all hands were given elementary instruction in self-defense, including wrestling. The "sportsmen" who controlled the Intercollegiates claimed that this made us professionals, and they wouldn't let us enter their tournaments. So we used to take great delight in pinning all their champs' shoulders to the mat whenever they came to the Academy in dual meets.

	A famous incident in football history took place my plebe year. Great Lakes Naval Training Station had the best football team in the country that year. They had Paddy Driscoll and a lot of other All-Americans who formed the nucleus of the Chicago Bears after the war. Annapolis had the second best team with Bill Ingram, Bill Butler, Country Moore, Eddie Willkie, among others.

	The last game that season was Great Lakes vs. Navy at Annapolis for the national championship. Great Lakes, the Navy favorite, brought along about 2,000 wild-eyed sailor-rooters.

	Navy outplayed Great Lakes all the way. Late in the fourth quarter we were leading 6-0 and marched to another touchdown making it 12-0, putting the game on ice -- or so it seemed for a few seconds.

	In those days the rule on a fumble after crossing the goal line was different from what it is now. Then it was a free ball. Now it is a dead ball and a touchdown. Anyway Bill Ingram, Navy captain, smashed over for what looked like the clincher with only about three minutes left to play, going about five yards beyond the goal line. Then he fumbled, and the ball bounced clear over to the other side of the end zone where a big lug from Great Lakes was standing around picking his nose. What he was doing there on a crucial play of the game has never been explained.

	He scooped up the loose ball and took off for the Navy goal 105 yards away. Only one Navy player on the field had any chance to catch him -- Bill Butler. But Bill was losing ground on every stride.

	However, as the sailor passed the Navy bench in the middle of the field a figure in a sweat shirt took off and made the prettiest flying tackle I've ever seen, mowing the fleeing sailor down on Navy's thirty-five yard line. Then they both bounced to their feet, started swinging, and all hell busted loose.

	Two thousand sailors stormed out on the field from the north stands and 2,000 midshipmen south. It looked like it was going to be the damnedest naval battle since Jutland.

	But between the two onrushing mobs was Rear Admiral Eberle, Superintendent, United States Naval Academy, running backwards and jumping up and down, goatee and all, and waving frantically at the midshipmen to get back in the stands. At the last possible instant discipline prevailed, and the riot was averted. I think Admiral Moffett also got into the act, but in the confusion I couldn't be sure.

	Now a delicate problem arose. The sailor was downed on Navy's thirty-five yard line. According to the rules the only penalty for having twelve men on the field was half the distance to the goal line from the spot where the foul was committed. This would make it Great Lake's ball, first down, on the Navy's seventeen yard line, and the way the game had been going up till then, they would probably have wound up with fourth down back around Navy's thirty-five.

	But Admiral Eberle would have none of this. He said, "Give them a touchdown, put the ball smack in front of the goal posts and let them try for the extra point." They made it. Final score Great Lakes 7 -- Navy 6.

	There are three versions of why my classmate Bill Saunders made this tackle. One is that everybody in the stands and on the bench was yelling "Get him, Bill," meaning Bill Butler. Bill Saunders was getting ready to go in the game as soon as we had it on ice and was getting his last minute instructions from Navy coach Gil Doble. When Doble yelled, "Get him, Bill," Saunders took this as an order and, being a military man, he carried it out.

	Another version is that Doble, who would not hesitate to clip his grandmother to win a game, deliberately sent Saunders in to stop the play knowing that according to the book this would stop the touchdown and save the game.

	The third "explanation" is that Bill just lost his head and blasted off on his own hook.

	Bill was barred from athletics for the rest of his academy career. Next year he came down with TB and was retired to Los Animos. The day before he left Admiral Eberle made a nice gesture and lifted his suspension.

	Next year the fumble rule was changed and now when you cross the goal line you can just toss the ball away. Too bad this wasn't so in 1917!
My first contact with the seagoing Navy was on youngster cruise, the summer after I entered the Academy, when we put in three months cruising around Chesapeake Bay in old battleships. I made this cruise in the Maine. (Not the one that got blown up in Havana -- the next Maine.) She had three of the biggest damn smokestacks in the world and she was a coal hog. We had to coal twice as often as our sister ships. This was bad because coaling ship was a nasty job.

	The coal came alongside in barges and you had to get down on the barge and shovel it into big canvas sacks that were hoisted up on deck and dumped down manholes into the bunkers. It was backbreaking work, and coal dust got all over everything. When you got through coaling, you spent the next couple of days trying to get the ship clean again.

	The skipper of the Maine was Captain Reeves, a great naval officer who was later commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet. I almost nipped his naval career in the bud that summer.

	In those days we used to have speed cones, which were big conical shapes that you hoisted at the yardarm to show other ships what your engines were doing. Two-blocked at the yard-arm with the point up meant, "The engine on this side is going ahead full speed." Halfway up, with the point down meant, "This engine is backing at half speed." A speed cone must have weighed about twenty pounds.

	One morning, as the Maine was getting underway from Yorktown, Captain Reeves was conning the ship from the port wing of the bridge, and I was manning the halyards of the port speed cone. I was anxious to make a good impression on the Captain by handling that speed cone in a smart, seaman like manner.

	We had to swing ship through 180 degrees against the tide, keeping in formation with the other ships. The Captain and I were standing about three feet apart.

	At one stage of the maneuver Captain Reeves ordered the port engine, which had been going ahead full, to stop. I alertly cast loose my halyard, gave it a jerk, and brought the heavy cone crashing down on deck between us.

	If we had been standing a little closer together, the United States would have lost the services of two future admirals, separated in seniority by about forty years. The Captain looked at me quizzically and took station alongside the helmsman for the rest of the maneuver.

	As already related, World War I caused our academic course to be cut from four to three years. When the armistice was signed they decided to let the class of 1920 graduate in 1919 and then go back to the four-year course.

	But if nobody graduated in 1920 a lot of captains who were slated to become admirals in 1920 would have to wait a year. This would obviously have been a great blow against the welfare of the United States, not to mention that of the upcoming captains. So they split my class in two, those standing in the upper half to graduate in 1920, a year ahead of time, and the second half to graduate in 1921.

	I stood well up in the first half, and on June 6, 1920, in Dahlgren Hall, I received a handsomely engraved parchment in which the President of the United States claimed he "reposed special confidence and trust" in my "Patriotism, Valor, Fidelity and Ability" and was therefore making me an ensign in the U.S. Navy.

	Despite Woodrow Wilson's certified high regard for me, the paymaster took me up on the books at the then going rate for ensigns of $144 per month.

CHAPTER THREE

ENSIGN U.S.N.

	My first duty assignment after graduation was to try out for the Olympic wrestling team. Thanks to my patented "hold" I made it and went to Antwerp with a group of other Navy athletes on the U.S.S. Frederick. On the way over, the Frederick, an armored cruiser, was a seagoing gymnasium, much to the disgust of her officers and crew.

	One of the athletes was a Marine second lieutenant by the name of Harry Liversledge, who later won fame and a Navy Cross when his outfit hoisted a flag on Iwo Jima. They got a picture to prove it, too.

	Harry was a shot-putter. He could put the shot about fifty-one feet, and as I recall, that was just inches short of the world's record then. But practicing on the Frederick each day Harry wasn't coming anywhere near that. He would stand back at the stern and heave the shot forward so it would bounce against an athwart-ship bulkhead and wouldn't go overboard. But he was only heaving it about fifty feet. This caused Harry and the rest of us much concern, and there was a lot of talk about the reason for it.

	Finally somebody who didn't believe in Newton's laws of motion came up with a theory. He reasoned that since Harry was putting the shot forward and the ship was making ten knots, during the brief time that the shot was in the air the ship moved out from under it about eight feet. So, he claimed, you had to add eight feet to each of Harry's shipboard heaves, and if you did that he was breaking the world's record by a wide margin.

	This caused heated argument in the mess and a lot of money was bet on the outcome of a scientific experiment we decided to make.

	We hung a plumb bob from the main yardarm and drew a chalk line on deck directly below it. Then we lugged the sixteen-pound shot up to the yard, and one of the boys eased on it carrying the shot. All the sailors thought we were nuts and as things turned out they were right.

	We fired a pistol on deck, started stop watches, and the guy up on the yardarm let the shot drop. It crashed down on deck like an armor-piercing projectile, leaving a big dent.

	If Newton's laws were right the shot would have hit smack on the line. If the guys claiming a world's record for Harry were right, it should have hit about eight feet abaft the line.

	Actually it hit about six feet forward of the line. The ship must have pitched a little down by the head just as the guy on the yardarm let go. So we all said, "The hell with it." As soon as he got ashore Harry was OK again and did fine in the Olympics.

	I got myself mixed up in a bad snafu on the way to Antwerp. Athletes working out get up a sweat and need a bath afterward. But fresh water is precious aboard ship and the chief engineer took a dim view of a bunch of jockstrap artists using up all his fresh water. So he put a saltwater hose up on the quarterdeck. After a workout we were supposed to wash the sweat off under the hose and then go below to the officer's showers and rinse off in fresh water.

	One afternoon after a fast workout I was holding the saltwater hose over my head but standing a little too close to a hatch leading down to the officers' country on the deck below. It so happened the Captain and the Chief Engineer were standing down there just under this hatch and I splattered water all over them. The Chief Engineer came storming up on deck and made a rude suggestion as to what I should do with that hose.

	Since he was a lieutenant commander and I was just a new snotty ensign I was quite crestfallen. I didn't carry out his un-military and impractical suggestion, but as soon as I finished my shower I hauled the offending hose over to the port rail and dropped the end of it over the side.

By this time the Captain had gone aft and the Chief was in his stateroom seated at his desk next to a porthole. By one of -- those quirks of fate that govern life on this earth, the end of that hose popped in through the porthole and again spewed water all over the irate commander.

	Fortunately I heard the atomic explosion below and realized what had happened. I got out of there before the Chief could scramble up on deck to chew me out again.

I didn't go very far in the Olympics. I was growing so fast I had to move up from the 125pound class to lightweight, 135 . I could weigh in with my clothes on for that class, but my opponents balanced the bar on the ounce after sweating off nine to ten pounds.

	I won my first bouts, with a Dane and a Belgian, but then tangled with a Finn who was the strongest man I ever wrestled. His neck was so big he could button his collar and slip it on over his head. I got a full nelson on him with my fingers locked, and you can break an ordinary opponent's neck with that hold if he doesn't roll over. (It was barred in intercollegiate wrestling.)

	This Finn broke my full nelson as if I were a girl. He just shoved his head back and damned near tore my fingers out by the roots before I could grab loose. He pinned me in four minutes and went on to win the world's championship.

	Too bad I had outgrown the 125-pound class. In the finals of that class, two Americans met whom I had thrown at Annapolis, Gerson of Pennsylvania and Ackerly of Cornell. Ackerly won the world's championship. I had pinned him six months before, with my patented "hold" of course, after the fastest four and a half minutes I ever put in on a mat.

	Incidentally, Navy's eight-oared shell won the world's championship at Antwerp. My roommate, Victor Jacomini, pulled bow oar in this boat.
The United States won the unofficial team championship by a wide margin in the 1920 Olympics. We had a team of several hundred athletes, all specialists in their events. England came in second with a team almost as large as ours. Finland was third with a team of about thirty men. The Finns were all-around athletes. A Finn would be runner-up for the world's championship in wrestling, he would place fourth in the pole vault and third in the shot-put, and win the marathon. They were the outstanding all-around athletes at the games that year.

	The Russians found out that the Finns were pretty tough competitors too when they attacked them early in World War II.

	While in Antwerp I had my first flight in an airplane. It was a World War I plane, a beat-up two seated open-cockpit job. The hop cost fifty francs and lasted five minutes, and we got up to three thousand feet. Seven years later I got my naval aviator's wings, and I remained an active pilot until I retired.

	After the games we athletes got a lucky break. The U.S.S. Pittsburgh ran up on the rocks in the Baltic and the Frederick had to rush to her assistance, leaving the athletes behind. We to wait three weeks for a ride home on the Army transport Pocahontas, five bucks a day extra pay because we were on temporary "duty" overseas. It was nice work for young ensigns, if you could get it.

	In the interim my classmate Larry Litchfield and I made a trip to Berlin, Prague, and Vienna. In Vienna we ran out of money and had to borrow our railroad fare back to Antwerp from the American consul there. Larry is chairman of the board of Alcoa and I doubt if he ever has to borrow money to get home now.

	At the Academy in connection with my French study, I had corresponded with a young French girl going to a school in Paris where English was taught. I wrote to her from Antwerp and asked her if Eddie Willkie and I could visit her. With her parents' permission she replied that we could. So Eddie and I spent two memorable days in a tiny town called Maurs in the Cantal department of southern France.

	Eddie was an All-American football player as well as a wrestler. He weighed 230 pounds in his stockinged feet, was 6 foot 6, and hard as a rock. Marie spread word around town before we arrived that Eddie had won the world's heavyweight championship at Antwerp and that I had won the lightweight tide. We meant to correct this error but never got around to it

	They were having a carnival at Maurs when we got there and they made us its heroes. Marie was a very nice gal and her dad was mayor of the town. Her family were not wealthy but were very hospitable. Every meal we had there was a banquet, washed down with wine, champagne, and liqueurs. They really gave us the VIP treatment. It wasn't that they were trying to promote any romance, except maybe incidentally. It was a matter of the Republic of France entertaining the United States Navy. The U.S.N, made out real good.

	We did, however, have to put up with one minor difficulty. Eddie and I had to sleep in a double bed. Lightweights and heavyweights should not sleep together in the kind of bed they gave us. Instead of a mattress the guest bed had about five feather quilts on it, each one about a foot thick and very soft. Since Eddie weighed twice as much as I did, he made the bed sink so far in the middle I had to sleep on top of him. Wrestlers are accustomed to bodily contact and to being on top of each other but this arrangement was a little on the cozy side.

	Maurs was way off the beaten track, untouched by the War, and we were the first Americans who had ever stopped there.
Eddie and I never drew more water the rest of our lives than we did there, not even when Eddie's brother was nominated for president some years later.

	After the Olympics I was ordered to the U.S.S. Delaware, one of our first dreadnought-class battleships.

	At this time snotty ensigns always started off their naval careers on the battleships, which were the backbone of naval power then and the undisputed queens of the seas. They were heavily armored and fast, and for that day and age they packed a murderous wallop. The classic War College concept of a modern naval battle was for the battleships to line up one behind the other and blast away at their opposite numbers while finagling to cross the T of the enemy battle line. The other combatant naval vessels -- destroyers and cruisers -- were of secondary importance. They were supposed to scout for the battleships and to dart in and out from the van and rear of the battle line, harassing the enemy battle wagons with torpedoes.

	Submarines, although they had almost beaten us in World War I, were brushed under the rug by the postwar naval powers. They were regarded as an inhuman weapon which wouldn't be used by "civilized" nations. But we all kept a few of them -- just in case.

	The airplane had played a spectacular although minor role in World War I. But it had plenty of noisy enthusiasts who predicted it would soon out-mode all conventional weapons, especially navies. General Billy Mitchell was one of the noisiest. Billy didn't do his cause much good because he exaggerated so much. He was too far ahead of his times, which is almost as bad as being a fuddy-dud living in the past. In 1921 he was screaming for things, then and there, which wouldn't be technically feasible for twenty years.

	I was an observer at the bombing tests which were conducted in 1921 at General Mitchell's insistence off the Virginia capes against the ex-German battleship Ostfriesland. About the only thing that these tests really proved was that the army aviators couldn't hit a bull in the stern sheets with a big bass fiddle. But Billy yelled to high heaven that they proved battleships were obsolete. We had seventeen battleships then and were to build a dozen more before we finally relegated them to the scrap heap after World War II, in which they played a very minor part. Billy probably rolled over in his grave and muttered "I told you so" when the Missouri finally joined the mothball fleet in the 1950's.

 	Naval aviation at this time was just emerging from infancy into its early childhood. The only aircraft carrier we had was the Langley, a converted collier. The battleship admirals all figured airplanes might possibly be useful in spotting the fall of shot from their big guns, but that was about all.

	Our first real carriers were an incidental byproduct of the 1921 naval conference which set up the 553 ratio for the U.S., England, and Japan in capital ships. After this conference we had to stop building big ships, including two huge battle cruisers which were over half finished. Rather than scrap these great ships we converted them to aircraft carriers, which were so little regarded at this time that the treaty didn't even mention them. Hence die Lexington and Saratoga, forerunners of the great carrier fleet that smashed the Japanese navy, and of the nuclear carriers we are building now.

	Destiny has devious ways of working things out. Had it not been for the 1921 naval treaty we might have had to wait a long time for the battleship-minded admirals to authorize building any carriers. We might have fought World War II with a battleship navy.

My first ship, the Delaware, had ten 12inch guns in five turrets, was about five hundred feet long, displaced 25,000 tons, and had reciprocating steam engines which could drive her at about 22 knots. She was a coal burner but some of her boilers had experimental oil burners which the Navy Department was skeptically trying out.

	I got off to a bad start on the Delaware. I had reported aboard starry-eyed and determined to live up to President Wilson's certified high opinion of me. A couple of days later we coaled ship and it turned out to be a two-day job. The first day I got down in one of the barges with a shovel to set an example for the sailors. Having just come from the Olympics, I was in fine physical trim and I know I shoveled at least half of the coal the Delaware took aboard that day.

	I was completely pooped out that night and overslept the next morning when coaling resumed. I was one of six ensigns the Commander found in their bunks when he came snooping around next morning half an hour after reveille. We all got three days in our rooms for it!

	I was assigned to the engineers' department and stood a "makey-learn" watch-in-four. When we were under way my main duty was to avoid getting caught in the machinery and my secondary one was to try and learn how to operate the plant. In port I fell heir to the usual junior-officer assignments, such as officer, beach guard, safety observer at target practice and general handyman for all odd and unglamorous jobs.

	Naturally I coached the ship's wrestling team. Brought the Delaware up from last to the top of the Fleet in wrestling.

	We had a grand bunch of bright-eyed young hell raisers in the J.O. mess. Our official mission in life was to learn how to be naval officers so we could pull our weight aboard the ship. But we all figured the ship's official mission was to haul us around from port to port so we could explore the great world we live in and shake up its inhabitants wherever we found them in a rut.

	We figured naturally that we could beat the hell out of the J.O.'s in any other ship in the fleet in any contest they wanted to name from booze fighting to fist fighting -- but we were perfectly willing to team up with them if necessary to fight for the civil rights of ensigns in the U.S.N, when elder citizens tried to deny them to us. The year I spent in the Delaware was almost a total loss so far as advancing my value as a global naval strategist was concerned. But it was a lot of fun.

	At this time Prohibition was raging in the United States, and of course the Navy had gone dry by General Order of Secretary. Daniels some years before the country did. From 1914 until the country went dry, the Navy was actually bone dry aboard ship. But as soon as Prohibition broke out, liquor came back aboard most Navy ships, under cover, of course, and the Navy was wet until Repeal. As soon as the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed, the Navy went dry again and has been that way aboard ship ever since.

	One incident on the Delaware taught me a lesson that was useful in my later naval career. The Delaware was supposed to be the fastest battleship in the Fleet, about a knot faster than all the others, which could only make about 21 knots.

	Each year, on the way back north from winter maneuvers at Guantanamo, the battle wagons ran a full-power trial in which they had to steam wide open for four hours. To add zest to these trials all ships ran their tests together and made a race out of it. The ships, steaming at 19 knots, would line up like the horses in a trotting race. When the Admiral could squint down the line both ways and see all foremasts lined up, the flagship would fire a gun and the Fleet would be off for four hours at full power.

	The Delaware looked forward to this annual event eagerly. raised a big pot to bet against all comers. When no other ship would cover our dough we made obscene comments about the guys in the other J.O. messes of the Fleet. We were a cocky, patronizing bunch of boastards.

	In the actual race, in 1921, the Delaware came in dead last, five miles astern of the rest of the fleet. It was, you might say, a bit embarrassing. If we had been a submarine we would have pulled the plug and submerged. The Chief Engineer felt like opening the scuttling valves and doing it anyway.

	What happened was that they gave us a lousy load of coal in Gitmo just before sailing. It had been sitting under the tropical sun there for years, and although it looked OK, and burned all right under natural draft, as soon as you put on forced draft for full power the stuff clinkered. You couldn't hold a full head of steam with it.

	It certainly wasn't the fault of our engineers that we fluffed so badly and publicly. It was just one of those things. None of us felt very good about it.

	The Chief Engineer blew his stack. I think maybe the Captain made a few sarcastic remarks to him after the fiasco. Anyway, the Chief called all his officers and men together and delivered a tongue-lashing about being an incompetent, lubberly bunch of quitters with a yellow streak in us. He laid it on real good.

	Actually, everybody in the fire-rooms had split a gut for four hours trying to burn the goddamn fireproof stuff Gitmo had given us. The engine-room force used every trick of the trade to get all there was out of the steam we gave them. Nobody quit on the job and we all knew it was bad coal that had done us in. (Later, chemical analysis confirmed this.)

	That tirade from the chief, who should have stood up for his own people, almost caused mutiny. It taught me about the only lesson I learned on the Delaware that was of much future use, except for extracurricular ones. It was -- if you are the victim of a bum rap from above, take it, and shut up. Don't pass it on down.

	From the Delaware I went to the destroyer Stevens as chief engineer. She was a 1,200ton four-stacker, could make 35 knots, and had geared turbines developing 30,000 H.P.

	By this time World War I was safely over, the Navy was being put through the wringer because it probably would never be needed again anyway, and we were trying to operate on a shoestring, manning the tin cans with half a crew. We spent of our time in port tied up six ships at a buoy with only one boiler lit off in all six to save oil.

	Usually tin-can duty is good experience for a young officer. He gets more responsibility on a small ship and learns more about seamanship and ship handling by having to do things himself. But on the Stevens the extent of our cruising was Newport to New York to Charleston to Philadelphia. Even in those short voyages, undermanned as we were, we managed to back her up on the rocks once and almost capsized her in a storm.

	We laid her up in the Philadelphia Navy Yard in 1922, mothballed to last until the next world war, if any. But she came to an inglorious end. Fifty of her four-stack sister ships were pulled out of moth balls when Hitler's hordes were overrunning Europe, and figured in the destroyers-for-bases deal that F.D.R. and Churchill made when England was hanging over the ropes. Alas, the Stevens was long gone by then. She had been sold to the United Fruit Company. They took half her boilers and engines out and converted her into a fast banana boat.

	When we mothballed the Stevens I must have been living a good life, because with no wangling whatever on my part I was ordered to the U.S.S. Pittsburgh, then fitting out to sail for a two-year cruise in the Mediterranean. How lucky can you get, in your third year out of the Academy?

CHAPTER FOUR

EUROPEAN DUTY

	The Pittsburgh was an obsolete armored cruiser that would just clutter up the ocean in a naval battle. But she was well suited to be the ceremonial flagship of our Mediterranean Fleet and to haul adventure-seeking junior officers to exotic places. You couldn't learn much about modern fire control in her, but you could learn to stand a smart deck watch, and to render proper arrival and departure honors to VIPs ranging from vice consuls to high-ranking flag officers or even reigning monarchs. You could also learn how to handle a division of sailors -- to say nothing of learning what makes the wheels go round in such places as Constantinople, Cairo, Algiers, Athens, Rome, Nice, Paris, London, etc. The research which we conducted in these places seemed to indicate that the same thing made the machinery rotate everywhere, at least so far as ensigns in the U.S.N, were concerned -- wimmen.

	We no sooner arrived in Gibraltar than we got orders to sail under forced draft for Constantinople. Hell had busted loose in Asia Minor. Mustapha Kemal had routed the Greeks and burned Smyrna and was threatening to move on Constantinople.

	At Constan we anchored in the midst of one of the greatest international armadas ever" assembled. Every maritime nation in Europe had at least one man-o'-war there, and the British, French, and Italians had squadrons. Even the Japs got into the act.

	We soon learned never to get caught up on deck at 8 o'clock in the morning. That's when the colors go up and by universal naval custom the band plays your own national anthem and follows it with those of all nations having warships present in port. If you were unlucky enough to get caught on deck at 8 bells you had to stand at attention and salute for twenty with the damnedest racket going on you've ever heard, bands blaring away all over playing different anthems in different keys.

	Whenever anybody had a national holiday, everybody full dressed ship and fired twenty-one guns at noon. We got blisters just hauling the dressing flags up and down, and we blasted away more gunpowder than they did in the Battle of Jutland.

	The Turks on their national holiday asked us to fire three salutes, one at 8 A.M., one at noon, and one at sunset Not only that, they said it was their custom to fire a hundred and one instead of only twenty-one guns and they asked us to follow suit. This was a bit too thick. Twenty-one at noon was all they got.

	Ashore, there were British, French, and Italian armies of occupation, nearly a hundred thousand troops. There were about fifty thousand sailors in the fleets and half a million Russian refugees ashore. The refugees were the aristocrats of the czarist regime who once had everything and now had nothing.

	If you take half a million refugees, a hundred thousand soldiers, fifty thousand sailors, and a polyglot local population of several million, and stir them all up together, you've got quite a dish of hash. Season this dish with the fact that Kemal might overwhelm the city any day and you've got a goulash that tastes pretty hot. The Russians all figured, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow Kemal comes and the world ends. The allied military governments were broad-minded, and so were the Turk civil authorities. It would be an overstatement to say that in 1922 Constantinople was a hotbed of Christian virtue.

	I'm not going to clutter up this family volume with the early amatory exploits of a lot of naval officers who are now retired after years of distinguished service to their country. Suffice it to say that if you had a Russian mistress who was not at least a countess you were regarded as somewhat uncouth and careless of your social standing.

	The standard Russian toast is Za vasha zderovia, meaning "to your health." We approximated it with "cockroaches all over ya."

	Despite the enticing pitfalls all around us, relatively few of the boys got into any real trouble. In a complement of eighty officers only two had to be sent home with black marks on their records (liquor, of course). They were wardroom officers who were supposed to know better. The J.O.'s got into many jams, but were able to worm their way out.

	One of the characters floating around Constantinople at this time was a redheaded radio man off one of the destroyers by the name of Godfrey. Used to play the ukulele at some of the hot spots around town. Got to be a sort of radio announcer later on. Arthur and I didn't know each other then, but we got to be good friends later. We tell each other the damnedest lies about our Constantinople days when we get together now. He always gives my books nice blurbs on his radio and TV programs.

	Another well-known waterfront character was a ten-year-old orphan who lived by himself in a junked boiler down in the city dump. He had a cot in there, a small charcoal stove to keep the place warm in the wintertime, and a samovar and porcelain stove to cook his meals. He was alone in the world, making his own way. His right name was Ali, but we used to call him Mustapha.

	At the age of six he was adopted by the crew of the U.S.S. St. Louis, then stationed at Constantinople. They found him on the waterfront, took him aboard ship, and with the skipper's permission made him a member of the crew. They made special uniforms for him, gave him a hammock to sleep in, and a sea bag and ditty box to keep his stuff in. For a year he was a regular member of the ship's company, mustered with the First Division, had a regular liberty card, and was hauled up to mast before the Captain for punishment, whenever he got out of line. When the St. Louis went home they pulled all sorts of wires to take him along but couldn't get permission and had to dump him ashore on his own again.

	We were perfectly willing to take him aboard the Pittsburgh, but by that time he had set up housekeeping in his boiler, had several good rackets going, and couldn't see being under naval discipline again.

	The kid spoke seven languages fluently and had the best command of profane and obscene waterfront English I've ever heard. His seagoing vocabulary was colorful, forceful, and included every four-letter word in the language. When that kid told somebody off it was worth listening to. He could make any bosun's mate or Marine top sergeant sound like a Sunday school teacher.

	He was a busy little guy, with a finger in many pies. His enterprises included begging, running errands, pimping, fencing for thieves and peddling their loot, and pickpocketing a little his own. But his real profession was acting as a guide for wealthy tourists.

	Whenever a tourist ship came in he would put aside the ragamuffin clothes he usually wore and dress himself up spic and span in flowing white Turkish trousers, sash, colorful jacket, and fez. He would go out with the pilot to board the ship, go up to the main salon, and latch on to the most affluent-looking fat cat he could find.

	He was the best guide in Constantinople. He knew the city like he knew the inside of his boiler -- all the points of interest for tourists, the best ways to get there, all the shops, hot spots, dives, or whatever you wanted. Any cab driver who tried to gyp his protégés would get himself cursed out in seven different languages. No shopkeeper ever overcharged his patrons, except in certain shops where he had an arrangement with the proprietors. His command of languages enabled him to act as guide for anybody. He often got as much as fifty dollars for one day's work from wealthy tourists -- and he earned it.

	He lived high on the hog when he had tourists in tow because they would take him to the swankiest restaurants in town with diem. He could order a meal like a real gourmet. Liked his liquor too, although I never saw him drunk.

	He had no faith in banks. He wore a money belt in which he kept his earnings, and carried a curved scimitar to defend them. He knew how to use it too, as a big Armenian roughneck found out when he tried to get the money belt.

	All the American sailors knew him and used to borrow money from him between paydays at outrageous interest. They never failed to repay it because he had a free gangway on all U.S. men-o'-war and if he ever had to come aboard to dun anybody for money due it was a scandal to the jay birds. The delinquent one had better request transfer to the Asiatic station rather than try to live down the blast that Mustapha would put on him with all his shipmates listening in.

	I've often wondered what became of this little guy. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that he has since become the premier of Turkey.

	It's hard to see how they ever got any business done around Constan. There were three Sabbaths each week, the Mohammedan on Friday, Jewish on Saturday, and Christian on Sunday. So there were only four business days in the week at best. On top of this the calendars of the Orthodox and western Christian churches are two weeks out of phase. So at Christmas and New Year's you had a month with four big in it. Whenever Christmas fell on a day between Sunday and Friday you had a month with only fourteen business days in it. I don't see why everybody didn't go broke.

	The Pittsburgh rode at anchor in the Bosporus just upstream of Dolma Bagtche Palace for nearly a year, ready to evacuate Americans in case Kemal moved in.

	But Kemal stayed in Asia Minor, moved his capital to Ankara, and became the great liberator of Turkey. Despite his Mohammedan background he was also the damnedest two-fisted drinker of Scotch whiskey the Turks have ever known. The only moral that this points is that if you ever want to liberate Turkey you should stay plastered on Scotch.

	After about a year, the ominous rumbling in Asia Minor subsided and the Pittsburgh got underway to carry out her major mission, namely to enable ensigns Thug Harper, Andy Lawton, George Bahm, Ossie Colclough, D. V. Gallery et al to explore the bright spots of Europe and North Africa.

	The night before we got underway the Dolma Bagtche Massacre occurred. The victims of this international atrocity were Ensign Ash Pleasants and myself.

	That night being our last one in Constan after a long stay, the sailors naturally went ashore and raised a little hell along the waterfront. Just before the last liberty boat left the Dolma Bagtche landing to take the boys back to the ship at midnight, the liberty party observed an old naval custom and beat up the squad of Turkish soldiers who were guarding the landing. So far, so good. Nothing unusual about that.

	But an hour or so later Ash and I drove down to the landing, paid off the arabache driver and started dickering with a Turk boatman to row us out to the ship. We were both clean, sober, and ready to stand "eight-to-eight" (it says here). We didn't want no trouble with nobody.

	The Turk Guards were still licking the wounds inflicted by our liberty party an hour before and were just aching for someone from the Pittsburgh to appear so they could wreak vengeance.

	As soon as they heard us say "Pittsbourg" to the caique pilot they let us have it. Ash and I got the hell beat out of us. Of course there was only a squad on watch and I still say we might have held our own if the Turk army had been organized, as all other European armies are, with eight men in a squad. But the goddamn Turks had twelve guys in a squad and we were outnumbered too heavily.

	After sweeping up the dock with us they tossed us into the boat and told the caique coxswain to shove off.

	As we were pulling away from the landing I thought I saw a chance to get in the parting shot in this battle. The sergeant commanding the squad was standing on the edge of the dock making derogatory comments in Arabic about me and Ash and there was a long boat hook with a bronze end lying in the bottom of the caique.

	Forgetting that the boatman was a Turk, I grabbed the boat hook and was about to clout the sergeant in the ear with it. The boatman dropped his oars, whipped out a long curved scimitar and flung me back in the stern sheets with the point of his knife poised an inch from my jugular vein.

	He made some ill-tempered remarks in Turkish and then pulled back to the dock, where I was hauled out of the boat and beat up some more. Finally the soldiers let him take us back to the ship.

	We made no report of this next day because reports lead to investigations and investigations often uncover things which are misinterpreted and cause trouble for the J.O.'s involved.

As will be related in due course, the Republic of Turkey finally made amends to me for this indignity thirty-three years later.

	After leaving Constan, we went everywhere that the water was deep enough to get into from Cairo to Stockholm. We even made some ports now behind the Iron Curtain, such as Reval, Riga, Danzig, and Swinemiinde.

	We were in Germany when the mark took its final collapse and became wallpaper. When we got there in the summer of '23 you got a couple of million marks for a dollar. When we left a month later you got eighty million. It was fantastic.

	You could go ashore, change one dollar into marks and get a whole hatful of official-looking money with at least five zeros behind the first significant number. You couldn't buy any hard goods with this rubbish because shopkeepers wouldn't accept payments in marks. But even paying in dollars or pounds you could buy jewelry, cameras, Zeiss glasses, and clothes much cheaper than you could steal them.

	Perishable commodities such as wine, women, and song, theater tickets, hotel rooms, and limousines with a liveried driver were so cheap it was ridiculous. You could make a big liberty on a dollar and still have half a hat full of money left when you came back to the ship.

	In Anno Domini 1965, when inflation is driving prices up in the U.S.A. and gold ingots are pouring out of Fort Knox like rats from a sinking ship, the fate of the mark in 1923 should be an ominous warning to us. Unless Americans are willing to settle for an honest day's work for an honest day's wage, "cheap Chinese labor" by people who are willing to work for less -- like most Europeans -- may bust the dollar just as bad as the mark was busted. I still have some handsomely engraved mark notes which were called back in, had a black bar stamped across the numbers, and had "80 million" printed in big red letters over the original amount. The printing job cost more than the notes are now worth. This could happen to our proud American dollar if we keep on as we are going.

	When we came to England, stopping at Portsmouth, I visited London for the first time. I had an eerie feeling as I went around the city that I had been there before. Many places I saw there seemed to ring a bell in the back of my head just as places in the neighborhood around Vernon Park where I grew up would have done. I had to keep pinching myself when I saw things that seemed to be familiar and tell myself. "You've never been here before." But the feeling persisted that I had been there, and that I knew these places well.

	The only way I can explain this is that I had read a lot of Dickens, illustrated by Cruikshank, when I was a kid.

	I was manager and right fielder of the baseball team on the Pittsburgh. We played local ball teams in such unlikely places as Riga, Gothenburg, Amsterdam, and London, among others.

	I was Officer of the Deck in Riga when the manager of the native team came aboard. He was a retired U.S. Navy chief who was living in Riga. He wanted to bum or buy a right-handed catcher's mitt, a hard thing to find even in the States.

	Our famous Flying Dutchman and baseball immortal, Honus Wagner, was a great hero to the Dutchman in Amsterdam. In the game we played with them they all took a terrific cut at the ball when they came to bat. Final score: Pittsburgh 30, Holland 20... good hit, no field.

	After two years in the Pittsburgh I was ordered back to the Academy to train for the 1924 Olympic tryouts. I was twenty-three then, in good physical shape, and had kept my hand in at wrestling on the Delaware and the Pittsburgh. I think I would have made the team again except that some sloppy rule writers did me in.

	The Olympic rules that year forbade the use of the "scissors." The intention was to bar the head and body scissors, both of which are brutal holds and can do serious damage to young athletes. A scissor on an opponent's arm can't possibly do any harm. But the loosely written rules just said "scissors." So when I slapped the only hold I knew on my opponent's arm in the finals at Madison Square Garden, he squawked "scissors" to the referee. The referee was a literal-minded guy and made me break the hold. That was the end of my career as a wrestler.

	Now that I'm retired from the Navy maybe I'll take up professional wrestling some day. But of course, I'd have to take a long course in dramatics first!

CHAPTER FIVE

PACIFIC FLEET

	After the Olympic tryouts I was ordered to the battleship Idaho in the Pacific Fleet, and my training as a modern naval officer really began. My tours of duty up till then had been a lot of fun although they didn't have much to do with defending the United States against foreign aggression. But the Idaho was definitely one of the keystones in our first line of defense at this time.

	She was a 35,000 ton battleship six hundred feet long with twelve 14-inch guns in a triple turrets. She was an oil burner, could make 21 knots, was heavily armored, and equipped with all the latest fire-control systems. Her armor plates could stop anything that could be thrown at them in 1925, and one of her big projectiles could blast anything out of the water, except another battleship, at a range of over ten miles.

	The Idaho was a crack ship -- the best one in the fleet at that time. She was the cleanest and smartest ship in the fleet, hardly ever had any men AWOL, and never a deserter. She was right up at the top of the heap in gunnery, athletics, and everything else except the engineering competition. She was always last in that. But there was a relation between her low standing in engineering and her high rating in everything else.

	To stand high in engineering you had to skimp on fresh water. If you did, the ship and crew got dirty and people didn't take the pride in their outfit that they should. On the Idaho, so long as your part of the ship was clean and your clothes were immaculate at inspection you could have all the fresh water you wanted. But on some ships after a hard day's work when you were all stinking and dirty you had to take a salt-water shower. Taking a salt-water shower is about like trying to make love wearing a winter flying suit and heavy leather mittens. It is unsatisfactory.

	The Idaho was a taut ship. They ran things by the Book. If you did something good you got a pat on the back. If you goofed you got a kick in the pants. That's the only way you have a crack ship like the Idaho. knows where he stands.

	If in addition the skipper will go to bat for his crew when necessary, you've got a combination that can't be beat. When the crew knows the skipper will stick his own neck out for them they will do anything for him. But sailors are smart cookies and they can see through a phony. If the skipper does things to impress the admiral which hurt the crew he is cutting his own throat. The only time his crew will put out is when he cracks a big black whip over them.

	We had two skippers and two execs during my tour in the Idaho. They were Captain W.S. Crosley and Commander A.B. Cook, followed by Captain A. St. Clair Smith, and Commander Freddy Poteet. Among our heads of departments were Lieutenant Commander Savvy Cooke, the gunnery officer and later a four-star admiral, and Lieutenant Commander Norman Scott, killed in World War II on the bridge of his flagship, the Salt Lake City, at the battle of Cape Esperance. In the wardroom mess, sitting at the low-pressure table next to me, was Lieutenant Deacon Parsons. He was bombardier of the Enola Gay and released the first atom bomb on Hiroshima, and eventually made rear admiral.

	Deacon dropped dead shortly after the war right after passing his annual physical exam. Bum ticker... very embarrassing to the medics. The United States lost the services of a brilliant young rear admiral.

	I can see how Deacon got the bum ticker. He helped develop the firing circuits of the Hiroshima bomb and bet his life on what he had done when he dropped it.

	At this time my classmate Apollo Soucek -- of whom more later -- was in one of the battleships. Apollo was a quiet, soft-spoken character with a sledge-hammer wit.

	One Monday morning I was standing on the dock in San Pedro waiting for the Idaho's boat and talking to Apollo, who had the beach guard that morning, when another officer from Apollo's ship arrived on the dock.

	This officer was a social climber who had married into the four hundred of Newport. He never missed a chance to make derogatory comparisons between society on the West Coast and the real McCoy in Newport, to which he was accustomed (since his marriage anyway).

	After saying "good morning" to us he promptly got off on his favorite subject. "Y'know, Soucek, society on the West simply can't compare with society on the East Coast."

	"Uh huh," said Apollo.

	"My wife and I have just spent the weekend as house guests of the most prominent social leaders of Los Angeles."

	"Yeah?" said Apollo.

	"Yes," said the socialite, "and to show you what I mean, believe it or not, Soucek, my host actually came down to breakfast on Sunday morning wearing a sack suit."

	Apollo looked at him in feigned shock and simply said, "Why, the son-of-a-bitch."*

	On the Idaho I was the First Division officer and assigned to Turret One. A 14-inch turret in those primitive days was about the equivalent of a SAC bomber in these enlightened times. A young turret officer had frightening power under his thumb tip. One 14-inch shell could blow up an enemy battleship, as was demonstrated at the Battle of Jutland. Of course in this atomic age the battleships are in the moth-ball fleet. But it may be of interest to learn how things used to be in the pre-atom navy.

	A well-trained main-battery turret was like a Notre Dame football team before N.D. went soft and began stressing education. Everything was done by machinery, but the shell hoists, upper and lower powder hoists, trays, and rammers were all run independently of each other, and the sailors throwing the switches needed split-second coordination to get the loading interval down and boost the HPGPM (hits per gun per minute). Speed and accuracy were the watchwords and only sissies worried about safety. When you fired a salvo the guns came back to loading position, the gun captains flung the great breech blocks open, and compressed air hissed into the powder chambers to blow the flaming gases of the previous salvo out of the bore. To save a little time the gun captains always hollered "bore clear," whether it was or not, because it was a hundred to one the bore would be clear before the powder charges were rammed home. (That time on the Mississippi when a turret blew up and we damned near lost one battleship was the hundred-to-one shot.)

	I had a chief turret captain who hated my guts and vice versa. He was a fine turret captain, but he resented having to take orders from a young-punk j.g. He figured it was his turret and I figured it was mine, so we didn't get along very well. He got shot and killed some years later when he was a cop in Los Angeles. I often considered shooting him myself but never quite got around to it.

•	Of course, nowadays Presidents wear sack suits at the inauguration!!

	Despite this lack of cordiality we had a good turret. We could pump out salvos of three 14-inch shells at ten-second intervals and put most of them through the target.

	In 1925 we were constantly training for the coming great naval battle with the Japs. We still thought then that it would be fought along more or less classic lines. We drilled at approaches and deployments of the battle line, attacks by light forces of the van and rear, and mopping-up tactics. Some officers thought airplanes might be useful for scouting and for spotting main-battery salvoes. But the big show would be the fight between the two columns of battleships. The carriers would be kept well over the horizon on the disengaged flank, and the big ships would slug it out. Actually, it worked out just the other way in World War II. Carrier planes did all the heavy slugging, and the battle wagons never got closer than 100-200 miles from the action.

	Once a year we would hold a regular Chinese New Year's out at sea and would run through the battle rehearsal using live ammunition. It was an awe-inspiring sight to see a dozen battleships, a couple of cruiser divisions, and several dozen destroyers all blasting away at the towed targets at once, with the tin cans darting in and out firing torpedoes too. Once or twice we held this practice a little too close to shore and the local taxpayers collected a lot of money from the government for busted windows, cracked plaster, and dishes that they claimed got rattled off the shelves.

	I think we would have beaten the Japs in a stand-up fleet battle. But of course no such battle ever came off. The last decisive fleet action was in 1905 -- when the Japs smashed the Russian fleet at Tsushima Strait.

	The odds against any such battle ever coming off again were very long because neither side would commit a large fleet to action unless it thought it had a decisive advantage. But both sides were not likely to feel this way at the same time.

	Jutland was an example. At Jutland, Admiral Beatty, in command of the British Battle Cruiser Fleet and second in command of the Grand Fleet, got himself sucked in by the Germans and almost lost his Battle Cruiser Fleet. He thought the German battleships were still in Wilhelmshaven, so when he sighted the German battle cruisers under Hipper he took after them hell for leather, and Hipper enticed him right under the guns of Admiral Scheer's battleships. Beatty had to wheel around and bug out for the protection of Jellicoe's fleet to the north, meanwhile taking a bad beating in the gun duel.

	In the pursuit to the north the Germans were now licking their chops because they thought the British Grand Fleet was still at Scapa Flow. It looked like they were going to finish Beatty off. Suddenly who popped up out of the mist but Admiral Jellicoe, the British commander in chief, with twenty battleships. Now it was Scheer's turn to reverse course and try to drag his can out of there.

	But Jellicoe had scruples about a tail chase taking him through waters which the fleeing Germans had just passed through. They might leave mines, torpedoes, or other un-neighborly stuff behind them. So he let them get away! He was so much stronger than the Germans he could have lost a whole division of battleships and still be in no danger. He should have annihilated the High Seas Fleet that afternoon and shortened World War I by at least a year. But he was too timid and nervous. A nervous commander in chief is about as useless as a goosey center on a pro football team.

	The strange thing is that if he and Beatty had switched jobs just before the battle started, the result would almost certainly have been a smashing British victory.

	Beatty was a completely fearless blunderer. He handled his battle cruisers incompetently and was getting hell beat out of him until rescued by the battleships. Early in the battle he made a remark which the Royal Navy still quotes with pride but which is probably the most asinine ever made by an admiral on his flag bridge, and that is saying a big mouthful.

	He had just seen two of his great ships blow up and sink close aboard him, and his own was being battered into a shambles. As the second ship blew up he turned to an aide and said, "There seems to be something the matter with our bloody ships today. Steer closer to the enemy."

	Under the circumstances, after making his shrewd observation about his ships, the next words out of Beatty's mouth should have been, "Leave us get the hell out of here."

	If Jellicoe had been in command of the battle cruisers he never would have gotten caught the way Beatty did. He would have scrammed to the north the instant he sighted Hipper and would in due course had delivered the High Seas Fleet within range of Beatty's guns. Beatty would then have barged in with battle wagons like a shark in an aquarium. With the odds so heavily in his favor he couldn't have failed to destroy the Germans.

	At Jutland both Beatty and Jellicoe bungled, but if they had simply swapped jobs they would have written another brilliant page in British naval history.

	The United States has built a total of fifty-eight battleships at great cost, and few of them ever fired a shot in anger except for shore bombardment. The Battle of Surigao Strait was probably the final battleship action in naval history. All our battleships are either scrapped or in moth balls now, and our Sunday punch today is the atomic sub firing the Polaris missile.

	This Polaris weapons system is of such terrible power that the only way it can justify its existence is by deterring the Atomic War and never being used. If we and the Russians ever start hurling atom bombs at each other it will be the end of both of us.

	Within the span of my naval career we moved up from the surface into the air to launch our primary weapons, and now we are going below the surface to do it.

	The scientists say that all life began in the depths of the sea and that many land creatures evolved from fish. A thing that can blot out most of the land creatures is now lurking down there in the depths of the ocean. If we ever fire it, the fish may have to get busy evolving again to repopulate the land areas.

	I put in two fine years in the Idaho running Turret One, coaching the wrestling team, and editing the ship's paper. She was the best ship I ever served in, except of course for those I commanded myself later on.

	I got in several jams with the ship's paper. This was a weekly four-page paper set up on our Linotype and printed on board. I had a lot of fun with it but also learned there are pitfalls an unwary publisher can fall into.

	One weekend when the ship was supposed to go to Seattle, the best liberty port on the West Coast, we were diverted at the last minute to Anacortes, a tiny Puget Sound village none of us had ever heard of before. Morale was at a low ebb when we dropped the hook in the Anacortes harbor.

	To help soften the blow I wrote for the ship's paper what I still think was a very funny piece, alleged to be the history of Anacortes. It contained some pretty outrageous statements about what went on in Anacortes and the peculiarities of the . The Mayor was the hero (or villain) of this piece, and I'm sure that if I had let any good lawyer read the piece before I started the presses rolling, he would have advised that a narrow-minded mayor might be able to make something of it in a libel suit.

	Shortly after we anchored, Hizzoner the Mayor came aboard to pay his respects to the Captain and offer us the keys to the city. Just as the Mayor and Captain were settling down in the cabin for a friendly cup of coffee the marine orderly marched in and handed the Captain two copies of the Idaho Yarn, hot off the press. The Captain noted the front-page headline, "History of Anacortes," and handed one copy to Hizzoner smugly pleased with the journalistic enterprise which this demonstrated.

	Shortly thereafter, the Captain and Mayor bustled up on deck both rather grim-faced, Hizzoner took a hasty departure, and the Captain sent for me. I found out then and there that a lot of this stuff about freedom of the press, editorial license, etc., did not apply aboard first-line battleships of the U.S. navy. I got fired on the spot, but was reinstated the next day, because after all I was running the best ship's paper in the Fleet at the time.

	I turned out a fine wrestling team on the Idaho. We were the champs among the battleships.

	I used to work out several times a week myself with our lightweight, a young carpenter's mate named Kinney. After a while it got so that I had a busy time handling him. He went on to win the All Navy Lightweight Tide.

	In 1925 the Idaho made the Australian cruise with the rest of the Pacific Fleet. We went to Sydney and were greeted with open arms literally as well as figuratively.

	The day the Fleet arrived, the leading paper in Sydney had a cartoon that took up half the front page and was symbolic of things to come seventeen years later. It showed the Fleet standing into Sydney harbor with the sun rising behind it and great rays of light reaching from the sun to the edge of the picture, thus making the background the Japanese flag. The title was, "The American Fleet Between Australia and the Rising Sun."

 	By 1926 most of the junior officers in the battleships were getting the flying bug, much to the disgust of many of the admirals, captains, and heads of departments in the battle wagons. On the Idaho, exec, Commander A.B. Cook, used to send for each J.O. who put in for aviation and lecture him about selling his birthright for a mess of pottage!

	In the middle of '26 I too sold my birthright and applied for flight training in the next class. Turned out to be a pretty good kettle of soup.

CHAPTER SIX

FLYING SCHOOL

	When I went to the flying school at Pensacola in 1926, the pioneer days of the Early Birds were over, but there was still plenty of danger and adventure left. We used to say, "You don't have to be crazy to fly, but it helps."

	There were twenty-three who got wings in my flight class including one Captain Ernest J. King, later commander in chief and chief of naval operations with five stars during the war. Seven of the class got killed the first year after we started flying, which is rough going. But although most of us remained on active flying duty for twenty to thirty years, we only lost one more after the first year (to the Japs).

	This was typical of most flight classes in those early days, and maybe it still is. The first couple of years out of flying school were the most dangerous. If you survived them, you learned enough in the process to stand a fairly good chance of dying of old age.

	"The planes we flew were open-cockpit biplanes of wood, wire, and fabric. They had non-retractable landing gear, no brakes, no landing flaps, no self-starter, and a tail skag instead of a swiveling tail wheel. The struts and wires between the wings gave them a build-in head wind, and for all types except fighters the cruising speed was just a little over 70 knots.

	Most of us who started flying in those days went into it for the glamor and adventure of it. Gambling is one of the great human vices. The biggest kick you can get out of gambling is when the stake is your life. Very few of us flew for the 50 per cent extra pay that we got, and those who did didn't make good pilots. They were too cautious. I think most of us would have kept on flying even if they had taken away the extra pay. There was some talk of doing this at times because the surface sailors who were running the Navy then begrudged the fly boys that extra pay. Whenever the question of abolishing flight pay came up, the aviators all swore they would turn in their helmet and goggles the day their extra pay was taken" away. But I don't think we would have. Most of us were hooked, and couldn't go back to normal shipboard routine.

	Your first solo flight is obviously a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The first time you take off by yourself, you break some kind of barrier and enter a new dimension. You will never be the same again, but you probably have to go into orbit to get that feeling now -- but that's how it was back in 1927.

	Despite the high death rate we all figured, It can't happen to me. Each of us felt that he would die in bed. We used to say we would quit flying at the age of ninety-nine and then get hung for rape.
We never thought of death except when it got rammed down our throats by the sudden end of a friend. But we didn't plan things too far ahead, either. We lived from day to day. If we had something real big planned for the next weekend we might be a little more cautious that week because we didn't want to be in the hospital for the weekend. But the usual attitude was, If I get myself into any jam I can't get out of any other way, I've always got my chute.

	Whenever anybody did get killed we could nearly always put a finger on some mistake he had made and say, "I wouldn't have done that." We had a saying in those days, "When the salvage crew get to the crash they find blood all over, but no brains." Even today most accidents are blamed on pilot error one way or another, and as long as we could read pilot error into a crash, we could always persuade ourselves that it wouldn't have happened to us.

	The really bad crashes were those where some sort of mechanical failure like a wing coming off caused disaster. In those cases, we just swept it under the rug and gave the plane a little more thorough preflight inspection for a while.

	I hope no young pilot learning to fly today who happens to read this book will take anything I say about those early days as applying to the 1960's. Things have changed too much. They fly infinitely better planes today, but they fly them higher, faster, and farther, and need more room to land and take off. The air is also much more crowded, and they fly today in weather when even the birds are walking. We never flew unless we could keep the ground in sight.

	I feel we certainly earned our flight pay in those days, but I think the present-day pilot earns his even more. Things can happen in jet planes that couldn't happen in the old crocks. When they do, you've got to make up your mind a lot quicker.

	When we had an engine failure, we could glide around for a while looking for a good cow pasture to land in. Dense treetops were a safe landing place. So was the water. Main highways were OK too, except you had to watch out for damned-fool drivers.

	When you found a field for a dead-stick landing, you maneuvered to come in the long way of the field and up wind if possible, keeping your approach a little high and fast all the way until you were sure you had it made. Then you pulled the nose up a little, dropped one wing, kicked high rudder, and side slipped in over the treetops and down to the ground. There you leveled off, fishtailed to kill your excess speed, and stalled her in straight ahead, ignoring such things as small trees, fences, and chicken coops. Nine times out of ten, unless you were unlucky, you could walk away from it without a scratch.

	But today when you have a flame out in a jet, that cancels your contract with the government. You have to bail out right away. Come to think of it, I date myself as an old fossil when I say "bail out." The air blast would break your back before you could get halfway out of the cockpit of a supersonic jet. They "eject" now.

	One of our hazards in those days was just plain ignorance. We were exploring an unknown area, and it was a big one. There are many things about flying that small boys know now which experienced pilots didn't know then. One example is the flat spin. Commander Alford, a Pensacola classmate of mine, and lieutenant Bill Butler, All-American halfback in 1918, were killed in one at Newport soon after we got our wings.

	We had learned at Pensacola that if you got into a spin, all you had to do was shove the stick forward and kick opposite rudder until the spin stopped, as it always would, unless you were too low to begin with.

	Then along came a new-model aircraft with a sensitive center of gravity, and the regular procedure wouldn't stop a spin. A number of the boys got killed before one of them hit the water, survived, and was able to tell us what the score was. Now everybody knows you've got to load your plane so the center of gravity isn't too far aft. But we had to kill a number of good lads before anybody knew it.

	I have a story I like to tell which shows how much kids know now about things we had never even heard of in the early days.

	Two five year olds from the kindergarten are playing marbles in the schoolyard during recess. Suddenly there is a great whoosh overhead, and they look up just in time to glimpse a jet plane disappearing over the treetops.

	FIRST KID. Gee! What was that?

	OTHER KID. Why, that's the Navy's new night fighter, the XFQ12, that's going on the Independence. You ought to know that.

	FIRST KID. Well that's what I thought it was. But I heard they were having trouble with that plane. Not enough thrust on take-off.

	OTHER KID. They were. But then they put in that G.E. afterburner, the Z-128, and got two thousand pounds more thrust. Of course, then they ran into that aileron trouble.

	FIRST KID. Yeah. But they put power boost on the ailerons and coured that. Remember?

	OTHER KID. Sure. But then she started buffeting going through the sound barrier. I wonder what they did about that?

	FIRST KID. They just swept the wings back five more degrees and added 15 per cent more area to the stabilizer....

	At this point the school bell rings and the kids start gathering up their marbles, and one says to the other, "So now we go back in and string some more of those silly damn colored beads."

	But now that we are rocketing into outer space even jet flying is becoming "square stuff" for the kids. By now we know most of the things there are to be known about flight in our own atmosphere. But our astronauts have barely scratched the surface of cosmic space. Each time one of them goes into orbit the big question is, What brand-new phenomena that we know nothing about will I meet this time?

	Rockets can blow up on the launching pad; they can go astray, making it necessary to eject the astronaut and blow up the rocket; a little too much oomph in the booster can heave them out so far they'll never come back; many things can go wrong on re-entry and make them burn up like meteors. But these are all known hazards, which the boys can evaluate ahead of time, prepare for, and accept. 

Although space travel is a desperately hazardous business, everything is checked and double checked during the countdown, and control systems are duplicated and paralleled so that if one fails another can take over. But the real big question mark in each astronaut's mind as he lies strapped to his seat at "minus one minute and counting" is, What may I see this time that no one else has seen up to now?

	Until Colonel Glenn's flight we knew very little, for example, about weightlessness. Even after it, all we knew was that four and a half hours of it wasn't bad at all. Glenn saw color displays in the sky at sunrise and sunset that no one in the free nations had ever seen before. He also saw little luminous objects floating past his portholes at sunrise that had him and the debriefers puzzled.

	One of the debriefers asked him, "Did they say anything?" This may sound like a silly question, but I don't think it was. It would have been just as silly to ask him, "Did you see little luminous objects floating past your portholes at sunrise?" until he had reported them.

	Anything can happen out there, including strange objects or even creatures peeking in your portholes at sunrise. I don't know why most of us jump to the smug conclusion that man is the only intelligent being in this infinite universe in which the earth is a mere flyspeck. 

	There may be many intelligent creatures out there, much smarter than we are, perfectly at home in an environment in which man couldn't exist. Maybe they are the souls of former generations of men. Because if they are really intelligent and smarter than we are, I think they would stay farther away from this pest-hole of ours than Glenn got on any of his orbits. But at any rate, when an astronaut reports unknown things peeking in his porthole, I think it's perfectly logical to ask him, "What did they say?"

	Anyone who is in active military flying has a number of narrow escapes where the difference between living happily ever after and sudden death is a close thing. In many of these, luck is the deciding factor.

	I have had several close shaves where I can say I came out of it OK because I reacted right. In others I had figured out ahead of time what I would do if something happened, and simply followed the preset plan. During over thirty-three years of active flying, I was in the pilot's seat in four crashes. They were major crashes so far as the airplanes were concerned. But nobody got hurt. However, I would say that at least every other year, on the average, something happened where the outcome seemed to depend on pure chance, with the odds being about 50-50. The straight gambling odds against still being alive after almost thirty-four years of active military flying (with one 50-50 near miss every second year) are Vi to the 17th power. This works out to be 131,072 to 1 against. I cannot believe that I am lucky enough to beat this kind of odds nothing but pure chance working for me. I simply have to think that maybe my Guardian Angel nudged my elbow the right way more than several times. After all, he was my first instructor... remember?

	I could spin many yarns about the improbable things that happened at Pensacola in the early days, but I'll settle for just one, the saga of "Country" Moore's watch. It involves three classmates of mine, Joe Boler, "Cat" Brown, and "Country" Moore, all retired Admirals now with nine stars among them. Country was a lanky farm boy from the deep South, an All-American football player and an Olympic oarsman. He was honest to a fault, rather excitable, and always said exactly what he meant without beating around the bush.

	At one point in the course we had to fly some decrepit torpedo planes turned in by the fleet and not much good. Each student had to put in a certain number of hours flying these lumbering old seaplanes around. Since there were twice as many students as there were planes, we had to get back promptly from our daily flights so the next guy could get his time in.

	One day Country Moore taxied in to the beach exactly on time after his hop, and Joe Bolger was waiting with his flight gear on to go out next.

	"Don't take that crate out, Joe," said Country.

	"Why not?" asked Joe.

	"It's dangerous," said Country. "It can just barely fly."

	"Well, you flew it, didn't you?" said Joe. "If you can fly it, I guess I can too."

	"But I'm a lot bigger and stronger than you, Joe. I'm warning you, don't try to fly it," said Country.

	"Come on, Country," said Joe, "cut out the horse-feathers and let me get in there."

	Country climbed out of the cockpit shaking his head and muttering ominously. "All right. But don't say I didn't warn you."

	As Joe got in he said, "Hey, Country, lemme borrow your watch, will ya? I want to be sure to get back on time."

	"No, SIR," said Country. "I ain't gonna lend you my watch!"

	"Why not?"

	"You're gonna crash," declared Country. "I don't wanta get my watch busted up."

	"Cut it out, Country, and lemme have the watch."

	"No," said Country, "I'm telling you, Joe, you're gonna crash."

	"Look, Country," said Joe, deciding to humor Country, "if I crash, I'll keep the watch out of water. If the plane sinks, I'll stand on the upper wing holding my hand straight up over my head so that the watch won't get wet even if the crash settles on the bottom." (Pensacola Bay is shallow.)

	Country finally relented and gave Joe the watch.

	Fifteen minutes later, Cat Brown came roaring in toward the beach in another torpedo plane. He landed down wind, heading right at the beach, bounced into the air, and the next time he came down he hit the concrete ramp leading from the water up to the apron by the hangars. The plane slid up the ramp, disintegrating as it did so, with propeller blades, struts, pontoons, and wings flying in all directions. As the fuselage came to rest between the hangars, Cat Brown leaped out, rushed up to the Chief Instructor who was standing there with his mouth open, and yelled, "Sir -- there's a bad crash out in the bay."

	"What the hell do you call that thing you just got out of?" demanded the instructor.

	It turned out the crash was Joe Bolger. He had stubbed his toe and smashed the plane up into small pieces. The crash boat found him swimming around in the wreckage, his face pretty badly cut up from going through the windshield. An ambulance rushed him up to the hospital as soon as the crash boat got him ashore.

	Country arrived at the hospital just minutes behind the ambulance. He demanded to see Joe, and they directed him to the emergency room. Country rushed up there, but they wouldn't let him in. However, he raised a big fuss, indignantly pointing out that he was Joe's roommate, and the head surgeon had finally to come out to calm him down.

	"Look," said the surgeon, "there's no use arguing about it. You can't see Mr. Bolger now, and that's that."

	"Hell, I don't want to see him, Doctor," said Country. "I just want to get my watch back."

	I was in one splintering crash as a student. It happened just after we got our wings and were shifting from training planes to service types.

	Another student and I went out together in a T3M on pontoons one morning, and alternating at the controls, each of us naturally tried to show the other that he was the world's greatest aviator. An hour later we wound up in a heap of junk that made one hell of a splash two hundred yards offshore from the Commandant's office. We were both able to hold our breath long enough to fight our way out of the submerged wreckage and got nothing but a good ducking out of it.

	There was an aftermath to this crash. The day before it happened I got a letter from my mother enclosing a miraculous medal with instructions to wear it at all times when I was flying. I sewed it inside my flying helmet and was wearing it for the first time when we crashed.

That evening I wrote home:

Dear Mother -- 
	Your medal was no good. I got through eight months down here without it and didn't put a scratch on an airplane. I wore it for the first time today and crashed....

By return mail I got the following:

My dear Boy -- 
	How dare you say the medal was no good. If you hadn't been wearing it you would have been killed.

	I wore that medal through thirty-three years and over ten thousand hours of active military flying without injuring myself or anybody else, although I did put several government airplanes in the junk heap.

	I was about halfway through Pensacola when Lindbergh captured the imagination of the world by flying to Paris. Up to this time my mother had been strongly opposed to my flying. Lindy won her over. I'm sure she decided that if Lindy could fly the Atlantic, I could do it better.

	Toward the end of the course at Pensacola we were flying fighter planes and part of the course was dogfighting. We were all feeling our oats then and every dogfight you got into was a close call for all concerned. To let another guy get on your tail, where he could shoot you down, was as humiliating -- as dropping a pop fly and losing a ball game. So those dogfights were as much for keeps as those in the Battle of Britain later. Even so we only had one midair collision. Both boys were killed. One was Thug Frawley, an Olympic teammate who pulled up the navy crew that won the world's championship at Antwerp.

	I had a strange thing happen to me once. It was a prophetic dream, in which I apparently foresaw the future.

	I was on duty at Pensacola as an instructor and was scheduled to be officer of the day over the weekend. On Friday night, I dreamed that Dick Gaines and Pop Conway went off on cross-country hops over the weekend and that Pop spun in and got killed.

	Dick and Pop were both friends of mine, although not intimate ones. I hadn't seen either for a week or so and had no idea what their plans for the weekend were.

	When I took over the duty at Saturday noon and looked at the blackboard with the weekend cross-country flights on it, the two names at the top of the list were Dick Gaines and Pop Conway. This was quite a coincidence, but I didn't give it much thought at the time.

	Sunday afternoon, I got a phone call from the airport where Pop Conway had gone. It was the airport manager. He said, "Lieutenant Conway, U.S.M.C. has just spun in here and been killed."

	I'm sure those who study extrasensory perception, precognition, and that sort of stuff will be able to calculate that the odds against this happening by pure chance are several million to one. Therefore, they will say, it must have been caused supernaturally. However, this sort of reasoning leaves me cold. Whenever you pick up a hand in a bridge game, the odds against getting that particular hand are several million to one. Therefore, by the same line of reasoning, supernatural forces must be at work.

	I have no idea how to explain a thing of this kind. I simply report it as an eerie fact and let it go at that.

	I had a close call one time when I fell out of a plane over Washington. I was practicing slow rolls in a Boeing single-seater and went into a roll with my left hand holding the throttle lightly and my right hand on the stick. We had just reached the inverted position and I was hanging head downward by the safety belt when the belt let go. My hands slipped off the throttle and stick and I took off head first for terra firma. As I was leaving the cockpit I instinctively kicked my legs apart, and the toe of my right shoe hooked on a projection up around the windshield. The only hold I had on that plane was with my right toe.

	A plane won't stay on its back with no one at the stick, and this one promptly went into a vertical dive. I still had my toe hold but the air blast flattened the rest of me back over the turtle-back, with my head near the tail. I had a parachute so I could just kick my foot loose, get clear of the plane and pull the ripcord.

	But we had started at seven thousand feet and I didn't have to bail out yet. The plane might hit in a populated area, so I decided to stay with it for a while.

	I found that by bending my right knee I could pull myself forward, still flattened against the turtle-back, until my hands could reach the after edge of the cockpit There I pulled myself to a sitting position on the rear of the cockpit, reached inside, got hold of the stick, pulled her gently back to level flight and got back into the cockpit. I must have looked silly as hell sitting there on the turtle-back like a cowboy riding a wild horse!

	When I resumed my place in the cockpit I expected to find the safety belt was broken. There was nothing whatever wrong with it that I could see. The buckle of a safety belt is so designed that the harder you pull on it, the tighter it is supposed to lock itself.

	Being of an inquisitive turn of mind I decided to buckle the belt again, try another slow roll and see what happened. But this time I was going to be cagey about it. My left hand, instead of being on the throttle, would be under the bottom of the seat, ready to grab if the belt let go, so I would still be firmly attached to the airplane.

	I did a couple more slow rolls, but I didn't find out anything. My left hand refused to cooperate in this project and wouldn't allow me to put any weight on the belt when we were upside down. Instead of just hooking under the seat ready to grab if the belt let go again, it took a firm hold and sank fingerprints into the metal of the seat bottom. I just couldn't get word down to it to relax and take it easy.

	I've still got the shoe I was wearing when it happened, with a half-inch gash in the leather of the toe to show how strong the air blast was.

	When I finished at Pensacola, there was no such thing as instrument flying as we know it today. We didn't have the cockpit instruments and we didn't have the navigational aids on the ground. Some of us claimed we could fly blind "by the seat of our pants," but that idea has long since been splattered all over the mountain-tops. While that belief prevailed, people used to say, "An aviator's brains are in his ass." When it was finally shown that an aviator's brains did not reside in his stern sheets, many people claimed this proved what they had really thought all along... that we had no brains at all!

	Practically, all military flying in 1927 was done in good weather, in daylight, or with a pretty good moon. This was still true in 1934 as F.D.R. found out when he called in the Air Corps to fly the mail and break an airplane pilots' strike. The mail wound up in the treetops all through the Allegheny Mountains.

	When you ran into bad weather in those days you either flew around it or landed until it went away. If you ever got trapped by bad weather the first rule was "keep the ground in sight." As the ceiling came down you stayed under it, figuring that before it pushed you clear down into the ground, you would find a good cow pasture to land in.

	When you had to fly through soupy weather your best "instrument" was the "iron compass," i.e., railroad tracks. They always lead somewhere, so if the overcast shoved you right down on top of the tracks you just followed them until they led you to a spot where you could land.

	Of course, sometimes the tracks would go into a tunnel in a mountain, in which case you just did the best you could.

	When you fly a single-seater cross country in good weather, you have a wonderful chance to confer with yourself and see what the score is. Once you get squared away on your course, settle down at altitude and get your mixture control and r.p.m. set, it takes only about 10 per cent of your attention to fly the plane. You can turn the rest of your mind loose and let it wander where it will, subject to abrupt recall if the engine sputters.

	In the summertime, when updrafts pile cumulus clouds into great heaps and columns, you can see all sorts of things in the clouds -- heads of men, women, angels, and animals. Sometimes you see whole armies of giants on the march, or locked in mortal combat with other armies. The great sculptures are changing all the time as you fly through the aerial museum hall from one exhibit to the next. Even as you look at them internal air currents may change a great snarling lion's head into a benign image of God the Father. I've never seen any images in the clouds except those of living things. The outlines are never sharp enough to create the illusion of inanimate or mechanical things.

	The head shrinkers have the Rorschach test, in which they show you a lot of random ink blots and ask you what images they suggest to you. From this they find out a lot of things about you that are none of their goddamn business. If they could read your mind as you flew along through a cumulus-studded summer sky, maybe they would find out a lot more.

	I used to sing a lot when I was flying by myself, making up new verses to our Bachelor Officers' Quarters drinking songs. I wish I could sing as well on the ground as I can all by myself up in the air. I can hit every note smack on the beam, and coming back through the lip microphone and earphones it sounds much better than Caruso ever did. You can feel your whole body vibrating in turn with what you are singing, and nobody ever yells at you to pipe down.

	You can put your brains in neutral as you fly along, and let your eyes roam around, looking at the cloud sculptures and taking in their images. At the same time various ideas come idling through your brain, until one happens to mesh and get the gears spinning. You can go on for maybe an hour or so, flying the plane more or less automatically, singing like a nightingale, enjoying the heroic scenery, and thinking great thoughts.

	Every now and then you have to come back to earth to check a landmark, make a position report, switch to a new tank, or to make sure you are clearing OK when another plane shows up.

	I don't know of any better way to get away from the turmoil and strife of this world and to enjoy life in peace and quiet for an hour.

	In the early days flyers on cross-country trips were lost a large part of the time. We had no radio beams and radar beacons to tell us exactly where we were. We had to navigate by dead reckoning, checking on prominent landmarks like rivers, railroads, mountains, lakes, etc. I had a bad half hour one time flying from Augusta to Pensacola, when a man-made "landmark" threw me for a loss.

	It was a clear day and I had taken a careful departure from Augusta, getting a good check on my ground speed and course on a rail junction about thirty miles out. For an hour and a half everything went fine. I was checking smack on course, and the landmarks were coming by exactly on time.

	I was using a Rand McNally map about four feet square. Before take-off I had carefully folded this map so that my course from Augusta to Pensacola ran down the middle of the main fold, showing about twenty miles of terrain on each side of the course. Then I folded it into accordion pleats so it would fit into the pocket of my coveralls and I could flip the pleats over to follow our progress as we flew along and still have a neat, easily-handled package.

	About two hours out, a great big lake loomed up in front of me that wasn't on the map. This was no millpond. It was a couple of miles wide and seven or eight miles long. I searched the map back and forth along the pleated section and there was no such lake to be found anywhere. I figured the wind must have shifted, or maybe my compass had gone haywire.

	A big shift of wind could blow those old slow planes more than twenty miles off course, so I put the plane in a turn, held the stick between my knees, and unfolded the map.

	In an open-cockpit plane this is one hell of a job. The map has a tendency to blow up and wrap itself around your face. You have a hard time holding it still long enough to get a good look at any given area.

	I struggled with that map for about twenty minutes, searching the whole state of Alabama for that lake. There was no lake anything like it anywhere in the state -- and I knew damned well we hadn't had a wind shift big enough to blow me clear out of the state.

	Finally my erratic circling carried me over the far end of the lake. There I spotted a big dam and power station. The map I was using had been printed in 1910 and the dam had been built since then. I was exactly on course.

	I arrived in Pensacola about a half hour overdue and have been skeptical about small lakes as landmarks ever since.

	Twice I flew in the Curtiss Cup Race. This was a seaplane race held each year in Washington. There were five classes of planes entered: trainers, observation planes, amphibians, torpedo planes, and fighters. The fighters always won, of course, but there were prizes for each other class too. It was a hundred-mile race up and down a ten-mile course from Haynes Point in Washington to Mount Vernon.  There was a pylon at each end where you made a 180-degree turn. 

	If you fly a plane within one wing span of the water you can make about 5 knots more than you can higher up. So everybody flew within a few feet of the water. You had to pull up to get room enough to bank for your 180-degree pylon turns.

	To avoid dragging things out too long they used to run off all five classes simultaneously. And to add a little human interest to proceedings they started the classes one minute apart, the slowest planes starting first. As a result by the time you got to the first turn there were about twenty assorted airplanes of various sizes and shapes jockeying for position to whip around in a vertical bank just missing the pylon.

	One pylon turn in that race is etched into my memory until the day I die. I was overtaking another torpedo plane and would catch up with him just about when we came to the pylon. If I went around the pylon outside of him I would lose ground on the longer circuit. If I climbed up fifty feet or so higher than he was and turned above him I would also lose ground (in climbing). I decided to turn inside him, if I could.

	I had to be careful about this because since I was passing him, he had the right of way. If he cut the pylon close enough, I would have to go inside the pylon to avoid him and would be disqualified. But he was approaching the pylon a little wider than I figured was necessary. I slid over behind him and got a few yards inside just as we started banking for the turn, twenty feet off the water.

	I had one eye on the pylon and one on my friend as we wound our big crates up into nearly vertical banks. If things started jamming up it was up to me, not him, to get out of there. We kept banking and hauling back on our yokes till our wings were almost vertical. He chickened out just a few degrees before I did.

	We roared around that pylon in a stacked-up formation with my pontoons a few feet from his upper wing. But, banked steeper, I was turning on a little shorter radius.

A small slip by either of us would have splattered blood, guts, and feathers all over the place.

	As the pylon flashed by I had it framed between my lower wings tips, so the turn was legal. As we unwound from our banks and headed down the river again I was in front -- and stayed there.

	Whenever I think of that turn now, and of some others in that race, I have a tendency to pee in my pants a little bit.

	Why that race didn't kill off most of the contestants, I'll never know.

	I won the torpedo-plane class that year. I wouldn't fly in that rat race now for all the gold we have left in Fort Knox (if any!).

CHAPTER SEVEN

NAVAL AVIATOR

	When we finished at Pensacola I had my heart set on going to a single-seater fighter squadron in one of the big carriers on the West Coast. Instead, to my disgust, I was ordered to VT 9, a squadron based at Norfolk and flying big, lumbering torpedo planes.

	Adding insult to injury when I walked into the B.O.Q. at Norfolk, where the pilots of Fighting Squadron 5 were quartered, the first thing to greet my eye was a sign saying, "No dogs or two-seater pilots allowed." '

	VF 5 were an insufferably cocky bunch of intrepid birdmen. Their squadron insignia was the head of the boar off a Gordon gin bottle surrounded by lightning flashes and thunderbolts, and they flew around wearing long red scarfs that trailed out in the breeze behind them. They thought that they were God's gift to young womanhood. We all hated their guts, but would have given a month's pay to transfer into their goddamn outfit.

	VT 9 was a hybrid squadron that was literally neither fish nor fowl. Our planes were supposed to be carrier-based land planes, but they had pontoons on them instead of wheels. So we tried to make like a patrol squadron. The only trouble was that our cruising radius was about four hundred miles and if we had to land in a rough sea we smashed our pontoons and became a submarine.

	But despite these handicaps we pulled our weight in the boat. We developed a technique for cutting this sort of squadron loose from a fixed base and-operated all the way from Newport, R.I., to the Gulf of Cherique, on the other side of Panama. Today jet transports can make this flight round trip without refueling. But with our short-legged seaplanes it took a bit of doing. We used to leapfrog from small mine sweepers equipped as tenders, which would go on ahead, lay buoys in a sheltered anchorage, refuel us, and give us a place to eat and sleep.

	One time while operating from one of our small tenders at Cienfuegos, Cuba, we made friends with a pelican. We noticed this rather crummy-looking old bird swimming around our tender, trying to swallow scraps of garbage that were thrown overboard. He didn't seem to be very happy. He never flew, and appeared to be getting weak. Then somebody noticed that his beak had a long gash in the side and that everything he tried to swallow came out through the gash. We sent a boat out, caught him, and brought him aboard.

	Then we all gathered around while our hospital corpsman sewed up the gash with catgut. The old bird was on the verge of starvation when we brought him aboard, but he soon corrected that when we turned him loose again. Before long he was flying and diving for fish as pelicans are supposed to.

	The old guy was grateful to us and hung around. I'm sure he associated us with the great noisy mechanical birds that were anchored around the lagoon. Be that as it may, one day when a group of us were sunning ourselves on deck, he put on a flying exhibition for us mat was a honey. He kept maneuvering around the ship, doing flipper turns, wing overs, and dive-bombing attacks on fish, squawking every now and then as if to attract our attention.

	After a beautiful exhibition of flying he pulled up to about a hundred feet astern of the tender, dove straight down, and leveled off about a foot from the water, making a high-speed torpedo run close aboard and looking up as he streaked by as if to say "How'm I doin', boys?" Then for a grand finale he pulled up in a steep wing over, reversed course, and came in for a full stall landing right alongside the ship.

	But the old duffer made one mistake. There was about a 15-knot wind blowing, and although he landed parallel to the wind streaks, as all birds and aviators do, he landed 180 degrees the wrong way, smack down wind. Naturally he landed much too fast, made a hell of a splash and almost nosed over, dipping his beak about a foot under water.

	He righted himself, and kicked angrily around into the wind without looking up at us. As he shook the water out of his eyes you could almost hear that old bird saying "son-of-a-bitch.

	One of our main jobs in VT 9 was working out tactics for attacking big ships with aerial torpedoes. Some scoffers will say that this was a waste of time because the only ship we sank with torpedoes during the war was the Musashi, after the dive had crippled her, and that at Midway we lost a whole squadron of torpedo planes without scoring a single hit.

	True, VT 8 got wiped out at Midway. There was only one survivor out of fifty-four men in an eighteen-plane squadron. The skipper of VT 8, Lieutenant Commander John Waldron, was in VT 9 when we were working out our attack tactics, and he used our system at Midway. But we based everything on the assumption that our torpedo planes would be supported by gunfire from surface ships, dive bombers, and fighters. John had none of this at Midway.

	When he found the Jap fleet he just barely had gas enough left to deliver his attack and get back to his carrier. Our dive bombers were rooting around looking for the Japs in another area; our ships were a couple of hundred miles away, and John had no way of knowing they would ever find the Japs. And besides, he couldn't wait anyway.

	So when John finally found the Japs it was the Moment of Truth for him and his gallant squadron. They could either go it alone against fearful odds, or turn back -- and John wasn't the kind that turns back. It is a great tribute to his leadership that his whole squadron stayed with him in a suicidal attack reminiscent in some ways of the charge of the Light Brigade.

	But this charge was not a futile one like Balaklava. Our dive bombers finally arrived over the Jap fleet when all their fighters were down low, picking off the last of John's lumbering torpedo planes. The Jap carriers were sitting ducks for our unopposed dive bombers, which polished off four of them in what turned out to be a turning point of the Pacific war. John's Light Brigade charge, which sucked all the Jap fighters down to low altitude was largely responsible for the success of the dive-bombing attack.

	VT 8 was warded the Presidential Unit Citation and John got a posthumous Navy Cross. It should have been a Medal of Honor. In this book John Waldron is one of the great heroes of the Pacific war.

	After three years in VT 9 I went to Pensacola as an instructor and then to the Post Graduate School for a three-year course in aviation ordnance engineering.

	The Ordnance P.G.'s were known as the "gun club" and were supposed to have an inside track on promotion. They alternated between shore duty in the Bureau of Ordnance and key jobs in the fleet at sea. As long as we had a battleship navy they were in the driver's seat. All the aviators that I can remember who managed to get into the "gun club" eventually made admiral, too.

	One day at the P.G. School I was walking down a back alley of the Naval Academy grounds and I met Rear Admiral Thomas C. Hart, the Superintendent. He later got four stars, was commander in chief of the Asiatic Fleet when the Japs clobbered us, and after the war became the U.S. senator from Connecticut. He was a strict disciplinarian, and my blouse was unbuttoned when I met him.

	I cracked up with a snappy salute, which he returned, and then he halted. So did I. He looked me up and down with a jaundiced eye, said, "Young man, button your blouse," and marched off.

	I hastily carried out his order and seriously considered crawling into the next trash can I encountered after we parted company.

	I didn't see the Admiral again for nearly twenty years. Our next meeting was in the main corridor of the old Navy building after the war. I was a brand-new rear admiral, and he had just become a senator.

	My blouse was again unbuttoned when I spotted him coming down the corridor.

	I quickly buttoned up, and since you don't salute in the Navy without a hat on, I stuck out my hand and said, "Hello, Senator, I'm Dan Gallery."

	The Admiral was obviously taken by surprise. But he did remember me. As he grasped my hand he said, "Hunh! They're making everybody admirals these days."

	Whenever I got feeling cocky about my rapid rise in the Navy, the memory of this meeting always brings me down to earth.

	After three years at the Ordnance P.G. School I went to VS 4, a scouting squadron on the Langley, our first aircraft carrier. Although this was 1935 we were still flying biplanes with fixed landing gear. The Langley was a converted collier; her flight deck looked about as big as a tennis court, and she could only make 14 knots, so we couldn't have flown anything but old crocks off of her.

	In those days a scouting mission that took you a hundred miles from the ship was a maximum effort. The cruising radius of the planes was five or six times that much, but the bottleneck was our. ability to navigate by dead reckoning and find the ship when we came back. If we missed her and got lost, the ship would open up on radio so we could try to take bearings. But this was done only as a last resort because in wartime an enemy could use those bearings, too.

At this time Admiral Reeves, whose naval career I had almost cut short with that speed cone on the Maine during my youngster cruise, was commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet Reeves was one of the most brilliant naval officers this country ever produced. He was a master of strategy and tactics, and a student of history, was articulate, and was a fine seaman and an inspiring leader. Although a product of the battleship era, he fully understood the capabilities of aircraft in naval warfare, and had qualified for naval observer's wings.

	He clearly foresaw the coming war with Japan and knew the Japs would start it with a sneak attack on the fleet just as they had hit the Russian fleet at Port Arthur in 1904, before a declaration of war. He constantly harped on the necessity for eternal vigilance against just such an attack.

	He drove this point home on Saturday afternoon when everybody had gone ashore for the weekend by cracking out an urgent signal from his flagship -- 

U.S. PACIFIC FLEET GET UNDERWAY IMMEDIATELY.                                                            RENDEZVOUS IN BATTLE FORMATION AT 5 A.M. SUNDAY
150 MILES WEST OF POINT LOMA.

	What a whoop-de-doo that signal created! "Immediately" means right now. You can't send messengers ashore to get the Captain, Exec, and Navigator off the golf course, or to round up the liberty section from the waterfront barrooms. You've got to get up the hook and go.

	Battleships steamed out of San Pedro that afternoon with two-and-*a-half-stripers on the bridge, leaving captains and commanders jumping up and down on the dock. For all anybody knew, this was it and the Jap fleet was just beyond the horizon.

	The rendezvous came off as directed on Sunday morning, and although all ships were shorthanded by about 25 per cent of their personnel, they could have fought the Japanese fleet had it been there. They wouldn't have been sitting ducks in the harbor, as they turned out to be only a few years later on another Sunday morning.

	After a year in VS 4, I fleeted up to command, my first. It was a good squadron and within the limits of our obsolete planes we did everything that was asked of us on fleet exercises and war games. But I'm glad we weren't playing for keeps on the war games.

	On one of these games I almost met the most ignominious fate I can imagine for an aviator. I was nearly shot down by a submerged submarine!

	I was working with the battleships on an exercise in which submarines to attempt to sneak in and "attack" the battle wagons. Rooting around about twenty miles ahead of the big ships, I spotted an oil streak that was pointed at the battleship column and was growing toward them at the rate of about 4 knots. Obviously it could only be coming from a submerged sub with an oil leak.

	I gleefully latched onto this tell-tale marker and radioed the exact position, course, and speed of the sub to the commander in chief. As the sub neared firing position, I got down low, flew directly along the oil streak, and pulled up sharply at the end, thus giving all the battle wagons a perfect visual check on the enemy.

	About the third time I did this, the sub reached firing position for her torpedoes and indicated this by turning loose a diabolical piece of ordnance equipment. It was a canister that came up to the surface and fired a rocket that shot up, burst, and released a parachute flare. This goddamn thing almost busted in my face. It was a miniature preview of things to come later, like Polaris.

	From VS 4 I went to command of an observation squadron in the battleship fleet. We flew seaplanes that were launched by catapult. Our job was to spot the fall of shot from the big guns so we could control the main batteries in the great battleship action against the Japs which the non-aviators still thought would be decisive in World War II.

	Until war broke out there was strong rivalry and jealousy between the surface sailors and the aviators, known respectively as the "black shoes" and the "brown shoes." One morning on the Langley I heard a couple of mess boys discussing life in the Navy outside the porthole of my cabin while they shining shoes. An old-timer was giving a newcomer the low-down on how things were in the Navy. He said, "Twenty years in de Navy, shinin' shoes... shine de white shoes... shine de black shoes... shine de aviators' brown shoes.... Battleships are jes de same as carriers, cepin' you don't have so many brown shoes."

	Maybe this was true from a mess boy's point of view, but believe me, it wasn't from a brass hat's. The black-shoe Navy still pinned its faith on the battleship as being the backbone of the fleet and the brown-shoe boys said the carriers would be the capital ships of World War II. At the time we were going through one of the great periodic naval transitions which occur when weapons change and which always stir up a rhubarb between proponents of the old and supporters of the new. In the past three centuries navies have gone from sail to steam, from wood to steel, and from battleships to carriers. As of 1965 we are in the midst of another change, perhaps the greatest change of all. We are going under water, and the Polaris submarine will be the capital ship of the future, until it goes into action and blows the world apart.

	By the beginning of the war, the aviators had won reluctant consent to a good carrier-building program, but the black shoes had nine big battleships on the building ways and still regarded the brown shoes as rowdy upstarts. Pearl Harbor, where most of our battleships got sunk, was really a blessing in disguise. It settled the hash of the battles i^s once and for all. No carriers got sunk there, so we had to fight the early part of the war without battleships, and by the time they were ready to go into action again, the carriers had proved themselves and the brown shoes were in control. From then on the battle wagons just tagged along and acted as floating antiaircraft batteries for the carriers.

	By law the carriers had to be commanded by aviators, but until war broke out most of our naval aviators were too junior to command a big ship. The Navy had got around this by training as flyers a number of older officers to fly who were senior enough to qualify for command. This worked out a lot better than you might think and some of the oldsters were pretty good flyers as well as good carrier skippers. Admiral Halsey was one of these, and Admiral King was another.

	"Uncle" Ernie King was in my flight" class at Pensacola, and when it came time for him to take his stunt check they told him he would be excused from that. But he wouldn't have it mat way. He went up and did his stunts the same as the rest of us. He was a good pilot, and he didn't do so bad either as commander in chief and chief of naval operations with five stars.

	In that same flight class we had commanders Alva Bernhard and Kelly Turner, both of whom made admiral. In fact, all of us who survived either made admiral on active duty or got "tombstone" promotions to admiral when we retired as captains.

	Soon after my class finished at Pensacola, who should show up there to learn how to fly but Commander "Mess-of-Pottage" Cook, our former exec on the Idaho. I was sure that some of his former junior officers who were instructors would bust him out on his can. But they didn't and his mess of pottage turned out to be three stars.

	At this time we had a big "hump" in the Navy promotion list due to all the temporary reserve officers of World War I who had been given permanent commissions. This was done mostly for the benefit of the admirals and captains who had been promoted ahead of their time in the war and needed a lot of junior officers to justify keeping their wartime rank. Promotion was by seniority in the lower grades, and well documented articles appeared in the Naval Institute magazine proving that the only prospect for my class was to retire at the age of sixty-four as two-stripe lieutenants. Under the promotion laws then in effect there was no other possibility. In between wars nobody gives a damn about the armed services anyway, so there was little hope of changing the laws.

	Whenever anyone asks me the secret of my success in reaching flag rank at the age of forty-three, I always think about the reporter who was sent to interview a multimillionaire for a success story. When he asked the tycoon, "To what do you attribute your rapid rise from rags to riches?" the great man replied, "To thirty years of hard work, thrift, keeping my nose on the grindstone, and to the sudden death of my uncle, who left me nine million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand dollars." To me and my classmates World War II was the sudden death of our rich uncle.

	Rear admirals on the retired list are a dime a dozen now. This is because anyone in the Navy who got a medal during the war was entitled by law to retire in the rank next above the one he held on active duty. Nearly every captain in the Navy during the war got some kind of medal, so almost all the retired rear admirals you meet nowadays are what we call "tombstone" admirals. No extra pay is involved, but they are entitled to put "rear Admiral, U.S.N, (ret.)" on their visiting cards.

	I don't know how the Navy managed to wangle this law. It was a silly one, and never should have been enacted. As soon as Congress found out that / was getting ready to retire, in 1960, they repealed it. So I am one of the few authentic rear admirals (retired) now at large in these United States. Almost all of my contemporaries who made rear admiral on active duty retired as vice admirals.

	Ah well! I made rear admiral due to a fantastic break of good luck. I guess I shouldn't bellyache about the bad breaks.

	My tour of duty as skipper of Observation Squadron 3 in the battleships was my last one as a pilot in an operational squadron. From then on, the only flying I had to do was four hours a month, with a safety pilot if I wanted one, in order to draw my flight pay.

	But I kept my hand in as an active pilot for the next twenty-one years, and still held a valid "green card" when I retired. I continued to fly all types, including single-seater jets, even after I made admiral. I did this for several reasons. One was that the younger pilots get a definite lift out of seeing the boss man take off and make carrier landings in a single-seater. Another was that the boss man gets a kick out of seeing the younger lads grinning their approval.

	In June, 1939, I was ordered to shore duty in the Bureau of Ordnance, where I had charge of the aviation section. In this job I was responsible for the development, buying, and testing of all ordnance equipment for our naval airplanes, including the famous Norden bomb-sight. This sight was the best bomb-sight in the world at that time, much more accurate than any other in existence, and we surrounded it with security measures like those used later on the Manhattan Project. It was so good that even the Air Corps came to us with their hat in their hand and asked us to share it with them, which we did (reluctantly, because we knew they couldn't keep a secret). The pickle-barrel accuracy which the Air Corps later claimed for it was an exaggeration, of course, but it was a fine bomb-sight, particularly for use against a small moving target like a ship.

	Nazi spies tried to penetrate the iron curtain with which we surrounded the Norden sight. They did, once, and planted an agent in the test room of the Norden factory.

	Smart work by the Office of Naval Intelligence and the FBI trapped him. I was up to my ears in this intrigue, of course, and for a while considered buying a cloak and dagger myself.

	Actually I don't think it would have done the Nazis much good even if they had gotten a complete set of blueprints. Certain vital bits of information were purposely omitted from even the official prints on file in the Bureau of Ordnance.

	Even if they had stolen a complete bomb-sight they would have had trouble duplicating it. It was almost a watchmaker's assembly job.

	In the two years I was in the Bureau of Ordnance I saw the contracts for the Norden sight go from $800,000 to $80,000,000. Since all our heavy bombers of World War II were eventually equipped with this sight, we must have invested close to a quarter of a billion in it altogether. The ironic part of it is that after we got into the war it turned out we didn't need that kind of sight. In the Navy we found that with inexperienced wartime pilots, we could do better against ships by dive bombing than we could by horizontal bombing even with the Norden sight. For the Air Corps, in city busting, no bomb-sights at all were necessary. The Norden sight was a wonderful precision instrument ideally suited for use by experts against small moving targets, but those conditions didn't prevail in World War II. Just shows how wrong the experts can be at times.

	The only proper use we made of the sight was for dropping the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where we wanted ground zero at a precise spot.

	I was in the Bureau of Ordnance when our two-ocean-navy program got into high gear after the war started. After the blitz on Poland, the calm before the storm set in. Six months of "phony war" slipped by, with both sides apparently unwilling to really fight. Then came the explosion. Norway, Rotterdam, Dunkirk, and the fall of France left most of a stunned world convinced that Hitler's Wehrmacht was invincible. Even when the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain to the gallant lads in the R.A.F., England's cause still looked hopeless. But thanks to Churchill, the R.A.F. and the Royal Navy, the British stuck it out.

	Meantime, the United States edged closer and closer to getting into it. Lend-lease began giving Churchill the tools he needed to finish the job. The destroyers-for-bases deal wrote a new chapter of international law. We revised the geography books, declared Iceland a part of the Western Hemisphere, and moved in there with the British. The Atlantic Fleet began escorting convoys and attacking U-boats that ventured into the new Western Hemisphere around Iceland.

	Most of us in the U.S. Navy had no doubt whatever that we would wind up in the shooting war eventually, despite F. D. R.'s campaign promises assuring American mothers "again and again and again" that we would not.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LONDON

 	In January, 1941, I was sent to the American Embassy in London as a naval observer. I went over on the Pan Am Clipper from New York via Bermuda, the Azores and Lisbon. London was catching hell from the air, so I made my will before going and took a good look at the Statue of Liberty as we left New York, wondering if I would ever see the old gal again.

	At this time I thought England was doomed. The British Empire seemed to be a decadent relic of the past which was coming apart at the seams because it was run by a bunch of stuffed shirts and Colonel Blimps whose main interest in life between wars had been preserving their special privileges.

	I didn't think much of Hitler and his Nazi thugs. But the Nazi system seemed to be in tune with the times. To say the least, it had been sensationally successful so far. It looked like one of the facts of life which we would have to live with for many years.

	I volunteered for this observer job for two reasons. One was to learn things which might be useful to the United States in dealing with Hitler after he conquered England. The other was to get in on the excitement.

	On the Pan Am Clipper, Lord Louis Mountbatten sat in the seat next to me all the way to Lisbon, where he transferred to an R.A.F. plane. Lord Louis was a captain the Royal Navy and had seen plenty of action in the war at sea. The destroyer Kelly got sunk from under him at Crete when Lord Louis had his rudder hard over trying to dodge bombs. She capsized while still making 30 knots. He was swept off the bridge as she keeled over. He then saw plenty more action as a destroyer division commander. He had just relinquished command of the aircraft carrier Illustrious, then under repair in the Norfolk Navy Yard. He was on his way back to England to head the new Commandos and later to be Supreme Commander, Southeast Asia, with four stars.

	I listened all the way to Lisbon, learned a lot, and acquired great respect for Lord Louis as a leader and a fighting man. He was no Colonel Blimp. No one listening in on our conversation would ever have guessed that he was from the inner circle of the royal family. I wasn't quite so sure that England's cause was hopeless when we parted in Lisbon.

	But things did look grim for England in January, 1941. Hitler had overrun the Continent, the Luftwaffe was blasting the British industrial centers every night, and the U-boats were running hog wild along the Atlantic shipping lanes.

	True, the R.A.F. had driven the Nazis from the daylight sky and won the Battle of Britain. But death prowled overhead each night. True, the R.A.F. and Royal Navy held Hitler's Panzer divisions at bay on the French side of the English Channel only twenty miles away. But when you saw the nightly carnage wrought by the Luftwaffe in London, Coventry, Bristol, and elsewhere, when you saw hordes of hungry people huddled together sleeping in the subway stations at night, and when you saw the top-secret reports in the Admiralty of the U-boat sinkings, it just didn't seem possible that England could survive. Many qualified observers, including Ambassador Kennedy, didn't think so. Neither did I, really, despite Lord Louis.

	Most Americans had forgotten by this time how close the U-boats came to starving England into surrender in World War I. England depends absolutely on her imports of food to keep her people alive, to say nothing of her imports of vital strategic materials and munitions. In 1917, for months, England was only a few weeks away from starvation and surrender while the U-boats made a shambles out of the North Atlantic sea lanes. The convoy system, adopted at the insistence of our Admiral Sims, finally saved them just in the nick of time.

	A civil population with a lot of guts, like the British, can hold out under unbelievable punishment from bombing. When they get blitzed they just brace themselves until the attack is over. Then those still alive .come out of the shelters, put out the fires, clean up the rubble, bury the dead, and go on about their business. But with starvation it's different. No matter how much guts and love of country you have, when you don't eat there comes a point where the body simply cannot carry on whether the spirit is willing or not.

	England faced up to this gaunt prospect of starvation in both world wars, and until about June of 1943 they could never be sure they had it licked in World War II. Churchill says, in one of his books " .. the only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. "I need hardly add that Sir Winston didn't frighten easily. Having been First Lord of the Admiralty in both wars, he knew all about the U-boat problem, and knew that no amount of blood, sweat, and tears could save England if her food supply was cut off.

	In 1941 the Battle of the Atlantic was just approaching its climax. U-boats sank over 4,000,000 tons of Allied shipping that year at a cost of only thirty-five U-boats. Although the danger of starvation was not yet acute, the U-boats were sinking ships faster than we were building them, and the Nazis were building U-boats faster than we were sinking them. England was losing the Battle of the Atlantic and the worst was yet to come. In this battle 1942 was to be a grim, almost disastrous, year.

	Later Japan found out what it means when an island empire is cut off from the sea. Toward the end of the war, our submarines had Japan bottled up and sealed off from her sources of food, raw materials, and oil. In mid-1945 her surrender was just a question of time. The official U.S. "party line" now is that we cut the war short and saved thousands of American lives by dropping the atom bomb. This is a lot of hogwash.

	In August of 1945 we didn't have to do anything but wait a while, and the Japs would have been starved into submission. Waiting wouldn't have cost any American lives. It would have been utter murderous folly to invade Japan -- as we fully intended to do at that time. But now we justify dropping the bomb by claiming that it saves us the appalling loss of life that would have been involved in a foolhardy invasion.

	England, Germany, and Japan fought on in World War II despite terrible punishment from the air. I'm sure that if, between wars, we had been able to accurately foresee the destruction that would be heaped on their big cities, no on would have believed that any country could take it and survive.

	We seem to feel the same way now about an atomic war. The next big war will certainly be infinitely worse than anything we have known so far. It seems incredible that civilization could survive a hail of megaton blasts.

	But I was in Tokyo a few days after the surrender. "Civilized" life was still going on amid the charred ruins there only four hundred miles away from the still-radioactive shamble of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Maybe civilization can survive the atomic blitz.

	We will never be sure until we have tried it -- and man always does try such things.

	My job in England took me around to various R.A.F. bases and naval stations gathering technical and tactical information. We had much to learn from the British about radar and aircraft armament. We had everything to learn from them about early warning, fighter direction, and civil defense.

	The job also gave me a fine chance to see how the English people were taking it, from the very bottom level of society to the upper crust. I spent several weekends in London groping around in the blackout with the air-raid wardens. We visited the tube stations in the East End which served as "home" for thousands of families who had been bombed out, and as sleeping places for many others whose homes were close to the docks -- the main target of the Luftwaffe. The tube stations were full of standee bunks for those whose homes had been blitzed. Those for whom there were no bunks slept on the concrete platforms. They slept with their feet toward the tracks, leaving a narrow passageway between their heads down the middle of the platform, and also at intervals between their bodies, where the car doors would open when the trains stopped. The air was foul from sweat and overwhelmed toilet facilities. Lights glared in the sleepers' faces and the trains ran all night. Babies learned to sleep through it.

	None of these people seemed to have the slightest doubt that England would win the war. Upstairs from the station whole neighborhoods were being bombed flat each night. The refugees in the tube stations kept a stiff upper lip and even could put on a show of being cheerful about it.

	I remember one sassy-looking young cockney gal who preferred the deep, lighted, tube station to the blacked-out bomb shelter above ground. Speaking of the shelter, she said, "You sit there in the dark and you may get blasted into maternity any minute... the 'ell of it is, you won't even know 'oo done it."

	After two weekends of touring the tube stations I had a look at the other side of the coin. I spent a weekend as house guest of Lady Smiley at her manor house about twenty miles outside of London.

	The manor was blacked out, of course. But that was the only obvious sign there was a war on. Almost the full staff of servants were in attendance, all of them family retainers too old for military service.

	The guest list, present company excepted, read like a page from Burke's Peerage and included several members of the family. I played poker with a duke, two lords, a retired four-star admiral, a brigadier who you could tell had spent most of his life in "Injah" the moment he opened his mouth, and a couple of old duifers who were right out of Wodehouse's latest story. They were all solid citizens too, and took most of my dough away from me although I always cut the cards carefully. We went to church on Sunday in the chapel of Windsor Castle, sat next to the royal pew, and I put a crown in the collection plate. (God forgive me for helping support the Anglican heresy.)

	Dinner at Lady Smiley's was a memorable affair. I sat next to the Duchess of Something-or-Other who had come out from London because her flat near Berkeley Square had come apart during a recent air raid. I'll never forget her description of the debacle. She said, "We heard the sirens but decided it would be a frightful bore to go to the air-raid shelter again. Some incendiaries came down on nearby houses, but the air-raid wardens dealt with them. Then a land mine descended in the square with a parachute on it. It rested there for a moment and then let itself off with a great roar. It knocked in all the windows, lifted the roof off the house, and it was MOST disagreeable."

	Soon after dinner got underway the Duchess focused her lorgnette on me and asked, "Do you speak English?" (All the American observers at this time wore civilian clothes.)

	I should have fumbled in my pocket as if reaching for a Polish-English dictionary and said, "Don't spik very good but I understand."

	However, I doped off on that opportunity and simply admitted deprecatingly that I was an American naval officer. She asked me where in the U.S.A. I came from. "Chicago," I answered.

	"Oh...," said the Duchess vaguely. "The only other person I ever heard of from Chicago is Al Capone."

	With that I made up for missing the boat on the language question. I told her a tale about Al Capone and I being childhood playmates, growing up together, and how I had helped him to organize his gang. I told her that some early troubles had made it necessary for me and Al to rub out a few weak sisters in the gang with a baseball bat. (By this time the Duchess' eyes were as big as the lenses in her lorgnette, and her eyebrows were going up,aad down like Yo-yos.)

	"Finally," I said, "There just wasn't room enough in the gang tor me and Al both, so I joined the Navy and went to Annapolis."

	I'm sure the Duchess believed every word of this. She is still probably telling her friends about the "typical American" she sat next to that night.

	Please don't think that I mean to belittle any of those people in any way. They were all in war work one way or another, most of them making great sacrifices. Knowing what the score was better than the cockneys in the tube stations, they may not have been so sure that England was bound to win. But they all were sure that they would rather die than submit to Hitler.

	Perhaps the most belligerent character I met in England was a noble lord of about sixty-five at Lady Smiley's that night, who was in the Home Guard. His invasion station was at a crossroads about a quarter mile from the manor. His command was only a squad, equipped with World War I rifles. But his plans for that squad were more ambitious than those of Marshal Montgomery for the Eighth Army. I am sure that no Nazi invaders would have passed his crossroads until his lordship and all his men had been killed.

	I did some flying during this period by joining the Auxiliary Air Transport Corps, an outfit of ferry pilots who were ineligible for the R.A.F. for one reason or another, such as age or physical disability. We went to the factories where they built Hurricanes or Spitfires, and ferried new planes to the R.A.F. fields where the armament was to be installed. So I can say I flew fighters over England during the blitz -- but they were unarmed.

	I had several chances to go along in bombers on night raids over Germany. The British were very liberal at this time in dishing out Distinguished Flying Crosses and Air Medals to American observers. You could get them by just taking a junket over Germany with Bomber Command. But these missions didn't get back till nearly sunrise so you didn't get much sleep if you went on them, and I never did. I couldn't see much future in it anyway.

	I spent some time at various R.A.F. fighter stations observing the boys about whom Churchill said, "Never have so many owed so much to so few." How right he was!

	You could never tell from seeing these boys around the mess that their life expectancy for the next week was little better than 50-50. Each time a pilot left the mess for an operational flight, there was a good chance that he would never come back.

	Fighter pilots are a breed apart among warriors. Nearly everyone in military service runs the risk of sudden death in wartime. But usually it is a common risk shared with a group of friends. On a large ship you all go into battle together and if disaster strikes, you are surrounded by shipmates who are literally "in the same boat." It's more or less the same way with ground troops.

	But a fighter pilot often goes into battle all alone. He bets bis life against the other guy's every time he makes a pass at an enemy plane. He always tries to catch the other guy unawares, and to come down on him out of the sun for a sitting-duck shot. He has to have a neck like an owl and keep twisting it to make sure the other guy doesn't pull the same stunt on him.

	Often there are no witnesses to his combats. If he comes back, he is hampered only by his conscience in what he puts in his report. Whenever he gets into a fight, it's nearly always because he was up there looking for it. Any time he feels so inclined, a fighter pilot can abort a mission, return to base, and say "She started cutting out on me at fifteen thousand feet." No one will ever question this, unless it gets to be a habit.

	One of our first observers in England, a good friend of mine, was a former fighter pilot from VF 1, which had been a hotshot outfit in the Pacific Fleet along about 1935. Like all VF 1 pilots, this officer was quite a gabby guy and thought VF 1 was the most in any phase of aerial combat that you can name. On his first visit to an R.A.F. fighter station, he backed a quiet-looking Spitfire pilot into a corner and spent half an hour lecturing to him, with the usual weaving hand gestures and elbow cocking, on how VF 1 used to make their attacks on towed sleeves. His listener appeared to be quite interested and made some intelligent comments during this instruction period.

	Later, my friend found out that his pupil was Paddy Finucane, the R.A.F.'s greatest ace in the Battle of Britain. He had shot down two Nazis over the Channel that very morning.
My friend later made admiral and continued to talk too much until he retired.

	Most of the R.A.F. fighter pilots were nonprofessionals, but they formed an elite, dedicated outfit.

	Churchill was right when he said these lads saved our way of life in the Battle of Britain.

	I returned to the States in March and was back in England again in October. By this time we were in the undeclared war with the Nazis, escorting British convoys and attacking U-boats that molested them too far west in the Atlantic. It was obvious that this would soon blossom into a full-fledged shooting war, despite F.D.R.'s election promises to the contrary, so we were now building a great seaplane base at Loch Ryan, in Scotland.

	I was back in England to supervise the building of this base and to command it when we got into the war officially. I spent about a third of my time at Loch Ryan, in Annie Laurie's country, a third circulating around in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the rest living in London with five of my contemporaries in a flat on Berkeley Square.

	This job in Scotland was one of the very best available for an officer of my rank. It promised command of a large shore base and the patrol squadrons assigned to it when we got into the war. I would be in one of the key spots in the Battle of the Atlantic, based in Scotland, where the bombing wasn't so bad, and close enough to London to get down there as often as I wanted to. It was a choice billet for a captain and I was only a commander. I considered myself very lucky.

	I was in London early in December, 1941, when relations with Japan neared the breaking point. All of us in the Berkeley Square flat assumed that a sneak attack by the Japs on the Pacific Fleet was coming soon and that we would be ready for it. We weren't soothsayers, and we didn't know that our black-chamber boys were reading the Jap codes, but we did know a few basic facts about Japanese history. We accepted the coming Japanese attack as being just as certain as tomorrow's sunrise, and it never even occurred to us that any American naval officer might do otherwise.

	Then that awful Monday morning they woke us up about 1 A.M. and said, "Get over to the Embassy right away." At the Embassy just around the corner we got the incredible news of the disaster at Pearl Harbor. The top-secret dispatches from the Chief of Naval Operations (C.N.O.) tried to tone it down a bit, but couldn't conceal the fact that we had been caught sound asleep and clobbered real good. We were told to wear our uniforms from then on.

	This could not have happened if Admiral Reeves had still been commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet. He would never have agreed to basing the Fleet at Pearl Harbor in the first place. And even if he had, you can bet your starboard anchor he wouldn't have had all the battle wagons tied up alongside each other in a bunch at Ford Island, fat, dumb, and happy, just asking for it!

	I never thought I would be embarrassed by my U.S. Navy uniform. But I would rather not have worn it in London that Monday morning after Pearl Harbor.

	Our gallant British allies were most sympathetic in a smug way, but couldn't conceal their relief that we were finally in it with them. The smugness disappeared two days later when the Prince of Wales and the Repulse got sunk off Singapore. But at any rate the undeclared war was over and now we were fighting for our lives together.

	Only two months later the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and the Prinz Eugen made their unbelievable daylight run up the English channel from Brest to German waters. They caught the R.A.F. and the Royal Navy both "with their thumbs up their arse" as the Limeys say. This, coming so soon after the debacle at Singapore, really cut the British down to our size and stopped all patronizing about Pearl Harbor. Each of us could make just as bad boo-boos as the other.

	This Channel operation, incidentally, was rammed down the throats of the reluctant German admirals by Hitler himself. He insisted it would catch the British flat-footed and that they wouldn't be able to react quickly enough to stop it. Like so many other of the paper hanger's early hunches this one turned out to be right, too. It is no wonder that, for a while, many of his henchmen thought he was supernatural.

CHAPTER NINE

ICELAND

	The "DAY OF INFAMY" brought on more naval disasters than just the sinking of a few battleships at Pearl Harbor. Among other things it blasted me out of the nice job that I had lined up in Scotland and landed me in the arctic boondocks. Our plush new seaplane base at Loch Ryan was turned over to the R.A.F. and I was ordered up to Iceland to command the Fleet Air Base at Reykjavik. At this time the air base was in crates on a pier in Brooklyn. We had a squadron of PBY amphibians in Iceland, and the personnel were camping out around Reykjavik aerodrome in dilapidated Nissen huts abandoned by the British, and on an old four-pipe destroyer.

	The situation was grim. Our boys were eking out a miserable existence knee-deep in mud, waiting for their ship to come in. All that came in was me!

	The wind howled through our broken down Nissen huts with arctic glee. The well-dressed man-about-camp wore two sets of long flannel drawers and without our eider-down sleeping bags at night we would have frozen. Our galley was equipped with salvaged junk, and the food was terrible. The principal plumbing necessities were of the Chic Sale variety, and you couldn't take a bath even if you wanted to. While struggling to stay alive under these conditions, we also had the little problem of helping to guard the North Atlantic convoy lanes in the worst flying weather in the world.

	The first couple of months were rugged. But Pearl Harbor had hit us all the same way. We were so stunned and ashamed that we didn't mind living like Eskimos for a while. We were content to comply with Admiral King's directive, "Do the best you can with what you've got." We plunged into the Battle of the Atlantic and did our share of escorting convoys over the stormy Atlantic in the short foggy winter days five hundred miles south of Iceland.

	The year 1942 was to be the worst in the Battle of the Atlantic. Over 7,500,000 tons of ships went to the bottom that year.

	England passed through several desperate crises in World War II. Dunkirk was one and the Battle of Britain was another. They were both indeed Moments of Truth. But both were over in a few days.

	England's survival depended on the sea battle fought in the North Atlantic just as much as it did on what happened on the beaches at Dunkirk or in the skies over Britain. But the outcome was in ghastly doubt for months upon months instead of only for days.

	It depended on many things. Among them were the number of new U-boats that the Nazis were building and the night raids of the R.A.F., aimed at smashing these boats on the building ways. It depended on our destroyers and corvettes and their limited ability to find and destroy U-boats around the convoys. It depended on the number of aircraft that we could put over the convoy lanes and their ability to detect and destroy submarines. Finally, it depended on our ability to build merchant ships faster than the U-boats were sinking them. In 1942 the U-boats had the upper hand in all phases of this battle.

	Plenty was being done that would finally stem the tide -- if it got done soon enough! New radars were being developed to enable planes to "see" U-boats at night and in fog. Torpedoes were being perfected that would home on the noise of a U-boat's screws. Better planes and escort ships were taking shape on the production lines. And a huge merchant marine was being built in the shipyards of the United States. But in 1942 we were losing the race, and in the single month of November, the shambles at sea mounted to over 800,000 tons sunk.

	England still held out. We flew a huge air force into the beleaguered island. We transported an invasion army there. We supplied Russia with the munitions that enabled her to keep on fighting. But it was touch and go.

	Our job in Iceland was to pick up the convoys as far west as we could and cover them until they came within range of aircraft based in England. The convoy lanes passed five hundred miles south of Iceland, so our lumbering PBY's had to spend five hours flying out over the stormy, frigid waters of the North Atlantic to meet the convoys and five hours coming back. At the most they could only spend four hours over the convoy.

	For 99 percent of the time, convoy escort was a dreary business, except for the adventures of trying to find our way home through the murderous arctic weather. You might fly for months without seeing a U-boat. But they were there just the , lurking around the flanks of the convoys and peeking at you through their periscopes. Until we got the new air-borne radars, the U-boats nearly always sighted our planes before we sighted them. This was because they had the greater incentive. Aircraft crewmen who sighted a submarine got ah air medal. Submarine lookouts who failed to sight an airplane first got drowned.

	The U-boats ran submerged most of the time in daylight and did their dirty work at night when aerial and surface escorts were not very effective. The wolf pack would gather on the flanks of the convoys, remaining submerged until the long arctic night came on and then the slaughter would begin.

	The U-boats would surface and charge through the convoys, firing torpedoes right and left at the massed ships. Escort vessels and merchant ships lit up the sky with flares and blasted away in all directions with their guns, often shooting into each other. Depth charges made the ocean quake and rumble. Tankers went up in mushroom clouds like atomic explosions, leaving huge lakes of flaming oil on the sea behind them. Some of the surviving sailors froze to death with merciful speed in the frigid water. Others burned to death even more quickly in the flaming oil. Wolf-pack attacks were a seagoing version of Dante's Inferno. The U-boat sailors still speak of them as "the nights of the long knives."

	If you ask the average American now, "What were the decisive battles of World War II?" he will probably tell you, "Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Omaha Beach, and the Battle of the Bulge." Ask him about naval battles and he will name Midway, the "Marianas Turkey Shoot," and the Battle of San Bernardino Strait. These were all spectacular battles that made wonderful headlines and will live in the history books. The Battle of the Atlantic was a dreary, long-drawn-out struggle in which cold tables of statistics about ships and U-boats sunk took the place of dramatic battle reports from ace correspondents and screaming headliners. But it was one of the decisive battles of world history up to date.

	Monserrat hit some of the highlights of it in The Cruel Sea, but he makes it out to be a battle which the British fought singlehanded. They did bear the brunt of it, as they should have, since it was their life that was at stake. But out of 781 U-boats sunk, the U.S. sank 181, while fighting for our life in the Pacific at the same time, so it wasn't exactly a singlehanded battle. But most of the U.S. naval effort was in the Pacific, and battles out there were much more colorful than the cruel, relentless struggle in the Atlantic.

	I have a sure-fire formula now for starting a fight whenever I get together with a bunch of classmates around a bottle in an officers' club and start swapping lies about what we did in the war. I let the Pacific sailors tell their stories first and then I say, "I spent most the war in the Atlantic. There, we were fighting against professional naval officers, the Germans. That thing in the Pacific was just a banana war against a bunch of aborigines."

	Shortly after this the club manager hurries over to the table and says, "Will you gentlemen please leave quietly, or will I have to call the shore patrol?"

	There is at least an element of truth in this facetious comment of mine. If the Japs had used their submarines the way the Germans did, the war in the Pacific would have been much tougher for us. But, fortunately, the Japs used their subs mainly as cargo vessels hauling supplies to their beleaguered outlying island garrisons.

	While I was in Iceland 9,700,000 tons of Allied shipping got sunk in the Atlantic. It's hard to grasp the meaning of a figure like that. It means about three thousand ships, a capital investment of many billions of dollars, and millions of man hours of labor spent in building the ships, to say nothing of the effort that went into the cargoes of food and war munitions. It means perhaps thirty thousand seafaring men lost in the crews. Three thousand ships, placed end to end, would form a line over 220 miles long.

	I must admit that when I first got to Iceland I noticed a certain reticence in the manner of the British officers with whom I had to deal. It took a little time for us to get acquainted. Some of my friends claim that my face is a map of Ireland and I'm sure this had a lot to do with it. The British Admiral there, after we had gotten to know each other and become close friends, said to me one day, "You know, at first we were a bit suspicious and felt that anyone whose ancestry was so obviously Gaelic as yours would probably make things as difficult as possible for His Majesty's representatives."

	I assured him that his fears were unfounded. "In fact," I said, "I am eternally grateful to your ancestors for persecuting my ancestors so that I was born in the United States."

	Planning convoy coverage with the Royal Navy and arranging interlocking flight schedules with the R.A.F. to keep the covered, I had to exchange frequent memorandums and notes with the British Admiral and the R.A.F. Air Commodore. Whenever a high-ranking British officer sends you an official letter he puts a whole string of initials behind his name, D.S.O., K.C.B., etc., indicating the orders and decorations which he holds. When I wrote to my opposite numbers I had nothing to put after my name except Junior, which made no impression whatever upon my gallant compatriots. After I got to know them better and found they both had twinkles in their eyes, I began putting D.D.L.M. after my signature, knowing full well that sooner or later one of them would ask me about it.

	Sure enough, one morning I met the Air Commodore in R.A.F. headquarters and after exchanging good mornings he said, "I say, Dan old man, what does that D.D.L.M. mean that you put after your name?"

	I said, "Oh, that's the American equivalent of your K.C.B." 

	K.C.B. (Knight Commander of the Bath), is about the biggest and best decoration the British have, so the Air Commodore was duly impressed. He said, "Well! That's splendid. That's fine." But I could see the wheels going round inside his head as he tried to puzzle out the meaning of the cryptic initials. Finally he gave up and asked, "But just what do the initials stand for?"

	I replied, "They stand for Dan Dan the Lavatory Man."

	The command setup under which I had to work in Iceland was one of the typical snafus of the early part of the war. Almost all Allied officers in Iceland senior to me had some sort of authority to issue orders to me, and whenever they happened to think of it they did. I had five official bosses who could tell me what to do -- two U.S. admirals, one U.S. general, a British admiral, and the R.A.F. Air Commodore.

	It says in the Gospel that "no man can serve two masters," and I agree that serving two is a very difficult job indeed. But I soon found that serving five is easy. All you have to do is to exercise a little judicious stupidity and get your bosses debating among themselves about their respective prerogatives and about who does what to whom. The situation becomes confused and to avoid any high-level rhubarbs about it, they finally let you write your own ticket. You wind up a small-scale commander in chief yourself, hobnobbing with all five bosses on an equal basis and running your own show to suit yourself.

	As soon as I acquired this status I found that in order to pull weight in the boat the R.A.F. Air Commodore was the boss I had to really work for. For all practical purposes I joined the R.A.F. and the Air Commodore's planes and mine worked together over the routes as if we were one outfit.

	Finally, after a couple of months of Spartan existence in the hand-me-down huts the British gave us, a ship came in and delivered us one air base, complete with spare parts. We set about erecting it with no jurisdictional hassles among the ' sailors as to who put up the living huts, installed the plumbing and generators, set up the galley, or laid out the Ops Room. One day I caught the dentist, the doctor, and the chaplain digging a foundation in the icy ground. I knew then that this was total war and that we wouldn't lose.

	We did, however, have one bit of labor trouble in setting up the camp. This was before the Seabees were in business so part of our camp was built by a civilian contractor (with plenty of help from my boys). The contractor had his own labor force, brought in from Rhode Island, and his men and my boys lived in separate but adjoining camps. The whole job was supervised by a naval constructor who handled all dealings with the civilians but I, as commanding officer, was the top man.

	When it came time to set up the washrooms and showers, I learned that the washroom for the contractor's men would be set up first and those for my boys wouldn't be set up until a month later. This burned me up. It may seem like a small matter now but by that time we hadn't had a bath in a long time, and we were all beginning to stink a bit.

	I sent for the naval constructor and told him, "This is no good. My washrooms go in first."

	This threw him into a tizzy.

	He said, "My men are griped about being up here, their morale is low, and I'll have bad trouble with them if I do that."

	I said, "Okay. So you'll have trouble. That's your problem. But my washrooms go in first."

	He argued with me a long time about this. He said it might even cause sit-down strikes that would stop all construction. I was adamant.

	He finally went over my head to the U.S. Admiral in Iceland.

	This officer hemmed and hawed and tried to dodge the issue. But I wouldn't budge and neither would the naval constructor. The admiral, of course, finally had to back me up and my boys got their showers first.

	This, mind you, happened not long after Pearl Harbor. At this time we were losing the Battle of the Atlantic and my boys were risking their lives daily trying to escort convoys through the U-boat wolf packs. The contractor's men were drawing fabulous pay with bonuses for everything you can think of, plus all sorts of fringe benefits. The pay of my boys was well below the poverty line now set for the Great Society.

	All this may seem like trivial stuff now that we have won the war. But it is indicative of a trend in the United States which, if 'anything, is stronger now than it was then.

	The planners back in Washington did very well by us. When we unloaded that ship we went from rags to riches overnight. I wish you could have seen the galley equipment they sent us: Electric ranges and ovens, steam kettles, automatic dishwashers aid driers, deep freeze lockers, and fine butcher-shop equipment. When I brought the British Air Commodore over to see it his eyes bugged out like a tromped-on toad's. He went away muttering to himself about "the hardships the poor colonials have to put up with."

	We were grateful to our friends back home for all this, but we didn't lose our heads over it. We immediately submitted an outrageous batch of requisitions for automobiles, recreation gear, radios and victrolas, and overstuffed leather furniture. We had been paving the way for this ahead of time. We had sent the Navy Department numerous photographs of our original dilapidated camp. Iceland's winter climate is actually milder than that of New England, but everybody in Washington thought it was like the North Pole. We had reinforced this impression by hustling our photographers out whenever it snowed to get pictures before it melted that we could send to Washington.

	When our requisition for all the luxury items got to Washington, the first reaction of the people in the Bureau of Aeronautics was "What the hell! Don't these guys know there's a war on?" But when they saw "Reykjavik, Iceland" at the bottom of the requisition, they would say, "Ah well, for those poor fellows we will do it."

	We called ourselves the F.B.I.'s and after you had been up there one hundred days you got a handsome certificate of membership in this exclusive club. "Forgotten Bastards of Iceland" is what the initials meant. But we weren't forgotten. We were very well cared for indeed.

	However, we didn't get to keep all the stuff at the Fleet Air that arrived in Iceland for us. I was just a commander then and there was a black-shoe U.S. Navy rear admiral commanding the Naval Shore Base in Iceland, which was entirely separate from the Air Base.

	At this time the Bureau of Aeronautics took much better care of its own people than the black-shoe Navy did. At first the Naval Base people were living in luxury compared to the aviators, but after our ship came in we ate higher off the hog than they did. Although this black-shoe rear admiral really had nothing to do with the running of the Air Base and wasn't even in the operational chain of command, he was the Senior U.S. Naval Officer Present, Iceland.

	The Navy Regulations have several articles setting forth the authority and prerogatives of the S.O.P. They are many and far-reaching. They are supposed to be used only in time of emergency, such as earthquakes, floods, or uprisings of the civil population.

	But every time a ship came in with a lot of stuff, bought and paid for by the Bureau of Aeronautics and consigned to the Fleet Air Base, my black-shoe friend would declare a national emergency and wave the regulation book at me. He would then confiscate all the automobiles, overstuffed furniture, and radios, and let us keep the shovels, pickaxes, and wheelbarrows. He did this despite the fact that his people were fighting the war by moving colored pins around on a chart in his Ops Room, whereas mine were flying over the convoys in stinking weather five hundred miles to the south.

	I squawked so loud about this that he recommended I be relieved as unfit to command an advanced base in wartime. However, thanks to the five bosses and complicated chain of command previously mentioned, my friends were able to beat this rap for me. It was lucky for me they did, because if I had been relieved of command under these circumstances I never would have gone any further in this Navy! As long as my admiral pal stayed in Iceland I had to fight two enemies. The Nazis and the Naval Operating Base.

	Several months after we got our base set up, a Marine detachment of one hundred men reported. Most of them were kids just out of boot camp, where the drill sergeants had concentrated on toughening them up and making them bloody-minded for combat in the Pacific. The sergeants had done their job well.

	The newcomers were the most foul-mouthed bunch of men I have ever listened to. That's a rather sweeping statement. But it's true. They couldn't even say good morning to each other without adding a whole string of obscene adjectives, phrases, and four-letter words to show how tough they were. They were practically tongue-tied when addressing an officer because enlisted men aren't supposed to use that kind of language in the presence of an officer -- except behind his back
.
	After a few days of this I took corrective action. I got the marines together and gave them a lecture about the use of bad ' language. I was against it and presented some pretty sound arguments for not using it. In opening this little sermon I said, "I have called you... [long string of unprintable epithets] together today to..." This shook them up right off the bat because if anyone else had referred to them in those terms they would have clobbered him. While they were still stunned by this opening blast from a commissioned officer to enlisted men, I said, "I'm only calling you what I've heard you calling each other ever since you got here."

	My whole lecture was couched in exactly the kind of language I was preaching against, and included every four-letter word I had heard in twenty years of naval service. I think even the authors of some of the current best sellers would have blushed at some of the expressions I used.

	I won't try to make the reader believe that my marines talked like a bunch of choirboys from then on. But at least they were a little more discreet when I was within earshot.

	The arrival of our first shipment of recreation gear from the U. S., which we managed to smuggle past the Operating Base, brought about an incident which helped us to bypass protocol and get better acquainted with the British.

	Opening up the boxes like a bunch of kids on Christmas morning, we found among other things, a push ball. We promptly blew it up to its full five-foot diameter. Exploring the boxes for more loot, we left the ball sitting outside the storehouse unattended.

	You should never leave anything as big and light as a push ball unattended in Iceland because the wind comes along and blows it away. This happened to our push ball. I came outside just in time to see it go bouncing down the hill, over the bluff, and into the water. It sailed rapidly across the inlet and grounded on the opposite shore, where a British AA battery had their camp.

	I wanted that push ball back, so I picked up my field teleto call the CO. of the AA battery and ask his help. things often happened on our field-telephone system, consisting of a maze of wires laid out on the ground. Sometimes connections got crossed, as they did this time. I heard my friend across the way calling Admiralty headquarters in Reykjavik and reporting, "The biggest bloody mine you've ever seen in your life has just washed ashore at our camp and will you please send a bomb-disposal squall to deal with it?"

	I hung up without saying a word. After a few minutes I called Admiralty headquarters and reported that we too had seen this "mine" drift ashore, that we had a qualified bomb-disposal party, and that if the Royal Navy wished us to do so, we would be glad to deal with this situation.

	Of course there was nothing in the world that the Royal Navy wished more at that moment than to have someone else take this nasty job off their hands. They replied, "That will be quite satisfactory."

	I rushed around to several nearby huts, rounded up about a dozen helpers, explained the pitch to them, and we organized a bomb-disposal squad on the spot. We all knew enough about bomb disposal to have a rough idea of what sort of equipment we needed and how to go through the proper motions. We commandeered half a dozen rifles, grabbed a portable field-telephone set, and got a voltmeter, a stethoscope, and a couple of small tool-boxes. 

	Dumping this equipment into jeeps, we roared over to the British camp, where we found a crowd of our allies standing back at a respectful distance casting nervous glances at the "mine."

	The arrival of our businesslike group of American experts obviously relieved the tension. We immediately posted sentries and shoved the crowd back to a safer distance. Leading out our field-telephone set, we placed one phone at the mine and the other about a hundred yards back, so the boys at the mine could phone back every move they made to be recorded in a notebook for the guidance of future mine-disposal parties in ease they made the wrong move and blew themselves up.

	After a few minutes of hocus-pocus with the stethoscopes, much telephoning back and forth, and scribbling in the notebook, we finally gave the signal that the great moment was at hand. As the crowd watched in awed silence, we unscrewed the valve, let the air out, and got the hell out of that camp as fast as we could.

	The official opening of our recreation hall was a gala event which we invited all the top brass in Iceland. There were three U.S. Army hospitals with nurses Iceland, and it was obviously my duty as C.O. to stand in well with the chief nurses so they would be favorably inclined toward allowing the younger gals to date my boys from the Fleet Air Base. Complying with this obligation I invited the three chief nurses to the grand opening, sent my car to pick them up, and instructed my driver to stand by at the Officer of the Day's shack to take the ladies home after the show.

	When the premiere was over, all the official guests, including the chief nurses, adjourned to my hut for coffee, sandwiches, and one for the road. At this gathering one of the generals graciously offered to take the nurses home. In the midst of all my social duties I forgot to pass this word along to my driver. After speeding the last departing guest into the night, I crawled into my sack and slept soundly until 6 o'clock next morning.

	On the way to breakfast I looked in at the O.O.D. shack, and there sat my driver, heavy-eyed and sleepy but with an accusing smirk on his sassy face. He was carrying out my orders and was still waiting to take the three chief nurses home!

	He had spent an all-night vigil in a place where everyone who happened to be up and about would see him and wonder what he was doing. Every four hours a new duty section mustered in the O.O.D. shack. Naturally they all knew the captain's driver, and asked him why he was up so late. All night long he smugly spread the word, "I'm waiting to take the captain's gal friends home. He's got three of 'em down in his hut!"

	I noted a marked increase in the deference with which I was treated by all hands from then on.

	The Saga of the Three Nurses, coupled with the fact that, as related later, I was one of the few officers in Iceland to lose a pair of pants on duty there, caused exaggerated tales to circulate in the officers' messes of the island. I defended myself against these slanderous canards by pointing out that it is impossible to be a Don Juan in the Arctic because in the summertime it is daylight all night long, and in the wintertime you leave tracks.

	After the rest of the camp had been built, we got busy building an officers' club. One day I was showing a group of Army nurses around the camp. They were pop-eyed over our fine sick bay, galley, bowling alleys, and gymnasium. By the time we got to the nearly finished club they were ready to believe that anything was possible for the navy.

	The club was located on the edge of a small bluff overlooking a forbidding rocky beach. I casually remarked to the nurses that the next convoy was bringing us a shipload of white sand from Miami and that by next summer, we would have a fine bathing beach at the foot of the cliff.

	The nurses spread this whopper all over Iceland, causing much indignation in Army and Air Corps circles, and many threats to write to Drew Pearson or to congressmen.

	Even though we never got our beach, we did have some equally improbable things. Our pride and joy was a pair of palm trees in front of the officer's club.

	Trees do not grow in Iceland. One day the leading chief from our metalsmith's shop came around to my office and said, "Cap'n, we ought to have some palm trees around this place." I thought to myself, "Now it begins. Here's the first one we'll have to ship home in a strait jacket."

	But I humored him and listened to his proposal. When he got through explaining his idea I quoted Joyce Kilmer to him: "Only a God can make a tree."

	He replied, "Yeah. We know that, Cap'n. But we'd like to have a shot at it anyway."

	Within a week two authentic-looking palm trees had sprouted in front of the club. The "trunks" were steel pipes about six inches in diameter, with burlap wrapped around them to give them a rough, tapering appearance. The "stems" of the leaves were reinforcing rods for concrete runways, bent to proper curvature. The "leaves" were cut from sheets of tin obtained by flattening out five-gallon kerosene cans. A coat of green paint plus some worn-out softballs for coconuts completed the job.

	These trees got to be quite famous and many visiting VIP's were taken in by them. Even Admiral King relaxed, grinned, and had his picture taken standing under these horticultural miracles.

	We had an officers' Softball team on which I played third base. We won 30 and lost 6, for a percentage of .833. This would easily win the pennant in either of the major leagues, but not in the league we had in Iceland. The marines nosed us out, and we came in second in a twelve-team league of soldiers, sailors, and marines.

	The sailor and marine umpires always took great delight in calling the close ones against "me just to hear me squawk, and to be able to say (very respectfully of course) "Captain, sir, if don't SHADDUP I'll hafta heave you outa the game, SIR!"

	We had one serious morale crisis at the Fleet Air Base. In the beginning living conditions were pretty awful. But right after Pearl Harbor everybody was willing to put up with this.

	As time went on and supplies came up from the States, things got better, until eventually we had the best camp in Iceland. It got so good I was able to send for lads who got out of line, shake my finger at them, and say, "Son, get back on the team and keep your nose clean or I'll send you back to the States." We had a happy bunch up there.

	Then one day the roof fell in. I got a dispatch saying the next convoy would bring up a draft of a hundred bad eggs, misfits, and troublemakers who had been given the choice of general court-martial or being sent to Iceland. By the time this dispatch got from the radio shack to me, everybody in camp knew about it. All hands, including me, were furious.

	So this was a prison camp... a Siberia!

	I had to get up at the movies that night and talk fast to the boys, selling them a bill of goods I didn't really buy myself: "There's a war on. We'll straighten these guys out and make real sailors out of them, etc."

	It was bad enough for some chair-borne weak sister back home to evade his responsibility and save himself the headache of conducting a hundred courts-martial by just dumping the mess in our lap. But to send me a dispatch telling me (and everyone else in camp) about it was the height of stupidity. He should have been busted to Wave apprentice.

	But this didn't turn out too badly. When these guys arrived we made it very plain to them that we weren't going to fool around with them. The first two or three who pulled any funny business got clobbered real good. Soon the rest all got the word, revised their outlook on life, and did their duty just like the rest of the boys.

	One way of getting an idea of what the boys are thinking about and the state of their morale is by censoring outgoing mail. I used to have the censors send me an armful of letters about once a week. 

	Every now and then I would find a legitimate squawk in a letter home and be able to correct it.

	But you have to be careful about this. Sometimes what the boys write home isn't exactly the gospel truth. And sometimes they set booby traps for the censors.

	I remember one letter in which a lad told a friend that just leaving for Iceland he had murdered his grandmother.... Chopped her head off with an Axe and buried her in the woods, he said. He asked his friend to go out in the woods and make sure the old lady's body was still covered up.

	I deleted a couple of items of classified info from this letter but let the fable about the grandmother go untouched.

	The writer was a baby-faced little twerp who wouldn't harm a flea. But he was a wise guy and knew that the officer who usually censored his mail was a very serious-minded gent

	I'm sure that this officer would have peed in his pants if he had read this letter.

CHAPTER TEN

BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC

	Iceland was a whistle stop on the main line between England and Washington, and we had a constant stream of VIP's going both ways who stopped there for gas. One day Molotov popped in on his way to the U.S., accompanied by a large staff of flunkies. His arrival was unexpected, so the Commanding General had to whip up a luncheon for him on short notice. He invited all the senior officers of the various military outfits in Iceland, including even me.

	The General's aide made up the seating arrangements for this clambake assuming the table would be a long, straight one. He placed Molotov on the General's right at the head of the table, and since I was the junior guest, protocol put me way down at the other end of the table.

	A different aide was responsible for setting up the luncheon room, and he found there wasn't space enough for one long table. He solved this problem by setting up a horseshoe table. This had the effect of splitting the long table down the middle, spreading it out, and bending the ends back to meet in the middle, right opposite the Commanding General and Molotov.

	A third aide set out the place cards according to the original seating arrangement, so I wound up directly opposite Molotov and four feet away from him.

	He was a square-headed little twerp who seemed friendly enough when talking to the luncheon guests. But he could turn charm on and off like a' flashlight. Every now and then one of his flunkies would come in to whisper in his ear and hand him dispatches. Whenever this happened, his face would freeze and he would get a look in his eye that made me think of a cobra. The aides would stand at a rigid attention while the great man decided what to do, and then get the hell out of there as if they were glad to be still alive.

	He spoke to us through an interpreter and pretended not to understand English, but I'm sure he did. I think he would be an ideal guy to run a big extermination camp.

	Our relations with the Icelanders were reasonably good, considering the way we muscled in on them. Almost all the history books claim that they invited us to come in there. That's not exactly so. The British moved in, with our approval, to forestall the Germans. Maybe they did get some kind of grudging permission from the Icelanders before doing it, but if the Icelanders had resisted, they would have come in shooting apologetically. The British invited us in right after they got ashore and we were established there months before the war with Germany became official.

	All this was perfectly justifiable under International Law. The pertinent statute is the Number One rule of International Law, namely, "Might is Right." This section of the law is very strictly enforced
.
	About 5 per cent of the Icelanders were pro-Ally, 5 per cent were definitely pro-German, and 80 per cent didn't give a damn who won if we would just leave them alone. They had kept out of all the wars of the world since A.D. 800 and didn't want any part of this one. The other 10 per cent of the people were Communists, whose only interest was to promote chaos and revolution so they could become the big shots of the new order.

	We had a few minor misunderstandings with the local authorities, like the times our sentries shot some of their citizens who didn't understand that Halt! means Nema Stadar. But we patched these up.

	We got a fine object lesson from the Icelanders about what an influx of easy money can do to a country. Before the war Iceland was a very poor country by our standards. Many of her people lived, and were fairly happy, on what we would consider pittances. The occupying forces with their huge construction programs flooded the country with undreamed of sums of money. Everybody made three or four times as much money as they had ever hoped to earn. But the prices of everything promptly went up to three or four times what they had been before, and nobody was a bit better off. The rich stayed rich, the poor stayed poor, and the Communists chortled with glee. This should furnish food for thought to our leaders today, as hourly wages and prices in the United States follow the same pattern.

	Much of our flying was done in the long winter nights when wings loaded up with ice and the low-lying clouds around Reykjavik had centers of solid rock.

	I used to make about two of these convoy hops per month as copilot. The main reason I did this was that it's good for morale when the working pilots know that the boss man is taking his chances along with them. I had to get rid of ope squadron commander while I was there because he wouldn't schedule himself for any of the tough flights.

	We only had one operational crash while I was up there, and just missed being in it. One morning we had two planes taking off a couple of hours before sunrise, and I had scheduled myself to go out in one of them. The one I was going in had warmed up and was about to taxi out for take-off when the other called us on voice radio and said they couldn't take off for another hour or so because of frost and ice on their wings. I didn't think things were as bad as they claimed, so I told the first plane to go ahead without me, that I would come out in the other one. I shifted over to the second plane, and found the ice wasn't as bad as the young, inexperienced pilot imagined.

	About fifteen minutes later we were taxiing out for take-off in the second plane when the control tower called us and said the first plane had flown into a violent arctic williwaw, had crashed, and was burning ten miles from the airport. There were no survivors.

	On the average, you would fly a couple of hundred hours before actually seeing a submarine, and when you did see one, it was vitally important to make a kill because you probably wouldn't see another for a long time. On our first three sightings we goofed, due to inexperience, buck fever, and inattention to details. I got my boys together and read the riot act to them. We had just opened our new officers' club and I announced that until we got our first kill the bar in the club would be closed. This was cruel and unusual punishment, be~ cause it meant you had to go all the way into Reykjavik to get a drink. But my policy at the time was that I would rather help win the war and be thought a son-of-a-bitch, than to help lose it and be thought of as a swell guy.

	During the era of the closed club, Lieutenant Hopgood, en route to meet a convoy coming from England, caught the U-464 doping off on the surface and crippled her so she couldn't submerge but could still limp along on the surface. Hoppy expended all his depth charges on his first attack, and his single 30-caliber machine gun wasn't much use against the sub's thick plates and heavy AA battery. In the soupy weather, the sub soon shook off our circling plane and disappeared into the fog.

	A British destroyer broke off from the convoy at full speed in answer to Hoppy's radio report of the attack. Hoppy flew toward the convoy till he found the speeding destroyer and then flew back to hunt for the sub. Meantime the fog had lifted a bit, and he found it heading for an Icelandic fishing vessel a few miles away. As Hoppy circled, the sub went alongside the trawler and boarded it. The Germans abandoned and scuttled the sub, and laid a course for Germany.

	Hoppy duly reported all this by radio and spent the next couple of hours shuttling back and forth between the destroyer and the trawler, advising the onrushing tin can how to steer.

	This was an exciting three hours in all R.A.F. and Royal Navy Ops rooms in England, as well as in ours up in Reykjavik. Hoppy's first electrifying message saying that he had a cripple on his hands but couldn't finish it off had brought all the top brass to the Ops Room. For the rest of the morning, vice admirals, air marshals, and their staffs sat with their ears glued to the radio following the dramatic developments at sea.

	Hoppy's coded radio reports right up to the last one were masterpieces of correct official terminology, giving a terse, clear, and complete picture of what was happening around the trawler. Finally he came through with the one we were all waiting for: "Destroyer alongside trawler and has captured fifty-two prisoners."

	Then he shifted from code to plain English, and paraphrasing another famous (but phony) U-boat sinking report, he said, "Personal for Commander Gallery: Sank sub open club."

	We opened the club all right. We damned near blew the roof off the joint. But my friends in the R.A.F. and the Royal Navy were a bit puzzled by that last message, and even after I explained it to them they thought it was "most extraordinary."

	Another tale resulting from Hoppy's exploit is the Legend of the Skipper's Pants. While the celebration reopening the club was at its height, we conceived the idea of getting a suitable trophy of this victory for our club. Obviously the U-boat skipper's pants would be the most suitable one.

	Next morning I addressed an official letter to the First Lord of the Admiralty, outlining what had happened, explaining the American expression "caught with your pants down," and asking that the skipper's pants be forwarded to the Fleet Air Base.

	To make the deal somewhat legal and prevent leaving the German skipper pants-less, I sent a pair of my own khaki trousers along with the letter and forwarded the correspondence through the British Admiral in Iceland.

	At first the Admiral was horrified at the idea of addressing any such irregular proposal to the First Lord. But the Air Commodore persuaded him to "bung it on into London and see what happens."

	By return mail I got a nice friendly reply from the First Lord congratulating us on our first kill and saying that my request would be given "due consideration." A month later I got a very stuffy letter from the Director of Naval Intelligence. He called my attention to article so-and-so of the Geneva Convention, which prohibited humiliating prisoners, etc., and he regretted that my request could not be granted.

	I took a dim view of the matter. I didn't mind the malarkey about the Geneva Convention, but I did resent the outrageous injustice that he didn't even send me my own pants back!

	Not all of our convoy escort missions turned out as happily as Hoppy's did. One time we sent a plane out in soupy weather to cover a westbound convoy coming back from England. Our boy had to fly out four hundred miles on instruments and find the convoy by radar. He did a beautiful job of it, letting down through the overcast smack over the convoy.

	But this convoy had been beat up by the Luftwaffe the day it sailed from England. It was jittery and trigger happy. The moment our PBY broke through the low-lying clouds over the convoy, they opened up on him with every gun they had, shot out his starboard engine, and damaged his hydraulic system so he couldn't lower his wheels.

	Our boy struggled back up into the overcast, and although his whole crew had shrapnel wounds, he limped back to Iceland on one engine. There he made a crash landing in the surf, from which all the boys were able to swim ashore despite their painful wounds.

	Our lads didn't even get a Purple Heart out of this mission. The Purple Heart is for wounds "inflicted by the enemy," and the Board of Awards in Washington claimed that this convoy was friendly! Even the British Admiral admitted to me later that in this case the convoy's behavior had been "naughty and bloody-minded."

	In the Atlantic we came out on the short end of the medals deal all around. In the Air Corps and in the Pacific Fleet, Distinguished Flying Crosses and Air Medals were handed out by the basketful. Sometimes special missions were laid on so junketing VIP's from Washington could qualify for medals by riding over hostile territory. I even know of cases in which chiefs of staff were given Navy Crosses for riding around on a battleship during an action.

	I go along with giving a chief of staff the Distinguished Service Medal for giving the Admiral outstandingly good advice on strategy and tactics. But a Navy Cross awarded for "heroic conduct" behind ten inches of armor in the Flag Plot of a battle wagon has a distinct odor of dead fish.
Not all medals for heroism are won at risk of life and limb. Even the Congressional Medal of Honor has been prostituted at times for political purposes. After our landing at Vera Cruz in 1914, a mere police action in which we lost fifteen men, Secretary of the Navy Daniels decided it would be a good idea to hand out a lot of Congressional Medals for this "battle." Out of a clear sky he sent a message to the Admiral commanding our small fleet at Vera Cruz telling him that fifty-five Congressional medals would be awarded for this action and directing him to submit the names of those who should get them!

	The Admiral, instead of protesting this outrage, did as he was told. They drew lots and rolled dice in the fleet to decide who should get them!!

	I knew an officer who got one of those Vera Cruz medals and got out of the Navy right afterward. He came back in just before World War II started, and had high-level connections.

	Naturally, he had a guilty conscience about that Congressional Medal of Honor, which makes its wearer quite conspicuous. He spent the whole war collecting ribbons and medals, trying to prove he was really as brave as C.M.H. winners are supposed to be. Through high-level connections he attached himself to junkets all over the world and collected practically every area ribbon there was simply by passing through the areas. He acquired a whole chestful of fruit salad to go with his Congressional medal. But he didn't contribute much to the war effort in doing it.

	Medals and decorations have an important place in military operations. But if improperly handled, their award can become a tawdry racket that cheapens medals which are legitimately earned above and beyond the call of duty.

	All the time that we were in Iceland the ominous shadow of a great ship, the Tirpitz, hung over us. In 1942, before we and the Japs had completed our super giants of the Missouri class, the Tirpitz was the most powerful ship in the world. She was 50,000 tons, heavily armored, had a main battery of eight 15-inch guns and a tremendous antiaircraft battery, and could make 31 knots.

	Her sister ship, the Bismarck, had broken loose in the Atlantic in 1940, had sunk the Hood and crippled the Prince of Wales in the Denmark Strait northwest of Iceland, and caused panic in the Admiralty until she was cornered and hammered to pieces by a whole armada of British ships.

	The Tirpitz was lurking in the Norwegian fiords, where she could pop out and pounce on the Murmansk convoys and also threaten to break loose in the Atlantic as the Bismarck had done. Torpedoes were the only aerial weapons that could inflict serious damage on this great floating fortress, and I had the only torpedo planes in Iceland.

	Of course I knew that if my lumbering PBY's had to go in unsupported against the powerful radar-controlled AA batteries of the Tirpitz, we would be clay pigeons. I also knew that when and if the Tirpitz ever tried to break out through the Denmark Strait they would wake me up in the middle of the night and hand me an urgent dispatch from London saying, "Go get her." If we had to go in on our own, I knew that hardly any of us would come back from that clambake, and that probably none of our torpedoes would hit. But I felt that with proper support from fighters and high-level bombers we might put the Tirpitz on the bottom.

	I spent several months setting up a suitable reception committee for the Tirpitz in case she tried to run the Denmark Strait.

	The humiliating Channel dash of the three German ships from Brest was still very fresh in our minds. This had succeeded mostly because it caught the British flat-footed with no detailed plan for stopping it. Wild confusion reigned all over England that day as the Royal Navy and the bomber, fighter, and coastal commands of the R.A.F. fell all over each other trying to get organized while the Nazi ships sailed boldly up the Channel at 30 knots.

	Arranging a joint operation involving the R.A.F., the U.S. Army Air Corps, and the U.S. Navy, in which a U.S. Navy officer although quite junior in rank is to be the task-group commander, is no easy matter. But I kept reminding everyone of the Channel fiasco, and needled all concerned so much about it that we finally got it "laid on." Whenever one of our battleships came into Reykjavik, we had "Tirpitz drill," and practiced combining the attacks of fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes so that the Tirpitz AA gunners wouldn't just be holding routine target practice on my PBY's when we came in to fire torpedoes at them.

	Admiral King got quite a kick out of the last section of my operation plan, which finally got up to him for approval. It read:

ZERO MINUS 2 MINUTES --  Fighters strafe decks of Tirpitz.
ZERO MINUS 1 MINUTE 	--  Bombers attack from high altitude.
ZERO MINUTES              	--  PBY's launch torpedoes.
ZERO MINUTES PLUS 1  	--  TIRPITZ blows up and sinks.

	At first the Senior British Naval Officer, Iceland, Admiral Dalrymple Hamilton, was rather dubious about this plan. He said, "But you know, old man, the Tirpitz is C. in C. Home Fleet's bird." However, I persuaded him that if C. in C. Home Fleet ever let the Tirptiz wander as far afield as the Denmark Strait, it would become our sad duty to reluctantly bag his errant bird.

	C. in C. Home Fleet came up to Iceland once in the King George V. and we held Tirpitz drill on her as she came in. Afterward, the Army Air Force Colonel, Admiral Dalrymple Hamilton, and I went aboard the King George V to discuss the operation with the C. in C. It was a bitter day in the middle of January.

	As we left the ship after the conference, two British sailors took station at the foot of the gangway to help the visiting brass into the Admiral's barge. As the boat was shoving off, one of them slipped on the icy gangway and plunked into the near-freezing water. His buddy promptly hauled him back on the gangway again, and although both were drenched with icy brine they snapped to attention and stood at salute while the bosun's mate finished piping the barge away.

	I complimented Admiral Dalrymple Hamilton on this "good show -- traditions of Nelson -- and all that sort of thing."

	"Nothing at all, old boy," said the Admiral modestly. "I'm sure any Of your sailors would have done the same."

	"I suppose so," I said, but then all my Irish ancestors rose up in their graves and compelled me to add, "except, of course, none of our sailors would have fallen overboard in the first place."

	The year 1942 was crucial in the Battle of the Atlantic, and over 7,500,000 tons of ships got sunk. The bulk of this slaughter took place to the south of us, where the wolf packs tore into the convoys as if they were herds of sheep. But a grim chapter in the history of the war was also being written to the northeast of us on the infamous Murmansk run.

	On this run the convoys were out of range of our air escort most of the way. They had to pass within easy range of the Nazi air and U-boat bases in Norway. The Russians kept promising heavy air escort for each succeeding convoy and never produced a single plane. As a result, our losses were terrific. Fortunately for us, the Luftwaffe and the U-boats were jealous of each other and didn't work together very well. If they had, they would have stopped the Murmansk run cold. Looking back from 1965, when Russia is our worst friend, it's too bad they didn't!

	The fate of one Murmansk convoy, PQ 17, will stand as a shameful page in naval history for all time. Some of the preceding convoys had been so badly beaten up that there was much unrest among the merchant sailors when PQ 17 was forming up. To quiet their fears, we promised them the heaviest naval escort that any convoy ever had.

	In a way we fulfilled the promise. We gave them two battleships, including our brand new U.S.S. Washington, several heavy cruisers, and a couple of dozen destroyers. But the big ships tagged along many miles astern of the convoy and were under orders to protect it only from surface raiders. When the Luftwaffe and U-boats began hammering the convoy, the Admiralty ordered all warships, including destroyers assigned to the convoy, to retire to the west at full speed, and told the convoy to scatter and make their way to Murmansk as best they could.

	I'll never forget that Fourth of July morning in 1942 when PQ 17 was fighting for its life halfway to Murmansk. The Air Commodore and I were in the R.A.F. Ops Room watching the drama unfold on the big chart board. When a dispatch cracked in from London saying the Tirpitz was heading for the convoy, we both rubbed our hands in glee. The Tirpitz was heading into a bobby trap and should get polished off by the King George V and the Washington. The Air Commodore turned to me and said jubilantly, "It looks like this is going to be the best Fourth of July since you blokes declared your independence.”

	Then came the incredible orders from London: "Warships retire west at full speed. Convoy scatter and make best of way to Murmansk."

	Nobody said a word. We all just drifted out of the Ops Room and slunk back to our huts to weep or curse.

	Apologists for the Admiralty justify this cowardly business on the ground that the British dockyards were full of crippled battleships and they couldn't afford to risk any more of them within range of the Luftwaffe and U-boat bases in Norway. Pearl Harbor and Singapore were also fresh in the minds of the lords of the Admiralty, as well as that of Churchill, who approved the order to desert the convoy. But don't try to sell this bill of goods to the merchant sailors who saw their naval escorts haul ass for home, leaving them to their fate. Only eleven out of the thirty-four ships in that convoy finally struggled into Murmansk.

	It is an evil, ironic fact that we made great sacrifices on the Murmansk run to save an ungrateful ally which has now become a deadly enemy. Had we left the Russians to their own devices and let them sink or swim on their own, this world would probably be a better place to live in now. My old friend, Admiral Standley (Commandant of Midshipmen back in 1918), who was then ambassador of Russia, nearly got in serious trouble with the State Department by denouncing the Kremlin for refusing to tell the Russian people how much help we we;re giving them. At that time, and for some years after the war, the State Department viewed with alarm any derogatory remarks about "our gallant Russian allies."

	Actually, we ran forty convoys to Murmansk. Out of 811 ships in these convoys, 87 were sunk, 4,000,000 tons of munitions delivered. I saw many shiploads of planes, tanks, and ammunition sail from Reykjavik for Murmansk at a time when we needed this stuff badly ourselves.

	There was a. peculiar incident in the Battle of the Atlantic which occurred just before I got to Iceland, the "capture" of the U-570 by an R.A.F. aircraft. Believe it or not, this submarine actually surrendered to a lone land plane several hundred miles at sea.

	The plane caught the sub. on the surface, crippled it with depth charges so it couldn't submerge, and jarred it so badly that chlorine escaping from the batteries made the crew seek fresh air on deck. The plane, its depth charges all gone, circled the sub and sent a blinker message to steer for Iceland. The U-boat meekly obeyed and showed a white flag. The first plane was relieved by another and the U-boat continued toward Iceland until intercepted next day by a Royal Navy tug. Then the sub accepted a tow line from the tug and resumed the journey. When close to the shore the towline broke in a storm and the sub was washed up on a sandy beach a few miles south of Reykjavik. Eventually the British salvaged it, repaired it, and put it in commission as H.M.S. Graph.

	Why the U-boat crew behaved as they did is incomprehensible. It was their duty to scuttle that boat even if it cost them their lives. After the Royal Navy tug arrived they had a right to assume they would be rescued even if they did scuttle. But they allowed their boat to fall into the hands of the enemy almost intact, except for the codes which they threw overboard and the electronic gear which they smashed.

	The skipper of the U-570 was ostracized by the other Germans in the prisoner-of-war camp. They tried to bring him before a so-called "Court of Honor" to try him for cowardice. But the British got wind of this and would not permit it.

	I mention this strange business because it has a bearing on later events in this story.
For the first year that I was in Iceland the gents' can in my hut was of the indoor outhouse type. The only reason it could be tolerated at all inside the hut was that it had a chemical tank that was supposed to sort of purify the atmosphere.

	Our global planners back in Washington eventually thought of everything, and one day one of our Seabees came around to my hut lugging a beautiful streamlined flushing job under his arm.

	"I think you'll like this one better, Cap'n," he said as he started hooking the new equipment into the camp's drainage system.

	He was right. I liked it so much better that I decided the Spartan decor of a Quonset hut was out of keeping with this fine reminder of The American Way of Civilized Life. Aided by enthusiastic suggestions from all hands in our camp, I set out to create a suitable environment for it.

	First we erected an ornate canopy trimmed with "ermine" (made from a roll of cotton produced by the pharmacist's mates). We shopped all over Reykjavik getting suitable curtains for the canopy. The whole camp aided in designing the great heraldic insignia which went up behind the throne. We installed rose-colored indirect lighting to encourage the contemplative mood and bookshelves were conveniently placed.

	By the time we got through it was fit for a king, and looked as if it had been built for one to reign on.

	However, we didn't want the users of this luxurious facility to lose sight of the fact that there was a war on. So we installed a battery of field telephones within easy reach of the occupant of the throne. One was labeled "10 Downing Street," another, "White House." On hooks adjacent to them we hung a pair of relief tubes from airplanes labeled "Wilhelmstrasse" and "Tokyo."

	The final touch was a spare porcelain seat which we sawed in two. One half, embellished with the traditional fur lining, was attached to the bulkhead, where it would be the first thing seen by anyone entering the throne room. A sign below it said, "For use by my half-fast friends."

	When the job was completed it became one of the show places of Iceland and my johnny was warmed by the fannies of many Very Important People in the army, navy, and air forces of Great Britain and the United States.

	Early in 1943, the tide of battle turned in the Atlantic with startling suddenness. Many things that we had been waiting and praying for came to a head at once. The new radar systems and acoustic torpedoes became operational. Long-range patrol planes which could reach much farther out from land came pouring off the production lines. Our huge ship-building program was now in mass production. And finally the CVE's, merchant ships converted into small aircraft carriers, closed the "mid-ocean gap," which was beyond the reach of shore-based aircraft, and the whole Atlantic Ocean was being patrolled by Antisubmarine Warfare (ASW) aircraft.

	In the forty-four months of war up to May, 1943, we sank 192 U-boats. In May, June, July, and August of that year the Allies sank 100. Most of these boats took their highly trained crews to the bottom with them. The U-boat fleet kept on fighting and sank over 2,000,000 more tons of ships before the war ended. But it was never the same again after that shambles.

	The curve of new tonnage built finally crossed the curve of tonnage sunk by the U-boats. From that time on, the tonnage available rose like a flood tide. The Battle of the Atlantic went on for another year and a half, in which 600 ships and the staggering total of 500 U-boats were sunk. But the battle was won. The food supply of the British Isles was assured, our invasion forces were poised in England, and their vital sea-borne supply routes were safe.

	While I was in Iceland our allowed complement was one squadron of twelve workhorse PBY amphibians. At first it was VP 72 and later, VP 84. During this time our twelve planes accounted for six U-boats officially sunk. The total U-boats sunk by all means during this period, by surface ships, planes, and mines, was 186. So we did our share.

	The arctic nights are long, the social whirl of Iceland was slow, and we often gathered around the fireplace in the officers' club after dinner to swap tall stories about our flying experiences and to discuss global strategy. The strange story of the U-570's surrender was hashed over many a time. One night after Hopgood's exploit, while a marvelous aurora borealis display outside made all things seem possible, a fantastic plan was hatched. Somebody tossed the question on the hearth: "Why can't we board and capture a sub with one of our PBY's?"

	When you analyze this question now it seems crazy. But when you are gathered around a fireplace in Iceland and a dozen active young imaginations go to work on it, especially when the bar stays open late, small difficulties are solved immediately and big ones soon after.

	We started from the known facts that a depth-charge attack which doesn't sink a U-boat can cripple her so she can't submerge, and that U-boat crews have a strong desire to stay alive. We all knew you can land a PBY in a pretty rough sea and get away with it -- much rougher than you can take off from.

	We pictured another situation like Hoppy's, with a cripple limping along on the surface. We decided we would circle a few times, peppering the hull with machine-gun bullets to convince the crew they had better stay below. Meantime, by radio to the base we would crack off a previously chosen code word which meant, "We are about to board and capture this guy. Send destroyer out to accept the prize from us." BOREALIS was to be the magic word.

	Then our PBY would land just short of the U-boat's stern, taxi rapidly up, and hook her wing over the sub's deck just abaft the conning tower. All this time the bow gunner would be beating a tattoo on the conning tower with his machine gun to maintain discipline among' the Nazis. The plane's crew would of course be equipped with boat hooks, tommy guns, and about a fathom of light anchor chain.

	While the pilot gunned his outboard engine to hold the plane in place alongside the moving sub, the rest of the plane crew would pile out-on deck and after lashing the plane securely to the sub would rush up to the conning tower. They would toss a few grenades down the hatch, and the man with the chain would secure one end on deck and drop the other down the hatch, making it impossible to close the hatch in case the Nazis were able to make repairs and wanted to submerge. Then the only thing left to do would be to pound out a message on our portable radio transmitter asking the base, "What the hell is the delay is getting that destroyer out here?"

	About this time the bar closed and we went to bed.

	Call this plan fantastic if you will. I suppose it was. But as will appear in a later chapter, an almost equally fantastic plan bore fruit little over a year later.

	While in Iceland I was promoted to captain, having been a commander for only two years. As things turned out, I was to be a rear admiral within two more years.

	You can see what I meant by that story about the tycoon and his rich uncle. I spent eighteen years getting to be lieutenant commander, four in the ranks of commander and captain, and my last sixteen on active duty as a flag officer.

	While we fought the Battle of the Atlantic up there near the Arctic Circle, our Pacific Fleet struggled back to its feet after Pearl Harbor, cleared its head, and started punching. As each new convoy arrived it brought confidential action reports on battles fought months^previously. We pored over these avidly, learning why we lost the Lexington, Wasp, Hornet, and Yorktown; how we got the four Jap carriers at Midway; and how those desperate battles in the dark were fought in Iron Bottom Sound.

	The more I read, the more restless I got. This job in Iceland was vitally important, of course -- and if we lost the Battle of the Atlantic, we would lose the war. But I had spent twenty years of my life learning to be a naval officer and to fly airplanes from ships. I didn't want to sit out the greatest war in history on the beach. I wanted a ship.

	In May, 1943, my prayers were answered, and I was ordered back to the States "for further assignment."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

COMMISSIONING

	Back in the States I spent a month's leave with my wife and three youngsters on our place near Fairfax, Virginia. I was slated after my leave to go to Astoria, Oregon, to form and train a crew for one of the jeep carriers being built by Henry Kaiser in Vancouver on the Columbia River. I would command the ship when she went in commission. Her name was to be the Guadalcanal.

	Several times during my leave the Bureau of Personnel tried to get me to take a ship which would be commissioned a few weeks sooner. But I wouldn't have it. I wanted the Guadalcanal and no other. Insisting on this turned out to be one of the best hunches I ever had.

	Like all new skippers, I wanted this ship, my first seagoing command, to be the best jeep carrier that ever put to sea. 

	We would tackle any job that came our way, no matter what, and run away with it. If Admiral Halsey could just hold out a little longer, until we got there, his problems would all be solved.

	To make wishful thinking like this come true you've got to have more than just an eager-beaver skipper. You've got to have something that makes the whole crew feel the same way. I figured the name "Guadalcanal" would be this something.

	The Marines had made this name immortal in our history books. Their capture of that island had finally turned the tide of war in the Pacific. It was a name known to every school kid in the country and we just had to live up to it. It was unthinkable that a ship with that proud name on its stern could be anything but the best.

	The fifty Kaiser jeep carriers taking shape in Vancouver when I reported there in July, 1943, were a public scandal to all craftsmen in the ancient and honorable guild of shipbuilders*. Ships had always been custom-built jobs put together on the building ways rivet by rivet and plate by plate. Skilled shipwrights never built two ships exactly the same, even from one set of plans, just as no custom tailor will make you two identical suits of clothes. But in the Kaiser yard ships were being assembled in a new way that was typical of how we mobilized the industrial might of the United States to win the war.

	All over the country, factories that made structural steel shapes, heavy machinery, large tanks, and pipelines, were building various sections of ships. These sections poured into Vancouver on flat-cars, were put on assembly lines like automobile parts, and were then assembled into bigger sections. Huge cranes picked up the big sections and carried them down to the building ways, and there they were welded into whole ships by former shoe clerks, farmers, stenographers, and chorus gals.

	The finished ships were marginal in every way, meeting absolutely minimum requirements but that's all. They were only 11,000 tons, compared to over 30,000 for the Essex-class carriers. Their flight decks were no bigger than the Langley's. They could only make 19 knots, and they were armed with one 5-inch gun, mounted on the stern so it could only be fired at a target you were running away from. They had no proper watertight compartments like regular Navy ships and one torpedo or bomb would finish them.

	The Navy Department, including Admiral King, had turned thumbs down when Kaiser presented his plans for these freaks. When Kaiser went over their heads and got F. D. R. to buy the idea, every salt-water sailor and all naval architects shook their heads in dismay. By usual naval standards these assembly jobs were ridiculous and no good could ever come of them.

	A lot of "experts" said this in no uncertain terms. When my crew was assembling I found it necessary to get the boys together and spike some of the rumors that were going around the waterfront.

	One of them was that these ships were structurally unsound and would break in two in a seaway. I must admit now this didn't seem too implausible at the time, especially when several Liberty ships did break in two. But looking back these Kaiser ships did fine work during the war and justified their existence many times over. The only ones we lost were sunk by bombs, torpedoes, and 16-inch guns.

	Our crew was just as green and inexperienced as the workers who assembled the ship. Only about 10 per cent of the officers and men had ever been to sea before. In some ways this was an advantage. We had a big job of technical training to do, of course, teaching the boys to operate the machinery and molding them into the kind of smooth-working team it takes to run a good aircraft carrier. But young Americans learn that sort of thing fast, so that part of it wasn't too hard.

	The biggest job was getting them into the right frame of mind, and that's where their inexperience was an asset. My great plans for the Guadalcanal were perhaps a little visionary. If you tell a crew of old-timers that you intend to do some very improbable things with a new ship, they are apt to look at each other knowingly and say, "How did this skipper escape from the booby hatch?" But if you tell the same thing to a bunch of greenhorns, they may just say, "Aye aye, sir," and go out and do it.

	This is where having a name like "Guadalcanal" pays off. Even identical sister ships like the fifty Kaiser jeep carriers, built from the same plans and as alike physically as two swab handles, can be as different as night and day. One is happy; another surly. One is lucky; another never finds a fair breeze. One can go alongside a dock in a foul wind with a mean cross tide running and not knock a splinter off a piling; another will make a dozen powerful tugs puff and grunt to shove her alongside at slack water. You can bet your life on one in the wildest gale that blows, and the other is not to be trusted beyond the horizon.

	The first order that we published to our assembling crew was:

1.	The motto of the Guadalcanal will be "Can Do," meaning that we will take on any tough job that is handed to us and run away with it. The tougher the job, the better we'll like it.

2.	Before a carrier can do its big job of sinking enemy ships, several hundred small unspectacular jobs have got to be done and done well. One man falling down on a small job can "bitch the works" for the whole ship. So learn everything you can about your job during this shakedown period. Pretty soon we will be out there where it rains bombs and it will be too late to learn then.

NOTE:  This ship will be employed on dangerous duty. We will either sink the enemy or get sunk ourselves depending on how well we learn our jobs now and do our jobs later. Anyone who prefers safer duty see me and I will arrange to have him transferred.

D.V. Gallery
CAPT. USN

	Nobody took me up on the offer made in this NOTE. From the day of our commissioning the crew all referred to the ship as the "Can Do," and that's the only name they use for her even now.

	It's important for a crew to know something about the man who will take them into battle and whose orders can mean life or death to them. So we used to take time out from our training program once a week for me to give a talk to the crew. This gave us a chance to have a look at each other and to start getting acquainted.

	In one of my first talks I told them:

	I'm going to ask quite a lot from you people in this ship, and I'm sure I'm going to get it. I don't believe in one-sided bargains, so in return I make you two promises:

	First: To every man who makes the welfare and efficiency of this ship his major concern in life as long as he is aboard, I promise you that one of my major concerns will be to see to it that he gets every break that he has coming to him.

	Second: I promise you that after we go in commission whenever a good fight breaks out anywhere within our range we will be right smack in the middle of it just as fast as I can get you there.

	Maybe the above sounds sort of corny now, twenty years after we have won the war. But it didn't then, while the issue was still in doubt.

	In my commissioning address the day we hoisted the colors and became an official U.S. Navy man-o'-war I said:

	We are getting a fine ship with a wonderful fighting name.

	The job which you and I have cut out for us now is to live up to that name. That's going to be a tough job.

	The name "Guadalcanal" has become a household word in the U.S. That name means so much to the people of our country that great things will be expected of us. I hope, and I believe, that we will live up to these expectations. I know that all of us present here this morning are determined that we must live up to them.

	I want to warn you against one mistake that is very easy to make. Don't say to yourself, "I will live up to what is expected of me in this ship by being very brave on the day we go into battle." That's not enough. That's the very least that is expected and required of any U.S. Navy sailor. The crew of every single one of our ships that has gone into battle in this war so far has been very brave just as part of the day's work.

	We have got to live up to our name not only on the day of battle but every day from now on. We have got to do it in the little things as well as in the big ones. We have got to take any job we are given, whether it is a spectacular one with a lot of glory in it or a dirty, unpleasant, and inconspicuous one, and do it as if our lives depended on it. It is only by doing this and by striving to excel every day in everything we do, that you and I can prove ourselves worthy of the great name that is being entrusted to our care... Pipe down and set the watch.

	As every captain knows, the Creator of men's souls sometimes takes a hand in the destiny of his ship's soul. I had read accounts of battles in the Pacific which told about holding special prayer services just before going into action. When I discussed this with our chaplain, Father Weldon, now Bishop of Springfield, Massachusetts, we agreed it was bad psychology as well as shabby theology to wait until we were looking down the enemy gun barrels before starting to pray.

	And, besides, Father Weldon quoted Mr. Dooley's remark about the parish priest on his way to become a chaplain in the Spanish-American War who was asked if he would pray when he went into battle. "I will not," replied the padre. "Any healthy man should be ashamed," he said, "to ask for help in a fight."

	We decided to get around that difficulty by asking for help every day as a matter of ship's routine.

	Each morning, right after colors when in port or after sunrise at sea, the bosun's mate passed the word, "Attention to morning prayer." All hands stopped what they were doing, uncovered, and faced the bridge, while Father Weldon said a prayer to which all hands, no matter what their religion, could say Amen.

(I hope no members of the Supreme Court read this book! They might declare everything we did unconstitutional and make us give the U-boat we captured back to the Germans.)

	Throughout the life of that ship there were three ideas that guided her and that put more strength in her plates, more speed in her engines, and more displacement in her hull than the designer's slide rules said were there. They were the custodianship of a great name, the Can Do motto, and faith in God.

	Looking back now, twenty years later, I think I can safely say we did live up to the name on our stern. Before we had been in commission a year we had the coveted Presidential Unit Citation for boarding and capturing an enemy ship in battle for the first time since 1815. And I know better than anyone else that we were a very lucky ship. But... we asked for God's help every day -- we got it.

	One thing that's important in breaking in a new crew is for all hands to know that the skipper will stick his own neck out and go to bat for them if necessary. If the Admiral's staff carelessly give the ship a bum deal, say on leave schedules, the skipper must go to the Admiral and respectfully put in a beef. He may get thrown out of the cabin, but even so, his stock with his crew will go up almost as much as if he got the schedule corrected. If a young officer of the deck bollixes up some maneuver and the Admiral afterward asks the skipper "Who had the deck?" the only proper reply is, "I had the deck, sir."

	There is really nothing heroic about this because the skipper is responsible and holds the sack for better or for worse for everything that happens on his ship. When what happens is good, he has a perfect right to be smugly modest in accepting credit for it. When what happens is bad, if he is worth bis salt, he steps up and takes the rap even though he may have had little control over the boo-boo in question. After all, the skipper is supposed to have control.

	The birth of an ace ship is a mysterious and unpredictable business. All Navy ships have got to be good. Some are better than others. Once in a while, for no obvious reason, a ship comes along that has the magic touch.

	A crew gets assembled who are all in a hurry. A few hustling salty chiefs come aboard. A group of sharp officers strike just the right balance between spit and polish and the crew's welfare. Then suddenly, and no one knows why, fission occurs, the whole ship's company ignites, and everything that ship does turns out to be right You've got another Enterprise on your hands.

 	This happened on a smaller scale with the Guadalcanal. One of the big reasons for it was my executive officer, Commander Jesse Johnson.

	The exec is the key man on any ship. He runs the internal administration, is much closer to the crew than the skipper can be, and is the one who tries to execute the skipper's policies. The skipper sits up in the cabin thinking great thoughts. When he comes up with one that he thinks is a Good Idea, he sends for the exec, dumps it in his lap, and says, "You work out the details."

	There are times when the skipper thinks that the quickest way to get something done is to blow his top and raise hell. When this happens, if you have a seasoned, understanding exec like Jesse, he acts as a shock absorber, keeps the ship on an even keel, and allows only enough of the fireworks to go down the line to accomplish the desired purpose.

	With a different type of exec the skipper has got to keep his temper or he can easily make the ship too hot to live in. But if he keeps it he may get so hot inside himself that he is not fit company to have on board.

	With a man like Johnson around to take the curse off of it, an occasional blast of seafaring language from the bridge can blow the fog out of a befuddled seaman's mind like an offshore wind clears a harbor.

	Jesse was exactly the right kind of exec for me. I must admit, however, that he deserves a Purple Heart with a lot of stars in it for the suffering he patiently endured when I didn't think we were winning the war fast enough.

	I had assumed right from the beginning that the Guadalcanal would stay in the Pacific. Just before we began our shakedown cruise I learned that we were going to the Atlantic. This was a bitter blow to me. The Battle of the Atlantic was won, and had become almost a mopping-up operation. I had been looking forward to joining my classmates out in the Pacific, where the outcome of the war still hung in the balance and big, decisive battles were still to be fought. I was chagrined at the prospect of going back to the Atlantic, figuring I had already served my time in Siberia.

	Actually, as things turned out, going back to the Atlantic was one of the luckiest breaks I ever got. In the Pacific, jeep carriers were very small cogs in the huge machine of the Pacific Fleet. They were used mostly as transports to haul new aircraft to the big carriers in Halsey's great task forces. In the Atlantic, they were the flagships of the new Hunter-Killer task groups. Heading one of these groups was as close as a captain could get to having an independent command at sea in this day and age of centralized command and instant radio communications. So I consoled myself with the thought that, at any rate, I did know the ropes of the submarine-hunting trade.

	One of the characteristics of the Kaiser jeep carriers was dinned into our ears the day we crossed the bar at the harbor entrance on our shakedown cruise and got some motion on the ship. The thin plates between the hangar deck and the flight deck "oil canned" with every pitch of the ship -- the plates would spring in when the ship was over the back of a wave and they were in tension, and spring out when we got in the trough and put them under compression. This working in and out like an oil can was accompanied by a thunderous booming that reverberated throughout the ship and reminded everyone of those predictions that the ship would break in two.

	Actually there was no danger of this. Those plates were really just spray shields for the hangar deck and had nothing to do with the structural strength of the ship. But that ominous thunder from them sounded like the crack of doom.

	On our shakedown cruise we ran through all the drills and maneuvers in the book, plus a few that weren't in it. One of these latter ones was taking another ship in tow. Several times we had one of our destroyer escorts lie to, passed her a big wire cable, and took her in tow. Manhandling an inch-and-a-quarter wire cable is a backbreaking job and my boys could see little sense in it because a carrier wouldn't tow a disabled escort. She would give the job to another destroyer. But my reasons for practicing this job were so visionary that I didn't care to explain them. Anyway, for future reference, we did learn to handle a towline.

	After a month of drills designed to make a seagoing ship out of us, we picked up an air group at San Diego to start learning how to be an aircraft carrier. It was about five years since I had made my last carrier landing on the expansive flight deck of the Saratoga, but I wanted to make the first one on the Guadalcanal.

	I wanted to do this for several reasons. First, I was constantly preaching Can Do to the boys -- here was a chance to demonstrate it in a small way myself. Second, I intended to ask those young pilots in the air group to do some pretty tough jobs, jobs that nobody had done before. I figured they would tackle them more willingly if they knew that the boss man could land on that tiny flight deck himself, and that the air-group commander might therefore be a little more bashful about trying to talk me out of some of the fast balls I was going to pitch at him.

	So, cheered on by the whole crew and air group I made the first take-off and landing. Seventeen years and over twenty thousand landings later, I made the last landing on the Guadalcanal, cheered on only by ghosts.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SHAKEDOWN CRUISE

	On our shakedown cruise, when we were cruising down the Pacific Coast on our way to the Atlantic, the Curious Incident of the Colored Soap Bubbles occurred. One calm, lazy afternoon I was standing on the starboard wing of the bridge gazing off into space and daydreaming when suddenly I thought I saw red, yellow, and blue soap bubbles floating past me. I did a quick double take, and as I looked, the bubbles burst. I had been up late the night before, was a little off my feed too, and so I just said, "The hell with it," and tried to brush it under the rug.

	But a few moments later here came some more, and there could be no doubt about it -- colored soap bubbles. I was on the verge of calling the attention of the young Officer of the Deck to this phenomenon when some instinct made me think better of it. The bubbles seemed to come from under the flight deck near my cabin so I beat it down there to have a, look.

	It turned out that my mess boys had been amusing themselves by blowing colored soap bubbles and releasing them out the port. It also turned out that they had tired of this pastime and were just putting the gear away when I came in the cabin. I explained that I had just come down to get a handkerchief and went back up to the bridge considerably relieved that I wasn't having hallucinations.

	But just suppose I had tried to call the young O.O.D.'s attention to this phenomenon at the exact moment when those mess boys decided they had had enough. Word would have spread through the ship like wildfire: "The Captain thinks he's seeing pink soap bubbles!" A new captain would have been waiting on the dock when we got back from that cruise and I would have gone off to the booby hatch for observation.

 	On our way to. the Atlantic we were accompanied by one of our sister ships, the Mission Bay. Indicative of the contempt in which we held the Japanese submarines, we had only two escort destroyers for this pair of carriers. The Japs at this time were using their submarines trying to get some supplies to their beleaguered island garrisons and even to the homeland. They seldom used their submarines as offensively as the Germans did. If they had, the war in the Pacific might have been a different story.

	On the way to the Canal my farm boys and shoe clerks began to get a little salt on them and become real sailormen. I doubted that some of them would ever get all the hayseeds out of their hair when I overheard one lad tell a shipmate, "I gotta get up at eleven and a half bells tonight!" (That rattling noise you just heard was caused by generations of old sailors turning over in their graves.)

	To a lad who had lived all his life at an inland place the first voyage at sea can be a big adventure. He learns that the sea is a mistress of many moods. Sometimes it is a millpond on which the Samoans were able to paddle to Hawaii in their canoes. At others it's a raging monster that can force the biggest ship that man will ever build to heave to. He learns that flying fish are not a tall story told by old sailors. He sees schools of porpoises grinning at him as they dive playfully back and forth across the bow wave. He sees whales, sharks, and great schools of tuna. He sees pelicans, seagulls, and bosun birds near land; albatross and Mother Carey's chickens a thousand miles at sea.

	Each day at sea brings a sunrise and sunset, different from any there have ever been before. Each night the cavalcades of stars march overhead, never changing but always new -- because one lifetime is too short to learn them all.

	Keeping the night watches at sea under a clear sky is good for your soul. On a ship's darkened bridge the full grandeur of the heavens soaks into you as it never can ashore. When you watch the majestic procession of the constellations across the sky, you can't help thinking of the millions of light years that separate us from the stars, of how long they have been there, of their infinite extent and uncountable numbers, and of then-vast bulk dwarfing our earth into insignificance. It helps you to put this puny planet of ours with its wars and conquests in proper perspective.

	It does a lot more than that. It is better than a sermon in St. Patrick's Cathedral to make you know beyond possibility of that there is an almighty and all-wise God who controls this universe and that the only reason you were born into it was to serve Him and be rewarded for it, if you deserve it, when you die.

	Look up at Orion, the greatest constellation in our northern sky. Orion will make his nocturnal sweep across the sky for millions of more years. You wonder if he will notice it when you no longer look up and nod at him from this planet

	Near the horizon astern you can see Polaris, the hub of our universe. It shows true north to all seafaring and flying men, be they Americans, Russians, Nazis, or Japs. You ask Polaris, "Don't you know there's a war on?" Polaris simply goes on announcing to all impartially, "Here is north."

	Overhead is Jupiter. In the quartermaster's big glass you can see four of his moons, nearly always in a perfect line. He has eleven moons, but you need an astronomer's telescope to see all of them. They circle around their parent as our moon does around us, sometimes disappearing behind him and sometimes throwing their shadows on his disc as they pass in front.

	Not so very long ago Galileo built a telescope and became the first man to gaze at this working model of our solar system. Until that moment some of the wisest men on earth still thought that the earth was the center of the Universe and that the sky * revolved around it. Galileo's first glimpse of Jupiter's moons lifted the scales which had covered man's eyes for thousands of years. Less than four hundred years ago one look through a telescope like the one on the bridge turned man's concept of the Universe inside out. Now, you and I and the O.O.D.'s messenger can glance at this marvel when we have nothing else to do and turn away from it to listen to the 10 o'clock news broadcast of things that will be forgotten next week.

	Overhead you see Sirius, Aldebaran, the Pleiades, and Cassiopeia. In all the wars of the world so far these stars have been neutral. Now man is plotting to latch onto their light with navigating devices for guided missiles so that we can make these stars help us kill each other in the next war. If man succeeds in this sacrilegious plot the One who keeps the stars in their appointed places should destroy this evil world of ours.

	But even if He did destroy it with an atomic blast and scatter the ashes from here to Polaris like dust before a cosmic wind, the rest of the heavenly bodies would still continue in their appointed orbits undisturbed. Our planet is so puny that not even our nearest neighbors would notice that we were gone.

	Many of our present-day wise men claim that in the past four hundred years they have found the answers to all the questions you can ask about the whys and wherefores of creation. They have determined the velocity of light, even though the sixth decimal place may be in doubt. They know that the ponderous masses of the stars, their orbits, and their velocities through space are all governed by a great code of natural laws, and they can quote and explain these laws in great detail until you ask them, "Whence came the laws?" Then some of these men who claim to be wise will tell you that the whole thing got started by chance, without any rhyme, reason, or cause. Maybe you can believe this when you are sitting in a lecture hall ashore, but not when you look up at night from a ship in the open sea.

	These same stars have watched everything that has ever happened on this earth and have seen all history in the making. Will the Battle of the Atlantic, or even World War II, be mentioned in the logbook of the Universe? I doubt it.

	Why should they be? The only event of any cosmic significance that ever happened on earth took place nearly two thousand years ago. Then the Creator of the universe took human form, came down on earth, and we crucified Him. We have been robbing and murdering each other ever since.

	Whether the next war lasts two hours or twenty years, whether we win or lose it, this world will look exactly the same to an observer on Orion as it always has. The heavenly logbook might well sum up the last two thousand years of man's existence with the usual laconic entry for an uneventful watch: "As before. No remarks."

	 I once heard a clergyman trying to explain why God allows catastrophes such as deformed children, pestilence, and wars to exist on the earth. He said that these things, even a war killing millions of innocent women and children, are really trivial incidents against the background of eternity. He said that what happens during a man's life on this earth is significant only for the bearing it has on his future eternal life. So far I went along with him.

	Then he said, somewhat apologetically, "I hope you don't think I'm preaching 'pie in the sky by and by.' " This apology rubbed me the wrong way. "Pie in the sky" is simply a flippant and sneering, but essentially accurate, way of describing exactly what the reverend is supposed to believe in -- and what I do believe in.

 	Even in peacetime about three fourths of the human beings on this earth eke out a miserable existence. Unless there is something better to come, life on this earth is a tragic joke for most of mankind. It doesn't embarrass me a bit to say that I believe we do have something better to look forward to.

	I admit it is hard to grasp the concepts of eternity and life after death. But I string along with the unknown philosopher who said, "I would rather govern my life by belief in God, die and find there is no God -- that to live refusing to believe in God, die, and meet Him face to face."

	But enough of this midnight meditation! There was a war on. We were en route to Panama accompanied by the Mission Bay, and two destroyers, and I was the task-group commander of the armada.

	A week before we were due in Panama the General commanding the Canal defenses sent me a dispatch asking us to play a little game and test his defense plans by trying to slip in an air attack on the Canal. I don't think the guardians of the Big Ditch took our jeep carriers too seriously when they arranged this little game.

	But we did. We decided to pull a statue of liberty play on them. We reshuffled our air groups, putting all the fighter planes on the Mission Bay and all the bombers on the Guadalcanal. We planned to split the task group and have the two carriers go separate ways.

	The Mission Bay was to launch a high-level "attack" at dawn from the Pacific side. We figured the Canal Zone radars would be sure to spot them a hundred miles or so out. A fighter looks about the same on a radarscope as a bomber, and we hoped they would concentrate on this attack and send all their interceptors up to meet it. Meantime the Guadalcanal would simultaneously launch the bombers from Salinas Bay in Costa Rica. They would cut across the Isthmus to the Atlantic side, stay down low, and hit Gatun Dam coming in from the "wrong" ocean.

	This sneaky plan worked like a charm. The things we did to their reconnaissance forces, radar net, interceptors, and bombers, were- very humiliating. I'll admit, we used some underhanded hocus-pocus in doing this.

	Their far-flung air-scouting Line picked us up five hundred miles from the Canal just before sunset the day we were to part company with the Mission-Bay. They kept a shadow over us all . As soon as it got dark, the Mission Bay off and made a beeline for the Canal, while we backtracked toward Salinas Bay.

	The shadower, unfortunately, stayed with the Guadalcanal. Apparently he didn't notice the task group had split up, which was fine. But we didn't want him to find out we were heading the wrong way. By a bit of skulduggery we made that plane think we were steaming south all night when we actually were going north! You have to behave rather dishonestly to do that.

	We fouled up our shadower's navigation so badly that the plane sent out to relieve him just before dawn found nothing but an empty ocean at our reported position several hundred miles south of where we really were. I am sure that no one in the Air Corps who was on duty in Panama at that time will ever trust the Navy again, even under oath.

	You understand, of course, that this fraud was a bit complicated; otherwise our brothers-in-arms wouldn't have fallen for it as they did. But I will try to explain it so even an Air Corps pilot can understand it.

	It hinges on two simple facts. First, on a dark night you can't tell by looking down on the rectangular flight deck of a carrier whether she is headed north or south. The only way you can tell is by spotting the bow wave at one end and the wake coming off the other. Second, an aviator, flying a complicated pattern to stay over a ship which is making a known course and speed, bases his navigation on this "known" course and speed rather than on an independent plot of his own gyrations.

	When our friend found us at sunset, we were headed south, and he knew and reported our exact position, course, and speed. Then he flew a clover-leaf pattern over us, keeping track of us by radar. We soon found that his clover leaf brought him back over us only once every half hour.

	I knew that if I had been in that plane I would not have attempted to lay down this complicated flight pattern on my chart and keep a dead-reckoning plot of my position. I would have started from the known fix at first contact, and every hour, as long as the ship held the same course and speed, I would have moved her fifteen miles farther south on my chart. I made the conservative assumption that Air Corps pilots are no smarter than Navy pilots.

	The problem was to make him think we were running south all night when we were actually going north. We did this by with the bow wave and wake.

	Soon after dark, when our friend was out of visual contact, we split off from the Mission Bay, reversed course, and steamed north the rest of the night. Every time the shadower's clover leaf brought him back over us, we backed full speed. This put the "bow wave" on the south end of the ship and made a "wake" come off the north end, indicating that we were still running south at 15 knots. In the phosphorescent waters near Panama this was "unmistakable" from the air on a dark night.

	We couldn't actually turn south when he approached and north again when he left, because two 180-degree turns require about five minutes and would have left a conspicuous S-shaped trail in the luminescent water showing exactly what we were doing.

	(Do you "follow" me so far? ... So did our Air Corps friend who stayed with us all night!)

	He simply moved his charted position fifteen miles farther south every hour, whereas actually we were making good about twelve miles to the north. Homing on us by radar, this was an easy mistake to make.

	Just before daylight he had to leave us. But he confidently radioed our position to his relief before shoving off. His relief hasn't found us yet, because the position was over two hundred miles in error.

	We pulled off our Statue of Liberty play at sunrise, sending our bombers across Nicaragua to the other side. Mission Bay did her part well, and the play went for a touchdown. Our bombers were not detected, the Zone's interceptors were all up dogfighting with Mission Bay's fighters a hundred miles out in the Pacific, and we hit Gatun Dam unopposed. (I could write a whole chapter about how this proves the Navy's case for mobile carrier bases -- but I won't.)

	The Canal Zone scouts didn't find the Guadalcanal again until near the end of the afternoon watch that day. By then we were committed to a definite arrival time in Panama, so we held our course and speed all night with no hanky-panky.

	We knew that soon after sunrise the guardians of the Canal would lower the boom on this troublesome little packet of ours which had fouled up their defenses.

	Just before sunrise, we met an angry rain squall about five miles in diameter. I sent for our aerological officer and said, "Riggs, for the next few hours you are skipper of this ship. Put us smack in the middle of that squall and keep us there."

	Riggs did a scientific job. From sunrise till 9 o'clock, weather on our flight deck was zero-zero, although it was CAVU a few miles away all around us.

	Two squadrons of B-17's came out right after sunrise to beat the deadlights out of us. They had our exact position, but that tropical rain squall was a little too rich for their blood.

	For three hours we watched them circling on our radarscopes as they went around and round the mulberry bush. It was the prettiest rat race I've ever seen.

	Finally we heard the two squadron commanders cooking up a deal on their voice radio to "get this damned thing over with." They agreed to bust through that squall from north to south with their planes making individual instrument approaches by radar at one-minute intervals.

	This meant the jig was up -- except there had been a lot of uninhibited chatter on the radio for the past three hours. We were listening in on this party line and by that time, we knew all the call signs, authenticators, and procedure.

	We simply called the two squadron commanders, using the "phone number" of their home base in Panama, and told them, "Exercise completed. Return to base."

	It so happened that the squadron commanders missed our transmission. But somebody always gets the word to knock off a tedious exercise. Their Number Two and Number Three planes promptly relayed this message to the skippers, thus making it seem all the more authentic. They all buzzed off and went home.

	When we anchored in Panama the next day a critique of the exercise was held in General Brett's headquarters. Adding insult to injury, I brought along a tape recording of all radio transmissions, climaxed by our phony about returning to base.

	At the end of the critique I got the hell out of there and beat it right back to the ship. I'll never go ashore in Panama again as long as I live, without a bodyguard. Some of those Air Corps people might still be on duty there. Of course, now that we are unified, maybe this couldn't happen any more.

	Our whole crew naturally got a huge kick out of screwing up the Army and Air Corps this way. On our first public appearance, so to speak, we had done very well and had left our sister services muttering in their beer.

	But this of course was just make-believe stuff. As the Colon breakwater light dropped out of sight astern a few days later, weren't making believe any more. We were entering waters U-boats might be lurking anywhere, ready to strike without warning. We had to get used to living with the idea that a torpedo might tear our bottom open at any hour of the day or night.

	The blood pressure and heartbeat of everyone on board went up a couple of points.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

FIRST KILL

	We arrived in Norfolk in December, 1943, to prepare for our first foray into the North Atlantic early in January. Hampton Roads was a far cry m 1943 from what it had been eighty-one years before, when the Monitor and the Merrimac ushered in the ironclad era with their famous battle. Clustered around the historic roadstead were Langley Field, Fortress Monroe, a great naval operating base, a naval air station, a naval shipyard, an amphibious base, and the giant shipyard of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company. Most of the Atlantic convoys assembled in Hampton Roads and sailed from there. Practically all the effort of this great military complex was focused on the Battle of the Atlantic.

	Although the tide in this battle had definitely turned, it was by no means over. Before Germany collapsed in May of '45, 328 more ships, totaling over 1½ million tons, and 402 more U-boats would go to the bottom.

	But those figures tell a graphic story of the change that had taken place at sea since the early days of the war. The "exchange rate," as the statisticians called the ratio of ships sunk to U-boats sunk, was now less than 1 to 1. In 1940 it had been a murderous 40 to 1!

	There were no more "nights of the long knives," with U-boats running amok among the convoys. The submarines were the game now, instead of the huntsmen. Aircraft and destroyers attacked them wherever they showed themselves on the surface. The recent advent of the jeep carriers had closed even the "mid-ocean gap" where the U-boats had been able to run on the surface with impunity. When the Card, Core, and the Bogue first sallied forth in the Atlantic they caught the U-boats lying to on the surface with their crews sun-bathing on deck west of the Azores. They sent ten U-boats and their sun bathers to Davey Jones in the first couple of months and put a stop to that foolishness.

	One thing that the reader must know to understand antisubmarine warfare is that the type of U-boat we were fighting until near the end of the war had to spend most of her time on the surface in order to accomplish anything. Actually she was a surface vessel with the ability to submerge, for a while, when making an attack or when being attacked. But she handicapped herself severely when she submerged because her underwater speed was very slow, 3 to 4 knots.

	And she couldn't stay submerged long. Submerged, she couldn't run her diesel engines because, until the advent of the snorkel,.the diesels couldn't get air. So the sub had to run on battery-driven electric motors, and the maximum life of the battery's charge was twenty-four hours. After twenty-four hours at even creeping speed, the U-boat skipper had to surface and open his hatches so he could run his diesel engines and recharge the battery. Since the boat would have to surface anyway after twenty-four hours to charge batteries, the U-boat designers gave the crew only one day's supply of breathing air when submerged. So at the end of twenty-four hours, a U-boat had to surface for two urgent reasons: to recharge batteries, and to renew the air for the crew.

	Our antisubmarine tactics were based on these facts. When you sighted a U-boat on the surface you immediately bored in and tried to sink it with a spread of depth charges. But you seldom did sink it on the first attack, perhaps only once in ten attempts. The sub would see you in time to submerge, dodge, and escape with only a bad shaking up. Then you started what we called a "hold down."

	You knew that if the sub remained submerged she couldn't move more than about seventy-five miles at the most in the next twenty-four hours. At the end of that time she would have to surface to charge the battery. So you drew a circle with a radius of seventy-five miles around the spot where she had disappeared and patrolled that area constantly for the next twenty-four hours with planes and destroyers.

	Destroyers could sometimes find a submerged U-boat with their sonar gear, and occasionally planes would do it with sonar-buoys. But attacking a submerged U-boat which you can't see is a tricky job. You've got to get your depth charges within about thirty feet to rupture the tough pressure hull. The sub can be anywhere from fifty to five hundred feet below the surface, and it's difficult to guess what depth to set your charges for. If he is down deep, even if you guess the depth correctly, he has time to squirm and dodge while your depth charges are . When the charges explode they disturb the water so much that you can't hear anything for fifteen minutes or so and meantime the U-boat gets out of range of your listening gear.

	But you've still got her in a hold down with a fresh and accurate point of origin. If you just stay somewhere near him and keep worrying him you are winning the battle. After twenty-four hours at the most he will have to come up and then you should get him. If you just stick to your hold down doggedly and patiently you make a kill.

	This idea worked fine when the U-boat was within range of" shore-based aircraft which could cover an area all night. But for the jeep carriers it broke down at sunset. We had not yet learned to land at night on the pitching decks of those little CVE's, Even in the big carriers in the Pacific, flying was a dawn-to-dusk operation except for a few specially trained night pilots.

	Some of the Atlantic jeeps had been tiptoeing around the edges of this problem by launching in the dark a couple of hours before dawn. Others had stripped their planes of weapons, added fuel tanks, and launched them at sunset to stay up until daylight and act as scarecrows that would keep the subs submerged. But nobody wanted to go whole hog and try to land planes on those postage-stamp decks at night. Although there were no regulations saying you couldn't fly planes off a jeep carrier at night, it was generally accepted as a fact of life that you couldn't. The first skipper who tried it on his own initiative might have a fiasco that would kill several young pilots and make him look very bad indeed.

	A Hunter-Killer task group as organized and operated under Admiral Ingersoll, Commander in Chief, Atlantic fleet, was an ideal setup for an eager-beaver young captain. The task group consisted of your own jeep carrier with twelve ASW airplanes (known as "Turkeys") plus some fighters and five escort destroyers. Top speed of the group was 19 knots, and you could stay at sea for a month. The carrier skipper was the task-group commander and operated directly under Admiral Ingersoll. Before sailing he would assign you an operating area out in the Atlantic, and he would usually sail you about the same time as an eastbound convoy. You weren't tied to the apron strings of the convoy, but your sailing date and route usually kept you within a day's run of the convoy in case it got into trouble. When you got to your assigned operating area you your own ticket. You didn't even have to stay in the area if you had sound reason for leaving it.

	To baffle the enemy direction finders you never touched a long-range radio key unless it was really urgent. Admiral Ingersoll would pass you all information of interest in messages requiring no reply.

	By this time we had a network of radio direction-finder stations (called "Huff Duffs") in England, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, the U.S., and the Atlantic islands. Plotters in London and Washington had hot lines to these stations and could get across bearings and a fix almost instantly on any radio transmission in the North Atlantic. Whenever a U-boat touched a radio key, we would get a flash from London or Washington within minutes giving a pretty good fix on her position.

	Each day there was a top-secret message from Washington giving the latest estimated position of all U-boats known to be at sea. This was put out by Commander Kenny Knowles on Admiral King's staff in the so-called Tenth Fleet, which was actually just a cover name for some cloak and dagger activities. 

	Kenny kept track of U-boats and predicted their movements with uncanny accuracy. He seemed able to read the minds of the U-boat skippers and to know what their next move would be. I always regarded his daily bulletin as a page from the Bible, and often based my operation plans on it.

	The dope from Knowles and Admiral Ingersoll could guide you to the general area where a sub was. Then you relied on patrols by your planes to get a sighting from which you could start a hold down. In twelve hours you could thoroughly comb an area of 40,000 square miles -- just about the size of the state of Ohio. The area that you had to cover during the first twelve hours of a hold down was only about 7,500 square miles.

	When we shoved off from Norfolk early in January with our escort of four old four-pipe destroyers, we were a cocky but unproven outfit. On the Guadalcanal we were all sure that we would prove to be a great bulwark to the western world against Hitler's efforts to wrest the freedom of the seas from us. But to the rest of the Atlantic Fleet we were just a small question mark. We were a new type of ship and had made it from Astoria to Norfolk without getting sunk. But we were now going out where they played for keeps and the penalty for making a small mistake could be all hands going to Davey . We needed a kill to prove ourselves. Before long we got it.

	Our assigned operating area was to the west of the Azores. The Card, Core, and the Bogue had skimmed the cream off this area, and it was not unusual to go for a month without seeing any U-boats there. They were still around, but they stayed submerged during daylight hours and had become very wary and hard to find.

	We were very lucky. As we neared the operating area we got a message from Knowles saying that two U-boats were scheduled to refuel from a "milch-cow" submarine near- sunset on January 16 in the middle of our bailiwick. I immediately hauled clear of that area and kept our planes out of it until January 16 in order not to flush the game prematurely and scare them off. On the afternoon of the refueling date we closed toward the rendezvous point and launched an eight-plane search-and-attack group that was to land during evening twilight

	Sure enough, we caught the refueling party with their pants down, just before sunset at the predicted spot. There were three of them, a refueler and two smaller subs, all fully surfaced. The milch cow had one of her calves alongside eagerly sucking on the six-inch, hundred-foot-long teats from her ample fuel tanks. The third was standing by, patiently waiting its turn.

	Four of my boys barged in on this peaceful domestic scene like hawks in a chicken yard and plastered depth charges all around the two subs encumbered with mooring lines and fuel hoses so they couldn't submerge. There was a solid "overcast, so the planes were able to swoop down unobserved until it was too late. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. When the depth-charge eruptions subsided there was junk all over the ocean and about thirty U-boat sailors were paddling around in the mess of oily wreckage.

	The three subs had disappeared and we thought at first we had sunk all three. We found out later we had sunk the refueler (U-544) and damaged the one alongside her (U-129) so badly she was just barely able to limp into Lorient later. The other one {U-516) got away, but had to creep back to France to get fuel.

So far, so good. This was a fine beginning for our career as a Hunter-Killer group. Cheers went up all over the ship when the squawk boxes announced that we had just blasted three subs to the bottom. Now we were full-fledged, combat-seasoned memof the Atlantic Fleet team.

	But the day's work wasn't over yet. Under that solid overcast, it would get dark very rapidly after the sun went down, and we had to get our eight planes on deck before complete blackness set in.

	When the planes that had made the kill radioed the news to us, the other four planes were already in the landing pattern and we were about to bring them aboard. But curiosity is one of the strongest human emotions. This was our first kill, and that oil puddle full of Germans was only thirty miles from the ship. Every one of the pilots in the search-and-attack group felt that it was essential to the war effort for him to fly over there and take a gander at those U-boat sailors paddling around in the wreckage.

	We put out peremptory orders by radio to "get the hell back here and land." But the boys claimed there was a lot of static and they didn't understand. When they came wandering back from their rubberneck trip the sun had gone down and darkness was rapidly closing in on us.

	The first four lads got aboard OK, but the fifth landed too far to starboard and wound up with his right wheel down in the gallery walkway and his left wing sticking out over the deck and fouling the landing area. We still had three planes in the air and time was running out on us.

	Ordinarily, getting that plane back on deck and out of the landing area shouldn't have taken five minutes. But we were a new ship, pressure was on us for the first time, and we got butter-fingered. After we had fumbled around for about ten minutes the plane suddenly took a sickening lurch, swung its left wheel over the deck coaming and came to rest nose down in the walkway with its tail sticking out at right angles across the deck. My farmer boys messed around with it a few more minutes, getting nowhere, and then I said, "The hell with it. Shove it overboard."

	This was easier said than done. We heaved and we hauled, we grunted and we cursed, we even rammed into that plane with tractors. But we couldn't move the damn thing. Like Uncle Remus' Tar Baby, it just sat there and wouldn't budge.

	By this time it was pitch dark, and my three boys in the air were getting low on gas. We couldn't fool around any longer. You don't like to turn on the lights when you are in submarine-infested waters. But sometimes you have to stick your own neck out for the boys who are risking theirs carrying out your . And you've got have lights to land on a jeep carrier at night

	We lit up the ship like a waterfront saloon on a Saturday night and I got on the radio phone and made the following pitch to the boys in the air:

	That tail doesn't stick out very far into the landing area. If you land just a hair to the left of the deck's center line your right wing will clear it. So just ignore that wreck in the starboard walkway. Come on in and land.

	Three very dubious Rogers came in out of the blackness.

	For the next thirty minutes those three lads made the wildest passes at the deck I've ever seen. Our landing signal officer gave them wave-off after wave-off, trying to get them to settle down. It was easy enough for us on deck to make believe that wreck wasn't there, but the boys in the air just didn't have enough imagination. They kept edging over too far to port coming up the groove.

	Finally one of them reluctantly drifted over pretty close to the center line and the L.S.O. gave him a desperate "cut" even though he was way too fast. He hit wheels first, bounced into the air, rolled over on his back, and plunged into the sea. One of the destroyers fished the three crewmen out of the water unhurt.

	That was enough of that. We turned on the searchlights of all ships, pointed them down at the water, and ordered the other two planes to ditch alongside the destroyers. The tincans hauled all our boys out of the water OK. We blew out the lights, and got the hell out of that area.

	What I had just gone through was a miniature preview of what happened to Admiral Mitscher in the Pacific a few months later. On the evening of the "Marianas Turkey Shoot" he got caught with several hundred planes in the air after dark, and about half of them wound up in the water. That was the night he gave the famous order: "Turn on the lights."

	When I heard about this several months later, I knew exactly what had gone through his mind that night. But I never could see why the feature writers made such a whoop-de-doo about turning on the lights, and I doubt if Pete Mitscher could either. It was just one of those things that had to be done.

	Incidentally, we sent a destroyer to the scene of the kill to hunt for survivors, but they didn't find any. To ask a destroyer turn on searchlights on a dark night looking for survivors of an enemy U-boat would be stretching chivalry a bit too far.

	That night, after the excitement was over, I made up my mind we were going to learn to do two things: to clear a wreck out of the landing area promptly, and to land planes safely in the dark. The second project would have to wait till we got a new air group aboard on the next cruise because the present air group were too shook up to try it. But we went to work on the first project next morning.

	The Turkey that had gone in the walkway would have to be turned in for overhaul when we got back to the states and I figured a few more bumps and bruises on it wouldn't overtax the war effort of the country. We used it as a guinea pig learning how to get wrecks out of the landing area.

	Each day we would roll it carefully over to the edge of the deck, ease one wheel down into the walkway and hold a stop watch on the flight-deck crew while they wrestled it back on deck. When they got so they could do this smartly, we eased both wheels into the catwalk and cracked a big black whip over the boys until they could snatch it out of there in about three minutes. Before long they could throw up shear legs, rig blocks and tackle, and use jacks and 4 by 4 levers or just plain manpower to clear the landing area in jig time.

	By then our battered Turkey wasn't worth overhauling. So I said to the boys, "Next time start her with a run from the other side of the deck and see if you can get rid of her."

	The boys had all had a bellyful of dragging that airplane in and out the catwalks, so they gathered around, put their backs into it, and had her making knots by the time they got her to the opposite deck edge. But the decrepit old clunker just dropped both wheels into the catwalk and stuck there. From the bridge I could almost imagine it looking back over its shoulder at me reproachfully. The boys had to drag it out and try again.

	That plane became an albatross around the necks of the whole flight-deck crew. Try as they would, and I can assure you they tried real hard, they just couldn't get up enough speed to heave the damned thing plumb overboard.

	Just before we got back to Norfolk I finally relented and let the boys push it over the after ramp, giving it a decent burial at sea with appropriate ceremony. Meantime, they had become the outstanding experts in the Atlantic Ocean on how to get out of the unusual places that pilots sometimes park them in.

	On the way back to Norfolk we had a spectacular fire on the flight deck. A plane landed with a wing tank, full of gas, which bounced off, busted open, and torched, enveloping the whole after end of the flight deck in a mass of flames and a towering column of smoke. But our fire fighters soon had it under control and in ten minutes we were landing planes again.

	The only casualties from this mishap were three sailors who had been shirking duty and were seated in the gentleman's room just below the after end of the flight deck pretending to be occupied with legitimate business for the gents' can. Some of the flaming gasoline from the flight deck came down the drain and washed through the metal trough which ran under of toilet seats.

	My three boondoggling sailors came flying out of that head like bats out of hell, hauling their pants up as they ran. Scorched the hide off their biblical beast of burden and formal dances!

	As soon as we got back to Norfolk I sent for Lieutenant Commander Dick Gould, the skipper of the squadron we would take out with us on our next cruise. I told Dick I planned to fly his boys around the clock, day and night, but would not start the night flying until the moon was nearly full, so bis pilots could work into the pitch-black landing stage gradually as the moon got smaller. To my surprise, Dick took this in stride. He said he had been drilling his lads on. night-carrier approaches ashore, and thought they were ready for the real thing.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

U-515 AND U-68

	We sailed on our second cruise early in March with .four destroyer escorts from Escort Division 4, led by Commander Frederick Hall. These cans, the Pillsbury, Pope, Chatelaine, and Flaherty, stayed with us for our next three cruises.

	Our assigned area was northeast of the Azores about three-hundred miles off the coast of Portugal. This was right on the route used by most U-boats headed toward or out from the Bay of Biscay.

	During the first half of the cruise we didn't get the weather I wanted for breaking the ice on night operations. So we flew only in daylight. We found nothing, despite the fact that the daily broadcasts from Knowles showed a constant stream of U-boats passing us on the way in and out of Biscay.

	The fact that we patrolled this area for a month asking for trouble but not getting any shows how the U-boats' morale had been beaten down. Just a year before this, any submarine skipper would have rubbed his hands in glee at the prospect of getting a pot shot at a jeep carrier. Now they avoided us.

	By checking back on captured U-boat logs I can show you where one U-boat outbound for the Freetown area in Africa ran almost between my legs one night when I had all my planes on deck. She was the U-505, and plays a prominent part in this story a little later. We had a historic rendezvous to keep with her in June on our next cruise. But in March we passed in the night. She didn't see us and we didn't see her.

	After refueling in Casablanca we resumed our patrol in the same area early in April. This time as the moon got bigger the weather was fairly good. So a few days before full moon, with our fingers crossed and an extra fervent Amen after the morning prayer, we plunged into night operations. It was scary business, the kind that promotes the screaming jitters and ulcers. Every approach was a hair raiser. Every landing threatened to be a major crash. But it worked. We busted up a few planes, but nobody got hurt.

	This paid off almost at once. On the second night, a few hours after sunset, one of our pilots caught a fully surfaced U-boat recharging her batteries on the way out of Biscay. Our lad bore in and got off a quick depth-charge attack which merely gave the U-boat a good shaking up while she was crash diving. But now we had an accurate fix on a U-boat only thirty miles from the task group. We immediately went into our hold-down routine, concentrating our planes around the point of submersion and peeling off a couple of destroyers to get over there at full speed. The circle containing all possible positions that the U-boat could reach grew at the rate of only 8 miles an hour, and it was easy to keep that small area thoroughly covered.

	The sub's skipper evidently was reluctant to believe that he couldn't run on surface at night this far from the nearest land. And besides, he had been submerged all day and his battery-was low. He surfaced twice during the night but had to crash dive immediately to escape our planes, which spotted him as soon as he came up. This gave us new fixes on him and thus kept our hold-down circle small. It also prevented him from renewing the air in his boat and getting a charge into his battery. Each new fix brought our destroyers closer to him with their probing sonar gear. Just before sunrise the destroyers picked up an answering echo to the pings of their sonar and attacked with depth-charges and hedge-hogs -- small bombs that explode only on contact.

	But even a surface ship with a solid sonar contact can't be sure of a kill every time. Four times that morning my destroyers dropped full depth-charge patterns all around the U-boat and shook him up brutally. But each time when the reverberations of the depth charges died out, our sonar men heard telltale noises indicating a U-boat was fleeing for its life somewhere in the nearby depths. After the fourth attack a lot of garbage and oil came to the surface. By this time in the war we were all wise to that standard U-boat trick, so we paid no attention to it. We could still hear the desperate thum, thum, thum of propellers running very deep.

	A destroyer's sonar loses contact when nearly over a deep-running sub. If relying only on her own sonar she had to make the last minute of her firing run blind. We had already found out that if you gave this guy half a minute's leeway it was too much. So we had one destroyer lie off about a quarter of a mile, ping her sonar on the sub, and coach the other destroyer into firing position directly over him. We held this kind of deliberate target practice for a couple of hours.

	But this sub skipper was a tough customer who knew all the tricks of the trade. He twisted and squirmed, he changed depth, he fired decoys to foul up our sonar operators. He couldn't shake us off. Although we gave him a terrible beating, we couldn't kill him.

	At 1410 the Pope dropped a depth-charge pattern set for six hundred feet It exploded just barely outside lethal range. It slammed the U-boat crew against the steel walls of their pressure hull, smashed the lights, knocked great flakes of paint off the bulkheads, and spilled acid from the battery. The battery was almost flat anyway and the air in the boat was foul even before this new hazard of the loose acid and chlorine gas.

	The hard-boiled U-boat skipper knew that this was it. If he tried to stick it out any longer his boat would soon go to the bottom, taking all hands along with it. "Blow all tanks!" he ordered. "Stand by to scuttle and abandon ship."

	At 1417 the U-boat broke surface within a hundred yards of the Pope, Pillsbury, Flaherty, and Chatelaine. I could see her from my bridge five miles away.

	We had no way of knowing that she had surfaced in extremis to abandon ship and scuttle. So far as we knew a deadly rattlesnake had just reared its head from the depths, ready to strike. In a situation like this you can't afford to fool around trying to negotiate a surrender. You let him have it. The destroyers opened up with everything in their shot lockers: depth charges, torpedoes, 20 millimeters, and 4-inch guns.

	That U-boat was still able to fire a salvo of six torpedoes from her bow and stern tubes, as many others had done just before heading for Davey Jones. So we paid no attention to the little black figures that popped out of the hatches and dove over the side. We whammed away at the snake till we were sure we had broken its neck.

	Ten minutes after the U-boat had surfaced it slowly reared itself straight up in the air, pointing its bow to the sky, with white water pouring from the vent holes in the gingerbread fairing around the pressure hull. I suppose a literary man might say it looked like a cobra rearing up to strike. But on the bridge of the Guadalcanal, as the sub plunged to the bottom, Jesse Johnson, a seafaring man, yelled, "Thar she blows and sparm at that."

	We fished forty-five survivors out of the water and hauled them aboard the Guadalcanal. From some of the first we learned we had sunk the U-515, which meant nothing to me at time except another U-boat. I told the boys to bring the skipper up to the cabin when and if they got him.

	Soon the Chief Master-at-Arms escorted a husky, blond, eagle-eyed character up to the cabin and said, "This is the captain, sir."

	It was hardly necessary to tell me this. I knew the instant he came into the cabin this man was the captain. He looked like an Ail-American halfback whose team has lost a close game and who is beaten but unashamed.

	I found out later that he was one of the aces of the U-boat flotillas and though his crew respected his ability, they hated his guts. They said he took unnecessary chances because he wanted an oak-leaf cluster for his Knight's Cross, and they blamed the loss of their boat on bis reckless confidence that he would sink the Guadalcanal. They were also bitter because for two years he had frozen promotions in his crew to prevent any of his seasoned veterans from being transferred to new boats.

	"Your name?" I asked him.

	"Henke," he said, and continued in English as good as mine, "Werner Henke, Kapitan Leutnant in the German Navy," and gave his serial number.

	"The number of your U-boat?" I asked.

	He stood mute for a moment and then said, "Captain, I have a protest to make."

	Caught off guard I said, "What is it?"

	"You killed many of my men when we were trying to surrender."

	That was easy to answer. I said, "I had no way of knowing whether you were trying to surrender or to torpedo my ships. As soon as we were sure you were harmless we ceased firing and rescued forty-five of your crew."

	"But you killed ten," he said, "in violation of the Geneva Convention."

	Henke knew as well as I did that many U-boats had surfaced to allow their crew to escape and with their dying gasp had torpedoed the ship that did them in. I've often wondered whether in such a situation the survivors should keep on fighting in the water after their ships go down or should try to negotiate a truce.

	But there was no point in arguing with Henke about this. "Take him below," I said.

	Some of our skippers in the Battle of the Atlantic treated captured U-boat captains as guests.

	Since they themselves in the sea cabin up on the bridge when in dangerous waters, they turned their own main cabin over to the captured U-boat skipper. I didn't hold with this idea at all. I thought it better for all concerned to treat all U-boat survivors as prisoners of war regardless of rank.

	On the Guadalcanal we put all the captured officers, including the skipper, in the brig (ship's prison) and kept them separated from their crew.

	So Kapitan Leutnant Werner Henke, Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for sinking 160,000 tons, was incarcerated in the brig.

	Next day the Master-at-Arms brought word up to the bridge that Henke wanted to see me. "What for?" I asked.

	"Something about the Geneva Convention," replied the Chief.

	"Oh, that again," I said. "Okay. Bring him up to the cabin after we land the next flight."

	When Henke was escorted into the cabin he had lost most of the beaten air of the day before. He put in an official beef about being quartered in the brig and claimed that under the Geneva Convention he was entitled to an officer's stateroom and a place at the wardroom table.

	That wasn't hard to answer either. I didn't have my copy of the Geneva Convention handy, but I told him that despite whatever the Convention said, we were in a war zone and had to be practical. To give him an officer's stateroom I would have to put one of my own officers out of a bunk, and I didn't propose to do that.

	"But the Geneva Convention says -- " he began. "Besides," I interrupted, "many of my crew are of Polish and Jewish ancestry. They might not be polite to you if I gave you the freedom of the ship."

	"According to the Convention it's your duty to protect your prisoners," he said.

	By this time I-was getting a little P.O.ed at being lectured on how to run my ship. The next thing I said was just a shot in the dark on an unpremeditated hunch. "Captain," I said, "in about ten days we will refuel in Gibraltar. If you don't like the way I'm treating you I can turn you and your crew over the British. Maybe they'll treat you better."

	There are several things about this statement that liberal-minded people may criticize now. In the first place we weren't going anywhere near Gibraltar. In the second place, if we had, the whole British Mediterranean Fleet couldn't have taken prisoners away from me. I was bringing them home for proof!

	My statement had an even greater effect On Henke than I had expected. The beaten look came back and he said quickly, "Captain, it isn't that bad. I can put up with it for a few more weeks. I withdraw my protest."

	So he went back to the brig and requested no more audiences with me.

	A few days later the Chief Master-at-Arms came up to the bridge with an interesting story. Henke had relaxed a little with my M.A.A., who brought him his chow, and had done some reminiscing. He told about sinking the Ceramic a year earlier with a loss of seven hundred lives. Henke had brought back one survivor for proof. He said that just before they sailed on this last cruise, a propaganda broadcast beamed at the U-boat bases had announced that the British had found out it was the U-515 that sank the Ceramic, and that after the sinking, she had surfaced and machine-gunned the lifeboats. (Henke indignantly denied this.) The broadcast then went to say that if the British ever got their hands on the U-515 crew, they would try them for murder and hang them if convicted.

	At the time I thought this yarn originated with the BBC. Later I learned that it was put out by our own Tenth Fleet on one of the so-called Norden broadcasts cooked up in the fertile brain of Ladislas Farago.

	I am as sure as you ever can be about things like this that Henke would never have machine-gunned a lifeboat. But after mulling over this story I decided to see how far I could go with the idea of turning him over to the British. I had a message prepared on a Top Secret dispatch blank as follows:

FROM: Cinclant

TO: USS Guadalcanal

    Admiralty has requested that you turn survivors of U-515 over to them when you refuel in Gibraltar. In view of crowded condition of your ship you are authorized to use your discretion.

	I also drew up the following statement on legal parchment with the ship's seal on it, ready for signature by Henke:

I, Kapitan Leutnant W. Henke, hereby promise on my as a German Officer that if I and my crew are imprisoned in the United States instead of in England, I will answer all questions truthfully when interrogated.

Signed __________________________________________
                                          KAPT. LT. 

WITNESSES:

________________________________________
D.V. GALLERY CAPT. USN

________________________________________
             J. G. JOHNSON COMDR. USN

	I must admit that the chance for success with this shenanigan didn't seem very good. But it was one of those things where you've got nothing to lose and may gain something. The worst that could happen would be for Henke to spit in my face, which wouldn't affect the outcome of the war one way or the other. If the idea worked, something pretty good might come of it.

	I sent for an anchorage chart of Gibraltar and laid it out on the cabin table where Henke was bound to see it. Then I got Commander Johnson up to the cabin as a witness, had the M.A.A. bring Henke up from the brig, and handed him the phony dispatch.

	His face fell when he read it, and it was obvious he took a dim view of going to England.

	"The Geneva Convention ..." he began.

	"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "The United States and England are allies. You can be legally imprisoned in either country."

	After a long pause he looked at me rather pathetically and said, "Well, Captain, I suppose there is nothing I can do about it."

	"Yes, there is," I said. "That message allows me to use my discretion. If you make it worth my while, I'll keep you on board till we get to the United States."

	"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

	"Just sign this," I said, pushing the prepared statement across the table and laying a pen down alongside it read the paper through a couple of times, thought it over a while, and said, "Captain, you know I can't sign that."

	"It's up to you," I said. "Sign and I'll take you to the United States. Otherwise you and your crew go to England."

	Henke was a hard-boiled and courageous man, as proved by the decorations he wore. But this put him in a tough spot. Finally he looked at me and I could sense that here was one professional military man baring his soul to another whom he respected, even though an enemy. "Well, Captain," he said, "what would you do if you were in my position?"

	I answered truthfully and said, "If I were convinced that my country had lost the war and that I could help my crew by signing, I would do so."

	He stood there for a minute or so without saying a word. The sinking of the CERAMIC must have been running through his mind. He knew that no impartial court-martial would punish him for what he had done. But he believed that the British would hang him.

	Finally he picked up the pen, signed the paper, looked at me defiantly, and went back to the brig.

	I then circulated a Photostat agreement among the other prisoners and put a similar proposition to them: Sign and you go to the United States. Refuse and you go to England. The agreement for the others went into much greater detail as to what they would say than did Henke's. But they all knew the skipper's signature, and there could be no doubt that he had agreed to talk. Every man in the crew of the 515 signed, agreeing to tell all he knew. 

	Upon arrival in the United States, Henke reneged on his agreement, as I felt sure he would. But his crew, whom we kept isolated from him, didn't know this. Each man figured, "the skipper is talking, why shouldn't I?"

	When interrogated by our submarine experts they all sang like canary birds, and the Office of Naval Intelligence made quite a haul.

	Now that the war is years behind us, some bubble-headed people may say that I used dishonorable tactics on Henke. However, I fed him well, gave him a comfortable bunk to sleep in, and put him ashore alive, healthy, and mentally undamaged. When I think of Buchenwald and Dachau and of the brainwashed debris of humanity that the Reds sent back to us from Korea, I can sleep with a clear conscience despite the finale to this episode, which I would not have foreseen.

	When Henke reneged on his agreement, our Intelligence people decided to hold him to it. They told him, "Either you talk or we will send you to England." When he still refused, they got ready to send him to Canada for transfer to England.

	The day before he was due to leave for Canada, he waited till a sentry was looking right at him and then made a break to scale the fence around the prison yard. He ignored the sentry's orders to halt. The sentry shot and killed him. It amounted to suicide.

	What is the moral, if any, of this grim tale? A pat answer would be, "All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." That seems to dispose of Kapt. Lt. Henke quite neatly. But it is much too pat and simple.

	Henke's torpedoing of the Ceramic, picking up one survivor and leaving the other seven hundred to drown, seems ruthless and brutal. But our submarines in the Pacific did the same thing. That's the only way you can wage war with submarines.

	I'm sure that if we had lost the war I could have been hung by a Nazi court-martial on Henke's charge that I ruthlessly killed his men when they were trying to surrender. But we won the war, and hung a lot of Germans after the Nuremberg trials on similar charges of violating the so-called "laws of war."

	If there is any moral at all to this tale it is that there is really only one binding law of war: Don't lose it.

	When we hauled the survivors of the U-515 out of the water, we were smack in the middle of a well-traveled U-boat lane and had another moonlight night coming up. Our first round-the-clock operation had hit the jackpot, so we repeated it that night.

	Again it paid off. At the crack of dawn on April 10 (Easter Monday) three of our Turkeys got a radar contact, maneuvered carefully to approach out of the dark western sky, and caught a fully surfaced U-boat flat-footed, silhouetted in the anemic light of dawn to the east.

	The first warning she had of my planes diving down from the western sky was a storm of 50-caliber bullets around the conning tower. The skipper made a crash dive without even waiting to get his lookouts below. 

	But it was too late. The planes roared over seconds apart, and tore the ocean up with depth charges, rockets, and homing torpedoes. The U-boat was blown in two as she was trying to submerge.

	It was a Götterdammerüng sunrise for the lookouts left swimming around in the wreckage. For the rest of the crew it was the same fate they had been bringing down on merchant sailors for two years -- sunk without warning.

	Our planes dropped flares to mark the spot, circled, and radioed to us that they had chalked up another kill.

	As the light in the east grew stronger, objects took shape on the water. For a while my boys thought that we had another whole crew in the water. But when the sun peered over the horizon only three human heads were visible in the spreading pool of oil surrounded by a welter of rubbish, wooden boxes, and torpedo air flasks. My boys dropped rubber boats, we took careful radar bearings on the circling planes, and headed over that way at full speed to pick up survivors.

	When we got there three hours later only two men were left One was dead, but the other, though badly wounded, was hanging onto a rubber boat with one hand and holding up his shipmate's body with the other. They were from the U-68, another U-boat with an imposing total of tonnage sunk.

	Next day I tried to pull what I now feel was my only unethical shenanigan of the war on this sole survivor of the U-68. I thought I might get some valuable information out of him, so after he had recovered somewhat from his ordeal, I had him brought up to the cabin and tried to question him. I gave him a pitch about his captain deserting him when the chips were down, whereas I had stuck my neck out to save him. He listened respectfully and made no comment. Then I asked him some questions that I was very curious about, but which he had no right to answer.

	I'll never forget how this gaunt kid, who was not yet sure he was going to live, looked me smack in the eye and said, "Ich bin deutsche Soldaten." ("I am a German soldier.")

	He then added, through the interpreter, that our attack had torn the U-boat in two, so his captain hadn't abandoned him voluntarily. He went on to say that even if the U-68 had escaped from our attack, it was the captain's duty to submerge, sacrificing the lookouts to save the rest of the crew.

	I asked this man no more questions. I sent him back to sick bay and we restored him to good health. He is back in Germany now, and I get a card from him every Easter.

	I'm sure that a Communist brainwasher confronting a prisoner still shaken by a terrible experience would not be as chicken-hearted as I was in this case. I believe if I had snarled at this man and threatened him, I might have broken him. But I'll never know, and I'm glad I won't. I can still look myself in the eye when I shave in the morning. If I had broken him I might not be able to.

	This man's name is Kastrup. He lives in Essen. If he gets to be head man in Germany later on in this century, I won't be surprised. If he does, the power politicians of this world will get no place trying to bluff him.

	Coming back from that cruise with two pelts under our belt at a time when U-boats were hard to find, one thing was obvious -- our main flying experiment had blazed a trail that everybody had to follow. In a month of daylight flying we had accomplished nothing. In one twenty-four-hour period of round-the-clock operation we had sunk two ace U-boats which, as we found out later, had sunk fifty-five ships totaling 250,000 tons. The night flying was difficult and bad for your ulcers, but it could be done and it paid off.

	The Guadalcanal was beginning to live up to her name.

	The sinking of the U-515 started ideas stirring in my head which had been dormant since a certain night around the fireplace up in Iceland. After sixteen hours of constant hounding and pounding, this U-boat had finally surfaced near the task group to give her crew a chance to survive after opening the scuttling valves. Her skipper was a tough, experienced professional and he had taken a brutal beating before he made up his mind to surface and scuttle.

	Since we didn't know when he first came up whether he wanted to fight some more or not, we had thrown everything at him but the galley range. Even so, it had taken us ten minutes to kill the boat, and I had begun to think we might have to ram her to make her sink.

	The obvious question was, Why be so bloody-minded about sinking a sub? Why not try to save it? True, hundreds of U-boats had been sunk under similar circumstances and no one had tried to board them. But a skipper who was hounded and battered might surface prematurely, before his boat was actually fatally wounded. Suppose that as the Germans went overboard you sent a party of stouthearted characters aboard to close the scuttling valves and make a survey of the situation. They might report back, "This sinking isn't really necessary."

	An operational U-boat, complete with spare parts, torpedoes, tactical instruction books, and code books, would be a tremendous windfall for our intelligence people.

	I made up my mind to explore this possibility with our destroyer skippers before shoving off on the next cruise.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

U-505

	In Norfolk just before the next cruise, at the departure conference attended by all the destroyer skippers and various kibitzing experts from Washington and the staff of CINCLANT (Commander in Chief, Atlantic), I unveiled my ideas about capture. I pointed out that the U-515 had remained afloat for ten minutes after opening the scuttling valves, while we pumped her full of holes with armor-piercing shells. I said that perhaps she had been finished as a submarine when she popped up to the surface to scuttle, but maybe we could have kept her afloat as a surface vessel if we had been willing to try it.

	I said, "On this next cruise if we force a submerged U-boat to surface, let's assume he has come up for only one reason -- to give the crew a chance to survive after scuttling. We will therefore cease firing with any weapons that can do structural damage and will fire only small stuff to expedite their abandon-ship drill. All ships in the task group will organize boarding parties, keep whale-boats ready to lower, and -be prepared to board the U-boat and close the scuttling valves."

	I noted several of the kibitzers from Washington making circular motions with their forefingers pointed at their heads, indicating I had barnacles on the brain.

	I paused briefly to let this proposal sink in and then asked, "Any questions?"

	What questions can you ask when a wild-eyed character who happens to be the CO. gives birth to a screwy idea like that one? The destroyer skippers who had all been through the U-515 episode saw at least enough merit in it to nod gravely and preserve a respectful silence. I was senior to all the kibitzers. So I glowered menacingly at them and they said nothing.

	There being no further business, the meeting adjourned. We sailed next day before this proposal had time to percolate up the chain of command and higher authority could send for me and say. "For Chrissake, NO."

	That month the Battle of the Atlantic fell to its lowest ebb so far in the war. Huge convoys plowed back and forth across the ocean unmolested, jammed with supplies for the coming invasion of France. In May, 1944, only five ships totaling 14,000 tons got sunk. Twenty-three U-boats were destroyed, most of them close to the French bases. The hunting in the open sea was very poor.

	We rooted around the Cape Verde Islands for three weeks, accomplishing nothing except for definitely cracking the new field of night flying wide open. Another new squadron took to it like bats and made passable, although scary, landings on pitch-black nights with only light breezes blowing. From then on night flying was Standard Operating Practice for all jeep carriers in the Atlantic.

	Inter-squadron and inter-ship rivalry is always high, pride is a strong motive, and as soon as one squadron has broken the ice in a new field, the others feel they have to keep up.

	One thing that helped us a lot on the Guadalcanal in breaking in new squadrons was that the boys knew we would go all out to help them if they got into trouble. They knew that once, while in submarine waters, we had turned a big searchlight up in the sky and left it on for half an hour to guide a lad home when he had a radio failure. (This is what is known among military experts as a calculated risk -- when you get away with it!! When you don't, it's called stupidity.) They also knew that we had made a couple of remarkable rescues of planes' crews after they had to ditch a long way from the ship. The point is that if the pilots know a skipper will stick his neck out for them, they don't mind sticking their own necks out for him.

	During our three weeks around the Cape Verdes we had many indications of possible submarines. We had disappearing radar blips, noisy sonar buoys, answering echoes to our sonar pings, and lots of other things. But we had no proven submarine contacts.

	In this kind of work the task-group commander's most difficult job is making up his mind whether he has a real submarine contact or not. He has lots of helpers and can get all the advice he wants, but the final responsibility is smack in his lap and he is the one who makes the pay-off decisions. Like the skipper of a ship, if the task group scores a success, he gets the credit even though he was asleep in his bunk at the time. If some of his ships get sunk he gets the blame, even when the sinking was due to some very improbable bad luck.

	One of the boss man's big difficulties is that all the information on which he must act is second- or third-hand. It isn't like the old days when, at the cry "Sail ho," from the masthead, the skipper could climb up in the rigging himself and size up the strange hull down on the horizon.

	A sonar operator gets an echo which he thinks may be a submarine, or maybe even claims he can hear screw noises, a radar man gets a disappearing blip which could be from a periscope; a pilot fifty miles away finds a suspicious-looking oil-slick. All these things could be from submarines. The' task group commander must decide if they really are. If he believes a mistaken report he can tie up his task group jousting with windmills for a week. If he doesn't believe a good one he may let a sure kill escape.

	Many times during the Battle of the Atlantic a tense group of officers huddled around a radarscope in CIC (Combat Information Center) anxiously watching the skipper's face as he tried to make up his mind. They thought he was carefully evaluating all their expert advice and coming to the most logical conclusion. As often as not he actually was mentally flipping a nickel.

	The U-boats had a whole bag full of tricks they could fool you with. One of the most outrageous was a radar decoy which was simply a weather balloon, anchored to a block of wood so it would ride about twenty feet above the water. Suspended from the balloon were strips of tinfoil which gave back the same sort of radar blip that a periscope does. Many an ASW group wasted a whole night chasing one of these booby traps.

	You had to treat those things with respect because when you got one on your radarscope, presumably a U-boat skipper was peeking right down your throat from the other end of a periscope. You couldn't just barge right in, discover what it was, and bust the balloon. You had to maneuver around it zig-zagging at high speed and keeping a prudent distance. You might send a destroyer sneaking in closer to try and make a depth-charge attack. You might have planes drop sonar buoys to listen for engine or propeller noises.

	Then after a whole night of this foolishness, the sun would come up and reveal a silly goddamn balloon grinning at you. The worst of it was that everybody in the whole task group saw that balloon too. The boys would all shake their heads and say, "That Nazi bastard sure made a bum out of the Old Man last night."

	Of course for old hands at the game, the tip-off on this thing that you got an almost steady blip instead of one that disappeared periodically, as a periscope did, behind the waves. And this "U-boat" always proceeded down wind at just a little less than the speed of the wind.

	The subs had a sonar decoy called Pillenwerfer. This would release a bunch of little pellets which gave off chemical bubbles and sent back almost the same kind of echo to a sonar ping as you get from a steel hull. Many times, task groups misled by the decoys spent their time beating the hell out of the bubble clouds while the real U-boat escaped.

	Even the animal life in the sea sometimes conspired to fool you. Many strange noises from sea life come up from the depths, and some of them sound exactly like diesel engines or submarine propellers.

	A destroyer skipper friend of mine tells a story which illustrates this graphically. He says that one day it was the good fortune of his task group to witness the most colossal bit of lovemaking (at least so far as physical bulk is concerned) that takes place on this earth -- the mating of two whales. This is something worth seeing because the whales go at it enthusiastically and create quite a commotion in the water. While everybody on the bridges of the destroyers was eagerly training spyglasses and binoculars on this rare sight, the sonar operators down below, conducting their routine probing of the depths, bounced a ping off the two great fish and reported "unidentified echo" on the exact bearing and distance of the amatory leviathans. Then, following the regular procedure, they quit pinging and listened. My friend swears that his sonar experts then reported, "We hear screw noises."

	During the first three weeks of the cruise I sent several blinker messages to the task group reminding them about the ready whaleboats and boarding parties. On the Guadalcanal, we carefully screened the numerous volunteers to pick out the men best qualified to man a submarine -- or rather the men least qualified. It turned out we only had one man who had ever been aboard a submarine. He was a yeoman who had put in a cruise in one of our subs, and so could tell us all about the filing system and paper work on an underwater craft.

	I'm sure that most of us in the task group had our tongues in our cheeks when we organized those boarding parties. I'm not sure whether mine was there or not. I suppose we could claim that this was an example of sound imaginative planning, but I "wishful thinking" would be a more accurate way of describing it. Most of the boys who volunteered for the boarding parties probably figured, "What the hell. This clambake will never come off. I might as well get credit for volunteering." But whatever their reasons, we got plenty of volunteers. We organized the parties and when opportunity hammered on our door the next time, we were ready.

	The old adage says, "Opportunity knocks but once." She had knocked for us on the previous cruise, but we had been so" set on sinking the U-515 that we didn't have time to answer the door.

	Finley Peter Dunne's famous Irish philosopher, Mr. Dooley, differs with the old adage. He says, "... on some mens dures it [opportunity] hammers till it breaks down the dure and thin it goes in an' wakes him up if he's asleep, an' iver aftherwards it wurrks f'r him as a night watchman."

	I think Mr. Dooley have have had me in mind when he said this.

	Incidentally, the final selections for the Guadalcanal!* boarding party were made on June 3. The list went up on the bulletin boards all over the ship on the morning of June 4. Events a few hours later that day convinced all the boys that I had a crystal ball up in the sea cabin.

	Toward the end of May, shortage of fuel made it necessary for us to head for Casablanca. A U-boat, homebound from the Ivory Coast, was reported by Kenny Knowles to be on our route to Casablanca, so we laid out our operations to get him.

	For a week we scoured the ocean day and night, sweeping out a path a hundred miles to each side of his reported track. We got many indications that we might be on a hot trail -- disappearing radar blips, strong transmissions on the U-boat radio frequency, suspicious noises from sonar buoys. But this fellow was obviously running submerged nearly all the time, and we never actually saw him.

	We had many of those midnight conferences in CIC trying to decide whether the indications we were getting came from the homebound U-boat or from some of the many other things that can lead U-boat hunters astray.

	On the night of June 2-3 our conference of "experts" decided that we had the sub cornered. We had a disappearing radar blip with a noisy sonar buoy at the spot where the blip disappeared. Our pilots were so sure of this contact that they scattered high explosives all over the ocean there, and I headed task group for the spot, expecting sunrise to reveal a big oil pool and a lot of wreckage.

	Sunrise revealed nothing. But soon after, my chief engineer, Earl Trosino, came up to the bridge with a long face and said, "Cap'n, we've got to quit fooling around here. I'm getting down near the safe limit of my fuel."

	I reluctantly resumed course for Casablanca. I was thoroughly convinced that we had spotted our prey the previous night and driven him down before he had finished recharging his battery, and that one more night in the' area would boil bis lobster.

	I argued with Trosino all day long about fuel and finally I brow-beat him into admitting that maybe he had enough fuel left for one more night's operations, if I was willing to get into Casablanca with my tanks nearly dry. This, of course, was a foolish thing to do because in a global war you should always leave yourself a little leeway on fuel.

	A belligerent captain can always intimidate his chief engineer into admitting he has a little extra fuel stashed away, and I was dead certain that one more night's operations would bring us a kill. We decided to shoot the works, and headed south again at sunset.

	We worked back and forth over that same area all night, keeping the air full of planes. It seemed impossible for that guy to elude us, if he was in the area. We drew a complete blank.

	At sunrise I headed for Casablanca again, not quite sure whether we could make it or not. Of course I could always radio in for a tug. But this would gain me a place in naval history comparable to that of the foolish virgins in the Bible!

	This was Sunday morning, June 4, and when Trosino gave me his fuel report right after sunrise he said solemnly, "You better pray extra hard at mass this morning Cap'n. You used a lot more oil than I figured on last night."

	After mass I went up on the bridge to sit in the skipper's chair overlooking the flight deck. It was a beautiful day with a moderate sea. We had only two fighter planes aloft as a token patrol because I figured our quarry was out of range astern of us. I was still fuming over the fact that we had let him get away.

	Suddenly, at 1110, the squawk box on the bridge blared forth, "Frenchy to Blue Jay, I've got a sound contact." (Frenchy was the U.S.S. Chatelaine, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Dudley Knox, and I was Blue Jay.)

	An aircraft carrier right at the scene of a sound contact is an old lady in a barroom brawl. She had no business there, can contribute little to the work at hand, and should get the hell out of there and leave elbow room for those who can.

	I veered off to the west, left two other destroyers there to help Frenchy, and banged off a couple of Turkeys to lend a hand to the destroyers. I warned the Turkey pilots, "Use no big stuff if the sub surfaces -- chase the crew overboard with 50 caliber."

	The Pillsbury and Jenks boiled over to assist Chatelaine, which had picked up the sound contact so close aboard she ran smack over it before she could make up her mind what it was. Now she announced, "Contact evaluated as sub. Am starting attack." She wheeled around under full rudder, maneuvering into firing position again. She made a complete circle, pinging away on the sub, then straightened out and fired a salvo of twenty hedgehogs. They arched up in the air and splashed into the water like a handful of rocks, a hundred yards ahead where the sonar was pinpointing the as yet unseen sub.

	All eyes locked on the spot and we ticked off the seconds after the splashes while the hedgehogs were sinking. After ten seconds we knew there would be no explosion and began to doubt that Chatelaine's contact was really a sub.

	Pillsbury and Jenks were now prowling warily within hailing distance of Chatelaine and probing with their sonars. If this was a sub, and if Chatelaine missed again, they would pounce on it and plaster it themselves.

	Suddenly all doubt about the contact was removed. Our two circling fighter planes opened up with their machine guns, blasting bursts of .50-caliber into the water a hundred yards from where the hedgehogs hit, and yelled over the radio, "Sighted sub -- destroyers head for spot where we are shooting."

	Chatelaine heeled over again and charged in on the bullet splashes where the pilots saw the dim shape of a submerged submarine trying to go deeper. At 1121, eleven minutes after the first sonar echo, Chatelaine fired a spread of twelve six-hundred-pound depth charges, set to explode shallow.

	A few seconds later we felt the ocean quake and saw it boil astern of the Chatelaine. A dozen geysers burst into the air from the underwater explosions.

	As the great white plumes were subsiding, Ensign Cadle, in one of our circling fighters, shouted jubilantly, "Frenchy, you've struck oil -- sub is surfacing."

	At 1112½, 150 miles west of Cape Blanco, French West , the U-505 itself up from the depths and broke surface seven hundred yards from our destroyers, white water pouring off its rusty sides. Our quarry was at bay.

	The sub was running in a tight circle to the right at about 5 knots. As the hatches popped open and little figures scrambled out and dove overboard, I grabbed the mike on the bridge and broadcast to the destroyers, "I want to capture that bastard if possible."

	After he had seen about fifty men plunge overboard, the destroyer division commander, Commander Hall, ordered, "cease firing," and the ancient cry of "away all boarding parties" boomed out over modern loud-speakers for the first time since 1815. The Pillsbury's party, led by Lieutenant (J.G.) Albert David, had already piled into their motor whaleboat. The boat plopped into the water and took off after the circling sub.

	As that tiny whaleboat chased after the great black monster I wouldn't have blamed those men in the boat for hoping that maybe they wouldn't catch her. The "Nantucket sleigh ride" they would get if they did might top anything in Moby Dick.

	But cutting inside the circle, the gallant band in the whale-boat drew up alongside the sub and leaped from the plunging boat to the heaving deck. As the first boarder scrambled up the sub's slippery sides with the whaleboat's bowline it looked for all the world like a cowboy trying to rope a wild horse. I grabbed the TBS mike and broadcast, "Heigh-o, Silver! Ride 'em, cowboy!" -- not a very salty exhortation, but OK for those circumstances.

	No one in that boarding party had ever set foot on a submarine before, to say nothing of a runaway enemy sub. On deck they found one dead man, killed by a 50-caliber bullet, lying face down with his head alongside the open conning-tower hatch. There might be live ones below. Anyone who ventured down that conning tower hatch, stern first, might be greeted by a blast of gunfire from below hitting him in a tender spot. Even if abandoned, the sub might blow up or sink at any moment. That sewer-like opening on the conning tower, leading down into the depths, looked like a one-way street to Davey Jones' locker to everybody in the boarding party. (Lieutenant David told me later that on his way down that hatch he found out exactly how Jonah felt going into the belly of the whale.)

	David, Arthur K. Knispul, and Stanley E. Wdowiak plunged down the hatch and hit the floor plates at the bottom of the ready to fight it out with anyone still aboard. I recommended the three of them for Congressional Medals of Honor. David got it -- the only one awarded in the Battle of the Atlantic. Knispul and Wdowiak got Navy Crosses.

	But the enemy had abandoned ship and all were now in the water watching the death struggle of their U-boat. My boys were alone on board a runaway enemy sub with machinery humming all around them, surrounded by a bewildering array of pipes, valve wheels, levers, and instruments, all with German labels on them. They felt the throbbing of the screws still driving the ship ahead and heard the ominous gurgle of water pouring in. Here was a new version of the Flying Dutchman, even more eerie than the old sailing ship with all her canvas set and not a soul on board.

	The abandoned submarine was all theirs. "All theirs," that is, if they didn't grab the wrong valve or lever in the semi-darkness of the emergency lights and blow it up or sink it. David yelled up to the boys on deck to tumble down while he, Knispul, and Wdowiak ran forward to the radio room to get the codes. They smashed open a couple of lockers, found the books, and passed them up on deck so we would have something to show for our trouble in case we still lost the boat.

	The reader, knowing that naval code books have lead covers on them to make them sink, may ask why the Germans didn't heave those books overboard. Why throw anything overboard from a submarine you are abandoning in a thousand fathoms of water because you think she is sinking? Nothing had gone overboard except the crew. We now had in our possession one operational U-boat, fully equipped with charts, codes, and tactical instructions from Admiral Doenitz. This would be the biggest intelligence haul of the war -- if we could keep it afloat.

	For a while it seemed doubtful that we could. The sub was riding in nearly neutral buoyancy, ten degrees down by the stern and settling deeper every minute.

	One of the first of David's boys to tumble down the hatch was Zenon B. Lukocius. As soon as he hit the floor plates he heard running water. Behind the main periscope well he found a stream six inches in diameter gushing into the bilges from an open sea chest. By the grace of God the cover for this chest hadn't fallen down into the bilges where we would never have found it, but was lying nearby on the floor plates. Luke grabbed it, slapped it back in place, set up on the butterfly nuts, and checked the inrush of water in the nick of time. The boat about to upend and plunge to the bottom any minute as the U-515 . Had she done this, she would have taken the whole boarding party along with her.

	Luke told me afterward that when he was jamming that cover back in place he was too busy to be scared. But when he tore his Mae West life jacket later on a sharp projection from the conning tower, that shook him, because he couldn't swim!

	The sub was now so low in the water that the swells breaking across the nearly submerged boat were beginning to wash down the conning-tower hatch. David had the men on deck close the hatch while he and his boys continued working below. The main electric motors were still running and driving the boat ahead at 6 knots.

	Meantime I had returned to the scene of action and lowered my whaleboat, with Commander Trosino and our group of "experts" in it. When Trosino and his boys scrambled aboard the U-boat they couldn't get the conning-tower hatch open. A partial vacuum inside the boat was holding it down and the boys couldn't budge it. The circling U-boat was constantly passing Germans paddling around in their Mae Wests, so Trosino's boys grabbed one, hauled him aboard and asked him how to open the hatch. The German showed them a little valve on the side of the hatch which would let air into the pressure hull, equalizing the air pressure inside and out and enabling them to get the hatch open.

	"Thanks bud," said Trosino, and shoved the German overboard again. He then went below and took over command from David.

	I cannot speak too highly of the job that Trosino did in keeping that sub afloat. He too had never been aboard a submarine before. But he had spent most of his life at sea as chief engineer of Sun Oil tankers. He is the kind of practical engineer who can walk into any marine plant, whether it is installed in the Queen Mary or a German U-boat, take a quick look around, and be ready to put the blast on any dumb cluck who touches the wrong valve or control lever.

	He spent the next couple of hours fighting to keep the sub's head above water. It was touch and go whether he would succeed or not, and the men had to keep the conning-tower hatch closed. Much of the time Trosino was down in the bilges under the floor plates tracing out pipelines. Had the sub taken a sudden lurch and upended herself -- as she was constantly threatening to do -- Trosino wouldn't have had any chance whatever to escape.

	I recommended him for the Navy Cross when we got back to Norfolk. All he got was the Legion of Merit. He did this job in the wrong ocean. But his Atlantic Fleet Legion of Merit is worth more than dozens of the Navy Crosses they were scattering around the Pacific at this time.

	While Trosino was bilge diving, gunner Burr searched the boat for demolition charges. Our intelligence reports told us we would find fourteen TNT charges distributed throughout the hull and fired from a central time switch. Burr didn't know what time it might be by the clock on-the firing switch, but he found and disarmed thirteen charges. They found the fourteenth in Bermuda two weeks later. They also found that when the Germans abandoned ship they had been so sure the sub was on its way to the bottom within minutes, from structural damage, that they hadn't set the firing mechanism. This information is worth only a raised eyebrow now. When Burr, Trosino, David, and the boys were aboard that first day, that unlocated demolition charge raised hackles on all their spines.

	Soon after Trosino got aboard, the Pillsbury came alongside to pass over salvage pumps and take the boat in tow. She didn't allow for the fact that submarines have large flippers sticking out from the bow underwater on both sides. The sub's port-bow flipper cut a long underwater gash in the Pillsbury as she came alongside, flooding two main compartments and making it necessary for her to back clear and fight to keep herself afloat. For a while I thought we were going to lose her.

	I then headed over to take her in tow myself. Trosino pulled the switches as we drew near and stopped it dead in the water. Working fast, I backed our stern almost up to the nose of the sub and threw over a heaving line with the wire towline bent onto it. As the lads on the heaving, slippery deck of the sub were struggling to secure the towline, with the four loaded bow torpedo tubes of the U-boat, nuzzling my stern, I said a short but fervent prayer. "Dear Lord -- I've got a bunch of inquisitive young lads snooping around inside that sub. Please don't let any of them monkey with the firing switch!"

	When the towline was secured we eased ahead, took a strain, and got going again with our biggest set of U.S. colors proudly flying over the swastika. As we gathered speed the stern came up and we could open the hatch again. I cracked off a dispatch to COMINCH (Commander in Chief) and CINCLANT: "Request immediate assistance to tow captured submarine U-505. Suggest take her to Dakar."

	That dispatch caused quite a flap in the headquarters back . At first they wouldn't believe it, and made the communicators recheck the decoding -- but lost no time getting necessary action going just in case it might be true.

	It soon became apparent that although we had our bronco roped, she wasn't broken to the halter yet. She sheared out oh our starboard quarter and rode there, stretching the towline as taut as a banjo string. Her rudder was jammed hard right.

	Trosino reported to me when he got back aboard that he thought the after torpedo room was flooded but couldn't be sure because the watertight door was dogged down, and he didn't want to open it for fear of flooding the boat. He also said there was what looked like a booby trap on the main dog. He had been so busy over there he hadn't noticed that the rudder was jammed, but said he would get it back amidships for me next morning.

	Dragging our balky prize behind us held our speed down to 6 knots, making us a sitting target for any other sub that came along, so I figured we had to keep our planes aloft for our own protection. We flew all night, with very little wind across the deck for landing. The pilots made it look easy. At a time like this everybody rises to the occasion and does things that you would ordinarily say were impossible.

	Right after sunset our lookouts and sonar men got jittery, and for a while I thought we were being surrounded by Doenitz's whole U-boat fleet. Flaherty announced she had a disappearing radar blip and Chatelaine chimed in with another "possible sound contact." The only thing I could do was pray and stick on a few extra turns to get the hell out of that area quicker. I guess I put on too many knots because at midnight the one-inch towline snapped and we spent the rest of the night circling the sub under a full moon and rousing our 2¼-inch tow wire up on deck to put over the next morning.

	While we were doing this, the Pillsbury, with her leaks patched but compartments still flooded, limped up and rejoined our screen. I knew her skipper would be worried about a board of investigation when we got home, so I sent him the following message: "This is for your files regarding damage to your ship yesterday. This damage was done executing my orders and I assume responsibility." It didn't cost me a nickel to make this gesture, but to the Pillsbury's skipper, Lieutenant Commander Casselman, it was worth a lot.

	During the night we got orders from CINCLANT to take our prize to Bermuda. Dakar was full of spies, and if we had there they would have known about our tow before our anchor's splash subsided. Admiral Ingersoll diverted the fleet tug Abnaki an eastbound convoy to rendezvous with us and take over the tow. He also diverted the oil tanker Kennebec refuel the task group at sea. (Thank God!!)

	Next morning we got the big tow wire rigged, and when Trosino came back from the sub he reported he had put the rudder amidships using the electric control in the conning tower. But as we gained headway again, it became apparent the rudder hadn't moved at all. The electric indicator in the conning tower had come back amidships, but the rudder was still hard over. We would have to get into the after torpedo room and hook up the hand gear to move it.

	I had been itching to get aboard the sub myself and the "booby trap" on the torpedo-room door gave me an excuse. As an Ordnance P.G., I knew as much about fuses and circuitry as anyone in the task group, and so had designated myself Officer-in-Charge-of-Booby-Traps in the capture plans.

	Trosino and I took along a couple of helpers and went over to spring the "booby trap." As we drew alongside, the sub was riding with her bow out of water and her stern clear under, with the seas breaking over the conning-tower hatch. We had to close the hatch behind us again when we went below.

	As we groped our way aft through the dark, foul-smelling boat, it suddenly occurred to me that one way submarines correct the trim of a boat is to move men up to the high-end. Now four of us were trooping aft to the heavy end of a boat that was already teetering on a knife edge. But we had passed the point of no return on this junket when we closed the hatch behind us. You do your best to look calm, cool and collected at a time like this and tell yourself, "You can't live forever, anyway."

	At the after bulkhead of the motor room Trosino put his flashlight on the door and said, "There she is, Cap'n." There was an open fuse box with a dozen exposed fuses and many wires leading in and out. The cover of the box opened down and was lying across the main dog of the door we wanted to open. You couldn't move the dog without closing the fuse-box cover. This had the makings of a booby trap and closing the cover might complete a circuit that would blow us all up.

	But I didn't think so. This was an unlikely place for a booby trap, and the Germans obviously hadn't expected us to board their ship. Why set a booby trap?

	Close scrutiny of the wiring and circuits revealed nothing . It looked to me as if that cover had just been jarred open accidentally after the door was dogged shut.

	You can't hem and haw over something like this very long when you are thirty feet under water in a wallowing submarine. And one nice thing about fiddling with booby traps is that you find out right away when you open them whether you were right or not.

	I eased the cover shut and nothing happened. The four of us then braced our backs against the door, so we could get it closed again if the water started squirting out around the edges, and carefully moved the main dog till we had just cracked the watertight seal. No water. We swung the door open and scrambled into the torpedo room to get at the hand steering gear.

	We quickly connected it and spun the wheel amidships, and I said, "Let's get the hell out of here." The fresh salt air smelt mighty sweet as we clambered up into the sunlight on the bridge.

	When I think of this incident now I still have the same childish tendency that I get whenever I think of those pylon turns in the Curtiss Cup race back in 1928.

	Now the sub towed properly and we proceeded west for our rendezvous with the fleet tug Abnaki and the oiler. On June 9 we turned our tow over to Abnaki and refueled from the Kennebec, I landed a group of planes while the Kennebec was alongside refueling us. This was really just showing off and was a foolish thing to do. But when you have a captured U-boat in tow you feel pretty cocky. After fueling we formed a screen around the Abnaki and "Junior," as my crew have called the U-505 ever since, and proceeded toward Bermuda.

	Trosino had been after me ever since we opened that booby trap to let him start the sub's diesel engines and bring her in under her own power. I wish now I had let him do it. But at the time I was afraid that if we got fancy and tried to start the engines, someone might open the wrong valve and we would lose her. I hereby apologize to Trosino and his talented lads for underestimating them. I'm sure now, after all the improbable things they did, that they would have brought her in triumphantly with colors flying.

	An unusual feature of this exploit was that we got movies of the whole business. Each ship had a combat photographer aboard. When things began to happen his battle station was on deck, cranking his camera. We got many feet of film that morning impossible to duplicate.

	The Navy later strung this footage together into a twenty-Combat Report film called "Away Boarders." I have been showing it around the country for the past twenty years to luncheon clubs and on TV.

	We rescued fifty-nine of the U-505's crew of sixty men. Her skipper, Oberstleutnant Harald Lange, had a badly wounded leg and I went down to sick bay the day after the capture to see him. He had passed out in the water from his wounds and hadn't seen our people get aboard his boat. He wouldn't believe that we had her in tow until I sent over to the sub and got a picture of his wife and kids off the desk in his cabin.

	When he was finally convinced, he kept saying over and over again, "I will be punished for this." I tried to cheer him up by saying that the Nazis were losing the war and that a new regime would replace them afterward. He kept shaking his head and saying, "No matter what happens -- I will be punished."

	In a way he was punished, for a while, after the war. He was barred from the elite association of former U-boat sailors in Hamburg, his home town. When I found out about this I wrote to Kretschmer, the greatest U-boat ace of them all and president of the association. I explained a few things, and Lange is now accepted among his contemporaries.

	Actually, as I wrote to Kretschmer, Lange was the victim of a grim set of circumstances. He did exactly what several hundred other U-boat skippers had done when they thought the end was at hand and surfaced to give their crews a chance to survive before scuttling their boats. Perhaps a dozen or more of these boats might have been captured if we had been prepared to send off boarding parties. I still think I could have towed the U-515 home if I had exercised proper foresight before she surfaced. Kretschmer himself had been captured with his whole crew while his U-boat lay abandoned and helpless on the surface with two British destroyers close aboard for much longer than it took us to get aboard the 505.

	Besides that, Lange had stepped into a ghastly heritage when he took command of the U-505 just before the cruise on which we captured him. The previous skipper had had a run of very bad luck. Six times in succession he had sailed from Lorient on missions that were scheduled to last ninety days. Six times he had come limping back into Lorient without having gotten out of Biscay, on account of enemy damage and machinery breakdowns due to sabotage by French dockyard workers. This run of bad luck had broken his nerve. He began to think his squadron mates were avoiding him and regarded him as lacking guts. He made up his mind he was going to succeed on his seventh attempt -- or else.

	On his seventh sortie, two British destroyers caught him just as he was getting out of Biscay. He took her down to three hundred feet and a salvo of depth charges very close aboard gave him a bad shaking up. With all his crew looking on and steeling themselves for further action, he hauled out his Luger and blew his brains out.

	His first officer, Leutnant Meyer took over, quelled the panic, shook off the destroyers, and brought the boat back to' Lorient again for repairs.

	As soon as this crew got back in, the high command should have split it up and distributed the members among a dozen other U-boats. But they didn't. They dumped this bunch of men with their shattered morale into Lange's lap and sent him to sea again.

	He had been out for eighty days along the Ivory Coast and had seen nothing when we caught up with him. The last enemy action his crew had been in, until the Chatelaine's depth charges exploded all around them, smashing the lights, jamming the rudder, but doing little real damage, had been when their previous skipper had ratted out on them.

	Naturally, they panicked again this time. The crew of the after torpedo room came running forward yelling that the torpedo room had been split wide open. Lange had no choice except to blow tanks, surface, and try to save his crew.

	People often ask me, "What did you get out of this capture that was worth the chances you had to take?" Of course, we got a tremendous amount of technical information plus samples of their torpedoes, sonar, and radar gear. But more importantly, we got their current code books, the cipher machine, and hundreds of official dispatches with the code version on one side and the translation on the other.

	Like all military services the German Navy re-scrambled their codes about every two weeks so that enemy cryptographers wouldn't always be working on exactly the same system. But the key to these routine scrambles was in the code books! Our experts in Washington read the operational traffic between Admiral Doenitz's HQ and his U-boats at sea for the rest of the war. This eavesdropping enabled us to arrange proper reception committees for U-boats converging on convoys and may have had a lot to do with the sinking of over 250 submarines in the next eleven months.

	This brings me to what I think is the most remarkable part of this whole improbable episode. It was very important to prevent the knowledge of this capture from reaching Germany. If it had, they would have scrapped the old code books and switched to brand-new ones, which are always kept ready for issue in such an emergency.

	While towing the U-505 to Bermuda, we carefully explained this to all hands in the task group and directed them to tell no one, but no one, what had happened on this cruise.

	We had about two thousand lads in that task group', all of whom came back from that cruise just bursting with the best story of their lives. But they knew they shouldn't tell it. I am very proud indeed of the fact that the Germans never found out that we had the U-505 until the war was over. The boys did keep their mouths shut.

	I think this speaks very highly indeed for the sense of responsibility and devotion to duty of the average young American wearing bell-bottomed trousers. When I read the headlines these days about atomic secrets leaking from high-level sources and government VIP's popping off with secret stuff just to get in the headlines or to win an election I am even prouder of the lads in Task Group 22.3. As long as we continue to raise kids like these the country may survive despite blabbermouth bureaucrats and politicians who like to see their names in the papers.

	While lecturing the boys on security I also laid down the law on souvenirs. I pointed out there's no use having a souvenir unless you can show it around and brag about it, and that Navy regulations required all captured equipment to be turned in to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington. I said, "If any of you have picked up a souvenir, turn it in to the exec's office tomorrow and no questions will be asked. But after tomorrow we will lower the boom on anyone caught with a souvenir."

	Next day the exec's office was swamped with the damnedest collection of junk you've ever seen -- Lugers, flashlights, officers' caps, German cigarettes, etc. It was un-credible that while struggling to keep a foundering U-boat afloat the boys could find time to pick up all that loot.

	I knew that everyone would rather have turned in his right arm than those souvenirs. So, following the regulations, we tagged everything with the names of the "owners" and told the boys that (according to the book) this stuff would be returned to them at the end of the war. Most of us, including even me, naive enough to believe this. But nobody ever saw those souvenirs again. After peace broke out, the Washington bureaucrats absconded with them.

	Whenever I meet any of the boys now, after the usual big "Hello... long time no see," they always cock a reproachful eye and say, "Cap'n, where the hell is that souvenir you said I'd get back?"

	One souvenir eventually wound up on President Roosevelt's desk. It was a book we found in the captain's stateroom entitled Roosevelfs Kampf. It told about how F.D.R. and the Jews were out to dominate the world. I got a nice letter of thanks from the President for it.

	Checking back on the logbooks and track charts of this operation now, it seems as if the U-505 and my task group simply had a rendezvous set up in the book of destiny and there was no avoiding it. The U-505 was never where I thought she was until she popped up that Sunday morning almost underfoot. I was never where she thought I was.

	I was searching the wrong areas all the time except that last night. That night he ran on the surface for two hours and my planes must have gone right over him without spotting him. His lookouts didn't see my planes either. Next day our tracks converged at a 45-degree angle and met at noon as if we had a preset date to keep!

	I suppose I can say that at any rate I was correct in my decision to turn back again that last night. But I was right for the wrong reason. I was certain we had been breathing down his neck the night before. Actually, he had made a detour toward the African coast. All our contacts had been phonies.

	It is apparent that this whole business hinged on the fallible workings of two men's minds -- mine and Lange's. Working on equally false premises both of us made decisions which brought about a highly improbable result. Had either of us done things just a little differently, the capture would never have come off.

	What causes such things to happen? I don't know how to explain it, except to say that maybe our morning prayer had something to do with it.

	It's no good to say it's all a matter of chance. If it had been, I should have happened to make at least one correct decision, instead of the series of wrong ones I did make. One "correct" decision would have upset the apple cart.

	Naturally, the wishful thinking that we had done about the of a capture belongs on the credit side of the book. So does our pioneer night flying, although in the final analysis, the effect of the night flying was a left-handed one. If our planes had found the V-505 night, there would have been no possibility of capture. That boarding operation was improbable enough in the daytime, with destroyers. It would have been impossible with planes and at night.

	The whole operation is an example of the fact that a military commander controls events only up to a certain point. He can anticipate certain things, perhaps even set the stage for them to happen and be ready to cash in on them if they do. But whether they will happen or not depends on many tilings over which he has little control.

	One is what goes on in the enemy commander's mind, and another is what goes on in his own. Both of these mental processes are subject to influence from above, or by Divine Sufferance, from below.

	I am not trying to say that we have no control over our destiny on this earth. But I do say that we control it only up to a certain point. Beyond that point, nebulous things which go on in men's minds decide the issue. In this particular instance, I speak from experience when I say that most of the stuff that had run through my mind for a week or so was all wrong. But the final result was very good!

	I don't ask the reader to believe that Almighty God took time out from his regular duties of running the universe to take a hand in a puny naval battle here on earth. But ... we asked for God's help first thing every morning on that ship. In my book we got it!

	The difference between being a hero or being a bum is often very slight. In a world-series ball game with two out and bases full in the last of the ninth and the home team three runs behind, the batter hits a screaming liner. It looks like a sure home run and a hero's crown for the hitter. But a strong wind is blowing directly across the ball's flight path, and just before the ball goes over the fence the wind carries it foul by inches. On the next pitch the hitter is called out without swinging.

	He is a BUM! He will be remembered not as the guy who hit what should have been a grand-slam home run, but as the goof who went down with his musket on his shoulder and sacks loaded.

	The difference between brilliant success and humiliating failure in battle can often hinge on things that are no more predictable or controllable than the wind in a ball game.

	The only moral I can see to all this is -- plan your operations carefully, get the best advice you can from the "experts," and fix it so that if certain things happen you won't get caught flat-footed. Then rely on the motto we have stamped on our pennies, "In God We Trust."

	While we were towing the U-505 to Bermuda, with a broom at our masthead, I was up on the bridge one starry night discussing life on this earth with Father Weldon. We got to talking about our morning prayer, and the padre said that it reminded him of the story, about the Bishop of Dublin.

	It seems that one day the Bishop came across a member of his flock who was trying to change a flat tire. The rim was stuck, wouldn't budge, and Pat was painting the air blue with language not fit for a bishop to hear.

	The Bishop took him to task and Pat apologized.

	Then the Bishop said, "You should try prayer instead of profanity," so the two of them bowed their heads and the Bishop said a short prayer.

	Then Pat braced himself for another heave on the rim, and the moment he touched it, it popped right off.

	Whereupon his lordship the Bishop said, "Well, I'll be damned."

	When we pulled into Norfolk after dropping the U-505 off at Bermuda, my boys were the cockiest bunch of sailors on any ship in any ocean. They had a right to be. In less than a year they had put a new page in the history books. Our ship had, indeed, lived up to its name.

If you ask a retired admiral, "What was the highlight of your naval career," he hardly ever tells you about something that happened after he made flag rank. He gets a faraway glint in his eye and says, "Once, when I was skipper of the---------...

	The Guadalcanal is the glint in my eye.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PENTAGON -- HANCOCK

	In September, 1944, I was ordered to duty in the Plans Division of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air) in the Navy Department. As I walked down the gangway of the Guadalcanal I left a part of me behind and took away many memories. The part I left behind was broken up for scrap in Japan in 1959. The memories will live as long as I do.

	She was a good ship and she served her country well. It's a shame she had to wind up in a Japanese junk yard!

	There is no greater demotion for a. naval officer than to go from the bridge of a combatant ship in wartime to a desk in Washington. At sea you are the monarch of as much ocean as you can survey. Ashore, you are a faceless bureaucrat at the beck and call of bigger bureaucrats. At sea, if you let out a growl, everyone breaks their neck to do what you want. In Washington, if you say "boo" the word goes around that you're getting top big for your britches.

	The years that you spend pounding the ocean waves or flying airplanes are of little help in preparing for duty in Washington. To get along there you've got to be a "smooth operator" and be able to talk a bird down out of a tree. I've known officers you would follow to the gates of hell in battle, who were clay pigeons for the sharpshooters around Washington. At sea you know who your enemies are and can shoot at them on sight. In the national capital they can do you in while patting you on the back and telling you what a fine fellow you are. The very traits that make a man a fine combat leader at sea can cook his goose in Washington. They can get him tagged as "controversial" by the civilian bureaucrats and politicians, which is just about as fatal as being caught paying dues in the Communist party.

	In wartime the politicians will sometimes tolerate a "controversial" character. But when peace breaks out they give him the heave-ho. Admiral Halsey feared no man alive and led his Fleet up to the doorstep of Tokyo. But in his long and distinguished naval career he carefully avoided shore duty in Washington.

	Now that we have un-f-c-t-n in this country, and the UN, NATO, SEATO, and OAS to cope with in foreign affairs, we actually need two different kinds of military officers. The peacetime people have got to be State Department types who talk and think in the gobbledegook of diplomacy. They have to be able to "get along" with characters like Secretary McNamara and his Whiz Kids, and to avoid stepping on anybody's toes. Whether they can lead men in a bloody fight, deploy a fleet, or draw up a battle plan, makes little difference.

	I sometimes think we should have two teams of top brass in our military services. The peacetime smoothies would run the show between wars, while the belligerent types relaxed in the bar of the officers' club, waiting for their cue. When the shooting began, we would sober up the fighters and turn them loose on the unfortunate foe. After the Pattons, Halseys, and "Howling Mad" Smiths had clobbered the enemy, and peace broke out again, the other boys would come out of the bomb shelters and resume command.

	While I was trying to adjust to the comedown from the bridge of the Guadalcanal to a swivel chair, my three brothers were busy in the forward areas. Phil had command of a destroyer which bombarded Corregidor at shotgun range when we recaptured Manila. Shortly after, he hit a mine which almost broke his ship's back. By expert seamanship he got her safely into port under her own steam. I enviously sent him the following dispatch. "Just because you've got a hole in your bottom don't think you're a flowerpot."

	My brother Bill at this time commanded the seaplane tender Half Moon, a 1,500-ton expendable spit kit. He was tending a squadron of Black Cats out in New Guinea in an area where we couldn't afford to risk any big ships. The lagoon in which he was hiding out was right on the dividing line between the Navy's and MacArthur's bailiwicks.
Bill's Black Cat seaplanes could find no targets on the Navy's side of this line. But there was a constant stream of juicy Jap shipping going past each night on MacArthur's side.

	Of course the "correct" thing to do in a case of this kind is to send a dispatch to your boss asking permission to cross the line. Such a dispatch would be forwarded up the line to Halsey to Nimitz to MacArthur and then down to Kenny and finally the Air Corps local commander. After due consideration the , "Yes" or "No," would come back via the same channels. Bill didn't bother about this. He just sent his boys across the line and blasted the Japs, sending 60,000 tons to the bottom.

	Bill's boss, back in the rear area, was a literal-minded peacetime type. He noted that Bill's action reports put these sinkings in an out-of-bounds area, and sent him an urgent dispatch demanding an explanation of his unauthorized invasion of MacArthur's preserve.

	Bill came back with a terse answer pointing out that he was clobbering the Jap supply line to a vital area, and that he wasn't bothering MacArthur any because no Air Corps planes came down that far. He wound up with a blunt query: "Do you wish me to cease and desist?"

	No answer was forthcoming. Bill continued his poaching. My other brother, Father John Ireland, joined up as a chaplain as soon as war broke out and was sent to the Chaplains School at Williamsburg, Virginia. Some months later I got a letter from him saying, "I just left the school and am being sent to Hart Island, N.Y."

	Hart Island was the site of the naval penitentiary, where they sent the real tough eggs, guys who were too belligerent to waste time on in a rehabilitation center.

	I immediately wrote back and said, "For gosh sakes, John, be more specific. Are you being sent there as chaplain or as an inmate?"

	After a short tour as chaplain there, Father John went to England and was the padre of Patrol Wing 7, based on the Channel coast during the Bay of Biscay offensive against the U-boats.

	My new job, as Assistant Director of Plans in the office of the DCNO for air, was quite a change of pace from running a Hunter-Killer group in the North Atlantic! I didn't like it a damned bit. It griped me to be sitting on my fanny pushing papers when so many of my friends were out in the Pacific fighting big battles.

	It is customary for high-ranking military officers to proclaim that they hate war. I go along with this as a general principle. War is certainly a stupid way for civilized nations to settle questions of right and wrong. But as long as a good fast war is going on somewhere, most professional military men want to get into it.

	Any military man who had an active wartime command and claims he didn't get a kick out of it is toying with the meaning of words. Military men don't instigate wars, but after the diplomats and politicians have got one started, no military man who is worth a damn wants to be left out of it.

	Our job in the Plans Division was logistics. We had to make the plans that would eventually produce the stuff we needed and get it to the battle areas. The global strategists would gaze into their crystal ball and tell Admiral Nimitz they thought he ought to capture Iwo Jima. Nimitz and Halsey would get together with their staffs and draw up the operational plans for the job. These plans would come to Washington and the logistic boys would get busy. We had to see to it that the required number of bombs, bullets, planes, pilots, and tanker loads of fuel oil were at the right place at the right time.

	As an assistant director I was of course a small potato in the global scheme of things. However, I occasionally got in on the fringes of some of the high-level planning. I was the alternate for Rear Admiral John Cassady on the Joint Logistics Committee of the Joint Chiefs. This committee had to okay the logistic feasibility of all operational plans before the Joint Chiefs would give final approval. I guess John knew that by the time a plan got to that committee it had been worked on by experts and committee approval was just a formality, because he usually sent me to the meetings.

	Some of the stuff we were supposed to pass on made my head swim. Everything in the Joint Chiefs' mill went through our committee whether it had much to do with logistics or not. Among other things (God forgive us), we approved the division of Germany that made the Berlin airlift necessary. I voted for this proposition, or rather refrained from voting against it, without having the foggiest idea of what it meant.

	Only once did I try to assert myself and take issue with one of the operational plans presented to us. This was when the invasion of Japan came up for our approval.

	At this time Japan was hanging over the ropes. Our submarines had cut their supply lines so they didn't have enough fuel oil for their battleships or gasoline for their fighter planes. Our air force had burned out a huge chunk of Tokyo and Yokohama. It was impossible for the Japs to hold out much longer. All we had to do was to be a little patient and wait for a few months. Japan would be starved into surrender. Invasion was definitely not necessary. In fact, it was colossal stupidity to even think of it seriously.

	So when the plan for invasion of Japan came up before the Joint Logistics Committee I naively raised the question, Why invade at all?

	I should of stood in bed. The Army and Air Corps members looked at me as if I had just puked on the table.

	Of course a question of this kind was none of our goddamn business on the Joint Logistics Committee. This was global strategy. All we had to do was to certify that the beans and bullets would be there if we were foolish enough to go ahead with this plan. But it should have been somebody's business to raise the question, because the lives of several hundred thousand American soldiers would be at stake.

	But once a top-level plan like that gets made it is almost impossible to stop it. The President might, but I doubt that anyone else could, certainly not a junior captain on the logistics committee.

	It turned out that the atom bomb stopped the invasion by giving the Japs a face-saving excuse for surrender. Had it not been for the bomb we might have gone ahead with the invasion and the useless sacrifice of many young lives. This is the only redeeming feature of our decision to use it. Maybe we would be better off today if we hadn't invented it and had gone ahead with plans for the invasion, bloody though it would have been. Japan would probably have collapsed before we could launch it.

	All the time I was in Washington we seemed to be planning for a war in which our only objective was "unconditional surrender." So far as military planning was concerned, there was no consideration of what would happen after that. I suppose theoretically that's as far as military planning should go. But somebody should have been thinking beyond the firing of the last shot. The only plan for a postwar world I ever heard of was the notorious Morgenthau plan. I guess the United Nations was supposed to take over after the surrender so we could all live happily ever after.

	On the Logistics Committee we always made damn sure there would be enough stuff where it was needed. To do this we had to allow for supply ships being sunk, ammo dumps being bombed, and other sources of wastage. Operating forces always overstate their requirements, too. So we sometimes wound up with a hell of a lot more stuff when a battle was won than we really needed.

	This always scandalized the junketing congressmen, feature , and civilian "experts" from Washington. They seemed to feel that we should win the war by killing the last Jap with the last bullet in our shot locker.

	But the penalty for having a few less bullets than we needed was too severe. We made sure this didn't happen even though in doing so we sometimes used a sledge hammer to crack a nut.

	My boss at this time was Rear Admiral John Cassady, who later went on to four stars. I had served under John before and consider him the finest officer I ever worked for.

	He had an unusual experience during the war when he was skipper of the Saratoga. He was leaning out on a wing of the bridge one evening in the Pacific watching the sunset when a lieutenant junior grade came up to the bridge to relieve the watch as Officer of the Deck. The J.G. mistook John for the officer he was to relieve. Evidently he was on rather familiar terms with his messmate because to attract his attention he walked up behind John and goosed him.

	John let out a whoop, whirled around, and the J.G. almost jumped overboard. John fixed a steely eye on the flabbergasted young officer and said: "Young fellow, are you a Naval Academy man?"

	J.G: "Y-y-y-yessir."

	John: "Well, they're sure teaching young officers different things there now from what they did when I was a midshipman."

	In my new job one of my regular chores was to attend a meeting each morning in Admiral Home's office, where the staff was briefed on important events of the past twenty-four hours. I, a captain, was the only aviator among a dozen surface admirals, and I came in for a lot of good-natured ribbing whenever the foibles of aviators came up for discussion. 

	"Goddamn-aviator" was still a hyphenated word in the Navy at this time, although the havoc wrought by Admiral Halsey's task forces was beginning to build the aviators' position up to the point where we could refer condescendingly to our surface brethren in the "black-shoe navy."

	At one of these conferences a new command setup was announced for the Third Fleet. Since the Third Fleet was built around carriers, the aviation admirals drew all the plums in the new setup, and commanded the task forces. In some cases this placed comparatively junior flying admirals over the heads of shoes, commanding battleships and cruiser divisions, who were far senior to the flying upstarts.

	When this setup was announced there was some acrimonious discussion among the conferees. Finally one old salt cocked a weather-beaten eye at me and said, "It's a funny navy where they make plebes senior to the first-classmen."

	I edged toward the door, got set to run, and replied, "As soon as the war is over, sir, and it's safe to do so, we will go back to the old system."

	While I was on duty in Washington, Germany surrendered and news of the U-505's capture was released. 

	When we were towing her to Bermuda I knew that the capture would be Top Secret until the end of the war, and I knew too that we had one whale of a story on the end of that towline. I also knew I wouldn't even be able to talk to a ghost writer about it after we got in. So I wrote up the story myself and turned it in to the security people in the Navy Department, who promptly locked it up in the Top Secret safe. When Germany surrendered they hauled it out and sent it up to the Saturday Evening Post, which grabbed it forthwith.

	Talk about falling into the outhouse and coming out smelling of roses! This was my first appearance in print since I was editor of the Idaho Yarn back in '26, when my byline under a piece used to carry some weight with the management of the ship's paper.

	Soon after V-E Day the U-505 came up the Potomac under her own power with an American crew aboard. She was on a bond drive down the East and Gulf coasts. My wife, my three youngsters, and I went aboard. I demonstrated the "booby trap" to them and we bought a war bond with the check from the S.E.P.

	Whenever anyone asks me now how to get started in the writing racket I tell him to "capture a submarine and write it up for the Post." 

	Actually, that story was such a natural that making the big leagues with my maiden attempt wasn't much of a feat. All you had to do was to be able to spell and know a little bit about sixth-grade grammar. As in everything else in this life, luck plays a big part in breaking into literary circles.

	Shortly after this, CINCLANTS citation of the Guadalcanal's task group for the Presidential Unit Citation came up before the Board of Awards in Washington. Since this was the capture of a foreign enemy man-o'-war on the high seas by our Navy since 1815, Admiral Ingersoll had written us a flowery citation. I thought our chances of getting the coveted P.U.C. pennant were pretty good.

	I reckoned without the chair-borne bureaucrats on th« Board of Awards. They ruled that the Presidential Unit Citation could be awarded only for bravery in battle. They said that since none of my boys had been killed -- or even wounded -- this couldn't have been much of a fight!! They turned down the award.

	Admiral King snorted disdainfully when informed of this remarkable decision, summarily brushed it under the rug, and gave us the P.U.C. So everyone in the task group got a ribbon to show for the capture.

	Lieutenant David got the Congressional Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Battle of the Atlantic. I recommended Knispul and Wdowiak for it too, but they had to settle for Navy Crosses. Several dozen other boys got Silver Stars and lesser awards.

	David died of heart failure some months after the capture and before he received his Congressional medal.

	In December, 1964, I went out to Seattle and helped launch a new destroyer escort, the U.S.S. Albert L. David. I'm sure that with a name like that to live up to, this ship will be a fine one, just as the Guadalcanal was for a similar reason.

	I knew Admiral King pretty well. I doubt it anyone far junior to him ever got to be on intimate terms with him, but I guess I came about as close as you could. We were in the same flight class at Pensacola, I served under him while he was still a captain, and he never found it necessary to keelhaul me.

	He stopped off for a few hours in Iceland while I was a commander, gave a talk to my boys at the air base, and I introduced him by saying, "He is a hardboiled, two-fisted, seafaring, flying, and fighting man." He seemed to like this.

	He was an aloof character, at least to his subordinates. He certainly inspired respect, sometimes even awe -- but not the intense personal loyalty that Halsey did.

	He was a man of few words. He was not fluent with either tongue or pen except when he blew his top, and then his command of waterfront English was impressive. Our public-relations officers had trouble prying information out of him. After an unproductive interview with him, one ace reporter , "If Admiral King had his way the Navy would issue only one communique for the whole war. That one would be released at the end and would be quote, We won, unquote."

	If you did a good job for Uncle Ernie he would just grunt approvingly. If you loused up a job he would lower the boom. His attitude was, You are supposed to do a good job -- so don't expect a medal for doing what you are paid to do. He worked very hard himself and was intolerant of laziness or stupidity.

	I never thought he was a brilliant strategist. But he recognized talent in others and used it. He surrounded himself with high-caliber people, drove them hard, and got the best out of them.

	One of his main characteristics was stubbornness. But it wasn't the mulish kind. He would listen to reason. Once his mind was made up, he had the guts to defend his decisions against anybody. Even such strong characters as F.D.R. and Churchill found this out. It took a lot of intestinal fortitude to say "Hell, no" to them.

	He was one of our few top leaders who wasn't bamboozled by the Russians -- or by the British, who were always trying to diddle us out of the thirteen original colonies. They couldn't even get back the tea out of Boston Harbor with Uncle Ernie around.

	They say that when notified right after Pearl Harbor that he was to replace Admiral Stark as Chief of Naval Operations, King just grunted and observed, "When the going gets tough they always send for the sons-of-bitches." I asked him if he had really said this. Scrupulously honest, Uncle Ernie replied, "No. But I wish I had."

	I don't think he would have lasted for three months as C.N.O. in peacetime. But he was just what we needed in World War II; I hope the Navy can always produce an Uncle Ernie when the fate of the nation hangs in the balance.

	Early in 1945 I found out about the Manhattan Project. This information reached me on a "need-to-know" basis, because in the logistics business we had to be ready to choke off the tremendous volume of munitions production if the Big Bang ended the whole thing all of a sudden. I was determined to get out to the Pacific Fleet before this happened.

	Once they got you in the Navy Department you were supposed to be stuck there for two years. I had only been there eight months. But I had a good drag with Uncle Ernie, after home the U-505. managed to get him to turn me loose. In July of 1945 I finally headed for the far Pacific to command one of the big carriers in Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet.

	On the way out to report to Admiral Halsey we got word of the dropping of the first atom bomb. I'll never forget the graphic picture painted by the closing line of the first dispatch we got about Hiroshima. There was a garble in the decoding of the dispatch reporting this milestone in the history of civilized man. The word "debris" decoded as "derbies." So the last line of the message describing the devastation at Hiroshima read, "Derbies were blown 30,000 feet in the air.

	Our starry-eyed "ban-the-bomb" reformers and other "advanced" thinkers now claim that our Christian principles were blown sky-high too. I can't see this.

	As long as man thinks it is proper to settle international disputes by suspending operation of the commandment "Thou shalt not kill," and opposing armies go into battle each with the blessing of the same churches, I don't see why the details of the killing make much difference.

	Our subs in the Pacific sank Japs without warning and left survivors to their fate. Our bombing of Dresden killed and maimed more women and children than the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did.

	I'm not worried so much about moral principles as I am about the fact that we have unleashed a weapon which may later enable some small nation to destroy us. It will indeed be ironic if some day one of the new cannibal republics of Africa blows the U.S.A. off the map!

	Just after I got to the Pacific Fleet, and before I could take over command of the carrier Hancock, the Japs surrendered. My story ever since has been that they surrendered for three reasons: Russia's entry into the war, the atom bomb, and Gallery's arrival in the Third Fleet. If I am sufficiently urged I will also admit that the Kaiser surrendered in World War I as soon as word got to Germany that Midshipman Gallery was about to graduate from the Naval Academy.

	So I didn't see much of the Pacific war. I took over command of the Hancock right after the war was over and the "bring-the-boys-home" panic had started. Everybody in the Hancock figured she would be one of the first ships to go home because had been out there a long time, had got hit, and had been repaired in Honolulu and rushed back out instead of being repaired stateside.

	When I took command I addressed the crew at the evening movies and told them that since the war was now over, there was no further need for secrecy, and I would cut them in on all operation schedules as soon as I found out about them.

	The next day I had a problem dumped in my lap. We got a dispatch from the Navy Department giving the order in which ships would be brought home and Hancock was one of the last on the list. The message was Top Secret so no one but the decoders and my executive officer (now Vice Admiral "Red Raborn) was supposed to know what was in it, when Red brought it in and laid it on my desk. Red recommended strongly that I sit on it for twenty-four hours, while he got some of the cooler heads among the chiefs together and explained things to them so they could cushion the blow to the rest of the crew.

	I thought this over very carefully. With all the hysteria and whoop-de-doo at home and with the crew in the mood that they were, there could be trouble. I knew very well that despite the Top Secret label on this message everyone on the ship probably knew of it as soon as I did.

	At the movies that night I reminded the crew of my promise, and read the dispatch to them. After I finished, for a few moments a flake of dandruff falling anywhere on the hangar deck would have made an audible thud. After a pregnant pause, scattered applause started and swelled into a nice hand. It wasn't any ovation and there were no cheers or whistling.

	But that crew knew now they could depend on the skipper to tell them the bad news as well as the good. This was very bad news, indeed, that I had just given them, but they appreciated the new skipper's getting up in front of them, looking diem in the eye, and dishing it out.

	The first time I took the Hancock alongside a tanker to refuel-was an adventure. This was a maneuver in which all carrier skippers tried to outdo each other. The Hancock was a much bigger ship than the Guadalcanal and handled a bit more ponderously.

	I came boiling up alongside much too fast and cutting in at too sharp an angle. I almost chickened out on the first approach, but at the last possible instant I put the rudder hard , and backed the engines, dropping that ship right smack in the slot where she belonged. It was a real slam bang performance and everybody on both bridges just said "Jeezs." I said to myself, "Thank God."

	I was reminded of the story they tell in the British Navy about the cruiser captain who brought his ship alongside a dock and made an ungodly mess of the job with the Admiral watching from his flagship in the berth ahead. Shortly after the timbers of the dock got through splintering and the ship was tied up the red-faced captain was handed an official message from the Admiral which simply said, "To Commanding Officer: Good."

	Ten minutes later he received another from the Admiral saying, "To my previous message add the word 'God.'"

	I soon found out how different being captain of a big carrier in the Pacific was from being skipper of a small one in the Atlantic. In the Atlantic the skipper was a big wheel who actually ran a task group and made some important decisions. In the Third Fleet, he was just a high priced officer of the deck, who never left the bridge area, and seldom gave any orders except to the helmsman and the engines.

	The Third Fleet was an armada of hundreds of ships. Even an Essex-class carrier was a small cog in that machine. The Fleet was split up into task forces consisting of four or five carriers, several battleships and cruisers, and a couple of dozen destroyers. These groups had to maneuver together like a pro football team, and a late or clumsy move by one ship could louse things up for the whole works. Since the captain holds the sack for whatever the ship does, most skippers lived on the bridge and stood right behind the helmsman every time a maneuvering signal was executed.

	This simply verifies a fact of life, by no means peculiar to the Navy, that the bigger an organization is, the less water anyone draws in it except very close to the top.

	I didn't realize until I took over the Hancock how lucky I was when I got "banished to Siberia" in the Atlantic with the Guadalcanal.

	I made two trips to the States with the Hancock, hauling soldiers home. One was from Okinawa and the other from Manus. On the trip to Manus we crossed the equator and of course had the traditional ceremonies. In addition I published memo which originated on the Langley twenty years before and which caused much argument and discussion on the Hancock.

	The memo referred to the well-known-fact that whirlpools, typhoons, and cyclones rotate counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern. This, of course, is due to the rotation of the earth. The memo went on to state that leading scientists had believed for years that the same reversal of twist would occur in a small squirted stream of water when crossing the equator and for the same reason. The memo requested all hands to assist in settling this question once and for all by taking personal observations on the day we crossed the line, using whatever hydraulic equipment was most convenient.

	This memo stirred up heated arguments in the wardroom, J. O. mess, chiefs' quarters, and general mess as we approached the line. Many argued that rifling of the bore was the controlling factor rather than rotation of the earth.

	On the day we crossed the line, everybody on board made several trips to the gents' can to take observations.

	However, no reports of any scientific value resulted from these experiments. All hands seemed to take a frivolous attitude in the matter, and most of the data turned in is not suitable for publication in a serious volume of this kind.

	Upon returning from Manus, I was promoted to rear admiral and took command of Carrier Division 16. Theoretically this was an active unit of three jeep carriers in full commission. But I referred to the year I spent in it as "Operation Stagnate." The helter-skelter demobilization had reduced the crews to the point where the ships couldn't get underway and just lay alongside the dock in San Diego doing nothing.

	At this time the United States was by all odds the top dog among the nations of the world. Despite our frantic demobilization, we still had a Navy and an Air Force that were invincible. Our vast industrial complex was the greatest the world had ever seen, whereas most of Europe's industry was in ruins. Our only possible rival as the world's top nation was Russia, and she didn't seem to be a very serious rival. Large portions of her country had been laid waste, millions of her young men had been slaughtered, and she was a backward slave nation anyway.

	Unification was beginning to rear its ugly head and underminethe military structure that had won the war for us. But we were the only country in the world that had the atom bomb, so that didn't seem to matter much. Things looked pretty bright for the United States in 1945.

	After a year in Carrier division 16, I was ordered back to Washington for a newly created job -- in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

BACK TO THE PENTAGON

	In June, 1947,1 reported to the Pentagon for duty as Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Guided Missiles. This was a wonderful job in a brand-new field that intrigued everybody. Nobody, including me, knew much about it, but at least I had the shingle hanging over my door saying I was the Navy's missile expert. I did know something about ordnance, engineering, and flying, and I had a staff of a dozen top-notch captains and commanders, all sharp characters, who now (eighteen years later) are coming to the top of the Navy.

	Our job was to orient the Navy's guided-missile program, fit it in with those of the other services, and guide the efforts of the various bureaus and the Office of Naval Research.

	Looking back now, almost twenty years later, when Polaris is the mainstay of the free world against Communist aggression, I think I am entitled to say that we got things started right. I am not trying to claim any credit for Polaris. That belongs to Vice Admiral "Red" Raborn. But a lot of ice had to be broken before anything like Polaris could get serious consideration in the Pentagon. I broke some of the ice.

	In 1947 the guided-missile programs of all services were in the embryo stage. Enthusiasts claimed that push-button warfare was "just around the corner." Willy Ley and Dr. Wernher von Braun were confidently predicting things that were literally out of this world: men in orbit, moon shots, and interstellar space travel. The slick magazines were having a ball with fantastic articles about things that made an old fogey out of Jules Verne. All three services had modest guided-missile programs started, and ambitious plans for expanding them if they could get the money.

	The service chiefs and Congress would listen tolerantly and even with interest to these plans. Getting the money to carry them out was something else again. The United States was then sitting on top of the world. We were the only country that had the atom bomb. We had a powerful strategic air force to deliver it, and the biggest Navy in the world. We were smugly confident that we would be top dog in this world for many years to come. We were so sure that the atomic bomb was all we needed that we cut the Army to the bone and put a large part of our Navy in moth balls. For everyone except SAC, the watchwords were economy and reduction of force. Missiles were an interesting but expensive and as yet unnecessary luxury.

	This was when we should have been launching the programs that would have given us the first Sputnik, put the first man in orbit, and made us first on the moon. But if any service chief had asked Congress then for even a fraction of the kind of money we are dumping into these nonmilitary programs now, the little men in white suits would have come and taken him away to St. Elizabeth's. After all, why spend money on that of stuff when the atom bomb and SAC made us invulnerable?

	The Martin Company made a detailed engineering study, and submitted a proposal for launching a satellite, but it was never given serious consideration. It was too far ahead of the times, and the price tag (a mere eighty million dollars on a cost-plus basis) at that time seemed colossal. Von Braun and his team of expert German rocketeers were champing at the launching pad to get into space projects, but they were kept busy launching obsolete captured V-2 rockets at White Sands.

	Even when the Russians exploded their first atom bomb, it didn't change things much. It jarred our complacency a bit, but it didn't have much effect on space projects. It took Sputnik to do that. Until then, we never gave the Russians a serious thought so far as missiles were concerned. We had gotten the cream of the German rocket experts, and the Russians were backward people anyway, almost ruined by the war. We went about our missile program as if we were the only ones in the world who knew anything about missilery. Although I had been away from the Pentagon for almost ten years when Sputnik hit the fan. I think this attitude of complacency prevailed up to that moment, so far as space was concerned.

	All services, including the Navy, were more interested in earthly projects having direct military application than they were in moon rockets. Everybody gave lip service to space but put their money into things that seemed to be of more immediate military value, such as ICBMs and antiaircraft rockets.

	Nobody in the military services seemed to appreciate the propaganda value of firsts in space, and actually, I don't think it was the military's business to do so anyway. But if Von Braun and his people had been set up then in the space agency and given the money we are now spending trying to catch up, we would have been first in space by a number of years.

	In the Navy we pushed the Bumble Bee program, which has since produced the Terrier missile, now replacing antiaircraft guns in the fleet. We developed Regulus, forerunner of Polaris, which is the most deadly weapons system ever developed. We were working on Sidewinder, the heat-homing rocket which is now standard equipment for Air Force and Navy fighter planes. The Office of Naval Research was interested in space at this time, but about all it could do was to get in on the instrumentation of the V-2 rockets that von Braun was firing at White Sands.

	I pushed one project through when I was ACNO Guided Missiles which had far-reaching effects in the Navy. It was the firing of a V-2 rocket from the carrier Midway. In a way this was just a stunt, because we certainly would never fire V-2 rockets from ships as a military operation. But it was a spectacular stunt that focused a lot of high-level Navy attention on the guided-missile program, made some of our top people aware of things to come, and resulted in the conversion of the U.S.S. Norton Sound to an experimental guided-missile ship. It was one of the seeds that produced Polaris and gave our whole program a much needed shot in the arm.

	While planning this shoot I met Dr. von Braun and Dr. DeMuth, both big wheels in the space program now. At this time they were practically prisoners of war. They had been the brains of the German rocket program that produced the V-2. At the end of the war they took pains to see to it that they were captured by the Allies rather than the Russians. We lost no time in shanghaiing them to the Army missile center at White Sands. Had we given them the backing in '47 which they now have we might have men on the moon right now.

	At this time, unification had just become one of the facts of life, and we were still going through the birth pangs. When I was on duty in the Navy Department during the war we had our hands full fighting the Nazis and Japs, and didn't have time for much inter-service squabbling. There were only two services then, anyway, and we had learned to live with each other. The Army and Navy were like an old married couple each of whom thinks the other is a goddamn fool, but has learned how to live with the other's foibles.

	But military men have to fight with somebody, and now that peace had broken out we had no foreign enemies left. The British had gone home and a flashy young female of sketchy morals, the Air Force, had moved in with the old couple. It was bound to cause trouble, and it did.

	"Unification" was an absurd misnomer for what happened right after the war. The Air Force split off from the Army and we "unified" into three services instead of two. Most of us in the Navy figured that if the Army was willing to let the Air Force go, that was their funeral, and we shouldn't get excited about it.

	But the Air Force wanted a lot more than just independence from the Army. They wanted control of everything that flew, including rockets, space vehicles, and naval aircraft.

	In the war just ended, both the British and Germans had sad experiences with their independent air forces. Goering's Luftwaffe never would cooperate with the U-boats. Coastal Command of the R.A.F. and the Admiralty fought each other behind the scenes throughout the war. An independent air force always wants to win the war singlehanded -- and thinks it can.

	With war experience still green in our minds, we in the Navy felt we might as well scuttle the fleet as give up control of our naval aircraft.

	While we were in the throes of being unified, the B-36 "billion-dollar blunder" battle broke out. The Air Force was riding high, hogging the headlines and appropriations and reaching out for more all the time.

	Nearly all dedicated military men are able to persuade themselves that what is good for their service is good for the country. (Judging from an oft-quoted remark about General Motors by Mr. Charles Wilson when he was Secretary of Defense, this frame of mind is not confined to the military.) But the Air Force carried it to extremes. So far as they were concerned, money spent on anything but the Air Force was down the drain, and wasted.

	The inter-service war was confined to the Pentagon, where the appropriations swag was cut up, and to the Air War College. In the field, the services cooperated smoothly and efficiently on common tasks. But in the Pentagon, officers and gentlemen were quite willing to stick a knife in the back of anyone wearing a different uniform. Some of the trickery, sharp practice, and downright dishonesty that was rampant seems inconsistent with the character of the men involved until you remember the basic principle on which we all worked: What's good for the (Army, Navy, or Air Force) is good for... etc.

	For instance, the Air Force fought tooth and nail to block development of smaller A-bombs and hydrogen bombs. At the end of the war, our A-bomb was the so-called "Fat Man," and the Air Force wanted nothing but the Fat Man. They wanted the Atomic Energy Commission to concentrate on production of the Fat Man and stop all research and development aimed at producing smaller bombs of greater power. They could produce charts on fallout, "over kill" ratio, world resources of uranium, and on the most efficient use of fissionable resources to get the greatest yield in kilotons per pound of uranium showing that the Fat Man was good enough. They had cost-analysis figures on the research and development necessary for small bombs, versus mass-production costs for the Fat Man. It was all very scientific and impressive and looked like a sincere effort by dedicated men to save money for the harassed taxpayer.

	But the real reason for it was that the Fat Man was so big that only something like the B-29, or bigger, could carry it Improved bombs, much smaller than the Fat Man, would enable the Navy to get in on the act, for its smaller planes could carry them. So long as progress could be frozen where it was at the end of the war, the Air Force had a monopoly on delivering fissionable weapons and could fence the Navy out of the strategic-bombing preserve.

	At this time I was forty-six years old and had sixteen years to go before reaching retirement age. Since I was on the ground floor of missile development, my future prospects looked pretty bright. It seemed like about an even bet I might make three stars before I was let out to pasture.

	However, as I was to find out, you should never count your stars until they twinkle. I had some stormy weather ahead.

	I got caught in the inter-service rhubarb and had trouble with the civilian secretaries of Defense and Navy, not to mention Secretary Symington of the Air Force. The Secretary of Defense was the Honorable Louis Johnson, who got his job because he was a fair-to-middling fund raiser for the Democratic Party. As Secretary of Defense he was... a fair-to-middling fund raiser for the Democratic Party.

	When he could find time from his political activities, he issued several gag orders designed to stop "inter-service bickering." The intent of these directives, addressed not to the officers of the various services but to the service secretaries, was obvious. No officer on active duty was to publish any article without prior clearance from the Secretary of Defense.

	However, there were legal loopholes in those so-called "orders." I doubt that their violation would have stood up in a court-martial as violation of military law. So the only real penalty for disregarding them would be to incur the displeasure of the secretaries -- a penalty not to be sniffed at.

	I incurred it twice by publishing in the Saturday Evening Post two articles of which Mr. Johnson disapproved. I felt that what I had to say was important to the future safety of the United States. I knew Mr. Johnson's flunkies would have squelched these pieces and so I had not submitted them to his office for clearance.

	Neither article contained classified information, but both deviated from Mr. Johnson's current party line, which was, "All we need is SAC, and everything is sweetness and light in the Defense Department." Both pieces could be construed as not supporting these ideas.

	In publishing the pieces, I complied with time-honored Navy regulations which did not require prior clearance of an article except for military security. There being no security angles involved, I simply submitted copies for the Navy Department's files after acceptance by the Saturday Evening Post -- as required by Navy regulations.

	The first one was called "An Admiral Talks Back to the Airmen." It challenged the idea, then becoming widely accepted, that the atom bomb was all we needed to preserve our way of life. It undertook to show that reliance on the atom bomb and nothing else could smash the way of life of everybody on this earth.

	The second, "Don't Let Them Scuttle the Navy," took up where the first left off. It pointed out that 75 per cent of the earth's surface is salt water, and that our great industrial complex depends absolutely on many raw materials which must be imported by ship. It showed the part that control of the seas played in making this country great, and said that even in the atomic age, control of the great ocean highways was still vital to our survival.

	 Mr. Johnson threw a fit over both pieces. On the first one, he was foolish enough to tell the Saturday Evening Post they couldn't print the article, even though there was no security involved. The Saturday Evening Post gave him the horse laugh. When the second article was about to appear, he put the squeeze on me, and things got so hot that I had to write a letter to Ben Hibbs, the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, with a copy to Mr. Johnson, withdrawing the piece after the Saturday Evening Post had bought it. However, I had had a hunch ahead of time that something like this might happen, and had an understanding with Ben that if he got a pusillanimous letter from me saying "Stop the presses," it would just be window dressing, and he was to disregard it.

	Johnson put the heat on all right, and Ben got such a letter. "Don't Let Them Scuttle the Navy" appeared in the September, 1949, issue of the Saturday Evening Post.

	Then I was really on the anxious seat. There were a number of things Mr. Johnson might do-^all of them unpleasant. The first was to give me a general court-martial. However, this would have made a martyr out of me, and the press would have given Mr. Johnson a bad time about freedom of speech. Besides, I don't think he could have preferred any charges that would have stood up in a court. But I had a sweaty time wondering for a while. He also could have had me ordered to duty in Alaska, but apparently he didn't think of it.

	I was scared stiff that Mr. Johnson might learn about one old Navy way of straightening out stubborn cases where you can't make a court-martial stick. It is practically never used any more, and should have been abolished when we did away with flogging. But it is still on the books. You simply send the offender home to await orders on half pay, and then forget about him. They tell me this was quite effective in the old days, and I imagine it still would be. Fortunately, Mr. Johnson was not familiar with this quaint old Navy custom, and after a few weeks the storm blew over.

	Later, I had a piece in Collier's called "If This Be Treason." That one stirred up a real rhubarb. Among other things, I undertook to explain why it was that most of the complaints, about unification came from the Navy, whereas the Army and Air Force seemed to be satisfied with it. I answered this question by asking another one -- "Who does the screaming when a rape is being committed," In certain Pentagon circles, this remark was regarded as having inflammatory implications.

	Just before this piece appeared, President Truman had stricken Arleigh Burke's name from the admirals' promotion list because Arleigh had been defending the Navy more strenuously than Mr. Johnson thought proper. In the original version of my article, I had a sizzling paragraph about the President's action.

	(Mr. Truman found that political meddling with Navy selection boards was too hot to handle and stuck Arleigh's name right back on the list. Arleigh later served an unprecedented six years as chief of naval operations.)

	I was able to wire Collier's just in time to stop the presses and kill the paragraph about Burke.

	I said some other things in the article which the new Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Matthews, didn't like. He sent me the following letter:

THE SECRETARY OF THE NAVY
WASHINGTON, D.C.

From: The Secretary of the Navy
10 Jan 1950
To: Rear Admiral D. V. Gallery, U.S. Navy
Subj: Your proposed article entitled "If This Be Treason"

1.	A draft of an article entitled "If This Be Treason," written by you and intended for publication, has been received and examined.
2.	The proposed article I consider to be not only inflammatory and inaccurate, but contemptuous of and disrespectful to both the Secretary of Defense and to me. Its publication would constitute conduct to the prejudice of the good order and discipline of the Navy.

Francis P. Matthews

This letter is an ominous document with unpleasant implications. It was drafted by the Judge Advocate General's Office for the Secretary's signature and it laid the ground for a general court martial. "Conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline" is one of the stock phrases used by the Judge Advocate General in preferring charges for a court-martial.

	By the time I got this letter it was too late to kill the Collier's piece, even if I had wanted to. That issue of Collier's wasn't on the streets yet, but several million copies had been printed. I started looking for a smart defense counsel because Mr. Matthews' letter seemed to leave no doubt that I was going to need one.

	While I was still on the anxious seat about a court-martial, I received one letter which brightened my day considerably.

DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY
WASHINGTON, D.C.
18 Jan. 1950 

My Dear Dan -- 

   I have read and reread that article which you wrote in Collier's for the issue of January 11th entitled, "If This Be Treason" in which you put your cards on the table, indeed.

   I must say that the article was well written and I hope most people will read and reread it because you tell the truth, at least as I see it. The time has come for our people to understand that a proper officer does not-like to be made a mere yes-man. Otherwise, as you have said, the police state is close at hand.

   Thanking you for your good work,

Faithfully yours,

ERNEST J. KING
Fleet Admiral

This letter is one of my most treasured possessions.

	When that issue of Collier's came out it caused a bit of comment here and there, and a congressman put the whole piece in the Congressional Record as an "extension of remarks." But there were no riots in the streets, and no mutinies broke out in the fleet.

	Mr. Matthews wasn't anxious to begin his term of office with a Donnybrook about freedom of speech so he tossed this hot potato to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Sherman.

	Sherman after due deliberation sent me a "letter of admonition." The dictionary defines an admonition as a "friendly, gentle reproof." I cannot imagine Admiral Sherman issuing only a gentle reproof to someone whom he believed to be guilty of "inflammatory," "disrespectful," and "contemptuous" conduct to his superiors. After all the thunder and lightning from the Secretary's office about a court-martial, this was almost the equivalent of getting a medal!

	There is one more letter pertaining to this case which I keep in the Believe It or Not section of my files:

NAVY DEPARTMENT 
OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY

PR-300 (JGR)/ce   
Serial 780
20 March 1950

Col. Wiley J. Adams Convention
Chairman Dept. of Oklahoma
Reserve Officers Association
407 Medical Arts Building
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

My dear Colonel Adams:

This will acknowledge your letters of 20 February and 3 March addressed to the Secretary of the Navy in which you invited him to attend the Twenty-third annual convention of the ROA of the State of Oklahoma on 6 May 1950.

In accordance with your suggestion that the Secretary designate an official representative if it was impossible for him to attend, I am pleased to inform you that Rear Admiral Daniel V. Gallery, USN, Deputy Commander Operational Development Forces Atlantic Fleet will represent the Navy Department unless unforeseen matters arise between now and 6 May.

Trusting that you will have a most successful convention and knowing that Admiral Gallery will carry an inspiring message for the members of your ROA, I am

Very sincerely yours,

J. G. REARDON 
By direction

	I don't know what the Secretary's office had in mind when they stuck in that cryptic proviso about "unforeseen matters." However, none arose, and I was still out of jail on May 6.

	So I represented Mr. Matthews at the Reserve Officers convention and delivered a forthright speech coming out flat-footed in favor of home, mother, and the American flag.

	I've often wondered how a court-martial would have turned out had it ever come to trial. I think the Secretary laid it on a bit thick when he said "inflammatory... inaccurate... contemptuous... and disrespectful."

	I think I could have beaten the rap in a court-martial. But you never can be sure in a case of this kind. The penalty for losing the case could have been dismissal from the Navy and thirty years of service down the drain, with no pension.

	The trial would have stirred up a real rhubarb because fundamental issues would have been at stake -- freedom of speech on one side, and military discipline on the other. The lawyers on both sides would have had a Roman holiday. It would have been a lovely battle. But, the "winner" in that kind of fight may never get out of the hospital after he wins it.

	Lest the reader get the impression that I was a belligerent and insubordinate s.o.b. to all my civilian superiors, let me say that Dan Kimball, when he was Secretary of the Navy, was in my corner all the time. He fought my battles with Louis Johnson when it was dangerous for him to fight them. In fact, I had to advise Dan several times to take it easy or he might get canned himself.

	Whenever I was getting ready to publish a controversial piece, all my friends would pat me on the back and say, "Get in there and fight, kid, they can't hurt us." When the bell rang and Mr. Johnson came storming out to the center of the ring, the only one left in my corner would be Kimball. And of course as long as he was there I didn't need anyone else. Kimball knew all about the Post deal on the window-dressing letter, used a copy of it with a perfectly straight face to Johnson's lid back on after it had nipped.

	Kimball's predecessor, Mr. John L. Sullivan, wasn't much help to me, and vice versa, I'm afraid. Whenever Johnson said "boo" he jumped about a foot, and Johnson said "boo" every time he thought of me. This went on until Mr. Johnson scuttled our first super-carrier, the U.S.S. United States, on which construction had already begun. Then Mr. Sullivan lived up to his fighting name by resigning.

	I was the shuttlecock in another high-level badminton game along about this time. In 1949 I wrote a ten-page confidential memo to the Chief of Naval Operations setting forth my ideas about how Navy policy should be oriented with regard to strategic bombing. In a nutshell, I said that basically the Navy was better suited for strategic-bombing missions than the Air Force, and that unless we kept our foot in the door for that mission the Navy would soon be out of business and the United States would be the loser. This, of course, was rank heresy in those days, when the Air Force, with the Defense Secretary's approval, claimed strategic bombing for its birthright, and Polaris was still just a gleam in a few farseeing eyes.

	At this time a report by General Collins, later chief of staff of the Army was circulating in the Pentagon and getting wide high-level reading. It urged adoption of the German general-staff system, and cutting the Navy down to a convoy-escort force.

	My memo exposed some of the myths in the Collins paper. It also stated a few simple facts about sea power that even generals should be aware of.

	I pointed out that big bombers flying from foreign overseas bases could never depend on their bases any longer than the next election or revolution in the countries concerned. The high seas are traditionally free to everybody. No foreign nation's consent is needed to send our carrier task forces or Polaris subs anywhere on the globe outside the three-mile limit.

	I said that if the Navy lost its air arm and was reduced to a convoy escort force we might as well scrap it.

	These ideas sound trite now. But back in 1949 they were regarded as wild-eyed radical ones by many Very Important People.

	The memo got attentive reading in top-level Navy circles and most of the comments made on it were favorable.

	Then Drew Pearson somehow got a copy of it and ran it verbatim in his column, giving it the full treatment for two days.

	The published memo hit the Pentagon like an earthquake. The Secretary of Defense and the Air Force raised hell. Secretary of the Navy Sullivan blew his main gasket, and although I had nothing to do with Pearson's getting hold of the memo, wanted to hang me from the top of the Washington Monument. My friends had to fight a delaying action. I was rushed off on an inspection trip to out-of-the-way places and told to take my time about getting back.

	All copies of the memo were recalled to the files of the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Office of Naval Intelligence was directed to find out how Pearson got his copy. For a while my name was a bad word around the Pentagon. When I finally slunk back into town ten days later, other things had come up, as they always do around Washington, and the seas had calmed down again.

	There was an aftermath to this incident. After I retired, I searched my files for a copy of this memorandum and found that I didn't have one. Apparently my personal copy was turned into the CNO files with all other copies. The original was, of course, an official Navy document and should have been in the CNO files. So I went there to have a look at it. There was no original on file, no copies, and no record that there ever had been such a memo. Shades of 1984! They must have burned the memo, original, copies and all, on the steps of the Pentagon while I was off "inspecting."

	So I phoned Drew Pearson, and he very kindly provided me with a copy of my own memorandum for my personal files. Incidentally, reading this memo in 1965 against the background of our present Polaris program makes my 1950 crystal ball look pretty good. In fact, if I were built that way, I might even say, "I told you so."

	While all this was going on I became friendly with (of all people) Steve Leo, the high-powered public-relations director of the Air Force. Although Steve and I used to lie awake nights dreaming up ways of making each other unhappy, we became good friends. Perhaps it was a case of a couple of competent pickpockets who respected each other's handiwork. Steve was one of the most expert poisoners of the wells of public information I have ever met.

	Every week or so we used to have lunch together in the top brass lunchroom of the Pentagon just to see the heads snap around for a double take when two such characters as Leo and Gallery came in together, and the eyes pop when we sat down at the same table without spilling any blood. All sorts of interesting rumors got into circulation as a result of these purely social lunches.

	I used to tip Steve off whenever I had a hot article in the Saturday Evening Post and after lunch Steve would surreptitiously purchase a copy of the magazine, smuggle it into his office, and take the piece apart. At this time I was also writing short stories for the Post and a couple of times I diddled Steve out of fifteen cents by tipping him off that I had a piece in the Post, but not telling him it was a harmless fiction piece about Fatso, the Captain of the Incinerator. But Steve didn't mind this too much. He used to say I never wrote anything but fiction anyway.

	We had a minor domestic tiff in my family while I was on duty in Washington. One day Mrs. Gallery and Mrs. Radford, whose husband was later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, got to comparing notes at an officers' wives tea party. The Rad-fords lived in the city, and Mrs. R. had a garden which was in urgent need of some good fertilizer. We lived out in the country and had a couple of horses on the place, and there was a growing pile of horse manure behind the barn.

	So the two ladies cooked up a deal whereby I was to drive in to the Pentagon next day with half a dozen sacks full of manure in my all-purpose jeep. I was to park the jeep in my regular place, and the Radfords' gardener would come and pick up the precious fertilizer.

	I flatly refused to cooperate in this project on the grounds that driving a jeep full of horse manure into the Pentagon would be carrying coals to Newcastle.

	It was during this tour of duty that the "Gray Angels" burst on an unsuspecting public. (The Navy's famous Blue Angels are a precision stunt team of jet pilots who go through all sorts of hair-rising maneuvers wingtip to wingtip.)

	Aviator admirals have to keep their hand in at flying too, and one day Apollo Soucek, Bat Cruise, and I decided to check out in the McDonald Phantom, a single-seat jet fighter, brush up on our formation flying, and form an exhibition jet team of three admirals. We had no intention of trying to make bums out of the Blue Angels. We would simply try to fly a fairly tidy formation without any looping, swooping, or sideswiping.

•	He of the sack suit and the S.O.B. episode recounted in an earlier chapter.

	At first we were just three potential crashes looking for places to happen. We didn't find any, but we almost did. At the opening of Idle wild, Bat got confused about the plumbing in his Phantom, had a flame-out over the field, and had to make a dead-stick landing. He set her down in the middle of the main runway as if that were the way he landed all the time. I got caught out by a line squall at Patuxent, had to land downwind inches ahead of the squall, used up all ten thousand feet of the runway, and blew a tire. But nobody got hurt, and no jet airplanes got smashed up. (Don't try to tell me the age of miracles is past!)

	The main object of this aged aviator was to catch the Air Force flat-footed at the National Air Races in Cleveland -- which we did. They didn't have any generals flying formation in jet fighters. We were promptly dubbed the Gray Angels, and we closed the Navy's show each day. All we did was to make a low pass in front of the grandstand in V formation, but the Navy announcer built this up into quite a feat and it caused a lot of comment -- favorable from the general public, obscene and unprintable from our colleagues in the Air Force.

	On the opening day we had a bit of an adventure. At the briefing for all pilots in the show the control officer ran through the whole program, telling each outfit where to rendezvous, where to hold, what their cue was to come over the field, what direction they had to come from, and how many minutes and seconds they were allowed.

	When he came to us he said, "Now you three old poops [although not exactly in those words] will close the show. All you've got to do is circle at ten thousand feet five miles west of the field until I give you the word. Then you come down and make one low pass in front of the grandstand following the big white line across the field from west to east. You'll have the air all to yourselves at this time." You could almost hear him add mentally, "Even three old fuds like you ought to be able to do that."

	That afternoon Apollo, Bat, and I tottered out to our Phantoms, were helped into them, climbed up to ten thousand feet and took station five miles west of the field. As the Navy's show got going I carefully checked off each event on my knee pad when I heard it called in over the control circuit. About the middle of the show the controller began deviating from the previously prepared script, changing the order of events, and the time and direction of approach. I didn't like this, but it seemed to be working out all right. Finally the tower called me and said, "OK, Gray Angels -- make your pass."

	So down we came, hell bent. We whooshed in over the treetops at the west edge of the field, got down as low as I cared to go, and started following the white line, making a flock of knots. Just as we were committed to the pass, a squadron of Marine jets popped over the trees at the other side of the field, also making a low pass following the same white line -- but in the opposite direction.

	That Marine squadron occupied a lot of air space. I couldn't pull up or turn away. The only thing I could do was to go under, which I did. We crossed under smack in front of the grandstand. The mechanics swore later that they fished weeds out of the wind-scoops of all three planes when we brought them in.

	Many spectators commented afterward on the beautiful timing of this daring and spectacular maneuver. We told them it was really nothing for highly trained naval flyers, although it did take a little practice. But that ain't what I told that character in the control tower as soon as I could get to him. For a few seconds that day I thought there was going to be blood, guts, and feathers all over the Cleveland airport.

	Along about this time the Korean War broke out. My brother Bill did a fabulous job in that fiasco. He was ordered to command the big aircraft carrier Princeton, then in the mothball fleet. He had to pull her out of the deep freeze and take her to Korea.

	During World War II, when the whole Navy was geared to training crews and manning new ships, the record time for getting a new ship into action after her commissioning was six months. Bill pulled the Princeton out of moth balls with a hastily thrown together crew of reservists, and launched his first strike off the coast of Korea three months later. This is a record that may never be equaled.

	The thing that made this possible was that every man on the Princeton swore by "Cap'n Bill," and thought he was a miracle man. He was. In every job he ever had his subordinates worshiped Bill.

	His last job on active duty was commanding officer of the naval air station at Whidbey Island, Washington. When he retired, his officers and men gave him an unprecedented send-off. Unbeknownst to Bill, because he wouldn't have allowed it, they "manned the rail" as he left the base. All officers and men put on their dress blues and lined up three feet apart on both sides of the street to salute him, his wife, Betty, and their six kids as they drove off the station.

	Bill retired as a rear admiral, and a rear admiral only rates six side boys. Bill got nine hundred when he retired.

	My youngest brother, Phil, was a captain at this time. He commanded the heavy cruiser Pittsburgh and took her around the world. (Not the Pittsburgh I served in back in 1922!) Phil, too, was the kind of skipper you would be glad to have your son serve under. He made the Pittsburgh a crack ship and won many important friends for the U.S. on his cruise around the world.

	Phil had bad luck. One dark night in a fog, a feeble-minded merchant skipper who was passing well clear of the Pittsburgh suddenly changed course directly across the cruiser's bow, to present his red light to her and thus claim the right of way. (This is an old custom among those merchant skippers who are too stupid to command ships but who manage to get command anyway.) It was impossible to avoid collision. Phil hit and sank the merchant vessel.

	Phil was cleared by the board of investigation, but a collision on your record is ... a collision. It doesn't help when you come up for admiral and only one out of twenty captains is selected.

	Phil was passed over but retired as a rear admiral because of his war record.

	So there are now three Rear Admiral Gallerys on the Navy retired list. Whenever I meet someone now who says, "Oh sure, I've heard of you," I always say, "I deny whatever you heard and can prove I was somewhere else when it happened." Then if it turns out to be good, I claim credit for it. If it is bad I say it must have been Bill or Phil.

	They were both wonderful fighting leaders. I'm proud to be related to them.

	Phil's son is a midshipman now, class of '68 USNA. So there's a Gallery back on the Navy rolls again and our citizens can rest safely in their beds.

	Early in 1950 I was ordered to sea duty. The congressional hearings on the B-36 "billion-dollar blunder" were coming up, and the Navy was going to be closely questioned about strategic bombing. The top brass decided it would be best not to have "controversial" characters too close to ringside while this was going on.

	I left the Pentagon with a few cuts and bruises, but no regrets. However, I had definitely acquired a "controversial" tag in the Defense Secretary's files which caught up with me a few years later.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SIXTH FLEET

	After a year as Deputy Commander, Operational Development Force, and some months as Commander, Fleet Air Quonsett, I got myself a good job. In March, 1951, I went to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean as Commander, Carrier Division Six, with my flag flying on the Coral Sea, one of our three biggest carriers at that time. Whenever the Fleet was at sea I was in tactical command of the carrier task group. This usually meant the whole fleet.

	The Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and the Seventh Fleet in the Far East are our muscles for enforcing national policy on short notice. Their amphibious forces, and carrier task forces, are ready to go into action instantly on receipt of orders radioed from Washington. Backed up by the oilers and supply ships of the Service Force, they are self-sufficient mobile units not dependent on foreign bases. They are also versatile precision instruments which can supply just exactly the" amount of force required in a given situation.

	The Air Force can blast whole cities off the face of the earth, but there are many situations in which such action would be too drastic. The Army depends on foreign bases and has to be transported by the Navy or the Military Air Transport Service. Its movements are slow and cumbersome. The Sixth and Seventh fleets can blast cities if necessary, or can merely land a few battalions of marines if that's all that is required. They are fast-moving, hard-hitting mobile forces useful in anything from cold-war operations such as those in Lebanon, Formosa, or the Gulf of Tonkin to all-out atomic war.

	When and if we decide to settle problems such as Fidel Castro by direct action we certainly won't do it with SAC and atom bombs. It will be with operations of the Sixth Fleet type.

	The United States obviously must have the capability for devastating retaliation, but if we put all our eggs in that basket we would handcuff ourselves. If then we found it necessary to stop a brush-fire war we would be forced to use atom bombs, which might touch off the holocaust that would destroy civilization. This would be using a pile driver to crack a nut. So long as we keep the Sixth and Seventh fleets sharp and ready, we can use just enough force to crack the nut, but not enough to smash everything.

	My new job in the Sixth Fleet was a dream because there was hardly any administrative work connected with it. It was all tactical. It was concerned with seagoing operations, handling ships and fleets, and running tactical maneuvers. I won't burden the reader with a technical description of carrier-task-force maneuvers. But I will say that running this sort of operation is the most fun a naval officer can have with his clothes on.

	There was, however, one operation which I think may interest the reader. It was an air-sea rescue job when two of our jet fighters went into the water. My flagship, the Coral Sea, was operating off Crete that morning and had planes out doing gunnery exercises. There was low-lying haze and the jets up at 30,000 feet were in the clear but had trouble seeing ships on the surface. One pair of jets was working about sixty miles west of the Coral Sea. When the rest of the planes returned at noon, this pair turned up missing.

	The ship couldn't raise them by voice radio and we didn't have them on our radarscopes. A plane over the ship at 30,000 feet reported it could hear them faintly. He said they were lost, thought they were thirty miles west of the ship and were getting ready to ditch.

	If they went in only thirty miles from us, getting them back would be simple. The Coral Sea's skipper peeled off a destroyer to run west at 30 knots and sent planes over there to spot the rafts and hold contact till the can arrived. A fifteen-minute search by the planes made it apparent the jets hadn't gone in thirty miles west of us, or anywhere near it.

	When planes get lost they are supposed to climb as high as they can, circle in a fixed position, and talk continuously on radio. This gives the ship a chance to spot them by radar, radio bearings, or both. Since the Coral Sea had no trace of these birds, it meant they had gone in at least 150 miles away and maybe farther.

	Up to this point, finding those planes was the Coral Sea's job. If they were down near the ship and could be located , there was no reason for me to butt in on the operation. If the Coral Sea help, I had another carrier, the Oriskany, a dozen destroyers nearby, and if necessary, I could call on a newly-formed NATO air-sea rescue setup. It soon became apparent that Coral Sea need help.

	Even with the Oriskany, I didn't have enough planes to search the whole eastern Mediterranean for fiyspecks on the water, so I decided to hit the panic button and call on the new NATO team. This touched off the greatest air-sea rescue operation ever seen in the Mediterranean up to that time. It involved the whole Sixth Fleet, the R.A.F. and Royal Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the Greek Navy, and about thirty merchant ships passing through the area. For the next twenty-seven hours there was never a dull moment.

	This international effort got rolling with heartwarming speed. By sunset that evening it was in full swing, and everybody in the eastern Mediterranean was hunting for our boys.

	As Officer in Tactical Command I should have arranged to keep the sun from setting that day, because as soon as it got dark the gremlins got busy and the whole Mediterranean ex-plodded in a rash of wild rumors. Everybody and his brother sighted flares, rockets, and lights on the surface blinking SOS. We had two definite reports from widely separated positions of sighting rafts with survivors. At least a half a dozen times I would have been justified in closing out this expensive operation on the basis of radio reports that the boys had definitely been found. But I had a hunch the gremlins were out that night, and hung on. One after another the reports proved false. Came the dawn, the gremlins vanished, and left everyone gaping at an empty sea.

	The search continued until 3 o'clock next afternoon, when one of the Coral Sea planes found our errant aviators with their rafts lashed together 320 miles east of the Coral Sea's noon position on the previous day.

	It seems our boys had wandered off on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. There was a homing beacon in Jerusalem that was on nearly the same frequency as the Coral Sea's homer. The call sign of Jerusalem, JU, differed from that of the Coral Sea, JV, by only one dot in the Morse code. There was some excuse for the boys starting to home on Jerusalem, especially since it was due east of them, and so was the Coral Sea. 

	But to pass right over the Coral Sea and to ride the wrong beam for almost hundred miles was just pigheaded.

	It was a sheepish pair of intrepid birdmen that we brought aboard near sunset that night. Unfortunately the U.S. Navy had abolished flogging about a hundred years ago, otherwise I would have had the Master-at-Arms waiting for them with the cat-o'-nine-tails. They were so crestfallen that I think they would have submitted with good grace. I closed out the day's work with the following dispatch:

FROM: Com Car Div Six 
TO: Comdr Sixth Fleet
   Downed pilots recovered. They made it difficult for us by violating old Navy rule "When in danger or in doubt run in circles scream and shout." They flew in a straight line and didn't say much.

The Commander of the Sixth Fleet, Admiral Carney, wrapped things up in true Navy style with a pat on the back and a kick in the pants. He came back at me with:

FROM: Com 6th Fleet 
TO: Com Car Div Six
   For the rescue operation Well Done stop Why Was It Necessary?

"Why!" is often the most embarrassing question your boss can ask.

	The Sixth Fleet ranged from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, "showing the flag" in all harbors of any importance and some of very little. Many observers credited the Fleet with influencing the Italian election which repudiated the growing Communist power in Italy. In the Coral Sea we visited Gibraltar, Nice, Oran, La Spezia, Naples, Livorno, Catania, Palermo, Athens, Istanbul, and Crete.

	While in Naples I went up to Rome and paid my respects to the Holy Father, Pope Pius XII at that time. This was an inspiring experience. He gave the impression of being definitely not of this world. I spent ten minutes with him in a private audience, and although his main interests were obviously spiritual, he spoke knowledgeably of Sixth Fleet operations.

	In Athens I met the King and Queen of Greece. Both were people. The Queen is a stunning beauty. The King was a qualified airplane pilot and a good one. I had lunch with them in the palace and dinner with them aboard Vice Admiral Gardner's flagship.

	At the luncheon I informed the Queen that I had studied ancient Greek in high school and had picked up some modern Greek when I was in Istanbul back in 1922. Her Majesty asked me to say something for her in Greek. Our ambassador almost gagged on his artichoke when I said the only thing I could remember, "Sagapo poly." This is the first thing a seafaring man learns ashore in any language, and means, "I love you very much."

	From Athens we went to Istanbul. I was the senior officer present there and as such had to return the calls of various local dignitaries. As my barge neared Dolma Bagtche landing I couldn't help thinking back to thirty years before, when Ensign Ashur Pleasants and I got hell beat out of us by the Turkish beach guard on that very same landing.

	There was a guard on the dock again this time, and a large military band. The guard was an over sized elite company of immaculately uniformed hand-picked troops. After shaking hands with the mayor and saluting during the ruffles and flourishes, I made a formal inspection of the guard.

	When I got back to the ship I broke out my little black s.o.b. book and marked the Dolma Bagtche account of 1921 "paid in full."

	While in the Mediterranean, I met the Duke of Edinburgh, now Prince Philip. He was on active duty in the Royal Navy then and commanded the frigate Magpie. She was just a little spit kit, but of course drew a lot of water on account of her skipper.

	For a while she was slated to join my task group for a joint U.S.-British exercise. I looked forward to having a royal duke under my command. I thought perhaps I might have a chance to send him a sharp signal or two, if Magpie got out of line. But there was a change of schedule and I never got to do this.

	However, I did spend a memorable evening in a bar with the Duke. We were both invited to a dance at an Italian Air Force officers' club near Bari, when our ships were in Taranto. The young Italian fliers seemed to attract the girls more than we did, so about the middle of the evening we wound up in the bar with a bottle of Scotch on the table.

	After a snifter or two I mentioned that I had spent several months in Scotland at Loch Ryan, just before we got into the war. Naturally, the Duke knew that country well.

	I said, "When I was a kid my mother used to sing 'Annie Laurie' to me. So while I was there in Annie Laurie's part of Scotland I took a run over to her home town... er...urn ..." (I couldn't remember the name of it)

	The Duke said, "Oh, yes... ah... er... um."

	He couldn't remember it either. Being the Duke of Edinburgh, and Annie being one of his most famous subjects, this was rather embarrassing.

	He tried to refresh his memory by singing softly, "Dum Dum Dum's braes are bonnie, where early fa's the dew." But he couldn't think of what "Dum Dum Dum," stood for.

	It was right on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't say it either. I was quite anxious to think of it first and to straighten out the Duke on the geography of his own bailiwick. He naturally was determined to think of it himself.

	Most of the bottle of Scotch disappeared with each of us alternately going "Dum dum dum's braes are bonnie" between drinks.

	Finally the Duke banged his fist on the table and said, "I've got it... MAXWELLTON!"

	We toasted Annie Laurie with what was left of the bottle of Scotch and went back to our respective flagships.

	We always looked forward to visiting Nice and the Riviera. Many wealthy American and British tax dodgers have holed up there in plush villas along the Cote d'Azur. They entertain the fleet royally. In fact, few of the royal families still left in the world can afford to entertain the way these fugitives from the tax collector do. Many of them are lonely widows, ex-chorus girls who married money and worried their meal tickets into an early grave. They love to throw snooty parties, and put on some pretty good clambakes whenever the fleet is in.

	There is a great rivalry among the hostesses. They all try to outdo each other by attracting the most distinguished guests and throwing the biggest parties, some of which begin in the middle of the afternoon and don't break up until sunrise.

	At these parties we met dukes and duchesses from all the defunct monarchies in Europe. It was difficult to pop a champagne cork without hitting an out-of-work count in the monocle. The principals of many of the important divorce scandals the past thirty years were there. Mingling with the unemployed aristocrats we met famous writers, actors and actresses, tycoons, statesmen, big-time international swindlers, and well-known fairies.

	One day when we were in Suda Bay, Crete, I went sailing in the ship's dinghy with Captain Jim Russell, skipper of the Coral Sea, and later Vice Chief of Naval Operations. The rusty hulk of the British cruiser York was on the beach there. Jim and I went aboard and spent about an hour wandering around the upper decks trying to decide what had sunk her. We were both trained in ordnance. As we could find no holes in her side, but did find a dozen or so in her decks, obviously made by bombs, and as she had gone down on an even keel, we decided she had been sunk by bombs.

	Some months later I attended a dinner at the Italian naval academy in Livorno. Seated next to me was a young Italian officer by the name of Cabrini. He was a relative of Mother Cabrini -- from Chicago -- the first American saint. During the course of the dinner I said that we had recently visited Suda Bay. This seemed to interest him, so I went on to say that Captain Russel and I had spent an afternoon inspecting the hulk of a British cruiser which had been sunk by the Luftwaffe. 

	"No, no," said Cabrini. "By the Italian Navy."

	"Well, anyway, by aerial bombs," I said. 

	"No, by a torpedo," he said emphatically.

	"Captain Russell and I inspected the ship thoroughly," I said. "We thought she had been sunk by bombs. We looked it up later in the official British list of ships sunk and it said 'sunk by aircraft bombs.' Why do you think it was a torpedo?" 

	"Because I sank her," he said.

	He was the skipper of one of the five Italian E-boats that got through the nets into Suda Bay on March 26, 1941, and made a shambles of the anchorage there. After Cabrini's boat blew a hole in her, the York was beached and sank on an even keel. From the air she looked perfectly normal (except that she was sitting on the beach). Naturally, air-force pilots saw nothing strange about a ship being on the beach, so the Luftwaffe bombed the hell out of her every time they came over Suda Bay, and dozens of German pilots claimed credit for sinking her. During the war, the British minimized the accomplishments of the Italian frogmen -- the only branch of the Italian Navy that earned-their pay -- so they credited the sinking to the Luftwaffe.

	While I was in the Mediterranean, instead of going ashore and riding around as copilot of a transport plane to put in my monthly flight time, I used to fly from the ship in an A4D, a single-seat, propeller-driven dive bomber.

	The Landing Signal Officer of the Coral Sea had never waved paddles before at an officer senior to a commander. He was a bit skeptical the first couple of times he brought me aboard. But when he found I answered his signals promptly and correctly he got ideas for bigger and better things.

	He and the Air Group Commander knew about the Gray Angels flying jets at the Cleveland air races. After I had made a dozen good landings in the A4D with no wave-offs they proposed that I shift to one of the late-model jet fighters they had aboard.

	I was a bit chicken about bringing one of those expensive blowtorch jobs aboard. If I busted one up everyone would say, "He was just doing it to show off anyway."

	I asked the Landing Signal Officer and the Air Group Commander, "Are you both fully satisfied I could do this OK?"

	"Absolutely," they replied.

	"That makes it unanimous," I said. "So we will let it go at that. If there was any argument about it I'd take one out and settle it."

	I finally did get a wave-off on a landing approach. It was on my last flight from the ship before being detached.

	I was to be the first plane to land that day and I crowded the ship a little as she was turning into the wind. I got a "Roger" from Paddles all the way up the groove and came across the ramp just as the ship had steadied into the wind. It was a perfect approach except the ship wasn't quite up to speed after the turn, so they gave me a wave-off, much to my disgust. On a nice approach like that one, 3 or 4 knots of wind less than usual meant nothing to an A4D.

	I gave her the gun, pulled up my wheels, and went round again. Still muttering to myself about the unnecessary wave-off when I turned into the groove again, I forgot to put my wheels down.

	That time there was no room for argument about the wave-off! It cost me fifteen gallons of ice cream for the flight-deck crew, the standard fine for any intrepid birdman who tries to come aboard with his wheels up.

	After a year in the Mediterranean I came back to the States and took command of the Hunter-Killer Force, Atlantic Fleet. was right down my alley because it was an antisubmarine-warfare outfit built around task groups similar to the one I commanded during the war.

	I was an important command too, because by then it was apparent that the Russians were building a formidable submarine fleet. And at this time our Hunter-Killer forces were primitive. Thirteen years later, in 1965, this Russian underwater fleet is still the biggest threat to our command of the sea. I'm glad to say that our Hunter Killer forces have grown in the meantime.)

	As it turned out this was to be my last tour of sea duty. In November, 1952,1 was detached from the Hunter Killer Force and reported to the Naval Reserve Air Station at Glenview, Illinois, as Commander, Naval Air Reserve Training.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

GLENVIEW

	Although this book is concerned mostly with my life and hard times in the Navy, it calls for at least brief mention of my family, who shared the hardships with me.

	At the age of twenty-nine I got married to Vera Lee Dunn of Fremont, Nebraska. Thirty-five years later we are still living with each other. (It's a quaint old Catholic custom)

	Meantime we have raised three youngsters, two boys and a girl, who are now married and making their own way in the world. James J. and Daniel V,, III, both served four-year hitches as enlisted men in the Navy. Beatrice Constance married Lieutenant Commander W. R. Moyer, S.C., U.S.N.

	We now have four grandchildren, three girls and Daniel V., IV. The latter is just learning to walk, and I think I can detect a slight seagoing roll in his gait. I hope this is not just wishful thinking!

	At Glenview I took over an empire of twenty-eight naval air stations scattered all over the country. This was the realm of the "weekend warriors." They are naval-reserve aviators who spend one weekend each month flying service-type airplanes and keeping their hand in at military flying so that in case of need they will be ready to go right into operating squadrons upon recall to active duty. They proved themselves in the Korean War, where they performed as well as regulars. Many of these men travel several hundred miles to attend their weekend drills.

	They do all this at considerable personal sacrifice, for which there are a number of reasons. One is that they have bird blood in their veins and like to fly. Another is that they get paid for it... a little bit. But the pay is trivial compared to the risks involved, and many of them spend more money getting to and from drills than they get for attending. Another reason is that Americans are great joiners and like to belong to clubs. In a sense, the "weekend warriors" are an exclusive club where a man who loves flying and the Navy can rub elbows with others speak his language. But these are incidental reasons. The main one is simply patriotism. Patriotism is looked on as a sort of corny virtue by many now. But not by the naval reservists. It is the mainspring of the whole reserve program.

	I had to get around to all stations in this far-flung empire at least once a year and inspect the troops. On these inspections my staff would dig into all phases of a station's operations and administration. I would make a general tour of the station, meet the press, and conduct the formal review and personnel "inspection." This inspection was really a sort of ritual in which the boys lined up in the big hangar wearing their best uniforms, with their families in the grandstand. Then I would pace up and down the ranks, going through the motions of inspecting.

	Only once did I try to take an inspectee to task. I came upon a lieutenant standing in ranks in blue uniform with a lot of ribbons on his chest, wearing brown shoes. This was too much for a trade school character like me to ignore. I stopped, pointed at his shoes, shrugged my shoulders, and raised my eyebrows inquiringly.

	The lad said, "Sir, this morning my wife gave away a lot of old clothes to the Near East Relief and gave them my only pair of black shoes. I had to drive three hundred miles to get here and I just didn't have time to buy new shoes."

	I resumed my pacing and asked no more trifling questions.

	While I was at Glenview we brought the U-505 to Chicago and installed her at the Museum of Science and Industry as a memorial to the American sailors who have lost their lives at sea.

	This was a bit of a project. It involved organizing a committee of leading citizens, getting the city council to pass resolutions, negotiating with the Navy Department, getting a bill through Congress, towing the U-boat up the St. Lawrence and across the Great Lakes to Chicago, hauling her across the outer drive, and installing her on concrete cradles alongside the Museum in Jackson Park.

	The Committee was headed by Mr. Ralph Bard, former Under-Secretary of the Navy, and Carl Stockholm and Robert Crown of the Navy League. The U.S. government contributed nothing to this project except the rusty hulk of the U-boat, so the committee had to raise about a half a million dollars by public subscription.

	While the fund drive was on I sent one of our appeals for to my old Air Force pal, Steve Leo. I did this more as a gag than in any hope of getting a contribution. I expected a somewhat flippant reply. I got it.

Dear Dan:

    Herewith is my contribution to the U-505 fund.

   I trust this project will be the beginning of a worldwide movement to put all naval vessels in their proper place, namely alongside inland museums. Steve

	Enclosed was a check for $250.00!

	Getting the sub ashore and across the busiest thoroughfare in the city was a feat of engineering. Among other things it involved building a pier out into the lake, dredging a channel, and using a floating dry dock.

	We were very fortunate indeed in having Mr. Seth Gooder as our chief engineer for this work. Seth had just retired, found time heavy on his hands, and volunteered his expert services gratis. For over a year he gave his full time to the project, and he made a spectacular success of it.

	On the night when we crossed the Outer Drive with the U-boat we had about twenty thousand sidewalk superintendents kibitzing. Every one of them knew a better way of doing the job than Gooder's way. But we got across in nine hours-and had the Drive open for business as usual hours before the morning rush started. Some wag put up a sign on the Outer Drive that night saying, "Drive carefully -- submarine crossing." A cartoonist drew a picture of a drunk looking in pop-eyed amazement at the U-boat astride the Drive and muttering to himself, "I'm-off the stuff for life."

	My Uncle George Donoghue was head of the Chicago Park Board at this time, and I had to get a permit from him to cross the Outer Drive. On the night when we did it, I had a jet plane warmed up at Glenview so that, if we broke down in the middle of the Drive that night, I could be way the hell and gone out of town next morning, beyond the reach of Uncle George's wrath!

	Gooder parked the sub a hundred yards inland, alongside the Museum. The Museum cut holes in the pressure hull fore and aft, and built covered passageways connecting it to the Museum. They also cleaned the sub up, replaced all missing equipment, and restored the machinery to operating condition.

	When we got the sub to Chicago, she was a rusting shell of junk. She had lain in the Portsmouth yard for twelve years with no upkeep whatsoever, and souvenir hunters had stripped her of everything that wasn't securely welded to the hull.

	Major Lohr, president of the Museum, wrote to all the firms in Germany which had a hand in building the sub, gave them a list of missing equipment, gauges, name plates, etc., and asked for replacements. The Major expected most recipients to ignore his letter and some to write back and tell him to go to hell.

	But to his amazement, they all did just as he had requested. They sent almost identical letters along with the missing equipment saying, "We're sorry you have our U-boat, but since she's going to be there for many years, we want her to be a credit to German technology."

	She is in better condition today than she was that day back in '44 when we captured her. The Museum kicks the diesels over under their own power once a month!

	The Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Thomas, came to Chicago for the dedication ceremony. His son had been a lieutenant in the engineers' force of the Guadalcanalwhen we captured the U-505Arthur Godfrey was the master of ceremonies, and Fleet Admiral Halsey was the principal speaker. We had all nine members of the Pillsbury's boarding party on the speakers' stand.

	Since the dedication, over five million visitors have gone through the U-505She is the most popular exhibit in the Museum. I hope that most of these visitors carry away with them a better appreciation of what they owe the sailors of this nation. Without them we couldn't have won either the Battle of the Atlantic or the Pacific war and would now be a second- or third-rate power.

	Some years after the dedication, the then Soviet foreign minister, Molotov, came through Chicago on his way to a high-level powwow in San Francisco. He visited the Museum, and Major Lohr showed him around. When they came to the U-505Molotov

	Lohr is plenty sharp and he smelled a rat right off. At the end of the war the U.S., England, and Russia each got ten of the surrendered German submarines. By the Potsdam Agreement all these subs were to be. destroyed within five years. Molotov thought he had caught us violating this agreement and made a note to spring this charge against us at an opportune moment in San Francisco.

	Lohr got off a telegram to the Secretary of State that night pointing out that the U-505 was captured, not surrendered. It didn't come under the Potsdam Agreement.

	A State Department man explained the situation to Molotov in San Francisco. So the little square-head didn't get to accuse us of bad faith -- at least not on the U-505's account.

	There is one more incident in the U-505 story that is worth relating. In 1958 I was in Germany and decided to go up to Hamburg and call on former Oberstleutnant Harald Lange, who was skipper of the U-505 when we captured her. I wasn't too sure he would be glad to see me, because in addition to capturing bis boat, we had also shot his left leg off at the knee.

	Lange took the whole day off from his business, gave me the VIP's tour of Hamburg, took me to lunch at his club and dinner at his home, and to the theater afterward.

	While at Glenview I published a book and also some articles and short stories in the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest. As a result, my advice to young naval officers who have the urge to write and who want to get ahead in the Navy is -- don't do it. Or if you do,, use a nom de plume.

	Almost all senior naval officers think they can write. Many never get around to trying it, and most of those who do have their stuff turned down by "stupid" editors. It must be that this experience prejudices them against the writing racket and against any brother officers who succeed in it. They seem to feel there is something immoral about being paid for writing while on active duty. Time and again I've had contemporaries ask me, "How much did you get for that last piece in the Saturday Evening Post?" They always ask with a knowing leer, as if they were asking me how much I chiseled on my last income-tax return. My writing did my naval career no good.

	So I say to hopeful naval scribblers, remember the Navy gave even Admiral Mahan a hard time for a while. If you want to write for the Proceedings of the Naval Institute, that's OK. But if you are aiming at the big slicks, use a pen name.

	I've been very lucky at scribbling. I've written three fairly successful books, twenty pieces for the Saturday Evening Post, and others for Reader's Digest, and Sports Illustrated.

	Marty Sommers of the Saturday Evening Post was my guardian angel in the writing racket. He was the only editor who ever of any help to me. Marty could tell me in a few sentences how to fix a piece that wasn't right. Few editors will take the time to do this even when they have brains enough to figure out what's wrong with a piece.

	Bill Lederer, Captain, USN (retired) and writer of best sellers like The Ugly American and Nation of Sheep gave me the most valuable lesson in writing I've ever had. He came out to my place in Virginia one evening to help me revise a piece on which an editor's shrewd analytical comment was, "Has possibilities but needs more work."

	In a couple of hours Bill showed me how to bust long sentences up into short ones, to use little words instead of big ones, and how to say things crisply.

	I had one quite controversial piece published in the Saturday Evening Post while I was at Glenview. It was about brainwashing and came right after the big scandal about the behavior of some of our prisoners of war in Korea. I proposed a brand-new and unconventional way of dealing with brainwashing. My proposal caused much eyebrow raising around the Pentagon and, I'm told, even a lid flipping in the White House. I won't go into any details here because my proposal is outlawed by the new Code of Conduct for Military Personnel, adopted later.

	I followed my usual procedure with this piece and published it without prior clearance. So again I spent a couple of weeks on the anxious sea while the Pentagon and White House were deciding to do nothing about it.

	It was while I was at Glenview that I first was passed over for Vice Admiral. All along the line I had been selected for promotion the first time I became eligible, so I figured I would at least be in the running when my class came up for three stars. It turned out I was an also-ran.

	I had no real complaint because two stars is nice work if you can get it, and there are all sorts of angles involved in any higher promotion. Admiral Arleigh Burke told me later that he had proposed me for several three-star jobs to CINCLANT and CINCPAC, but they had turned me down on the ground that I was "controversial." (I'm about as controversial as a mother superior of the Little Sisters of the Poor compared to Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover!)

	Chance plays a big part toward the end of a naval career just as it does in all human affairs. So when you are up for three stars and the dice fall the wrong way, the only thing to do is to remember the times when they fell the right way and enabled you to get up there and have a roll in the big crap game. , I had Arleigh Burke's assurance that if a shooting war started while I was still on active duty, he would have use for me.

	At Glenview I sat in solitary grandeur in my large office, where I could think great thoughts without being disturbed. However, there was a small peephole between my office and that of the Chief of Staff. It was about two inches in diameter and had a little slide on the Chief of Staff's side that closed the hole except when in use. When the Chief of Staff wanted to come in and see me he could pull the slide aside, peek in, and see what, if anything, I was doing.

	After a while this got on my nerves. For all I knew, half the time he was catching me picking my nose.

	I got a glass eye and installed it on my side of the peephole. Next time the Chief of Staff pulled the slide back and applied his eye to the peephole, there was another eye staring right back at him.

	Shook him to the core, as our Limey friends say.

	Every now and then some underlings in the Time magazine bureau of Chicago would call me up to check some Navy story. Whenever they did the conversation went something like this:

ME:   	Rear Admiral Gallery speaking.
PHONE:   This is Time calling.
ME:     	Oh yes. The New York Times?-
PHONE   	No, no. Time. The weekly news magazine.
ME:       	Oh -- News Week. Sure, what can I do for you?
PHONE:  	(somewhat testily) No. Time MAGAZINE.
ME:      	(vaguely) Time MAGAZINE??

	By this time I could practically hear the guy on the phone muttering to himself and saying "why this stupid old fud never even heard of us." He would give me a quick briefing on Time magazine's place in the global scheme of things and then we would get down to business. Whenever this happened it always made the rest of the day happy for me, no matter what calamities befell later.

	I've been a White Sox fan ever since I used to sell score cards in their ball park when I was a kid back in 1913-14. When I came to Glenview they gave me a season pass and made me a member of the Bards Club. When I left they preme with a home plate that has a legend on it signed by Chuck Comiskey saying, "Stolen at Comiskey Park by Admiral Dan Gallery." I claim I am the only officer of flag rank in any service who has stolen home in the big leagues.

	One day when a "crucial" series with the Yanks was coming up, Johnny Rigney, vice president of the Sox, called me up and asked me if I could loan the Sox a good spyglass.

	Next day before the game I brought the lookout glass from a Japanese battleship out to the park and turned it over to Johnny. He gave it to an attendant and said, "Take this up to the cubbyhole in the center-field scoreboard. I'll be up there as soon as the game starts."

	I said to Johnny, "I can see how an old-time big-league pitcher like you can steal Yogi Berra's signs with this, but how are you going to get the news to the hitter in time to do any good?"

	Johnny said, "That's top secret even to you, my friend."

	I spent the whole first game of the double-header watching the scoreboard, trying to dope out what they were doing. I could see the sun glint on the lenses of the glass every now and then; the Sox hitters obviously knew what was coming, but I couldn't dope out how they were getting the word until early in the second game. Then I tumbled to it.

	It was the most brazen piece of effrontery I've ever seen. With fifty thousand people in the ball park that day, including Casey Stengel, Rigney was flashing the sign to the hitters in electric-light numbers three feet high. In the upper right-hand corner of the scoreboard they had the numbers of the batteries for all the American League games that day. The number of the White Sox catcher was 10. If the pitch was going to be a fast ball, the 0 went out. For a curve, the 1 went out. For a change of pace, both went out. This didn't happen until the pitcher started his motion, and in half a second, things went back to normal. Naturally, when Whitey Ford is going into his windup, nobody is looking at the batteries for today's games on the scoreboard, so despite the capacity crowd that day Rigney got away with his knavery.

	The Sox lost the first game 4-2 but when they were dug in for the fast ball they hit half a dozen line drives that would have been home runs anywhere except in spacious Comiskey Park. They won the second game on a home run.

	Before the first game that day Rigney took me down to the Yankee dugout to talk to Casey Stengel. I was writing a story at that time and wanted to get some dope on inside" baseball.

	I found out right away you don't talk to Casey. You listen.

	I listened spellbound for about twenty minutes. Although Casey takes a few liberties here and there with the English language, he doesn't really murder it the way sports writers claim, although it knows it has been in a fight when he gets through with it. You can follow him all right. (Several sentences behind!)

	You'd never guess what he talked about -- dentistry. It seems that Casey studied to be a dentist and it was a toss of the coin whether he would be a molar mender or a ballplayer. He gave me all the inside dope on dentistry, in case I should ever want to take it up. I think his comments on that profession were just as shrewd as his knowledge of baseball strategy.

	He said, "Don't ever be a dentist for grown people, be an orthodontist for kids; you look in a grown fella's mouth and tell him, 'Your teeth are in awful shape and you've got to do something about it right away,' and the fella will say, 'OK, Doc, I'll be back next week,' and you won't see him again for about a year, but you look in a kid's mouth and say, 'One tooth is a little out of line, but I can straighten it out for about nine hundred dollars,' and the kid's mother will say, 'Well, what are you waiting for? Get going.' "

	He finally got around to baseball and told a story on himself that I hadn't heard before. He said that when he was managing Brooklyn and used to coach at the third-base box, there was one guy who got on his back opening day and stayed there the whole season giving him hell about bis coaching.

	In the middle of the season, the St. Louis Cardinals came to town, with Dizzy and Daffy Dean pitching for them. There was a double-header in which Dizzy pitched a one-hitter in the first game and Daffy a no-hitter in the second. (You can look it up.) No Brooklyn runner got anywhere near third base that day.

	Casey said that at the end of the second game, as he trudged wearily in toward the dugout, his loud-mouthed critic yelled at him, "Best day's coaching I ever seen you do, Stengel."

	While I was at Glenview, and trying to help the White Sox win the pennant, I got interested in the physical laws governing the behavior of a pitched ball. It is of course aerodynamic forces which cause a ball to "break" and curve. planning operations of our new jet airplanes, I learned that the take-off run for a jet can vary by as much as a hundred per cent from day to day at the same airfield, depending on the density of the air at the time of take-off.

	The density of the air in big-league ball parks changes by as much as 15 per cent from day to day. Since air density has such a big effect on airplane performance, it seemed obvious it also affects the behavior of a pitched ball. This probably is why Whitey Ford pitches a no-hitter today but can't get the side out the next time he starts.

	I wrote an article for Sports Illustrated about this which stirred up a lot of discussion. The White Sox top brass got interested in the subject and so did Dr. Sharp, one of the head aerodynamics experts of the National Advisory Commission on Aeronautics. He was in charge of NACA's battery of wind tunnels in Cleveland, and had one tunnel big enough to take a full-sized airplane in which the air density could be varied at will.

	I proposed to Dr. Sharp that we put the White Sox pitching staff in this tunnel and have them run through their assortment of fast balls, curves, and knucklers, while we varied the density of the air. We could thus calibrate each pitcher and find out what air density was best suited for this stuff.

	Then each day before the game the White Sox manager would go into a huddle with his Assistant Coach for Aerodynamics. They would consult the barometer, thermometer, and hygrometer and calculate the density of the air for that day. Then they would flip through their calibration charts and select the pitcher whose stuff was best suited to the prevailing weather conditions. Junk men would get the call in heavy air, fireballers when the air was thin.

	I'm sure that had we done this the White Sox would have romped off with the pennant that year and it would have revolutionized baseball.

	But, alas, this world-shaking experiment never came off. I was transferred to Puerto Rico before we got around to it. I still suspect the Yankees got wind of it and pulled wires in Washington to get me shanghaied out of the country.

	In all seriousness, this is a field of scientific interest which should be more fully explored. Some primitive wind-tunnel experiments have been made on baseballs to measure the forces which make a ball curve. Baseballs have been mounted on spindles and spun in a wind tunnel while air was being blown them. After everything is up to speed, delicate balances measure the size and direction of the forces that would make the balls curve.

	This doesn't tell the whole story by a long shot. The above is what scientists call a "steady-state" experiment and shows what happens after conditions have steadied down. But this isn't what happens when a pitcher throws his curve ball. The ball is suddenly accelerated from a state of rest to 1,400 R.P.M.'s and 100 feet-per-second, and in less than one second it is either in the catcher's mitt or on the way out of the ball park.

	Duplicating this in a wind tunnel is a difficult but not impossible job. You have to measure what the long-hairs call "transients" instead of a steady state. It is these transients that make a well-pitched curve "break" suddenly as it nears the plate instead of coming up in a uniform roundhouse curve.

	Some day a bright young student of aerodynamics will do the necessary research and write his doctor's thesis in this subject. Then instead of slaving his life away in some obscure laboratory he will wind up managing the world's champion baseball team and will win himself a place in world history alongside Casey Stengel.

	Dr. Vannevar Bush, an ardent fan, and I have had an interesting exchange of letters on this subject.

	While at Glenview I became friends with George Halas, owner and coach of the Chicago Bears pro football team. "Pappa bear," as George is called, had just announced his retirement from active coaching, and said that from now on he would watch Bear games from the stands instead of running up and down along the side lines raising hell with the officials as was his habit. (Nobody, including George, believed a word of this.)

	Soon after this, George happened to read a story in an old issue of the Saturday Evening Post which I had written several years back after an underdog Navy football team had beaten undefeated Army in a stunning upset.

	This story "explained" how it was done. In it the Navy had fitted their football helmets with miniature radio receivers and the coach ran the team from the bench with a walkie-talkie. The story was of course, pure fiction.

	The day after he read this story George called me up and asked, "Is this technically feasible?"

	"Of course it is," I said.

	"Then I want to do it with the Bears," said George.

	Next day he and I had a meeting with the Motorola people. Their electronic experts agreed they could easily wire the Bears for sound with tiny radios that would not be bothered by the beating they would take in a pro football game.

	However, they pointed out, there were some complications to a deal like this. First of all, George would have to take out a license with the FCC for a broadcasting station. Next everybody, including the Bears' opponents could tune in on bis broadcasts, so he would have to devise a code for talking to his boys in the huddle. They also said that although it would be illegal to jam his broadcasts, the opposition could easily do it with a small transmitter on their bench.

	George said, "Hell, the opponents are always doing illegal things to the Bears. I'm used to that."

	"Finally," the experts said, "the only frequency which FCC can assign to you is a very narrow band close to the frequency radio-operated garage doors are tuned to in Chicago. So if you get excited in a close game and use a little too much power you'll be slamming garage doors up and down all over the North Side."

	Halas did wire the Bears for sound and ran them from up in the stands for the first couple of games that year. This was supposed to be Top Secret, of course, but word leaked out. Two other pro teams did it too, and then the Rules Committee had a special meeting and made everybody knock it off.*

	George was back on the side lines immediately, sprinting back and forth with the ball and putting the blast on the officials. Ten years later he is still at it.

	Although I am of course a faithful Navy rooter, I seldom go to Army-Navy games. But I found a way to make good use of the two choice seats which my seniority entitles me to each year.

	At least half of the time the Army-Navy game is played in terrible weather. It's usually very cold and there is often freezing rain or snow.

	So each year I figure out who is the worst enemy I've got in this world, and send my fifty-yard line ducats to him. If he falls for this and goes to the game there is a good chance he will catch pneumonia and won't be able to bother me any more.

	One time we had a big air show scheduled at Glenview in which the Blue Angels -- the Navy's precision stunt team -- were to perform. It happened that the King and Queen of were slated to be in Chicago on the day of the show. Knowing the King's keen interest in flying, I decided to try and get the King and Queen out for our show.

	Getting a King and Queen to come to a party is not a simple matter. But I was making out fine on the project -- up to a point. I got in touch with the head Greek in Chicago, who was in charge of the royal program there. It turned out that he ran a big restaurant on the South Side. He said my idea could be fitted in very nicely with his plans but I would have to clear it with the royal family.

	Next I got in touch with the U.S. naval aide of the royal party, which was then in New York. He said it sounded like a swell idea, their Majesties were agreeable, and all I had to do was get the head Greek in Chicago to phone the Greek Ambassador in Washington, tell him he was in favor of it, and it would be in the bag.

	I got on the phone to my friend on the South Side and gleefully told him that all he had to do now was phone the Ambassador.

	However, in all this maneuvering, I had forgotten about one very important fact which one must consider when dealing with the Greeks. Greece is divided into two political factions which hate each other cordially not only on election day (as we do here) but all the year round.

	There was a pregnant pause after I had told the good news to my friend on the South Side and then the voice on-the phone said, "The AmBASSador? I don't spik wid dot son of a bitch."

	There went the old ball game. We ran our air show without benefit of royalty.

	I guess I must not look, talk, or act much like an Admiral. This was driven home to me in a way that even I could understand one Sunday afternoon when I went down to the Lincoln Park yacht basin in sports clothes to go out on the lake in a friend's cabin cruiser. I got there first, and while waiting for my friend, noticed that the boat across the slip from his was flying a flag which I hadn't seen before. Like most seafaring men I'm curious about strange flags. So I strolled over and asked the owner, who was sitting in the stern sheets what flag that was.

	He looked at me somewhat scornfully and said, "That's the Power Squadron."

	"Oh?" I said, "What's that?'-*

	He frowned as if considering whether I was kidding him or , and then replied, "It's a volunteer organization of yachtsmen who put themselves at the disposal of the government in time of national emergency."

	"Oh," I observed.

	"Yes," said he. "In time of war we are taken over by the Navy. We have to pass examinations in navigation, communications, and tactics. When the Navy takes over we are given commissions as Ensigns." He paused for a moment to let the full implications of that sink in.

	"That's fine," I said, trying to appear duly impressed.

	He then launched into a dissertation on the wartime missions of the power squadron, now it fitted in with our naval strategy, and its place in our global plans for the national defense.

	He was going strong and giving me some good stuff, that everybody ought to know, about the importance of sea power, when my friend Dr. Ed King came down the dock, greeted us, and said, "I see you've introduced yourselves."

	When we admitted that we hadn't, Ed said to his fellow yachtsman, "This is Admiral Gallery."

	His pal glowered at me skeptically and demanded, "Admiral of what?"

	In November of 1956 I turned over command of Naval Air Reserve Training to Rear Admiral Howard Caldwell and proceeded for duty in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

CHAPTER TWENTY

SAN JUAN

	In December, 1956, I reported for duty in San Jaun, Puerto Rico, as Commander, Caribbean Sea Frontier. I also put oh two other hats, Commandant of the Tenth Naval District and Commander, Antilles Defense Command, a joint command of Army, Air Force, and Navy. The headquarters of the command was in San Juan, and the geographic limits included the whole Caribbean and an equal adjacent area in the Atlantic. I was also a task-force commander in the Atlantic Fleet chain of command, and was the senior U.S. official in the area. Because of the Commonwealth status of Puerto Rico, the State Department did not have any representative there, so I had diplomatic as well as military duties.

	There were numerous powder kegs with short fuses in the area, such as Haiti, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Panama, and Trinidad, to mention only a few. Latin-American politics being what they are, there was never a dull siesta period. Revolutions and rumors of them were constant. Our South American neighbors often tried to lynch U.S. citizens, up to and including the Vice President. The Navy had to be ready to step in on short notice to evacuate Americans from trouble spots if requested by our ambassador, or to take military action if requested by the Organization of American States.

	We were ready to do these things. But before I had been in San Juan long, I felt pretty frustrated by the waste involved in keeping our Navy task forces ready when I knew damned well we would never use them. The State Department is too nervous about our public image, and too guilt ridden about the "Big Stick" and "Yankee imperialism" to ever lift a hand in Latin America now. When a mob tries to demolish a U.S. embassy and the U.S. Government says "tut tut" to some South American government, the Foggy Bottom boys think they have taken real drastic action.

	Vice President Nixon stopped in San Juan overnight on his way back home after he escaped from Venezuela on his goodwill tour there. I'll never forget the scene at the airport that night Mr. Nixon looked like a man who was seeing ghosts as he came down the ramp from the plane. His eyes were as big as golf balls. I was proud of the way he had conducted himself during this ordeal. But I wasn't proud of the U.S.A. that night!

	This couldn't have happened in Teddy Roosevelt's time. Our eggheaded liberals claim that the South Americans hate us now on account of the things we did in the days of the Big Stick. This is a lot of hogwash. They hate us for the same reason that the poor hate the rich everywhere. Jealousy and hunger are the causes of the Yankee-go-home riots. Yankee imperialism and the Big Stick are just red rags that the Commies wave to stir up the riots.

	The Big Stick first appeared in this world in the Garden of Eden, in the form of a flaming sword. Whether we like it or not, the world has been ruled by it ever since. Wielded by law-conscious police, it encourages law-abiding citizens to remain law abiding. Wielded by bullies, it perpetuates lawlessness. Wielded by armies, it settles disputes among nations. For good or bad, the Big Stick is a determining element in life.

	We feel justified in throwing our weight around on the other side of the globe in Korea and Vietnam, risking an atomic war, trying to impose our way of life on nations which are not yet ready for it. But in this hemisphere we won't even say "boo" to make neighboring countries give us a minimum of decent respect.

	Nations get only as much respect from each other as they demand and are able to enforce. To have our neighbors hate, fear, and respect us may be unpleasant. But to have them hate and spit is intolerable.

	In T.R.'s time, we were by no means top dog in this world as we are now. But Teddy had the guts to confront England and Germany eyeball to eyeball when a war with either one of them would have been a disaster to us. It would have been so costly to them, however, that they blinked -- and respected T.R.'s demand that they stay out of Venezuela.

	In the Cuban missile crisis, as soon as the Russians were sure J.F.K.CubaJ.F.K.CubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaJ.F.K. was not fooling, they pulled their rockets out of CubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaJ.F.K.CubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaBay of PigsCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaJ.F.K.CubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaJ.F.K. was not fooling, they pulled their rockets out of . Had we cracked down on Castro properly at the CubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaJ.F.K.CubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCubaCuba

	You don't have to put Marines ashore to get proper respect in Latin America. As soon as Panama heard that we might dig another canal elsewhere, the Panamanians themselves cracked down and stopped the student riots.

	A poor, weak nation can be meek and humble to its neighbors without doing itself much harm. But when a strong, rich nation gets too meek and humble, the have-not nations spit on it. Nixon's reception in South America is a good indication of how they really feel toward us down there. The only way we will ever correct this is by being firm, or getting tough, when we have good reason to do so, instead of always turning the other cheek.

	We might make them stop hating us if we made them all rich, and became poor ourselves. But we can't make them love us, no matter what we do. We can, however, make them respect us, and at least quit spitting on us.

	The governments that I had to live with in my new job varied from a few reasonable facsimiles of our own to iron-fisted dictatorships. In many of the dictatorships, the Head Man found it desirable to bump off a few of the loyal opposition every now and then. This always aroused great indignation among U.S. liberals, although as long as it was only his own people that El Jefe bumped off, I couldn't get excited about it.

	In many Latin-American countries, only two forms of government are possible -- dictatorship or anarchy. I found it much easier to live with the dictators than with the anarchists. But many do-gooders seem to think it is better to have our citizens lynched by the anarchists than to have them treated well by the dictators. They think our form of government is the only proper one and are determined to foist it oft on everyone else. Maybe it is the best for us (although that is open to question!) -- But it just won't work for everyone, especially Latin Americans -- to say nothing of cannibal republics in Africa!

	Our liberals get all excited about freedom and insist that other nations enjoy its blessings whether they want it or not. But freedom is a relative thing and its meaning depends on what you are used to. To us it means that you can pop off on any street corner, picket the White House, lie down in streets, beat up nonunion workers, or even vote Republican if you want to. In some Latin-American countries freedom simply means the ability to take it on the lam and get the hell out of the country. In Africa it means freedom to barbecue and eat the European colonialists -- as well as the neighboring tribes.

	Generalissimo Trujillo was one of the most ruthless dictators in the world. But in his Dominican "republic," "El Benefactor" had peace, law, order, and "contentment" (all the malcontents being either in exile or in the graveyard). The Cubans overthrew a similar dictator, Batista. So what did they get in his place? They got liberty, equality, fraternity, and utter chaos.

	People usually get the kind of government they deserve. We have no more right to throw out a Latin-American dictator than our federal government has to step in and take over a corrupt city government in the U.S. Of course if they start playing footsie with the Communists, that's something else again. That affects the safety of our country.

	During the three and a half years that I was in San Juan we had our thumb poised over the panic button half a dozen times, but never actually pushed it. We had detailed plans made up, had task forces set, and ready to go. All it took to set things in motion was the word "execute" from Washington.

	One of those times was when Nixon was mobbed. Before the next sunrise we had a task force of paratroopers and air-borne commandos poised in Puerto Rico with planes fueled and warmed up, troops armed, briefed, and ready to take the airport in Caracas by surprise, drive their armored vehicles uptown, rescue the Nixon party, and bring them out. This was to be done "on the request" of the so-called Venezuelan government... or maybe even without it.

	This sort of lightning-bolt operation would have caught the Commie mobs flat-footed. Our forces would have been on the ground in Caracas for not over two hours. We came very close to launching this mission.

	Too bad we didn't. If we had, our standing in South America would be much higher than it is now.

	Only two hundred years ago Commander, Caribbean Sea Frontier, would necessarily have had to decide on his own hook when to move in situations like this. But nowadays every really important decision is quite properly made in Washington. The field commander simply keeps Washington supplied with the best possible information, makes plans for every contingency he can foresee, and acts as operational commander when and if the plans are executed.

	There was one situation that came up where I disagreed with Washington, and had I been on my own hook, would have taken different action from what they did. That was when Castro was still in the hills and his people kidnapped thirty of our sailors who were on a bus returning from liberty in Guantánamo City. He held our men up in the hills about thirty miles from our naval station for a couple of weeks.

	Guantanamo was part of my command. My recommendation at the time was that we send the Marines up into the hills and bring our men back. Washington said, "No, let the State Department handle it." I believe the main reason for this decision was fear that Castro would kill our men if we sent the Marines.

	I think I'm entitled to second-guess on what would have happened had they taken my advice. Maybe we would have brought out only dead men. But I doubt it. If Castro had killed our people I'm sure the Marines would have wiped out his mob of guerrillas, and by hindsight this would have been a Good Thing.

	I don't think even Castro would have been crazy enough to kill our men. I think he would have given them up meekly. And our prompt, firm action would have planted enough respect for the U.S. in him to prevent him from treating us with the contempt he has shown for us since the day he came into power. We might have changed the whole course of his revolution after he overthrew Batista, and he might have been a Good Neighbor.

	But if you kidnap thirty sailors and get away with it, you can't have much respect for the country to which those sailors belong.

	I was at Gitmo when our sailors were finally returned. Although there were thirty of them on the bus and there were only four or five of Castro's punks in the snatching detail, I was chagrined to note when our boys came back that not one had a bullet wound, a broken bone, or even a black eye. I can't help wondering if this could have happened in John Paul Jones' time!

	Another incident typical of naval strategy and tactics in the Caribbean was the "Great Shrimp Boat Fiasco." This naval battle could have come right out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Due to a series of fortuitous happenstances which couldn't occur again -- not before next week anyway -- we were very close to landing Marines in the Dominican Republic one Sunday afternoon when absolutely nothing was happening there. It came about as follows:

	One Saturday we got a flash from the cloak-and-dagger boys in CIA that an invasion of the Dominican Republic from Cuba seemed to be imminent. The dope was that half a dozen good-sized fishing boats were loading guerrilla troops and light field equipment in Baracoa, near the northeast tip of Cuba, and they would soon make a landing in Trujillo-land. This didn't sound unreasonable because Castro and the Benefactor were very bad friends and the Cubans had recently made on abortive attempt to land in Haiti.

	To check this report we sent out aircraft patrols from Puerto Rico to fly along the north coast of Hispaniola to Cuba and see what was cooking. Our first patrol neared the coast of Cuba just before dark on Sunday evening and immediately reported a fleet of eight fishing trawlers in column formation five miles off shore from Baracoa and heading for the northwest corner of San Domingo. Before he could get close enough to really case the setup it was dark, so all he could do was look at them on his radarscope. However, he said that in the failing light he did see one craft with a canvas-covered object on deck about the size of a field gun.

	We fired this information in to Washington, told our plane to track by radar all night, and arranged to have another plane relieve him on station at daylight. All night long we got a stream of reports about the "invasion" fleet keeping good formation and heading smack for Monte Cristi in the northwest corner of the Dominican Republic. It looked like the cloak-and-dagger boys had given us the McCoy on this operation.

	We had an amphibious exercise scheduled for the next day at Vieques, a small island just east of Puerto Rico. We altered the amphibious force to be ready for a quick shift from their exercise to playing for keeps in another area.

	At dawn the "invasion" fleet made their landfall right at Monte Cristi. This was another of the fortuitous circumstances. Dawn is the favorite time for amphibious forces to hit the beach.

	To complicate matters still further, invasion-conscious Trujillo had become jittery about planes invading his air space and several times recently his fighters had intercepted U.S. Air Force and Navy planes innocently passing near the Dominican Republic and had forced them to land and explain where they were going. To stop such incidents, we had agreed to keep our planes at least ten miles off shore.

	So next morning, when the "invasion" armada was practically on the beach, our plane had to stay so far off shore he couldn't really get a good look at them. But by this time we were all sure that the invasion predicted by CIA was actually coming off. So was Washington. They directed us to call off the amphibious exercise and head the task force for the invasion area. Of course, we wouldn't land in the Dominican Republic unless Trujillo requested help, but in case he did, we would be set to get it to him fast.

	Meantime I got on the phone to the Embassy in Ciudad Trujillo to find out what the score was, expecting there would be a hell of a flap on there. Everybody was asleep. I told them what we thought was going on and suggested that they wake up the Dominican Navy and pass this info on to them. Of course, this was really unnecessary, because in El Benefactor's country all phone calls were monitored. By the time the Embassy called the Dominican Navy, this would be old stuff.

	At this point the situation seemed to be that an invasion was within minutes of landing on the north coast of the Dominican Republic, but the only ones who knew it were Washington and me. Everybody in the Dominican Republic was either in bed or in church praying for (or perhaps only about) El Benefactor. However, our task force loaded with the U.S. Marines was rushing to rescue our friends from the Bad Guys from Cuba.

	Then something happened that wasn't in the script. The "invasion" fleet, instead of sending the landing force storming ashore, simply paralleled the coast and went pooping along in column at about 8 knots.

	We consulted our charts and decided that maybe they liked the beaches further east better. We flashed word to Washington and they said, "Keep the amphibious force coming but keep them out of sight of land until we give you the 'execute.'" 

	This comic opera went on for longer than I like to remember. I called the Embassy in Ciudad Trujillo half a dozen times and always got the same reply: "Everything is peaceful over here."

	Finally I had a long-overdue hunch and cut the Coast Guard in on the operation. They queried their stations all around the Gulf of Mexico, and within an hour we got word from Tampa: "A fleet of eight shrimp boats sailed from here the other day bound for Trinidad." That cleared the whole business up.

	Our "invasion" armada was actually the Tampa shrimp-boat fleet, which just happened to pass Baracoa at the wrong time. Shrimp boats know little about celestial navigation, so they hug the coast whenever possible. That's why they came down the north coast of Cuba and laid a beeline from Baracoa across the Windward Passage for Monte Cristi. After verifying their position at sunrise by reading the name on the city hall there, they bugged off along the North coast of the Dominican Republic for the Mona Passage, in accordance with S.O.P. for shrimp boats. I doubt if the shrimp fleet knows yet about the flap stirred up in San Juan and the Pentagon.

	Puerto Rico, the "Enchanted Isle," is a place which the U.S. has good reason to be proud of. We can be proud not of what we have actually done there, but because we provided the political climate which enabled the island, nominally a U.S. territory for almost fifty years, to perform miracles.

	Only about thirty years ago, Puerto Rico was known as the "Poorhouse of North America." Things were so bad there that Congress appointed a commission of experts to advise it on what to do about Puerto Rico. The commission included economists, bankers, lawyers, doctors, and experts in every field. After thorough study, the commission submitted a report to Congress saying in effect, "There is nothing you can do about Puerto Rico. Things are terrible there now and they will get worse from now on no matter what you do."

	Today, little over twenty years later, Puerto Rico is known as the "Showcase of North America." The State Department brings in observers from all over the world to see how our democracy and free-enterprise system works.

Twenty years ago, Puerto Rican economy was almost completely based on sugar. Now it is 50 per cent industrial. 

	"Operation Bootstrap" has attracted over six hundred factories from the United States. Business is booming, and the standard of living is constantly rising. Things are so good there that Hoffa and his flunkeys are trying to muscle in. Tourists jam the hotels the year round, and new luxury hotels are sprouting like sugar cane. Housing projects are rapidly replacing the slums, and the increase in public health has been phenomenal. All this just goes to show how wrong the experts can be when they really put their minds to it.

	Unrestricted immigration to the U.S. allowed Puerto Rico to ease the effects of the population explosion. But the tide has turned now, and many Puerto Ricans are going back. They find they can live better in Puerto Rico on low wages than they can here on high ones. (We might find a moral in this ourselves as wages and prices spiral upward here.)

	There are two big reasons for the miraculous recovery of Puerto Rico. One is the unique commonwealth status which it has. This gives Puerto Ricans most of the rights of U.S. citizens but exempts them from U.S. taxes. The other reason is Governor Munoz Marin, who has just stepped down as governor after eight years despite the clamor of the overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans for him to run again. I cannot do him justice in this book. It would take a much bigger book than this. He is one of the great statesmen of this hemisphere.

	Another great states-"man" of Puerto Rico is the lady mayor of San Juan, Donna Felicia. She is a fabulous character. She not only does a fine job of running the city; she gets around all over the hemisphere and knows more about public relations than all Madison Avenue.

	She was a great help to me. Each year during the months of January, February, and March the Navy overwhelms Puerto Rico with ships, refugees from the bad weather up north. The weather in Puerto Rico is always fine, better even than that in Hawaii, so it is an ideal training area for the Atlantic Fleet.

	But when five thousand or more sailors descend on the beach for a weekend in a place like San Juan, usually there is trouble. On Monday morning, the city jail is full of sailors and the local commandant and his staff spend most of the week straightening out misunderstandings that came up between the sailors and the cops over the weekend. But not in San Juan.

	When the fleet comes in, Donna Felicia throws a party at city hall for the sailors and has all the good-looking gals in town there. The visiting sailors usually come to this party skeptically because they are ordered to come. You should see their jaws drop open and their eyes pop when they get there.

	The San Juan cops have orders from Donna Felicia to keep the sailors out of trouble rather than throw them in the hoosegow for getting into it. This is a difficult assignment indeed, but the San Juan police force are expert at it. In the three and a half years that I was there, we didn't have a single serious incident.

	Puerto Ricans are, of course, American citizens, and they are loyal, patriotic ones. In fact, Puerto Rico is almost the only spot in Latin or South America where there is any real love for the United States.

	An indication of how the Puerto Ricans feel about the United States is the phenomenal growth of the Navy League chapter down there. Founded in 1955 with fifty members, it had 1,800 members when I left in 1960, was the largest chapter in the whole League, and was still growing fast. Puerto Rico has a population of 2,300,000, but they had more members than New York with over four times the population to draw from.

	I often marveled at the growth of the League while I was there, and used to twit the president, Alfonso Valdez, about it, saying that since Puerto Rico is a, small island where everybody knows all about everybody else, I suspected he was using blackmail to get new members.

	Alfonso would reply, "I have issued strict orders not to use blackmail except in difficult cases, and we don't have any difficult cases."

	I took on two extracurricular activities while I was in Puerto Rico. One was the Little League. I have been a baseball fan all my life, and in San Juan, I was Commissioner of Little League Baseball for Latin America.

	There were no Little Leagues in Puerto Rico when I got there. But it seemed an ideal place to start some because the Puerto Ricans are rabid beisbol fanaticos, you can play all year round there, and the population explosion supplies plenty of little ballplayers.

	With the help of Donna Felicia, the Rotary and Lions clubs, and many generous citizens we organized twenty Little Leagues. By the time I left we had eighty teams with 1,200 kids in uniform playing in official leagues. In 1959, Puerto Rico nosed out Venezuela for the Latin-America championship and played at Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in the tourney for the world's championship.

	Most of our leagues were in the slum areas and in housing projects, which are the next step above the slums. We concentrated on them because obviously this was where we could do the most good. Many of the kids in those areas had nothing to do in their spare time except learn how to steal.

	I financed the leagues by putting the bite on well-heeled citizens. Donna Felicia dug up managers and league officials for me, the Naval Station laid out six Little League fields and we were in business. I asked fifteen individuals for $1,600 each, the amount needed to finance one league. Although many of them didn't know me from Abner Doubleday not one turned me down.

	The day we issued the first sets of uniforms to the slum kids, I had expected a mob of tough ragamuffins to show up. But Donna Felicia didn't want the kids to be embarrassed, so she fitted them out with new T-shirts and clean dungaree pants. They were all overawed at being allowed on the Naval Station and behaved like a bunch of choirboys. There eyes nearly popped out of their heads when they received uniforms that were duplicates of those of the Yankees, Braves, Pirates, and the rest. And when they got brand-new gloves it made them believe in Santa Claus again. After a week I had to issue strict orders that uniforms could be worn only when playing ball. The kids had been strutting around their neighborhoods wearing uniforms all day long every day.

	I can't produce statistics to show just how much good the Little League program did. But cops and parish priests told me it did "mucho plenty." Obviously it gave 1,200 potential juvenile delinquents something to do which kept them too busy, at least while the games were in progress, to commit any major felonies -- except on the ball field. I think in addition we taught the kids something about law, order, and respect for authority.

	Anyone associated with the Little League program in the U.S. knows that it has its problems, disgruntled parents being one of the biggest. We had all the usual ones in Puerto Rico, plus some special ones. I soon found out that each Puerto Rican kid had three birth certificates: his correct one which he hardly ever used for anything; a second one, which made him a couple of years older so he could get a job; and a third, which shaved a couple of years off his age so he could play in Little League.

	I had to "confiscate" twenty games and deprive a team of the championship before we finally corrected this practice and got everybody to use the correct birth certificate.

	Puerto Ricans are extremely competitive, and at first, our games had a tendency to break up in riots with the losing team trying to lynch the winners and the umpires. By constant patient preaching, confiscating a few games, and suspending wild-eyed managers, I finally got things to the point where riots were the exception rather than the rule. By the time I left Puerto Rico there was still an attitude of smoldering hatred and contempt for the opposition and umpires. But it was an undercurrent rather than an open, raging storm. At the end of a game the opposing teams would give each other a reluctant cheer and go home muttering curses more or less quietly.

	I found out that although managers and league officials were inclined to go berserk on the field when something displeased them, they were reasonable when I got them into my office after they simmered down. When I confiscated games or suspended offenders they took it with good grace, because they knew I was the same kind of son-of-a-bitch with everybody.

	I had to suspend one whole league for "unsportsmanlike conduct," which is a mealy-mouthed way of saying assault, battery, and attempted murder. When I left Puerto Rico, this league, which was located in a housing project where mostly woodworkers lived, presented me with a set of hand-carved rum goblets.

	Little League was a lot of work, although just between you and me I "let" my staff do most of it. But it was also a lot of fun. I used to get a great bang when I drove around town in my official car and shoeshine boys would stop work, wave, and yell "Almirante GOLAREE!"

	Another job which I got into, believe it or not, was that of impresario for the world's only ail-American steel band. For the benefit of readers who have not been to the West Indies, a steel band is a musical group whose instruments are empty oil drums doctored to produce musical notes. And I really mean true musical notes, not just hillbilly approximations of them.

	Steel drums originated right after the war in Trinidad, where the natives have rhythm and harmony in their souls but can't afford to buy musical instruments. The waterfront musicians down there discovered that by taking a fifty-gallon oil drum and grooving, "punging," tempering, and tuning the top, one can produce an array of musical notes. The "ping-pong," or melody, drums have a range of an octave and a half. In the very low registers a drum can be used for only two or three notes, but with an array of five drums, the bass player can cover the range of the bass viol. Between the bass at one end of the scale and the ping pong at the other are the "tune booms," "seconds," and "guitar pans," in an array of twenty-one drums for a good steel band. The range of the whole array is five and a half octaves of accurately tuned musical notes.

	In any musical organization it is the drums that set the beat. A steel band is all drums, and the rhythm and beat which a good steel band produces is subversive of morality and against the public interest. When a steel band takes off and gets a "jump up" going they often have to call the cops to break it up.

	Many people when they first learn what a steel band is think it must be a sort of Spike Jones deal, depending on bizarre instruments to make up for what it lacks in musical quality. Nothing could be further from the truth. A steel band produces real music with a tonal quality that is positively uncanny. (If you think that's meant as a lousy pun, you are mistaken. It's a fact.)

	I don't ask anyone to take my word about this. I offer that of Maestro Pablo Casals, one of the world's leading musicians, who lives in Puerto Rico, Speaking of our bass drums, he said, "Those drums have a pure musical tone which can't be matched by anything in the symphony."

	I had my fingers crossed when I invited a great musician like Pablo Casals to come and listen to our waterfront steel band. The Maestro literally flipped his lid. When the boys blasted off, he jerked his pipe from his mouth and beat time with it as if he were conducting an orchestra. Our rendition of the "Poet and Peasant Overture" hung him over the ropes. But the piece that sent him into orbit was "Brown Skin Gal," right off the waterfront in Trinidad.

	I never heard of a steel drum until I was in Trinidad at carnival time in 1957, and when I heard hundreds of them in the fabulous carnival parade. The music just got inside me and shook me up. I bought a whole set of steel drains, and when I got back to San Juan I sent for the leader of my official navy band, Chief Musician Charles A. Roeper, and told him I wanted him to teach his boys how to play them.

	Roeper had never heard of steel drums either, and when I told him what they were he looked at me as if I were nuts. But being a good Navy chief, he said, "Aye aye, sir." His sailor musicians took to the drums like natives, and only a year later they were a smash hit playing in the American Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair.

	Because Roeper's boys were trained musicians to begin with, they developed a much bigger repertoire than any of the native steel bands. It ranged from all the regular waterfront stuff like "Steam Pipe Rumba" to Gounod's "Ave Maria."

	One of the Trinidad steel-band leaders came around to hear the boys play while they were learning. He was skeptical that anyone except native West Indians could ever learn to play steel drums, and was amazed at the progress they had made. Then he happened to look at the blackboard in the rehearsal room, where Roeper had written the parts for all the drums. He scowled darkly and said, "Aw hell, you guys can read music." (Unfair competition!)

	My boys not only learned how to play steel drums, they learned how to make them too, all except ping-pong pans. This is quite an art. We had the best drum maker in Trinidad, Allie Minette, to teach them. Allie taught them all he could, but Allie knows a lot of things about making drums that he doesn't know he knows. And besides, I think there is a certain amount of voodoo and black magic in making a good ping-pong drum.

	Down in Trinidad they say you must heat your pan over a bonfire during the dark of the moon. The bonfire must be made of driftwood gathered from the shore of the Dragon's Mouth lagoon. You must throw chicken guts on the fire at the proper moment, and must chant certain cabalistic phrases which are Top Secret to all except natives.

	Allie Minette doesn't go along with all a this. But he goes heat his pans over a bonfire.

	I asked my staff metallurgist about this and he said the temperature of a bonfire is too low to have any effect whatever on the physical properties of the steel in an oil drum. I'm sure he's right. But I do know that if you don't fire your pan, you don't get a good one. My theory is that by putting it on the fire, you appease evil spirits back in Africa who sure louse up the song of your pan otherwise.

	Among the many fans that the band has acquired besides Maestro Casals are the exiled king of Spain, Arthur Godfrey, Joe E. Brown, Jim Hagerty, and President Eisenhower. Nobody can listen to it without tapping his feet, and it has stolen the show at the World's Fair in Brussels, numerous state fairs, the Chicago Tribune Music Festival, and the Mardi Gras at New Orleans.

	Right after I left San Juan our band made a tour of all South American countries, playing in public squares as well as in concert halls. The reaction was terrific.

	The band gave open-air concerts in some places where anti-American feeling was rampant and local State Department people were worried that our musicians might be mobbed. They were mobbed all right -- by people demanding encores and autographs.

	The Navy Department got many flowery messages from State about this tour, which just goes to show that "music hath charms..." and that American sailors can speak Spanish or any other language with steel drums.

	During my forty-three years of active duty in the Navy, I had a hand in a lot of things for which one might think I would be remembered, such as inventing new ordnance devices, flying jet airplane, and capturing a German submarine. I have also written three books and a lot of articles and short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, and other national magazines.

	But if you ask any captain or admiral on active duty now, "Do you know Dan Gallery?" the chances are he will say, "Sure. He's the guy who started that steel band in San Juan."

	I'm sure there's some moral to this, but I don't know what

	The social side of the job in San Juan was strenuous. As the senior U.S. official there, I was equivalent in some ways to the ambassador in a foreign country. I had to attend many parties and give many in return, including the big Fourth of July party. There was a constant stream of VIP's to be entertained, especially in the winter time. Among others whom I put up in my guest house were Secretary of the Navy Gates, Jim Hagerty and General Persons of the White House staff, secretaries Francke and Higgins, and Herman Wouk, Cecil Forester, and Joe . Brown.

	The most famous visitors we had in San Juan while I was there were Sir Winston and Lady Churchill. They came in on the Onassis yacht and graciously invited me to lunch.

	I brought along a copy of my book Twenty Million Tons Under the Sea and presented it to Sir Winston. This, of course, practically obliged him to give me one of his books, which he did, suitably autographed. When my friends around San Juan heard of this, they claimed it was the greatest swindle in the history of English literature. As long as they didn't specify who swindled whom I let it pass.

	After lunch Lady Churchill expressed a desire to see what a baseball game was like. I took her over to Sixto Escobar Stadium, where the Puerto Rico winter league plays, and we sat in the governor's box, to which I had a key. All the baseball fans in San Juan knew me, and I was in a conspicuous white uniform, so when I came in with this distinguished-looking elderly lady on my arm it attracted a lot of attention and everybody wondered who she was. Word soon-got around that she was Lady Churchill. We had to leave about the middle of the game, and when we got up to leave they stopped the ball game and the fans gave her a standing ovation. Lady Churchill was greatly pleased, and also enjoyed the ball game.

	While at San Juan I had my first ride in two somewhat different types of ship. One was a square-rigged sailing ship and the other an atomic-powered submarine.

	The square-rigger was the Spanish Navy training ship Almirante Gracia de los Reyes. She was manned by midshipmen from the Spanish naval academy. Except for her donkey engine, which was down below and out of sight, she was identical to the ships which sailed into San Juan Harbor two hundred years ago.

	While aboard her for a two-hour sail I had a feeling of awe and reverence for the past, and for the sturdy old tars who sailed the seas in these ships -- the forerunners of the present Queen Marys. seamen were the astronauts of previous centuries. I was proud to be descended, nautically, from such intrepid ancestors.

	Some people question that it does any good in the atomic age to train midshipmen on a sailing ship. I think it does a lot of good. The winds and the waves of the ocean haven't changed since the days of sail. You are a lot closer to them and learn more about them in a sailing ship than you can ever learn in a modern one.

	During their year in the Almirante the boys will have many a chance to look up at the night sky, unpolluted by smoke, and to think undisturbed by the throb of engines about the whys and wherefores of life on this earth. When a lad spends a mid-watch gazing up at the infinite galaxies of stars, he may learn things that will make a better man of him, whether they make him a better steamship sailor or not. He may come to realize that the injustice of man to man, and even the great wars between nations, are trivial matters when seen against the perspective of the infinite universe twinkling above his head, in which a million years is a short time, a trillion miles a short distance. He may decide that the manner in which he serves the Maker of this universe during his brief life on earth is more important than the wealth he acquires but can't take with him when he departs from it.

	My short cruise on the atomic submarine, U.S.S. Sea Dragon, was a change of pace from the Almirante. As I stood next to the atomic reactor I was again filled with awe, this time tempered with dread rather than reverence. Here man had harnessed the most powerful force in the solar system, but had installed it in an instrument of destruction. What was it leading to?

	Scientists tell us that all life began in the depths of the ocean. The ship in which this engine was installed was designed to live under water. Would we soon drive all life off the land and back under water again?

	It took millions of years for man to evolve from the plankton of the primordial seas. If man wipes himself off the face of the earth with an atomic holocaust it may take only half a million years or so for the present sophisticated creatures of the ocean to evolve another human race. Perhaps the next man evolved from the depths may be a better one than we are. God knows he wouldn't have to try very hard!

	We ran into an interesting phenomenon on this short trip, an uncharted sea mountain. In fact we almost ran smack head on into it. We were cruising submerged at several hundred feet and the chart showed over a thousand fathoms everywhere within fifty miles of us. Suddenly our sonar began getting a solid echo from dead ahead. This echo closed on us at the exact speed that we were making. The skipper watched it for about five minutes, glancing skeptically from the sonar scope to the chart. Then he gave her full left rudder and reversed course. We had been headed at a solid wall of rock that wasn't on the chart.

	Present-day charts were made for surface ships, and the makers weren't much interested in mountains sticking up from the bottom so long as their tops were ten fathoms or so under water. But submarines are! Until recently ocean-sounding techniques were designed to find all shallow sea mounts, but not necessarily the deeper ones. Deep-cruising submarines are finding new sea mounts all the time in areas where the charts are based on old surveys.

	In July, 1959, a picture in The New York Times caught my eye. It showed a jeep carrier like the Guadalcanal being towed out of the moth-ball fleet at Bayonne, New Jersey. In fact it was the Guadalcanal, and the story said she was on her way to the scrap yard.

	I thought, "Ah well. Too bad. That is the fate of many a good ship." Then I read on and found it was a Japanese scrap yard she was bound for. She and her sister ship, the Mission Bay, were to be towed to Japan in October by a Dutch tug. That really shook me. I couldn't help thinking it was at least possible that some of her plates might go into bomb cases in their next reincarnation. Wouldn't it be the irony of ironies if this happened and the gallant ship which had fought so well for the U.S. should be forged by our former enemies into weapons which could conceivably be used against us? But there was nothing I could do about it.

	However, she would pass through my bailiwick on the way to Japan via Panama. The more I thought about it the more I felt I had to take some notice of her as she came through... I had made the first landing on her flight deck back in 1943. Why not make the last one as she passed through my area of command?

	After assuring her new owners and their insurance agents that my heirs and assigns would not hold them responsible for any unfortunate incident, I got their OK. When the tow got underway they sent me daily position reports, and at the proper time I popped over to Guantanamo, climbed in a whirly-bird, and went out and landed on her flight deck right after she came through the Windward Passage.

	It was a sad business, as I knew it would be, like going to a wake. She was a dirty, rust-covered corpse, with even a few maggots aboard (if the seven-man Dutch towing crew will forgive the analogy).

	The last time I had been aboard, she was a living, breathing member of the seagoing community of ships with a cocky, bright-eyed crew who were good and didn't mind admitting it. Now she was a dead hulk with no power aboard. All they had were kerosene lamps and stoves. The tow crew were living in my cabin and had made a mess of it.

	I went up to the bridge and looked down on the flight deck. Naturally my thoughts went back to the U-505. This was the place where I had reached the high spot of my naval career that Sunday morning fifteen years before when we captured the U-505. In forty-three years in the Navy this was my principal service to my country.

	I also thought back to some of the night flying we had done from that deck, which was responsible for not a few of the gray hairs I now have. And of the battles with V-515 and U-68 and of the Strange Incident of the Colored Soap Bubbles. I thought of the three sailors fleeing from the after head, where they had gotten the hot seat... and of many other things.

	But I couldn't stay too long. I took a final walk through the hangar deck, as familiar to me as the house I grew up in. It was full of ghosts. I knew they were friendly ones, of course, but I had an eerie feeling just the same. My circle of acquaintance among ghosts is limited, and I'm never quite sure exactly how to act in their presence.

	When the time came to leave I said to her, "God bless you, old gal. You were a good ship and you served your country well." Then I climbed into the whirly-bird and flew back to Gitmo and more prosaic affairs. The last I saw of her she was hull-down on the horizon, being dragged along on the end of a towline -- the opposite end from the one she had been on fifteen years before.

	That wasn't quite the end of the Guadalcanal story. Half way across the Pacific the tow ran into a storm. Both hulks parted their towlines, one line got wrapped around the tug's propeller, and all three craft were adrift and helpless for over a . When I got word of this I thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes' immortal poem about Old Ironsides, which starts off, "Aye, tear her tattered ensign down," and winds up,

Nail to the mast her holy flag, 
Set every threadbare sail, 
And give her to the god of storms, 
The lighting and the gale!

I couldn't help hoping that she would spring a leak and find a peaceful resting place on the bottom (the tow crew escaping, of course, in a lifeboat).

	But this was not to be. Another tug came out from Honolulu, rounded up the derelicts, and towed them to Japan. By this time I'm sure the "Can Do" has been broken up and melted down.

	Like the fella said, all good things must come to an end, and on July 8, 1960, I reluctantly turned over the command to Rear Admiral Andy Smith and proceeded to the Pentagon for further assignment. I still had three years to go before reaching the compulsory retirement age of sixty-two, and I was anxious to know what my next and presumably last assignment would be.

	When I left Puerto Rico, Donna Felicia gave a party for me at city hall. In my farewell address, speaking to friends who knew that I had the welfare of their island at heart and could have no ulterior motives, I made some derogatory remarks about James Hoffa and his flunkeys, who were then trying to muscle in on Puerto Rico's booming economy.

	Soon after I left Puerto Rico, one of my secret agents sent me a copy of the following letter, which is now framed and hanging in my den.

September 20, 1960. 
Mr. James R. Hoffa
General President
International Brotherhood of Teamsters, 
Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America 
25 Louisiana Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C.

Dear Sir and Brother:

    Admiral Daniel F. [sic] Gallery, former commander of U.S. Tenth Naval District with headquarters in San , is being mentioned for a choice Latin American U.S. ambassadorship, according to an item prominently displayed by tabloid El Imparcial.

   While still a U.S. Navy official -- top one in this area -- Admiral Gallery publicly took issue with the labor conflict between El Imparcial and this Teamsters Local Union 901 and openly sided with the Island's most despised management interests.

   His statement, unbecoming of such a high ranking naval official and disproportionately publicized by joyful El Imparcial, branded our Teamsters Union as a terrorist, gangster organization of underworld characters bent on disrupting the peace and democratic efforts of the people of Puerto Rico. He added that the strike against El Imparcial was ostensibly an effort to smother freedom of the press in this Island.

   I would strongly advise that our International Brotherhood take every step and make all conceivable efforts in Congressional circles, the Senate in particular, to prevent that this man's name may come up for consideration for U.S. ambassador to a Latin American country and much less his confirmation. Diplomatic envoys who, like Admiral Gallery, overstep their jurisdictions are responsible for the Ugly American concept so prevalent abroad.

Fraternally yours,
Frank Chavez
Secretary-Treasurer

	By this time I had become a problem child so far as duty assignment was concerned. Since I had missed the boat for three stars and was second in seniority on the rear admirals list, there weren't many good jobs for which I was eligible. Arleigh Burke had tentatively promised me one of them, chief of the Military Assistance Group in Germany. But this blew up when some top-level finagling by the Army wangled this fine job away from the Navy. I didn't blame the Army for wanting the job, but I resented the way I got diddled out of it.

	Next I was offered a couple of jobs which are usually filled by very junior Rear Admirals. I said I didn't want them, and the Chief of Personnel, Vice Admiral Smedberg, said, "We have nothing else open." But in almost the same breath he told me he was having a hell of a time because the flag billets that he had to fill exceeded the supply of flag officers by about thirty. So I decided to sit tight and see what happened.

	What happened was that Admiral Arleigh Burke, the CNO, sent for me and gave me a pep talk about requesting retirement to make room for some up-and-coming captain. The CNO was not completely successful in selling me this bill of goods. After all, when I was an up-and-coming captain, no old poops had retired early just to make room for me.

	Legally, I had the right to hang on for three more years. Of course, I also had to carry out any orders I received to a new duty assignment whether I liked them or not. I decided to just keep on sitting tight, to emulate Micawber and hope for something to turn up. If they decided to get tough and issue me a set of orders I didn't like, I could always retire at my own request It would be an interesting little poker game between me and the Bureau of Personnel.

	But before we finished playing the hand out, the doctors lowered the boom on me. On my annual physical exam they pronounced me physically disqualified for active duty.

	So on September 30, 1960, I signed a few papers, picked up my pay check, and went home to my place in Virginia.

	They asked me if I wanted a retirement ceremony at the Washington Navy Yard, with the band playing, troops parading, and saluting guns booming. But by the time they asked me, the retirement date was so close that I couldn't get out invitations to my friends, so I said, "No, I'll go quietly."

	At midnight on September 30, I automatically went on the retired list, after forty-three years, one month, forty days, and fourteen hours of service in the U.S. Navy. I sort of wish now that I had let them blow the bugles and shoot the guns.

EPILOGUE TO MY RELIEF

	When you turn over the watch to your relief, you are supposed to give him all the dope on conditions that prevail as he takes over -- what formation the fleet is in; course and speed; any un-executed orders, etc., etc. That's one reason for this last chapter.

	Besides, all military officers who write memoirs these days seem to feel duty bound to tell the people what's wrong with the way the country is being run and how the mess can be straightened out. I will follow this custom too, not because I think it will do any good but because it might cast doubt on the authenticity of all the rest of this book if I didn't.

	Although now retired, I'm still on the Defense Department payroll. Since I'm taking the Queen's shilling, I will make the usual disclaimer required by regulations that the ill-tempered opinions expressed from here on are those of the writer only. They should not be construed as necessarily reflecting the official position of the Defense Department. It is unlikely that they will be.

	Many things have happened in this country since I arrived here. We have had wars, the League of Nations, the United Nations, NATO, SEATO, and Castro. We have had booms and depressions; F.D.R., John L. Lewis, and Jimmy Hoffa. We have given the vote to everybody, including even women. We developed indoor plumbing, the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, anti-stink lotions, and the atom bomb. We have had prohibition, integration, and unification; the New Deal and, now the Great Society. We have had great scandals such as the Ponzi swindle, Teapot Dome, Billy Sol Estes, Bobby Baker, the TFX, and the building of a new aircraft carrier not having nuclear power.

	I suppose you can say the country has come a long way during my lifetime. When I was born, it was a lusty young giant on the make. It has since become by all odds the world's leading nation. But I'm not sure that the shares in it, which I will leave to my grandchildren before too long, are quite the gilt-edge securities which all this might indicate.

	When I was born, my share of the national debt was $16.60. When my grandchildren are born now they come into the world with a mortgage of over $1,600.00 pinned on their didies.

	Many respected economic experts claim this is nothing to worry about. They say, "after all we owe it to ourselves. The government never has to pay off the national debt." Other equally recognized experts say this is fiscal flapdoodle that leads to economic disaster. However, I am glad to note that we have finally taken positive action to check the outflow of gold from this country. Mr. McNamara's Whiz Kids have canceled the annual visits of cadets and midshipmen to Europe this summer. So all that money which these kids would have squandered on the insidious pitfalls of Paris that some Senator recently warned us about will now be saved to bolster the international status of the dollar.

	This sort of stuff is difficult to explain to midshipmen and cadets. But they are smart kids, and they'll learn.

	The only moral I can see in this is that at least half of the best economic brains in this country are nitwits. When I try to explain to my own youngsters the importance of paying bills and keeping out of debt, I feel like the old-timer astronomers must have felt after Galileo came along. "Thrift" and "industry" have become almost dirty words. Any kid can look around at what his elders are doing today and see that such things as hard work and a savings account are for the birds. Wheeling and dealing is the way to get ahead these days. Almost anything goes as long as you don't get caught at it, and even if you do, most people will look the other way.

	The public reaction to the cheating scandal at the Air Force academy is a shocking example of what has happened to morality in this country. Most of the newspapers and magazines seem to feel that there is something un-American about requiring one cadet to report another for lying, cheating, or stealing. The hoodlum words "stool pigeons" and "squealing" have appeared in many editorials.

	I'm not in favor of "snitching" and I cracked down on my own kids for being tattle-tales when the motive was obviously a selfish one. But there certainly is a line somewhere beyond which reporting a friend is not snitching. If I find that a lifelong friend is selling military secrets to the Russians, that surely is beyond the line. It is my plain duty to turn my friend in, and I should be court-martialed, if I don't.

	The service academies draw the line at anything dishonorable. help this country if we are going to raise a breed of military officers who tolerate dishonesty, although the line separating crookedness and honesty is getting so fuzzy these days it's hard to say just where it is. The reaction of many indignant citizens seems to indicate that the gangster's code, "Cover up for the mob no matter what" is good enough for our future officers.

	Since many people seem to think that honor is not a good enough reason for the code at the academies, another reason, which may have wider appeal to them, is that of fair play. At the service academies, class standing at graduation determines seniority, which governs promotion for most of an officer's service career. Exam marks are a big factor in fixing class standing.

	When a cadet cheats, he is not just putting one over on the faculty. He is unfairly (and dishonorably) putting himself ahead of classmates who don't cheat.

	There has even been talk of appointing a committee of Congress to investigate the honor code.

	How hypocritical can we get?

	Men who cover up for Bobby Baker, sweep Jenkins under the rug, load the payroll with their relatives, junket all over the world at government expense, and refuse to apply conflict of interest laws to themselves -- they should investigate the conduct of a bunch of bright-eyed kids who are trying to live up to the academy motto of Honor, Duty, Patriotism?.

	I hope Gen. McAuliffe will allow me to borrow a word... "NUTS."

	I am not a member of any organized, political party, and I don't mean by that that I'm a Republican. I belong to what is called in England "Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition." I'm in favor of a certain amount of law and order, but I'm agin the government no matter who is running it.

	I'm for whichever party is out of power until they get in. Then I'm in favor of throwing them out at the next election. The idea is that if you keep turning the rascals out at short intervals, no gang of them can get too deeply entrenched at the public trough.

	All you have to do to conclude that all politicians are scoundrels is to believe the charges that the most eminent statesmen of both parties hurl at each other at election time. By simply quoting from the campaign speeches of our most respected leaders the Russians can prove, to anyone who believes campaign speeches, that our system is hopelessly rotten.

 	I wouldn't say that all politicians are liars. A lie is a deliberate misstatement made with intent to deceive. Few of our cabinet-level officials would do a thing like that.

	But politicians can easily convince themselves that things are the way they want them to be. When they get up on a platform at election time and make outrageous statements which we all know are not true, they are not lying. They are simply the victims of their own persuasive wishful thinking.

	The most honest statement on the subject that I've ever seen by a politician was made by a Congressman for whom I have no use -- the Hon. Adam Clayton Powell. He said, in an article in a national magazine, "The first duty of any politician is to get himself re-elected." I suspect all politicians feel this way, although Powell is the only one I know of brazen enough to admit it.

	This being the case, politicians feel at election time that it is their patriotic duty to put the slug on their opponent. Several times during my Naval career, patriotic duty has impelled me to kill other men -- a thing which I am reluctant to do ordinarily. I think politicians, when they "lie" at election time, feel the same way about it as I did about killing Germans.

	Another group of men who seem to feel that things are whatever they say they are is the Supreme Court. There is some reason for them to feel that way, because the law and the Constitution are whatever the learned justices say they are, no matter what is written in them. The Court actually enacts new laws and amends the Constitution under the pretense of "interpreting" existing laws and words. But when the Court "interprets" something to mean the opposite of what the accepted meaning has been for years, it is stretching the meaning of words to call this "interpreting."

	You can't very well accuse the Court of doing anything illegal when it does this because anything it says, no matter what, is the law of the land. However, I think you can properly say that in some recent cases it has acted in an outrageous and flagrant "legal" manner.

	The Supreme Court is supposed to be our main bulwark of respect for law and order in the land. To me, many of their recent decisions tend to bring the law into contempt. The Court is so zealous in protecting the legal rights of criminals that it deprives citizens of their right to be protected by the police against criminals.

 	Criminals caught red-handed with damning evidence are turned loose every day because of far-fetched legal technicalities not about the validity of the evidence but about how the evidence was obtained. A cop pinches a suspected dope peddler and, after the pinch, they find him loaded with the stuff. The courts turn the guy loose because the cops didn't have "reasonable cause" for their suspicions until after the arrest

	The cops suspect some hood of murder, and by tapping his telephone they find out where the body is buried. They go out and dig it up, but have to turn the guy loose because it isn't fair to tap his phone! In most criminal trials now, the moot question is not did the defendant hit the old lady with the ax or not, but rather, did the cops find out about it legally.

	I'm all for keelhauling a cop if he makes a bum pinch on an innocent citizen. But when he gets the goods on a criminal, its O.K. with me if he had to use a little hanky-panky to find out where the poor little old lady's body was buried.

	The Fifth Amendment was supposed to be a last-resort refuge for law-abiding citizens against persecution such as they suffered under the British crown. The Court has made it a happy haven from which hoodlums smugly defy the forces of law and order.

	The Constitution itself says that it can only be amended by action of three-quarters of the state legislatures or state conventions. The Supreme Court effectively amends it by a 5-to-4 vote.

	I have a plan that might restrain the court a little bit and make an honest woman again out of the blindfolded goddess of Justice. Just require all decisions to be unanimous, the same as we do when a jury of twelve laymen have to rule on tricky legal questions. When the nine leading jurists in the stand can't agree on what the law is, then it would be no decision.

	This would impede the court in enacting new legislation because they can seldom do better than a 5-to-4 decision now. And just think of the effect it would have on the learned justices if they could no longer pop off and write minority opinions saying that the other five justices are stupid. They would all split gaskets from frustrated intellectual arrogance.

	Something should be done to curb the Court because as things stand now, the Supreme Court, or rather a mere majority of its justices, have frightening power. "All power corrupts... absolute power corrupts absolutely." There is really only one Power in this Universe entitled to be called "Su." The Court now takes a dim view of any recognition of this other Power in the conduct of official business (professional jealousy?).

	Another group whose power is almost as unlimited as that of the Supreme Court is the labor unions.

	When I was born, the crimes committed against labor were many and scandalous. Labor unions were weak and the antitrust laws had only been on the books ten years. Big corporations exploited the working man and the public unmercifully.

	Times have changed. The crimes committed now by racketeer-ridden unions against law and order, as well as against the economic welfare of the country, are every bit as outrageous as what was done to their grandfathers by big corporations. But memories are short and labor tycoons drawing fabulous salaries from the union kitty won't admit that 1900 is ancient history.

	Nowadays, if some big corporations get caught in a little collective skullduggery with the laws of supply and demand, a lot of vice presidents get fined and thrown in jail. If a couple of manufacturers try to merge to eliminate waste and make their operations more efficient, the anti-trust lawyers crack down on them. But when unions mob up for collective extortion, that's the American Way of Life.

	If management tries to resist intimidation, the National Labor Relations Board steps in and decides, the dispute whatever way the unions tell them to. All management can do is follow the old Chinese woman's advice to her daughter -- "When being raped, relax and enjoy it."

	God knows reform was necessary in 1900 and this country could never have gotten where it is today without it. But the pendulum has swung too far now. It must swing back some, either through enlightened self-interest making labor finally accept some of the economic facts of life, or through economic disaster ramming them down its throat.

	Many of the ills of this great free country of ours stem from an obsession about freedom. Everybody wants freedom but mostly for his own particular group. Labor demands freedom to picket, to strike, to sit down, to deny employment to nonunion members, and, to beat up anyone who gets in their way. Big business wants freedom to form monopolies and to tinker with the laws of supply and demand. Doctors want freedom from everything except the AMA, and especially from anywhich might regulate the cost of their services. Lawyers claim that only the Bar Association can tell them to do, and their legal brethren on the bench featherbed for them outrageously by rendering strange decisions that generate extra work for their colleagues. Cops want freedom to use rubber hoses, when necessary, on suspicious citizens. The press wants freedom from any and all restraints. Since the press controls the media of communications, it is always raising shrill hell about freedom in general and has done more than anyone else to make a fetish of it.

	Freedom of the press has become a sacred cow and saying anything against it is like denouncing Home, Mother, and the American Flag. The Press is supposed to be a band of fearless crusaders whose main interest in life is to protect our liberties. This humbug is zealously promoted by the Press. Actually, the main objective of the newspaper racket, taking precedence over all others, is to make money -- and I don't begrudge this. But I deny their claim to a God-given right to print anything and everything that will make headlines and sell newspapers regardless of its effect on national security or on the lives and reputations of individual citizens.

	I'm in favor of persecuting the Press and making them struggle for what they claim to be their rights. I say this because I love the Press and am in favor of a strong and healthy Press. But -- -"all power corrupts; absolute power etc." Our Press has acquired almost absolute power. Therefore, ki order to save the Press from becoming any more corrupt than it already is, I say we should chivvy them at every opportunity and thus keep them strong and healthy by making them fight to stay alive.

	What I have said about the Press applies equally well to all media of communication -- radio, TV, the stage, magazines and books. Pornography has gotten to be a national disgrace. When a package of filth like Tropic of Cancer is on the bestseller list for months and passes unhampered through the U.S. mails, there is something putrid about the system that allows it But the press and all the eggheads will scream to high heaven about Freedom of Speech if you try to bar such sewage from public circulation.

	Of course, the real principle at stake is not freedom of speech but Freedom to Make Money. When filth makes the best-seller list, heavy dough is involved and Property Rights are at stake. But the smut scribblers and publishers have no more right to scream about restricting their freedom to peddle their wares than prostitutes and pimps have to protest about their freedom to ply their ancient trade.

	The mass communication media, ably abetted by Madison Avenue, are rapidly making us a nation of phonies. It doesn't matter what you are any more. Your image is what counts. You may be the worst double-crossing scoundrel that ever swindled a widow out of her life's savings. But if you've got a smart public relations man who can use warped mirrors and trick lenses to project a good public image, you've got it made.

	The liberal image is that of a knight in armor defending our freedoms against fascist reactionaries. Actually, the loudest liberals are Don Quixotes protecting us against dragons that were slain back around 1776.

	They battle for my right to "take the Fifth" and thumb my nose at a committee of the U.S. Senate. I say "the hell with this right -- I've got no use for it." But it is very useful indeed to Communist agents who get hauled up before a Senate Committee.

	Fanatic insistence on irresponsible freedom of the Press makes a Red spy's job in this country a cinch. All he has to do is sit in the Soviet Embassy and clip stories from our newspapers and magazines smugly labeled by their authors "Exclusive" or "It will be denied but..."

	The liberals raise the cry of "witch hunt" at any attempt to weed out pinkos, or even queers, from government service. They are quite properly scandalized when the John Birchers accuse highly-respected public figures of being active members of the Communist Party. This charge is ridiculous. But you don't have to be a member of the party to help its cause along. Some of our leading liberals should be made honorary members of the party for services they have rendered to the Communist cause by their misguided efforts to protect our liberties.

	They are responsible for the Castro regime in Cuba. He is our boy. The United States of America put him in. God knows Batista didn't take any stock in our brand of freedom, but at least he had no truck with the Russians. Castro was a known communist when he was still in the hills of Oriente, and our "liberal" statesmen maneuvered Batista out and put him in.

	It was the advice of these same "liberals" that resulted in the Bay of Pigs disaster, when we had a chance to get rid of Castro. But they were afraid that firm action would damage our image in Latin and South America. They persuaded the President to abandon a starry-eyed band of Cuban patriots, who had every reason to believe that we were firmly committed to see through. We deserted them on the beachhead as soon as the going got tough.

	We tolerate a Communist regime on our doorstep in Cuba to "preserve an image" -- which has now become an effigy. But we go to the other side of the globe and risk atomic war with Red China to keep the Commies out of Vietnam, and to force our way of life down the throats of people who don't give a damn about it.

	If we had taken action at the Bay of Pigs such as we are now taking in Vietnam, we wouldn't be floundering around in Santo Domingo as we are today (June '65).

	It's a strange thing that as we go left toward the socialist state, the Russians are gradually edging toward the right. We surrender more and more of our liberties to the federal government and adopt fiscal policies that leave little or no incentive for hard work and thrift. The Reds abandon the theories of Karl Marx and adopt a "new economic policy" that permits private ownership and rewards hard work and initiative. We rule God out of our schools, and the Reds relax their original anti-God policy, at least to the extent of allowing a puppet, state-controlled church. Maybe by the time they take us over, we will be too far left for them.

	I don't think we will be destroyed by an atomic holocaust, unless it starts by a mistake or an accident, which can originate on either side of the Iron Curtain.

	Despite all assurances from the Pentagon, there is no such thing an an infallible safeguard against an accidental war. It could start from a mechanical mishap, from an aberration of one of the many human beings in uniform whose thumbs are poised over the push button of doom, a mental slip of the politicians who command these men, or through a Pentagon Whiz Kid pushing the wrong button on his computer.

	The Russians are not stupid. They know just as well as we do that an atomic war will be the end of both of us. They have even more reason than we do to dread being blasted into oblivion because they don't believe in a hereafter.

	They are getting everything they want by peaceful means, if you can call terror, brain-washing, and slave labor "peaceful." They are making phenomenal progress, considering the handicaps they work under, and have rebuilt a strong nation out of the shambles that was left after World War II. Why should they touch off an atomic disaster that will obliterate all of this?

	Our Polaris submarine weapons system, with its atomic rockets fired from invisible, mobile, underwater launching pads, has removed any doubt that the Russians may have had that atomic war means mutual suicide. They know that even if they level the United States with a sneak atomic blitz, Polaris will survive untouched.

	Cataclysmic retaliation is certain. It doesn't depend on a finely poised, hair-trigger system that might be jarred out of order by a sneak attack. It has fool-proof security in the bowels of the ocean. It can strike even after the homeland of the United States has been devastated. It will be end of Russia. It is inescapable. So long as we have Polaris and keep it alert and ready, this country can never be conquered and enslaved.

	Of course, the only time we would use Polaris is in an all-out atomic war which neither side will win. It will be suicidal and will either blot out civilization as we know it now, or will certainly eliminate the warring participants as major powers. It seems unlikely that great nations which have enough atomic weapons to blot each other out will ever use them against each other. Later on, when atomic weapons become commonplace, some small hot-headed nation, or rather the ruler of such a nation, might, in a fit of anger, fire one at a major power.

	Of course eventually, when everybody can make atom bombs, there must be a world government if humanity is to survive. National governments as we know them now must disappear just as our state governments are withering away in this country, and for the same reason. The individual liberties that we prize so highly have to give way before the necessity to survive.

	But this is much too big a deal for any such body as the UN to swing! It requires fundamental changes in human nature. -We must eliminate greed as a human motive. We must change things so that the United States of America and Russia, India -and Pakistan, Red China and Moscow, Israel and the Arabs, the Congo and the Union of South Africa trust each other. This is a large order.

	I doubt that any purely human agency can bring it about. It will take the help and guidance of the Almighty. Maybe the fourth session of the Ecumenical Council might break some of the ice that freezes international understanding.

	But whoever does it, when the great day comes and we have world government, it may not be the paradise of brotherly love that the bleeding hearts and, bubble-heads predict. It will be by a gang of cold, tough realists. The world will be governed by brotherly love -- but God help any brother who gets out of line! Most of the freedoms that we prize so highly now will have gone down the drain in exchange for freedom from the threat of an atomic holocaust. Maybe this will be a fair exchange.

	However, until then if we rely on Polaris alone, the Reds will take over as much as they want of the rest of the world by conventional armies, leaving us a choice between letting them do it or mutual suicide. If we propose to prevent this, we have to keep a strong Army and Air Force and the Navy that enables them to operate overseas.

	It thus appears that Polaris is in a class apart from the other armed forces. We've got to have it as insurance against atomic blackmail. If we ever use it -- it will have failed in its mission of deterring the atomic holocaust. A good case could be made for not counting it as an arm of the Defense Department. It might well be classified as an executive power of the President (which it actually is), given a separate budget, and put under the Navy for training and administration.

	I think a major war in which no atomic weapons are used is quite conceivable. It is even conceivable that such a war could be fought to a finish between major powers and a satisfactory peace signed at the end, with the defeated power still retaining its atomic weapons. But the "unconditional surrender" bit would be no good in such a war, because the loser would certainly shoot the works before submitting to such terms.

	I would like at this point to make a few well-chosen insubordinate remarks about the Defense Department. But I'm afraid I can't do so properly without using many four-letter words which I picked up in forty-three years of sea service, but which would be out of place in a book of this kind. Suffice it to say that the commissariat which we have set up in the Pentagon must make the founding fathers, with their checks and balances, turn over in their graves.

	There's no use crying over spilt milk now. We have made a Frankenstein's monster of the Defense Department and we are stuck with it. We have to learn to live with it. God grant that we can survive with it!

	Now we have Whiz Kids in the Pentagon who have never even been in an alley fight, telling Generals and Admirals who have fought through several bloody wars, how to run their . Of course the Whiz Kids say they don't claim know anything about global strategy. They just go by what comes out of their computers... and the computers are very accurate.

	Soon after I retired, I rubbed elbows briefly with the sort of stuff Mr. McNamara's Whiz Kids are doing now. I was called in as a technical expert by one of the Think Factories employed by the Pentagon to solve our problems for us. They wanted me to discuss the subject of "Command Decisions" with them. Offered me four hundred bucks a day as a consultant to air my opinions on this subject!

	When I appeared before their panel of longhairs, they explained to me that they were designing a command and control center for the President as C-in-C of the armed forces. They said this" would be an underground command post capable of surviving megaton blasts. In it would be an amazing array of computers and thinking machines. All the data about everything in the world of any strategic importance, which is now in the files of the CIA, would be stored in the memories of these computers. By just punching the right buttons you could get the up-to-date order of battle of the USSR, or the strategic imports for Afghanistan, in less time than it takes to write this. Hot lines from all over the world would feed in vital information about current events as fast as they happened. The DEW lines, SAC, and our Polaris subs would be in instant communication with the Headquarters, where great display boards would show the location and state of readiness-of all our military forces. Whenever a crisis came up, all the President would have to do would be to push the right buttons, pull the lever that set the machines spinning (the same as you do on a one-armed bandit), and in a matter of seconds, the right answer would pop up.

	After explaining all this, they asked me what did I think of it.

	I answered, "I think it's sacrilegious and idolatrous."

	They thanked me very much, paid me my four hundred bucks, and haven't called on me for any more expert advice since.

	I'll bet if they put that U-505 job of mine on one of their computers the answer they'd get would be, "The guy is nuts. Lock him up."

	My little lady, who ordinarily is an even-tempered, polite person, recently had trouble with a mechanical brain and wrote the following letter about it.

Dear Humble Oil Company:

For some years I have been buying all my fuel oil from your company on your monthly budget plan, and using a credit card for my gasoline, and such things as tires and batteries from your Esso stations.

Each month I get a card with a lot of little holes punched all over it and some numbers at the top telling me how much I owe you, or vice versa.

Evidently somebody in your computer department must have punched the wrong hole some time back, because my account is all fouled up now. I bought some tires and paid in full by check, but the computer, for some reason began budgeting for the tires. For the past several months I have been exchanging letters with your accounting department trying to straighten the mess out, but the computer won't stop budgeting, and it still can't tell us who did what to who and who ought to pay for it.

Meantime, I think it will be a lot easier to keep my accounts straight if I pay cash for everything from now on. Will you please take the enclosed credit card and stuff it up your computer?

Sincerely,

Mrs. D. V. Gallery

Encl: Credit Card

	I subscribe to the above sentiments. God help us if one of the Whiz Kids ever punches the wrong hole!

	The Pentagon Whiz Kids are, I think, conscientious, patriotic people who are experts at calculating odds, figuring cost effectiveness, and squeezing the last cent out of contract negotiations. But they are heavy-handed butchers in dealing with that delicate, vital thing called "morale"... and I don't mean the goody-goody-everybody-is-happy kind of morale. I mean the kind that gives you a fierce pride in your own outfit and a deep-seated conviction you can beat the hell out of any outfit twice your size. This is the stuff that makes ships like the Enterprise, puts flags on top of Iwo Jima, and wins wars. But I four by our State Department people, under the influence of Alger Hiss. Even so, the nations of the free world had a clear majority of votes. Since then, a lot of cannibal republics have sprung up all over Africa and have been admit-ed to the UN. Each of these comic opera nations, smaller than most states in our Union, populated mostly by jungle tribes, has as big a vote in the assembly as we have, and, more often than not, this vote is cast with the communists. It's fantastic.

	We pay over half the whole UN budget, several times as much as Russia does. Khrushchev came to the UN, hammered on the desk with his shoe, and bragged about how Russia is surpassing us in material prosperity. But he had a mighty poor mouth when it came to figuring out Russia's fair share of the annual UN deficit.

	I wonder what would happen if we proposed making the number of votes in the UN proportional to the amount of cash that each nation puts into the kitty. What a rhubarb that would stir up.

	I don't exactly favor abolishing the UN entirely. That would be unfair to the free-loading diplomats who have come from distant jungles to suffer the hardships of life in New York. After all, they are entitled to job security, under our current philosophy, just as much as our own feather-bedding railroaders are.

	I would keep the UN going and let them keep on cutting out paper dolls in their big glass house. But I would never again place American armies at their disposal as we did in Korea.

	Of course, the idea of giving everybody one vote is the American way. That's how we run things in our own country, giving shiftless, illiterate bums, movie stars, admirals, and editors just as big a vote as substantial tax-paying citizens, college professors, atomic scientists, governors, and U.S. senators. Under this system, it's easy for politicians to convince themselves that whatever kind of boon-doggling keeps them in office is good for the country, because it's the will of the people, otherwise they wouldn't be in office. The inevitable result, as we are finding out, is the welfare state.

	We have made a fetish of the idea that there is something sacred about the opinion of the man in the street. If you want to know whether something is right or not, don't waste time on the morals or ethics of the matter. Hold a Gallup poll. Whatever the majority says must be right, because the bed rock on which democracy rests is the will of the majority.

	The founding fathers of this country didn't feel that way. knew the dangers of mob rule. They knew that the majority votes for its belly, and the hell with whatever is right or wrong. The founders tried to set up a republic in which the demands of the mob would be tempered to some extent by the better judgment of elected representatives of some stature. This has gone by the board now.

	I think this country became great in spite of the handicap of democracy rather than because of it. We started off with a virgin continent, almost unlimited natural resources, and a thrifty, adventurous population who were willing to work and endure hardships. The country would have prospered under almost any form of government, but it would have retained its greatness longer had we stuck to the republican ideas of the original Constitution.

	When this country goes down the drain it will be because we have allowed our national character to decay. We are losing the pioneer spirit that carved a great nation out of a wilderness. Our main interest now is in getting something for nothing. Personal security from womb to tomb perhaps even conception to resurrection is the new national objective, rather than exploring new frontiers. We have a few pioneers left, like the astronauts. But the "smart operators" today figure these lads are suckers to stick their necks out for the paltry pittance of military flight pay.

	We will never be destroyed by card-carrying communists. But we may destroy ourselves by making a fetish of false liberty, by greed, and by obsession with the idea of "what's in it for me?"

	There is a saying in the Navy which we use to cheer up discouraged recruits: "The first forty years are the hardest." I put in forty-three years, and couldn't see much difference the last three. Matter of fact, they were all good, and I have no complaints whatever about how I made out. But I shudder to think of what the next forty may be like for my children and grandchildren. My generation managed to preserve the life of the country through two great wars, but we are sure leaving a hell of a mortgage behind for our kids to pay.

	I am reminded of the old story about the MP from Dublin, during a debate in the House of Commons. The bill being debated was one which, its sponsors claimed, would be of great benefit to posterity. The member from Dublin was opposed to the measure. When his turn came to address the house, he rose and demanded, "What has posterity ever done for us?"

	This seems to be the attitude of our people at the present time. Thank God it was not the attitude of our forefathers, otherwise the country would now be bankrupt and I might still have to work for a living. I hope by the time my grandchildren grow up, there will still be something left in the public kitty, but I doubt it.

	However, oldsters have been predicting since the beginning of history that the world was going to the dogs, and although several ancient civilizations have gone down the drain, man has managed to muddle through somehow.

	I have no faith whatever in my generation's ability to pull us out of the mess we have gotten into. But I do think maybe the youngsters can do it, after they get dry behind the ears and outgrow the campus revolution and beatnik kicks that they are off on now.

	May God guide their footsteps and help them, if it is still constitutional for Him to do so.