Bosworth, Allan R. "You Always Remember."

Semi-comic tale. Elderly Captain Elam Andrews is called out of retirement by World War 2 to take command of his old ship, the freighter WESTBROOK, and take the vessel, loaded with foodstuffs for Britain, eastbound across the North Atlantic in a slow convoy. Right off the bat his crew think him “a bit unhinged” (he putters around a lot in a locked portion of the cargo hold, supposedly trying to grow tomatoes) and when Andrews refuses to allow the ship’s Navy gun crew to practice artillery shooting they wonder whether he’s a coward, too. All too soon the old WESTBROOK’s engines break down and the ship has to fall out of convoy to effect repairs. Sure enough, right on cue, a German U-boat soon surfaces and orders captain and crew to abandon ship and take to their boats. Before the Nazis sink the vessel, though, they proceed to loot her – paying particular attention to the ship’s cargo of canned goods. And, then to the great surprise of the WESTBROOK’s crew, a few minutes after the last crate of canned goods has been put aboard the submarine a huge explosion destroys the U-boat. Seems that Captain Andrews hadn’t been tending his tomato plants but rather, in secret, had placed a series of time bombs in a crate containing canned grapefruit. You see, he explains later to his crew, he’d had a freighter of his looted and sunk by Germans during World War 1, with the Huns taking “a case of grapefruit the first thing.” He’d been thinking up the “grapefruit defense” for over 23 years, he tells, them. And the crafty shipmaster, knowing that the good ship WESTBROOK just might be accosted by another U-boat before reaching the safety of England, assures his crew (now safely back aboard their ship) that he’s booby trapped a couple more cases of grapefruit just in case! For another World War 2 short story utilizing the very same plot twist (i.e., timed bombs in cased goods) see Albert Richard Wetjen’s “The Pleasure Is All Yours,” which had appeared in an earlier (July 19, 1941) issue of Liberty Magazine.