Fernald, John Destroyer from America
Surprisingly sunny World War 2 North Atlantic convoy novel, based upon the author’s own experiences in 1941. The setting is H.M.S. PORCHESTER, a 4-funneled, ex-U.S. destroyer which had been built in San Francisco in 1918 and turned over to the British as part of the Lend-Lease Act. The novel chronicles the vessel’s first seven months in North Atlantic convoy duty, as she shuttles (and protects) merchant vessels between Iceland and Great Britain. Her crew is a mixture of ex-retired Royal Navy officers, Royal Navy reservists and recently-trained “ratings.” All are depicted as self-effacing, no-nonsense men who understand the importance of their mission. Fernald writes:
“PORCHESTER and her crew settled down to the familiar round. It was odd, thought the Navigator, that doing the same thing day after day was not intolerable in its monotony. Politicians could talk about the Battle of the Atlantic, the Press could shoot its mouth about watch-dogs, sea-dogs, heroes and the like, but to him as when as to everybody else in the ship all that was flapdoodle. It was all part of the vulgar twentieth-century habit of hyperbole. Words no longer meant what they used to mean: with every other man a hero, what words were there for the really brave men, for people like Captain Scott and Oates, or the Commander of the JERVIS BAY, or the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of September 1940?”--Pp. 46-47.
The novel’s climax occurs when one of the PORCHESTER’s charges, the aged freighter SARATOGA, is attacked by a German U-boat. PORCHESTER hunts down and “kills” the submarine and returns to the surprising sight of the SARATOGA still afloat, even though her stern had been blown off by the force of the German torpedo. With great common sense and seamanship PORCHESTER‘s crew rigs a tow-line to the disabled merchant vessel and then successfully tows her (and her load of desperately needed Canadian grain) 150 miles to the safety of Northern Ireland. Fernald himself was at the time serving aboard an ex-U.S. Navy destroyer similar to the PORCHESTER. The book was well-reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, though the veddy English Times Literary Supplement (July 11, 1944) concluded its review with the waspish note:
“If his book has a fault, it is the yachtman’s habit — now seemingly being to some extent adopted by the younger generation of naval officers but anathema to the old school — of writing of a ship by her name only, with no prefix “H.M.S.” or definite article — as though one should use “telegraphese” in ordinary conversation.”
Note that the British (but not American) edition is illustrated by evocative drawings by John Worsley.