Fettes, Jonathan "Nazis is Mugs"
A rousing World War 2 short story set in the North Atlantic, off Iceland, aboard the freighter McGILLICUDDY, sailing eastbound out of convoy. The Adventure tag line nicely evokes the tenor of the times:
“Captain Junius of the McGILLICUDDY was in the war up to his neck but had his own ideas what he was fighting for – not for freedom, or to make the world a better place to live in, or for any other catch phrase on a poster – and certainly not for glory. The right to be decent was how he put it, and that was what he gave the Nazi raider’s crew a lesson in when they wanted to play dirty with the traditions of the sea.”
Fettes’ plot mechanics are simple: the McGILLICUDDY answers a distress signal from an unknown ship only to find that the vessel in question was a sinking German sea raider. Following the above-mentioned traditions of the sea, Capt. Junius rescues the enemy seamen (he rejects his crew’s suggestion that he leave the Nazis to die at sea as the Germans had done to the survivors of the many ships they’d sunk), only to have the rescued Germans perfidiously make an attempt to hijack the McGILLICUDDY. But they’d not reckoned with the leaky old ship herself, for she was a notoriously cranky vessel that only the old American ship master could control. And in the end the cowardly Nazis give up their arms and allow themselves to be taken captive by Captain Junius rather than endure icy death in the waters of the North Atlantic.