Merrick, Elliott "The Second Engineer."
Merrick's low-keyed World War 2 short story opens:
"We were bound north along the coast of Newfoundland in the battered Labrador mail steamship ... Her portholes were blacked out and her sides were daubed with red lead and patches of war gray."
Aboard the vessel were over two hundred and eighty Newfoundland fishermen and their wives (the vessel was certified for ninety passengers), bound for the cod fisheries of Labrador.
The story's unnamed narrator strikes up a friendship with the ship's 2nd Engineer, who shows the passenger around the ship's engine room and engages in a series of rather fruitless attempts to explain the fundamentals of steam propulsion to the non-mechanically inclined narrator . During the course of the voyage the narrator notices that the Engineer has a pronounced limp and asks him about it. It turns out that the 2nd had been torpedoed in the Irish Sea the previous Fall and was one of four survivors aboard a wet life raft (the limp was a result of exposure: he had lost circulation in his toes). The 2nd's story of his actions after his ship had been torpedoed are understated to an extreme and very grim - particularly when he relates that fierce winds blew the life raft away from other survivors, and how he and the other three men on the raft were forced to listen to the agonized calls of shipmates freezing to death in the surrounding icy ocean waters.
Even more disquieting is his revelation that the German U-boat which had sunk his sink actually hovered in the vicinity of the life raft for a day, hoping to torpedo any vessel which ventured to rescue the survivors. Indeed, at times the sub was so close that the men on the raft could clearly see the faces of German sailors standing watch on the U-boat's conning tower - and vice versa. "Did you say anything, or they?" asks the narrator. The 2nd Engineer's sad and horrifying reply: "What was there to say?"