Watkins, Richard Howells "Mates"

Yankee ingenuity prevails over Nazi sneakiness in this Caribbean tale about a “dizzy kid” (American 4th Officer Ted Buckley of the freighter ELSIE J. BROOKS) and how he takes on — and bests — a Nazi “rattlesnake raider” that had been preying upon Allied shipping off the northern coast of Venezuela. The junior officer had been seeing submarines everywhere, so Buckley’s shipmates rather naturally ignored him when he announced to one and all that the blacked out ship the BROOKS had “kissed” in a glancing nighttime collision was a German sea raider. Soon enough he was proved right, and the crew of the virtually defenseless BROOKS, after having been shelled by the raider and ordered to abandon ship by an arrogant Nazi ship master, were on the verge of taking to the boats when Buckley had a brilliant idea involving the ship’s line-throwing gun. Against all odds, his unorthodox weapon beat off the German vessel’s boarding party, giving the BROOKS time to both escape destruction and pinpoint the Nazi raider’s location for the U.S. Navy.