Yonge, Roy "Against the Clock"

World War 2 Maclean’s effort with a tag line promising: “Torpedoed, alone with the grey sea, there was still an enemy that he could lick!” “He” being young Canadian tanker seaman Fred Hatch, whose inordinate pride in a newly-acquired, pre-War German self-winding wristwatch leads him to the upper deck of his tanker one dark Caribbean night (he’d wanted to temporarily escape from a fellow crew member’s non-stop, “humorous” banter about his supposedly waterproof timepiece). Hatch’s moment of peace is abruptly terminated when a U-boat torpedo explodes the tanker sky high, blowing the young man into the sea as his ship’s only survivor. Drifting alone in the ship’s flotsam, Hatch ponders death and then begins to hate his watch when he envisions it ticking on and on, long after he himself has perished in the sea. A mounting hatred of the German instrument helps fuel his will to survive the ordeal, and indeed, when rescue finally comes some days later, he discovers that the wristwatch had actually been losing time ever since its initial immersion in the warm waters of the Caribbean. Score one for the human spirit / human survival against the purported machine-like mechanical efficiency of Hitler’s “Thousand Year” Reich!