Across a War-Tossed Sea (16 page)

“E
eeeewwww!” Jamie and Johnny squealed in delighted disgust. “Did you really suck out snake venom?” “Did you really chew up a smelly old root?” “Really?” “Did you really?”

Charles smiled mysteriously and took a bite of his pancake, not answering. Wesley followed his lead, thoroughly enjoying their new status as family legends.

“Yes, they did, boys,” said Mr. Ratcliff as he sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee. He'd been outside talking with the sheriff while the boys ate. “And don't you ever think about doing something like that, because it could kill you. And if it didn't kill you, I'd tan your behinds.” But he winked at Charles as he said it.

“What did Sheriff Bailey say, Dad?” Bobby asked.

“Well, sir, as we speak, Günter is being transported to Fort Eustis in Newport News. Evidently, at that camp the army is going to teach more open-minded Germans the principles of democratic government with the hope they will lead Germany to a better way of doing things after the war. On the flip side, the Kraut we old men caught is being sent to Oklahoma to a die-hard Nazi camp where there's maximum security.”

Mr. Ratcliff rocked back in his chair. “Now, here's the real excitement. Charles and Wesley are going to be written up in the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
. The sheriff's calling them true red-white-and-blue
American
heroes.”

“What?” Charles and Wesley asked together.

“I reminded him that you two are British. He thought that made the story even better.”

“Hold your horses,” said Ron. “Bobby and me went looking for that guy too, you know.”

“Aww, come on, Ron,” Bobby started to silence him.

But Wesley interrupted. “We wouldn't have gotten there without Freddy either. He told us where to go, and Freddy wouldn't have been there if you hadn't given him a ride on your bike, Ron. We'll tell the newspaper that, won't we, Charles?”

“Yeah, that's right,” Ron said, nodding and sitting up taller. Then he grinned and added, “Limey.”

The boys laughed and went back to their pancakes.

Patsy rolled her eyes. “Honestly, don't you boys ever tire of goosing one another?” She turned to Charles. “I'm just glad you're all right. What you did was very brave. And kind.”

It was the first time she'd really looked at him since getting the news that Henry was missing in action. Charles felt a little twinge of that suppressed crush on her.

There was a knock on the door.

“Goodness,” sighed Mrs. Ratcliff. “What now?” She got up to answer it.

“Probably the newspaper people,” Mr. Ratcliff explained. “The sheriff said they wanted a photograph of you two. Better finish your food and go clean up.”

“Yeah, gotta get pretty for the cameras,” Bobby teased.

Mrs. Ratcliff came back into the kitchen. She held a telegram. Her face was pale.

“What is it, Mary Lee?”

She answered by approaching Charles and putting her hand on his shoulder. “It's from your mama, honey. She's fine. But your daddy has been hurt. He was at church with your uncle, the Buckingham Palace guard, when some new kind of Nazi bomb came out of the blue and hit the Guard's Chapel, completely destroying it during Sunday service. It's an unmanned rocket bomb, of all things. No planes needed, so there was no air raid warning sounded. Those poor people saying their prayers didn't know trouble was coming. Hitler's calling it V-something. Some German word for vengeance. It's nothing but pure spite.”

Mrs. Ratcliff knelt by the table to catch Wesley up in a hug. “Sugar, I'm so sorry. Your uncle is dead. The roof collapsed on him and about two hundred other people.” She hurried to add, “Thank the good Lord that your daddy was pulled out alive. His legs and hip were broken. But your daddy will recuperate. It'll just take time and considerable bed rest.

“Wesley, you'll stay here with us. Charles”—Mrs. Ratcliff turned to back to him—“your mama says she needs your help to take care of your dad. These days, the Atlantic crossing is safer. Our navy has the upper hand on the seas. She wants you to come on home now.”

“All ashore that's going ashore!” a merchant sailor called, in the last call for boarding.

The time had come.

Charles glanced over his shoulder at the Liberty ship, crammed with wartime cargo for England, that he was about to board. Finally, he was going home as he'd longed to do. But he was leaving America, which he had come to love too. He hadn't expected how bittersweet the parting would feel.

“Well, this is it.” He smiled and shrugged uncomfortably, turning back to the Ratcliffs there to see him off. “Please tell Ed for me that I really appreciate his son arranging a berth for me on his boat.”

Mr. Ratcliff nodded. “I will.”

“And, Mr. Ratcliff, I can't thank you enough…for everything.”

“It's been a pleasure, son. You be careful now, you hear?”

Charles nodded and stepped to face Bobby.

Awkwardly, Bobby punched Charles's shoulder. Charles punched him back.

“Hey,” Bobby joked. “That's my throwing arm!” Then his face grew sad. “The football team just won't be the same without you, Chuck.”

Charles swallowed. “Nawww, it'll be okay. Ron's coming up next year. Bet he can catch your passes. They're always spot-on. Right, Ron?”

Ron grinned that new genuine smile of his. “That's right…old chum.” He shook Charles's hand.

Bobby grabbed Charles in a bear hug, the two friends slapping each other's back.

Patsy was next.

“I'll never forget how you encouraged me about my artwork,” she said in a low voice. “Maybe I'll come to London someday to see all the paintings you described. Buy me a cup of coffee if I do?”

“Tea,” Charles corrected her.
God's teeth! What a stupid good-
bye!
But it was too late to say anything else as Patsy kissed him on the cheek, and stepped back to let him say his good-byes to Wesley.

The two Bishop brothers had already discussed their parting. No blithering at the dock, they'd agreed. Now they faced each other in a kind of attention, even though tears blurred their eyes.

Charles took his little brother's arm by the elbow. “Stiff upper lip, now.”

“Never show we're downhearted.” Wesley repeated the mantra the brothers had been told as they'd boarded the ship that took them to the States, across the treacherous, wide waters of the Atlantic, three thousand miles from home, not knowing if there would even be an England for them to return to one day.

“Good little ambassadors for England,” Charles finished.

Wesley nodded.

“Good lad,” Charles said. “Do write me what is going on here. Just like we did for Mum and Dad, eh?”

“Shore 'nough,” Wesley drawled in a perfect Tidewater Virginia accent.

Charles laughed, proud of his little brother's new shield of humor. He started to turn.

“Charles,” Wesley whispered.

“Yes?”

“There's a stowaway in your bag.”

“What?”

“My stuffed koala bear. I haven't had nightmares for the longest time now. And I'm going to move in with Ron and the twins since you're leaving. Ron and I talked about it. Bobby should take the attic bedroom. Ron said I can hang Churchill and our model Spitfires over my bed. So I don't need Joey anymore.” He smiled and added with a new Charles-like swagger, “And since I can't be on the ship to look after you properly, Joey can.”

“Glad you told me, Wes, so I didn't unpack him around a bunch of sailors!”

“Be careful, Charles. Old Adolf's still out there, you know.”

Charles squeezed Wesley's arm. Then he gave the Ratcliffs one last fond look. He'd learned so much from them—about friendship, about generosity, about standing up to trouble. “Right-o,” he said. “I'm off.”

Putting his British bravado back on like a life jacket, Charles stepped onto the gangplank.

From an adjacent ship, docked and unloading, a sailor shouted. He threw up his arms in greeting. Then he raced down the gangplank to gather up a beautiful girl waiting there for him with a Hollywood-perfect kiss. It was the kind of unabashed display of joy Yanks were so good at, Charles thought as he watched, the kind of spontaneity and openness he'd come to really appreciate. He'd have to try to hold on to that American influence back home in England, that uninhibited courage to say what they honestly thought and felt.

Wait a minute
. Charles stopped in his tracks. What did he have to lose? He dropped his bag. He turned and strode down the gangplank—straight for Patsy.

Before she could protest, he grabbed her. He wrapped his arms around her. And he kissed those lips he'd longed to touch. It was his very first kiss. And it was beautiful. He'd remember the sweet burning press of it for the rest of his life.

Mr. Ratcliff cleared his throat loudly.

Charles let go and imitated the thickest of London cockney accents. “That's what you missed out on, love.”

With that and an enormous self-satisfied grin, Charles swaggered back up the gangplank. As he stepped onto the ship's steel deck, an Andrews Sisters tight-harmony hit filled his mind. It was one of those American big band, swing-dance melodies, the kind during which a boy could dazzle a girl with a dip and a slide, and then grab her for a whirling embrace. The song was all about confident, no-regret good-byes as a man sailed off to sea.
Don't cry, baby
.…
Shhh-shoo baby, shoo, shoo.

Charles crossed the deck to face the ocean as the sailors released the ship's mooring ropes. Its foghorn blared farewell, and the boat skimmed out into the Chesapeake Bay currents. The sun was warm. The sky was clear. The waters were calm and beckoning, a gray-blue mirror of the azure heavens. Charles knew he was heading back into uncertainties, back into a war-tossed world. But he was ready to face it now, to fight, as Günter had advised—not for revenge—but to stop those who brought war and delighted in it.

Charles took in a deep breath of salty air. It smelled like home. It smelled of promise.

Back on the docks, the Ratcliff boys stared at Patsy. Flustered, blushing, she laughed out loud. “What a cheeky bloke!” she murmured, touching her lips.

Wesley smiled to himself. It was the very first time Wesley had ever heard Patsy use a British phrase. It'd be the first thing he'd write Charles.

“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word:
freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.”
—Winston Churchill

In May 1940, Hitler's Blitzkrieg (lightning war) gobbled up nation after nation with terrifying ease. Denmark fell in one day, Holland in five, Belgium in eighteen, and France in six weeks. Only Great Britain remained standing in defiance.

Immediately, Hitler's Luftwaffe set up air bases along France's coast, just across the English Channel. It took Nazi bombers a mere sixteen minutes to be over London. In contrast, the British RAF needed eleven minutes to scramble their fighter planes—once they knew the Luftwaffe was coming. At first, the RAF had only seven hundred serviceable planes to fight the Luftwaffe's thirty-five hundred. “Never was so much owed by so many to so few,” Prime Minister Churchill said about the pilots who raced up into the sky to face down the Luftwaffe legions.

The Blitz—Hitler's air campaign to pound the British into surrendering—began in earnest on September 7, 1940, when the Luftwaffe dropped nearly a hundred tons of incendiary bombs on London. After that, Nazi bombers came almost nightly. With each raid, hundreds of homes went up in flames.

To survive, the British huddled in deep Tube (subway) stations and prefab backyard bomb shelters. Cardboard boxes containing gas masks hung from their necks at all times. Barrage balloons and ack-ack cannons ringed the city. Thousands became volunteer firemen, ambulance drivers, or simply joined the effort each morning to dig out their neighbors from rubble. More than 43,000 British civilians died, including 7,736 children.

Most children were sent out of the cities to the relatively safer countryside. But when the Blitz started, the American embassy was besieged with two thousand frantic calls a day from parents wanting their sons and daughters out of England entirely. About four thousand children came to the United States, some sponsored by the CORB (Children's Overseas Reception Board), their costs paid for by the British government. After ten days, however, that board had stopped taking applications—they'd already received 211,448 pleas for the few thousand slots they had to offer.

As ships steamed out of Liverpool for dangerous two-week crossings, evacuee children sang “There Will Always Be an England.” From July to October 1940, the height of the evacuations, German U-boat submarines (
Unterseeboot
) sunk 217 British ships. To safeguard them, children's ships were tucked into large convoys sailing in zigzags. Portholes were blacked out and screwed shut so no telltale shard of light shone along the waters. Children were strapped into cumbersome, orange cork life jackets.

Evacuee memoirs recount the fun they had—sailors taking them into the navigation cabin, and massive games of tag. But many were horrendously seasick and frightened. One child watched eleven of the twenty-eight ships in his convoy go under. Another survived dud torpedoes ricocheting harmlessly off his ship.

Then, tragically, in bad weather and high seas, the
City of Benares
, carrying ninety children, was torpedoed by U-48. Many children died in the explosion. Some fell into the sea as lifeboat pulleys jammed, tipping the boats. Other lifeboats capsized in the typhoonlike wake of the enormous ship as it went under. The convoy continued on, under orders to do so. The nearest British destroyer took nineteen hours to get there through a gale and hailstones. The crew reportedly wept when they found boats filled with dead children, a few survivors clinging to rafts.

One family lost all five of its children that night. Only thirteen youngsters survived, including the six CORB boys Charles thinks of as he struggles against the James River. The
Benares
tragedy brought an abrupt end to Britain's transatlantic evacuation of its children.

After the war, U-48's captain was tried for war crimes. Responsible for sinking fifty-five ships, he was put on trial specifically regarding the
Benares
. Nothing had marked the
Benares
as a children's ark. Outfitted with a large antisubmarine gun, she could be interpreted as a troop transport or military supply ship. The captain was acquitted, his actions deemed “within the rules of engagement.”

Throughout World War II, a few U-boats did help survivors of the ships they torpedoed, giving them food and water, or even taking them on board, as did U-156 and Captain Werner Hartenstein after sinking a passenger ship, the
Laconia
. But, tragically, there were no international requirements that U-boats do so.

The British evacuees who made it typically relished their time in the States. Freed of gas masks and dark, long nights trembling in shelters, listening anxiously to the thud and bang of an aerial bombardment, they rediscovered childhood. They delighted in ice cream, hot showers, co-ed schools, Fourth of July homespun parades, and the unrestrained friendliness of most Americans. They marveled at our abundance of food, the suddenness and range of weather in the States plus its vastness, Frigidaires and ice cubes, jazz and blues, peanut butter and BLT sandwiches, toasted marshmallows, watermelons, and how small the White House was by comparison to Buckingham Palace.

They were disappointed not to meet Native Americans, cowboys, mobsters, or movie stars. But they heartily adopted American slang, dances, and mannerisms, and came to speak their minds with adults in a way that would shock their more formal British parents back home. Even so, evacuees often struggled to fit in. Isolationists embarrassed them by blaming the British for pulling the United States into war again. They were baffled by regional accents or sayings, and words having very different meanings. “Pants,” for instance, in England meant “underwear.”

Many felt guilty, and worried that their friends thought them “chicken” for leaving. Others, like my fictional Wesley, suffered what we now know as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). They wet their beds, suffered bad dreams, and worried about their parents, especially since letters from home could take two months to arrive. Ironically, letters could spark nightmares. Accustomed to the Blitz, parents often spoke nonchalantly of terrifying events. One father matter-of-factly described his family's favorite pub being obliterated by a bomb, the blast near and strong enough to blow the shaving brush out of his hand.

U-boats, the American Merchant Marine, Shipbuilding, and Segregation

While the Luftwaffe bombed London, the German navy torpedoed incoming supplies—equipment, food, gas, and medicines—that kept England on its feet to fight. Called “gray wolves,” the U-boat submarines skimmed along the water's surface at seventeen knots, much faster than cargo ships' average speed. They easily tracked convoys by spotting clouds of steam from smokestacks, or trails of discarded garbage.

When Hitler's U-boats turned their periscopes on the U.S. East Coast, they announced their threatening presence by German newspapers running a close-up photograph of Manhattan taken from a U-boat's conning tower. In the first eight months of 1942, a mere five Nazi U-boats managed to sink 397 freighters and tankers along our Atlantic coast.

Suddenly at war on two seas, our U.S. Navy could offer little protection. Tankers and freighters sailed unescorted, equipped with vintage guns from the First World War, their untrained, civilian watchmen searching the ocean for a tiny enemy periscope. German U-boat commanders, on the other hand, had easy viewing of our ships. Ignoring British warnings, we didn't mandate nighttime blackouts until May, meaning cargo ships sailing along our coast were backlit by a bright horizon of city lights. Nazi U-boat crews dubbed it “the great American turkey shoot.”

Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, became nicknamed Torpedo Junction. Outer Banks residents kept kerosene by their back doors to wipe from their shoes the oil that covered the beaches from exploded tankers. They grimly joked they could read at night by the glow of the ships burning off shore. They raked the sand every night and checked it each morning for footprints, to make sure no U-boat put saboteurs ashore as one managed to do in Florida. The account Wesley gives of Virginia Beach sunbathers witnessing four ships explode as they ran into a string of magnetic mines left by a U-boat the night before is true.

In the end, 1,554 American merchant ships were sunk and 9,521 mariners killed. According to USMM.org (American Merchant Marine at War), civilian sailors suffered the highest casualty rate of any service in World War II. One in eight experienced his ship going down. Yet they still joined. Their ranks quadrupled as they bravely delivered the critical supplies that kept Allied forces fighting.

A 1940s recruiting poster features a rough-hewn merchant mariner with a determined grimace on his face. The headline?
“YOU BET I'M GOING BACK TO SEA!”
Many of these volunteers, aged sixteen to seventy-eight, were African American. The merchant marine was the first racially integrated service.

Part of what finally stopped U-boats was the United States producing ships at an enormous speed. Just down the James River from the Ratcliffs' imaginary home was one of the country's busiest shipbuilding centers. Between 1942 and 1945, the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company built forty-seven fighting ships, including nine aircraft carriers like the
Ticonderoga.

Cargo boats, called Liberty ships, were designed to be built in large numbers in the shortest time possible—welded rather than riveted together, reducing construction to thirty-five days. Welding could be taught quickly. Demand for such labor skyrocketed. Many African American workers won their first mainstream industrial jobs in newly integrated assembly lines. Some Liberty ships were even named for African American mariners lost to German torpedoes. The SS
William Cox
, for instance, honored an African American fireman who died on the
Atwater
, the same cargo ship on which Freddy's fictitious uncle dies.

All this while the country clung to segregation laws that mandated separate schools, water fountains, bathrooms, and seating on buses for black people. (To be accurate to the 1940s, my characters say “Negro” or “colored” rather than “African American” and “Indian” rather than “Native American.”) Congress did not pass civil rights legislation until the 1960s, but the courage and dedication of African Americans during World War II—civilian and military—went a long way to hasten those laws.

Native Americans faced similar inequalities. In the 1940s, Virginia residents could only check off “white” or “colored” on documents such as birth certificates, so tribes ceased to legally exist. Native Americans' segregated schooling ended at the eighth grade. The only way for them to achieve a high school diploma was to go to a boarding school in Muskogee, Oklahoma.

And yet, Native Americans enlisted to fight, just as African Americans volunteered for legendary units like the all-black Tuskegee Airmen—fighter plane squadrons credited with saving hundreds of bomber crews from Luftwaffe attack. Navaho became important code talkers, using their native language to transmit messages during some of the Pacific's worst battles. The Japanese were never able to decode it.

Secret Air Bases

Also in the Richmond-Norfolk area was the Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation, which handled hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops heading to North Africa or Europe, processed POWs, and rushed D-day casualties to Richmond's McGuire Hospital. Tons of military supplies left its docks each month. January 5, 1944—the night several squadrons of the famed African American Tuskegee Airmen shipped out—was typical of its daily traffic. Convoy UGS.29 departed, taking sixty-three cargo ships and tankers, seventeen escort vessels, and nine troop transports carrying 6,067 fighting men.

Scattered between Norfolk and Richmond were more than a dozen military bases plus many war factories, producing things like Jeep tires, flak jackets, radar-baffling devices, parachutes, ship anchors, and jungle hammocks. Because of such critical activity, Elko was built just east of Richmond by the 936th Camouflage Battalion. Its soldiers cleared swamps, bulldozed in runways, and constructed dummy airplanes, antiaircraft guns, and barracks out of plywood and canvas. If Hitler managed to launch an aerial attack from carriers off our coast, Richmond's lights would shut off, while the fake airfield's lit up, hopefully tricking Luftwaffe bombers into dropping their loads harmlessly on the decoy.

Elko remained a hush-hush project even after the war, with locals speculating on all sorts of clandestine activities. It's likely the FBI, CIA, and National Guard conducted training there until it was sold to commercial development.

German POWs in America

Across the United States, 371,683 Germans were imprisoned in five hundred camps. POWs helped pick crops, log, and repair roads, and worked in nonwar factories like peanut-processing plants. Occasionally, they engaged in disruptive protest—scratching swastikas into peaches they picked in Virginia, for instance—but mostly their labor helped the United States when so many Americans were overseas fighting.

Only 1,583 escape attempts were
recorded.
The United States was vast and the POW camps rather luxurious, their food and housing equal to what our military provided its own personnel. POWs were offered college-level courses. Camps had libraries, soccer games, and art facilities, and allowed prisoners to carve puppets or plant gardens. The motivation to escape was small. Most escapes were as Sheriff Bailey describes to the Ratcliffs—sightseeing jaunts for a few hours.

Within the camps, however, die-hard Nazis did terrorize moderate Germans who they felt didn't adequately revere Hitler. The worst perpetuators were Rommel's elite
Afrika Korps
, ardent believers in Aryan superiority, shipped from African battlefields directly to the United States. They never saw German cities bombed or the Allied assault of Normandy's beaches. They dismissed such reports as American propaganda, and German prisoners recounting them as liars.